The Dynamic of Attitudes in Russia Concerning Social-Economic and Political Changes

Abstract

An Academy of Sciences collective has conducted All-Russia monitoring to document a twenty-year period of transformation, from 1990 to 2010. Field research featured semiformal interviews and a methodology stressing comparability, with a periodicity of four years. Six studies were conducted in the relatively calm early summer in 1990, 1994, 1998, 2002, 2006, and 2010. Results reveal some increase in positive attitudes toward the market economy and modernization, although many feel themselves to have been economic losers in the past twenty post-Soviet years. An emerging middle class, including objective and subjective criteria, is identified, with over half living in mid-sized and large cities, and Muscovites comprising 15 percent. Like the rest of the population, the middle class associates its hopes for a secure life with the state.