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Professor Boris Grushin Ph.D. is one of the founding fathers of Soviet theoretical and empirical sociology. He is a philosopher and methodologist of sociology who has deepened the conceptual language of this science substantially. He is also a researcher who has studied various social institutions, mass consciousness, public opinion, ideological processes, mass media functioning, and political processes. He spent years purposefully and successfully developing methods and procedures for field data collection and analysis.
Boris Grushin is the author of textbooks read by every generation of Soviet and Russian sociology students. The major project "Russia's Four Lives in the Mirror of Polls" he is working on today is aimed at analyzing the Russian mass consciousness in the times of Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin. The first volumes of this work have already been published.
In early December, Grushin was a guest of POF-CLUB, answering dozens of questions asked by club members (Questions were asked by club members Grigory Yefitov (Institute for Management, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow); Evgeny Kostomarov (club member, participant in discussions on regular basis); Alexander Ivlev (Head, Center for Information and Communication Technology Analysis, Novosibirsk); Viktor Burko PhD (Perm regional administration); Nikolay Katsuk (Institute for Sociology, National Academy of Sciences, Belarus); Yuly Feodoritov (Chief Editor, Pervy Kanal website); Pavel Antipin (social researcher); Maria Ivanova; Mikhail Tarusin; Mikhail Podgornov (sociologist, Moscow); Yury Chernyak (sociology professor, Belarus State University); Andrey Andreyev (sociologist, Moscow). See questions and discussion in full at (http://club.fom.ru/guest.html?id=30)). Later, he selected the most interesting issues and prepared this paper in which all questions and answers are placed in a logical order.
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During the first two weeks of November, thirteen members of our club have asked me 21 questions. These were, of course, questions of many different sorts, which is natural. I have grouped them into two classes. One group includes questions concerning general problems for researching and interpreting public opinion, while the other contains questions concerning tools, methods and techniques of research.
While the first group of questions certainly deserves the most serious discussion, I felt that "public opinion" meant many things to the people asking the questions. Most of them didn't even seem to see any problem about the definition of the phenomenon of public opinion. It is not by chance that nobody asked me what I think it is. Alexander Ivlev said, though, that in his work he often uses "a truncated concept whereby public opinion is an informal modulator of public consciousness, an indicator of local societal relations and social hierarchies". This is a beautiful, sophisticated definition indeed. However, viewing public opinion as a mode of public consciousness (or mass consciousness) is certainly worth consideration. The fact that this was the only case of definitional reflection in the whole bulk of questions probably testifies to the underestimated importance of initial definition for studying public opinion.
In particular, people seem to underestimate the question of whether there is public opinion in our society at all. As for me, I asked myself this question for the first time forty years ago, but it is as topical today as it was before.
On the occasion of my birthday (I turned – horribile dictu! - 75), the Levada Center posted a congratulation message on their website which contained this sentence: "Boris Grushin was once angry enough to state that there is no public opinion in this country. But it is he himself who has gone the longest way towards making this public opinion emerge". Grateful as I am for such a high appraisal of my work, I would like to object. It was by no means anger that made me write that. What I meant – and formulated – was a thesis and a question. The thesis was, "Not every poll is a public opinion survey", and the question was, "What is it we are actually studying when we think or pretend we are studying public opinion?"
In this connection, I would like to address questions asked by Victor Burko and, partly, Nikolay Katsuk concerning the place of the so-called population polls in social science or sociology. The matter is that polls are not identical with sociology. They constitute a branch of social science touching sociology proper, social psychology, demography, mathematics and some other disciplines. As a tool, polls help solve practical problems in politics, economics, culture, and so on. On the other hand, the study of public opinion as a mode of mass (I emphasize: `mass' not `social') consciousness is one section of sociology or social philosophy among others, such as sociology of the family, sociology of politics, etc., and it is not only by means of polls that it can be studied.
In this connection, I would like to address Yury Feodoritov's question on schools in Russian sociology. So far as polling is concerned, no schools exist either in Russia or abroad. There is just a set of tools one has to learn to work with. As for sociology proper as a theory of social action and social relations, many different schools exist in the world, but I don't think the development of Russian and Soviet sociology can be described in terms of a 'school'. The so-called `Leningrad school', the `Novosibirsk school', `the Ural school' are not «schools» in the proper sense of the word, I think. For a «school» is an association of scholars sharing methods, research fields, etc., which is not the case with any of the schools mentioned. It is my conviction that scientific schools could not have emerged in the first place in a totalitarian state like the Soviet Union.
I will cite one example, the `Taganrog project'. About a hundred scholars have taken part in it. It yielded data for 21 doctoral dissertations. A `school', it would seem! But it wasn't one, because some of the postgraduate student participants betrayed the ideas of the Taganrog project, betrayed me as its head. Others would have very much liked to continue working within its framework, but they could not, due to shortage of technical, financial and other resources. It might seem to have been a very favorable point for a school to come into being, but this was impossible in Soviet time.
