“Silence has come”: axiological foundations of Russian youth’s representations about the ideal socio-political state

The article examines the representations of Russian youth about the ideal state of the state, society and man through the prism of the axiological concept of “silence”. The theoretical and methodological foundation of the authors’ research is the political and psychological approach, which allows analyzing values and ideas as elements of the political consciousness and worldview of young people. The interpretation of the traditional axiological concept of “silence” was carried out based on the developments of historians of socio-political thought. The empirical basis of the study was the materials of 31 focus groups conducted with Russian youth aged 14 to 30 in 2021–24, which were analyzed using quantitative and qualitative procedures.
The results of the study showed that the semantic framework of Russian youth’s representations about “silence” as an ideal socio-political state is a set of political values of peace, security, stability, order, legality, to which the non-political value of comfort is closely related. The paternalistic orientations traditional for the domestic political culture can be traced in the representations of young people: expectations of ensuring an ideal state and solving possible problems are addressed to an external entity, as a rule, the state. The significance of “silence” is determined by the age factor: it increases from younger respondents to older ones. At the same time, thoughts and experiences associated with the needs for security, peace and confidence depend not on the age of the individual, but on the degree of his or her inclusion in the system of social connections of modern society, which generally occurs as they grow older. The key axiological dominant of young people’s representations about the ideal sociopolitical state is “truth” (justice), which is interpreted contradictorily – both as a necessary condition for existence in “silence” and as a threat to this existence. 

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