ИСТИНА

Recent events in the world reflect widespread discontent with the authorities ranging from silent resistance to violent confrontation. Russia wasn’t able to bypass these problems either. The 2012 Presidential election revealed a distinct crisis of confidence in all the branches of power. This situation gives a lot of food for thought: the ongoing processes can hardly be attributed to local problems or the economic and political situation within a given country. Since protest moods are a global phenomenon, affecting not only poor countries with a lot of marginals, but also stable and prosperous societies and law-abiding citizens, we can assume that their roots lie deep beneath the surface of the current problems. Granted, there are external factors that have a considerable impact on the situation, but before they can affect political behavior they are perceived by mass consciousness. There is an opinion that the current protest movement is prompted and fueled from the outside of the Russia, but this would be impossible without the readiness of masses to actively respond to this influence. So, we can assume that protest moods can be partly put down to the specificity of mass consciousness as such. Thus, we can single out at least three major factors that are shaping the situation in Russia today, namely: current political and economic problems, external influence and the specificity of mass consciousness. Our research focused on the third of these factors and we tried to understand why the authorities are not able to handle the present-day social and political challenges the way they did before. We should take into account that society is not homogeneous in structure. Various groups differentiated by social, economic, political and psychological factors perceive the same problems and external circumstances differently. So there must be some common features shared by a sizeable proportion of the population that reinforce external factors and current problems and result in a certain behavior. The main goal of this paper is to reveal the common features in mass consciousness which can form the basis for the protest moods. We focused on mass perception to examine the content and the meaning of the contemporary image of Russia inside the country and the specificity of the different relations between certain components of the image. To understand the context of the perception I will first analyze the results of the recent opinion polls conducted by the «Public Opinion» Fund – one of the largest Russian sociological agencies. Then I will present the results of our research in the context of the contemporary trends in mass perception. We conducted 5 series of our research in the period from 2010 to 2012 in 9 regions of Russia, such as: Moscow, Central Russia, Volga region, Southen Russia, Ural region, Siberia, Dagestan, Buraytia and Tatarstan. While collecting the data we applied qualitative methods to analyze the attitudes and meaning of the images rooted in mass perception. We also applied classical methods of discussion and interview and also the projective method which allowed us to examine the deep layers of mass perception. In our comprehensive study we tried to exclude additional information from the respondents’ answers that helped us to study political images in detail. This paper will analyze the images of Russia perceived by the masses. We conducted 17 focus-groups and 226 focused interviews. The overall number of respondents amounted to 400. We chose participants aged 18 to 70 who represented the main strata of the Russian society. We examined 8 factors, including: the perception of contemporary Russia (10 items), the respondents’ perception of Russia in the past (7 items), the image of an ideal Russia (3 items), the perception of the Russians as a nation (3 items), the perception of the country’s future (4 items), the perception of the Russian authorities (4 items), the perception of the Russian territory (8 items), the perception of Russia’s role in the world (4 items). This paper will closely examine two of these factors more fully, namely the image of contemporary Russia and the image of the Russian authorities.