The concept of the "Russian world" in the ideological attitudes of southern Russian student youth (based on sociological research materials from 2015–2021)

Konstantinov Mikhail Sergeevich ORCID: 0000-0003-2781-789X PhD in Politics Associate Professor; Department of Theoretical and Applied Political Science; Institute of Philosophy and Socio-Political Sciences; Southern Federal University 105/42 Bolshaya Sadovaya str., Rostov-On-Don, Rostov region, 344006, Russia konstantinov@sfedu.ru Other publications by this author     Potseluev Sergei Petrovich Doctor of Politics Professor, Department of Theoretical and Applied Political Science, Southern Federal University 344006, Russia, Rostov-on-Don, Bolshaya Sadovaya Street 105/42 spotselu@mail.ru Other publications by this author

Pupikin Roman Aleksandrovich PhD in Politics Head of the Department; Institute of Philosophy and Socio-Political Sciences; Southern Federal University 105/42 Bolshaya Sadovaya str., Rostov-On-Don, Rostov region, 344006, Russia proman2006@mail.ru

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the expression "Russian World" owes its rapid transformation into one of the important concepts of Russian public discourse to the Ukrainian crisis of 2014 and its dramatic evolution in the future. When VTSIOM conducted a survey in November 2014 ^[1] to find out what meaning Russians put into the concept of "Russian World", it turned out that 70% of respondents only learned about such an expression for the first time during the survey itself. Russian Russians, however, 75% of respondents referred to the territory of Donbass as the "Russian World" (75%), while the lands of Central and Western Ukraine, rather, were not perceived as part of the "Russian World" (56% were of this opinion).

This article is devoted to the study of interpretations of the "Russian World" by the student youth of the Russian South. The data for the analysis were obtained during three series of a sociological survey of student consciousness.

Materials and methods

A serial sociological survey of student consciousness was conducted by employees of the Southern Federal University together with colleagues from the Southern Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The target group in the series of studies was represented by students from the South of Russia who studied at universities in Rostov-on-Don and the Rostov region from 2010 to 2021. The questionnaires were conducted in the spring of 2015. (N=718, standard deviation ±3.7 %) in five universities of the Rostov region (SFU, RSUPS, South Russian Institute of Management – branch of RANEPA, DonGAU and DSTU); in autumn 2019 (N=812, standard deviation ±3.4 %) in four universities of the Rostov region (SFU, RSUPS, M.I. Platov YURGPI, G.Ya. Sedov Institute of Water Transport); in the spring of 2021 (N=785, standard deviation ± 3.5%) in four universities of the Rostov region (SFU, RSUPS, YURSPI named after M.I. Platov, Sedov Institute of Water Transport). The gender composition in all three surveys was maintained close to the ratio of 50% of boys to 50% of girls.

At the first stage of studying the collected data sets, factor analysis was used. Correlation coefficients were used as a measure of the relationship; factorization was carried out by the principal component method, and factor rotation was carried out by the varimax method. Then a deeper correlation analysis was carried out, based on the results of which regression analysis was applied. Regression analysis is quite effective in revealing some unity of respondents' ideas about a particular problem. It was assumed that the positive or negative value of the coefficients of the linear regression equation allows us to make assumptions about the influence of variables on each other. Correlation analysis allows us to identify the dependencies between the attitudes of respondents, and regression analysis allows us to determine the position of variables in the structure of student consciousness and the dynamics of ideological concepts [for more information, see: 7-9]. The result of regression analysis can be illustrated by graphs of the interaction of variables. The following symbols were used to display this interaction:

– initial moment (independent variable);

– the central moment (a variable that depends on other variables, but at the same time determines subsequent variables);

– terminal moment (a variable completely dependent on other variables);

Inside the icon, the number of the variable is indicated, under which it appears in the table.

