Cultural Values and the Transformation of the Soviet Union

近年来，苏联和东欧以惊人的速度发生了重大变化。虽然可以预期文化中的政治价值观会影响变革进程，但对苏联的法律和政治文化几乎没有系统的了解。这项研究提供了一个独特而重要的机会，让我们进一步了解普通公民的信仰、价值观和态度是如何影响变革的速度和可能性的。这项研究的核心是对大莫斯科地区的民意调查。预计约500名答复者将在长达一小时的会议中接受面对面面谈。虽然研究小组是由美国学者组成的跨学科小组，但数据收集本身将在美国国家科学院社会学研究所的指导下进行。这项研究预计有几个贡献。首先，它应该有助于形成苏联法律和政治文化的主要特征的概况。其次，它应该允许测试关于苏联价值观起源的各种假设。第三，这些调查数据应该有助于对苏联、西欧和美国之间的价值内容和结构差异进行探索性分析。最后，这项调查在为研究未来的政治变革进程建立基线数据方面将极为有用。

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.