In search of patriotic activism: Between declaration and reality

The historical period marked by a shift in the world order and the transition from a unipolar to a multipolar system presents the world's key nations with a set of existential challenges related to spiritual, moral, and cultural self-determination over the strategic horizon. This challenge is especially urgent for Russia, which, since the start of the special military operation in Ukraine, has been undergoing a comprehensive transformation of all spheres of life. At the heart of this transformation lies a rejection of the liberal-capitalist paradigm and the adoption of a sovereign course of national development, based on traditional cultural and moral values and on the country's self-definition as a civilization-state. Although recent legislation has outlined the contours of Russia's desired future, these contours still require further specification, as evidenced by ongoing debates around such concepts as ideology, the image of the future, and so forth. One such concept is patriotism – a term that Presidential Decree 809 of November 9, 2022, includes in the list of traditional values that shape the worldview of Russia's citizens. This circumstance lends urgency to scholarly inquiry into the content and key characteristics of patriotism and into how it is perceived today by various groups of Russian society. The present study aims to contribute to this inquiry. Its objective was to identify the relationship between the level of patriotic self-identification and subjective assessments of the population's civic engagement – including people's sense of responsibility for the state of affairs at different levels of social life – drawing on the case of the Vologda Region, one of Russia's federal subjects. The empirical basis of the paper includes the findings of a sociological survey conducted by the Vologda Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences in the region in April 2025 (N = 1,500). The data were processed using cross-tabulation analysis, with Cramér's V coefficient computed to gauge the strength and significance of the associations among the nominal variables. The analysis yielded a socio-demographic profile of the respondents who identify themselves as patriots, and an assessment was made of the relationship between the degree of patriotic self-identification across different categories of citizens. In substantive terms, people's perceptions of patriotism were found to be dominated by the worldview component, which prevails over the activity component – a pattern manifesting itself in the combination of a high degree of patriotic self-identification with a relatively low level of civic engagement. The study also compares the data obtained with the results of similar surveys conducted at both the federal and regional levels. Our contribution lies in developing a methodological approach to investigating the characteristics and perceptions of citizens regarding patriotism that rests on empirical data, thereby making it possible to use this approach for comparative analysis in similarly themed research projects, as well as in the practice of public administration