Why once again the election in our country turned into an indecent formality suiting many? Where the real political struggle and competition of opinions have gone to? Where is our Russian “civil” society and any Russian society without adjectives? Why does one get an impression that most part of our compatriots do not really care?  

There are a lot questions similar to those mentioned, while the answers given are rather monotonous: it’s the authority, the regime, the system etc., to blame for all that. Yes, the contemporary Russian authority and the Russian authority in general has never been featured with the wish to be heard by one’s own compatriots.

And what about compatriots themselves? Why don’t they use the existing democratic mechanisms? Why are they so sluggish in getting united so that to defend their own interests and to influence the authority somehow?   

We tried to build up a generalized portrait of the average Russian citizen jointly with the leading sociologists from Levada Polling Center. They are Lev Gudkov, the director of the Center, Boris Dubin, the head of the social-political research department, and Alexei Levinson, the head of social-cultural research department.

Does the society exist in Russia?

Lev Gudkov: Yes, in a certain sense. There are common symbols, common beliefs, and a certain feeling of integrity. But comparing all that to the western arrangements, we can see that our society is very poorly organized and has a very low level of solidarity. Our integrity is kept not through an inner sense of unity, but it is kept rather mechanically through the structures of the state integration and state submission. 

In this sense we are leaving the totalitarian whole very slowly and with uncertain prospects. In that totalitarian whole there was no society, but the system of total state control, organization and distribution. The state acted as employer, police officer, educator, guardian of family relations, moralist, and whatever else.  

What is society? This is the system of stable relations based on solidarity, mutual values, feeling of participation and mutual interests. I shall stress that sociology does not measure the authority within the notion of “society”, as this is a kind of association not implying the power-driven relations. So if we talk about the society with us, well, it is getting to appear, but it’s still weak and non-integrated. 

What ties us?

Lev Gudkov: If we talk about common values, I would divide them into two principal types and levels. These are collective values – empire, heroic past, authorities controlling and taking care of everything, i.e. this is the level of collective symbols. It is rather declarative one: although people share these values, they are not ready to sacrifice anything to protect them.  

The second level is the values that are less declared, but people are really guided with them in their everyday life. These are values of relations with one’s family and friends, the consolidation of the lowest level. Solidarity at this level is not just traditionalism and the product of our past. This is also a type of adaptation to the repressive state where one may only rely on “one’s” people – relatives, friends, and colleagues. These are people with whom a person has personal relations. Such values are the basic resource for existence and survival and that is why they are much more important.   

The problem is that the interim level values, related to publicity and more differentiated interests, do not appear, are oppressed or are not articulated. The structure of the values itself, where such a middle level is not presented, speaks for primitiveness of the arrangement. Some new formations appearing on this level, it still stays underdeveloped.   

Of course, one may say that such a defective structure of values is the remnant of patriarchal character – and the fundamentalists and nationalists make a stress on this. But it is more likely to be related to a strategy of surviving: one may survive only relying upon oneself and one’s inner circle. This is a kind of “shrinking”, an attempt to find comfort under conditions of the general discomfort.    

The signs of this are tangible. We have an incredibly high level of mutual distrust. When we ask a question “Can one trust to most of people?”, 83% of the respondents say “no”. And the western democratic countries with high level of the public solidarity are featured with the opposite situation. They also have a high level of idealism and people there respond willingly to various events and public appeals. 

All that has to deal with a notion of one’s own opportunities – people are ready to be responsible for what they really can do. In our situation, according to our research, the absolute majority of 90% consider they are not able to influence any matters beyond their immediate environment. 45% of people say that the best they can do is influencing the situation in their home or in the yard. Everything else is considered to be out of their control and they feel to be dominated by some estranged forces. So they are not ready to answer for anything and they do not bank on anything. We can say, this has become the part of our national character.       

Alexei Levinson: If this question had been asked not through anonymous questionnaires, we would have got the answer that we all are Russians, we have much in common, and we have never been more united, and it’s not like it was in those times when we had our state half-ruined. It seems that the experiencing of the unity is really high now. But all that remains on the declarative level. Talking of solidarity itself, I fully agree with Lev Gudkov. Nonetheless, the emotional experience of a certain imagined solidarity has never been stronger. This explains the phenomenon of the Putin’s rating, the phenomenon of the confident feeling that we are the great power, and that others must take our opinion into consideration. This is a kind of suggesting ourselves and others that we are living well and everything is all right with us.     

