Cultural Values and the Transformation of the Soviet Union

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Within recent years the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have undergone major changes at a dramatic pace. While it might be expected that political values in a culture influence processes of change, there is little systematic knowledge about the legal and political culture of the Soviet Union. This research constitutes a unique and important opportunity to advance our understanding of how beliefs, values, and attitudes of ordinary citizens structure both the pace and the possibility of change. The core of the study is a survey of public opinion in greater Moscow. It is anticipated that approximately 500 respondents will be interviewed face-to-face in hour long sessions. While the research team is an interdisciplinary group of U.S. scholars, the data collection itself will be performed under the direction of the Institute of Sociology, National Academy of Sciences. This research anticipates several contributions. First, it should enable developing a profile of the major attributes of Soviet legal and political culture. Second, it should permit testing a variety of hypotheses about the origins of Soviet values. Third, these survey data should lend themselves to exploratory analyses of the differences in value content and structure between the Soviet Union, Western Europe, and the United States. Finally, the survey will be extremely useful in establishing baseline data for studying processes of political change in the future.