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At the end of the 20th century, changes took place in the world that forced politicians and scientists to rethink many seemingly established postulates about the laws of social life and about the ways of development of human civilization. The modern development of the social movement among the Tatars of Russia, and especially the national processes in Tatarstan largely repeat the trends in the development of the nation in the pre-Soviet period. The main role in the social movement of nations is played by the activities of the elite aimed at creating political, educational and cultural institutions. The turning point in the history of the Tatar people should be considered the end of the 19th - the beginning of the 20th century. The Tatar ideology was created during the period of rapid development of bourgeois socio-economic relations (especially noticeable among the Tatars of the Volga-Ural region) and the rise of national culture. However, until recently, the sources and works of authors of different times have not been fully studied, although they contain data on the processes of formation of the Tatar social factor and the Tatar nation itself in the context of the development of the Russian community.

In this paper we analyze a historical form of media literacy education that is still insufficiently discussed in English language literature: Russian cineclubs. We focus on one particular cineclub that was created by a Soviet educator Oleg Baranov in the 1950s. We describe this cineclub's context and structure, and discuss its popularity among students. The content of Baranov's classes might have been shaped by ideological requirements of the time. However, we believe that the structure of his model can be used as an inspiration for a media literacy club in today's schools globally, and not only in Russia.

This historical study explores how educators in the United States responded to the rise of fascism between the World Wars. By considering and then ultimately rejecting the fascist approach to education and philosophy, American educators defined democratic education in contrast to fascist/totalitarian approaches to education by rejecting indoctrination and propaganda. The author argues that fascism provided a catalyst for pushing epistemological issues surrounding propaganda, indoctrination, relativity, and absolutism to the center of their collective consciousness in ways that parallel the controversies of today over "fake news" and "alternative facts."

The earliest hypothesis concerning the phonetic-phonological roots of reading and writing learning disabilities is usually attributed to Boder in the U.S. literature. Yet by following a trail of references to work in psychology and education conducted some 30 years earlier in the USSR, we find the seeds of this idea already well established in the work of Russian educator and psychologist Roza Levina. Here we trace the Soviet origins of these ideas and discuss their heretofore unrecognized importance in the field of learning disabilities and special education.

This article focuses on the elaboration of institutional research practice, which is an important element of any research university. The study addresses three questions. First, how did institutional research arise, and what is its raison d'etre in a research university? Second, how can institutional research contribute to the improvement of the research university? And third, what are the most viable alternatives regarding the structure, staffing, and responsibilities of the institutional research office? To answer these questions, the article will draw on the historical and current state of institutional research data from different countries derived from an extensive literature review and several case studies conducted while launching and running the institutional research office at a newly established research university, the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, Russia.

In Russia in the nineteenth century, educators and professional teachers paid a lot of attention to formulating principles of the upbringing and education of the kind of person who is worthy to be a citizen of his Fatherland; this was reflected in their scientific writings and literary works. The idea that patriotic upbringing was a part of moral training and an inseparable part of education, was quite widespread. This article analyzes the main approaches to the upbringing of the citizen and patriot in Russian education in the nineteenth century, and examines the views of the most well-known Russian teachers and educators of that period.

This paper addresses theories of the avant-garde, especially but not exclusively in art and as part of a modernist aesthetic. The paper examines the ways in which avant-garde theory of the creative process can inform educational administration in the change process, as both a critique and an ideal. The argument adopted here is that if administration can be conceptualised as an art, then art's critical and creative traditions also speak to those aspects of professional practice that involve creative activity such as organisational design, leadership vision and strategic analysis. This is a possible way towards rethinking schools and educational systems.

Two years and seven months after the initiation of the U.S. satellite program, Soviet Russia launched a rocket north of the Caspian Sea carrying the now famous "Sputnik I" satellite. U.S. scientists were aware that Soviet Russia was planning on putting an artificial satellite into orbit; however, secrecy surrounding the timing and the location of the launch of the satellite served to intensify the Cold War and America's deepening distrust of Soviet Russia. The launching of Sputnik was a trumpet call to the U.S. educational system. Even if the public did not know much about rocketry, satellites, or space, they did understand a perceived blow to national pride. In celebration of the recent golden anniversary of the launching of the Soviet satellite, Sputnik I, this paper takes an historical perspectives approach to examine the social, political, and educational climate in the United States leading up to the launch. Ramifications to science education are discussed, and implications are made for the relevance of this event to science education today.

