Ideas and Ideals

The article examines the development of the Russian economy in its modern capitalist period. The authors emphasize that when analyzing the dynamics of GDP, there are five stages that have significant differences: growth rates, models that stimulate growth, sources of financing for economic growth, and other reasons, the totality of which determines the ‘face’ of each of the selected stages. The authors substantiate the necessity and possibility of using the potential of the financial market to stimulate economic growth. At the same time, considerable attention is paid to the justification of the impact of indicators that characterize the financial market within the framework of the institutional (financial institutions) and instrumental (financial instrument markets) approaches. The authors highlight five stages of Russia’s economic growth: economic (transformational) decline (1991-1998), rapid recovery economic growth (1999-2007), decaying recovery economic growth (2008-2012), stagnant economic growth (2013-2019). The article shows the importance of the financial market for the implementation of the main tasks at each stage from the standpoint of expert assessment of indicators of the development level of the financial market: depth (the importance of institutions and financial market instruments relative to macroeconomic indicators), availability of services provided by institutions and financial instrument markets, stability (the ability of financial institutions to continue providing services in the event of force majeure and financial market volatility), efficiency (the attractiveness of the market for business).

The authors of the article believe that in 2020, a new fifth stage of Russia’s economic growth began, the potential of which can be revealed through the use of financial boost tools. At present, Russia is in a unique situation of a combination of a crisis based on both a demand model and a supply model. The authors propose specific measures to use the potential of these models. The combination of the measures used will reveal new opportunities for the development of the economy and society. These opportunities can be obtained by using the ideology of the strategy of accelerated financial development of the economy – financial boost.

In recent years, the digital revolution and, especially, the problems associated with the transformation of the economy have become more and more interesting. However, few studies are devoted to issues related to the development of new methods of risk assessment and their impact on social processes in the context of the formation and development of the digital economy. It is unknown how the consequences of the digital revolution will affect the processes taking place in society. The purpose of this work is to study possible risks that may arise in the process of transforming the economy into a digital one, and primarily social ones. To study the risks of the digital economy, we use hierarchical methods that are characterized by a sequential algorithm for dividing a given set of items into subordinate subsets. The results of the study indicate that the risks of the digital economy have specific features that distinguish them from traditional ones. The authors demonstrate the classification of digital economy risks and show the place of social risks in it. A dynamic model of social risks in the digital economy is proposed. It is established that social risks in the digital economy are growing more and more from year to year. Research has shown that there is an urgent need to address the issue of skills imbalance in the labor market. It is necessary to increase the number of competitive employees who have a huge amount of knowledge, skills, and competencies necessary for this time, and constantly update them. The implementation of all this is impossible without the involvement of the state, the education system, public figures and the population.

The article explores one of the major points of contradiction in the interests and roles of Siberian urban actors with regard to so-called ‘national-cultural’ organizations (natsional'no-kul'turnye organizatsii, NKO, also known as natsional'no-kul'turnye avtonomii, NKA), ‘national-cultural’ associations, centers, foundations, etc., all of which are ethnic organizations. Specifically, it looks into why and how these organizations have become the centre of intersecting ethnic and migration discourses, what is their role and place in the urban infrastructure being created and used by migrants coming to Siberian cities, and how the relations between the state and national-cultural organizations formed at the regional level. Carried out in the Siberian urban centres of Tomsk and Irkutsk, our 30-year research into these questions (including thorough research methods such as observation, engagement in public events and public and advisory council meetings, interview and survey, analysis of documents and other materials released by national-cultural organizations as well as by the mass media) has enabled us to determine what place national-cultural organizations occupy in the migrant infrastructure of the two cities and to establish what kind of relations there is between these organizations and migrants from countries of the same ethnic origin – paternalistic or the one that allows leaders and activists from these organizations build their own social capital. The study of 2018 and 2019 – in-depth interviews and surveys held in Tomsk and Irkutsk – resulted in a substantial correction of the research results we had obtained in a few years prior to it. It revealed that the role migrants play in the local national-cultural organizations is not that of full members, rather, they act as an object of patronage on the part of the local ethnic elite deeply integrated into the host society (or ethnic activist groups that position themselves as such). In fact, the (social, economic and legal) support of these organizations provided to migrants is insignificant, and only a small number of migrants participate in cultural events organized by the local NKOs. Thus, these NKOs can hardly be seen as an element of the migrant infrastructure or an asset facilitating adaptation of migrants in these cities. It also became clear that migrants’ ties with their ‘historical homeland’/home countries, which the local national-cultural organizations take advantage of in sustaining their activities as well as the status of their leaders, often result in the issue of ‘conflicting loyalties’, especially when home countries actively conduct diasporic politics toward this category of their citizens abroad.

