Increased public awareness of environmental problems and the strengthening of diverse identities may lead to the emergence of “ethnic environmentalism.” These are movements that make environmental claims associated with the interests of an ethnic community. We develop this concept by examining protests in the Russian regions. Our findings suggest that ethnic identity facilitates environmental activism under the following conditions: the ethnic group claims a special cultural relationship to the natural environment; environmental concern and ethnic identity are linked to the unfair distribution of resources; and blame is directed toward regional actors, rather than the federal government.

Value polarization is one of the key factors in societal development. This research focuses on whether opinions concerning gender roles in the domestic and public spheres are polarized in European societies, a topic still under-investigated. Based on the fifth wave of European Values Study data (2017–2020), the study shows that gender role attitudes in the domestic sphere are more polarized than those in the public sphere. Polarization by education, level of income, migration background, and degree of religiosity is stronger for gender role attitudes in the domestic sphere, whereas polarization by gender is stronger for gender role attitudes in the public sphere. Both gender role attitudes in the public and domestic spheres are most strongly polarized by education. At the same time, belonging to a social group with higher education, higher income, and lower religiosity can promote more progressive views towards gender roles. Opinions in Eastern European countries tend to seem more polarized than in Western European countries, even if with some exceptions. In countries with a higher level of gender equality, the level of polarization is a bit lower, while in countries where there is a remarkable rise of anti-gender narratives, opponent and conflictual views are higher.

Belief systems are core organizing factors of social attitudes and behaviors, and their study has highlighted the role of conservatism as a contributing mechanism in mitigating concerns associated with change avoidance, as well as the reduction of uncertainty and ambiguity in life. Moreover, these aspects seem to be consistently used as powerful tools in the political and social discourse of the far-right. Life and death ethics are an example of issues that deal with the need for stability and control over personal and social life that people endorsing conservative values seek to attain. There is a rich line of studies on the individual and social explanatory factors of political conservatism, but less attention has been dedicated to moral conservatism as an autonomous and meaningful concept. The current research follows a multilevel approach to disentangle the individual and contextual correlates of conservative attitudes toward life and death. Thus, besides looking at the influence of individual choices related to religion and political orientation, this study also seeks to analyse the impact of the context, introducing in the model variables measuring economic performance, social and gender inequality, religious diversity and the prevalence of materialism and post-materialism values. Multilevel models using data from the 34 countries that participated in the last wave of the European Values Study (2017–2020), revealed an association between far-right orientation and conservative attitudes toward life and death, and that this relationship is moderated by materialism/post-materialism values, economic performance, and social inequality. Our findings reinforce the role of democracy as an environment where freedom of choice and thought are indisputable rights, cherished by most of the populations, regardless of their political position or their stance on moral issues.

Wellbeing levels have been a global concern during the COVID-19 pandemic, but there is a lack of attention to  invariance questions that allow a robust examination of wellbeing dynamics across cultures. Questions of temporal stability that are crucial for examining the impact of the pandemic on wellbeing have received even less attention. Some studies suggested that measures may not be stable after the onset of the pandemic. We examine invariance  parameters, the factorial structure and variability of wellbeing variables (life satisfaction, pandemic worries, anxiety and depression screenings) across five different cultural contexts from 2020 to 2022 (N = 4387, total observations = 13,161). A three-factor model separating life satisfaction, worry, and distress performed best in terms of model fit and parsimony. We observed scalar invariance across times and identified little variability of wellbeing measures during the pandemic, suggesting that wellbeing levels remained stable during the pandemic in each of the countries sampled. In contrast, we only identified metric invariance across countries at each time point, and found a weakening of correlations between life satisfaction and a depressive/anxious symptoms scale in lower income countries. We discuss implications of our findings for discussions of wellbeing dynamics.

In recent years a number of environmental protests in Russian regions has been on the rise, despite the shrinking political opportunity structure. In Bashkortostan republic, the Bashkir Soda Company’s (BSC) decision to develop the Kushtau Hill for soda ash provoked an environmental campaign for saving the mountain. The Kushtau Hill movement succeeded, despite the highly repressive response from regional government and its tight patrimonial link to the BSC – two conditions identified in the literature as unfavorable to protesters. How environmental discontent is successfully mobilised under a repressive government and embedded extractive practices? Drawing on semi-structured interviews with activists, I trace two interlinked pathways to successful mobilisation. The first one tells a story about the role national organisations play in sustaining environmental collective action. Under a shrinking opportunity structure for formal ENGOs, the Bashkir national organisation “Bashkort” provided the emerging movement with experience of informal organisation. Its leadership successfully linked ethnic grievances to environmental mobilisation by claiming the Bashkirs’ special relation to the mountain. However, ethnic and neighbour ties do not prevent a repressive response from the regional government due to a limited scale of such mobilisation. The second story is told about framing processes that expand the scope of potential supporters beyond particularistic ties. Protesters came up with perceived costs of neopatrimonialism to justify their demands. This framing put the republic head as a scapegoat who secured interests of federal centre and BSC, compromising the residents’ ecological well-being. Therefore, Kushtau Hill activists attracted new members, not putting themselves into danger of being perceived as extremists that targeted a regime-dimension. 

