The article traces possible channels of influence of a religious factor on the formation of a specific Russian version of socialism. Using the logics of the M. Weber?s work?The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism?, I. Zabaev reveals the categories that played a dominating role in the people?s consciousness in the pre-revolutionary Russia. According to his conclusion, these categories were?obedience? and?resignation?. It was obedience and resignation that assured the salvation of an Orthodox person. In everyday life (...) such orientations were easily transformed into the readiness to obey the?superior?. Once elaborated, they turned to be quite stable and, being separated from their religious roots, ensured a sort of asceticism on the secular path. (shrink)

ArgumentBy the late nineteenth century, science pedagogues and academicians became involved in a vast movement to popularize science throughout the Russian empire. With the aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, many now found the new Marxist state a willing supporter of their goals of spreading science to an under-educated public. In the Stalin era, Soviet state officials believed that the spread of science and technology had to coalesce with the Communist Party's utilitarian goals and needs to revive (...) the industrial sector of the economy. This resulted in a new Stalinist technologically oriented popularization campaign. In the Khrushchev era, Soviet politicians became increasingly more aware of the competitive power of Soviet technology in the global arena and developed extensive campaigns to publicize Soviet feats for a broad domestic and foreign public audience. This was particularly true for topics such as the space program and big technologies such as nuclear power. (shrink)

Liberalism in Russia is one of the most complex, multifaced and, indeed, controversial phenomena in the history of political thought. Values and practices traditionally associated with Western liberalism—such as individual freedom, property rights, or the rule of law—have often emerged ambiguously in the Russian historical experience through different dimensions and combinations. Economic and political liberalism have often appeared disjointed, and liberal projects have been shaped by local circumstances, evolved in response to secular challenges and developed within often rapidly-changing institutional (...) and international settings. This third volume of the Reset DOC “Russia Workshop” collects a selection of the Dimensions and Challenges of Russian Liberalism conference proceedings, providing a broad set of insights into the Russian liberal experience through a dialogue between past and present, and intellectual and empirical contextualization, involving historians, jurists, political scientists and theorists. The first part focuses on the Imperial period, analyzing the political philosophy and peculiarities of pre-revolutionary Russian liberalism, its relations with the rule of law, and its institutionalization within the Constitutional Democratic Party. The second part focuses on Soviet times, when liberal undercurrents emerged under the surface of the official Marxist-Leninist ideology. After Stalin’s death, the “thaw intelligentsia” of Soviet dissidents and human rights defenders represented a new liberal dimension in late Soviet history, while the reforms of Gorbachev’s “New Thinking” became a substitute for liberalism in the final decade of the USSR. The third part focuses on the “time of troubles” under the Yeltsin presidency, and assesses the impact of liberal values and ethics, the bureaucratic difficulties in adapting to change, and the paradoxes of liberal reforms during the transition to post-Soviet Russia. Despite Russian liberals having begun to draw lessons from previous failures, their project was severely challenged by the rise of Vladimir Putin. Hence, the fourth part focuses on the 2000s, when the liberal alternative in Russian politics confronted the ascendance of Putin, surviving in parts of Russian culture and in the mindset of technocrats and “system liberals”. Today, however, the Russian liberal project faces the limits of reform cycles of public administration, suffers from a lack of federalist attitude in politics and is externally challenged from an illiberal world order. All this asks us to consider: what is the likelihood of a “reboot” of Russian liberalism? (shrink)

The article traces possible channels of influence of a religious factor on the formation of a specific Russian version of socialism. Using the logics of the M. Weber?s work?The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism?, I. Zabaev reveals the categories that played a dominating role in the people?s consciousness in the pre-revolutionary Russia. According to his conclusion, these categories were?obedience? and?resignation?. It was obedience and resignation that assured the salvation of an Orthodox person. In everyday life (...) such orientations were easily transformed into the readiness to obey the?superior?. Once elaborated, they turned to be quite stable and, being separated from their religious roots, ensured a sort of asceticism on the secular path. (shrink)

The idea of entangled modernities is best understood as a complement and corrective to that of `multiple modernities': it serves to theorize the global unity and interconnections of modern socio-cultural formations in a non-reductionist and non-functionalist way. But it can also help to highlight complexity and divergence behind the outwardly uniform or parallel patterns of development. This line of thought seems particularly relevant to the history of Communism. The interdependent but divergent trajectories of the two imperial revolutions, Russian (...) and Chinese, exemplify the multiple patterns of entanglement in unusually instructive ways. In both cases, imperial legacies and traditions interacted with modernizing imperatives and geopolitical constraints, as well as with the revolutionary projects proposed as solutions to the imperial crises. The Sino-Soviet entanglement was highly asymmetric; although the Chinese connection seems to have been important at several critical junctures in Soviet history, the impact of the Soviet model on Chinese Communism was incomparably more formative. But the Chinese metamorphoses of the Soviet model deviated from the original in various ways; they were too complex and sometimes too self-destructive to be explained in terms of an adaptive logic. Rather, the transfigurations that took place at various stages - from the beginnings of Chinese Bolshevism to the aberrations of Maoism in power - can be understood as changing patterns of entanglement, combining radicalizing twists to the Soviet model with selective reactivation of Chinese traditions. (shrink)

Orthodox ethic is inconsistent with liberal values and the spirit of capitalism. This incompatibility sets limits on the rates of economic growth in Orthodox countries and determines their backlog from the most developed Protestant and Catholic countries at the present stage. In this paper is examined the hypothesis of the decisive role of geography and some random events in the adoption of Orthodox Russia and the formation of specific characteristics of Russian mentality, in particular, the (...) messianic spirit. The adoption of Orthodoxy by Rus is viewed in accordance with concept of Akhiezer and his co-authors as a partial borrowing of foreign culture for further development of its own culture. From this point of view such borrowing was not sufficient. Unlike Germanic tribes Rus did not succeed in adoption enough to start a new period of cultural self-development. The Baptizing was a large-scale intentional action for modernization of Rus life-style through intensifying with a help of cultural borrowing. But this potential was not enough for genesis of innovations that required for further intensive development. Thus the Baptizing can be viewed as a step on the way of extensive development. In the future Russia would use same practice of adopting ‘modern, more advanced cultural resources and reproducing on their basis the same extensive paradigm‘ (Akhiezer A., Kliamkin I, Yakovenko I. History of Russia. The End or New Beginning? M., 2005). The Baptizing can be considered not only as some kind of start for Russian history but also as a choice of development pattern. This pattern would persist even in 20th century in the period when Christianity and Orthodox church would be discarded. (shrink)

