James R. Millar – författare

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. This study is based on the first comprehensive survey of life in the USSR since the Harvard Project over thiry-three years ago. The essays contained analyze the variations in attitude and behaviour reflected in the findings of the Soviet Interview Project, a five-year investigation of contemporary daily life in the USSR. The survey involved interviewing thousands of recent emigrants from the USSR to the United States as a means of learning about their former day-to-day lives. Some aspects of this survey dealt with areas the Soviets themselves had never investigated, so the data were not, and indeed still are not, available even in unpublished Soviet sources. This study of a large volume of firsthand observations is extremely valuable to anyone interested in the inner workings and behavioural dynamics of the contemporary Soviet social system.

Work on the transition from communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union has emphasized the 'polity' and the 'economy'; this book analyzes the 'society', and thereby helps fill an important gap in the literature. It endeavors to summarize developments and impose some coherence on the subject by treating four basic areas: ethnic issues, deviance and health, social cleavages, and labor and elitism.