The essay calls for a re-imagining and reshaping of colonial constructs.  It concisely encapsulates the history of the Grand Trunk Road (GT Road), from the 16th century when it was referred to as ‘Sadak-e-Azam’ to the late 19th century, when the road was completed under the administration of Lord William Bentinck and was renamed as ‘The Grand Trunk Road’ to contemporary times when it connects multiple cities with National Highways as part of the Golden Quadrilateral project and remains a ‘continuum’ that covers a distance of over 2,500 kilometres. While highlighting its importance in terms of its criticality as a geopolitical/strategic connect, the essay concludes on the note that there is much more to the GT Road than being a mere logistical, infrastructural tool. It serves as a political and cultural connect as well as embodies a way of life and these historic and organic connections require reinforcement.  The essay underlines the symbolic value of the GT Road, while it comprises the mainstay of commerce in the subcontinent but, at the same time is significant in terms of rearranging social and political hierarchies, in other words, it constitutes an intrinsic part of the broader narrative of the south Asian space.

The subject of this article is the concept of the Church in the context of the contemporary Russian religious situation and the understanding of the concept by the Russian philosophical ecclesiology. The current religious situation could be described as post-secular. The Church, which survived two waves of secularization in Russia, retained its social subjectivity. The description of the Church as a conglomerate of believers does not correspond with the self-understanding of the Church in Christian thought. The article reveals the ontological self-understanding of the Church in the works of S.L. Frank, A.S. Homjakov, Russian theologians. The mystical reality of the Church could be combined with the empirical expression of it as a social institution. V.S. Soloviev considered the Church as a part of his theocratic utopia. In it he reduced the Church to a simple political social force. And at present, communities of Christians are expected to be embedded in a certain social functional. Meanwhile, arch-presbyter Nicolas Afanasiev pointed to eschatological reality: to the Church as an eschatological subject, as to the City of God (according to St. Augustine) only dwelling in the city of the earth. It forms the social Church ontology on the basis of the Church and society interaction. The social subjectivity of the Church is implicitly present in the framework of social activity in interaction with secular society. The concept of social subjectivity helps to reveal in the social analysis the essence of the dualistic nature of the Church. As an eschatological subject, it is the Body of Christ and at the head of it is the Christ. Therefore, the Church is a divine-human unity. But in the temporal order of things, in the secular aspect, the Church appears as an organization that performs certain social functions, or as one of the parts of the social institution of religion. The article points out the risk of institutionalization for the Church in which it may lose the social dimension of its subjectivity, which does not correspond to the mystical self-consciousness. The risk is that the Church will fulfill the requests of society but will not be able to reveal its main function of being the “the pillar and ground of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:15). The article summarizes that in modern Russian society the Church must have its own social subjectivity in order to pass this point of choice and create a working model of interaction with society, including secular society. The subjectivity of the Church is one of the conditions for its sustainable existence in modern Russia.

In the context of the modern ideological affirmation of the church in the Russian society, the supernatural origin of a religious subject is highlighted, from which all the diversity of the world is derived. Such a metaphysical approach to interpreting a religious subject seems to the author methodologically incorrect and impoverishes the research field. In the framework of the comparative approach, the article discusses the value orientations of the technological (scientific) and religious subjects. The author demonstrates the worldview proximity of these subjectivities and considers new ways of conceptualizing a religious subject. The author’s contribution to the study of the typology of religious and technological subjects is the search for new methodological approaches that could become a means of rethinking the established practices of historical writings of a religious subject, both at the level of new subject areas and at the level of the axiomatics of cultural and historical research. For the author, religion is close to science, especially in the early stages of its development. Religion, like science, does not intend to put up with the proposed historical and social conditions of the established world order, but wants to form them on its own terms. Both a religious subject and a scientist, developing a new revolutionary direction, want one thing – to actively change the world, to rule in it according their own rules. The triumph of religious and technological actors is considered in the study as “the invasion of new actors”, as a result of the painstaking work to create their own networks. This allows us to unite the inventors of the modern era and, for example, the first Christians. It allows you to connect the worlds of a scientific laboratory and a religious community that actively recruit their supporters. Such an understanding of the religious subject can become a means of rethinking the established idealistic practices of its representation, as well as the ideas of the ‘immanent development of religion’. The present paper attempts to expand the interpretation of the religious subject, to question its metaphysical totality and universality, and to create a new research field for the future research.

