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.
“National Academy of Sciences”1 page
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## Document 6 of 10 Page 6. The listed processes in mass conscience occurred against the background of its further politization, greater activeness of the broad strata and groups of the public, the developing independent movement and the flourishing of street democracy. It is no surprise that under these conditions there was a sharp rise in the overall critical attitude which accompanied an assessment of the course of perestroyka as a whole. Around 4% of those polled pointed out that their hopes tied to perestroyka had not been realized, 37 percent said this had partially been realized and only 3 percent of the respondents had hopes that were fully realized. 7. Under these conditions, just what characterized the 1989 election campaign? First of all, there was voter activeness which increased as voting day drew closer. Remaining in our memory were stormy voter district meetings which, as a rule, lasted far beyond midnight, televised and nontelevised debates of the candidates, official and independent posters and leaflets which praised certain candidates and were often inaccurate about others, pickets at subway stations and many other attributes of a real developing political struggle. 8. What candidate deputies did the Muscovites prefer? First of all, the voters focused on personality. For more than 4/2 of those polled, the main thing was human and professional qualities in the candidate and not his position, profession or even belonging to one or another sociopolitical organization. Among the personal qualities in first place were put honesty, decency and a feeling of social justice. Such preferences of course were manifested due to the stereotype which has formed in mass conscience of the corrupted representative of power, the bureaucrat, concerned solely with his own problems, worried about his personal privileges and violating social justice. In addition, an absence of a developed political structure in society was felt and this did not make it possible for the voter to focus on the membership of the candidate in one or another political organization. Party membership was not a factor which determined voter choice. But there was the other factor that belonging to the party apparatus immediately reduced the candidate's chances. The most popular with the Muscovites were representatives of the creative intelligentsia, including journalists, scientists and writers. In second place came workers followed by economic leaders. 9. In preparing to vote, the voters most often focused on the candidate's election program and more precisely on his position and attitude toward urgent problems. These possibly were not so apparent in the text of the program as they were in the entire flow of information which the candidate was able to get across to the voter. Incidentally, in 1989, the voters obtained the basic mass of information needed by them from the mass information media, followed by pamphlets and election posters and to a lesser degree from the
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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.