Russians More Certain About Their Personal Futures Than About Future Of Their Country – OpEd

Russians are more confident about how their own lives will proceed in the future than they are about how their country will develop, with young people showing the largest divergence because of uncertainty about the country, according to a survey of 1350 of them by scholars at the Moscow Institute of Sociology and Tyumen State University.

Mariya Podlesnaya and Ilona Ilina drew those conclusions on the basis of a study of how different generations view heroism. Their results, published in the Russian journal, Sociological Science and Social Practice, in its current, are discussed by Nakanune news agency journalist Yevgeny Chernyshov at nakanune.ru/articles/121711/.

The two sociologists divided their sample into four age groups: “the Soviet” (born before 1968), the “Reform” generation (born between 1969 and 1981, the millennials (born between 1981 and 1996, and Generation Z (born between 1997 and 2012). 

Seventy percent of the first but only 48 percent of the last told investigators that they have a clear vision of the future of Russia, the poll found. But the various age groups have roughly similar positions as far as their confidence in their own personal futures are concerned, Podlesnaya and Ilina report.

Perhaps the current turbulence in the world explains why Russians make such a distinction between their ideas about the future of their country and their personal futures. But that gap is “very indicative,” Podlesnaya and Ilina says, about the way in which Russians are confronting the future, paying less attention to that of the country and more to their own.