Boris Dubin: I would add the “decorative” orthodoxy to the symbols allegedly uniting us: the recent measurements say that 70% of the adults rank themselves to be orthodox believers.

Generally, if we conclude on what was said by my colleagues, we can formulate a theorem. When the social medium is intended to survive, it will be restricted to closer relations. Some common symbols appear above it all, but it’s only loyalty expressed towards them that is possible, and they do not require any practical actions. The Orthodox Church, Putin, our “special way”, or our love for motherland can function as such symbols.

For example, we ask people “Are you a Russian patriot?” and 80% of the respondents say “yes”. Then we ask “What is patriotism?”, and 70% of people say this is the love for motherland. And only 20% say this is a wish “to do something for one’s country”. This gap is not accidental, because the strategy of permanent adaptation does not make solidarity relations beyond the close circle. It only can be compensated with declarative acceptance of the unities of the upper levels. And those unities can be destroyed in some period, or mobilized in other period also with the use of media that now are repeating ceaselessly that “we are getting off our knees”, that others become to be afraid of us etc. In our case the weakness of the society is compensated with the super-power of the state. It’s not that our state was really strong, but it looks like that and is perceived like that by people in power. So we talk about “banners”, not real actions.      

Attitude towards future

Boris Dubin: When we started our measurements in the early 90’s, the situation looked disastrous. For example in the poll of 1991 to a question “For how many years can you plan your future?” 62% of the respondents said they did not even know what would happen to them in a month. Only 5% of the population could plan their future in 5-6 year-long perspective. In 1998-1999 up to a half of the population also could not forecast anything beyond the next few weeks.  

The situation was different in 2006. 12% of the respondents could plan their future for next 6 years, which was twice as much as in 1991. 48% did not know what would happen in the next month and that was less than in 1991. The youth-related situation looks even better. In 2007 20% could plan for years ahead. Half of the respondents could plan their future for 1-2 years ahead. And only 29% could not plan anything beyond a-few-months period.

Obviously, the situation is changing and we are dealing with a certain “adaptation plateau”. It means the situation has not changed dramatically, but the adaptation is going on. People think now that life has settled a bit and it has become possible to plan something for the future. And they vote so that to keep the existing state of things. Seeing the contrast with those “terrible 90’s”, told about by television, people are ready to accept today’s reality. Besides, they just don’t see any opportunity for improving the current situation.  

Institutions

Lev Gudkov: Stability of life and opportunities for planning can appear where reliable and effective institutions are functioning allowing more organized life. People do not dissociate from such institutions. On the contrary, they get involved and they trust the institutions. So they can plan their lives considering more general stability.  

Alexei Levinson: I would like to make an important point here. Even in the situation of sharp mistrust for the institutions, even during the hardest years, people took sensible strategic decisions about their lives within their inner circles Lev Gudkov told about. They had babies, sent their children to school and paid money for all that, i.e. they made investments. They also repaired their flats and built houses. There was a sharp division of the world. There was a private life where a person and one’s relatives could control the situation. And there was the outer world where all was being destroyed and it was impossible to plan anything. What we are observing now is gradual acceptance of the “upper” institutions into one’s own private life and also penetration of that private life somewhere in the outer world. Now we can plan our careers not only in terms of getting good instruction, but also in terms of possible exchange rate of US dollar, and in terms of opportunity of keeping one’s money in a bank, even considering the declared low level of trust to the banking system.       

The institution of school must be mentioned among others. Being assessed to be in rather poor condition, anyway the investments are done there. Or you may take the private medicine like denture treatment or cosmetics. Even with general poor evaluation of the medicine, this part of it really flourished and flourishes now and money is invested there.   

The society had and has the defective structure, but its empty “middle floor” “sprouts” with some institutions substituting the civil ones. This is exactly the substitution. This is the “wild meat” at the place where civil society must be. I mean the institutions of business, networked relations, revival of string-pulling and deficit-using relations. All that looks ugly being compared to a normal civil society.    

