Data for this study were produced by the Soviet Interview Project, which was supported by the National Council for Soviet and East European Research Contract no. 701 to the University of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign. The authors of this study wish to express their gratitude to James R. Millar, principal investigator, and to the other investigators for making these data available to the scholarly community at large. All interpretations and conclusions are solely the responsibility of the authors.

1. Daniel Franklin has outlined some of the built-in obstacles to perestroika in his “Gorbachev's Progress I: Is the Perestroikamobile Still Moving?” The World Today 44 (June 1988): 92–93.

2. This phenomenon is characteristic of Yugoslav politics; see Steven L. Burg, Conflict and Cohesion in Socialist Yugoslavia: Political Decision-Making since 1966 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983) and Lenard J. Cohen, Political Cohesion in a Fragile Mosaic: The Yugoslav Experience (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1983).

3. Colton, Timothy J., Reform in the Soviet Union (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1986, 166–167 Google Scholar.

4. Cohen, Stephen F., Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History since 1917 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985, 128–132 Google Scholar. Agreeing with Cohen's assessment of the conservative character of the Soviet population is Benn, David Wedgewood, “Gorbachev's Progress II: Confronting the Conservatives,” The World Today 44 (June 1988): 94–95 Google Scholar. Citing a Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe survey of Soviet visitors to the west, he claims that “no more than one in seven of the Soviet adult population was receptive to western ideas about civil liberties” (94).

5. Hough, Jerry, Russia and the West: Gorbachev and the Politics of Reform (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 180 Google Scholar.

6. Frederick Starr, S., “Soviet Union: A Civil Society,” Foreign Policy, no. 70 (Spring 1988): 180 Google Scholar.

7. For recent analyses both of the relevant literature and of the state of political opinion in the Soviet Union, see Shlapentokh, Vladimir, Public and Private Life of the Soviet People: Changing Values in Post-Stalin Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989 Google Scholar, and Zaslavsky, Victor, The Neo-Stalinist State: Class, Ethnicity, and Consensus in Soviet Society (Armonk, N.Y.: Sharpe, 1982)Google Scholar.

8. For an extensive discussion of the nature of the project, see Millar, James R., “History, Method, and the Problem of Bias” in Politics, Work and Daily Life in the USSR: A Survey of Former Citizens, ed., Millar, James R. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987, 3–30 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Previously, the Harvard Project, supervised by Alex Inkeles and Raymond Bauer, had interviewed many Soviet citizens who had been stranded in the west at the end of World War II; see Alex, Inkeles and Raymond, Bauer, The Soviet Citizen (New York: Atheneum, 1968 Google Scholar. While the SIP is the largest and most systematic effort to use the present wave of Soviet refugees to increase our understanding of Soviet politics, other scholars have also tapped this resource. Limited studies were carried out by A. Ross, Jeffrey, “The Composition and Structure of the Alienation of Jewish Emigrants from the Soviet Union,” Studies in Comparative Communism 7 (Spring-Summer 1974): 107–118 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and White, Stephen, “Continuity and Change in Soviet Political Culture: An Emigre Study,” Comparative Political Studies 11 (October 1978): 381–395 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Much more extensive has been the work of Gitelman, Zvi; see his “Soviet Political Culture: Insights from Jewish Emigres,” Soviet Studies 29 (October 1977): 543–564 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “Recent Emigrés and the Soviet Political System: A Pilot Study in Detroit,” Slavic and Soviet Series 2 (Fall 1977): 40–60; and, with Franceisco, Wayne De, “Soviet Political Culture and Covert Participation in Policy Implementation,” American Political Science Review 78 (September 1984): 603–621 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. For the purposes of this article, the concept “Jewish” should be understood as including any one whose permission to leave the Soviet Union was predicated on his or her Jewishness. This definition would include those who identified themselves as Jews, whether religious or nonreligious, those who had Jewish parents but did not consider themselves Jewish, and those whose spouses were Jewish. See Brian D. Silver, “Political Beliefs of the Soviet Citizen” in Politics, Work and Daily Life, 107, table 4.1, n. b.

