Ideas and Ideals

The problem of the reliable statistics on the USSR repression in 1918–1956 remains an urgent scientific challenge. It is particularly difficult to carry out calculations of the Civil War terror victims, as well as those who were killed in political, ethnic and peasant exile in the 1920–1950-ies. Inaccessible documents from Russian FSB, MIA, AP and a number of other important sources hamper a thorough study of the statistics. Nevertheless, the study of the material from the central and regional archives undertaken by the author enabled him to get valuable statistical information and convincingly challenge the accuracy of the figures usually given, especially for the period of the Civil War and the beginning of the 1930s. The documents from the FSB central archive provided the evidence of mass executions based on the extrajudicial procedure in 1933, the number of which turned out to be much higher than announced in the early 1990s. The statistical tricks used to drastically underestimate the mortality level in the Gulag camps were also refuted. Thus, the new data require clarification of the repressive statistics that will inevitably increase the number of victims of the state punitive actions.

The authors argue the need to develop a strategy for the country’s socio-economic break through, the formation of a new type of economic system - a knowledge-based economy. A qualitative characteristic of this type of economy in the form of a conceptual model is given in the article, and they also consider approaches to quantify the knowledge economy.

In this article the problem of reflecting historical dynamics of a society in modern humanitarian knowledge is discussed. The author shows, that in the modern humanitarian knowledge the tendencies to imitation the cognitive activities are widely presented that is reflected in the reduction of real conceptual and logical complexity of theoretical descriptions of social phenomena. This reduction is generated, among other things, by actual ignoring the principle of historicism in characterizing the studied objects. First of all, with such an approach the qualitative variability of social phenomena is ignored. To reveal the qualitative variability of social phenomena is possible on the basis of special reflection of their historical dynamics. The paper proposes a method to overcome such imitative trends in the consistent implementation of sociocultural cognition on the basis of the principle of historicism. According to this principle any phenomenon should be described theoretically in the whole process of its own internal development. Any social object at every moment of its existence is the result of its own genesis. That is why the consistent categorical description of dynamics of its development as a quality formation through internally irreducible to one another stages would really implement the cognitive principles, declared in the sociocultural approach. The proposed solution is constructed on the basis of socio-philosophical reflection of the historical cognition characteristics of a society as a dynamic system.

The article explains that the relevance of the topic is related to the need of developing youth entrepreneurship. Problems of development of entrepreneurship among young people are related to a number of reasons, including target settings, business motivation, support for authorities at all levels from the state to local governments, legal support, the attitude to entrepreneurship on the part of society, the attitude to the female and male entrepreneurship . Development of youth entrepreneurship can be analyzed from the perspective of endogenous and exogenous factors. Exogenous factors include government and legal support of business, the use of the financial system, the image of the entrepreneur in the mass consciousness. Endogenous factors include business-motivation and personal characteristics of young entrepreneurs. These factors have received empirical testing in the study of youth attitudes to business conducted on the total sample of Tomsk and Novosibirsk. Relevant for entrepreneurs is to obtain services from the state to realize their business project, as well as an information environment conducive to learning and sharing experiences in the field of entrepreneurship. The main problems of the youth of the Russian business are under-utilization of resources offered by the state, public attitudes towards entrepreneurs. Gender aspects are manifested in relation to the female and male entrepreneurship.