In both the United States and Europe, people's subjective perception of life's overall quality is not wholly reflected by their objective conditions: Riches do not necessarily bring satisfaction, nor are the poor always dissatisfied. In this chapter, we explore the recollections of recent Soviet emigrants about how satisfied they felt about their lives in the Soviet Union. We then identify the groups among whom satisfaction levels differed significantly.

The first goal is to discover how Soviet emigrants rated the quality of their lives in the Soviet Union during their last normal period of life in the Soviet Union (LNP). The data sought are the individual respondents' own assessments of the quality of their lives. The respondents' answers had a normative reference that is unique in Soviet studies, for it was the individuals' own expectations, values, and experiences that shaped their judgments. In order to minimize psychological weighting, they were asked to evaluate not Soviet society in general but their own life events.

Quality of life differs, of course, among different people. It also varies over time in an individual's life. There is a difference to be noted between an index of “happiness” (or “misery”), which assesses a momentary, fleeting state of one's feelings, and an index of satisfaction (or dissatisfaction), where reality is judged more soberly against one's expectations. It would be impossible to obtain a reliable index of happiness from Soviet emigrants because so much time has elapsed since the respondents lived in the Soviet Union.