Russia’s future in the views of its citizens: forming of a stabilization scenario in conditions of high political uncertainty

The article presents the results of an empirical study of Russians' ideas about the future development of Russia, conducted in 2023–2024. The findings were obtained by processing the texts of in-depth interviews, as well as graphic material from projective drawing tests using political psychology methods. The scenarios of Russia’s future development that dominate in the minds of the population are described: “mobilization”, “inertial”, “innovative” and others, with special attention paid to the formation of the “stabilization” scenario. Imagining the future of Russia in a variety of ways, describing positive, negative, neutral in their emotional and event orientation plots, respondents demonstrated difficulties in understanding any of them as the most probable. The main problems in this case, according to the respondents themselves, are the high uncertainty of the future, the dynamics of modern life, growing anxiety about the possibility of deterioration of its conditions, the unpredictability of changes in the economic and political spheres both within the country and in the world. The search for a zone of psychological comfort by the mass consciousness occurs in various interpretations of stability. At the same time, the formation of ideas about the stability of the future is influenced by factors of a subjective nature, mainly related to the age of citizens, factors of the political context and media manipulations related to understanding the future through the prism of current events and their coverage by the media. An analysis of these factors allowed us to conclude that binary plots of the future, including “World War III” and “world peace”, “technological paradise” and “technological prison” exist in the ideas of Russians as if simultaneously and are associated with the desire to achieve a “stable” future, in which there will be no such complex contradictions. The main obstacles to the formation of a stabilization scenario for the future are the differences in the understanding of stability by various social groups and the search for examples of such in the recent or distant past. It is noted that the stabilization scenario performs the same function for all social groups of psychological protection from the fear of uncertainty about the future.

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