Does an Enquiry for Socialistic Changes Exist in Russia?

Abstract

Objective: to study the problem of the request for change from the viewpoint of answering the question whether there is a reactionary desire of the least modernized strata of Russians to “return to the USSR”, completely abandoning the results of the “liberal revolution” of the 1990s.

Methods: to answer the question whether there is a request for the restoration of the “Soviet socialism” in modern Russia, the materials of the all-Russian sociological surveys on a representative sample (mainly the pre-COVID survey of 2019), organized by the Institute of Sociology of the FCTAS RAS, are analyzed.

Results: it is proved that, although the popularity of more authoritarian models of the state has been growing among the Russians in the last decade, at the same time, there is an active “habituation” to private property institutions and entrepreneurship. It is concluded that at present the main object of protest sentiments is not the exploitation of labor by capital, but bureaucratic corruption. This means that the high “demand for change” is objectively connected with the mass desire not to “return to the USSR”, but to complete the dismantling of quasi-socialist (political) institutions, which began in the 1990s, but then interrupted and partially canceled.

Scientific novelty: based on the original databases of all-Russian surveys, non-trivial conclusions were drawn about the direction of the “request for change”, which controvert with the statement popular in the recent years about the request for the USSR restoration.

Practical significance: understanding the direction of the mass request for change makes it possible, without waiting for a social explosion, to plan in advance those socio-economic reforms that best meet the requirements of the Russian citizens.