Request for Changes: Public Expectations and Modality of Presentation

The article analyzes the results of long-term sociological studies of the peculiarities of the transformation of Russian society associated with the growing public demand for change, the modality of which has not decreased for a long time. It is shown that this is due to increased social activism associated with “helping behavior”, mutual assistance and cooperation. This allowed us to understand that the administrative and bureaucratic class has built convenient “capsules” for itself, blocking the development of a natural, from the point of view of common sense, business and civic initiative of society, allowing its members to participate in making socially significant decisions. The society is set up to improve the institutional infrastructure of social development, first of all, to reduce the degree of corruption, alienation of the population from power, unblocking channels for promoting and realizing public interests. In addition, the problem of people’s dissatisfaction with the growing polarization of social incomes is being raised, which reduces the quality of social policy in terms of improving demographic indicators, increasing social upward mobility based on meritocratic principles, and improving the structure of social and labor motivation. This exacerbates the sense of social justice, which, when blocked, can lead to negative social consequences, forming “combustible material” and, accordingly, the risks of unconventional social actions associated with social explosions and revolutionary consequences of expressing discontent. It is shown that at the moment the majority of the population is set up in a reformist way, since they are only getting rid of the neurotic syndrome after the coronavirus pandemic and the onset of SMO. A certain energy impulse for change is also set by consolidated public opinion associated with the “rewiring” of Russian society along the line of differentiation from Western universalist approaches, the search for its own civilizational and cultural code of development, the revival of neotraditionalist narratives of the formation of a value-symbolic framework of public consciousness.