The global COVID-19 pandemic has quickly and radically changed the world. The healthcare system in Russia, as in other countries, is under incredible pressure, and Russian society likewise is tested by “social distancing” practices. The unceasing adaptation and mobilization of resources has become part of our everyday lives. The struggle against the epidemic continues to emphasize the priority of global social health. Accordingly, we must address questions recently raised by The Hastings Center in “What Values Should Guide Us?”. What (...) will be the new ethical norm after the pandemic? What compromises will be in place between civil liberties and public health? Will such biomedical ethical themes concerning the... (shrink)

The official patriotic narrative that emerged in the USSR during the Stalin period shows the continuity of imperial models that served to constitute "love of the fatherland". This article presents several concepts about the formation of imperial patriotism prevalent in the course of history; it identifies tendencies of interaction between cultural tradition and foreign models. It also shows the principal possibility of combining patriotism with other forms of unifying and mobilizing discourses. The official patriotic discourse of the Stalin (...) era is analyzed as an eclectic ideological construct that, to a large extent, relied on the tradition of imperial patriotic education. The constants distinguishing Russian - Soviet patriotism include the representation of Russia 's imperial past, viewing the question of a multi-national state through the paradigm of the empire's "civilizing mission", and patriotism as an integral part of public political education. Some of the elements fundamental for Soviet "love of the fatherland" are preserved in modern Russian patriotism as for instance in the form of " Soviet " nostalgia or representations of militant "statehood". (shrink)

The trial of Galileo remains a representative example of the alleged incompatibility between science and religion as well as a suggestive case study of the relationship between them from the Western historical and methodological perspective. However, the Eastern Christian view has not been explored to a significant extent. In this article, the author considers relevant aspects of the reception of the teaching of Copernicus and Galileo in Russian culture, especially in the works of scientists. Whereas in prerevolutionary Russia Galileo (...) was considered a symbol of the unity of science and religion, in the Soviet period his name and especially his trial was largely used for atheistic propaganda purposes. The author discusses the most recent debate in the Russian Orthodox milieu. The second part is dedicated to the presence of Galileo in Russian religious philosophy, especially in the thought of Gregory Skovoroda, Ivan Kireyevsky, and Sergey Glagolev. Finally, the relation of the Russian Orthodox Church to the teaching of Galileo is considered. (shrink)

This article aims to contribute to the Peircean studies by providing an account of the reception of Peirce’s philosophy in Russian academia. Peirce was introduced to Russian scholarship at the beginning of the twentieth century, but Russian scholars’ work on Peirce remains unnoticed for the most part in the international academic world. Presenting an outline of their research fills a certain gap in the Peircean studies demonstrating how Peirce was received in imperial Russia, the USSR and (...) post-Soviet Russian academia. This overview can also serve, to some extent, as a contribution to the studies in cross-cultural communication, because the authors present Russian philosophers’ take on an American philosopher considered in the context of the changing historical and cultural landscape. From being introduced to Peirce via a francophone scholar at the beginning of the twentieth century to criticizing Peirce from the stance of dialectical materialism during the Cold War and exploring Peirce’s original work from various angles in the recent decades, Russophone academics could not avoid being affected by the complexity of cross-cultural communication. (shrink)

Philosophical Thought in Russia in the Second Half of the 20th Century is the first book of its kind that offers a systematic overview of an often misrepresented period in Russia's philosophy. Focusing on philosophical ideas produced during the late 1950s – early 1990s, it reconstructs the development of genuine philosophical thought in the Soviet period and introduces those non-dogmatic Russian thinkers who saw in philosophy a means of reforming social and intellectual life. Covering such areas of philosophical (...) inquiry as philosophy of science, philosophical anthropology, the history of philosophy, activity approach as well as communication and dialogue studies, the volume presents and thoroughly discusses central topics and concepts developed by Soviet thinkers in that particular fields. Written by a team of internationally recognized scholars from Russia and abroad, it examines the work of well-known Soviet philosophers (such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Evald Ilyenkov and Merab Mamardashvili) as well as those important figures (such as Vladimir Bibler, Alexander Zinoviev, Yury Lotman, Georgy Shchedrovitsky, Genrich Batishchev, Sergey Rubinstein, and others) who have often been overlooked. By introducing and examining original philosophical ideas that evolved in the Soviet period, the book confirms that not all Soviet philosophy was dogmatic and tied to orthodox Marxism and the ideology of Marxism-Leninism. It shows Russian philosophical development of the Soviet period in a new light, as a philosophy defined by a genuine discourse of exploration and intellectual progress, rather than stagnation and dogmatism. In addition to providing the historical and cultural background that explains the development of the 20th-century Russian philosophy, the book also puts the discussed ideas and theories in the context of contemporary philosophical discussions showing their relevance to nowadays debates in Western philosophy. With short biographies of key thinkers, an extensive current bibliography and a detailed chronology of Soviet philosophy, this research resource provides a new understanding of the Soviet period and its intellectual legacy 100 years after the Russian Revolution. (shrink)

Boring Formless Nonsense intervenes in an aesthetics of failure that has largely been delimited by the visual arts and its avant-garde legacies. It focuses on contemporary experimental composition in which failure rubs elbows with the categories of chance, noise, and obscurity. In these works we hear failure anew. We hear boredom, formlessness, and nonsense in a way that gives new purchase to aesthetic, philosophical, and ethical questions that falter in their negative capability. Reshaping current debates on failure as an aesthetic (...) category, eldritch Priest shows failure to be a duplicitous concept that traffics in paradox and sustains the conditions for magical thinking and hyperstition. Framing recent experimental composition as a deviant kind of sound art, Priest explores how the affective and formal elements of post-Cagean music couples with contemporary culture's themes of depression, distraction, and disinformation to create an esoteric reality composed of counterfactuals and pseudonymous beings. Ambitious in content and experimental in its approach, Boring Formless Nonsense will challenge and fracture your views on failure, creativity, and experimental music. (shrink)