The environmental movement in Russia has been a most institutionalized form of collective action. Originating from the Soviet period and gaining momentum in late 1980s, it survived the 1990s’ dramatic transformations as well as the changes in political opportunity structure in the 2000–2010s. Extant scholarship on environmental activism in Russia has been largely focused on case studies of regional mass mobilization, such as environmental campaigns at Shiyes station in Archangelsk. The paper represents the first systematic study of cross-regional variance in environmental collective action in Russia. Drawing on three datasets, we trace the general evolution of environmental protests in the period from 2007 to 2021 and provide a typology of Russian regions. The latter allows us to classify Russian regions by intensity and sustainability of eco-mobilisation. We demonstrate that, despite narrowing opportunities, the intensity of environmental protests during the last decade has been on the rise. The typology allows us to describe the existing variance and suggest new questions on the nature and factors of environmental protest activity in Russian regions.

This article studies the attitude of modern Russian conservatives to the “green agenda”. Even though the topic of ecology was initially considered a priority for left-wing parties and movements, in recent years European right-wing politicians have become more active in discussing and using environmental issues to increase their popularity. If the typical leftist “green agenda” largely focused on global issues, for example, climate change, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, energy transition, then right populists, denying the importance of the proposed environmental policy, proposed focusing on local problems: preserving native nature, maintaining national control over natural resources. We are seeing this trend now in Russia: domestic conservatives are actively discussing the “green agenda”, offering their vision of assessments and ways to solve environmental problems. In this article we set two tasks. First, we show that Western and Russian conservative discourses have more similarities than differences. In addition, it is shown that domestic conservatives, not being a single community, have different views on the origins and ways of solving environmental problems. The domestic “green” conservative discourse is heterogeneous; it goes back to both the origins of the Russian environmental movement and the European right. Secondly, we are trying to find out whether the views of conservatives influence environmental policy in Russia. To do this, we are studying data on supported presidential grants on environmental topics for 2018-22. In total, more than four thousand applications were examined, which were analyzed on several grounds. The results of the analysis show that local projects predominate. In addition, patriotic organizations are becoming involved in environmental issues, and a number of environmental organizations are beginning to deliberately use patriotic rhetoric. The results obtained allow us to make a cautious conclusion that traces of conservative attitudes can be traced in environmental policy.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people, including in Russia, did not take the threat posed by the new virus seriously and ignored basic precautions such as mask wearing and social distancing. Due to the obvious danger that such views and the irresponsible behavior they provoke pose to other people, the phenomenon of COVID skepticism has become an object of close interest among sociologists and public health specialists. However, most existing research on the topic focuses on identifying correlates of COVID skepticism from a static, cross-sectional perspective.

This study is aimed at identifying socio-demographic and personality factors in the variability of individual attitudes towards coronavirus in Russia and tries to reveal the characteristics distinguishing those who cease to be COVID skeptics over time from those whose attitudes change in the opposite direction. For this purpose, the authors use the data from two waves of the Russian part of the longitudinal international online survey “Values in Crisis” (June 2020 and April — May 2021).

The study shows that, in less than a year, the share of skeptics among  those who participated in both waves dropped from 37.4% to 31.6%. Of the panel respondents, 15.4% ceased to be COVID skeptics, and 9.6%, on the contrary, became sceptics. Abandoning a skeptical position is positively associated with age, income, and health-related anxiety. In addition, former skeptics to a greater extent (compared to new ones) support the values of equality and choice (components of Welzel's emancipative values). The transition from a group of non-skeptics to a group of skeptics (as well as vice versa) is also closely associated with a decrease (increase) in institutional trust.

In recent years, environmental protests have intensified in Russian regions.
At the same time, the level of protest activity in the population is not directly dependent
on the degree of environmental threats but is due to various political and social factors.
According to researchers, one of the main factors contributing to the mobilization of the
population is regional identity. In this paper, we analyze why regional identity is important
and what elements are actualized in the process of environmental mobilization in the
Russian regions. The results of the study show that mobilization was based on such
components of collective identity as the opposition of regions to the center, peripherality,
ethnicity, and historical past. The environmental agenda turned out to be significant in
conjunction with perceptions of social injustice. Natural objects were considered by local
residents from the perspective of their social Environmental problems were mainly
presented as threats to national culture, traditional ways of life, religious, and culturalhistorical
objects. At the same time, global environmental values were articulated mainly
by professional ecologists. In addition, in some cases, a strong collective identity could
contribute to environmental demobilization and resistance to those environmental
projects that conflicted with the interests of the local population. Thus, grassroots
environmental mobilization in Russia is mainly associated with ideas about the uneven
distribution of resources and survival values.