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53 Russian Pol. & L. 32 (2015)
Russian Public Opinion in the Aftermath of the Ukraine Crisis

handle is hein.journals/ruspl53 and id is 338 raw text is: Russian Politics and Law, vol. 53, no. 4, 2015, pp. 32-44. Routledge C 2015 Taylor & Francis Group, LLCeg Taylor&FrancisGroup ISSN: 1061-1940 (print)/ISSN 1558-0962 (online) DOI: 10.1080/10611940.2015.1142339 LEV GUDKOV Russian Public Opinion in the Aftermath of the Ukraine Crisis This article discusses changes in public opinion in Russia in 2014. The anti-Putin minority (about 20 percent of the population) have merged with the conservative pro-Putin majority and opted for loyalty to the Kremlin leadership. The main reason for this shift is rising uncertainty and insecurity, as well as fear of losing the relative prosperity gained in previous years. The year 2014 marked the end of a long period of political and popular reaction to the transformative changes of the 1990s and to unsuccessful attempts at modernizing the institutional system of post-Soviet Russia-unsuccessful because these changes were largely a forced adaptation of Soviet institutions and the population to the disintegration of the communist system. In every single institutional sphere (the constitutional order, reorganization of the armed forces, the political and criminal police, the judicial, tax, and law enforcement systems, education, English translation © 2015 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC, from the Russian text. This article has not been published previously. Lev Gudkov is Director of the Levada Center, an independent, non- governmental polling and sociological organization in Moscow, Russia. He may be contacted at gudkov@levada.ru Translated by Stephen D. Shenfield.