Ideas and Ideals

  A quiet town of Ascona, located on the shores of Lake Maggiore, became a place of concentration of public life in Switzerland in the late XIX-early XX centuries. The colony of vegetarians "Monte Verità" (“Hill of Truth”) studied and tested new philosophies, developing new special systems of dieting and physical exercises. Zurich artistic community concentrated in that very colony "Monte Verità" in Ascona at the end of the First World War. It was there in 1924, where an artistic association "Big Bear" was formed, which included seven artists: W. Helbig, O. Niemeyer, E. Frick, A. Kohler, G. McCoy, O. Rice and R. Zivald. The ideological leader of the group was Marianne Verevkina. She actively participated in exhibitions of “Big Bear” artists in Zurich, Lugano, Berlin. In Ascona M. Verevkina was the first director of the Museum of Modern Art. It was she who persuaded many artists to donate their paintings to the museum. Marianne Verevkina had a leading role in the cultural life of Ascona right up to 1938.

The article "Russian Universities and the Russian Intelligentsia" was written at the request of Inna Kizhner to work with students. According to Inna, it was in 1996, when she was working with a group of economists. She might be wrong. I remember that year very well: A.I. Fet was in America for a long time and returned to Russia only in December. Apparently, he started writing this article not earlier than in 1997. He wrote about half of the text at once up to the chapter "Russian Universities before the Revolution and the Emergence of the Russian Intelligentsia," and then he gave it up for a few years. At some moment, Inna reminded him of her request. A.I. Fet half-heartedly returned to the writing of his manuscript, having marked in it that it is necessary to insert a certain section from "Instinct." At that time, he was absorbed in the work on the book, but, yielding to Inna’s insistence he wrote the last half, ending it with the words "Russian universities, Russian science and science education will have to be rebuilt. We need to overcome this tragedy quietly. You cannot be angry with these swindlers: they do not know what they do". As such, the article was ready in 2001; then A. I. Fet added the chapter "The Russian Intelligentsia" from "Instinct", prefacing it with a small foreword.

The article analyzes G.D. Gachev’s reflection of philosophical thought genesis in its ethnic and cultural conditionality. The authors believe research experience of G.D. Gachev to be the implementation of methodological directions by Moscow logic study group to update the genesis of knowledge not on the basis of formal logic but content genetic logic. G.D. Gachev considers that the form and content of philosophical thought emerge in the bosom of national culture and preserve its characteristics.

In the article the author considers the tendencies of transformation of human life in the conditions of permanent sociocultural complexity. The social structure becomes more and more complicated, saturated with knowledge and information and a human being at the same time falls apart into functional subsystems – modules. Getting adjusted to the new conditions of sociocultural complexity a person risks to lose his/her ontological status. In the article, using the idea of modularity, the author describes the image of sociocultural complexity and the place of a person in the emerging conditions. The author comes to the conclusion, that a modern person, adapting to sociocultural complexity, turns into a «framework» construction comprised of «modules», deprived of any independent ontological status.

The article explores the role of Russia in the post-Soviet space, the purpose and the results of cooperation with the newly independent countries in 25 years after the liquidation of the Soviet Union. The main task is to analyze the Russian policy towards the countries that emerged from the former Soviet Union, measures aimed at the development of mutually advantageous cooperation, and their outcomes. It is important to develop the further strategy of Russia taking into account all the pitfalls in the interaction of Russia with all the newly independent countries taken together, to understand the reasons why there have been arising some periodical economic, political and cultural contradictions, and sometimes even conflicts. Today, it has become vital in the period of the new world order formation, in the conditions of worsening relations with Ukraine. The article substantiates the reasons for the lack of efficiency of interaction between Russia and CIS countries in the 1990s in the economic and military-political spheres. The author also highlights the historical significance of the efforts to preserve the declared unity of post-Soviet space in the organizational documents. The article shows the changes that have been made in Russia's policy towards the CIS countries since 2000s, the intense integration of regional parts of the countries to jointly emerge from the crisis, the creation of the collective security system of a group of countries of the former Soviet Union, awareness of the need to move towards multi-level cooperation with these countries as they are ready to join in the interests of mutually beneficial cooperation.

