The Soviet Citizen. Daily life in a Totalitarian Society, by Inkeles & Bauer

[p023] The Soviet Citizen. Daily Life in a Totalitarian Society. By Alex Inkeles and Raymond A. Bauer. Oxford University Press. 40s. This massive study (carried out in {950-S1—at the height of the cold war—as part of the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System) is based largely on written and oral evidence supplied in Western Germany and the USA by some 3,000 former Soviet citizens who, in their major- ity, left the USSR between 1942 and 1944; 16 per cent. of them had been prisoners of war, 4 per cent. were deserters from the Red Army, 43 per cent. were forcibly evacuated by the Germans, and 37 per cent. had left voluntarily, together with the re- treating Nazis armies. A quarter claimed to have been under arrest (presumably for political reasons) by the Soviet authorities at one time or another, and more than half re- ported the arrest of a member of their family. Three-quarters of the peasants interviewed and one-third of the workers came from ‘dekulak- ized’ peasant homes: 30 per cent. indicated that they had ‘once’ been in favour of the Soviet regime, 2 per cent. had been members of the Soviet Communist Party and about 10 per cent. of the Komsomol. The authors do not, of course, claim that their sample is a repre- sentative cross-section of the Soviet population. But they argue at length that their method of enquiry and assessment largely eliminates any sources of bias, and that their study reflects significant class and group conflicts and attitudes in Soviet society. No doubt, the project has yielded some useful marginal in- formation on the relative reactions of different groups to certain aspects of ‘the Soviet regime. One is not surprised to learn, for instance, that 82 per cent. of the intellectuals and 20 per cent. of the collective farmers used to read the Soviet press ‘fre- quently’, and that 20 per cent. of all the intellectuals and 64 per cent. of peasants questioned stated that there was ‘nothing reliable’ in the Soviet press. They may well be a close approximation to the true state of affairs in the Soviet Union. But when 50 per cent. of the sample say that ‘Bolshevik leaders should be 57 put to death’, 60 per cent. that ‘Bol- sheviks are worse than Nazis’, and about one-third favour the dropping of an A-bomb on Moscow, one has to remember the time and circum- stances of this enquiry. The authors of this study, in fact, have some fascinating things to say when they interpret their material (as they should have done through- out) in the light of the impact of a new milieu on the views of former Soviet citizens. Take for instance the refugees’ attitude to the social services: ‘if the Bo‘sheviks were overthrown’, 57 per cent. want to keep the Soviet system of education, 54 per cent. the health service, and 32 per cent. ‘workers’ benefits’. This may or may not be true for the parent population. These percent- ages are significant only if they are related to the refugees’ reactions to their new capitalist surroundings: it then emerged that considerably more refugees settled in the USA than in Germany (where in 1950 they still lived in the relative isolation of refugee camps) are in favour of these social services (61 per cent. to 53 per cent.; 63 per cent. to 45 per cent.; 40 per cent. to 23 per cent.). ‘.. . Refugees of all social classes’— the authors conclude—‘respond to contact with American society with a renewed desire for the welfare pro- visions of Soviet society’ (page 238). The reader is left to assume that this ‘renewed desire’ also accounts for the fact that 88 per cent., 85 per cent. and 35 per cent. respec- tively, voted for the retention in the Soviet Union of government con- trol over Transport, Heavy Industry and Light Industry. A.D. Crankshaw’s Russia