Research & Expertise

Getting an education and a job, leaving the parental home and starting a family are some of the the milestones of growing up. For Russians in their thirties today, these stages do not necessarily follow a pre-set sequence and often overlap. In contrast to their parents, linear and predictable biographies are increasingly rare among Russian millennials, whose lives tend to look more like a patchwork of diverse events than a straight line. Some of these events, especially childbirth, often get postponed until later in life. For young Russians today, having children tends to be the last stage in their own transition to maturity, according to demographer Ekaterina Mitrofanova.

In 2001, ten years after the launch of reforms in Russia, 54% of Russians  believed  the main achievement of the reforms was the availability of consumer goods, rather than freedom of speech or the possibility of travelling  abroad. A decade later, public attitudes had not changed, and the availability of goods on store shelves was still perceived as the number one priority. The massive trauma caused by scarcity was particularly strong. How it was addressed and in what way it influenced public attitudes after the USSR collapse is examined in a study  by HSE professor Oleg Khlevnyuk.

Unlike many other countries, Russian children’s educational path is decided from an early age. Starting with the first grade, parents try to send their children to schools where they can remain until they graduate after either the 9th or 11th grades. Moreover, many families do not use the opportunity available to them to transfer their children to a better school partway through their education. The result is that inter-school mobility remains low and a child’s educational path is often hard-wired early on, HSE University sociologists in St. Petersburg found.

In 1992 in post-Soviet Russia, retail trade was allowed to flow out of stores to the streets where people were now able to sell things hand-to-hand, from stands and kiosks. Immediately, street vendors flooded the country and open-air markets expanded and multiplied. After a few years, according to some estimates, more than 30 million people, or nearly half of Russia's economically active population, were engaged in trading. This phenomenon was examined in detail for the first time by HSE professor Oleg Khlevniuk.

An international team of researchers carried out an experiment at HSE University demonstrating that knowledge of several languages can improve the performance of the human brain. In their study, they registered a correlation between participants’ cognitive control and their proficiency in a second language.

Having studied the impact of warming on countries in Central and Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia, Georgy Safonov, Director of the HSE Centre for Environmental and Natural Resource Economics, warns that responding to climate change does not seem to be a top priority for the region's governments, while potential threats are assessed only in economic terms and almost never as a social challenge.

At the end of January, Rosstat presented preliminary data on Russia's economic performance during 2019. In anticipation of the official publication, IQ.HSE interviewed a prominent  Russian expert, Director of the HSE Centre for Business Tendency Studies (CBTS) Georgy Ostapkovich, about the 2019 results and the outlook for 2020.

On February 7, Professor Marcus Levitt (Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Southern California, USA) visited the Faculty of Humanities to give a lecture about Mikhail Chulkov’s The Comely Cook. In his lecture, Professor Levitt examined the novel within the context of eighteenth-century Russian culture and, in particular, the tradition of ‘lubok’ literature.

People’s values of personal choice, suсh as their attitudes towards abortion, divorce, and premarital sex, are usually determined their level of education, age, religiosity, and social status. At least this is the case in many countries such as the US and those in Europe. In a recent study, HSE sociologists found that in post-Soviet countries, personal values are most determined by people’s level of patriotism.

On February 6, 2020, HSE University hosted an expert seminar, ‘Global and Russian Trends in Cluster Development and Regional Competitiveness’. The event was organized by the Russian Cluster Observatory based at HSE University’s Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge (ISSEK HSE). Keynote speaker Dr. Christian Ketels spoke about cluster policy and regional competitiveness in other parts of the world in order to further discussion about what form cluster policy should take in Russia.