The recent acknowledgment that the US runs a network of secret prisons where terrorist suspects have been held outside any legal regime produces a sense of déjà vu for those familiar with Russian society. At the beginning of his tenure, the Russian president made a very similar statement about his resolve to fight terrorists everywhere—including in the dark of Russian public toilets. The effect of déjà vu is strengthened when one looks at a number of other aspects of social, political and economic life in Russia and the US.
We become more and more similar—for worse or for better?
One of the basic indicators of social “health,” the level of generalized trust shows negative trends both in Russia and the US. While about a half of Americans in the early 1970s believed that most personally unknown people can be trusted, their number shrank below 40% in the 1990s to reach the current low of 31.5% in 2002. The intensity of communitarian life, this social fabric of civil society, has decreased accordingly.
Very similar trends have been observed in Russia since the late 1980s, i.e., since the start of reforms that aimed at opening the society towards the outside world. While more than a half of Russians were of opinion that most people can be trusted in 1989, this number has sharply declined by more than a half toward the end of the 1990s.