The article considers creationism as a historically relevant principle in the scientific and philosophic aspects denoting the ontological structure of the world. Outside of the religious interpretation, the author speaks of the dialectics of creation, which is revealed as an implicative connection of the one and nothing. Logical inversion (logical turn), acting from within this implicative connection, is postulated as the principle of a fundamental negation, which, according to the author, forms the true and dramatic essence of the world as a creation.

The author distances himself from the widespread discussion between evolutionism and scientific creationism, stating that it does not correspond to the very subject of creationism, understood as the implication of a real from nothing. The author focuses on considering ‘nothing’ as a purely dialectical / metaphysical principle and relies partly on the Hegel’s dialectic of ‘being’ and ‘nothing’, and partly on the neoplatonic concept of the one. Rejecting the medieval interpretation of the temporal beginning and the Hegel’s identity, he deduces a scheme of the logical connection between the one and the difference, which postulates the inversion (turnover) forming the creation - the one and the difference disjunctively change places, the one becomes the real, and the difference out of the one becomes nothing. It is argued that this postulate, in particular, refutes the thesis about the ‘fall into sin’.

In the second part of the article, a spatial-phenomenological hypothesis is presented: the author provides a description of the space as a geometrical-semantic plane (projective structure). This hypothesis follows from the phenomenological problem of the duality of a geometric object, which results in the problem of ontological transition between a point and a line (in the aporia of the Eleats) and the related problem of spatial congruence / parallelism. According to the author, the potential for solving these not essentially mathematical, but metaphysical questions is the projective geometry, in which parallel lines intersect at ‘point at infinity’, and space is complemented by the ‘plane at infinity’. The essence of the solution consists, firstly, in the assumption of the single plane, which underlies the transition, and secondly, in the description of the perceived world as a result of a specific turn over and closure of this plane, forming the projective structure. The key in this part is the demonstration of the surface of a three-dimensional object as a phenomenon of perceptual-semantic unfolding, which can be imagined as an action of consciousness, consistently reducing the usual scheme. An important aspect of considering the projective structure is the correlation with ‘the Plane’ by G. Deleuze.

The general idea of the article is that the dialectical scheme of creation and the projective structure of the space coincide: the logical inversion (logical turn), acting in connection of the one and nothing, and projective structural turnover – are the same things.

The article analyzes the ideas of the great reformers of the 16th century Martin Luther and John Calvin about marriage as the most important social institution. Luther's doctrine of the "earthly institution" of marriage and Calvin's doctrine of the marriage covenant had been shaped under the influence of their criticism of the Roman Catholic Church's position on marriage. Catholics considered marriage to be inferior to celibacy. The Church forbade marriage for monks and priests, and also prevented many lay people from getting married on the basis of prohibitions regarding religion, consanguinity, and guardianship. Since the Church considered marriage to be one of the seven sacraments that imparted grace to spouses and symbolized the mystical union of God and the Church, the marriage union was considered indissoluble. If the spouses were unhappy in their marriage, then they could get permission only for a separate living, but not for divorce. The reformers shifted the emphasis from the sacramentality of marriage to its social significance. They emphasized that marriage is the first institution in terms of importance in comparison with the Church and the state. The institution of matrimony is able to provide an example of relationships based on love, trust and mutual assistance, and the family is not only a means of population reproduction, it educates future citizens and members of the Church. The views of Martin Luther and John Calvin have had a decisive influence on Western European views on marriage, family and parenting.

The article analyzes the ideas of the great reformers of the 16th century Martin Luther and John Calvin about marriage as the most important social institution. Luther's doctrine of the "earthly institution" of marriage and Calvin's doctrine of the marriage covenant had been shaped under the influence of their criticism of the Roman Catholic Church's position on marriage. Catholics considered marriage to be inferior to celibacy. The Church forbade marriage for monks and priests, and also prevented many lay people from getting married on the basis of prohibitions regarding religion, consanguinity, and guardianship. Since the Church considered marriage to be one of the seven sacraments that imparted grace to spouses and symbolized the mystical union of God and the Church, the marriage union was considered indissoluble. If the spouses were unhappy in their marriage, then they could get permission only for a separate living, but not for divorce. The reformers shifted the emphasis from the sacramentality of marriage to its social significance. They emphasized that marriage is the first institution in terms of importance in comparison with the Church and the state. The institution of matrimony is able to provide an example of relationships based on love, trust and mutual assistance, and the family is not only a means of population reproduction, it educates future citizens and members of the Church. The views of Martin Luther and John Calvin have had a decisive influence on Western European views on marriage, family and parenting.