The Nazis' use and misuse of Nietzsche is well known. The Superman, the "will to power," Nietzsche's equation of bourgeois democracy and decadence, and his denigration of reason were staples of Nazi propaganda. Communists also used and misused Nietzsche, but that fact is largely unknown because Soviet propagandists invoked reason and labeled Nietzsche the "philosopher of fascism," even while covertly appropriating his ideas. In this pioneering book, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal excavates the trail of long-obscured Nietzschean ideas that took root (...) in late Imperial Russia, intertwining with other elements in the culture to become a vital ingredient of Bolshevism and Stalinism. Nietzsche made a difference. He furnished intellectual ammunition for a prolonged conflict about culture, society, and politics that began around the turn of the century. His first Russian admirers were poets, philosophers, and political activists. They responded to the changes transforming their society by espousing new values and seeking a new faith by which to live and work. This response resulted in new aesthetic and political amalgams, such as Symbolism, Futurism, Nietzschean Christianity, and Nietzschean Marxism. The ensuing debates between and among their partisans reverberated throughout the wider culture and therefore also into Bolshevism, becoming the subject of an uninterrupted polemic between Bolsheviks and non-Bolsheviks, and among Bolsheviks, that continued into the 1930s. In Stalin's time, unacknowledged Nietzschean ideas were used to mobilize the masses for the great tasks of the first Five-Year Plan and the Cultural Revolution, which was intended to eradicate "bourgeois" values and attitudes from Soviet life and to construct a distinctly Socialist culture. Nietzsche's belief that people need illusions to shield them from reality underlay Socialist Realism, the official Soviet aesthetic from 1934 on. In the aftermath of de-Stalinization, the government cast Nietzsche as the personification of "bourgeois" nihilism and "bourgeois" individualism. Soviet intellectuals wishing to reappropriate their lost cultural heritage discovered the Nietzsche-influenced intellectuals of late Imperial Russia and reopened discussion on the issues they had posed. More than an exercise in historical rediscovery, _New Myth, New World_ offers a new interpretation of modern Russian history. By uncovering the buried influence of Nietzschean ideas on Soviet culture and politics, Rosenthal opens new avenues for understanding Soviet ideology and its influence on the twentieth century. (shrink)

This article deals with women-centred prose texts of the 1990s and 2000s in Russia written by women, and focuses especially on generation narratives. By this term the author means fictional texts that explore generational relations within families, from the perspective of repressed experiences, feelings and attitudes in the Soviet period. The selected texts are interpreted as narrating and conceptualizing the consequences of patriarchal ideology for relations between mothers and daughters and for reconstructing connections between Soviet and post-Soviet (...) by revisiting and remembering especially the gaps and discontinuities between (female) generations. The cases discussed are Liudmila Petrushevskaia’s ‘povest’ Vremia noch [The Time: Night] (1991), Liudmila Ulitskaia’s novel Medeia i ee deti [Medea and her Children] (1996) and Elena Chizhova’s novel Vremia zhenshchin [The Time of Women] (2009). These novels reflect on the one hand the woman-centredness and novelty of representation in women’s prose writing in the post-Soviet period. On the other hand, the author suggests that they reflect the diverse methods of representing the Soviet era and experience through generation narratives. The texts reassess the past through intimate, tactile memories and perceptions, and their narration through generational plots draws attention to the process of working through, which needs to be done in contemporary Russia. The narratives touch upon the untold stories of those who suffered in silence or hid the family secrets from the officials, in order to save the family. The narration delves into the different layers of experience and memory, conceptualizing them in the form of multiple narrative perspectives constructing different generations and traditions. In this way they convey the ‘secrets’ hidden in the midst of everyday life routines and give voice to the often silent resistance of women towards patriarchal and repressive ideology. The new women’s prose of the 1980s–90s and the subsequent trend of women-centred narratives and generation narratives employ conceptual metaphors of reassessing, revisiting and remembering the cultural, experiential, and emotional aspects of the past, Soviet lives. (shrink)

The Nazis' use and misuse of Nietzsche is well known. The Superman, the "will to power," Nietzsche's equation of bourgeois democracy and decadence, and his denigration of reason were staples of Nazi propaganda. Communists also used and misused Nietzsche, but that fact is largely unknown because Soviet propagandists invoked reason and labeled Nietzsche the "philosopher of fascism," even while covertly appropriating his ideas. In this pioneering book, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal excavates the trail of long-obscured Nietzschean ideas that took root (...) in late Imperial Russia, intertwining with other elements in the culture to become a vital ingredient of Bolshevism and Stalinism. Nietzsche made a difference. He furnished intellectual ammunition for a prolonged conflict about culture, society, and politics that began around the turn of the century. His first Russian admirers were poets, philosophers, and political activists. They responded to the changes transforming their society by espousing new values and seeking a new faith by which to live and work. This response resulted in new aesthetic and political amalgams, such as Symbolism, Futurism, Nietzschean Christianity, and Nietzschean Marxism. The ensuing debates between and among their partisans reverberated throughout the wider culture and therefore also into Bolshevism, becoming the subject of an uninterrupted polemic between Bolsheviks and non-Bolsheviks, and among Bolsheviks, that continued into the 1930s. In Stalin's time, unacknowledged Nietzschean ideas were used to mobilize the masses for the great tasks of the first Five-Year Plan and the Cultural Revolution, which was intended to eradicate "bourgeois" values and attitudes from Soviet life and to construct a distinctly Socialist culture. Nietzsche's belief that people need illusions to shield them from reality underlay Socialist Realism, the official Soviet aesthetic from 1934 on. In the aftermath of de-Stalinization, the government cast Nietzsche as the personification of "bourgeois" nihilism and "bourgeois" individualism. Soviet intellectuals wishing to reappropriate their lost cultural heritage discovered the Nietzsche-influenced intellectuals of late Imperial Russia and reopened discussion on the issues they had posed. More than an exercise in historical rediscovery, _New Myth, New World_ offers a new interpretation of modern Russian history. By uncovering the buried influence of Nietzschean ideas on Soviet culture and politics, Rosenthal opens new avenues for understanding Soviet ideology and its influence on the twentieth century. (shrink)

