Vol 87, No 5 (2017)

The exploration of the Arctic is largely determined by the availability of materials that are necessary to create technical devices and facilities and can ensure comfort for people who stay and work in severe climatic conditions. Arctic materials should not only preserve their performance and physicochemical properties under low temperatures, high humidity, and excessive mechanical loads but also ensure a high reliability of equipment and facilities. The importance of materials for the exploration of the Arctic requires a generalizing analysis, understanding of the specifics of Arctic materials science, and determination of prospects for its development. To date, the scientific literature lacks such analysis and the authors of this article attempt to fill this gap.

The notion of the collective cognitive unconscious (CCU) is introduced. The hypothesis is formulated that data from the external world are processed proceeding from intuitively adopted assumptions, which substantiate for a subject of cognition the sense and justifiability of any statement or semantic construction. These intuitions are of mass character and are transmitted within a culture. The CCU is probably supported by neuronal mechanisms. It is potentially a universal faculty of man as a generic creature, although it is always realized in one of its possible variants. CCU explications in Western and Arabic–Muslim cultures are demonstrated as spatial visualization and a metaphor of flux. Three major functions of the CCU are considered: specifying the intuitive background for the substantiation of formal logic, the logic of language, and the logic of culture. Since the CCU is potentially universal for humans but is actually always accomplished as a variant and cannot be realized as an invariant, this determines the justifiability of the strategy of panhuman and not common-to-humankind understanding of culture and civilization. The question is posed about the necessity to return the category of panhuman into the field of theoretical discourse.

These are results of large-scaled research project done in many regions of Russia on the conditions and factors of implementing the nationalities policy in educational activities. It investigates civic and ethnocultural components in identity formation among students. The goal of this research is also to disclose status, concerns and aspirations of the population, primarily the youth, for studying ethnic (minoritarian) languages and for practicing ethnocultural contents in education. A gap has been discovered between state educational requirements on teaching minority languages and ethnocultural necessities. So far school students are primarily oriented to study subjects needed for state certifications, existing system does not reflect varieties of interests of multiethnic populations in Russia’s regions. Another discovered problem is a disparity between the objectives of civil identity formation and of keeping and studying ethnic backgrounds. By the results of this study, conclusions and recommendation are made to improve ethnocultural contents of education as part of state nationalities policy and as a condition to ensure interethnic peace and accord.

October 1917—a critical stage in Russian history—the centenary of which is celebrated this year, is analyzed. The author proves the inconsistency of concepts about this pivotal event as an armed mutiny, Bolshevik coup, spontaneous mass uprising, or a socialist revolution, offering a fundamentally different interpretation, free, as expected, from ideological mythology.

The key characteristics of the social situation in their interconnection with the population’s orientations to various forms of protest activity are considered. The empirical base of this paper is the data of the comparative representative studies conducted in Moscow in 2008–2016. Analysis of these data has made it possible to fix negative trends in the development of the social feeling of citizens in recent years. The authors characterize the dynamics of social tension and citizens’ attitude to various forms of defending their interests. The use of binary logistic regression makes it possible to build a hierarchy of the social situation’s factors that demonstrate the probability of active participation in protest. Such factors include negative phenomena of social life, a critical attitude to the existing political system, and adoption of orientations at participating in a conflict on the side of one’s ethnic group. Consideration of the above factors in the practice of social management can minimize the potential of social tension.

Novosibirsk National Research State University is one of Russia’s most intensively developing higher education institutions, demonstrating the highest growth rates of publishing activity. This is largely due to the university’s participation in the Program of Improving the Competitiveness of Leading Russian Higher Education Establishments (Project 5–100) and is explained by the close scientific interaction with organizations Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Using a wide range of bibliometric indicators, the authors have analyzed publications by associates of Novosibirsk State University (NSU) from 2000 through 2015 (about 80% of all NSU publications since the foundation of the university in 1960). Leading scientific trends have been identified, the intensity of collaboration with research establishments of the Novosibirsk Scientific Center and foreign organizations has been elucidated, and the journals with the highest number of publications by NSU associates have been analyzed. The most frequently cited scientific areas have been identified and compared with the global distribution of citations by discipline. The share of highly cited publications and their influence on the university’s average citation rate have been determined.

Mass foreign-culture immigration sharply increases the heterogeneity of the population of developed regions of the world, generating both serious risks and new possibilities for their development. To withstand challenges and use the advantages of diversity, host states look for more adequate models of managing plural societies. An alternative to the existing approaches to integrating immigrants and their descendants is interculturalism, which implies establishing positive intercultural interaction between people, which would be based on the commonalities of their needs and interests. This concept is embodied in intercultural practices of several cities; there have been positive results. However, such practices have not been adapted for use at a higher territorial level thus far.