Quality Of Life In The Soviet Union

Horst Herlemann, Shaun Murphy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000308815
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

"Quality of life" is a difficult concept to define, and particularly so when referring to the Soviet Union because Westerners have many preconceptions about Soviet living conditions. This volume goes a long way toward illuminating the realities of daily Soviet life and stands as an important contribution to our understanding of the Soviet Union. Contributors focus primarily on the relation of quality of life to living conditions but also discuss the quality and availability of state-provided services such as education, health care, and housing. Of special interest is their coverage of problems in Soviet society, including working conditions in factories, living conditions in rural areas, alcohol abuse, and the status of the elderly. Together these essays show that although the Soviet government has made great strides in improving the living conditions of its citizens, Soviet living standards and services are relatively poor by Western standards and several important social problems continue to burden the Soviet people.

1. What Is and Why Do We Study the Quality of Life in the Soviet Union?

— Horst Herlemann

When in 1789 Friedrich Schiller for the first time ascended the rostrum of Jena University, his lecture bore the tide, "Was ist und zu welchem Zweck studieren wir Universalgeschichte?"—"What is and Why do we Study Universal History?" To define the object of study and the purpose of inquiry still seems the best way to start a scientific project, particularly if the topic is one that everybody should understand and be concerned with, such as the quality of life in the Soviet Union.

In preparing the conference from which this volume derives, I asked a colleague to write a paper on social conditions in Soviet factories. How many hot showers are available per capita? What kind of cafeterias can one have lunch in? And what about personal facilities, work clothes, and safety devices? His answer was that he would prefer to comment on the basic question "What is the quality of life?" rather than count restrooms. This shows that even empirically inclined social scientists prefer to talk about definitions, to play the overture, so to speak, instead of pulling the curtain.

When I tried to convey the idea of an investigation of the quality of life in the Soviet Union to a colleague in Moscow, his immediate reply was, "This is only another attempt to slander the achievements of socialism." Thus it seems appropriate to explain the purpose of this inquiry. By asking for a qualitative description of Soviet life, we hope to arrive at a better understanding of contemporary Soviet society. We also hope to advance the level of comparative research by departing from GNP and industrial growth rates as the only way to measure social change and compare different economic systems. There is, however, no intention to give up quantification, exact measurement, or calculation. The introduction of the term "quality of life" is first and foremost meant to be a program of social research that aims at a description of individual lives and of factors that influence personal well-being. Instead of calculating the number of kilometers of newly-built railroad, we would rather like to know if access to railroad transportation is still limited in the Soviet countryside. Knowing how many million tons of steel the Soviet Union produces, we would still like to know under what conditions they are produced. How crowded is the streetcar that carries the average steel worker home? What is the quality of the air that steel workers breathe if they live in the vicinity of a steel mill? To understand the principal direction of our inquiry, it might be helpful to recall the development of the concept "the quality of life" in affluent societies.

The term gained recognition in the late 1960s when many people discovered that their lives and the development of their society were not what they should be. The negative side effects of affluence could not be gleaned from statistical yearbooks, but were nonetheless visible, audible, and to be experienced in many different ways. Books were published that questioned the costs of economic growth and discussed questions such as "bigger vs. better" at length.¹ Spurious measures of progress and goal attainment were seen as one of the reasons for this increasing dissatisfaction. Many people began to ask what an ever-increasing GNP meant in relation to their personal lives. It was their general conclusion that progress had been measured inadequately in relation to the genuine needs of human beings.

Attempts to use GNP as a yardstick to measure welfare and progress have long been criticized. Most reproaches have been based on the fact that GNP is concerned only with the exchange of goods on the market. The more goods that are produced and exchanged, the higher the GNP, and the better the state of the society one lives in. If one spends time playing the violin, this will lower the GNP no matter how much satisfaction the player receives from doing so. On the other hand, every device to increase productivity, no matter what impact it might have on the environment or on the people who use it, increases the GNP—the incarnation of progress. Such criticisms are now common knowledge. Discussions of the future of our industrial and commercial behavior have turned to new horizons, but 20 years ago they led to the search for alternatives in evaluating progress and in defining the goals of modern society.

