Gorski discusses the genesis of opinion polling in the final years of the Soviet project. Starting with Tatyana Zaslavskaya’s bombshell “Novosibirsk Report” (1983)—a paper that sharply critiqued the Soviet planned economy and caused a sensation in both the USSR and the West—what this author calls the “sociological turn” in late-Soviet social science paved the way for a shift from analysis of primarily economic data to public opinion. In 1987, Zaslavskaya founded the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM), which began presenting its first findings in the last years of the Soviet Union. VTsIOM implicitly argued that the Soviet person was receding as a specific type, rejecting the Soviet-Marxist legacy of materialism in favor of Hegelian idealism and promoting neoliberal values of transparency, openness, and democracy. In the post-Soviet era, public opinion formed an alliance with the market that surfaced specific cultural products as representative of objective social trends—with surprising consequences. The collection of public opinion data collided with the disintegration of post-Soviet space and the various national independence movements of the late 1980s and early 1990s, inhibiting data-gathering efforts and ultimately undermining the very ideals of public opinion polling VTsIOM originally represented.