This paper deals with the post-war period (late 1940s – mid 1950s) in the development of Soviet digital electronic computational tools and formation of the USSR science and technology policy in this field. The authors studied how well the Soviet scientists and managers were aware of the new aspects of this policy, detected its primary application area – the Soviet Atomic project and considered the conditions of its formation. Evidently, information about the new computational tools came to the Soviet Union from abroad. One of the sources of such information was academic and science and technical journals. Possibly, intelligence agencies played a certain role in obtaining this information. It was then that some contradictions between approaches to computer hardware appeared. On the one hand, leaders of the Atomic project realized its benefits and planned to produce and apply it, though in a limited scope. On the other hand, advocates of the development of computer hardware affiliated with the USSR Academy of Sciences and Ministry for Machine Building and Instrument Making were in favor of a more comprehensive approach, which implied the creation of new types of computers, increasing their capacity and extending prospective applications beyond the military-industrial complex. Participation of the two establishments in the development of computer hardware was highly competitive, with each body pursuing its own goals and lacking resources. The fact that the developments by S.A. Lebedev got ultimately higher priority testifies to the deep insight of the USSR Academy of Sciences into scientific and engineering problems. Ideological pressure, characteristic of the late period of Stalin’s rule with respect to some areas of science, did not have any serious implications for the development of computer hardware. The general situation with electronic computational tools confirms the fact that Soviet engineering in the period of late Stalinism was of the catch-up nature.

The author analyses the student movement in 1960s in the Novosibirsk State University (NGU), the longest open legal student movement of the Soviet period. The previous publications on this subject do not present the movement in its entirety, and they also do not reflect the nature of the phenomenon properly. The civil movement in Akademgorodok (Academic Town) and, in particular, at the NGU was a by-product of the famous Siberian experiment. Nowadays, this by-product is quite topical in search for the best strategy of social change. The article reconstructs and analyses the preconditions and factors of the student movement, as well as the spectrum and directions of its political activities: self-organization and self-management, club activities, participation in the Rector’s elections, protection of student political and academic freedoms, preservation of the autonomy of the university, etc. The conclusions about the nature of the movement are made based on numerous memoirs and available documents.

The article discusses the attitudes of different nations and national cultures to the memory of the Fallen on the battlefield. The author emphasizes the historical, cultural and religious peculiarities of the formation of traditions and customs of honoring and preserving the memory of them. It is concluded that the attitude to the memory of the Fallen demonstrates the level of development of national culture.

The article is devoted to the moral and ethical search and God-seeking of a prominent socialist-revolutionary Boris Savinkov. He earned a reputation not only as one of the leaders of the PSR “Fighting organization”, who participated in the organization of the most resonant attacks – on Interior Minister V.K. Pleve and Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, but also as a writer whose works "The Pale Horse" and "That Which Was Not (Three Brothers)" had a great public resonance. The contradictory nature of his personality, attitudes and actions, clearly manifested in the fact that he simultaneously combined leadership of “Fighting organization” and public reflection on moral inadmissibility of the murder, and in the fact that his anti-Bolshevik activities he combined with writing "The Black Horse", still attracts the attention of researchers and journalists. The circumstances of his death also attract the attention. The author explores them using the documents of "Savinkov case," initially stored in the secret archives of the Politburo of the CPSU (b), which allow us to speak with confidence about his suicide.

Modern science transformed our notion of the universe which appears now as an integrated, continuously developing system which is characterized by the interaction of the chance and the law. Philosophical comprehension of the new picture of the world demands essential changes in the worldview of people. Many western Christian theologians suppose that Christianity in this connection also must and may improve its doctrine of the Creator and creation. The author considers the conception elaborated by one of the most prominent specialists on the problem «science and the modern Christianity», an English scientist and an Anglican theologian A. Peacocke, which is directed at solving that problem. He motivates the legitimation of a new vision of God where the Creator appears as dynamic, limited in His power and knowledge, suffering, loving, personally connected with His creation, exploring it and developing with it. Peacocke’s conception enriches not only Christian theology but also our notion of it.