Once again we are devoting an issue of the Russian Social Science Review to articles that look at Russia in comparison with other countries.
The coauthors of our first selection analyze subjective and objective indicators of well-being in post-Soviet Russia, Belarus, and Central Asia, considering possible reasons for the comparatively higher levels of life satisfaction reported by Central Asians than by respondents in more prosperous regions of the former USSR—a pattern that does not replicate in most of Europe. Our second article focuses on public health deficiencies in Russia, which “lags far behind the developed social democracies of Europe, and has some of the most pronounced inequalities on the continent.” The authors observe that health outcomes for women, the elderly, and the poorly educated are conditioned by a country’s level of development, such that “increased development leads to the leveling of social inequalities in health: gender differences completely disappear, the gap between the elderly and young closes, and the impact of education may become less extreme.” In our next selection, which also draws on data from the European Social Survey, Natalia Mastikova examines interethnic tension. She finds it to be relatively low in the Scandinavian countries and high in Russia, while the “greatest tension was found among members of the old and young age groups and among women and respondents with the least education, least income, and who reside in rural areas.”
Our last two articles enlarge the map to pose political questions. The first seeks to identify the political factors that condition a government’s ability to expand or reduce public spending, concluding with the observation that support for expansive social democratic fiscal policies is sustained by universal suffrage, while political support for rollbacks can be stimulated by appeals to patriotism. The last article, on patriotism in the United States, Singapore, China, and Russia, draws on data from the World Values Survey. The author particularly focuses on Russians’ comparatively weak sense of civic identity and personal political efficacy at the local level. She concludes that “the government’s attempts to monopolize patriotism have meant that in contemporary Russian society, neither the state nor its citizens wish, or, even more so, have the opportunity to develop relationships based on cooperation and joint work to resolve contradictions and problems. This provides a foundation for teaching patriotism through militarization, the cultivation of outside enemies, and blind patriotism … [rather than] the formation of constructive patriotism.”
—P.A.K.