To try and understand the polls that show more than 80 percent support among Russians for Vladimir Putin even as the country’s economy tanks, The Washington Post’s Moscow bureau chief tagged along with a poll taker as she went door to door in a Moscow apartment building.
Although Putin’s popularity is often attributed to his government’s control of the media, his supposed foreign policy prowess and the Russian people’s proclivity for strong leaders, I found this detail especially interesting:
Over the course of five hours, [Lyubov] Kostyrya conducted just five interviews after knocking on 144 doors…
I think that tells us all we need to know about the reliability of this particular poll, and the general willingness of Russians to speak their minds on politics to strangers with clipboards.
