Intolerance as a value setting of Russian youth: causes and consequences

This article was created because of the authors desire to understand the reasons for increasing number of acts of intolerance and violence among young people in modern Russia. The basic hypothesis of this paper is that many young Russians nowadays have strong feelings of suspicion and hostility, because their growing up was accompanied by specific trends in political life of their country. The first part of the article is dedicated to the analysis of different trends of public and political life of Russia in 2000s. In the second part author describes the outlook and perception of reality of young Russians, who grew up, seeing these specific trends every day. The main conclusion of this paper is that contemporary young people in Russia grew up quite aggressive, because they heard a lot of news about huge number of internal and external enemies of their country, when they used to be kids. For many of these young people an idea about big number of threats and enemies in Russian society became usual, that is why sometimes they demonstrate aggressive and intolerant behavior. All conclusions of this article are based on the results of surveys of young people, conducted in Russia in 2007-2012.