Because of the character of the sample, the SIP team has spent a great deal of space defending the utility of the data. While the most extended defense is provided by James Millar in Politics, Work and Daily Life, 3–30, virtually every piece that has used the data has been forced to speak to this question. Because the sample consists largely of Jewish emigrants, some seem to assume that no opinions held by the respondents would be characteristic of the Soviet population and that, furthermore, they are likely to be Soviet liberals, hostile to most characteristics of the Soviet political system, and positive about reforms that would make the political system of the Soviet Union more nearly resemble that of the United States. On issues of direct concern either to Jews or to émigrés, the sample is likely to be distinctive. On any other issues, however, the opinions of the respondents are not as clearly distinctive. Inkeles found that the Soviet refugees he interviewed at the end of World War II were not hostile to all aspects of the Soviet system (Inkeles and Bauer, Soviet Citizen, 233–254). The same is true of the SIP sample. As we shall demonstrate below, the assumption that the sample is reformist is both useful to our approach and in need of substantial qualification.

10. Tucker, Robert, Political Culture and Leadership in Soviet Russia (New York: Norton, 1988, 1–11 Google Scholar.

11. We have also omitted from the tables respondents who did not answer the particular question or those for whom data are missing. Thus, the number of respondents reported will vary from a low of 659 to a high of 2, 703.

12. Literature on censorship in the United States does indicate a gap between the expression of support for the general principle of freedom of speech and a willingness to qualify that principle in particular cases; see Sullivan, John L., Piereson, James, and Marcus, George E., “An Alternative Conceptualization of Political Tolerance: Illusory Increases 1950s-1970s,” American Political Science Review 73 (September 1979): 781–794.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13. Eugene Parta, R., “Soviet Area Audience and Opinion Research (SAAOR) at Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty,” in Western Broadcasting over the Iron Curtain, ed., Short, K. R. M. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), 233 Google Scholar. In this work Parta does not specify what constitutes the basic western idea of civil liberties. He may have taken the extreme position that only total rejection of any censorship met his criterion for support of civil liberties. If this position was the one that he took, our result of 16 percent who strongly support civil liberties is quite close to his finding of “one-seventh. “

14. While few in the United States would express a desire to repudiate the principle of free speech, only a slim majority of the respondents from the Soviet Union repudiated the necessity of censorship. On the concrete level, however, respondents from both countries are willing to censor some things and not others. Compare the data from the United States in Sullivan, Piereson, and Marcus, “An Alternative Conceptualization of Political Tolerance,” 781–794.

15. While the tsarist government did introduce the framework of a limited parliamentary democracy in response to the Revolution of 1905, even these limited changes were increasingly abrogated over the following decade. The limited changes of this period were eliminated by the Bolshevik Revolution and democratic institutions remain alien to Russian and Soviet history.

While we do not automatically equate democratic institutions and practices with the operations of a multiparty competitive electoral system, we do find suggestions that the national political system of pre-1905 Russia contained democratic elements to be unconvincing. Some researchers argue that the mir or the zemstvo contained democratic or predemocratic elements. Even if one accepts these arguments, the adjective shallow still seems appropriate.

16. We interpret this question as dealing with attitudes toward autocracy and democracy. Some may argue that this question instead tapped attitudes toward efficiency and that those who believed that a few people should “run things” thought that this was the most efficient way to conduct business. We do not regard this interpretation as a basic challenge to our results, especially since some democratic theoreticians have tended to accept a certain loss in efficiency as a cost of living with democratic procedures.

17. This finding echoes that of Gitelman in “Soviet Political Culture,” 559.

18. See the discussion of political-cultural orthodoxy in Tucker, Political Culture and Leadership, 199–209.

19. For an extended discussion of the citizen values congruent with the operation of a democratic political system or a civic culture, see Almond, Gabriel A. and Verba, Sidney, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963), 3–40 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20. This pattern is similar to that found by Inkeles and Bauer thirty years earlier among World War II refugees; see Inkeles and Bauer, Soviet Citizen, 242–246. Brian Silver's analysis of responses to these items on the SIP survey is congruent with ours; see Silver, “Political Beliefs of the Soviet Citizen,” 15–21.

21. Starr, “Soviet Union: A Civil Society,” 28–35.

22. Tucker, Political Culture and Leadership, 160.