Boris Grushin, a Russian sociologist who was a pioneer of public opinion polling in the Soviet Union three decades before its breakup, has died in Moscow. He was 78.
His Sept. 18 death was announced by his daughter Olga Grushin, who said he had Parkinson’s disease.
In a communist society where directives came from the top, Mr. Grushin set out to find what the average person thought.
In 1960, in the Khrushchev era, Mr. Grushin founded and edited the Institute of Public Opinion at the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda. The institute conducted the Soviet Union’s first public opinion surveys, asking people to identify the major problems in Soviet society and inquiring about personal matters, including the quality of marriages and satisfaction with leisure time.
“The fact that people were asked what do they think, it was a revolution in totalitarian society,” said Vladimir Shlapentokh, a professor of sociology at Michigan State University and a former colleague of Grushin’s.
In the late 1980s, in the Gorbachev era, Mr. Grushin helped found the All-Soviet Center for Public Opinion Studies. Although state-owned, the center was free to raise politically charged questions. Subsequently, Mr. Grushin founded Vox Populi, the first free-standing, privately run opinion service in the Soviet Union.
