Muscovites are more likely to suffer from loneliness than people in smaller Russian cities. At the same time, Moscow is a city of individualists, and many people here choose solitude in order to focus on their career and personal development. A study by Christopher Swader looks at some of the causes and characteristics of urban loneliness

Russians are well ahead of many other countries in terms of literacy and numeracy, but lag behind in computer skills, according to the OECD Survey of Adult Skills presented at the HSE on October 8, 2013

Natural disasters and the election results have triggered rapid development of informal social activity in Russia. Experts revealed some new characteristics of Russian civil society in their research ‘Russian Neo-Political Activism: Sketching a Portrait of a Hero’

The self-sufficient and closed academic environment in Russia is an obstacle to the appearance of world-class universities, argues Maria Yudkevich in her article presented at the 4th International Conference ‘University Traditions: a Resource or a Burden?’

University rankings are clearly evolving from serving as a means of evaluating institutions of higher education to being a tool that impacts university management. Larisa Taradina spoke about university rankings at the 4th International Conference ‘University Traditions: A Resource or a Burden’

The only way to expand road networks in Russian cities is to make use of railroad corridors, declared Konstantin Trofimenko, Director of the HSE Centre for Urban Transportation Studies, addressing the first in the Infrastructure of the Future series of seminars

Religious beliefs affect the way people seek and choose jobs. Adepts of certain religions tend to rely on their skills, others on their good looks, while still others count on knowing the right people, suggests a study by Ekaterina Alexandrova and Elena Kalabina

Russia is a country with one of the highest levels of anomie – breakdown in social norms. It arises from the rapid economic growth combined with a weak system of social controls that Russia has experienced in recent years, according to research by Christopher Swader and Leonid Kosals

Authoritarianism has a future in Russia. In the next two decades, the 1980s generation will start to join the higher echelons of Russian society. But the situation is such that the change of generation of the elites will have little effect on the transformation of the political regime. Or so the authors of research on “The Russian elite in 2020” have concluded

The 50-year anniversary of the march on Washington was celebrated recently in the US, but the famous ‘dream’ of its inspirer, Martin Luther King, is still a dream: over recent decades, the level of economic and social inequality between whites and African Americans has grown

The Russian Government is discussing a proposal on the administrative limitation of maximum interest rates on consumer loans. The reason is the state’s concern regarding citizens who fall into debt to banks and micro finance organizations. One of Russia’s partners in BRICS – South Africa – already has experience of such a solution. The HSE Center of Development published an analysis of this case in its ‘Banks: Statistics and Economics’ newsletter

The Second World War ended on September 2, 1945. A new study of human losses suffered by the Soviet Union and their consequences for subsequent generations was published in Demoscope Weekly, an HSE online journal