Do Russians see their future in Europe or the CIS?

Abstract

Historic differences between Russian elites about where the country's future lies are here addressed by examining what the Russian public thinks, using data from the New Russia Barometer survey. More than two thirds see the country's future with the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and less than one third see it with Europe. Alternative explanations for these differences are tested statistically. The most important influences making Russians look to the near abroad are traditional identities, national pride and age. Although cosmopolitan contacts of individuals with the West encourage people to be pro-European, Russians are likely to continue to view their world as a CIS space. However, this does not indicate a popular demand to re-establish Imperial dominance but rather a durable commitment among most Russians to a Eurasian rather than European view of the world.

Notes

¹Russian Ministry of Defence, Usloviya voennoi sluzhby, 2007, available at: http://duty.mil.ru/uslovia/Uslovia.html, accessed 11 May 2007.

²Levada Center & CSPP, RussiaVotes Security: Chechnya, 2007, available at: www.russiavotes.org/security/security_chechnya.php, accessed 11 May 2007.

³See also Beissinger (2006).

⁴See also Goskomstat, Natsional'nyi sostav nasleniya, 2005, available at: www.perepis2002.ru/ct/doc/TOM.04.01.xls, accessed 25 September 2007.

⁵Vladislav Surkov, Deputy head of the presidential administration, ‘Speech to the General Council of Delovaya Rossiya (Business Russia), 17 May 2005’. Transcript taken by Radio Svoboda, Moscow.

⁶For full details of samples and questionnaires, see www.abdn.ac.uk/cspp, last accessed 25 September 2007.

⁷Russian passports no longer include a line for entering official nationality; hence younger respondents have no officially designated nationality other than their citizenship.

⁸White (2006, Table 6.1) similarly reports that relatively few Russians say that they have a significant identification with Europe, and the proportion doing so fell from 18% in a survey in 2000 to 7% in 2005. Herrera (2004, p. 19) reports that census figures exaggerate Russian knowledge of European languages.

⁹For full details of all variables, see the Appendix.

¹⁰For dichotomous variables such as whether a person does or does not live in Moscow or St Petersburg, the b coefficient and the impact are identical, 0.27 of a point on the four-point scale measuring how Russia's future ties are seen. By contrast, for variables that have a wide range, such as age, the b coefficient, 0.009, appears small. Given a difference of 63 years between the youngest and oldest respondent, multiplying the b coefficient by 63 years shows that, net of all other influences, the oldest Russian is likely to be 0.57 of a point more inclined to favour the CIS than is the youngest Russian in the sample, which is restricted to adults 18 years and over.

¹¹For statistical reasons, Russian identity is not reported in Table 3; in effect, it sets the implicit average against which the influence of Soviet, local or European identities can be compared.

¹²See also Rose (2005a).

¹³Freedom House, Freedom in the World, 2006, available at: www.freedomhouse.org, accessed 2 January 2007.

¹⁴Levada Center & CSPP, RussiaVotes, 2007, Slide 295, available at: www.russiavotes.org/admin/single_slide_display.php?sld=295, accessed 11 May 2007.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Neil Munro

This article is a product of an ESRC grant to the first-named author to study the impact of term limits on support for the new Russian regime (RES 062-23-0341). Earlier versions were delivered at seminars at St Antony's College, Oxford and the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Centre, Washington, DC.