Adaptable Minds

The Times-Mirror surveys also explicitly linked democratic values to intellectual flexibility: ‘the young, better educated and those who lived in major cities express more approval of change and appear much more able to adjust to the new requirements.’ Los Angeles Times-Mirror, The Pulse of Europe: a Survey of Political and Social Values and Attitudes (Los Angeles, CA: Times-Mirror, 1991) P. 9.Google Scholar

Reisinger, Miller, Hesli and Maher note that ‘one cannot rule out the possibility that [the better educated and younger] show higher levels of pro-democratic values because they have reacted more strongly to the dominant intellectual current of their time.’ William M Reisinger, Arthur H. Miller, Vicki L. Hesli and Kristen Hill Maher, ‘Political values in Russia, Ukraine and Lithuania: sources and implications for democracy’, British Journal of Political Science, vol.24. no.2 (1994) pp. 183–223 at p. 221.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

William L. Miller, Annis May Timpson and Michael Lessnoff, Political Culture in Contemporary Britain: People and Politicians, Principles and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) pp. 215–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Marc Raeff, ‘The people, the intelligentsia, and Russian political culture’, Political Studies vol.41 Special Issue on The end of ‘isms’?’ (1993) pp. 93–106 at p. 106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

There has been a lively debate between Finifter and Miller, Reisinger and Hesli in the American Political Science Review on the relationship between education and (in our terminology) socialist values. Finifter claims that the correlation between education and socialist values varied from country to country and from time to time; and, in particular, that it was positive in the USSR of 1989. Miller, Reisinger and Hesli claim that it was certainly negative in Russia, Ukraine and Lithuania throughout the period 1991 to 1995, and likely to have been so in 1989 as well. See Ada W. Finifter, ‘Attitudes toward individual responsibility and political reform in the former Soviet Union’, American Political Science Review, vol. 90 no. 1 (1996) pp. 138–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Arthur H. Miller, William M. Reisinger and Vicki L. Hesli, ‘Understanding political change in post-Soviet societies: a further commentary on Finifter and Mickiewicz’, American Political Science Review, vol.90 no.1 (1996) pp. 153–66. Our own findings in this chapter appear to support Miller, Reisinger and Hesli. Graduates were indeed less committed to socialist values than those with the least education. But we should warn that our multivariate analysis in Chapter 17 suggests that education had relatively little effect once age, class, sector and economic optimism were controlled. Brym’s reanalysis of Finifter’s and of Reisinger’s data and of his own additional data confirms the conclusion that the effect of education was small once other influences were taken into accountCrossRefGoogle Scholar

See Robert J. Brym, ‘Re-evaluating mass support for political and economic change in Russia’, Europe-Asia Studies, vol.48 no. 5 (1996) pp. 751–66, Like Finifter we do not believe there is an inevitable conflict between education and socialist values, but we do believe that, for a variety of reasons, graduates in the FSU/ECE were more confident and better able to cope with fast moving change in the early 1990s.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

This appears to contradict the finding of Times-Mirror surveys that ‘[although] in many societies, those who are better educated are more tolerant, that pattern does not hold in Russia or Ukraine.’ Los Angeles Times-Mirror, The Pulse of Europe: a Survey of Political and Social Values and Attitudes (Los Angeles, CA: Times-Mirror, 1991) p. 228. Liberal values include much more than tolerance, however.Google Scholar

Interestingly, Gibson and Duch, in a Soviet study conducted in 1990, found that education contributed to general democratic values but not directly to political tolerance. See James L. Gibson and Raymond M. Duch, ‘Political intolerance in the USSR: the etiology of mass opinion’, Comparative Political Studies, vol. 26 no. 3 (1993) pp. 286–329.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Gorbachev himself had been baptised in the 1930s. More important, in April 1988 Gorbachev met with the Russian Orthodox Patriarch in the Kremlin. Under Gorbachev clergymen began to appear on television, they took their seats as deputies in the Soviets, and the millennium of the Russian Orthodox Church was widely celebrated — which produced somewhat bitter-sweet feelings amongst Ukrainians who regarded the church of 988 as Kyivan, not Muscovite. However, tolerance was at last extended to the Ukrainian ‘Greek Catholic’ (Uniate) Church. By any objective standard, Gorbachev was unquestionably good for believers in the FSU generally, and for those in Ukraine especially. See John Anderson, Religion, State and Politics in the Soviet Union and Successor States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar