Documents / FOIA release
This JPRS report, compiled in 1991 and carried in CIA records, translates an article by Aleksandr Demidov of the USSR Academy of Sciences' Sociology Institute, published in Sotsiologicheskiye Issledovaniya in October 1990. It draws on 18 months of polls of Moscow residents to analyze public opinion during the 1989 and 1990 election campaigns, covering trust in the CPSU, voter preferences, and dissatisfaction with how the elections were organized. It notes a growing mysticism, including belief in flying saucers, but has no UFO content beyond that.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
# Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1991 ## Document 6 of 10 tolerated previously. A manifestation of this is, for example, the loss of trust in a majority of the official and unofficial political institutions. 36. One other trend in the mass conscience at present is its growing mysticalness and the appearance of this we are encountering everywhere. This involves both a belief in miracles, flying saucers, the growing influence of various prophets, including psychotherapists, and much else. 37. Finally, and most importantly, one observes a democratizing of social conscience and this slowly is accepting democratic principles and models of political behavior. This is manifested primarily in a definite change in the attitude toward a pluralism of opinions, a multiparty system, the rights of the majority and opposition and informal structures. At the same time, for now this process is just beginning. The transition from the old totalitarian thinking will be rather complex and painful. In mass conscience we are still clearly recording views of rigid control and regulation of social life, intolerance of other opinions and leveling attitudes. 38. An important aspect which characterizes the state of social conscience is its particular emotional background. In the current political situation, political moods and emotions play a very marked role. If we turn again to the previous election campaign, we cannot help but point out that precisely emotions often determined voter attitudes to a candidate and correspondingly influenced the voting results. Public moods are currently very mobile and unstable and the clearest indications characterizing the emotional state of mass conscience are the appearance of anxiety and hope as well as abrupt shifts from one to the other. These are the basic traits of mass conscience established as a result of a systematic study of public opinion among the Moscow inhabitants in 1988-1990. 39. COPYRIGHT: Izdatelstvo ''Nauka'' , ''Sotsiologicheskiye issledovaniya'' , 1990.
Not linked to a story yet.
FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 10 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.