This is a case study of the historical development of a private Christian faith-based school of higher education in post-Soviet Russia from its conception in 1990 until 2010. This binational school was founded as Russian-American Christian University (RACU) in 1996. In 2003, business and economics as well as social work undergraduate academic programs were accredited by the Russian Ministry of Education. In 2008, RACU added English language and literature to the list of its state-accredited undergraduate academic programs. The academic model of RACU was designed according to the traditional American Christian liberal arts model and adapted to the Russian higher education system.

In this article, the author offers reflections on the sociology of education, beginning with a discussion on the trajectory of the rise of the sociology of education in Russia. The author examines how the sociology of education in Russia looks compared to the rest of the world. The sociological study of education in Russia and the Soviet Union has made great contributions to knowledge and to the creation of policies, but there is still a lot of ambiguity in the interpretation of research data. More consideration needs to be given to improving the scientific status of this research. (Contains 1 table and 5 notes.)

Russian and Soviet sociology have always paid considerable attention to the study of youth. Interest in the problems of youth first emerged in Russian sociology at the turn of the twentieth century. It was manifested with special clarity, however, in the 1920s through the 1980s, when the research came to include problems of the daily life and material condition of college students; the position of adolescent blue-collar workers employed in production; the domestic life of young families; and the ideals of peasant children. For a long time, however, the study of problems of youth was not well developed in the social sciences, or it would develop in a controlled way as the activity of the Komsomol and other youth organizations of Soviet society (e.g., sports, cultural, and educational organizations). The study of young people became more active in the 1960s and 1970s: (1) in Moscow; (2) in Sverdlovsk; (3) in Leningrad; (4) in Novosibirsk; and (5) in Perm. But by the 1960s these studies had come to be developed as a special area of research. A very important landmark in the establishment of the sociology of youth was the creation of a Sociology Group under the Central Committee of the Komsomol, in December 1964. It is symbolically significant that this was due to the initiative of young scientists. The very fact that a sociology group was created in the structure of the central youth body in Moscow was of enormous significance, because it served as an important precedent for the institutionalization of the science of sociology in the country and for the establishment of a new sector within its structure, the sociology of youth. The group served as a center around which many fans of sociology rallied. This article discusses the current situation which requires a greater focus on the environment of Russian young people and its risks and how it influences behavior. (Contains 32 notes.) [This article was translated by Kim Braithwaite.]

The characteristics of the Russian intelligentsia, and even its definition, have been debated since the nineteenth century and continue to be a source of disagreement in Putin's Russia. The array of problems relating to the intelligentsia continues to be an inseparable element of ideas about historical experience and its fate that, in conjunction with other factors and symbols, make up the Russian identity. Problems of the group identity of the Russian intelligentsia have special significance owing to the social function this group performs in Russian society and culture, generating new ideas and the ideological constructs and patterns of the self-determination of Russian society as a whole. For this reason, every time this array of problems is addressed anew, it marks yet another crisis of identity in society, its entry into a period of searching for new foundations of that identity, new "social semaphores." For the intelligentsia as a social group itself, such debates have served and largely still serve as a means of group self-identification. This circumstance is by no means always recognized by the participants in the debates: it is as if the debate gets started anew each time, and each person claims that he is expressing a position that is completely objective and not dependent on personal views and preferences. The relationships among education, intelligentsia status, and moral and political issues are the subject of an ongoing discussion. (Contains 2 notes.) [This article was translated by Kim Braithwaite.]

In her article, R.V. Ryvkina gave an indication that "the intelligentsia is on the wane" in history, since "humanistic ideals are giving way to technocratic attitudes." While her article answered some questions, it inevitably gave rise to new questions, and they were no less significant. In this article, the author refutes the contentions made by Ryvkina in her article. The author also explains how the social humanities intelligentsia, which are the "major influencers of opinion," are the ones that are on the wane. (Contains 33 notes.)

