ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the opportunities for doing public opinion research in the former Soviet republics—in particular, in Russia—while drawing attention to those problems which need to be resolved before polling there attains the same consistency of quality encountered in the West. Assessing the state of public opinion research in the Soviet Union is an exercise in ambivalence. While the long-term prospects for the professionalization of public opinion research appear favorable, there are a number of problems which must be taken into account. Autarchy and compartmentalization rather than centralization and cooperation have tended to characterize the development of public opinion research in the Soviet Union. The problems of stratified sampling were compounded by the Soviet practice of freely substituting respondents and by an indifference to response rate. As a result, Soviet polling relied heavily on stratified quota sampling in which respondents were randomly selected from pre-selected strata.
