Russians are increasingly afraid of being new victims of terrorist attacks; the confidence in authorities has gone down.

MOSCOW, December 2, 2013. Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VCIOM) presents the data describing whether it was possible to prevent the terrorist attack in Volgograd; what it was caused by; whether the Russian authorities are capable of protecting its population. The press release contains information of social media monitoring conducted by the Social Networks Agency».

Nationwide poll results

Most of Russians are afraid of being the victims of terrorist attacks. Over the recent years the share of those who think so has not changed much, however in August 2013 this share made up 71%; in November – 78%.

The main terrorist threats are Caucasus (20%) and Islamists/vakhabists/Al-Qaida (16%); whereas several months ago these shares were 10% and 10% respectively. Other sources of terrorist threat are less important for Russians. The share of Russians who do not see such a threat is 9% today, which is 3 times less than in August 2013(26%).

In April 2010, after the Moscow underground terrorist attacks, more than half of Russians believed that the attacks could have been prevented (54%), today this opinion with regard to the Volgograd attack is shared by 41% of respondents. At the same time, almost half of respondents tend to think that it is impossible to protect the country against terrorism (49%); those who think so are mainly residents million cities (67%); residents of big cities are more optimistic (56%).

One-third of respondents are confident that Russian authorities can protect the population against terrorist threat (33%), whereas in August 2013 half of respondents thought so (55%). More than half of Russians (58%) are skeptical about authorities` capacities to protect the population against new terrorist attacks.

Results of social media monitoring

According to social media monitoring, half of the Internet users are not confident that Russian authorities and special services are capable of protecting the Russian population against new terrorist attacks (52%). Twenty-nine percent of respondents oppose them; the remainder say that they can rely on themselves and on God(13% and 5%).

One-third of bloggers suspect government and special services in organizing terrorist attacks (33%); other 23% blame the authorities for doing nothing. Eleven percent of users ` comments refer to the religious terrorists; 9% mention foreign terrorist organizations. Eleven percent of users find many facts ambiguous; 8% believe that the terrorist attacks are resulted from national and migration policies conducted by the government; 5% suspect the Central Intelligence Agency of the U.S.

The VCIOM opinion polls were conducted on November 2-3, 2013. 1600 respondents were interviewed in 130 communities in 42 regions of Russia. The margin of error does not exceed 3.4%.

Social Media Monitoring was conducted by the Social Networks Agency on November 21-26.  15 – 22, 2013.  The open source engines (Blogs.Yandex.ru, Blogsearch.google.ru) and a special search tool were used during the survey. A total of 1008 relevant publications were analyzed.

Results of nationwide poll

Results of social media monitoring

Note: Using materials from the site www.wciom.ru or wciom.com, as well as distributed by VCIOM, the reference to the source (or hyperlink for the electronic media) is obligatory!