There is strength – the mind would be needed

The Center for the Development of Humanitarian Technologies “New Era” published the results of the study “The Image of Russia in the Representation of Youth”, conducted as part of the “Laboratories of Thought” project. According to these data, young Russians (students or university graduates) most often associate modern Russia with phenomena associated with power, fear, and traditions. Among such images, the respondents recalled Ivan the Terrible, the Kalashnikov assault rifle and Koshchei the Immortal. The respondents mostly associate the ideal Russia of the future with other values ​​— development, beauty, and freedom. In the minds of educated youth, they correspond to the images of a space rocket, skyscrapers and Peter the Great.

The focus group study involved 101 people, mostly university students and graduates, as well as young scientists aged 18 to 35. Respondents were presented with 15 rows of symbols (rulers, colors, trees, animals, musical genres, etc.) and asked to indicate those that are associated with modern Russia and with the ideal image of Russia of the future. Together with the symbols, the respondent named from one to three explanatory tag associations (strength, justice, freedom, etc.). The researchers justified the non-standard methodology by the need to “overcome the constraint of respondents and stop their need to provide socially approved answers.” At the same time, the authors pointed out the need to “study the data comprehensively, without focusing only on the most striking indicators and associations.”

The most frequently encountered tag describing modern Russia was “strength” – 109 mentions. This characteristic was recalled when associating the country with the monument “Motherland” (20.8% of answers in the category “If Russia is a sculpture, then what?”), a bear (35.6% in the category “animal”), Ivan the Terrible (23 .8% in the category “historical figure”) and Joseph Stalin (22.8% in the same category).

Other leading tags in the description of modern Russia were “war” (45 mentions), “fear” (39), “power” (31) and “traditions” (29). Closed the list of “struggle”, “unity”, “simplicity” and “cunning” – 16 mentions each. These characteristics were born when the respondents mentioned Koshchei (19.8% in the “fairy tale character” category) and Kolobok (14.9%), historical reconstructions (30.7% in the “hobby” category), the paintings “Barge haulers on the Volga” ( 22.8%) and “The Ninth Wave” (14.9%). Participants named the Kalashnikov assault rifle (14.9%), matryoshka doll (12.9%) and an intercontinental ballistic missile or a nuclear submarine (9.9%) as three symbols of modernity.

The respondents connected the image of the ideal Russia of the future with development (101), beauty (83) and freedom (81). The participants cited these tags, recalling Peter the Great – 35.6% of answers in the category “If the ideal Russia of the future is a historical figure”, skyscrapers (24.8% in the category “building”) and Ilya Muromets (36.6% of answers in the category “fabulous hero”). Also, the ideal Russia, among other things, is associated among respondents with tranquility (59), progress (52), technology (41) and science (36). The respondents named the space rocket (22.8%), the wings of the firebird (14.9%) and the nuclear icebreaker (13.9%) as symbols of the desired future.

“The study is really objective,” Alexander Shabaltin, general director of Novaya Era, commented on its results to Kommersant. “There are moments that can upset: it’s a shame that young people look at some things like that, but this is really how they think.” Mr. Shabaltin emphasized that the methodology used was just designed to “give an honest look”: “Those structures that are interested in the development of our country should take into account these images among young people and continue to work with them.”

At the same time, the expert warned against unambiguous interpretations of the answers associated with the mentioned images: “Let’s take a historical figure: our leaders are Ivan the Terrible and Stalin – for some they were positive heroes, for others they were negative. They are in the lead, but they are in the lead not because it is bad, and not because it is good, but because different people bring them up in their answer and say: “I have such an image of today’s Russia.” Therefore, according to the researcher, it is important to study associations in a complex way and look not only at the most striking associations, but also at “small ones, which are also part of a multi-layered image.” “Young people have a very bright view of the future of their country: they wish it development, progress, creation. It is very important to maintain this attitude and put it into practice,” concluded Mr. Shabaltin.

Political scientist Pyotr Miloserdov notes that such studies lie in the plane of psychosemantics – a branch of science at the intersection of sociology and psychology, which deals with finding out “what people think through images.” “It looks like shamanism, but there is a serious mathematical apparatus behind all this. This is a really working method, if the research is done correctly, given that they are expensive, ”explains the expert. He also recalls that in Russia the percentage of refusals to participate in political polls is more than 90%, so it is impossible to confirm the conclusions of the New Era about the gap between popular tags denoting modern Russia and ideal Russia with classical sociological studies. Moreover, Russian political sociology, according to Mr. Miloserdov, is most often a “distorting mirror”, when “poorly trained and poorly motivated interviewers ask indifferent people about what they are not interested in.”

Grigory Leiba, Ksenia Veretennikova