In connection with the growing manifestations of the systemic crisis of civilization – ideological, ecological and socio-economic, there is an urgent need for a holistic spiritual and psychophysical picture of the world, called ‘the plot-game’ by the author. The author investigates the concept of ‘causality’ within the frame of this paradigm, and then shows the expediency of generalizing it to the concept of ‘plot coherence’, which opens up new possibilities for applying the plot-game methodology. The methodology and methodology of the research are based on the categorical apparatus of the story-game paradigm, the main feature of which, the novelty, is the proposal to add a third parameter to the space-time model of the world – the individual, who at each moment perceives the first two aspects – space and time – in his own way as a certain plot. Thus, the art-historical concepts of plot, scenario and game are generalized to the level of ideological universals and at the same time natural-scientific terms – ‘cross-cutting’ units of Being.

It is shown that we see each object under study as a participant in the flow of story cycles, and its essence is the roles that it ‘played’, can play and will play in them, and which are reflected in its genetic and acquired scenarios. The plot stream of events is formed as the resultant of the attempts of all its participants to implement their own behavior scenarios, generated mainly automatically with the help of programs for processing all incoming information, which are formed from the moment of birth in each individual. On the basis of the story-game paradigm, the concept of causality is expanded to plot coherence, and it can be applied both in natural science and in the humanities. In the proposed model of communal reality, the rigid opposition of science and art is removed, since both there and here, as in ordinary life, we not only learn, discover, and observe something ‘from the outside’, but continuously reproduce, create the world and ourselves in it, regardless of our awareness of this fact; and the story-game picture of the Universe and its corresponding approach make it possible to realize the dependence of the ‘world plot’ on our ‘scenarios’ and games, to feel the responsibility for the future in each of our steps.

The article considers the problem of correlation of aesthetic form and social content in contemporary poetry through the prism of contemporary poetry criticism, in particular, the New Lyric Studies of 2008 (M. Perloff, Y. Prins, R. Terada, V. Jackson, etc.). A representation of the lyrics as a genre of poetry, in which historically structured subjectivism and identity of author are interrelated with poetic writing, is at the center of the New Lyric Studies. In this context the lyrics is relative and volatile but also is the closest genre to the poetic nature, that allows to merge an autonomous entity of poetry with ‘agendas’ in the poem, which were difficult to connect in either too formal or too contextual critical approaches to the poetry in the 20th century. This became possible in the conditions of New Lyric critics speaking up against a substitution of poetry and literary criticism for historical, anthropological and cultural criticism because of the high popularity of cultural studies in the 1990s and the ensuing incorporation of interdisciplinarity in literary studies. Despite the objective of New Lyric critics to revitalize a theoretical study of poetry in the spirit of academic criticism of the New Criticism, the modifications in the methods for producing, existence and broadcasting of poetry and therefore in poetry of the last 50 years, poetry itself prevented the New Lyric from becoming the regressive movement. Some representatives of the New Lyric Studies subsequently expressed the need to study poetry in terms of new historical poetics and to create different methods capable to analyze the relations between culture and poetic form – between the social and the aesthetic.

Having considered advantages and limitations of the New Lyric studies in the context of contemporary poetry discourse, reflecting not only the nature of contemporary criticism, but also perhaps the history of poetry criticism of 20-21th centuries, which is the dynamical coexistence and the mutual succession of different movements, the author draws a conclusion that this movement defines the right vector for the reconciliation of the long-standing struggle of formalism and contextualism in the poetry criticism as well as social and aesthetic components which poetic work includes.

The article considers the erotic genre of traditional Chinese art, chun gong hua (‘spring palace paintings’), which was developed in painting. The study uses comparative - historical, cultural and historical methods, as well as methods of systematization, analysis and synthesis. The author traces the formation and evolution of the genre, reveals its specific features. The paper analyzes the system of artistic images of the works of chun gong hua, reveals that they are based on the ideas of Taoism, which are visualized through painting, which made it possible to reveal a second, meaningful plan of paintings filled with metaphors and allegories. Particular attention is paid to the characterization of expressive means, specific techniques and visual techniques of the genre.