On October 6, 1957, most Americans had concluded that Sputnik, a manmade satellite that the Russians had sent into orbit, was not a hoax nor an electronic Potemkin Village, a product of what is called today as "special effects." Initially, the idea that Russian technology could surpass the American's was unthinkable. And the brains' repression of Sputnik's reality was abetted by the implications that the putative orb carried: if they can send this thing over the people's heads, they can also attach an atomic bomb and drop it in their laps. In this article, the author looks back at an event in the Fifties that seemed to change everything for the U.S. as a whole and for U.S. education in particular. He reports on the condition of public education in 1957 and in 2007 as well as on the condition of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Working his way forward to the present day, he makes it clear that the time when everything changed also marked the point at which things started staying the same. (Contains 1 table and 58 endnotes.)

An intelligentsia plays an essential role in any civilized human community. While their role to societal development cannot be underplayed, there seems to exist a lack of unified opinion with regard to the nature of intelligentsia, most especially in Russia. The importance to find the exact definition of the term "intelligentsia" was periodically expressed by thinkers of the past and it came up again for Russian scientists in the 1990s, whose reflections provide grounds for thinking that the nature of the intelligentsia as a specific social group is defined by the level of intellectuality, a most important indicator of people's attitudes toward the way that society and the state are structured. An intelligentsia, as a specific social group in society, has existed during all historical stages of the development of humanity ever since the time that an ethical orientation of human reason was realized to be essential, so that human reason is no longer just "an instrument of understanding" and becomes a means for humanizing anthropological existence. In this article, the author discusses the various definitions of the term "intelligentsia." He also discusses how this particular group assumes the role of passionate activists in their communities. (Contains 32 notes.)

Many people in Russia feel that the intelligentsia is on its way out. This is something that writers sense more keenly than anyone else. Symptomatic of this is the headline of an article by Daniil Granin published in the newspaper "Izvestia" on 5 November 1997: "The Russian Intellectual Is Going Away" [Russkii intelligent ukhodit]. There are two interpretations of the term "intelligentsia"--an intelligentsia that consists of individual people who think, and an intelligentsia as a social stratum of the population that is a part of "social stratification," meaning the aggregation of social strata that form Russian society as a whole. The former is the commonplace interpretation; the latter is the scientific meaning. In Russia today, the fate of these two meanings is different: although there are still "intellectual people" around, there is no longer an intelligentsia as a specific social stratum as it used to exist in the Soviet Union and prior to the Revolution of 1917. This does not mean that there are no longer any "intellectual people" in Russia, distinguished by their level of education, good breeding, and high morality. Certainly there are individuals who are intellectuals. But in the same way that "one swallow does not make a summer," the existence of even sizable numbers of intellectuals ["intellektualy"] (politicians, writers, actors, artists, scientists, doctors, schoolteachers, etc.) does not mean that they make up a particular social stratum in the structure of society. In this article, the author discusses the disappearance of the intelligentsia as a social stratum in post-Soviet Russia. (Contains 1 note.) [This article was supported by Russian Foundation for the Humanities.]

Discusses influences on the development of Russian nationalism. Describes the development of an intelligentsia and its relationship with both peasants and rulers. Addresses the influence of French and German political and religious thinkers. Emphasizes that the Napoleonic wars provided both a Russian patriotic bond and exposure of Russia's elite to the realities of peasant life. (DK)

The article discusses "The Palgrave Handbook of Russian Thought" and its relevance to understanding the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of Russian intellectual history, covering topics such as philosophy, literature, art, and politics. However, the article criticizes the lack of representation of women thinkers in the Handbook and calls for a deeper exploration of gender in Russian thought. The author suggests that studying the role of women in Russian literature and history could offer alternative perspectives and contribute to resistance against misogynistic nationalism. [Extracted from the article]