The sources of religious tolerance but also of religious nationalism in post-soviet Russia can be found basically in the group identification of nationality and religion. In crisis situations, the historical religion of the Russian society - Orthodoxy - becomes the criterion for identifying the national identity. However, despite the fact that the majority of Russians in our times consider themselves Orthodox, many of them are not believers. The observable effect of the “external belief” results in the fact (...) that the religion tends to become a matter of personal choice and an individual value. It assumes a nationalistic function and to become an ideology. As a result, the political elite considers religion as a means of achieving different non- religious purposes. The Russian Orthodox Church, the official church, is compelled to take this fact into consider- ation and even support it. This is why religious intolerance and religious nationalism in modern Russia are often directed towards religion. (shrink)

The focus of the study is the problem of “entry” or “penetration” of pre-revolutionary philosophy into Soviet philosophy. On the example of the oeuvre of E.K. Gertsyk, the au­thor of “Memoirs” on the philosophers and writers of the religious and philosophical re­vival at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries, the translator of the works of F. Nietzsche, J. Huysmans, F. von Baader and others, the thinker who created her own version of the philosophy of life, it is shown how (...) a representative of the culture of the Silver Age managed to reconcile with the Soviet reality. The article traces Gertsyk’s creative evolu­tion from the philosophy of the phenomenon, presented in her dissertation essay on the problem of the real world in the Kant’s philosophy (1904), to the philosophy of life; her interpretation of Kant’s epistemology is considered; the concept of a path (a key one in Gertsyk’s work) was analyzed on the basis of works written in the early Soviet years (the hagiographic treatise “On the Ways” (1917–1918), the essay “Edgar Poe” (1918–1927)); the influences of decisive importance for Gertsyk’s philosophical searches are considered (I. Kant, F. Nietzsche, L. Shestov, N. Berdyaev, V. Ivanov, A. Bergson and etc). The article focuses on the transitional stage of Gertsyk’s oeuvre, when there was an increase in religiosity and apocalyptic moods in her mindset, which in the 1930s was replaced by a departure from Christianity as a stronghold of the old culture and old values, justification and apologia for the new social reality, demonstrated by Gertsyk in the well-known letters “from there”, i.e. from the Soviet Russia, published on the pages of the Parisian journal “Sovremennye zapiski” and caused a mixed reaction in the emigrant community. The article shows what ideological attitudes allowed the par­ticipant of the decadent meetings and the interlocutor of Russian religious philosophers to accept the Soviet reality. (shrink)

The article examines the question of the correlation of the phenomena “Russian philoso­phy” and “philosophy in Russia”. The author believes that these phenomena are not iden­tical to each other, and Russian philosophy, being an important fragment of intellectual subculture, was often created outside of Russia. This phenomenon became especially prominent in the twentieth century, when Russian dissidents who were exiled abroad, working in the West, continued to be the largest Russian philosophers. On the other hand, within (...) Russia itself (the Moscow Kingdom, the Russian Empire, the short “democratic republic”, the USSR, post-Soviet Russia), not only Russians in language and culture phi­losophized and continue to philosophize. The author notes that Russian literature and philosophical journalism played an exceptional role in domestic philosophizing. It was they who most often made philosophy, as knowledge objectively tending to universality, a nationally colored Russian philosophy. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the exhibition and creative activities of representatives of the Juelan Society and figures of Soviet unofficial art – a comparative analysis allows us to see common points regarding the choice of artistic means and techniques, themes and motives, the fate of creative associations. The purpose of the article is to determine the similarities and differences of the process of the origin of unofficial art in China and Soviet Russia. The author's field of attention (...) includes identifying similarities in the choice of genre, composition, artistic means, as well as the semantic content of the images revealed in the works of artists. It is important for the disclosure of the topic to determine the features and common features in the organization of creative activity and communication between members of artistic associations. The study concluded that Chinese and Soviet figures of unofficial art rallied around small associations, "circles", clubs, societies, offering an alternative to the official and, from their point of view, regressive art view of independent creativity. The artists of the Juelan Society sought to instill a modernist vision in Chinese culture, and Soviet conformists decades later developed their own understanding of contemporary art. Their attempts had a strong influence on the work of Chinese painters of subsequent generations and became a phenomenon in the art of their countries, still have an impact on its development. Their ideas and creative findings are the sources of the processes that take place in the artistic worlds that cooperate in the field of culture of Russia and China. (shrink)

Besides other changes that have taken place in the Russian Federation in our times, the process of constitution of an ideology, which is accompanied by different competing value-systems, is one of the crucial tendencies. This process also occurs in the area of the development and construction of religious institutions and religious consciousness. Historically, the Russian Orthodox Church has had a dominant position among the other religious institutions in the country. Unfortunately, it has not and does not serve (...) the role of promoting a democratic change, but is rather an “echo” of the authoritarian and totalitarian past of the Russian history. In my paper I will analyze different factors that contribute to these characteristics of the Orthodox Church, and their influence on the political culture of Russia. (shrink)

In search of salvation on the Stroganov estates -- Faith, family, and land after emancipation -- Youth : exemplars of rural socialism -- Elders : Christian ascetics in the Soviet countryside -- New risks and inequalities in the household sector -- Which khoziain? whose moral community? -- Society, culture, and the churching of Sepych -- Separating post-Soviet worlds? : priestly baptisms and priestless funerals.