Members of the scholarly community concerned with Soviet studies also took part in those discussions. For example, excerpts from the diary of George F. Kennan read like a modern accusation of unfettered industrial growth and illustrate the perspicacity of this farsighted scholar.²

One serious attempt to remedy the shortcomings of using GNP to address the quality of life was made by Japanese scholars who in the late 1960s replaced it with a measure called net national welfare (NNW). The most interesting aspect of this measurement was that leisure time and activities outside the marketplace were considered to have value. Therefore, housework, the costs of spoiling the environment, and increasing urbanization were quantified and became part of a new yardstick of development.³

Another instrument to describe and measure the state of society is the "social indicator." The pioneer step in this direction was a report by R. A. Bauer published in 1966.⁴ In 1969, the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare released a study entitled Toward a Social Report that used Bauer's newly-developed indicators. "Thus, while the first strategy to develop more adequate welfare measure [involved] efforts to restructure the system of economic accounts, especially by incorporating non-market activities . . . a second strategy was the establishment of a regular system of social reporting matching economic reporting. Social indicators were conceived of as qualitative measures to evaluate benefits and disbenefits in major areas of social concern. They ought to indicate, directly and in nonmonetary terms, changes in the individual's quality of life."⁵

One approach to establishing meaningful indicators of the quality of life was to focus on certain aspects of well-being that could be subsumed under one index figure. Another was to define goals of societal development and then create indicators to measure the attainment of those goals. In both cases, however, there were elements of arbitrariness. Later studies by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) aimed at minimizing such elements by systematically defining the goals a welfare policy could possibly strive for.

The OECD's definition contained nine basic social goals—health, education, occupation and quality of work, spare time, income and consumption, environment, security, family life, and social equality and mobility. The allembracing character of these goals led to the definition of 22 "fundamental social concerns," 74 "sub-concerns," and 177 "sub-sub-concerns."⁶ Evidendy, the imagination of a bureaucracy as to what should happen is unlimited, particularly if it has modern statistical methods at its disposal. The OECD's main interest in this project was to define as many social concerns as possible in order to provide politicians with a set of goals for societal improvement or with material to illustrate the quality of their policies.

For many observers, the main deficiency of such social indicators remained their disregard of personal satisfaction, which might not depend on any identifiable indicator. Social statistics are seldom concerned with individual satisfaction and subjective well-being, yet the quality of life depends on personal happiness, which might be considered a state of mind totally independent from material living conditions and the social environment that one lives in. Such happiness occurs only in individual cases. Elsewhere in this volume, Robert Belknap discusses the interdependencies between material and spiritual well-being. The social sciences have established various ways to determine the relationship between subjective satisfaction and objective circumstances. Two of them have gained a certain significance and have been used in several comparative studies.

The first proceeds from the degree of "needs satisfaction," the other from "command over resources." The latter was elaborated by the Scandinavian sociologist S. Johansson, who defined welfare as being "the individual's command over resources such as money, possessions, knowledge, mental and physical energy, social relations, security, etc., with which the individual can control and consciously direct his living conditions."⁷ In Johansson's view, the individual stands out as an active being who shapes his or her own life.

One of the problems with defining the quality of life in terms of resources is that it defines the concept too narrowly and disregards dependencies regarding the unuseability of certain resources. If, for example, one has sufficient mental and physical energy at one's disposal, but is without a job or generally lacking the chance to make use of it according to one's wishes, then this "resource" is evidently useless. In other words, one must contend with prerequisites that one does not control. These prerequisites are the determinants of the actual command that individuals might have over their resources.⁸

The other approach to the relationship between subjective satisfaction and objective circumstances was developed by E. Allardt.⁹ Allardt defined the "level of living" as "the extent to which the overall needs of a given population are satisfied." In classifying human needs, he used the traditional categories of Abraham Maslow, who in 1943 defined three levels of need—"having, loving, and being."¹⁰ "Having" is related to the individual's physical needs and security requirements, which grant existence and survival. "Loving" is related to the needs of affection and appreciating, and concerns both personal and social interaction. "Being" has to do with the individual's need for self-realization. The main problem posed by a definition of the quality of life in terms of needs satisfaction is the difficulty of finding out just how content people really are. Under what circumstances are people satisfied? The answer depends not only on objective circumstances, but also on one's personal aspirations and one's assessment of one's rightful due. Such factors depend on earlier experiences and are open to manipulation.

