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Introduction In Fall 2025, this project began as a research paper on the motives for defection among former Red Army soldiers during the Early Cold War. My project supervisor, Dr. Seth Bernstein, introduced me to the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System database, which had collected 705 interviews from Soviet emigrés. These interviews became […]

Data points This spreadsheet yields significant quantitative data about the Harvard Project as a whole, but a few visualizations help to highlight certain data points. The visualizations highlight the social history of the respondents, such as their ethnicity, sex, education level, and occupation. If I had more time and more programming skills, I would have […]

Occupation and Occupation Type This visualization shows the Occupation and Occupation Type of each respondent. To create the Occupation Types, I attempted to broadly categorize each occupation into its own category. For example, kolkhozniks, tractorists, and farmers are all organized into the agriculture category. Additionally, the Skilled Industry and Industry categories were together, but they […]

Education and Highest Education Level This graph demonstrates the education and highest level of education for each respondent. Like the Occupation and Occupation type visualization, this graph groups all respondents by their highest level of education. Furthermore, the highest education levels for each respondent were calculated by factoring in their highest listed education level and […]

Age and Sex Visualization This graph provides an overview of the age and sex of each respondent. For interviewees who had an estimated age or had an age range, the minimum age listed on the face sheet was used. A sheet showing the data represented on this graph is going to be on the main […]

Sex and Ethnicity This graph overviews the ethnicity and sex of each respondent and compares them to one another. The ethnicity of male defectors represents the general ethnic demographics of the Soviet Union, with a vast majority being Great Russian and a smaller, considerable number being Ukrainian or Belarusian (the files and spreadsheets label them […]

Sex and Communist Organization Membership This graph shows the distribution of the sexes among the Pioneers, Komsomol, and the Party. Among the Pioneers, it is about the same for both sexes, with only 8 more men in the Pioneers than women. The fact that only slightly more men are in the Pioneers than women, unlike […]