Results

The bipolar factor, which is an umbrella for the concept of the "Russian world", was immediately revealed in the data for 2015. Russian Russians have a positive pole formed by the following variables: slogans "Russia is only for Russians!" (0.577), "Stop feeding the Caucasus!" (0.542), "Give the "Russian spring" in the Russian Federation!" (0.535), "For the Slavic brotherhood!" (0.521), "Beat the Jews – save Russia!" (0.486), "Russians don't leave their own!" (0.464), "Russia should be an empire!" (0.454), "A woman's place is in the kitchen, not in politics!" (0.407), "The nation is everything, the individual is nothing!" (0.334), "Down with the oligarchs!" (0.333), as well as problems of attitude to non-Russian speech (0.380) and the definition of the "Russian world" (0.256). The negative pole of this factor was formed by the following variables: "What values (traditions) are most important to you? Russian Russian World Values)" (-0.366), "How would you characterize your ideological and political beliefs (national-patriotic)" (-0.299), preference for information resources of the Newspaper Slovo Russkim, Tomorrow, Russian Order, News of the Slavs of the South of Russia" (-0.269). It is curious that the conceptual content of the "Russian world" in this factor turned out to be separated from its value content and opposed to it.

Russians Russian world" concept variable was already in the group of the second bipolar factor with a sufficiently high factor load value of 0.766. The positive pole of the second factor was formed by the following variables: slogans "Russia is only for Russians!" (0.938), "Slavs of all countries, unite!" (0.788), "Stop feeding other nations!" (0.773), "Right or not, this is my Fatherland!" (0.724), "All people are equal by nature!" (0.718), "Personal freedom and human rights are inviolable!" (0.686), "Let's preserve nature for our children!" (0.630), "Return our pensions" (0.569), the idea of a world war (0.886), the prospect of Russia being drawn into a regional war (0.644), as well as the fear of loss of national sovereignty due to international isolation and technical lagging behind advanced countries (0.654) as the main threats to Russia in the next 10-15 years, the idea of a patriot of Russia as a person who "wants to see Russia as a democratic country with the domination of liberal values" (0.802) and at the same time "carries out an ideological struggle against the influence of foreign culture and liberal values" (0.595), attitude to the laws governing the Internet (0.631), trust in the Russian media, including the Internet (0.628), the problem of Russia's civilizational choice (0.595). The negative pole was the social value of "Leadership, the ability to lead other people" (-0.433) and gender (-0.732). Here we see, on the one hand, a great consolidation of the conceptual space of the concept of the "Russian world".

In the data for 2021, the studied variable also appeared to be in the bipolar factor. Its positive pole, in addition to the variable "Russian world", consisted of the first and second ranks of the most significant values ("good, friendly family" (0.442) and "interesting work" (0.417)), as well as the second, fifth and sixth ranks of a sense of community with other people ("people close to me for political reasons views" (0.324), "people of my nationality" (0.403), "people of the same religion as me" (0.411)). The negative pole of this factor is the fifth and sixth ranks of social values ("world peace" (-0.447) and "environmental well-being" (-0.463)), as well as the eighth and ninth ranks of a sense of community with other people ("inhabitants of the whole Earth" (-0.553) and "people close to me in culture" (-0.442)). It is also interesting here that the concept of the "Russian world" appeared in an ambivalent context. But if in 2015 it was about contrasting the conceptual content with the value content (which turned out to be at two poles of the same factor), then the data for 2021 clearly divided the effect of the factor on the positive side of family, national and religious values associated with the concept of "Russian world", and on the other – the negative side, opposed to universalist values and cosmopolitan identity. At the same time, it seems that the factors themselves related to the concept of the "Russian world" changed from 2015 to 2021, both in terms of content and value aspects. In 2015, ideological factors were more important (especially on the right side of the political spectrum), but already in 2019, these factors begin to blur in favor of issues of cultural and civilizational choice and identity. It can also be assumed that the concept of the "Russian world" itself occupied a different position in the structure of student consciousness, depending on the political conjuncture, as well as the socio-economic agenda, representing, in fact, one of the "migrating" ideological concepts identified by us in previous studies ^[9].

