Agriculture in Russia is in a dangerous state, and this is expected to worsen in the future. A modern agricultural workforce cannot be recruited to villages unless there are dramatic changes in the quality of village life, and serious consideration should be given to creating agro-urban centers that would attract people to live and work in rural…

Research on rural youth in Russia shows that keeping qualified and ambitious young people in the rural economy will require creating conditions for young people to exercise initiative in the rural economy and diminishing the gap in quality of life between rural and urban environments. Only in this way can the pessimism of rural youth be overcome.

Research on Russian students shows that obtaining a higher level of education and adding to one's knowledge, skills, abilities, and motivations increases levels of social and professional status. Investment in human capital in Russia, especially in education, also brings benefits that are not directly related to income, such as a rise in social…

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…

The current state of the economy in the developed countries make it possible to characterize them using concepts and terms such as the postindustrial society, the new economy, the service economy, the creative economy, the posteconomic society, the information society, the knowledge society, and the consumer society. Among these terms and…

Russian science is in need of serious reforms if it is to provide the research and development needed for economic health. Issues of increasing average age of scientific personnel, poor working conditions, low salaries, and relatively low social prestige need to be addressed. This article reviews a questionnaire survey conducted in 2008 that aimed…

Social systems, like biological systems, sometimes manifest dysfunctions that could be considered forms of "social disease." The author interprets the term "social diseases" as "persistent dysfunctions of social relations" that disrupt the normal functioning of particular elements of society or the entire social…

Recently, the need to turn away from technological education in general education schools and go back to labor training has been expressed, particularly by: (1) long-term teachers in the "Labor" (Trud) general education school who do not want to change their ways, go through retraining, and increase the amount of their work efforts in…

The urgent demographic situation has led to an acute awareness of the necessity of far-reaching decisions to strengthen the family and implement radical measures of family policy. Many experts are talking about the crisis of the institution of the family, about the loss of the importance of family values among a substantial portion of Russians,…

Improving the quality of life of the people of Russia--a paramount national priority--requires optimizing scientific activity and substantially increasing its technological success rate and social effectiveness, and reforming the administrative structure, in short, the fundamentalization of present-day science. The connection between fundamental…

Russian science is experiencing processes of personnel aging and stagnation, which are disrupting the continuity of the generations and are limiting prospective workers' opportunities for professional and career growth. The decline in the prestige of science work, the exodus of specialists into other, more attractive segments of economic activity…

Among the problems that make the everyday life of the family the most difficult, it is those related to people's material condition that have been and still are the most important. The fact that this topic remains solidly in the lead and has its own sequence of events--scarcity, rising prices, low income, and not having enough--is an indication…

The present article is designed to study the attitudes of young villagers toward living in the city or in the countryside as a condition that is essential for the reproduction of the social and professional structure of the countryside, a structure that has become deformed in the past few years and is not up to current requirements. The study is…

Concludes the findings from a survey that investigated how deaf and hearing-impaired Russian students in the upper grades deal with their hearing impairment in both their school and out-of-school worlds. Examines the value orientations and the emotional assessment of life plans through the prism of the students' attitudes toward their disability.…