Russian President Vladimir Putin
Photo: REUTERS
Almost all the speeches of the President of Russia immediately fall into the center of public attention not only in our country, but also in many countries of the world. “Putin will not say anything new, no one will look,” Russian liberals and foreign leaders and experts persuade themselves and their supporters every time, but Putin has not yet had time to move away from the microphone, and they are already starting to argue. how he again “does not say”, thus admitting that they watched and did it without looking up from the screen. The President’s Address to the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, which he announced on February 21, was no exception.
The All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion traditionally conducted a survey on the message and how the citizens of Russia perceived his theses and the speech itself. The results were not only interesting, but quite convincing even to the pessimists and skeptics.
The post made a positive impression on 81% of those who viewed it. 3% of those surveyed remained indifferent and 11% reacted negatively (also quite negatively). Another 5% found it difficult to answer. It is worth noting here the dynamics over the years. The positive attitude towards Messages has been growing continuously in recent years: 66% in 2019, 72% in 2021 and 81% this year.
Among the respondents, 74% considered all the issues (and most of the issues) raised by Putin in his speech to be important. For 23% of the respondents, only a part of the questions turned out to be significant. Another 3% considered the questions to be of little importance.
Three more questions in the questionnaire dealt directly with the perception of President Putin. 88% considered that he formulated his position in a clear and understandable way. And only 6% had some doubts about this topic (a positive change since 2019 in this item since 2019 + 8%). 78% believed that Putin was sincere in his speech, 9% suspected the president’s insincerity and 13% found it difficult to answer. And here, too, the dynamics are positive: in 2019, 54% of respondents considered Putin’s speech to be sincere and 23% considered it insincere.
And finally, the last question is whether people were interested in the issues that the president touched on in his speech. And here, too, the numbers are more than certain. The entire speech (or most of it) was considered interesting by 82%, but uninteresting or interesting only by a small part: 16% of the survey participants.
EXPERT “KP” Kirill Podyachev, Senior Researcher at the Federal Center for Sociological Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told Komsomolskaya Pravda Radio why so much attention was paid to this President’s Address.
– As far as I know, this Message was heard in the world more than any other. Or any other leader in the world. Only the Pope of Rome gathers a large audience, and only because the Roman Catholic Church is the largest religious denomination in the world. They even included broadcasts in China, India and Africa, which was not the case before. The BBC broadcasts live with simultaneous translation. The world has aroused great interest in what is happening in general. Experts have been talking about tectonic changes in the world for 20 years, but only now it has become obvious. And by the will of fate (believers will say that by God’s providence) Russia found itself in the epicenter of this demolition. And it is clear that everyone who is trying to understand what is happening now is turning their eyes to Russia. Even in the Western countries themselves, where they used to look for meaning in Washington, now there is disillusionment, because there are no special meanings coming from there, people are looking for what real alternative they can cling to. In addition, everyone is interested in when such events happen, how what is assessed in such an unstable situation, how the country’s leader sees what is happening and what he will say to the people.
– And what can be noted here in Putin’s speech?
– This is very interesting. First, he said almost nothing about the military component, about the army. Nothing. About where and how the battles take place, which worries many. It’s not that there aren’t any details, he just glossed over this topic. He doesn’t tout victory, he’s just sure of it. This is a deal for him. But Putin talked a lot about social guarantees, about the fact that we will not back down. And an even larger part of the Speech was devoted to the development of the country, the development of artificial intelligence and the economy. This is also a message to the outside world, they say, despite the fact that the entire so-called civilized world is against us, Russia is thinking not only about how to survive, but also how to develop further. This, it seems to me, is a very good message for the world, for that part of it that is not going to surrender, as they say, to the mercy of the West. For China, India, for African countries. It seems to me that this is even more of a foreign political nature. And this is very important.
