Western social studies show that the mentality of the Russians is similar to the North Europeans. However, during the years of Putin’s rule, most of them fell back into «traditionalism». There are significant differences in the culture of Russians and Europeans.
For several centuries now, the main enemy of the Russian people has been considered the state in the form of a serving-punitive class. “The source of good in the Russian mentality is the community, today it is relatives and friends (Gemeinshaft), and evil is projected onto the state in the form of bureaucracy (previously — a gentleman, a policeman, etc.); the way of action is “everything will work out”, and we think the triumph of good is undoubted, but … in the future (“not we, so our children …”),” sociologists write.
The question is natural: what are the pros and cons of the Russian mentality in the implementation of «pro-Western» reforms? Sociologists answer this question: “A German does not rely on “maybe it will cost”, an Englishman or an American seeks justice in the courts that protect human rights, which are fixed in the Constitution on the basis of a “sacred” contract between citizens and their elected authorities. As for the victory of good over evil, in Western culture it depends on the activities of the parties, their ideas about what is good and what is evil, and, most importantly, on the personal efforts of each citizen.
Well, then sociologists move from theory to practice. Statistical data are available using psychological tests in cross-cultural studies. K. Kasyanova applied the MMPI test on Russian students and a control group of pilots, comparing her data with the results obtained by other psychologists from many countries. She found that the Russians go off scale in «cycloid». This concept from the language of psychoanalysts means that Russians are not inclined to systematically performed activities that do not depend on mood, unlike, for example, punctual Germans.
The most interesting results of intercultural studies were obtained by E. Danilova, E. Dubitskaya and M. Tararukhina. They used the psychological test developed by the Dutch sociopsychologist Gerd Hofstaed in the 60s to measure the parameters of organizational culture.
Hofstede revealed the ethno-national features of labor relations and refuted the belief in their universal rationality. According to the Hofstede test, 70 peoples were studied. In recent years, mass testing of Russians has been carried out: 1700 respondents from among employees of energy companies in 23 regions of Russia and 518 employees of large machine-building enterprises in Moscow, the Volga region, and the Vladimir region. Power engineers are distinguished by the fact that managers and specialists of the new formation are sufficiently represented in their composition, and the latter (machine builders) are 90% ordinary Russian workers.
What are the results of these studies? It turned out that the Danes, Norwegians and Finns form one cluster. Dubitskaya and Tararukhina called it the «Northern European Solidarity Syndrome». The British, Americans, Irish, as well as Germans, Austrians, Italians and Swiss formed another statistical cluster, which was called the «Romano-Germanic achievement syndrome». Russia, on the other hand, fell into the group of North Europeans (by the way, based on these results, it is clear what could take root in Russia as a political and economic formation — liberalism of the Anglo-Saxon type, South European paternalism or Scandinavian socialism).
The researchers defined another scale in the vocabulary of management as “loyalty to the company in exchange for guarantees”, and in a broad sense, this is the mentality of dependence on the external environment or, on the contrary, tuned to the social subject’s own resource. In the logic of management, the first is the mentality of an employee, and the second is a partner. According to this index, Russians are among those who value the guarantees from the organization more. In general, they conclude that the Russian cultural matrix (let us recall, the matrix of labor relations) is far from the Romano-Germanic one, and again closer to the mentality of employees in the Nordic countries. The organizational culture of Russia is built on two pillars: solidarity between employees and subordination to the organization. In Hofstede’s scales, this refers to the culture of «femininity» on test items: caring for each other, intuition, the value of free time. The opposite pole of “masculinity” is assertiveness, rationalism, perseverance in achieving goals, money.
“The subordination of the organization in the culture of labor relations is associated with a well-known feature of the Russian mentality — etatism, the attitude towards the state in the role of its subjects, not free citizens. In practice, this means loyalty to the existing order in exchange for guarantees from the state,” the sociologists conclude.
The system of values in Russia, in comparison with the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, is quite close to the Western European one, “but more conservative, traditional, more prone to order, hierarchy, and less to the rights and freedoms of the individual.” In general, Western and Russian sociologists have not made any discoveries here. Another thing is more interesting: has there been a transformation of values in Russia in the last 20 years? There are also studies on this topic.
In the 1990s, there was a marked shift towards the values of the «modern personality» (intellectual autonomy, the value of mastery), especially among young people. However, in the period 2000–2005 an increase in hedonism was recorded instead of the values of the development of creative abilities. In the most important areas, there has been a rollback … the cultural preconditions for modernization have deteriorated. According to monitoring surveys carried out in 1998, 2004 and 2007. employees of the Institute of Sociology, in the period from 2004 to 2007. the share of so-called modernists decreased from 26% to 20%, while the share of traditionalists increased from 41% to 47%, while maintaining the share of «intermediate» (33%).