This article provides an annotated edition, along with an English translation, of a relatively neglected sixteenth-century Russian text claimed to be a response to Juan Luis Vives's renowned commentary on Augustine's De civitate Dei. The Words against Juan Luis Vives was composed by Maximus the Greek, who was a central figure in Russian culture during the first half of the sixteenth century. As this article demonstrates, Maximus' text serves as a revealing summary of what constituted the negative attitude towards Renaissance thought at the Muscovite court. This article also investigates the grounds on which Maximus based his critical remarks; there is a strong argument to assume that Maximus had never, in fact, read Vives's commentary on Augustine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the article is the source study of the A Brief Historical Description of Little Russia... and the reconstruction of its cultural context. The methodology of the study combines the text-critical and narratological approaches to the analysis of the text. The general methodological field of the article is history of ideas and history of historical thought. Scientific novelty. A Brief Historical Description of Little Russia... is a text of Ukrainian historiography of the late 18th century which has not been fully studied. After the publication of the text on the basis of two copies by O.Bodianskyi in 1848, it was mostly approached in connection with the question of I.Kvitka's authorship. A new impetus to the study of the work was given by the discovery of its copy by the article's authors which was stored in the National Museum of the History of Ukraine. This is the only available manuscript of the work. Conclusions. The main source of the work's narrative core was the Hrabianka Chronicle. Other sources of the narrative, as well as the appendices, included the works by G.Bayer, Ph. Stralenberg, Feofan (Prokopovych), Anthony Katifor, and G.Müller. The author deliberately selected and "melted" the information from other works, building up his own version of the Cossack history. The work was written in 1789, at the time of the disintegration of the structures of the Hetmanshchyna and Sloboda Ukraine, when the Cossack "ranks" were forced to prove their belonging to the "noble class". It reflected the views of the people of this environment and testified to their original attempt to rethink the traditional narrative of the Hrabianka Chronicle and modify the established scheme of the Cossack past. The responsibility for restricting the rights of Little Russia in this work rests with the hetmans. The Zaporozhians are also presented in negative tones. The analysis of the context of the creation and history of the work suggests that it was created in the circles close to the starshyna families of Kvitka, Horlenko and other "patriots of the region". A Brief Historical Description of Little Russia... belongs to the last generation of the Cossack historiography and is a distant predecessor of the History of Ruthenians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to address the traditions associated with studying cultural history as shaped by Czech Historical Russian studies, and to outline the steps being taken in current research. Its ambition is to point out that the study of cultural history provides an obvious enrichment to the holistic knowledge of the Russian (Soviet) past. This work is conceived as an analytical one with certain elements of synthesis. The defined topic has not been dealt with thus far, and it therefore relies on overviews and analytical probes into past Czech historical Russian studies or possibly Czech historiography as a whole. As regards how, to what extent, and the approaches that may be used to examine cultural history, this paper aims to be a case study and not only outline the state of research in this field, but also the possibilities for expanding knowledge in other areas of historical Russian studies. In order to explain the author's intentions more clearly, the first part of the paper focuses on the definition of the subject of cultural history. It is primarily based on the standpoint of Peter Burke, a British historian, and his somewhat negativistic formulation of what cultural history is not. He warns about situations, by no means unique ones, where cultural history has been confused with the history of culture. He does not address any Czech studies about the history of culture. Because Czech Historical Russian studies have not yet processed the cultural history of the Russian past in a synthetic manner, the role of this discipline is to draw attention to such works and key individuals, who within their professional historiographical sphere of interest examined the more widely understood non-political level of the Russian past, or at least some of its aspects (but no clearly definable economic, social or legal history, or the history of ideas and ideologies). It is essential to be able to define them as a part of or, at a minimum, a borderline area of cultural history. To clarify the approach, this study mentions in more detail the author's view of the paradigms of Czech Historical Russian studies and the paradigm of Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can the loss of connection with history be experienced and expressed? The relationship with the past is difficult to capture and describe, although at some historic moments the emotional connection with the past becomes pivotal. This article introduces the debates on loss and cultivating the sense of losing the past in modernizing Russia in the late 19th - early 20th century. It contributes to the history of emotions, analyzing the discourse on the disappearance of Russian cultural history cultivated by intellectual and artistic circles around the journals Mir Iskusstva, Starye Gody and Iskusstvo in the late Russian Empire, and tracing distinct voices that problematized the relation to earlier times in Russia and promoted the preservation of Russian cultural and historical monuments. The article concludes that the discourse of losing the connection with Russia's own past played an important role in forming the discourse and practices of Russian heritage preservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Florovsky's approach to the history of Russian philosophy, focusing on his unpublished article 'Russkaia filosofiia v emigratsii' ('Russian Philosophy in Emigration', finished in 1930). In this article, Florovsky interprets the expulsion of many philosophers from the Soviet Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 as a political and spiritual act, amounting to the government's rejection of creativity and freedom. He takes up the issue of continuity and discontinuity in Russian intellectual history and reaches a conclusion that it is émigré thought, especially religious philosophy, which stands in continuity with the philosophical heritage of pre-revolutionary Russia. In contrast, he interprets the communist ideology developed inside the Soviet Russia as a disruption of this intellectual tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This historiographical article examines the development of the study of Russian intellectual history following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The author notes that the collapse of communism in Russia largely opened up the field of intellectual history for study. She cites studies related to Russian conservatism, radicalism, and the Russian Orthodox Church. She also comments on debates over the validity and necessity of the study of Soviet philosophy. Historians discussed include Gustav Shpet, Claudia Verhoeven, and Martin Malia.

