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.
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Document 6 of 10 23. Precisely this determined, in our view, the mood with which the voters entered the 1990 election campaign. Even 3 months prior to the elections, the mass information media began to note a certain decline in voter activeness in comparison with the previous year, although interest in the coming elections was quite high: over 70 percent of those polled pointed out that they were concerned who would be elected as members of the republic and local soviets. During that period around 74 percent of the Muscovites intended to vote on 4 March. However, at the end of January and the beginning of February 1990, we recorded a decline in the given indicator by 10 percent. However, in our view, this showed not so much a drop in the activeness of the Muscovites as a response to a number of questions which arose in the course of the election campaign. 24. As a result, the Law on Elections to the Republic and Local Soviets was positively received. There was satisfaction, first of all, with the abandoning of the district meetings and the election of deputies by public organizations. However, the very procedure and organization of the elections undoubtedly influenced the fact that on 4 March a significantly smaller number of Muscovites went to the voter urns than in the previous spring. The electing of deputies all at once to three levels of soviets in four voter districts, the necessity of making one's way through 20 or 30 names of candidates of course could not help but lead to confusion among a portion of the voters and a refusal to vote generally, as a sort of defensive response. Moreover, the distribution of information about the candidates was extremely poorly organized. Even official election posters appeared in Moscow in a majority of the districts only 2 weeks prior to the elections. In this sense the provision of the law on observing the equality of candidates in utilizing materiel for the election campaign did poor service. The candidates were fettered in their actions, looking hopefully at the district commissions which were unable to promptly get the necessary information to the public. According to our data, a predominant majority of the voters a month prior to the elections did not know a single one of their candidates to all levels of the soviets. 25. Thus, while in the course of the 1989 campaign, there was a tendency for growing voter activity among the public and a focus on participation in voting as election day drew near, in the spring of 1990, the trend was the reverse. 26. The preference of the Muscovites on their candidate people's deputies as a whole was the same as in the spring of 1989, however the criteria of the social justice, honesty and incorruptibility of the candidate, in remaining extremely high for the voters, moved to second place, giving way to competence. It is no accident that
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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.