Articles

The article is devoted to the analysis of the doctrinal foundations and political practice of Bolshevism towards social groups. The first part of articles deals with the engineering and technical intelligentsia. The content of disputes within the Bolshevik Party on this issue is revealed. In this context, the views of the party leader V. I. Lenin on the content of the tasks of the transition period as aimed at implementing, first of all, transformations in the material and technical base of society, under which, in the conditions of monopoly political power and the preservation of the “commanding heights” of the economy in the hands of the state, it was possible and necessary to “revive” capitalism, and entrepreneurship. It is emphasized that the creation of a diversified economy in the USSR opened up prospects for sustainable economic growth, ensuring greater social stability in the country. The second part of articles deals with the clergy, religion and the church as a whole. The political foundations of the anti-clericalism of the communist party are revealed. The scale of the persecution of the church, persecution of clergy and laity is determined. The reasons and forms of tactical changes in the policy of the authorities in relation to religion are analyzed. The role of the clergy in educating the patriotism of Soviet citizens, its role in the spiritual life of the country as a whole, is highlighted. The problems of relations between the church and the political elite in the period of “perestroika” are noted. More generally, the article sets out the task of significantly intensifying the efforts of the political science community in the field of historical politics.

The article presents a comparison of the results of a study of Russia’s perception by its citizens of different periods, implemented at the Sociology and Psychology of Politics Programme, Department of Political Science, Lomonosov Moscow State University. The research methodology included focused semi-standardized interviews and projective tests. Qualitative methods with elements of quantitative ones were used for data interpretation: i.e. methods of coding and scaling answers to open questions and statistical analysis. The sample included respondents from 11 regions in 2017–2018 and 7 regions in spring-summer of 2022. The main attention was paid to the key structural elements of the country image: territory, people, power, political leaders and the geopolitical role of the country, as well as their representations of the past, present and future of the country. The study made it possible to reveal the transformation and peculiarities of the perception of Russia under the influence of the context change. Thus, three main conclusions were made. First, the recent changes in the domestic and foreign political context have changed not only current moods, but also the deeper layers of people’s minds. Second, individual components of the image of one’s country have changed unevenly under the influence of political context. Third, transformation affected not only the content of Russia’s image but also optics of the county’s perception.

It is the 100th anniversary of the Kars Conference with the participation of Russia in accordance with the Moscow Agreement signed between Russia and Turkey on March 16, 1921 and Kars Treaty signed by Turkey, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia on October 13 of the same year. The main purpose of the article is to study the course of the Kars conference, the position of the parties and the Treaty of Kars. To achieve this goal, the following questions were answered on the basis of reliable sources and offi cial documents from the archives of Russia, Azerbaijan, Turkey and Georgia: How was Turkey’s territorial and border issues discussed with Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia at the conference? What was the position of the parties? What attempts had been made to disrupt Russian-Turkish relations? How were territorial and border issues regulated in the agreement? What was the signifi cance of signing the document? How was the ratifi cation process carried out?

The article is devoted to the description of a new segment of the memory studies problem fi eld — the study of historical analogies in political discourse. From the point of view of mnemonic research, historical analogy is an intermediate link between individual consciousness, collective ideas about the past and the pragmatics of discourse. It is considered not as a special case of “inference by analogy”, studied within the framework of formal logic, but as an element of the process of political communication, the meaning of which is determined primarily by the social context. The author examines the origins of the formation of interest in this issue in Western political science and its development in line with political linguistics, theory of international relations and political psychology. Cognitive, communicative, discursive and constructivist approaches to the study of historical analogies are distinguished. For the fi rst time, the distinction between an individual and a collective subject of historical analogy is fixed (in the fi rst case, we are talking about an analogy that is used by a decision-maker; in the second case, it is about an analogy functioning at the level of discourse, forming collectively shared images of the present or the future).

The article analyzes the socio-political aspects of the internal church mission in the second half of the 19th — early 20th centuries. The author claims that for almost three centuries before the 1917 revolution, the Russian Church was one of the main forces of modernization of the country, carried out according to the Western model. With the development of theological schools, the discourse of the Russian clergy changed; it began to perceive itself as a civilizing force. Meanwhile, the bulk of the country’s population has preserved the ideals-images of pre-Petrine Russia. Now they are largely transformed into the discourse of the Old Believers and new religious entities, including those within the church. The inner mission expressed the ideas of the white clergy, which turned into an independent socio-political force and related spiritual schools and the missionary press. Her activities came into confl ict with folk tradition.

This article attempts to study the evolution of state-confessional politics in modern Russia based on an analysis of the reform of federal legislation, starting from the moment the Russian Constitution was adopted in 1993. The study is based on the key normative legal acts in the fi eld of freedom of conscience, which played a fundamental role in the development of the state’s confessional policy. Having freed itself from atheistic ideology, post-Soviet Russia for several decades has been forming new relations with religious associations, consistently fi lling them with normative and legal content. Careful reading of legal acts made it possible to gradually track the transformation of state-confessional policy and to understand the nature of the current model of relations with religious associations, the leitmotif of which is the popularization of moral and ethical values, rapprochement with traditional confessions and ensuring religious security.

In this paper the structural components of the media discourse of Russian politics, which are associated with the construction of multiple virtual identities based on value scenarios represented in the online space are examined. The research emphasizes the importance of political video content on social networks for the formation of stable behavioral attitudes in the youth environment, which consumes information mainly from Internet sources. Video blogs are analyzed not only as an integral part of the civil mobilization process, but also as an eff ective channel of communication between political elites and representatives of civil communities. The authors actualize the construct of political identity in the context of categorizing the online space and attempt to theoretically frame political and sociological studies of virtual identity. It is proved that the process of working with identity in a virtual environment presupposes a competition of meanings and the absence of an obligatory link to the real identity of an individual or a community. The results of a qualitative content analysis of the political segment of the TikTok media platform in the discourse of instrumentalization of identity on the Web are presented. The key vectors and strategies of representation of political parties, as well as the main orientations of the authors of political content, are highlighted. Recommendations to improve the effi ciency of promoting political actors and their symbolic agenda in a virtual environment have been developed.

The article is devoted to the study of the phenomenon of post-truth, which has become relevant in the modern era. The modern era is interpreted by public thought as postmodernism. The rapid revolutionary changes that are taking place in the life of society, caused by globalization and the development of high technologies, objectively cannot exclude the “side eff ects” of these processes. One of these eff ects is post-truth as a representation of non-existent prototypes, events and facts. There is an idea that the world today is in the “gray” zone of its development, because there is a reassessment of the values of all spheres of social life and consciousness in a quasi-scientifi c way, for example, a mixture of styles, images, methods, etc. Liberal values associated with the rights and freedom of the individual have reached their apogee and have lost their moral and ethical foundation, while freedom mutates into its extreme form — “ freedom without borders”, permissiveness, anarchy. Consciousness is in a gap with reality, outside of clear ideological coordinates. The author considers that it is important today to build an information policy, taking into account the moral traditions of the culture of society, and to determine the limits of the sovereignty of the ideological perspective in which society will develop.