Rifts in Russian Society Today

2000 ◽  
Vol 27 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 17-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zeev Katz
2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 459-480
Author(s):  
Graham H. Roberts

In our paper we propose a typology of the different ways in which the theme of consumption and the consumer society is treated in contemporary Russian literature. Some writers, of whom Oksana Robski is perhaps the best known, view consumption as something entirely positive, as a way for an individual (and especially a woman) to affirm their social identity. Others, such as Sergei Minaev and Viktor Pelevin, directly attack consumerism for the manner in which it has produced a spiritual void in Russian society today. A third group of writers, such as Zakhar Prilepin and Dmitry Bykov, criticise consumerism indirectly, by showing characters who are more or less violently opposed to the new society. Finally, novelists such as Ol’ga Slavnikova, Vladimir Sorokin and Mikhail Elizarov, do not evoke consumerism explicitly, but instead use metaphor to evoke the absence of basic human values in the new market economy. In today’s Russia, consumption has become the focus of a bitter struggle between different views of human nature, of society, and perhaps most importantly, of Russian identity itself. Nowhere is this struggle more clearly portrayed than in the pages of contemporary Russian literature.


2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-319
Author(s):  
Lorenzo Pubblici

Abstract The Mongol conquests and the following dominations have long been the subject of historical reevaluation by the scientific community. The spread and progressive specialization of Mongolian studies of the latest decades have also affected the westernmost of the four khanates resulted from the division of the Empire: the ulus Jochi, better known as Golden Horde. Russia’s territorial vastity, its proximity to Western Europe, and its multicultural characters have all attracted the historians’ attention to the Mongol era. By retracing the crucial historiographical passages, from nineteenth-century studies to the present day, this article aims to provide a broad and updated perspective of how the scientific debate has developed internationally and its relationship with the macro-levels of the Russian society today: from politics to public opinion.


Author(s):  
Alexander Burry

This chapter explores Karen Shakhnazarov’s 2009 film of Chekhov’s “Ward no. 6,” which combines the story’s plot with “mockumentary” features, as the director includes interviews with patients from an actual mental institution. It is argued that the focus of these interviews on childhood trauma underscores the same theme in the story. This theme can be traced back to Dostoevskii’s depiction of suffering children in The Brothers Karamazov, and also reflects Chekhov’s knowledge of the degeneration theory circulating in the 1890s. Shakhnazarov’s depiction of the same tragic plot in contemporary times implies that the “hereditary taint,” with its violence and abuse from generation to generation, continues to affect Russian society today.


2018 ◽  
pp. 25-40
Author(s):  
Walentyn N. Wandyszew

The aim of this article is to present the abovementioned events in Ukraine showed how the understanding o f them and experiencing o f the particular crisis situation can lead to the conditions when people start protesting against the ongoing socio-economic and political changes. Certainly, cultural, ethnic and religious identities have considerable importance. The author shows that Karl Popper was a witness of birth, adoption and death o f the totalitarian states o f the twentieth century, based on fascism and communism. He, as a thoughtful and observant scientist, fundamentally and profoundly studied the essence of Plato’s totalitarianism in Charmides. The scientific principles and scrupulosity o f Karl Popper also manifested in the fact that he repeatedly revised his study Open Society and Its Enemies, which was published in 1945, during more than two decades. Present media, subordinated to the creators o f new concepts and meanings and to the invisible fathers of netocracy, have already captured many of the commanding heights o f public life. And the modern censorship is focused not on blocking some messages or content, but on the promotion o f such messages and meanings, which deprive the consumer from the ability to know what is happening in the banking sector and infrastructural spheres of public life. Values o f the consumer society, still being imposed to a mass society, today, do not meet the spirit o f time. Thus, the world is still in between the past and the future, because authoritarianism and totalitarianism remain unresolved phenomena and these phenomena are aggressive and disguise themselves actively, using media resources. It is evident that the ruling elite o f the Russian society has set out to restore the former empire.


2000 ◽  
pp. 60-67
Author(s):  
M. M. Nikitenko

The inclusion of Eastern Slavs in the sphere of religious and cultural influences of Byzantium was a tremendous event both in national and in world history. Since then, the main center of the culture of Kievan Rus, incorporating a complex of ideas and functions of the spiritual, public and private life of ancient Russian society, became the Eastern Christian temple in its local version


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