The authors considered the acceptance of the values of individual freedom as signs of modernity, which is “completely unacceptable” for traditionalists and intermediates in this matter (80% of the sample!). “For them,” writes M.K. Gorshkov, “the optimal model of development, traditional for Russia, is based on the omnipotence of the state, which ideally serves as the representative of the interests of society as a whole and ensures the security of both each individual citizen and the community. Moreover, such a model is perceived more as a chaotic community, where everyone performs their function, than as a community of free individuals who consciously build a variety of life strategies, guided by human rights, recognized as basic by both the state and society.
So, the above evidence suggests that the value system of Russians is “quite close” to the North European one, but is more inclined towards order, hierarchy, and less towards the rights and freedoms of the individual. In addition, in recent years, the proportion of traditionalists has increased.
However, the «cultural component» of the Russian mentality is still far from the European one.
The cultural parameters of the attitude towards exclusion in modern Russia are considered in the works of S.S. Yaroshenko (attitude towards the poor) and I.N. Tartakovskaya (gender stereotypes and lifestyles). In the study of T.A. Dobrovolskaya and N.B. Shabalina noted the intolerance of Russian respondents in relation to the very idea of coexistence with atypical people. Respondents expressed a negative attitude to the fact that a disabled person was their relative (39%), flatmate (37%), boss (29%), representative of authorities (27%), subordinate (22%), teacher of the child (20% ).
Other studies show that patience as a component of mercy and humanism is less and less valued in post-Soviet Russia. So, the studies of N.I. Lapin show changes in the structure of the basic values of Russians over the period from 1990 to 2006: if in 1990 the traditional value of self-sacrifice was in 8th place among the fourteen basic values, then in 1994 it dropped to 11th place, and to In 2006, she fell even lower in this list, more and more yielding to such modernist values as independence and initiative.
The situation is different in European countries. A survey was conducted of 135 Russian and 98 foreign (USA, Canada, Austria, Germany) respondents — students, teachers and university staff. Intercultural research by S.A. Zavrazhina showed that only half of the Russian respondents were in favor of providing assistance to mentally handicapped people (44% believe that such people should be isolated, 2% should be liquidated, 2% should be ignored), while among foreign respondents no one supported the idea of liquidation, isolating or ignoring people with disabilities, and 98% were in favor of helping them. Let’s pay attention — this is a survey among the intelligentsia, and what can we say about the common people …
Will Russia help a man who has become ill on the street?
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What conclusions can be drawn from this study? On the whole, under a “favorable environment” (democratic rule, respect for individual rights, integration into the Western world), Russians are potentially ready to become “Northern Europeans” (at the level of the same Finns, who a hundred years ago were the same Russians, and who made the transformation into Europeans in a very short period of time by the standards of world history). But for now, it’s all pie in the sky. And the “tit in the hands”, the realities of today’s life are shattered by the tactics of survival in an environment hostile to the average Russian, where the only savior is only the highest power with its exclusive right to the “only European”.
It is curious that if you feel bad on the street, then, as the experiment showed, no one will help you in Russia. Two participants in the experiment, one in St. Petersburg, Russia, and the other in Miami, USA, simulated sudden health problems in crowded places. In Russia, no one approached the patient for an hour and a half, in the USA they approached and offered help immediately: not even a minute passed.
Attention! My colleague, Elena Chuevskaya, writes an important thing: The “experiment” mentioned in the article was not just carried out with violations, but is clearly “fabricated”. Its conditions have long been exposed by Anton Vuima, a candidate of cultural sciences. Anton conducted his experiment and got completely different results. He then “contacted the creators of the original video and asked them how they could have posted such misinformation. “To which I received a very specific answer that they did not have a goal to show the truth, but they only wanted to prove that no one would suit us. At first, they pretended to be very sick, and every passer-by stopped and offered help. Then they changed strategy and began to sit quietly in the corner. But even then every 15th person approached them. And finally, they simply cut out moments from the video where passers-by approach the “sick person,” Vuyma said. — That is, they deliberately fabricated the material so that it looked like people in Russia are not responsive. In the US, they admit that the same experiment failed in New York, no one came up. But when they repeated it in the student city, turned to some student organization for help in filming the video, then everything worked out. That is, the video is meaningfully fabricated. Not only Anton, but also many other people conducted alternative experiments that showed the responsiveness of Russian people. «»Scientific knowledge requires the repetition of an experiment. And I personally repeated this experiment in St. Petersburg, where the original video was also filmed, ”said Anton Vuyma. He portrayed that he became ill near the Elektrosila metro station. According to Vuima, within 20 seconds, eight people approached him and offered to help. “Moreover, the crowd around me increased at a tremendous speed, and if I lay down for another minute, then there were 30 people. Our people were not only ready to help, but immediately tried to determine the diagnosis of the disease and give a cure for it. A help desk was set up right there. Where someone called an ambulance, while others thought how to save me. And these people were with heavy bags and obviously going about their business, ”the experimenter notes.”