Politics in views of Russians: the experience of the sociological research

Abstract

Results of the sociological research of the Russians have been given in the article. These results are revealing their perception of a policy as one of the spheres of the public life and a kind of activity. The non-inclusion of the Russians into political processes has been established; their attitude to politics as a sphere of public life, that has no direct relationship to their daily lives, has been found. The political activity in submissions of the Russians belongs to the sphere of domination and is carried out by the sovereign and his close circle, who manipulate the ideas of the Russians, permanently activating subjective and civil discourses. The latter refers to the borrowing from another civilization some paradigm and applying it during the «election» period; first one is connected with the preservation of the basic parameters of the political system, e.g. a personified state, a non-institutionalized institutions, a traditional subordinate society, which consists of «little people» who need protection and who want to kneel before the «state». Based on the results of the research in the experimental region, the peculiarity of the views of Russian citizens on politics has been revealed: the growing interest to politics during the period of the activation of the governmental and imperial discourses by the «state», which is reviving the archaisms of the «Russian power». Interest is falling down in the period of increasing social and economic burden on the population, which is deepening the disunity of the population and social depression. At the same time, both in the first and second cases, the Russians usually remain to be passive observers. This is caused by the combination of both modern and traditional views on the political sphere of society with absolute dominance of the latter ones in their minds. The reasons and factors that influence the population’s interest in politics, as well as negative tendencies that stop the development of civil self-awareness of the Russians have been identified in the article: a) the orientation of potential transformation groups of authoritarian political ideas on distancing themselves from the political process; and the orientation of the conservative ones on the integration into it within the institution of service and (or) receivement of material benefits; b) the absence of a critical view of the population on politics under conditions of relative «stability» and satisfaction of physiological needs; c) the understanding of politics as a collective interest, rather than a private one, which reinforces the negative tendency of society’s mass and leads to the formation of a new-totalitarian milieu. The conducted research broadens the understanding of the Russians’ perception of politics and lead to the development of a set of measures for its (perception) correction.