Perceived Political Freedom in the Soviet Union

Abstract

The question of how political freedom gets allocated in societies is one of utmost importance for political science. Different polities allocate freedom differently. At the macro-level, some progress has been made in measuring levels of political freedom and accounting for intersystem variability. At the micro-level, however, very little work has been conducted. This paper is an analysis of micro-level political freedom in the Soviet Union. Relying on a survey of public opinion conducted in the USSR in May 1990, the analysis focuses on how individual Soviet people perceive the availability of political freedom. Perceived freedom is conceptualized as involving both perceptions of cultural and governmental constraints on political expression. Beyond the important task of measuring and describing freedom, I also consider how perceived freedom affects political activity. Different sorts of political activity are investigated, ranging from conventional and unconventional political activism to discussions about politics among family and friends. While perceptions of government political repression seem not to affect levels of activism, perceptions of cultural intolerance serve to constrain political behavior. I also investigate the etiology of freedom perceptions, testing several hypotheses about the connections between political deviance, minority status, politicization, personality attributes and perceptions of repression and intolerance. The most unfree Soviet citizens are those with less sense of personal political competence, with marginal political interest, and who perceive a repressive government. Throughout this analysis, I make comparisons to a similar survey of opinion conducted in the United States (in 1987). Though my ability to conduct a comparative analysis based on only two systems is of course limited, my inquiry does take advantage of both data sets in an effort to understand how freedom gets allocated in both a relatively capitalist country and a relatively socialist country. In general, the Soviet people seem to be remarkably free, a surprising finding in light of the history of totalitarianism in that country.