Moscow University Bulletin. Series 12. Political Science. 2021. 6.

This work aims to analyze the results of an international expert study devoted to identifying global trajectories of political transformations in the contemporary world, characterized by high instability and uncertainty. The main scientifi c task was to determine the key contours of the emerging new world order and the critical threats, challenges and risks associated with this process facing humanity today. The study examines the key factors contributing to the current political destabilization at the global level, as well as the dominant trends of contemporary global development. The special place in the study is given to the Russian prospects in the system of the new world order. An essential part of the study is devoted to scrutinizing the formation of new socio-political ideologies and the corresponding value components. An equally important section of the study is the analysis of the contemporary model of globalization and the construction of scenarios for its transformation, including the emergence of new global development actors. The use of methods for combining expert assessments and scenario techniques made it possible to make scientifi cally signifi cant conclusions on the problems of the study.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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?