Thus, the preliminary factor analysis showed that the key factors are variables related to the ideological spectrum of student consciousness, as well as issues of civilizational choice, identity and social values. It is curious that these three key aspects overlap in many ways with the three basic concepts of the Russian world highlighted by other authors: imperial-civilizational, superethnic and Orthodox-civilizational [see, for example: 13, 2, 1, 3, 6, 11].

Figure 1. Conceptualization of the "Russian world" in the student mind (2015)

As can be seen from the data shown in Figure 1, almost a third of the respondents (31.5%) found it difficult to identify with any of the proposed options for defining the "Russian world": imperial-civilizational, pan-Slavic and Orthodox-civilizational. Russian Russian world, however, turned out to be the most popular of these options, i.e. the definition of the Russian world as "a project for the revival of the Russian Empire, which includes different ethnic groups influenced by Russian culture" (29.7%). Russian Russians were identified by almost 16% of respondents as "a project of uniting Slavs into a single state", and another 13% chose the interpretation of the "Russian world" as "the great mission of the Russian people – the unification of all Orthodox Christians into a single civilization."

In general, the concept of the Russian world, even if it was defined in great-power-imperial and Messianic terms, tended in the responses of our respondents to its civilizational interpretation. At the same time, the analysis of the conjugations of this variable with other variables showed that the majority of respondents who chose the civilizational interpretation of the "Russian world" assessed the collapse of the USSR rather negatively or unambiguously negatively, and in the vast majority (85-93%) either entirely or rather positively related to the annexation of Crimea to Russia.

In this context, the analysis of the connections between the interpretation of the concept of "Russian world" and the interpretation of the civilizational choice of Russia is of particular interest (see Table 1).

Table 1. The contingent interpretation of the "Russian world" with the interpretation of the civilizational choice of Russia (in percentages by columns; 2015)

Russian Russian culture was the most popular (41.8%) concept of Russia as a "multinational civilization with the leading role of Orthodoxy and Russian culture" among those who interpreted the Russian world in 2015 as "a project for the revival of the Russian Empire, which includes different ethnic groups influenced by Russian culture." Russian Russian Russian Russian World interpretation with an emphasis on Orthodoxy (the Russian world as "the great mission of the Russian people – the unification of all Orthodox into a single civilization") has a similar picture: here, too, 40.9% identified with the concept of Russia as a "multinational civilization with the leading role of Orthodoxy and Russian culture." The high degree of ideologization of the respondents who have decided on the understanding of the concept of the "Russian world" is also interesting: in the first four groups ("unification of the Slavs", "imperial renaissance", "geopolitical confrontation with the United States" and "the great mission of the Russian people"), there is an extremely small number of those who found it difficult to answer, which is generally not very typical for the students we interviewed. The degree of politicization in these four groups of respondents is also quite high: 28,1 %, 31,9 %, 43,1 %, 24,7 % accordingly, some of them are constantly interested in politics, and yet 48,2 %, 51,6 %, 33,3 %, 64,5 % – they are interested from time to time.

To verify this observation, let's look at the correlation of the respondents' ideological self-identification with their interpretation of the "Russian world", and then compare it with their attitude to key ideological slogans (see Tables 2 and 3).

Table 2. The contingent interpretation of the "Russian world" with ideological self-identification (in percentages by columns; 2015)

From the analysis of the data presented in Table 2, it can be concluded that all four groups considered, as a rule, position themselves as conservatives and/or liberals, as well as national patriots (but there are slightly fewer self-identifications from supporters of the geopolitical confrontation with the United States) and socialists. Let's compare these self-identifications with the real ideological content of student consciousness.

