Vol 88, No 5 (2018)

The growing role of the military factor in world politics calls for considering and philosophizing about an ever-broader spectrum of warfare forms and methods. In recent years, various interpretations of the “hybrid war” formula in this spectrum have been distinguished in our country and elsewhere, assuming the use of not only advanced technologies but also means and methods of armed struggle that go back centuries. A major role in conducting this warfare is given to special operations forces; they are actively being developed by many countries, including the Russian Federation. Hybrid wars are characterized by active information confrontation and struggle in cyberspace, and the actors can be both governmental and nongovernmental forces, including private military companies, within the system of world politics. This phenomenon must be considered when developing modern war theory.

The authors justify the use of precision agriculture as a key vector in the development of the “smart agriculture” segment of the FoodNet platform of the national technological initiative. A prospectless extensive agriculture, based on exploitation of natural soil fertility, prevails in Russia; therefore, perennial field research has highlighted the economic and ecological advisability of using the information technologies of precision agriculture. Against the background of a significant increase in crop yields, the payback on fertilizers and plant-protecting agents increased 1.5–1.7 times; the agrochemical load on the environment decreased by 35–60%; and the quality of crop production improved noticeably. The transition to new crop production technologies is justified. Attention is paid to the need to create a domestic physicotechnical and software–hardware basis for precision agriculture, its absence being a major hindrance to the development of “smart agriculture” in Russia.

On March 13, 2018, a meeting of the RAS Presidium discussed the introduction of robotics into domestic medicine. It heard several coreports, the presenters of which—O.O. Yanushevich, E.V. Shlyakhto, D.Yu. Pushkar’, V.V. Krylov, I.V. Reshetov, A.V. Golanov, S.A. Sheptunov, Yu.V. Poduraev, S.A. Kraevoi, A.V. Alekhin, A.V. Koroteev, G.V. Savrasov, and V.P. Chekhonin—showed an exhaustive picture of the application and development of medical robotized systems in Russia and determined the prospects of further studies in this field. After having pointed to the advantages and drawbacks of the currently widely used da Vinci surgical systems, the presenters emphasized that copying foreign prototypes had no prospects. The general idea can be reduced to the urgent need for developing and designing original advanced digital robotic systems.

This article is dedicated to the struggle between major socioeconomic universities (SEUs) of Russia for leading positions in the higher education market. It is shown that only in Russia are SEUs, along with classical universities and technological institutes, the strongest players in the market of higher education establishments. The ranking data of the country’s higher schools of economics for 2013‒2016 are given, which demonstrate the escalating competition between the most successful SEUs of Russia, manifested in regular “castling” between the higher education institutions in the top list ranking. The authors emphasize the importance of factors of competitive growth, such as the publication of leading economics journals, the creation of a network of scientific divisions in the structure of universities, the formation of an all-Russia information agenda on their territories, and the development of regional analytics centers.

On the eve of the 200th anniversary of I.S. Turgenev’s birth, this article assesses the activities of the Group for Publishing the Second Academic Complete Collection of Works and Letters in 30 volumes, sets forth the justification of the project undertaken, as well as the reasons for the delay in publishing subsequent volumes, and characterizes briefly the four issues of the serial collection “I.S. Turgenev: New Studies and Materials,” prepared at the RAS Institute of Russian Literature, which includes newly found texts of the writer. In addition, the overview of the projects undertaken contains two prepared volumes “Chronicles of the Life and Work” of Turgenev, covering the period 1859–1866. In prospect, a fundamental encyclopedia of Turgenev’s life and work is being prepared, its materials being partially published in serial collections.

This article discusses basic paradigms and definitions of agrogeography (agrolandscape research), a science that studies the processes of the emergence, development, and functioning of agrosystems—geocomplexes transformed by anthropogenic agricultural activities. The main distinctions of this science from other geosystem and agronomic disciplines are outlined. In analyzing the published data and in-house study results, the geosystem, phytocentric, and hierarchical principles of the functioning of agrogeosystems have been established. Much attention is paid to theoretical issues of the substantiation of the geosystem character of natural agricultural formations. The main thesis of agrogeography has been established, stating that the essence of agrolandscape processes can be disclosed only through studying adaptive reactions of cultural and wild plants to the landscape conditions of a territory. The significance of agrogeography for the development of modern agricultural environmentally adapted production has been determined. Agrolandscape research as a complex agricultural science can also solve general problems of environmental engineering.

The results of an empirical pilot project focused on the association between classical bibliometrics—publication, citation index, and journal cited half-life—and an altmetric—the assessment of an article’s impact—are discussed. The analysis included an array of 37 200 domestic articles indexed in SCI-E in 2015. Two altmetrics are used: usage counts for the last 180 days, U1, and usage counts since February 1, 2013, U2. A significant Kendall rank correlation has been identified between citation indices and article-level metrics. A stronger correlation has been observed for long usage counts, U2. The relationship between usage metrics and traditional journal-level metrics (cited half-life) has been analyzed. A rather weak negative correlation between cited half-life and U1 (U2) has been revealed, which is described by an inverse logarithmic dependence. In the authors’ opinion, altmetrics should not be opposed to classical bibliometrics; they should be used as additional metrics to assess an article’s impact.

The perception of the Caucasus by Polish society is analyzed in the light of the Polish ethnopolitical myth, according to which Russia appears as an “historical enemy.” The myth’s influence is also traced in the concept of national security, formed by politicians. This myth has noticeably been manifested since Poland restored its independence after WWI but was not apparent for obvious reasons during the existence of the Polish People’s Republic, when the image of the “historical enemy” was formed in relation to Germany. The author concludes that the ethnopolitical myth predetermines Poles’ attitudes to movements for independence of ethnic groups that have no statehood at present. This attitude is of a positive hue primarily toward those movements that are aimed against Russia and that can allegedly hinder the political leverage of Poland’s “historical enemy.”

Achievements, trends, and problems in the development of social sciences after 1991 are considered, with a focus on the humanities—history, philology, and other areas. The author determines the distinctive features of this sphere of basic science and emphasizes the growing priority of domestic topics without compromising study of global subject matter and the structure of scientific institutions. A list of innovative interdisciplinary topics for future plans and projects is proposed. Special attention is paid to the RFH‒RFBR grant policy, which has made it possible to overcome crisis phenomena that emerged after 1991 and to correct the scientific agenda in favor of interdisciplinary, practice-oriented studies and institutionally, in favor of university science. The author fixes crisis and negative phenomena in modern social science and the humanities, especially those related to their institutional support, norms of scientific ethics, and responsibility. Measures to improve the situation are proposed, including with regard to the unjustified decrease in the share of grant support for scientists within the Russian Academy of Sciences, the center of basic humanities research in Russia.

Complex studies of the phenomena and processes in littoral zones that affect the conditions of life and maritime activities are a topical trend in modern oceanology. Coastal areas of Russia are diverse in terms of environmental conditions and heterogeneous in terms of development, which requires developing regional research projects on a single theoretical and methodological foundation. This article analyzes the current state of knowledge about geological, geomorphological, hydrometeorological, and biological hazardous phenomena in Russian seas and provides recommendations on how to study them considering the climatic trends of the early 21st century, which are particularly expressed in the Arctic and in the south of Russia. The need for a substantial modernization of the system of the monitoring and forecasting of hazardous phenomena and natural disasters is shown.