Ask people “what should be done” with certain deviant groups. It was not hard to be a deviant in Soviet society, and many people were—people who listened to rock music, for example (they were generally referred to as “rockers”), and hippies (the term was still in circulation in the late 1980s because there was still a subculture of people wearing long hair and singing to acoustic guitar). Offer respondents a range of options, from “leave them alone” to the Leninist “liquidate.” Gudkov figured that such questions would tease out the limits of tolerance and, more to the point, help measure the
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