MOSCOW, August 23./TASS/. Over half of the Russians polled view Western civilization, democracy, and culture as useless, the Russian Public Opinion Research Center revealed on its website on Tuesday.
"Over half of the Russian people (59%) don’t see any value from Western civilization, democracy, and culture. As many as 33% believe that they are not suitable for us, while 26% call them destructive. This thinking has markedly strengthened since 2000, when 35% expressed negative views - 25% believing that the western guidelines are not suitable for us, and 10% saw them as destructive," the pollster said.
According to the published results, the share of those who believe that much can be adopted from Western culture, democracy, and civilization dropped from 55% in 2000 to 30% in 2022.
Young people (18-34 years of age) see the West in a positive light and believe that Russia needs it or can take a lot of good from it (55% and 50% accordingly). Opposite views dominate among the 35+ age group. Respondents aged 60 and over consider the orientation towards the West as harmful and erroneous (70%). At the same time, one in two polled Russians (55%) believed that the West is not to blame, that Russians themselves are forgetting their own culture. One-third of those surveyed see a problem with the influence of Western culture (35%) gaining strength. Forty-four percent of those surveyed agreed with the opinion that Western culture has a negative influence on Russians’ taste for art.
"Russian culture is still characterized by protective filters that allow it to borrow new elements that contribute to its development and reject those that contradict basic values: while being curious and cautious about new trends, Russians do not always accept them as the norm," Yelena Mikhailova, advisor to the director general of the pollster, said in comments on the survey.
This nationwide poll was conducted on August 5 among 1,600 Russian citizens aged over 18.