Young Russians Increasingly Doubt Their Work will be Adequately Rewarded, Academy of Sciences Study Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 9 – Low levels of official unemployment hide a potentially dangerous trend, according to a new sociological study; and this that economic pessimism among the young is significantly increasing because “nearly 40 percent of the young are convinced their labor will not be adequately rewarded.

            The research, conducted by scholars at the Federal Center of Theoretical and Applied Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, has been summarized by Mikhail Sergeyev, the economics editor of Moscow’s Nezavisimaya Gazeta (ng.ru/economics/2026-08-09/1_9555_pessimism.html).

            According to the investigation, he says, the widespread view among older Russians that younger people don’t want to work has “deep-seated socio-economic causes” that have increasingly led young Russians to conclude that the existing state of labor relations in Russia is unfair and that hard work will not necessarily be rewarded.

            Among the more intriguing findings of the study, Sergeyev reports is that “’the rally ‘round the flag’ effect sparked by the beginning of the special military operation [against Ukraine in February 2022] was short-lived and that by 2024, it had begun to give way to structural pessimism.”

            Those who have such pessimistic attitudes are predominantly female, have vocation and technical education, and identify in class terms, with one in five of them identifying as lower class and three out of five middle class, a pattern that could lead to a growth in social tensions.

            But as of now, the scholars report, even the pessimists are still very loyal to key state institutions like the president and the army, with slightly more of the economic pessimists among the Russian young than among the optimists saying they trust Putin, 80.5 percent as against 77 percent.