Cross-Cultural Analysis of Values and Political Economy Issues

Nina Andreenkova

In analyzing the broad issue relating to the meaning and purpose of life, the Russian thinkers have traditionally given a significant place to the individual's value oientation. Even though the views on this issue of the most famous writers, F. M. Dostoyevsky, L. N. Tolstoy, and A. P. Chekhov, are well known in Western countries, because of the language barriers, the works of the Russian philosophers and psychologists are practically unknown. For this reason, before beginning an overview of the current empirical value studies in the Soviet social sciences, it is necessary to present a short historical overview of the main ideas that had been were worked out from the beginning of the twentieth century in the Russian philosophical and psychological schools. These ideas, together with the known western conceptions (as reflected in the works of A. N. Maslow, G. Hofstede, and M. Rokeach), provide the theoretical basis for the recent empirical research on this issue.

Intensive studies of individual values, and motives of behavior as their moving force, began in Russia in the beginning of the twentieth century. The most fruitful results were produced by psychologists. In the beginning of the twentieth century, L. I. Petrazhitsky ( 1904) and A. F. Lazursky made the most significant contributions. In the 1920s, in

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