Public Opinion in Revolutionary Times: Cybernetics, Sociology, and the Politics of Estonian Perestroika

During Perestroika, the Estonian Popular Front (PF) used opinion polling to assert itself as the only political force attentive to public feedback. This article situates this claim in the longer history of Soviet debates over the necessity for feedback in complex societies. It argues that the PF’s politics of polling were based on cybernetics-inspired theories of social communication, developed in the 1960s and 1970s at Tartu University by researchers such as Marju Lauristin. Institutionally, the rise of polling was enabled by organisations created to deliver the Scientific–Technological Revolution in Soviet economics and society, such as the Sociology Laboratory in Tartu, and the management consulting bureau Mainor, in Tallinn. Thus, the political contestations of the late 1980s appear as the radicalised end point of a decades-long Soviet debate over the shape and methods of social reform.