The 1st Soviet-Finnish Symposium of Sociology, Helsinki, Jan. 24-25, 1978.

In January 1978, a historic event took place in Helsinki. The soviet Union initiated a bilateral cooperation in the field of sociology with a capitalist country--Finland. The main item on the agenda was a two-day symposium on social indicators of way of life. In addition to this, there were official talks which resulted in a cooperation agreement for the next five years. Among other things, this agreement contains a program of biannual symposia and a list of possible research themes which can be carried out in cooperation , and so on. In the symposium, seven papers were presented, four from Soviet Union and three from Finland. The Soviet participants--the most prominent of whom was T. V. Ryabuchkin, director of the Institute of Sociological Research of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow--presented papers concerned with the concept of way of life, construction of social indicators for the way of life, criticism of bourgeois conceptions of the quality of life, participation and social activity of the people and so on. Ryabuchkin's speech contained interesting viewpoints on the way of life conceptualization and its position in scientific studies. He mentioned that he is of the opinion that the way of life concept cannot and should not be all too all-embracing.