Lev Gudkov: I'd point out that people have become increasingly content with their lives over the past year and a half. We're noticing for the first time that the general mood is positive: people are more satisfied than dissatisfied with their lives. For 15 years -- after 1991 -- the mood was decidedly negative: people believed that the country was not developing in the right direction, that their opinions and interests were not considered, that their income was falling.
All that, of course, is not equally distributed among different groups. Only 15 to 20 percent of people have actually benefited from all the changes, but the bulk of the people feel that they're living like before. For the first time after the crisis of 1998, however, people have calmed down and they are not expecting any commotion in the near future. This leads not so much to confidence and optimism as to the weakening of their feeling that something negative could happen. We're dealing here not so much with the formula: "Look how well off we are," but rather with the principle: "Thank God, nothing bad is going on."
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