
The applicants have three more weeks in order to submit documents to the admissions of the university’s admissions, but now it’s clear - the struggle for each budget place at the faculties of academies and universities, whose graduates have a chance to become officials, will be serious. The situation with those who wish to study free of charge at the Faculty of State and Municipal Administration as of July 1 is as follows: HSE - 333 applications (80 seats); RANEPAS - 388 applications (25 seats); Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation - 311 applications (55 seats). The reception commissions have no doubt that the number will still have time to grow two to three times, the competition will be higher than last year. (For comparison: in total in 2014, 1034 statements were submitted to the same HSE faculty.)
Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu personally reports on the growth of the attractiveness of military education: a competition in team universities - up to six people per place. Those who want to become officers are twice as much as last year. It is especially difficult for girls who decided to connect a career with the army: up to 33 people per place (at a military university).
At the same time, not only officer shoulder straps attract young Russians. Shoigu claims that the number of evading military service has doubled. And the state secretary of the Ministry of Defense Nikolai Pankov said that the number of contractors now exceeds the number of conscripts. 295 thousand people came under a contract, next year there will be 352 thousand, and by 2021 - over half a million.
The ordinary soldier Ilya, he, with whom the NT correspondent talked at the military registration and enlistment office in Tver, confirmed the words of the minister (and at the same time the layouts of sociologists who record a change in attitude to the army in society): “Sons will be, what to boast of? He was in the army, did not mow. There should be such pride. ”
According to VTsIOM, Russians associate the army with hope, respect, pride and trust. And 66 % of the public opinion surveyed by the Foundation believe that every young man is obliged to serve in the army.
Human rights activists also confirm the trend: the executive secretary of the Union of Committee of the soldiers' mothers Valentina Melnikova claims that if before, up to 10 thousand people came to the Moscow branch of the organization with a request to help avoid service, now - 100 (!) Times less. There were no deserters in the army. “They fled a lot before. Now there is no - only those whom they wanted to send to Ukraine, and then five a year, ”says Melnikova.
The director of the Center for Sociological Research by the RANEPA Viktor Vakhstein clarifies: “The most significant changes in the worldview of youth (or, more correctly, people aged 18 to 25 years) have not occurred in recent years, but in the late 2000s-early 2010s. It was then that our polls recorded a change in priorities from students and graduates of universities: public service and work in the authorities began to be considered by them as a more desirable alternative than “entering the market”. Increasingly, the strategy began to speak with respondents: "to work in the state system, to acquire the necessary connections, and then create your own company."
Natalia Zorki, a leading researcher at the Department of Social and Political Studies of the Levada Center, emphasizes another important detail: after Crimea, youth in the views of what was happening with the country almost ceased to differ from other age groups. “This is the failure of the expectations of the transition period, the transit of the early 1990s, when the illusion was widespread that it was young people with their pro-Western orientation, growing up, will root new values in society,” said Zorkaya.
However, the youth preferred the old values - a growing into the state, the abandonment of the world of freedom and initiative in favor of the tsarist service. The poor and destitute attracts the army as the only affordable social elevator, and the risks and difficulties are no longer scared. For representatives of the middle class, the official’s career is more interesting. And the limit of dreams is the FSB, a closed caste of the real hosts of the country.
Young people choose the state. Many young Russians simply do not see other opportunities for self -realization. So, the state is now the country.
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