The study shows that due to the richness of images, artistic and expressive means and techniques, juxtaposition of the conditional and the real, double transformation of nature, the first impression of seemingly pornographic images of naked bodies and erotic scenes is subdued. The high artistry of the ‘spring palace paintings’ allows us to attribute them to the unique works of Chinese traditional art.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the functioning of metamodernism in the field of Russian contemporary art. Researchers of metamodernism talk about the revival of historicity, depth and affect that were lost with the era of postmodernism. Metamodernism is characterized by oscillation, metaxis, new sincerity, neo-romantic sensuality, reconstruction, etc. In this paper, the author attempts to analyze markers of metamodernism in the visual arts using the example of the artist Vitaly Pushnitsky (St. Petersburg). The material for the study was a research interview with the artist V. Pushnitsky, as well as a semiotic and formal-stylistic analysis of his works (2015-2020). The author comes to the conclusion that through such markers of metamodernism as oscillation, reconstruction and appeal to new sincerity, the artist V. Pushnitsky seeks to show the reality in which the artist is at the stage of searching for new artistic means of expression. Along with this, through certain compositional and color features, V. Pushnitsky pays tribute to such artists as Pierre-August Renoir, Claude Monet, Leonardo da Vinci, Francis Bacon, as well as the Japanese poet I. Kosugi.

In the article the author considers the problem of using art as the political power instrument. The subject of the study is the analysis of applied arts possibilities as a means of political propaganda and agitation, the necessary qualities and political views formation in a person. The material for the analysis is the Soviet propaganda porcelain of the 1920s. The choice of this material is caused, firstly, by its great visibility in the framework of the discussed problem, and, secondly, by the negative result of its use in real politics (at first sight, paradoxical). At present, Soviet propaganda porcelain is considered to be a “unique phenomenon” of Russian and world art. However, the main reason for its appearance at the beginning of the 20th century was not the search for new art forms. After coming to power in 1917, the Bolshevists faced the need to form political views of the citizens that were compatible with the party course — in general, to form a “new man” capable of living in a new society. On the one hand, porcelain was a random choice at that period of time (1920-s) but, on the other hand, people assigned specific characteristics to it as a type of applied art. And, therefore, they ascribed to it the possibilities of an instrument of political power. But at the same time using it in that capacity is greatly limited due to other specific properties, as well as due to other historical circumstances. The main reason for the failure of Soviet propaganda porcelain as the political propaganda and agitation means is the contradiction between the course of political power and the essence of porcelain as a phenomenon, i.e. inconsistency between the goal and the means to achieve it. In general, the author draws a conclusion that there is a difference between the goals of art and power and, as a consequence, the groundlessness of the power attempts to consider art exclusively as its own tool.

The paper deals with the problem of the phenomenon of women’s protest during the process of “total collectivization” of the agricultural sector. The author investigates the phenomenon as social action within the framework of the structural-functional approach (M. Weber, R. Merton), which allows to eliminate ideological cliches and analyze women’s protest not as an affective social action (“Bab’i bunt” - women’s revolt), but as a complex social action in which the role of goal setting can be dominant. This approach makes it possible to establish the main characteristics of women's protest, its effect, and impact on the culture of peasant protest. It provides an opportunity to consider the processes of interaction between “authority – society” in the extraordinary conditions of “the Great socialist transformation”. Main sources are archival documents of the OGPU authorized representative in the Siberian region (krai); minor sources include archival documents of local party committees and Soviet organisations and also regional press. The author analyzes protest actions recorded by the OGPU officers with the participation of women in the first half of the 1930s, identifying the main characteristics of women’s protest, its forms, causes and motives, as well as the impact on peasant society and state policy. The author also reveals that this social action in the absence of a legal opportunity to influence the agrarian/peasant policy of the party was quite an adequate means to achieve certain goals of the protesters. “Bab’i bunt” was a marker of the extreme social life of early Soviet society during the “Great Break”, which demonstrated the radicalization of relations between the peasant society and authorities during a violent etatization of the village. The conclusion is that the women’s protest, as part of the general peasant protest at the first stage of “complete collectivization”, forced the authorities to adjust their policies and even seek some compromises.