ABSTRACT
The differences between the Harvard Project and Soviet Interview Project reflect the remarkable change in the state of Soviet studies in the quarter-century between them. The critical obstacle to research at the time was the paucity of data, particularly reliable data, on Soviet society. The proportion of respondents who accept regime norms, for example, provides no basis for an estimate of the proportion of the parent Soviet population that accepts regime norms. A central question at the time was the extent to which the abolition of private ownership of the means of production had eliminated the basis of the division of society into social classes, as Marx predicted and as the Soviets claimed. The wide acceptance of the findings of the Harvard Project signified that the scholarly community by and large was persuaded that their testimony, as analyzed by researchers sensitized to the problem of bias, did provide an acceptable basis for drawing inferences about the parent Soviet society.
