Attitudes and Perceptions: In Georgia and Russia

The idea of a parallel research is to create synergy in evaluating viewpoints in both countries regarding each other. With the cooperation of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES)  and Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies (Rondeli Foundation) research was conducted by  CRRC Georgia and  Institute for Comparative Social Research (CESSI) of Russia.

The study findings are  focusing on: attitudes towards Georgian/ Russian people and the Georgian/Russian state;  knowledge and perceptions of Georgia’s / Russia’s domestic policy; sources of information about Georgia/Russia;  Georgia’s/Russia’s domestic and foreign policy;  the public’s perspectives on relations between Georgia and Russia;  knowledge and perceptions of Georgia’s conflict regions, and attitudes towards the North Caucasus.

A total of 51% of respondents  in Russia could not answer a general question about the direction in which Georgia is developing today, while 27% considered its direction mainly wrong, and 21% considered it to be mainly right. Slightly less than two-thirds of the survey participants were  aware of specific challenges or threats facing Georgia today. Economic and social challenges were named as top priorities in Georgia’s national agenda by 30% of respondents, Abkhazian  and South Ossetian conflicts by 25% of respondents, and issues of public health, COVID and medical care by 19% of respondents.

A large share of the Georgian population (61%) report they are informed about developments in the Russian Federation to some extent (including 41% saying they are “little informed”), while a bit more than a third is not informed at all. Young people are slightly less informed on developments in the Russian Federation compared to older individuals. Being “fully” or “quite” informed is somewhat more common among people in Tbilisi (25%) compared to  individuals in rural settlements (16%).