"Survival values" is just right, and key. I've lived this divide (1st gen Russian), and as a teenager could not comprehend why my parents constantly pressured me to study physics and maths, which did not come naturally to me, and why they did not see any value in my achievements in the humanities, or even recognise them as work at all.
As a young adult I understood that from their perspective, physics and maths was the most sure-fire way for Soviet Jews to gain a modicum of stability and security in a country whose industrial and military sectors were prestigious and financed above all else. But I still resented them for not truly internalising that they were raising their child in a different culture and a different economic reality.
As an adult, I eventually came to see how a life that started in Stalinist Russia had robbed my parents of the cultural and emotional intelligence that would have allowed them to empathise with a child growing up in such radically different circumstances. And how instead of those intelligences, there was an unsleeping instinct for survival and a permanent anxiety, knots that are just starting to show signs of loosening in what are probably the last years of their lives.
Except that math background still gets you work in the US. There is a reason why a lot of Russian immigrants that were born in the 60s are directors of departments in the US. You gotta give the USSR its due - it had the best education in the world for a bit.
The USSR also completely shut down the humanities. Generations without philosophy or sociology or anthropology or psychology, it impoverished the culture.
As a young adult I understood that from their perspective, physics and maths was the most sure-fire way for Soviet Jews to gain a modicum of stability and security in a country whose industrial and military sectors were prestigious and financed above all else. But I still resented them for not truly internalising that they were raising their child in a different culture and a different economic reality.
As an adult, I eventually came to see how a life that started in Stalinist Russia had robbed my parents of the cultural and emotional intelligence that would have allowed them to empathise with a child growing up in such radically different circumstances. And how instead of those intelligences, there was an unsleeping instinct for survival and a permanent anxiety, knots that are just starting to show signs of loosening in what are probably the last years of their lives.