Political norms in rural Russia: Evidence from public attitudes

IN ANY COUNTRY, the citizens who reside in cities, as opposed to towns and villages, are likely to have a disproportionate visibility in public life and in the mass media. This greater visibility translates into greater influence over perceptions (domestic and foreign) about the nature, pace or style of life characterising that country. Yet paying insufficient attention to rural citizens may bias one's understanding of political dynamics. Certainly, that possibility exists for analysts of political change in the former Soviet Union. During much of the Soviet period, few Western scholars had access to the countryside and few rural Soviet residents could travel to the West. Both the Harvard Interview Project and the Soviet Interview Project, which surveyed emigres from the USSR, included predominantly former residents of Soviet cities. Some of the first Western-sponsored direct surveys of Soviet publics were conducted only in Moscow or by telephone, which leaves the small town and rural populace underrepresented. Even now, in post-Soviet Russia, the dramatic changes in the two largest cities of Moscow and St Petersburg-the cities which most Western scholars frequently visit-may convey a misleading impression about the depth of support for market reforms and democratic institutions. Thus great care must be taken to place rural outlooks and behaviours in the proper relationship to urban ones. In a recent article in this journal, Stephen K. Wegren argues for the importance of analysing political values among Russia's rural population.1 We agree with his call for greater scholarly attention to this important segment of the Russian populace. The evidence that Wegren is able to present, however, relates only indirectly to such values. We shed additional light on the state of rural Russian political norms using data from large-scale surveys of randomly selected citizens. We focus on the values of rural Russians (350 were interviewed in 1991 and 284 in 1992) but contrast them with the values of urban Russians as well as with those of respondents in Ukraine and Lithuania.2 The ability to provide these contrasts permits us to assess the particularity of Russian rural outlooks and therefore reexamine several of Wegren's conclusions. We find that, while Russian rural political preferences are not distributed in the same way as among urban dwellers, they actually have shifted in response to changing conditions. In fact, the distributions we find lend little support to Wegren's culturalist approach and much stronger support to theories that stress the varying political