Polls No Longer Reliable Because Russians Won’t Answer Questions from Those They Don’t Know, Academy of Sciences Sociologist Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 16 – The Russian government can no longer rely on sociological surveys of the population because Russians aren’t prepared to respond to pollsters they don’t know or even to speak to them at all, Mikhail Chernysh, the director of the Federal Sociological Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, says.

            He made that admission at a meeting of the presidium of the Presidential Council on Inter-Ethnic Relations in the course of a discussion about recent changes in popular attitudes toward polling (nazaccent.ru/content/44664-na-zasedanie-prezidiuma-soveta-po-mezhnacionalnym-otnosheniyam-obsudili-strategiyu-gosnacpolitiki-do-2036-goda/).

            Russians have long been suspicious of pollsters, but the situation has gotten much worse in recent times given the ability of the government to identify who has said what and the belief among many Russians that the Kremlin can then punish those it identifies as disagreeing with the regime.

            Chernysh said that one way of overcoming this problem is to develop a unified approach that would standardize the methods pollsters use and the criteria that various services use for determining objectivity. But it seems likely that such a cure might prove even worse than the disease and convince even more Russians that Moscow can identify who says what.

            That an Academy of Sciences sociologist should make such a proposal shows just how far things have gone in the wrong direction under Putin, especially given that the government has already effectively ended the possibility of conducting accurate telephone surveys (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2025/09/kremlins-ability-to-monitor-all-phone.html).