Practically no one will dispute that the future of Russia depends on the successfulness of the multifaceted modernization of Russian society, a task that cannot be confined solely to the socioeconomic sphere. The most fundamental task is that of changing the societal system of values and institutions. If Russia is to modernize successfully, the…

Research data on the dynamics of ethnocultural adaptation of migrant family students in Moscow schools shows a tension between assimilation and retention of one's cultural background. Ethnic differences create barriers between those of Russian and non-Russian ethnicity, including difficulties with language and the widespread phenomenon of…

The public has always had a keen interest in textbooks on history. Despite all the differences among textbooks on national histories, most countries have a similar focus: the task of shaping the new generations' positive image of their own people in its long or short history, while not disregarding any sinister, dark, at times frightful pages 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…

Today the scientific potential of any country, its science cadres, the volume and scale of the research being conducted, the number of science centers, the quality and subject matter of the research, the level of the material and technical equipment of its research laboratories, and other aspects constitute a most important factor in ensuring…

This article examines the opinion of experts who are first-rate specialists in their fields and can provide accurate and objective information about these issues. An expert survey was conducted by the Russian State Social University in seven federal districts, twenty-five regions of the country. The survey was participated in by 309 experts…

The rise of the present generation of young people in their 20s came during the 1990s, when the vacuum of form was being hastily filled with just about any content. At that time a fashion for churchly themes, traditional and nontraditional religiousness, arose. In the opinion of Deacon Andrei Kuraev, the most prominent phenomenon of religious life…

Education in Russia, like the systems of education in other countries, is going through substantial changes: the priorities, structure, and content of education are changing; new standards are being adopted; and an independent system is being put together to assess the results of instruction and the quality of education as a whole. It is the…

In the recent past there has been animated discussion of problems related to the image of the various social institutions and state organizations of Russia, including the Russian armed forces. Sociological analysis is a constructive way to shed light on the image of the military. The armed forces are linked closely to the main spheres of the life…

In the period after the collapse of the Soviet Union, cadre problems in Russian science gradually came to be included among the problems that are the most pressing and whose solutions need to be given top priority. The mass exodus of young and middle-aged qualified specialists from scientific research institutes, design bureaus, and scientific…

In June and July 2004, the Institute for Comprehensive Social Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with the Russian Federation office of the F. Ebert Foundation, carried out a repeat survey on the topic of "Citizens of the New Russia: How Do They Feel about Themselves, and What Society Would They Like to Live…

On 28 November 2006 Russia observes the one-hundredth anniversary of Dmitrii Sergeevich Likhachev. By an edict of President V.V. Putin 2006 has been designated the year of D.S. Likhachev. A scientist of encyclopedic scope and a renowned researcher into Old Russian literature, Academician Likhachev became, starting in the second half of the 1980s,…

The article, based on a study carried out in 2003, discusses Russia's migrant children's orientations toward acquiring higher education in the Russia Federation. The focus of this study was to determine the educational factors that motivate migrants to relocate to the Russian Federation. Immigrants in Russia make up more than 5 percent of the…

In the course of the transformation of Russian society that started in the early 1990s, when the adoption of market mechanisms of management led to a drastic stratification of the population's income levels, the position of scientists worsened, inasmuch as an ineffective system of providing incentive to work in science was kept in place. In this…