This book is part of a larger project to bring together articles by psychologists from the United States and the former Soviet Union and make them available to both English-and Russian-speaking audiences. The English-language version appeared first; the publication of the book in Russia, it is hoped, will follow shortly. The contributions to this volume were carefully chosen to reflect on contemporary changes in both post-Soviet and American societies. They are taken not from conventional academic subdivisions, but from the application of psychology to socially relevant issues: politics and persuasion, mental health, prejudice and ethnic conflicts, ecological and environmental problems. Following the editors' intention to highlight both differences and similarities between American and post-Soviet psychology, the book is organized in sections each containing parallel articles from U. S. and former Soviet scholars. Sometimes the articles complement each other, sometimes they stand in a striking but instructive contrast.
Interestingly, the view that U.S. psychology is a "normal" science and that psychology in the former Soviet Union should orient itself by reference to the former is shared by many American and non-American contributors. While U. S. authors do not always emphasize the particular American setting of their studies and sometimes generalize their conclusions across cultures, their post-Soviet counterparts tend to stress the particular context of research. Some non-Americans make what they see as their cultural uniqueness into a research subject (specific Russian patterns of truth and lie-telling, specific motives for alcohol abuse, etc.). Others emphasize how their approaches differ from approaches in the West (the use of "psychosemantics" in studies of political attitudes, an existential approach to post-traumatic disorder). Even when non-American authors evaluate the differences between their own and Western studies as quantitative rather than qualitative, hoping that the areas previously non-existent in Soviet psychology will soon develop (e.g., research in advertising and gerontology), they accept Western psychology as a model.
The difference between American and post-Soviet contributors is also reflected in their style: if the former are written in an "objective" language, with balanced and well-supported conclusions, the articles by the post-Soviet authors are often emotional, even bitter and angry, where the problems of their countries are concerned. Placed side-by-side with the stylistically highly professional American articles, the post-Soviet writers may appear "biased" to a Western reader. (Sometimes, as in the article on lying, a comparative study and much more evidence is indeed needed to support the author's conclusion that lying became the habit of everybody in Soviet society.)
A reader curious about the psychology of everyday life in the emergent countries of the former Soviet Union and willing to interpret all the contributions in context, will have a rich time. To the reviewer, the book provided an abundance of material with which to reflect on the differences between psychological communities. The book also aroused thoughts that