Most of the features of modern Russian business are transient, determined by the transitional character of the Russian economy and drastic changes in the social structure, ideology, and consciousness of Russian society in general. There are three main normative experiences in the traditions of Russian business: a) the experience of pre-Revolutionary business, specifically developed and practiced by the merchants of the old-believers extraction; b) the experience of socialist economy, which was more or less oriented to the (...) public good and presupposed selfless aspirations by the economic agents; c) the experience of legally and administratively constrained private business and illegal shadow business, which expected businessmen to be vigorous, industrious and enterprising. The process of privatization was developed under the aegis of state, specifically the state bureaucracy. The influence of changes in the social-economic system has been ambivalent for social morals. However, the reforms could stimulate their improvement. The recent development in the cultural environment of business testify to the emerging space of civilized business, which manifests that it is practically useful for businessmen to be ethical. (shrink)

The Russian Orthodox Church, the biggest centralized religious institution in the post-Soviet space, has been going through major changes in the 2000s. These are connected to qualitative changes in the composition of believers and clergy as well as legal registration of rights on church property obtained from the government in the 1990s. This has led to substantial changes in internal policies, particularly a sharp decrease in the influence of fundamentalists, which had been rising over the previous decade. (...) Moreover, the years of Putin's rule were years of failure in the church's relations with the government, which consistently denied the ROC's most important requests. In this paper we will examine the principal social developments that have been taking place within the Church in the first years of the twenty-first century. (shrink)

This is a review of Thomas Nemeth's Kant in Imperial Russia, Cham: Springer, 2017. It gives a rundown of the contents of the book, which may be considered the definitive, comprehensive, and authoritative overview of the Kantrezeption in pre-Soviet Russia in the English language. The book proceeds chronologically, starting from Kant's days up to the Bolshevik Revolution, examining well-known and lesser-known Russian philosophers and thinkers as well as figures of other nationalities who contributed to the dissemination of (...) Kant's ideas in Russia, from intellectuals like Nikolai Karamzin, who paid Kant a visit during his travels, to Mikhail Vladislavlev, Vladimir Solovyov, Aleksej Kozlov, Aleksandr Vvedenskij, Lev Lopatin, Nikolai Berdjaev, the brothers Trubeckoj, Georgij Chelpanov, Gustav Shpet, Pavel Novgorodcev, Ivan Lapshin, Vladimir Ern, Nikolai Losskij, Boris Jakovenko, and many others. The review emphasizes the principal outcome of the book, which is that the Russian reception of Kant's philosophy was largely negative. (shrink)

This article presents the understanding of Eurasianism as an expression of Russia’s essence in the works of N.S. Trubetskoi, P.P. Suvchinskii, P.N. Savitskii, and L.P. Karsavin. We use the cognitive category “historical collective individuality” for a more complete and deeper understanding of Eurasianism as a set of views and approaches, as well as a certain specialized social community of its representatives. The use of this category allows us to reveal Eurasianism as an area of ideas expressing the essence of Russia. (...) N.S. Trubetskoi considers Russian-Turanian unity to be just such an expression of that essence; for P.N. Savitskii, it is the circle of “European and Asiatic/Asian cultures”; for P.P. Suvchinskii, Russia’s great testament is the unification of the people and the intelligentsia under the “all-resolving dome of the Orthodox Church”; and for L.P. Karsavin, Russia’s essence consists in its development as a Eurasian subject or a collective person. In addition, the category of historical collective individuality allows us to reveal Eurasianism as a “gold reserve of life” for Eurasians in exile. Thus, the unity of metaphysics and life sought in Russian philosophy is achieved. We draw conclusions about the historicity of the Eurasianist collective individuality. (shrink)

Last June, Moscow was the setting for a Russian‐sponsored conference on business ethics. One of the participants from the USA, Professor Thomas W. Dunfee, here gives his impressions of what was clearly an instructive occasion. Professor Dunfee is Kolodny Professor of Social Responsibility at the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania and is an international authority on business ethics.“Older people have an ethics problem. By that, I mean they have ethics. To survive, I can break a (...) law if I need to and if the risks aren't too large. Older people wouldn't even think in such a way.” Dimitri Zotov, explaining why young people are in high professional demand in the new Russia, Wall Street Journal, p.A5, Col.1, 8/2/93.“Shell‐shocked men and women spend their days hacking through the post‐Soviet wilderness in search of a near‐mythical creature, an honest joint‐venture partner.” David Brooks, “Cracking That Post‐Soviet Market”, Wall Street Journal, editorial page, 8/24/93. (shrink)

What is hospitality? Who is it addressed to? Hospitality aims at welcoming those who arrive; it demands giving space and time and sharing our own resources with others. In view of the current global migration crisis and in the midst of the social debates and a critique of the failure of affluent countries and Western democracies to respond in solidarity to those in need, this article attempts to re-consider the space for hospitality drawing from the ethical and the political as (...) the two fundamental pillars of social architecture. In an effort to discuss collective grassroots reactions to this general lack of hospitality, I address the Catalan social platform Volem Acollir in their request to the state to open up the borders for the reception of a larger number of migrants. Far from being an individual choice, or an optional political decision, hospitality confronts us with the moral dilemma of the human response to our cultural others. (shrink)

This article introduces the main developments in studies on Chinese philosophy in Russia since the 1990s. At the backstage of upsurge of interest in cultural studies scholars tended to approach the Chinese philosophy from the angle of compatibility of modernization with continuity of tradition. Attention to the links between philosophy and civilization of China has made the impact to the work on encyclopedic-type reference books in Chinese philosophy. Along with studies in philosophy of Contemporary Confucianism scholars has debated on general (...) problems of Confucian influences upon the development of China. The concluding section attempts to sum up the results and to outline forthcoming tasks of Russian studies in Chinese philosophy. (shrink)

This article introduces the main developments in studies on Chinese philosophy in Russia since the 1990s.At the backstage of upsurge of interest in cultural studies scholars tended to approach the Chinese philosophy from the angle of compatibility of modernization with continuity of tradition. Attention to the links between philosophy and civilization of China has made the impact to the work on encyclopedic-type reference books in Chinese philosophy. Along with studies in philosophy of Contemporary Confucianism scholars has debated on general problems (...) of Confucian influences upon the development of China. The concluding section attempts to sum up the results and to outline forthcoming tasks of Russian studies in Chinese philosophy. (shrink)

