Vol 88, No 6 (2018)

The article analyzes the problems associated with the mismatch of speeds with which the processes of the formation of a totally digital society are taking place, and the creation of effective social (primarily legal) regulators for the new reality. The author believes that the unexpectedly, new emerging digital future should be viewed as a social revolution (break of continuity), which dictates the need to rapidly create mechanisms for the protection of a person, their basic rights and freedoms, including constitutional ones, in the digital world. This is a serious challenge for the social sciences and public administration practice not only in Russia, but throughout the world. The author raises the question of creating a digital law and developing a digital constitution, which should provide the necessary basis of consent and effective mechanisms for the establishment of a social order in cyberspace. The article outlines the main approaches to the creation of such a document.

Every language as a means of communication, as well as study, has its own “habitat” and scale of use, which change with time. Russian is no exception. This article, based on an analysis of censuses and the data of statistical compendiums of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and the Ukrainian Republic, discusses the fate of the Russian language in Ukraine, which has been very dramatic in the 20th and 21st centuries. The author traces the history down to the period of Kievan Rus’ and the existence of the Old Russian language, considers the period of the spread of Russian within the territory of Ukraine starting from the mid-17th century, and covers in detail the main trends in the use of the Russian language in Ukraine’s educational system in the prerevolutionary, Soviet, and post-Soviet periods. The alternation of periods when Russian dominated and periods when its use was limited is noted. In the last half a century, this fact was manifested in maximal strengthening of the positions of the Russian language by the mid-1980s and the growing difficulties in its functioning and its accelerating removal from the curricula of schools and vocational establishments of high and higher education of Ukraine in the 21st century.

This article is dedicated to social and psychological factors of aging, as well as to the psychological characteristics of old age. Note that old age is just starting to be understood as an age of significant reserves. The study of psychological mechanisms of aging is a new field, which requires close attention. The main conclusion reached by the author is that modern society needs a special ideology for old age, which would include economic, social, and psychological components.

Prospects for remote ground and satellite sensing to monitor agricultural (agrocenoses) and grass (meadows and steppes) vegetation are considered. This helps assess chlorophyll contents, crop yields, impurities of territories and identify agrocenoses. Investigation of vegetation on salinized soils identified the necessity to consider the succession of limiting factors (temperature and the degree of soil salinization). The results of studies on grassland plant communities in Khakassia based on geobotanical descriptions and ground spectral measurements are presented, allowing the refinement of methods that improve the accuracy of deciphering satellite images of medium and low resolutions.

In Russia, along with many other countries, the state and international institutions have established regions of outstanding universal value, which are World Heritage Sites. They are regulated based on the World Heritage Convention, e.g., Lake Baikal, the Volcanoes of Kamchatka, and the Golden Mountains of Altai. These special regions require long-term legal, institutional, and economic instruments to achieve their purpose. Among the most complex objectives is to improve the functioning of the instruments for the protection and conservation of unique natural complexes as a core life-sustaining condition of the country and the world. In December 1996 Lake Baikal was recognized as a World Heritage Site as approved at the session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee. Since then, the Russian Federation bears a legal, economic, and moral obligation in front of the world community to preserve the value of the lake. The existing Federal Law On Protecting Lake Baikal is the only Russian Federal law adopted with respect to a specific natural site.

The article discusses the impact of global climate change on the components of the natural environment of the permafrost zone (e.g.., the center of the continental cryolithozone of the Northern Hemisphere). These changes have significantly intensified the dynamics of the climate parameters of the region: the average annual air temperatures, precipitation, and the duration of seasons of the year, which correlates with the dynamics of the active soil layer, the upper layers of cryogenic soils, and the increase in the seasonal thawing depth of soil. In turn, influenced by these factors, the water content of large areas is changing and the relic of Pleistocene glaciations—the ice complex—is degrading. The transformation of the basis for the existence of terrestrial ecosystems—the soil cover and, on the whole, the landscape located on the ice complex—indicates irreversible changes in the entire natural environment of the continental cryolithozone. Climate warming affects the living components of nature, causing the expansion of many animal and plant species from south to north. Taking into account the fact that the cryolithozone occupies more than 60% of Russian territory and is a repository of natural resources, a new approach to planning and conducting scientific research, as well as economic activity, in the permafrost zone is particularly relevant.

