Was there social capital in the USSR?

The author makes an attempt to make a comparison, qualitative and quantitative, of the social capital that the population of the Soviet Union possessed in the last decade of its existence, and the social capital of today's Russia. The relevance of such a study is due to the intention to draw attention to the rich research experience accumulated by Soviet sociologists in the process of studying certain aspects of relationships in society. The main tasks that the author set for himself were: 1) determining the meaningful structure of social capital, which can be used when conducting a comparative analysis; 2) to operationalize indicators characterizing social capital: 3) to evaluate the substantive and quantitative characteristics of the social capital of Soviet and post-Soviet societies. Solving these problems, the author proposes his own typology of social capital indicators, based on theoretical developments of domestic and foreign researchers. A comparison of various aspects of social capital has revealed fundamental difficulties in interpreting one or another indicator of social capital formed in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. A comparative analysis of the level of social capital in Soviet and post-Soviet times, with all its conditionality, gives grounds to assume, formally, the presence of a higher level of social capital among the population of the Soviet Union of the last period compared to the level of social capital of the population of today's Russia.