Table 3. The contingent interpretation of the "Russian world" with positive (the sum of "I completely agree" and "there is something in it") assessments of political slogans (in percentages by columns; 2015)

Russian Russians, according to the data given in Table 3, the supporters of the ethnic concept of the "Russian world" ("project of unification of the Slavs") and the Orthodox–centralization ("mission of the Russian people to save Russia!") have the greatest sympathy for the right-wing radical slogans "Russia is only for Russians!" and "Beat the Jews - save Russia!" the unification of all Orthodox Christians into a single civilization"). In the same two groups, the largest number of supporters of the chauvinistic slogan "A woman's place is in the kitchen, not in politics!".

Russian Russians, however, if we look at the inverse relationship, we can see that of those who fully or partially agree with the slogans "Russia is only for Russians!" and "Stop feeding the Caucasus!" the largest number (60.3% and 58.2%, respectively) chose the position "The Russian World is a renaissance project The Russian Empire". In the same position, the maximum number of supporters of the fascist slogan "The nation is everything, the individual is nothing!" (67.1%). However, this slogan is also supported by supporters of the ethnic concept of the "Russian world" (40.8%). It is quite logical that the largest number of supporters of the slogan "Russia must be an empire!" choose the imperial concept of the "Russian world" (74.7%), compared with 30.9% of the "ethnic" concept and 28.9% of the "Orthodox-civilizational" one. Russian Russian Spring supporters' sympathies were also curiously distributed in the Russian Federation!: the largest number of respondents who chose this position are at the same time inclined to interpret the "Russian world" as a project for the revival of the Russian Empire (75.8%), while the "ethnic" concept gained only 35.3%, and the "Orthodox-civilizational" – 33.3%. It is also no less interesting that the "imperials" are more enthusiastic for the "Slavic brotherhood" (67.8%) than the "ethnic" group (40.1%); however, an even greater number of those who sympathize with the slogan "For the Slavic Brotherhood!" at the same time express preferences for the "Orthodox-civilizational" concept of "Russian peace."

Now let's look at the problem of interpreting the "Russian world" from the point of view of student identity (see Table 4).

Table 4. The contingent interpretation of the "Russian world" with identity (in percentages by columns; 2015)

The results of the data analysis from Table 3 are discouraging: students who have interpreted the "Russian world" in one way or another are quite indifferent to the values of this world itself. All four study groups identified universal human values, personal and family values as priorities. Here we can fix for now that in 2015 the concept of the "Russian world" in the student consciousness tended rather to the values of the right side of the ideological spectrum, often balancing on the verge of moderate conservatism, national patriotism and right-wing radicalism. That is, in 2015, the concept of the "Russian world" had a very ideologized content, but was not rooted in deeper value structures of identity.

From 2015 to 2019, there was a shift in student consciousness towards greater interest in domestic problems ^{[5, 10]}. This could not but affect students' ideas about the concept of the "Russian world" (see Fig. 2).

Drawing 2. The dynamics of attitudes towards the idea of the "Russian world" from 2019 to 2021.

From the data shown in Figure 1, we can see that during the studied period, the proportion of respondents who found it difficult to answer decreased from 31.5% in 2015 (see Figure 1) to 22.9% in 2021. With a parallel increase in the number of students who admitted to lack of interest in this phenomenon, focusing on their own world.

Let's see now if the connections of the concept of "Russian world" with other variables have changed. Let's start with an analysis of ideological self-representations and slogans (see Tables 5 and 6).

Table 5. Contingent of the installation to support the "Russian world" with ideological self-representations (as a percentage by columns; 2019)

The feature of ideological self-identification revealed on the basis of the analysis of the data in Table 5 shows very vague ideas of students about those ideological contexts in which the concept of the "Russian world" has a social existence: We see that the dependence of attitudes towards this concept on ideological self-representations is very low. Most of the students either chose to "find it difficult to answer", or position their views as liberal (against this background, the rather high political literacy of the "communists" looks curiously). This, in particular, confirms the conclusion we have made in previous works about the shift of students' ideological preferences to the left-liberal side. Let's try to look at this problem from a meaningful point of view by analyzing the correlations between different attitudes towards the "Russian world" with a positive attitude towards political slogans (see Table 6).