The paper focuses on a particular episode in the (pre)history of semiotics in the USSR in the 1920s-1930s. At that time, an attempt to create an "integral" science was made by linguists, among whom N. Ja. Marr was one of the best-known. Several semantic laws formulated by Marr could be either reformulated in order to be applied to other disciplines (literary studies, anthropology, archeology, biology) or "proved" by the facts or discoveries drawn from them. Another "proof" that these linguistic theories were correct consisted in the possibility of transferring the corresponding models and schemes from one field of knowledge to another: at that epoch the refusal to make a clear methodological separation between disciplines which were primarily concerned with "matter" and those that were more "spiritual" was an important tendency for scholars both in the Soviet Union and in other countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Russian economist Mikhail Ivanovich Tugan-Baranovsky (1865-1919) and his economic theories regarding business and trade cycles. The author considers the influence of Tugan-Baranovsky on twentieth century economists such as John Maynard Keynes, A. H. Hansen, and Joseph Schumpeter, and considers how the lack of English-language translations of Tugan-Baranovsky's writings have impacted a broad understanding and appreciation of his work. Tugan-Baranovsky's analysis of Great Britain's 19th century trade cycles are considered. Tugan-Baranovsky's beliefs regarding socialism, Marxism, and the redistribution of wealth are discussed.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Trista Newyear regarding the adoption of European ideas by Buryats, one by Melissa A. Chakars on the use of literature for cultural engineering in the Soviet Union and one by Anatoliy Breslavsky regarding youth culture in Buryatia, Russia.

The article comments on the differences of Andrzej Walicki and Isaiah Berlin in terms of being intellectual historians and liberal philosophers. It believes that the understanding of Berlin on the relationship of German romanticism to the Russian intelligentsia is indiscriminate and vague. It agrees with the differentiation made by Walicki between Russian Hegelianism and romanticism.

The article presents a panoramic view of the research program of author Andrzej Walicki on Russian intellectual history. According to Walicki, his work is summarized in three words, namely, Russia, Poland, and Marxism. He adds that the program is founded on the assumption that the situation of the intellectuals in Central Europe was determined by three factors: their own national heritage, Russia and her tradition, and Marxism as the ideological legitimation of the system.

Presents comments on the article "Dewey Meets the Mozart of Psychology in Moscow: The Untold Story," by Richard S. Prawat, professor in the Michigan State University. Description of Anatoli Lunacharsky, commissar of Narkompros, Russia's ministry of education and Nadezhda Krupskaya, a ministry official as successful implementers of a Deweyan reform movement; Information on the major problems with Prawat's portrayals of the reform effort in past-revolutionary Russia; Suggestions on Prawat's contribution to the confusion about Russian intellectual history by an excess of boldness, by the proclivity that many have shown towards magisterial judgments on the basis of insufficient evidence.

