Tikhonova N.E. Life Success: What Does It Mean for Russians? Issues of Economic Theory. 2025. No. 1 (26). Pp. 93–112.

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Abstract

The article, based on survey data from the Institute of Sociology of the Federal Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences for 2000–2024, shows that Russians are now much less likely to perceive themselves as successful in life than in the 2000s. It is also demonstrated that representatives of the mass strata of the country’s population have clear normative ideas about the criteria for a person’s success in life. Over the past few years, these ideas have been quite stable and included, fi rst of all, fi nancial well-being, family and children, good work, health, and opportunities for self-realization. However, although this set itself remains unchanged, the place of individual criteria for life success in the corresponding rating may change over the years. The most striking changes are associated with a decrease in the mention of family and children against the background of an increase in the importance of a good job and fi nancial well-being, although the comparative importance of individual components of life success in diff erent social groups is diff erentiated quite noticeably. Th e data are also presented on what representatives of the mass strata, judging by the results of correlation and content analysis, actually (and not at the level of normative judgments) associate success in life with. It is shown that the perception of many characteristics of life as evidence of achieving success in life is associated with the comparative importance of the corresponding benefi ts in the value system of citizens of the country and with their defi ciency in the mass strata of the population. As a result, two groups of factors have the greatest infl uence on the feeling of being a successful person. Firstly, these are indicators that directly refl ect a person’s place in the system of social inequalities (from position in the social hierarchy to the degree of social protection from various risks). And secondly, indicators of individual capabilities that indirectly refl ect this place (from opportunities for self-realization to various characteristics of consumption). At the same time, family and children or health are much less important for feeling successful. It is concluded that the decline in the real signifi cance of family and children in the criteria of life success, as well as the relatively small signifi cance of health among them, refl ecting their negative impact on the likelihood of achievements that really determine the feeling of one’s own success, requires adjustments to state social policy with a shift  in emphasis from monetary forms of assistance to the population to forms of assistance that ensure a more eff ective combination of various social roles by Russians.