This article deals with present-day threats from abroad to Russia’s security and offers proposals to reduce the danger they represent. The threats to Russian national security are, in the authors’ view, NATO expansion; the presence of large contingents of forces at Russian borders; claims to Russian territory and confl icts near its borders; aggravation of inter-ethnic and inter-nationality relations; violation of the integrity of the defense and an indeterminacy of the border of the Russian Federation, especially in the south and west; the spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction; and the West’s desire to establish its military and political dominance over the world as a whole and in particular regions. According to the authors, the threat to Russia’s national security forms the underlying ideology of the Western world, which is to form an archetype of the human of the future — an unthinking being, overwhelmed by unnatural instincts and dissimilar to his recent ancestors. The spiritual side of life is degraded in the Western world, notwithstanding continued attempts to impose the Western way of life on the rest of humanity.

This work is devoted to the consideration of issues related to the formation of a system of new scientific knowledge — sports policy, in particular, with its categorical and conceptual apparatus. Currently, there are no theoretically based scientific works devoted to the consideration of the categorical and conceptual apparatus of policy in the field of sports. A significant place in this study is devoted to the relationship between politics and sports, the challenges they currently face. Science need to form its own system of concepts and categories of sports policy.
The article points out significant differences between policy in the field of physical culture and sports as part of social policy and sports policy as an institutional system. The process of formation and development of sports policy as an independent field of scientific knowledge requires theoretical understanding in accordance with new scientific research and practical achievements, which will significantly eliminate the ambiguity in the interpretation of basic concepts and definitions. The study emphasizes that sports policy is a complex of scientific knowledge based on the achievements of other sciences. The article reveals the essence of the dualistic system of the concept of “sports policy”, examines the constituent elements of the categorical-conceptual apparatus of sports policy, including the categories of political and sports sciences, as well as its own.