The Image of the Future of Contemporary Russia (original) (raw)

Writing Russia’s Future: Paradigms, Drivers, and Scenarios

Abstract: The development of prediction and forecasting in the social sciences over the past century and more is closely linked with developments in Russia. The Soviet collapse undermined confidence in predictive capabilites, and scenario planning emerged as the dominant future-oriented methodology in area studies, including the study of Russia. Scenarists anticipate multiple futures rather than predicting one. The approach is too rarely critiqued. Building on an account of Russia-related forecasting in the twentieth century, analysis of two decades of scenarios reveals uniform accounts which downplay the insights of experts and of social science theory alike.

MODERN RUSSIA IN THE MIRROR OF HISTORICAL AND LOGICAL

The formation of modern Russia in the interaction of history and logic is the subject of this study. It covers a chronological framework from the socialist revolution of the 1917 th to the present day. The initial principle of the authors is that the adequate analysis of the problem raised in the work is possible only from the standpoint of understanding social changes as a natural historical process. Consequently, the theory of fatal inevitability, as well as the conspiracy theory in explaining the arrival of the post-Soviet present of our country, is unjustified. In other words, the revolutionary turn in October 1917 could not help splitting society into hostile forces, the struggle between which never ceased. At the same time, the CPSU as a leading and guiding social changes force not only proved inability to work out the answers to the challenges of history but also itself degenerated. In the conditions of severe rivalry between the two worlds-socialism and capitalism-these factors multiplied many times. Post-Soviet realities have sobered the Russians: did they fight for it? Did not they throw out the child together with the delivery water (whatever was good in socialism)? In the public consciousness, a turn is made towards recognizing, if not all, at least some socialist values. At the same time, there is a growing awareness of the need to take into account the cultural peculiarities of Russia when moving "along the high road of human civilization", that is, on the way to affirm the values of the Western world. Based on the documents of the CPSU, the messages of the President of the Russian Federation to the Federal Assembly, the works of the classics of culture (and not only Russian), the language of everyday life the authors come to a fundamental conclusion, that is, there is a situation developing in the country that will be reflected in the public consciousness in the form of another project for the reorganization of Russia on perfect principles. And it will be the next one, i. e. not the last.

Russia-2021: Experiencing the Present and Looking into the Future

Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 2021

Sociological portrait" as the purpose of the study. One of the characteristic, one might say, "trademark" features of Russian scientific culture is a special interest in conducting research in the genre of "portrait" sociology, the specific task of which is an integral description of various social worlds and specific societies [Andreev, 2017]. Such works have become a response of the Russian sociological community to an urgent public inquiry-to sort out again who we are, what we are striving for, and how, based on this, to build a new strategy for the

“The Fate of Mankind Is Again Closely Intertwined with the Fate of Russia”

Russia in global affairs, 2023

Turbulent events on the world stage are leading to inevitable changes, but what kind of changes? Can we understand what the world situation will look like when the current crisis ends? We have asked leading intellectuals from countries outside the Western community to share their thoughts.

Ideas, Ideology & Intellectuals in Search of Russia's Political Future

Daedalus, 2017

The intellectual discourse of any state can function within two broad paradigms: consensual and pluralistic. In the first case, political elites, intellectuals, and the public agree on the base parameters of what constitutes "the good life" and argue about the methods of application. In the second case, participants hold radically different, incommensurable views, which coexist in society. This essay argues that the Western political system broadly rests on the politics of liberal consensus, formed throughout the period of capitalist modernization. But Russia's history took a different turn, following a path of alternative modernization. This engendered the politics of paradigmatic pluralism, in which a number of radically different politico-intellectual frameworks struggle for the dominant discourse. This essay examines these paradigms and argues that, due to the nature and substance of these models, fundamental change of Russia's dominant discourse, along with its main politico-institutional parameters, is unlikely.

Threats and Possibilities of Modernization in Russia

2021

Regarding modern society as society of risks we suppose that quantity of social threats have been growing up in the context of globalization. Many of those threats need to be identified and interpreted. The paper is based on the data of multidisciplinary project “Cognitive mechanism of socio-cultural threats” which includes AllRussia Survey (n-1600 respondents, 2019), expert interviews (n-36, 2019), content-analysis of mass media of 2012, 2015, 2019 and on All-Russian Monitoring of Public Opinion (1993-2019) of Russian Academy of Sciences. We define social threat as potential breaking of normative order in the sphere of social connection, values, public and private relations, which consider by individual or group as danger, which corrupt reproduction of social and cultural way of life. Thinking about methodology of research, we proposed not to create the actual list of threats, but clasterization of threats on the base of situate, instrumental and functional character. In this logic...