The problem of personality in philosophy has been significant since the emergence of Christianity. In Soviet Russia, this problem has been actualized since the 2nd half of the twentieth century, since the Thaw, when the books of Russian religious philosophers became known. We were the original heirs of Christian ontology and ethics, which assumed that a personal appeal to God on You (Tu) testified to a change of places in the interior of being itself, which becomes intimate, close, (...) because the infinite God, being in a person, makes him the same infinite person. The Latin term "persona" is translated as "mask" (personality). V.V. Vinogradov in the "History of Words" says that the word "personality", associated with Latin and Greek meanings (persona, prosopon), was not used massively in the Old Russian language until the XVII century, and in the XVII and XVIII centuries it began to denote only the official position of a person. It is impossible to associate this meaning of the face with what was in antiquity and the Middle Ages. This is a homonym. Reflecting on Greek literature, S. S. Averintsev wrote that the term "creativity" is poorly applicable to the Greek philosophers: "poyesis" is a matter understood as an invention. The Greeks invented an objectified type of communication-through-literature, i.e. dialogue, consciously separated from life communication. Dialogue as an invention revealed the fundamental undialogical nature of Greek literature, and Socrates is the ideal of a radically undialogical person who cannot be internally hurt by the word of the interlocutor. Therefore, for Averintsev, a personality is a mind free from a "dialogical situation", it is a mask, an individual understood as an eidos. It is the mask — "immobile-clear, fully revealed and appeared" — that is the semantic limit of a continuously emerging face. By opening the "mask", the Greeks emphasized the importance of individuality. V. S. Bybler, criticizing Averintsev, argues that dialogue is not a construction, it is an internal dispute of the philosopher taking place in his own soul. He is in the thought itself, pushing its definitions to the limit and reaching the border of other possible definitions, concepts, understandings. According to Bybler, the thought itself is dialogical, communicating with itself within itself and forming a gap between itself and the other "I". At the same time, Bibler defines his philosophy as the philosophy of an eternally borderline culture. Dialogue is a tense collaboration between an author who worked in a past culture and a reader who lives in a modern culture. Personality for the Bibler is the ultimate embodiment of the individual — the reverse course of Averintsev. M. Ya. Gefter and V. V. Bibikhin worked out this problem 20 years later. Gefter, based on the unmotivated appearance of homo sapiens and the unexplained appearance of speech, emphasized that speech destroyed the limit of understanding between people. This is also connected with his reliance on the concept of the World of Worlds and the definition of personality, which, in his opinion, is not a higher form built over the individual, but a later phenomenon that entered into a dispute with individuation. Personality is a choice, a form of overcoming oneself with access to others, a case. Bibikhin, not agreeing with the theoretical positions of Averintsev and Bybler, turns out to be closer to Gefter. It does not proceed from the development of the individual or personality, having changed the aspect of reasoning. He posed the problem of the wholeness of a human (homo) who initially deals not with knowledge, but with being and non-being. Before knowledge there is affirmation and negation, which sound in speaking silence before any speech and push a person to act. A human (homo), i.e. not an individual or a person, begins with an act; he is, first of all, such an act. The difference between Bibikhin's approach, which is closely related to the ideas of hesychasm, from Averintsev and Bybler lies in his understanding of philosophy as timeless. For him, everything known is the World, not even modernity. Personal properties (prosopon) are possessed only by God, who is "personal" and "hypostatic", because He expresses energy. This problem of the action of the energetic Word is the most important witness of the world given through man and recognized through language. Language poses the problem of understanding, assuming an initial misunderstanding between people. (shrink)

The study of the cultural activity of the Spiritual missions of the Russian Orthodox Church in various regions of Russia is one of the urgent tasks in the context of the problematic field of the theory of regionalism, cultural studies and socio-philosophical knowledge. Russian settlements on the territory of the Yenisei River basin and the entry of ethnic groups and territories of Yakutia and Buryatia into the Russian Empire has become one of the most important stages (...) of the integration of the ethnic groups of Siberia into a single statehood. The Irkutsk Spiritual Mission received a more perfect organization, institutionalized by increasing the number of missionary camps, which for successful Christian activities carried out among pagans allowed the formation of school educational institutions for the education and upbringing of a new Buryat generation of children in the doctrinal Orthodox canons, and Russian cultural traditions. In this regard, one of the key tasks of the missionaries was to establish a rational view of further life in new Christian-type formations, which was realized in socio-cultural activities: providing medical care to sick representatives of other ethnic groups, a friendly attitude to people of a different faith and a sincere desire to guide them on the path of righteousness, etc. It should be noted that the largest share of foreigners in this territory belonged to Buddhists, which was reflected in the influence of lamas on doctrinal issues, including economic ones. Since Buddhism in the Russian Empire belonged to the section of tolerant religions, direct (administrative) pressure on it was impossible. There remained funds of an exclusively spiritual nature, to which Orthodox missionary work was directed. Today in the Russian Federation, Buddhism, as well as Islam, Catholicism and Protestantism, as well as some other faiths belong to the category of traditional religions, which organizationally operate within the framework of the modern Russian Constitution. (shrink)

During the First World War the radical nationalist sentiments were widespread in different European countries involved in military activities, including the Russian Empire. In Russia this rise united the features of Russian ethnonationalism and imperial enthusiasm. The Russian philosopher Vladimir Ern in his article “From Kant to Krupp” attempted “to ground” the hostility between Russia and its allies, on the one hand, and Germany, on the other hand. This attempt turned Ern’s article into one of the (...) earliest manifestoes of cultural racism in Russia, maybe the very first one. Discussing this article in the context of other works by Ern of 1910–1917, one can see that Ern applied Friedrich Nietzsche’s genealogical method for the political interpretation of “the problem of technology” causing the aggressive approach to the human’s environment. Nevertheless, Ern’s cultural racism and aggressive rhetoric blocked further development and even reception of his methodological innovations. The psychological compensatory pragmatic of his rhetoric seems to resemble the analogical function of rigid opposition between “Russia” and “West” in speeches of contemporary Russia’s official ideologues. (shrink)

