Emigration Attitudes and the Image of a Patriot in the Minds of Schoolstudents in the Siberian Federal District

Abstract

The article examines the Siberian Federal District’s high school students’ perceptions regarding the content and a normative model of patriotism in the context of their attitudes toward emigration. On the basis of the mass survey results, researchers identified the influence of emigration attitudes of students in grades 8–11 on their self-positioning as patriots and their dominant model of patriotism. The cluster analysis yielded seven clusters that differ in terms of emigration attitudes, patriotic self-identification, and the normative model of the forms of behavior acceptable for a patriot. It has been established that high school students perceive the presence or absence of the desire to migrate into a foreign country as the basic criterion of patriotism. At the same time, the majority of school students in the studied youth environment consider themselves “non-patriots” because of their desire for external migration and the lack of opportunities for its practical implementation. The authors emphasize that models of “blind” and “civic” patriotism co-exist among high school students, and their ratio is determined by age and living standards of the said students. Activity-­based content of patriotism is typical only for the students of the “patriots” cluster, who do not consider external migration for themselves, while the rest of the groups are more characterized by an emotional and contemplative interpretation of patriotism. The article focuses on exploring the structure of each cluster’s identity and its priority foundations for national identity. Among young people, an all-­Russian identity was found to prevail, with regional identities being weakly expressed. It was concluded that there is a kind of “vicious circle” in the minds of young people in the SFD regions: for most students, it is not the dominant model of patriotism and the associated assessment of the socio-­political situation in the country that is the key factor in favor of the desire to emigrate, but socio-­economic motives. Consequently, young people concentrate on finding better conditions for self-realisation abroad, do not consider themselves “patriots” and deliberately distance themselves from the sphere of patriotic education.