The paper is dedicated to the analysis of the social and political portrait of the contemporary Russian young students. The empirical basis of the work is made up by the results of sociological monitoring of the young students' ideas about social and political processes, socialization institutions and youth policy subjects conducted by the authors (in 2013 – 2017) as well as by the results of the "Social portrait of a contemporary Russian student" research (at the faculty of sociology of Lomonosov Moscow State University, 2017). The research technique was based on polling, with questionnaire survey selected as the research method. The questionnaire form contained questions aimed at finding out the students' political, ideological and moral values, their attitude toward the current power institutions, mass information media, religious denominations, public organizations and social work. The students also had to answer questions on the condition of the Russian state and society, any positive and negative phenomena existing among the young people; they evaluated the security of Russia and the effectiveness of the state youth policy. In the end, it has been found out that generally students evaluate the condition of today's Russian state and society in a sensible and critical way, realize the causes of crisis phenomena, and are prepared to take active part in social work. According to the results of analysis of the studies conducted, the necessity is noted of actively assisting the young people in fulfillment of their patriotic impulse and the capacity available.