When a wrongdoing occurs, victims, barring special circumstance, can aptly forgive their wrongdoers, receive apologies, and be paid reparations. It is also uncontroversial, in the usual circumstances, that wronged parties can aptly blame their wrongdoer. But controversy arises when we consider blame from third-parties after the victim has forgiven. At times it seems that wronged parties can make blame inapt through forgiveness. If third parties blame anyway, it often appears the victim is justified in protesting. “But I forgave him!” In (...) other cases, however, forgiveness seems irrelevant: B can forgive A, but it can still seem that third parties can aptly blame A for the wrong against B. This perplexity adds a dimension to ongoing discussion regarding criteria for apt blame and the related issues of standing and fittingness. This paper explores the status of third party blame after forgiveness. I argue that while post forgiveness blame is often inapt, in many other cases forgiveness is irrelevant. This difference is explained by appeal to the various relationships third parties might have to wronged parties, and how these differences affect the ways we blame and thereby blame’s aptness. (shrink)

ArgumentState patronage and the modernizing role of the government have been considered crucial for the development of science in Russia during both Imperial and Soviet periods. This paper argues, on the contrary, that the start of Russian agricultural science had predominantly local and non-governmental sources of support. Amateur experiments by nobles aspiring to become “cultured” landlords, university professors applying their scientific knowledge to their own estates, and the efforts by local community administrations, zemstvo, to compete for grain (...) markets all contributed, by 1900, to the establishment of various stations for agricultural research. The Imperial government became involved in this process rather belatedly, with an effort to further stimulate and coordinate the institutional network of agricultural science. By 1917, this network included more than 300 breeding and experimental stations. Despite revolutionary violence and the loss of former patrons, most of these stations managed to maintain their functions throughout the Civil War and formed the basis of Soviet agricultural science. (shrink)

The paper argues that the philosophy that was taught in Orthodox schools of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in late 16th – early 17th century and then became the ideological basis for the Moscow “Latinism” can be attributed to so-called Second scholasticism. The main features of Second scholasticism are the rejection of predestination in theology, usage of probabilistic approaches in logic and ethics and confrontation with absolutism in politics. These features made Second scholasticism unacceptable for absolute monarchies emerging in Europe (including (...) the Russian Empire) which utilized universal rationalism of the early Enlightenment as an ideological basis. Both in Western Europe and in Russia Second scholasticism became “a zone of cultural exclusion”. However prevalence of Second scholasticism in Orthodox schools of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth concurred with making up of the Ukrainian cultural originality and in many respects defined characteristic features of the Ukrainian mentality. (shrink)

The article defines the nature of the Russian war against Ukraine in the context of social and state transformations of the 20th — 21st centuries. It is emphasized that this is a war of different worlds, mentalities, worldviews, ways of life, values, etc., which has been going on for many centuries in various forms (direct and mediated, open and veiled, hot and cold). The role of the religious-legal factor in the Russian war against Ukraine at various stages of (...) Ukrainian state formation (periods of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, Soviet, modern) is revealed. It is emphasized that it was during the time of the Ukrainian People’s Republic that the legal basis for the organization of the Ukrainian Local Orthodox Church, confessional differentiation and the establishment of freedom of conscience and interconfessional tolerance in Ukrainian society was created. Emphasized attention is paid to the fact that in the Soviet period, the Russian war against Ukraine continued in a new, veiled, hidden, invisible (at first glance) form with the active use of the religious factor. The results of this period have been determined, namely: rampant militant/ scientific atheism, radical extermination, Russification of Ukrainian Orthodoxy, liquidation of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, etc. Special attention is paid to the Soviet secular/political religion (Marxism-Leninism) as a key basis for the implementation of an aggressive policy regarding the historical memory and cultural identity of the Ukrainian people and a manipulative tool for the destruction of Ukrainian history, culture, worldview, nation, state and law in the information, hybrid, total, full-scale and other Russia’s wars against Ukraine. The article substantiates that improved legislation with an effective legal mechanism for its implementation, a strong civil society with developed institutions, including the institution of religion (church), adequate guarantees of religious rights and freedoms are important factors in ensuring state, national, religious security and victory of Ukraine (at the current stage) in the war waged against it by the Russian Federation. (shrink)

In Russia a monotheism - Orthodox Christianity - and atheism in its Marxist version have succeeded each other as state systems of rites and representations. Rather than contrasting one with the other, term with term, this paper proposes to bring in a third term: the local religious systems of Russia’s animist minorities. We examine how Christianity and atheism tried one after the other to get established there and also consider the reactions they encountered. The analysis as planned is undertaken (...) on two levels: on an overall level we look at the strategies and aims of the state and its representatives, and on the local level - illustrated by the particular example of the Nenets - concrete and always specific mechanisms are presented, which application of general policy has implemented on the ground. (shrink)

This article sets out an analysis of the issue of the interrelationship between ethics and ideology in Russian culture in the 18th and 19th centuries, using historical materials to explore the fate of theoretical ethics in Russia, the diversity of the theoretical forms of the study of ethics in the culture of this period, the formation of an objective originality in ethical thinking, and the principal issues defining the distinctive pattern of moral introspection in Russian culture.

