Worldview Attitudes of Russians: Empirical Analysis

Abstract

This text is a fragment from the book “Russian Society and the Challenges of the Time”, which is now being prepared for publication by the publishing house “Ves Mir” edited by M. K. Gorshkova and N. E. Tikhonova. The material is devoted to analyzing the dynamics of Russians’ values and worldview attitudes based on the data from all-Russian polls of the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences for more than twenty years. Key analyzed parameters: respondents’ assessment of the path followed by Russia, the choice of a pro-Western or pro-Russian civilizational model, attitudes towards change or stability, support or non-support for power, attitude towards (de)centralization of power, attitude towards democratic values. Based on survey data, the similarity of trends in the development of public sentiment in 2014 and 2022 is described. The main difference is fixed in the position of young people: if, after the unification of Crimea and Russia, they generally adhered to the same basics in the spring of 2022, it was noticeably more critical, and there was a trend toward its worldview segregation.