The main conclusion made by the author after analyzing changes in various areas of life in modern Middle Eastern states is that transformations in the Middle East are associated with interfaith relations but are not solely caused by them and are not necessarily a result of their deterioration. At present these changes can still be reversed but they may become irreversible in some aspects as a result of current trends. Universalization is the main trend that affects social relations in the region. It manifests itself both in the life of religious communities and in sociopolitical and economic regional contexts. There are shifts in the perception of the social role of religion and how religious relations are refracted in the political sphere. There is a discussion of the close connection between the religious self-perception of community members, on the one hand, and the form and nature of their participation in political processes, on the other. As a result, ideas of eliminating elements of political confessionalism (religion-based quotas in particular) are developing in a number of countries in the region. The author shows that changes in the religious picture of the world and self-perception of members of faith communities can be facilitated by both external and internal factors. The analysis of both groups of factors reveals their negative implications, such as the violation of the harmony of social relations and increase in various forms of social disintegration. These findings shed light on the deep level of socioeconomic and political-military crises that are destabilizing the situation in the Middle East region.

The Institute of Geography, Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), was founded in Petrograd in 1918 as the Industrial-Geographical Department of the Commission for Studying Natural Production Forces. In 1934, it was moved to Moscow and renamed the Institute of Physical Geography of the USSR Academy of Sciences and then (in 1936) the Institute of Geography of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Its history included all stages of the development of the national geography, beginning from the traditions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the concept of geography as a descriptive science was given up and its branch specialization began, until the formation of geography of the 21st century as a paradigm and synthetic discipline with great prospects for developing knowledge. The modern geography and the Institute of Geography of the Russian Academy of Sciences use a wide range of interdisciplinary remote and field methods, the latest tools, and laboratory analyses to understand the quickly changing world, its nature, the population, and the economy retrospectively, at the present time, and in the future. The results of the research performed at the Institute was published in the Vestnik RAS periodical many times.

In 2018, the birthday of Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was included in the UNESCO calendar of commemoration days. The world remembers the writer not only as a creative personality but also as a fighter for truth and freedom of speech. His story about one day in the life of a Soviet prisoner, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, became the most important event in the country after N.S. Khrushchev’s historic speech at the 20th party congress, having largely predetermined the present-day ideas about the Soviet past and influenced the modern historical belle lettres. After the publication of Ivan Denisovich and the award of the Nobel Prize to Solzhenitsyn, the writer was officially recognized as a major figure in international literature. Interest in him among Western intellectuals was largely predetermined by the general idea of the Russian classics, which stood against the policy of the official authorities in the name of protecting human values. Today, when the writer’s life and creativity have come to an end, a new stage in the study of his legacy has been reached, and it may be termed as a “return to the eternity” of international culture and thought.

Did the Soviet period in the history of the national philosophy turn into a failure in the intellectual tradition, a time without serious research activity, when philosophy only catered for the needs of ideology without yielding any fundamental results in the humanities? The author of the article tries to answer this question; her thoughts are based on two books devoted to a landmark event in the history of Soviet philosophy, the so-called case of epistemologists. The discussion makes it possible to oppose the ideology-ridden pseudophilosophy for the development of the Marxist tradition by young philosophers who began their professional career in the early 1950s at the Faculty of Philosophy at Moscow State University and the Institute of Philosophy of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In her article, by considering the example of E.V. Ilyenkov’s creative work, the author shows that the Soviet reception of Marxism, which emerged in the second half of the 1950s and is referred to as the thaw in Soviet philosophy, gave rise to a number of concepts and ideas that followed the lead of the world’s philosophical endeavors of the second half of the 20th and early 21st centuries.