Using newly available data from the Trajectories in Education and Careers Study, the first longitudinal study on a representative sample of high school students in Russia, we examined the importance of investments in human and cultural capital on students' mathematics and reading standardized examinations, as well as on the likelihood of…

In this commentary, the author stresses that reading habits in Russia have changed since the Soviet era, and the more intellectual journals and magazines in particular have lost their importance. Audiences for books and magazines have fragmented, and there are fewer sources of commonly shared information and ideas than was true a few decades ago.…

It is acknowledged that the value of reading has gone down in today's Russian society, and this is rated as unequivocally negative. Instead of "the most well-read country in the world," Russia is now called a "society of TV viewers" by the some observers; it is not a nation of independent thinkers but passive objects of the…