The Failure of the Integrative-System Approach in Post-Soviet Russian Studies

Abstract

Although Americans are divided on many social and political issues, the majority of the population generally accepts the idea that private property, a market economy, and democratic institutions represent some of the fundamentals of American society. In Russia, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there was not only intense polarization in people’s attitudes toward specific political and economic issues, but also major differences in the way they characterized the society’s political and economic systems.