A detailed picture of what life is like under the Soviets, as seen by men and women who lived inside the system, was given this week by scholars of Harvard's Russian Research Center.

The Report, called "How the Soviet System Works," is published as a book by the Harvard University Press and summarizes the results of studies made by the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System, with the support of the United States Air Force. Its authors are Psychologist Raymond A. Bauer, Sociologist Alex Inkeles and Anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn.

The Report results from the first large-scale study of attitudes and life-experiences of Soviet citizens. Detailed questionnaires and extended interviews probed many aspects of life under the Soviets. The experts questioned about 3,000 former Soviet citizens who had left Russia during and after the second World War. Most of them were moved out of their homeland involuntarily by the Germans as prisoners of war or as workers. Such mass-interview techniques are not used, or permitted, inside the Soviet Union.

There is danger of a sample drawn from refugees being unrepresentative of the population inside the Soviet Union, the Report's preface concedes. But only a minority of these refugees (about 40 per cent) claim to have fled the Soviet Union voluntarily, it adds.