The system of education exerts a substantial, positive influence on all social processes in society, and that includes upbringing. Owing to a number of specific causes, however (in particular, inadequate material, technical, and organizational support), the system has not performed that function very well for about ten years. Moreover, various…

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.

Issues of sexuality have started to be studied quite extensively in Russia in the past few years, and the results of research have appeared in this country's scholarly literature.1 It is regularly noted, moreover, that at the present time Russian sociologists have only very preliminary, fragmentary ideas not only about the sexual behavior of…

Research on the influence that the needs of married couples have on family stability in Russia shows that there are marked differences in expectations in rural and urban areas. This article describes a sociological survey carried out in the territory of Rostov oblast in the spring of 2011. The basis for the study consisted of cities and rural…

Survey data show that Russians relegate free time and leisure activity to secondary status compared to work, and free time faces the threat of becoming devalued and losing its importance as a life value. At the same time, in the structure of Russians' leisure activities there is an ongoing tendency for leisure to become simpler, for active types…

Life values, value orientations, social attitudes, and other corresponding social collisions have been the object of many studies. Research on the values of youth in Russia is marred by methodological problems that have not been adequately addressed, and more careful approaches show that there may not be a finite list of values that are held and…

The crisis of rural life in Russia involves a declining and aging population, emigration of rural young people to urban areas, lack of employment, and farms in urgent need of modernization. Programs in rural schools can be used more deliberately to encourage young people to remain in the village and to equip them to be agents of rural…

Data from a survey of the value orientations of young people in Russia regarding work, family, and sex show that the balance between personal and societal concerns is changing. (Contains 5 tables.)

There can be no doubt that gender attitudes and the gender stereotypes formed on their basis have a deep-rooted social character. This stems unequivocally from the parallels of development of social processes and gender models. The ideology of gender began to flourish in Russia along with perestroika, an ideology that in the past quarter-century…

Attention to virtual space is growing in Russia. Russian politicians have an interest in the Internet: the president has his own blog and reads Twitter, and the United Russia Party is starting to work with the iPad on a mass scale. Opposition leaders and movements are not lagging behind either. Online surveys of various Internet resources are…

The socialization mechanisms of young people in Russia are greatly affected by the prevalence of youth subcultures, both socially positive ones and marginal subcultures that include antisocial ones. In this paper, the author focuses on a phenomenon in the youth community that is quite prevalent in the provinces of Russia, the "gopniki"…

In October to December 2008, the Laboratory for Political Research at the Higher School of Economics State University, as part of a broad project devoted to determining the degree of homogeneity versus heterogeneity of the political consciousness of today's Russian society, carried out a sociological survey on the topic "The Political…

In the ethnosociological literature, the term "ethnic tolerance" is interpreted as a specific trait of the national character of some particular people, its mentality, a trait that is oriented toward tolerance, harmony, and a willingness to deal constructively with any problems that arise in interethnic relations. The variegated…

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…

In the past 10 years, there has been a tendency in Kalmykia to drift away from traditional culture, the foundation of which has been the Buddhist teaching adopted by the Kalmyks in the 17th century, and also, most directly, the Kalmyk language, which has lost its definitive importance in Kalmyk society. Young people of Kalmykia today express…