What Young Russians Think about Russia and America

Abstract

The article provides a comparative analysis of the linguistic and cultural picture of the world of contemporary Russian university students on the basis of surveys of their perceptions of America and the Americans as well as Russia and the Russians. The data that were collected from a free association experiment that was conducted by S.G. Ter-Minasova in 1992, 1995, and 1998 are compared with the data that were obtained by the author during her study in 2015. Respondents were asked to write down one to 10 associations that came to mind for a given concept. By comparing the data between the different surveys, we are able to note how the perceptions of Russian students about Russia and Russians, America and Americans and the reasons prompting these perceptions have changed. The most notable findings are that the following words representing the lexical-semantic group describing financial status were no longer cited in the 2015 survey: “poor,” “rich,” and “dollar,” whereas the following words belonging to the lexical-semantic group describing power appeared on the most recent survey: “war,” “impudent,” “selfish,” “haughty,” “the desire to dominate others,” “cunning,” “powerful,” and “racism.”