In the 16th century, Moscow proclaimed itself to be the the third Rome and discovered the special way or Russian Orthodox Messianism doctrine. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the idea of Russia's unique global historical role went beyond exclusively church discussions, and the idea of Moscow as the Third Rome acquired an important place in the structure of imperial ideology. Even after a break with the past, after the 1917 October Revolution, the country did not abandon the idea (...) of Messianism, which organically fitted into the structure of Soviet ideology. At the same time, reanimation of messianic moods was carried out here in the format of the doctrine of the World Republic of Soviets and/or World Revolution. Of course, some backbone elements of old Messianism underwent a significant transformation, which can hardly be called secularization. The purpose of this article is to show that the time 1917 mid-1930s may be described with the help of a peculiar dialectic, as the unity of a radical break with the past and the specifically manifested continuity with it. Subsequently, despite large-scale changes, the idea of the peculiarity of the Russian way, firstly in Soviet and then in Russian society, including the specific perception of its past, continued to remain an influential political brand. This kind of discourse should be considered highly archaic today; however, it does not become an attribute of the distant past, retaining the attractiveness and even acquiring state ideology. (shrink)

In the article, an analysis of the structure of the Russian life-world in a new post-secular situation is given. The author proposes description of religious structures in the life-world of Russian citizens. Religion again became part of the life-world of the society in Russia. Despite this fact, current post-secular situation generally means that Russian society is neither atheistic nor religious. The work is intended to describe the stages of ideological aspects of the process of secularization in Russia, (...) which led to the formation of post-secular society. To achieve this goal, several task were pulled out in the article solving the following problems: explication of the stages of secularization process, designation of the key features of Peter the Great phase of secularization, marking the parameters of Soviet secular society. Then the analysis of the reasons for the desecularization outbreak was given. In the paper, several conclusions were made: ideological secularization was at least actualized with the successful and effective expansion of Soviet ideology. The ideological infiltration began from the pre-school and school educational levels. This infiltration continued on the secondary and high level of education and was supported by the Soviet mass media, literature, and art. It was shown that the results of Soviet secularization at the micro-sociological level were unstable due to the lack of substantiate elements of the world-view for the Soviet ideology. The term ‘post-secular‘ in relation to the contemporary Russian situation should mean the choice of a certain situation, a ‘bifurcation point‘ in the transition to a new model of society. Post-atheistic Russia can be characterized by a situation where a smooth cultural process was interrupted by an explosive secularization after 1917. Current Russian traditionalism is based on the restoration of Orthodox culture. (shrink)

The object of the study is atheism and theism as important ideological components of two opposing solutions to the "main question of philosophy" – materialism and idealism – forming two systems of human life navigation. The subject of the study is two ideological paradigms – Soviet atheism and Orthodox Christianity. Materialism and atheism are the fundamental elements of the Marxist doctrine underlying the philosophy and culture of the Soviet period of Russian history, opposing theism, creationism and (...) providentialism of the Christian understanding of the world and man, characteristic of the ideological paradigm of pre–revolutionary Russia. The purpose of the study is to clarify and substantiate the ideological intersection of these seemingly incompatible ideological positions. One of the objectives of the study is to substantiate their vertical semantic and value orientation. The novelty of the research, in particular, lies in the substantiation of the statement that two incompatible ideological poles represent varieties of the classical philosophical tradition with its vertical value-semantic orientation, and together oppose the main orientation of non-classical philosophy based on a horizontal scale of meanings and values. One of the main conclusions is that the vertical of Soviet materialism and atheism is a paradox and at the same time its tragedy: surprisingly, due to the vertical orientation of Soviet culture – formally atheistic – it is actually permeated with religious intuitions, questions, problems, ideas and plots disguised as secular concepts and terms, which finds its manifestation in various works of Soviet artistic culture. (shrink)

This article is devoted to theexploration of some trends in gender studies incontemporary Russia and is based on ourresearch and teaching in the field over thecourse of seven years. The main concepts ofgender research – gender, feminism,women's subjectivity – were introduced to theRussian public early in 1990s; Russian genderstudies began to develop as a whole due to theapplication of Western concepts and theories.The article examines the growth of genderstudies over the last 10 years, contextualdifferences as well as theoretical approachesin (...) Russian gender studies as these have arisenin the context of the `Russia – West'dichotomy. (shrink)

Regulatory oversight and public communication are intimately intertwined. Oversight failures, both actual and perceived, quickly galvanize attention from both the media and the public, as has occasionally happened in all of the historical cases with which this symposium is concerned — gene therapy, workplace chemicals, drugs and devices, and genetically modified organisms, especially those used as foods. Some developments, such as GMOs, seem to have more cultural significance or “cultural resonance” than others and are especially likely to garner public attention. (...) Developments in nanotechnology, on the other hand, do not seem to have captured as much popular attention. However, the accelerating convergence between nanotechnology as material science and biotechnology, health, and medicine could easily change this situation. (shrink)

In both occidental and oriental traditions, philosophers have long treated the martial arts as pursuits worthy of philosophical reflection. This is the first substantial academic book to lay out the philosophical terrain within the study and understanding of the martial arts and to explore the significance of this fascinating subject for contemporary philosophy. The book is divided into three sections. The first section concerns what philosophical reflection can teach us about the martial arts, and especially the nature and value of (...) its practice. The second section deals with the other direction of the dialectical interplay between philosophy and the martial arts: how the martial arts can inform philosophical issues important in their own right. Finally, because many of the notable martial arts are of Asian origin, there are particularly close links between the arts and Asian philosophies - and Buddhism in particular - and therefore the last section is devoted to this topic. The essays in this collection deal with a wide range of philosophical issues: normative ethics, meta-ethics, aesthetics, phenomenology, the philosophy of mind, Ancient Greek and Buddhist thought. By demonstrating the very real nature of the engagement between the martial arts and philosophy, this book is essential reading for any serious student or scholar with an interest in the martial arts, Eastern philosophy, the philosophy of sport, or the study of physical culture. (shrink)

The very occurrence of post-Soviet Russia necessarily dictates the need to study ideological foundations of its existence. What are they? How did they influence and continue to influence the social well-being of the country: do they corrupt or contribute to the unity of society; do they strengthen Russians in pondering over the historical path of the country's development, or, on the contrary, bring confusion into the souls of people and prophesy trouble? The purpose of the paper is to study (...) the language of everyday life as a kind of mirror reflecting the social well-being of the post-Soviet Russian Federation. The authors conclude that this social value is associated with the prosperity of both individuals and society as a whole, but of primary importance is the preservation of cultural and civilizational identity, sovereignty of the country, and solidarity. In modern conditions, cohesion seems to be the first step to social well-being of the country. (shrink)