One must use sophisticated methods of empirical research to study individual satisfaction. Without such methods, the categories of "loving" and "being" remain a matter of conjecture. Given the quality of Soviet sociology, the degree of individual satisfaction in the Soviet Union also remains a matter of speculation.

It seems an understandable concern in an affluent society to inquire into individual perceptions of the quality of life. It also seems natural to have a powerful minority maintain that material well-being is the smallest part of personal happiness. Under circumstances where food and shelter are merely a matter of further sophistication—when they are simply "structural problems" for most people—some people naturally discover that the quality of life is no longer a function of the production of consumer goods.

For most Soviet citizens, these questions are completely irrelevant. Very few Soviet needs are consistently satisfied, and for almost all Soviet citizens, "more is more" and "better is better." The Soviet government shares this attitude, and official statistics provide ample proof that everything is becoming "bigger and better." There is no dearth of information about the number of washing machines or televisions, or about the number of doctors, hospitals, and recreation facilities available to the population. Each is increasing, and will continue to increase. Questions as to the quality of household machinery, television programs, and medical care are sometimes discussed, but if problems are identified, most believe that they can be solved by greater numbers.

Thus it seems worthwhile to try to assess certain aspects of Soviet life with reference to quality. What does the number of doctors per capita mean for the quality of medical care? What does it mean to be poor or old in the Soviet Union while the GNP is continually increasing? How does alcohol abuse affect the quality of life in the Soviet Union? And what of life in the Soviet countryside?

Obviously, there are aspects of Soviet life deserving attention that are not discussed in this volume—for example, personal mobility and the limits of personal communication. Thus it remains the hope of all the contributors to the conference and this volume that their efforts will encourage further studies on the quality of life in the Soviet Union. We share this hope and our basic intentions with our Soviet colleagues. As the Soviet scholar A. Salai said in 1980, "Today, as mankind has enormous scientific-technical, industrial and economic capacities at its disposal to satisfy the material needs of the people, the investigation of the quality of life becomes important. Research about this problem, including comparative studies, supports the social progress of mankind and improves mutual understanding between different countries."¹¹

Notes

1. E. J. Mishan, The Costs of Economic Growth (London: Staples Press, 1967); and Donella H. Meadows et al., The Limits of Grouch: A Report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind (New York: Universe Books, 1972).

2. George F. Kennan, Memoirs, 1950-1963 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), p. 84.

3. S. Loercher, "Lebensqualität" Japan (Bremen, 1975).

4. R. A. Bauer (ed.), Social Indicators (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1966).

5. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Toward a Social Report (Washington, D.C., 1969).

6. Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, List of Social Concerns Common to Most OECD Countries (Paris, 1973).

7. S. Johansson, Om Levnadsnivaundersoekingen (Stockholm, 1970), p. 25. English summary, "The Level of Living Survey," Acta Sociologica 16, no. 3 (1973).

8. R. Erikson, "Welfare as a Planning Goal," Acta Sociologica 17, no. 2 (1974).

9. E. Allardt, A Frame of Reference for Selecting Social Indicators (Helsinki, 1972; Commentationes Scientarum Socialium).

10. Abraham Maslow, "A Theory of Human Motivation," Psychological Review 50 (1943), pp. 370-396.

11. A. Salai, "Kachestvo zhizni kak sotsiologicheskaya kategoriya," Sotsiologicheskie issledouanii...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• About the Book and Editor
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1. What Is and Why Do We Study the Quality of Life in the Soviet Union?
• 2. On Quantifying Quality
• 3. Soviet Living Standards in Comparative Perspective
• 4. Consumer Goods and Services: Contemporary Problems and Their Impact on the Quality of Life in the Soviet Union
• 5. Aspects of Poverty in the Soviet Union
• 6. Medical Care in the Soviet Union: Promises and Realities
• 7. Aspects of Soviet Secondary Education: School Performance and Teacher Accountability
• 8. Housing Quality and Housing Classes in the Soviet Union
• 9. Self-Fulfillment Through Work: Working Conditions in Soviet Factories
• 10. The Vanishing Babushka: A Roleless Role for Older Soviet Women?
• 11. Alcohol Abuse and the Quality of Life in the Soviet Union
• 12. Aspects of the Quality of Rural Life in the Soviet Union
• About the Contributors
• Index