Federov: Annexation of Crimea has brought us into a new era
Russian sociologist Valery Fedorov, head of the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (RPORC), compared President Vladimir Putin with Archimedes and called the President’s high ratings an important social fact. Fedorov said that Putin’s position only gets stronger as global crises develop.
"We have more and more opponents around the world, oil is getting cheaper, the ruble is fading, but voters believe in the President, support him and think that he will lead us out of troubled times," said the sociologist in an interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta.
Fedorov noted that all sociological agencies working in Russia found "ultra-high ratings of Putin," calling it "an important social fact.”
"The rating has been this high (over 80%) for about a year and a half, in spite of many predictions that people will get tired and start feeling disappointed. It didn't happen though, because for the last year and a half we were living not in an ordinary time but a historical one. The annexation of Crimea became a tipping point; we finally stepped into a new time period, moved to a different scale, changed a viewpoint," he continued.
According to the sociologist, the things that Russians had deemed horrible and unacceptable are now perceived as not terrible or even barely acceptable.
"We simply began to put ourselves and others in different categories. And this shift is a main reason for the extremely high popularity of Putin. It was he who brought us into a new time period, created a new starting point and a new critical foothold—the same one which was dreamed about by Archimedes. This point for us was the annexation of Crimea. We started to perceive ourselves and everything around us differently," he concluded.
On October 22nd, new polls on President Putin’s job approval were published, saying that a new record was set for Russians’ level of support for the activities of the President—89.9%.
However, Russian sociologist and political scientist Igor Eidman said that the President’s record-breaking ratings were a lie and should not be treated seriously. Eidman was the former Director of Communications at the RPORC.
"In Russia there is a ruling party of crooks and thieves. It's called United Russia. And there is an official "sociology of crooks and thieves." It's RPORC. I've been redeemed for my short stay in this Kremlin’s puppet theater by telling all that I know about it and passing the relevant documentation to the New Times. In the current magazine edition my materials were used in three articles that expose how RPORC leaders are being controlled by the presidential administration, how they have to get the approval of the government for literally every move and that the state money received for research is being transferred to fake companies offshore," he said.