printDecomposition of Liberal Values in Russia
Kireev E.Yu.
Cand. Sci. (Sociol.), Senior Research Fellow, Scientific Center of Digital Sociology «Yadov-center», Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow, Russia yegorkireev@gmail.com
Kryshtanovskaya O.V.
Dr. Sci. (Sociol.), Director, Scientific Center of Digital Sociology «Yadov-center», Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow, Russia olgakrysht@yandex.ru
Kireev E.Yu., Kryshtanovskaya O.V. Decomposition of Liberal Values in Russia. Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya [Sociological Studies]. 2026. No 10. P. 17-30
What has become of Russians’ liberal values 35 years after the collapse of the USSR? The article addresses this question drawing on the all-Russian survey “Sociocultural Identity of Russians” (2026, eight federal districts, N = 1113). The authors proceed from the premise that liberal ideas became mainstream in the 1990s and were later displaced from public politics without disappearing from mass consciousness. The analysis rests on three composite indices – liberal, statist and emancipative – built from respondents’ assessments of ten, nine and six value positions respectively. The data show that elements of the former liberal complex persist, but in a scattered form, having lost their ideological coherence. The defence of the private sphere and personal autonomy is reproduced as an everyday habit; basic freedoms survive at the level of declarations; the emancipative component, associated with tolerance and recognition of minorities, has retreated into a narrow, secular and predominantly young segment. Religiosity proves to be the strongest axis of value divergence, exceeding the generational divide, whereas education, contrary to Western patterns, has almost no discriminating power. The authors describe this state as a decomposition of the liberal complex accompanied by its demobilization: the carriers of a consistent liberal worldview – roughly one tenth of the population, delineated culturally rather than by class – have retreated from public politics into everyday practices.
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