Table 6. The contingent of the attitude to support the "Russian world" with a positive attitude (in the sum of the answers "I completely agree" and there is something in it") to ideological slogans (in percentages by columns; 2019)

The analysis of the students' real ideological preferences also shows a curious thing: ideological certainty has disappeared from their ideas about the "Russian world", the content of this concept is "smeared" across all ideological attitudes, mainly liberal and left-liberal. That is, regardless of what attitude of the state towards the "Russian world" the student chooses, he recognizes the high value of personal freedom and human rights, ideas of equality, etc. Such aberrations, of course, could be explained by reinterpretation of the concept of "Russian world" as "our own, native", but table 8 shows that the concept of "our own" has neither ethnic nor racial background. Moreover, such "omnivorousness" is characteristic only of the concept of "Russian world": in relation to other values and attitudes, the position of students is much more definite. Russian russians should definitely support the "Russian world" at the state level and "Stop feeding other nations" are particularly curious: the chauvinism of welfare expressed in the second concept does not correlate in any way with the requirements to support the "Russian world" at the state level. A more or less consistent position, as it often happens, is occupied only by those respondents who critically evaluate the concept of the "Russian world" (positions 5 and especially 4 in the columns of the table), but their attitudes are not stable enough. We will not give the conjugation tables for 2021 in order to save space, however, as shown above, for a year and a half – from autumn 2019 to 2021 – the shifts that occurred in the minds of students did not concern the problems of the "Russian world".

The right-wing conservative, ethnonational and even right-wing radical attitudes characteristic of 2015, which "framed" the concept of the "Russian world", had almost completely disappeared by 2019. On the one hand, as our group interviews and focus groups have shown, students simply know much less about the "Russian world", they care little about 2019. this is a problem. One can say even more: in the process of the questionnaire survey, there was a respondent in almost every group who asked to explain what the "Russian world" was. No one asked such questions during the 2015 survey. But, on the other hand, the concept of the "Russian world" could not completely disappear from the agenda: it periodically appeared in the media and social networks, so students somehow had to face it in the media space. They could push him to the periphery of their consciousness, but not completely exclude him. Therefore, let us turn to the analysis of correlations between the values of identity and ideas of belonging.

Table 7. Contingent of the installation to support the "Russian world" with the level of self-identification (the position "largely" was chosen) (as a percentage by columns; 2019)

Russian Russian world supporters, in addition to the traditionally high student connections with like-minded people (with "people who share my views on life"), are more likely to choose such potential components of the "Russian world". Here (in Table 7) we see a much more consistent position of respondents in relation to the content of the concept of "Russian world": supporters of the support of the "Russian world", in addition to the traditionally high student connections with like-minded people (with "people who share my views on life"), are more likely to choose such potential components of the "Russian world"like nationality, language, religion and culture. And vice versa: those who are critical of Russia's policy towards the "Russian world" are much more cool about the listed values, and they choose political and cosmopolitan self-identification with great enthusiasm. From this, we can draw a preliminary conclusion that the concept of the "Russian world" has migrated from the ideological concept to a much deeper level of identity, as it happened with the communicative value of the Internet at one time [see: 4]. But to test this hypothesis, let's turn to the data of 2021. Unlike the 2019 questionnaire, where respondents were asked to mark the degree of community for each of the self-identifications, in the 2021 questionnaire, students were asked to rank these communities according to the degree of decreasing importance. This method allows you to get a much clearer idea of the specifics of the respondent's self-identification (see Table 8).

