What will Putin bequeath to his successor in 2024?

In accordance with the title of the journal Economic and Social Changes: Facts, Trends, Forecast, in the editorial article we analyze objective and real trends and facts in Russia’s domestic and foreign political and socio-economic life. Trying to distance ourselves from a subjective viewpoint, we rely in our analysis on the assessments given by experts from different fields of knowledge (economists, sociologists, public figures, etc.), as well as on a long-term database of sociological data, formed on the results of our own observations for the period since 1996 up to the present time. For more than 20 years now, every two months, we analyze the data of a sociological monitoring, which shows that there are significant and largely positive changes in the President’s foreign policy, but the dynamics of the domestic socio-economic situation in Russia are stagnant: during the period from 2000 to the present time, the key issues of concern to people have not changed, and the relevance of many of them has even increased. The reason for this lies primarily in the public administration system, the effectiveness of which is hindered by the dominance of private economic interests of individual elites over the national need for social justice and dynamic development of the standard of living and quality of life. On the eve of Vladimir Putin’s fourth presidency the number of those who find the current socio-economic and political situation in Russia satisfactory becomes fewer, despite the fact that the President enjoys a high degree of support. In this situation, the government and the future President will face new challenges, the solution to which will be crucial not only for the future of Russia, but also for the preservation of its integrity as an independent sovereign state.