Vol 17, No 4 (2017)

The article presents a part of the intellectual legacy of the Chayanov’s school that is often con-sidered as consisting exclusively of the studies of peasant economy and its cooperative development. Such an interpretation overlooks the school’s contribution to the study of large-scale agrarian production within the establishing soviet system of collective farms. The authors provide another interpretation of the intellectual legacy of Chayanov and his colleagues, and focus on the works of A.N. Chelintsev (1874-1962) and N.P. Makarov (1888-1980), who survived the repressions of the 1930s and since the 1940s returned to the studies of economic organization of collective farms, which had become the main insti-tutional form of the soviet agrarian system. Chelintsev studied lagging collective farms, which were un-popular and even dangerous subject in the soviet agrarian science. Chelintsev’s recommendations were not followed in the collective farms’ economy of the 1950s. However, today they help to understand some system features of weak collective farms. Makarov summarized the results of his collective farms studies at the rise of the Kosygin’s reforms in the monograph published in 1966; it emphasized both the importance of collective farms in the soviet agriculture and alternative strategies of collective farms develop-ment by granting them more independence and involving in inter-farm cooperation. With such works, Chelintsev and Makarov ensured the highest methodological level of social-economic research typical for the 1920s’ soviet agrarian science, thus confirming that the Chayanov’s school introduced many original ideas in the study of peculiarities of the economic organization of both peasant households and large-scale collective farms, which determines the necessity of reevaluating the intellectual legacy of the organizational-production school to understand better the phenomenon of Russian collective farming in the XX century.

The article outlines social and economic consequences of collectivization to compare this state policy with the changes in agriculture in the 1990s, and to estimate chances of the Russian agriculture to overcome the current crisis. The article is based on archive data on collectivization and on the program developed by the Academy of High Ecotechnologies. The authors believe that at the time of collectivization, it was a way to optimize agriculture: largely due to collectivization, though with all its losses and ‘extremes’, the soviet agriculture was partially industrialized and provided the country with food in the hardest years of the Great Patriotic War and in the post-war period, thus ensuring the food security of the Soviet state. The ‘emergency’ model of the so-called ‘return to civilization’ that was adopted under the reforms of the 1990s aimed at turning the collective farmer into an individual farmer or a rural wageworker, but such a social ‘migration’ strategy imposed ‘from above’ deformed the rural social stratum and determined serious economic problems. Today the authors consider the neo-collective farms as a promising perspec-tive. They also support the program developed by the Academy of High Ecotechnologies for intensification of agricultural production on the basis of progressive domestic and foreign technologies, which will allow to increase the agricultural production in the next three to five years by several times. In particular, for more effective use of agricultural technologies and processing industries, the program suggests develop-ing the enlarged organizational-economic structures - ‘agropromkhozes’.

The author accepts the inevitability of the complex nature of contemporary Russian culture, and identifies four relatively distinctive social-cultural groups in the Russian society: (1) the most numerous layer of adherents of the past and, thus, nostalgic for the Soviet culture; it consists of representatives of all social-demographic groups that adhere to traditionalist patterns and norms; (2) proponents of the so-called ‘liberal views’ attracted by the principles of commercialization of culture in today’s consumer society though in general the western liberal culture failed to form a stable social basis in Russia and is still highly heterogeneous; (3) the conservatives oppose the on-going social-cultural modernization of the Russian society in its nowadays interpretation, and call for preservation of traditional and even archaic components of the Russian cultural identity; (4) finally, there are representatives of religious culture, which is becoming increasingly popular due to the active position of religious figures and open state support to religious initiatives. The author emphasizes that the social-cultural situation in Russia is complex and dynamic, it can-not be explained only by confrontation of the above mentioned groups, it is also influenced by subcultures and, in its turn, determines the ideological views of social strata. The second part of the article is devoted to the analysis of ‘ideology’ as a contemporary concept, mainly in its geopolitical dimension that reflects a complex combination of elements of different geopolitical models, both foreign and specific Russian (former Soviet and current, reflecting the position of Russia in the globalizing world and its aspirations in domestic and foreign policy). The author believes that the Russian geopolitical strategy under the current social-cultural changes has not been finalized yet, and insists on its urgent development in the format that takes into account interests of all citizens of the country, its geographical diversity and social-cultural features so as to consolidate the Russian society on the basis of the best samples of the Russian culture.