As civil society institutions we only have the ones satisfying the vital needs. The Soldier’s Mothers Committees appeared as a response to many cases of murders of the soldiers in the standing army. The tricked sharers unite in their own associations. The motorists make up their organized resistance to the cases of unjust treatment of innocent drivers by the police. This happens in the spheres of life where some individual values are considered to be higher than the state’s values. It’s only that narrow band where something appears reminding of a social protest and social organization. Another category of citizens on that “middle floor” are criminal societies who also consider their own values to be more important than the state’s ones. Those are strong societies with high solidarity and high level of organization.     

How to proceed to normal civil society

Alexei Levinson: Nowhere in the world has mafia ever turned into civil institutions. As soon as it reaches complex systems, it just disappears there. There is mafia in the building or in a car business, but there is no mafia in electronic industry, and corruption exists there in different forms.     

Lev Gudkov: Let us not forget about our background and about which zone the processes of “sprouting” of civil action are going on. Two thirds of the population are living in the villages and small towns. They have no resources, and no bank accounts. They live from paycheque to paycheque and have no opportunity to get out of such a situation. It’s them whom the authority counts on. It relies on them cynically, without doing anything for them. It relies on them because this part of population has biggest hopes for the help from the authority. They just have no one else to hope for help from. Those people are the main authority’s electorate and it’s them to support the standing regime. In this sense, we have an interesting paradox. The social discontent does not lead to the replacement of the system or to any political changes. On the contrary, such dissatisfaction strengthens the regime, as it causes the paternalist attitudes towards the authority and requires it to do what the previous authority did. And the real changes are going on in the limited number of the large cities where concentrated is the most educated, active and wealthy part of the society, where infrastructure is well developed, and where people are included into much more open systems of relations.        

Boris Dubin: There is no evolutionary way from networked type of relations or from the closed solidarity of criminal type to the forms of the civil society. And the self-defense associations are reactive in their nature. They appear as a response to the threat to a person, person’s property or family. Such associations are unstable and they are easily reduced. They are non-viable beyond the reaction to a concrete challenge. It’s a kind of splash or fermentation. They may even cause something like “calico revolutions” where old people come out. But it’s enough for the authority just to throw them some money to make all people from such a crowd go to their homes. Such groups have no leaders, programs or structure, and so they cannot create any institution to reduplicate itself. They do not have an attitude for getting the better. These formations disintegrate right after the reaction to the particular occasion dies away.     

When a person gets real property, he/she develops another kind of motivation expressed in trying to avoid conflicts and in preferring to give a bribe so that to get off. This leads to string-pulling and networked relations.    

Alexei Levinson: In this sense, the term of “business community” is deceptive. Our businessmen are not united in any real community. They have some particular fashion and they share some common rumors, but all that are weak forms of the community and all that does not lead to any actions. All of them deal with the authority on the one-to-one basis. And no local authority in Russia is afraid of possible disturbance by the business.    

Adaptation to the regime

Alexei Levinson: During the period from 1915-1918 Russia was featured with a mass of different kinds of self-organization where the Soviets were only one of the forms. There were cooperatives, land cultivation associations, trading partnerships, panels for helping the wounded etc. Just take a look at the local newspapers of those times. There were lots of announcements about the meetings, dinner parties, discussions and so forth. All that involved masses of people. That was a booming civil activity. And starting from 1919 all that began to be destroyed. Eliminated were not only organizations alternative to bolshevists; they destroyed just any organizations. And our today’s “empty” middle floor is the result of our history. In this sense, it would be useful to introduce a term “sociocide” where, differently from genocide, it’s not people of a certain nationality, but organizations that are annihilated. It is known that “political” article #58 of the Soviet Union Criminal Code was considered to be applied for anti-soviet activities, while people might be sentenced on the basis of this article just being Esperantists, Aquarians or whatever. All that is recorded in our genetic memory and people are really afraid of that.         

Lev Gudkov: This is where we started our conversation. This is the biggest sociological problem we have been dealing with during 15 years. This is our citizen with one’s experience of adapting to the repressive regime. This is the fundamental thing blocking and sterilizing any forms of socialization and adaptation. We see people adapt in different ways: corruption, family relations, and informal acquaintance networks. Every individual seeks for opportunity for adaptation. The state is bought its functions out through corruption schemes. Along with that, the state is always represented by a concrete person, and it is impossible to buy immunity from the state directly.            

Alexei Levinson: It’s exactly this individual paying off that eliminated the sprouts of universalism in our culture. In our situation anything looking like a community must get approval from the state. Otherwise, it is recognized to be “western” values.