The Quality Of Life In The Soviet Union

"Quality of life" is a difficult concept to define, and particularly so when referring to the Soviet Union because Westerners have many preconceptions about Soviet living conditions. This volume goes a long way toward illuminating the realities of daily Soviet life and stands as an important contribution to our understanding of the Soviet Union. Contributors focus primarily on the relation of quality of life to living conditions but also discuss the quality and availability of state-provided services such as education, health care, and housing. Of special interest is their coverage of problems in Soviet society, including working conditions in factories, living conditions in rural areas, alcohol abuse, and the status of the elderly. Together these essays show that although the Soviet government has made great strides in improving the living conditions of its citizens, Soviet living standards and services are relatively poor by Western standards and several important social problems continue to burden the Soviet people.

"Quality of life" is a difficult concept to define, and particularly so when referring to the Soviet Union because Westerners have many preconceptions about Soviet living conditions. This volume goes a long way toward illuminating the realities of daily Soviet life and stands as an important contribution to our understanding of the Soviet Union. Contributors focus primarily on the relation of quality of life to living conditions but also discuss the quality and availability of state-provided services such as education, health care, and housing. Of special interest is their coverage of problems in Soviet society, including working conditions in factories, living conditions in rural areas, alcohol abuse, and the status of the elderly. Together these essays show that although the Soviet government has made great strides in improving the living conditions of its citizens, Soviet living standards and services are relatively poor by Western standards and several important social problems continue to burden the Soviet people.

A QUALITY OF LIFE In SOVIET UNION

Based on the first comprehensive study of life in the USSR since the Harvard Project some 33 years ago, Politics, Work, and Daily Life in the USSR is designed to illustrate how the Soviet social system really works and how the Soviet people cope with it. Taken as a whole, the book describes the sources of support and alienation in the Soviet urban population during the late 1970s, discussing such issues as Soviet political beliefs, ethnic relations, economic inequality, quality of life, and perceptions of social status. The essays contained analyze the variations in attitudes and behavior reflected in the findings of the Soviet Interview Project, a 5-year, 7.5 million investigation of contemporary daily life in the USSR. Among these findings, generational differences and differential education attainment are found to be the most significant underlying determinants of the opinions on, and approaches to, the different issues; the young, the educated and the well-paid, that is, the "best and the brightest" of Soviet society, prove to be the most critical and least satisfied with life in the Soviet Union. This comprehensive investigation involved interviewing thousands of recent emigrants from the USSR to the United States as a means of learning about their former day-to-day living. These individuals provided for a large volume of first-hand reports. Some aspects of this survey dealt with areas the Soviets themselves had never investigated, so the data were not, and still are not, available even in unpublished Soviet sources.

How Soviet citizens in the 1920s and 1930s internalized Soviet ways of looking at the world and living their everyday lives.

This book describes an important advance in international social science research—the first cooperative survey of representative samples of the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It identifies changes in the time-use patterns of both cities during the last two decades.