The article is devoted to stydying of one of the most actual issues laying on the boder line of several social and humane sciences - youth political participation. Timeliness of the topic arises from the observed contradiction: on the one hand youth has always been one of the most active social collectivity, an accelerator and participant of the political changes. On the other hand y we can say that presently the Russian youth can be characterized as a rather politically passive social community. So that the aim of the article is to present the authors’ view on the causes of that problem. In order to achieve it we investigate such forms of Astrakhan students’ political participation as: voting, taking part in protests, participation in political organisations’ activity. The gethered data demonstrate political passivity of Astrakhan student youth. The authors allocated the following reasons of that phenomena: a) students’ ideas about inefficiency of voting as a mean of political changing; b) distrust towards political parties; c) students’ ideas of authority interests’ involving in the poitical nongovernmental organisations in Russia. The main concern of the gethered data is conncted with the fact that the majority of the respondents named such unconventional types of political behaviour as participation in protesrs as the most effient instrument of political changes in Russia. That leads to a very unpromising conclusion: if the Russian citizens is not provided with the real possibility to influence the situation in the Russian Federation by democratic means, then there is a possibility of radical methods usage in order to achieve demanded changes.