Speaking of public opinion, Pavel Antipin asked me an interesting question about public opinion in Ukraine. Admittedly, public opinion there is split. Which does not mean, however, that there are two societies in Ukraine. The case of Canada with its English-speaking and French-speaking parts shows that one state can comprise two large ethnic groups forming one society. Hopefully, Ukraine will remain a single society and will go the Canadian way, rather than the Czechoslovak one.
I was puzzled by Alexander Ivlev's statement that the Golden Age of polls ended in the 70s. It had not even begun by then! The Komsomolskaya Pravda public opinion research institute, which I was head of, closed in 1967. In 1969, a center for public opinion research was founded within the framework of the Institute for Applied Social Research of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and it existed until 1972. No other research centers existed in Russia at that time. Therefore, there was no Golden Age, and not even a Bronze Age.
As for the future of public opinion in Russia, which Maria Ivanova is so worried about, it is again necessary to bear in mind that public opinion is not a mechanical sum of statements secured from a certain number of respondents. It is an organic product of public life, a kind of collective judgment emerging from the rather complex social communication known as `public discussion'. As we know, certain preconditions are indispensable for public opinion to come into being. First, there has to be a public as a self-conscious, social behavior agent. Second, there has to be ample and accessible information on relevant issues; third, large groups of people have to take a considerable interest in this information and be able to articulate their position. Fourth, a ramified network of trouble-free operating channels for interpersonal and inter-group communications, etc., is needed. In our country, these preconditions often aren't fulfilled. It is in this sense that we can say that, strictly speaking, there is no public opinion in Russia.
The bulk of our pollsters don't have even the slightest idea about this and conduct their polls at ease. What they create is often simply an artifact, since public opinion involves attitudes that people develop through discussion, rather than just some statements or reactions to certain events the researcher is interested in. The developments in Karachaevo-Cherkessia are a fine example. How are we to understand this revolt, this terrible, furious crowd vandalizing the Cherkessian president's office building? What does such public behavior mean? Can this be seen as a display of public opinion? Not at all, because public opinion is a position, a rational outlook on things, whereas in Cherkessia we see rough emotions, pointless shouting and hollering. Hence my answer to Mikhail Tarusin's question on how I feel about the Levada Center's motto, "From Opinion Towards Understanding". I think this motto is good, but precipitate. I would transform it as follows: "From emotions and moods towards opinions, and from opinions towards understanding".
So, answering Maria Ivanova's question on whether public opinion fulfills its principal tasks, I have to return to the description of these tasks. In a normal democracy, they are formulated as follows: "Public opinion represents the fifth power. It is an active agent instrumental in decision-making when it comes to major problems facing society's development". This is a kind of public opinion that does not exist in our country yet, and its prospects depend on political changes that will occur in the near future. In this sense the relationship between public opinion and democracy is unequivocal: democracy is an indispensable condition of the functioning of public opinion in a given society. As yet, we have no democracy, not even the rudiments of it. That is why we should work and keep working: our society, our politicians, and especially our population has to work for public opinion in Russia to become a solid social institution playing a dominant role in society.
Mikhail Podgorny asked about Russian political sociology's efficiency in forecasting elections results. Unfortunately, the forecasts of various public opinion research institutes haven't been compared lately, so it is difficult to tell who is better and who is worse. The last presidential and parliamentary election campaigns aren't representative because everything was clear in advance: one candidate ran for president, and one party went for the Duma. If there were several candidates or parties, forecasts could be compared. But I think our pollsters would not show a very good performance anyway, because the political system undoubtedly affects the poll results. This impact leads to polls being conducted not so much to analyze as to manipulate the people's consciousness.
Let us now turn to questions concerning the tools, methods and techniques of social research. Yury Chernyak's question was on how to proceed from a description of secured data to its analysis when the object of study is a closed and highly mobile one, and we don't know the exact size of the universe. To tell the truth, I do not see any problem here. Description is about describing some conditions of the studied object, and analysis is about determining the relations between these conditions. There should be no special transition between the two.
Not knowing the size of the universe is no problem, either. We can always learn something about it in terms of the types of elements constituting it. Three hundred respondents were enough for Tamara Dridze to discover seven types of mass information consumers, characterized by different levels of semiotic competence (see her splendid study Mass Information in a Soviet Industrial City).
And the last question, asked by Andrey Andreev, about the possible reasons for a discrepancy between the results of measurements of the same subjects obtained by different methods, such as interview and observation. It is very difficult to answer without knowing the details. Maybe the explanation for this discrepancy has to do with mistakes made by interviewers as well as observers. But I think one should start with the research program. Possibly, the program did not contain indicators equally measurable by both methods. Suppose they studied meetings. One can use both interview and observation to find out how controversial a discussion was in a meeting. But the quality of the decision the assembly arrived at can only be assessed in an interview; observation won't do it.
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