Abstract
Because we most often encounter public opinion in the form of polls, it is easy to forget that polls and public opinion are by no means the same thing. Public opinion can take many forms. When thousands of Muscovites demonstrated outside the Russian Parliament, the White House, against the attempted coup d’état by communist hardliners in August 1991, this was a particularly intense form of public opinion. But equally, conversations in the street or on the bus, letters to newspapers, wearing a badge or putting up posters during election campaigns, all of these are more mundane forms of the same phenomenon.
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Notes
Matthew Wyman, Bill Miller, Stephen White and Paul Heywood, ‘The Russian Elections of December 1993’, Electoral Studies, 13 (1994), p. 263.
Quoted in Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion — Our Social Skin (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1984), p. 38.
For a profound discussion of the nature and causes of opinion inconsistency, see Leo Bogart, Silent Politics: Polls and the Awareness of Public Opinion (NY: John Wiley, 1972), pp. 129–39.
Linda Lubrano, Wesley Fisher, Janet Schwartz and Kate Tomlinson, ‘The Soviet Union’, in William A. Welsh (ed.), Survey Results and Public Attitudes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (NY: Pergamon, 1981);
a detailed account of official attitudes to such research is Vladimir Shlapentokh, The Politics of Sociology in the Soviet Union (Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1987);
the Taganrog research was carried out by Boris Grushin, who subsequently managed to publish some of the results — see B. Grushin and L. Onikov (eds), Massovaya informatsiya v sovetskom promyshlennom gorode (Moscow: Politizdat, 1980).
The ‘classic’ 1950s account is Alex Inkeles and Raymond Bauer, The Soviet Citizen: Daily Life in a Totalitarian Society (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1959);
for 1970s research see Zvi Y. Gitelman, ‘Soviet Political Culture: Insights from Jewish Émigrés’, Soviet Studies, 29 (1977), pp. 543–64;
James R. Millar (ed.), Politics, Work and Daily Life in the USSR (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind (London: Penguin, 1980), p. xiv.
For example, T.W. Adorno, E. Frenkel-Brunswick, D. Levinson and R. Sandford, The Authoritarian Personality (NY: Harper and Row, 1950);
Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century (London: Macdonald, 1989), pp. 1–12.
Geoffrey Hosking, The Awakening of the Soviet Union (enlarged edition, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), esp. chapters 3 and 4.
Vladimir Shlapentokh, The Public and Private Lives of Soviet Citizens: Changing Values in Post-Stalin Russia (NY and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
See Hedrick Smith, The New Russians (updated edition, London: Vintage, 1991), p. 86.
For an example of the state of affairs by the end of 1988 see Yuri Levada (ed.), Est’ mnenie! itogi sotsiologicheskogo oprosa (Moscow: Progress, 1990); for 1989 see Obshchestvennoe mnenie v tsifrakh, passim;
also Yuri Levada et al. (eds), Sovetskii prostoi chelovek (Moscow: Nauka, 1993).
S.P. Khaikin and E.P. Pavlov, ‘Kak pomoch’ interv’yueru’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 4 (1991), pp. 58–65.
See George Gallup, The Sophisticated Poll Watcher’s Guide (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976).
Philip Converse, ‘The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics’, in David E. Apter (ed.), Ideology and Discontent ( NY: Free Press, 1964 ), pp. 206–61.
Vladimir Rukavishnikov, ‘Pik napryazhennosti pod znakom belogo konya’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 10 (1990), pp. 12–13.
Timothy Heleniak, ‘Glasnost and the Publication of Soviet Census Results’, Journal of Soviet Nationalities, 2 (1991), pp. 139–60.
VTsIOM’s weighting procedures are outlined in E.V. Kozerenko and S.G. Novikov, ‘Vyborka monitoringa — aposteriornyi kontrol’, Ekonomicheskie i sotsial’nye peremeny: monitoring obshchestvennogo mneniya, 4 (1993), pp. 8–10.
James L. Gibson and Raymond M. Duch, ‘Attitudes Towards Jews and Soviet Political Culture’, Journal of Soviet Nationalities, 2 (1991), pp. 110–11.
A.V. Dmitriev and Zh.T. Toshenko, ‘Sotsiologicheski opros i politika’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 5 (1994), pp. 42–51.
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© 1997 Matthew Wyman
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Wyman, M. (1997). The Development of Russian Public Opinion. In: Public Opinion in Postcommunist Russia. Studies in Russian and East European History and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230373631_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230373631_1
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