Table 8. Contingent of the installation to support the "Russian world" with the level of self-identification (depending on rank) (as a percentage by columns; 2021)

Russian Russians, for example, critically minded respondents (who chose the position "The Russian World is a war–fraught invention of Russian nationalists...") more often ranked self-identification with Russian citizens higher than with people of the same nationality; they even considered religion to be a more important factor for self-identification than nationality (smaller, compared to all others The percentages indicate, first of all, that the hierarchy of identities of these respondents has a different sequence; a more complex table could reflect differences in structures, but would significantly complicate the perception of the text; therefore, we had to use averaged values). And vice versa: supporters of the first position in the columns of the table ("Definitely should support ...") placed political self-identification much lower than other respondents, preferring civil, linguistic, religious and cultural. If we slightly change the name of one of the collections of works very well known to political scientists, then it is quite possible to say: "Identity matters" ^[12]. In this context, identity turns out to be a much more effective variable for explaining the semantic context of the concept of the "Russian world". With the ideological blurring of this context in the student consciousness observed in recent years, the proto-ideological, deeper level of decontestation of this concept is becoming clearer and clearer. This hypothesis can be tested using regression analysis.

In 2018, the authors already conducted a regression analysis of the value of the "Russian world" in the structure of ideological attitudes of student consciousness (based on the materials of a 2015 survey) ^{[9, pp. 160-171]}, revealing a fairly high strength of the links between these values and ideological attitudes: rxy in relation to all positions turned out to be more than the required value of the Student's t-criterion. Despite some fluctuations in student interpretations towards ethnic and/or imperial issues, regression analysis of data for 2015 showed a significant dependence of the interpretation of the "Russian world" on ideological attitudes and values. Nothing like this in 2019-2021. It was not possible to identify it. It is possible that, as we have seen from the results of the correlation analysis, the student consciousness was simply more ideologized in 2015 (for reasons of "post-Crimean enthusiasm") than in 2019 and 2021, when the peak of enthusiasm had already passed.

Let's try using the same methodological means to test our hypothesis about the process of decontestation of the concept of "Russian world" by proto-ideological concepts related to identity, which is increasingly deepening into the structures of student consciousness. To do this, we will build a regression for the data presented in Tables 7 and 8. And although not all variables have demonstrated sufficiently tight relationships, the result of the construction can be seen in Fig. 3.

1. People who share my views on life (central)

2. People close to me in political views (central)

3. Residents of my city (source)

4. Citizens of Russia (source)

5. People of my nationality (terminal)

6. People of the same religion as me (central)

7. People who speak the same language as me (terminal)

8. Inhabitants of the whole Earth (central)

9. People close to me in culture (source)

From the graph shown in Fig. 3, it can be seen that the process of linking the concept of "Russian world" with identities has not yet been completed, not all variables are interconnected, but already on this material one can see the crystallization of two initial moments: so far, there is enough shaky local identity linking community relations with like-minded people (variables 1 and 2) and civil identity (variable 4). Nevertheless, this whole fragment is still "hanging in the air", has no rooted connections with other variables (or rather, this connection is unstable). The other starting point itself depends on the cosmopolitan identity ("People of the whole Earth"), but at the same time defines three other "soil" identities: ethnonational, linguistic and religious. Moreover, ethnonational and linguistic identities turn out to be terminal, dependent on all other variables. On this basis, it can be assumed that the process of deideologization of the concept of "Russian world" and decontestation of this concept in deeper identity structures based not on ideological premises, but on a cultural foundation is coming to an end in the student's consciousness.

Conclusions

The conducted research confirmed the hypotheses put forward by the results of the primary factor analysis on the migration of the concept "Russian world" in the student consciousness from 2015 to 2021. If in 2015 the decontestation of this concept took place mainly in ideological contexts, with a strong bias towards the right spectrum, then since 2019, the concept of "Russian world" has been rethinking in the student consciousness in favor of cultural and civilizational contexts and identity. As a result, the key factors influencing the decontamination of this concept are the variables of civilizational choice, identity and social values. Despite the fact that these variables significantly overlap with the three meanings of the concept of the "Russian world" represented in the media space of modern Russia (imperial-civilizational, superethnic and Orthodox-civilizational), the shifts taking place in the student consciousness indicate deeper changes: about the increasing rootedness of the concept under study in the structures of student identity, and not only at the superficial level of ideological attitudes.