Russians' perception of Foreign Countries

An article is dedicated to the problem of Russians’ perception of foreign countries. Studying the perception of other countries by Russians, we primarily relied on the theory of political perception, in addition to which we used the theory of political identity, as well as the work of political geographers, political communicators, specialists in international relations and the comparative political science. The theoretical analysis is based on a large-scale political-psychological study of qualitative-quantitative character. The data was collected by means of a poll that included a number of open-ended questions together with a cartographic study, a semantic differential method and projective tests. The goal of the study was to reveal and analyze Russians’ images and concepts of 8 Post-Soviet neighbor states, two of our strategic partners – India and China, individual European countries and the EU, former Soviet allies – countries of Latin America and Africa, the USA and two most popular resorts – Turkey and Thailand. The article discusses peculiarities of their perception in Russia.