Pollster Lyubov Kostyrya, 47, poses for a photographer in front of an apartment building on March, 2 in Moscow, Russia. (Alexander Zemlianichenko Jr/For The Washington Post)
Sun Mar 6, 2016
MOSCOW — Russian President Vladimir Putin has an 83 percent approval rating. Lyubov Kostyrya’s job is to knock on doors to track it.
Every week, Russian pollsters dispatch an army of workers to canvas the country’s 11 time zones for peoples’ views on Putin, the economy and other issues. And so Kostyrya visits one home after another to learn what Russians are thinking. Two years after Putin’s ratings skyrocketed at the start of a geopolitical conflict with the West, they have stayed there, week after week, month after month.
On behalf of the Kremlin, pollsters in recent weeks have tracked economic sentiment in struggling industrial towns. They ran a snap survey to test support to spurn an electricity deal with Ukraine that left Crimeans in the dark. And they have kept close track of reactions to cease-fire negotiations with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
“Survey!” Kostyrya said after she rang the bell of yet another steel-doored apartment in a Soviet-era 12-story complex of identically laid-out dwellings on Moscow’s edge. “Can I ask you a few questions?”
Just over two years ago, as Russia headed toward the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Putin’s poll numbers were slumping. Only 61 percent of Russians approved of his job performance — high by Western standards, but the lowest for Putin since shortly after he took office. After Putin annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, then stoked tensions with the West to their worst since the Cold War, Russians took their minds off their struggling economy and positioned themselves resolutely behind their leader.
It is a development that has flummoxed Western nations and frustrated Russia’s motley band of oppositionists. Some of them say that Russians are too scared to speak their minds to pollsters. Others claim that the poll numbers are manipulated, although most Western polling firms arrive at similar figures.
The pollsters say that the Kremlin is keenly interested in the results they turn up every week — and that it quickly reacts when it sees problems that could pose a threat to Putin’s ratings. Even as pocketbook problems have mounted, Putin has launched popular military campaigns in Ukraine and now in Syria.