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I examine issues tied to the alleged difficulties of mutual understanding between Russia and the West. I show that some of the background to these issues lies in the difference of culturally grounded differences in perceptual and conceptual schemata. In the West, a broadly understood Aristotelianism and in Russia Neoplatonism designate dominant attitudes to the world. The Russian `lunar' consciousness, in comparison with the `solar' consciousness of the West, tends by and large precipitously to totalize the world, and the experienced multiplicity of the real is referred to its imagined center. The difference between Russia and the West, limited to some degree by mutual similarities, can become the basis of an axiological and intellectual dialogue important for one side and the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I present the scope and characteristics of Marx's interest in Russia and review its evolution. Initially, Marx's attitudes were marked by russophobia, pronounced anti-panslavism, assessments of Russia as an outpost of European reaction and counterrevolution, and even as the head of a conspiracy to block the world revolution. With time, however, Marx came to consider Russia as the country in which the outbreak of the Revolution was most likely. In his research for sucessive volumes of Capital , he read Russian theoretical works by, among others, V. Bervi-Flerovskij and A. Koshelev. Marx's attitudes to the anticipated peasant revolution in Russia remained ambivalent; to a certain degree he feared its occurrence suspecting that it could take on an `asiatic' hue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the interest of the Polish in Russian thought. Factors that affect the character of Polish interest in Russia; History of research into Russian intellectual thought by several scholars, including Marian Zdziechowski and Jan Kucharzewski; Information on the publication of studies on renascent Russian Eurasianism.

I argue that one of the central aspects characterizing the philosophical horizon at the threshhold of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is the erosion of the humanist idea, i.e. `posthumanism'. Russian religious philosophy is pervaded by considerations of humanism and posthumanism (antihumanism). The latter ascribes central significance to the category of `Godmanhood' with which the leading Russian philosophers opposed the Nietzschean category of the Overman. But all of Germany philosophy can be reproached for having forsaken man. The `posthumanist' narrative about man and God is an extreme, indeed pathological symptom of philosophy waiting for Embodiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I present and argue for two theses: the first concerns the degree to which Chaadaev's thought represents a breakthrough in the development of Russian social philosophy and the second concerns the Hegelian character of this thinking. I also show that Chaadaev's theory retained an open character closely tied to the crisis character of the social reality of his time and that it depended for its justification on the further course of the historical process, which is impossible to predict. All this leads to an interpretation of Chaadaev's view according to which the standard opposition of Chaadaev's two best-known texts, The Philosophical Letters , with their predominantly pessimistic picture of Russia, and the Apology of a Madman , which refutes this evaluation, is rejected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I attempt to answer the question about the place of Eurasianism in the Russian intellectual tradition. I reconstruct its historiosophical assumptions as well the political ideology following from them. I share the opinion of certain historians that Eurasianism is interesting for a variety of reasons, but I disagree with those who see in it nothing more than a synthesis of standard ideas often found in the history of Russian thought. Eurasianism's originality includes its acknowledgment of the positive contribution of the Mongols to the history of the Russian state, the radicalism of its critique of the West, the innovativeness of its theory of revolution, as well as the absence, unusual for Russian thinkers of the period, of an eschatological sensitivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents information on several topics discussed during a scientific conference entitled 'Continuity and Discontinuities in Intellectual History,' held at the RAS Institute of World History in November 2000 in Russia. Intellectual culture of antiquity and the Middle Ages; Transformation of traditions in the intellectual history of the modern times and contemporaneity; Historical knowledge and historical science.

The author surveys recent interpretations of the heritage of Nicholas Danilevsky and places them in the context of Danilevsky scholarship in Russia and abroad. The article explores Danilevsky's thought in terms of its alleged affiliations with cultural relativism and anti-universalism, usually associated with the name of Oswald Spengler (whose ideas Danilevsky reportedly influenced) and in terms of positivist interpretations. Martyniuk also explores the revival and re-discovery of Danilevsky in post-Soviet scholarship and ideology, in particular (and exemplary) in Crimea, where the political situation made the re-appearance of Danilevsky specifically acute. Danilevsky and geopolitics is another subject of the article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzing the work of Geoffrey Hosking, Liah Greenfeld and Tim McDaniel, the author argues that their vision of the so-called "Russian idea" is constructed through the essential opposition "Russia - the West" in the context of an existing modernization paradigm. "Russian idea" is often viewed by Western scholars as reaction to modernization. Among its alleged elements are spiritual universalism, social cohesion and solidarity, equality and unity between people and authority. The author attempts to show that all these are not specifically Russian attributes and argues for a degree of relativism in the assessment of the "Russian idea". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]