The authors aimed to conduct a study of the current state and prospects for the development of elitology in Russia, and to identify the public perception of political leaders, which is necessary for federal and regional elites and for improving the efficiency of the state personnel policy, mechanisms for interaction of elites in the social-political space and, thus, for increasing the transparency of power. The authors rely on the political, historical-legal, formal-legal, and structural-functional analytical approaches. Based on the results of the panel expert surveys conducted during the First All-Russian Elitological Congress “Elitology of Russia: The Current State and Prospects for the Development” (2013, Rostov-on-Don) and the Second All-Russian Elitological Congress “Elitology and Strategies for the Development of Contemporary Russia” (2016, Rostov-on-Don), the authors reconstruct the general perception of Russian elites by the expert com-munity, and the dynamics of changes in the elite group; identify the public estimates of today’s regional political elites, and a discrepancy between elitism in the traditional sense and the real political power. The comparison of the results of the panel surveys conducted in 2013 and 2016 allowed to combine the findings in the groups: general perception of the Russian elites and the reliability of information about them; estimates of the dynamics of qualitative changes in the elites; measures to promote the development of inter-elite interaction and leadership. The authors made the following conclusions: both public and expert opinions underestimate the elite capital of the ruling groups; there are system symptoms of oligarchization of the elites that tend to use non-democratic means of holding power; there is an obvious task of changing the approaches to assessing and recruiting elites in the current social-political situation in Russia; in 2017, the Russian society is at the crossroads, and the choice of the direction for further development is com-plicated by the destructive impact of the aggressive global elites pursuing their own interests that con-tradict Russia’s national interests.

The article summarizes the results of the studies of reproductive attitudes of the Russian students (born in 1982-2000) published in 2000-2017. Students lack life experience, thus, they make moral choices under conflicting media information and sometimes even propaganda of certain values or anti-values concerning family, marriage, and motherhood (paternity). A low level of students’ awareness of the main issues in planning and creating a family, giving birth to children, taking care of their health is accompanied by an early start of active and risky sexual life. Despite the unconditional authority and positive example of parents, most young people independently search for information about sexual relations and sometimes get negative and painful experience. There are three types of young people: (1) the majority respect traditional family values, try (or wish) to follow them and to some extent succeed; (2) a significant part respect traditional family values but cannot or do not want to follow them (including approving and practicing cohabitation); (3) about a tenth do not respect and do not follow traditional values concerning marriage and family, refuse and oppose them; marriage does not matter for such students, they have no desire to give birth and raise a child, do not think about the morality of relationships between sexes, po-lygamy, abandonment of the child or abortion. Students indicate factors influencing their family plans and reproductive behavior: social-psychological (own beliefs, opinion of the closest people, limitation of the time resource; unplanned pregnancy and perception of abortion; availability and quality of the partner; social-psychological maturity; perceptions of the future - confidence in it); religiosity; experience (example of the parents’ family); social-demographic (age; structure of the parents’ family); economic (availability and quality of housing; financial situation); physical (health status); institutional (state family policy, influence of the church and media, values and traditions of society). Thus, the young people reproductive attitudes and the idea of a family are determined by various factors including values and traditions of the closest social circle and society in general.

The article considers methodological and empirical aspects of cross-cultural communica-tions under the economic and cultural globalization that determined the free movement of labor migrants around the world though this process is accompanied by certain difficulties. The authors believe that even a theoretically prepared person that knows about the influence of cultural differences on the organizational management in different countries will experience a cultural shock when working abroad. The cultural shock is a discomfort, frustration and even depression caused by getting into an unfamiliar environment. At the applied level, the authors analyze the so-called ‘cross-cultural experiments’ - attempts of an individual (a working specialist of a certain nation) to test one’s strength, skills, and professional competencies in a foreign company. The authors’ sociological study of a cultural benchmarking type consisted of two stages. At the first stage, foreigners working in the capital of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) were inter-viewed; at the second stage, the Russians working abroad, mainly in the USA, were interviewed. The migra-tion flows from China have recently intensified in Yakutia, but the overwhelming majority of labor migrants are still from West and Central Asia, mainly from Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Armenia. The foreigners working in Yakutia and Russians working abroad experience same difficulties of adaptation in a new col-lective. Friends, relatives, members of the ethnic community, but not specially trained cross-cultural coaches and mentors, help them with adaptation. Such a personnel technology as selection, recruitment and headhunt-ing works reasonably well, while other HR technologies of cross-cultural management (motivation, feedback, etc.) are still lagging behind. The authors insist on introducing courses on cross-cultural adaptation in interna-tional groups both in Russia and abroad together with a system of the so-called ‘budding’.

The article considers the possibilities of the sociological analysis of freedom by decod-ing meanings hidden in various elements of clothing. The author admits that it is extremely difficult to work with the concept of freedom in sociology due to both its elusiveness (empirical indicators are un-clear and ambiguous) and universality (everyone has his own idea of freedom and ways to define it). The author does not claim to develop a model of the sociological evaluation of freedom through its ex-ternal manifestations in the costume - just to outline the general sociological reasoning on the issue. First, the article considers some common interpretations of relations between freedom and causality, approaches to the study of freedom (its external and internal projections), analytical ‘optics’ to reveal the ways of self-expression in clothing (emphasis is made on the value-activity approach), and ‘ele-ments’ of freedom (possibilities and limitations, liberation and enslavement as coded in the correspond-ing clothing systems). The main part of the article considers the embodiment of these elements reflect-ing a certain degree of individual/collective freedom in the Russian costume in 1861-1905, in the so-called ‘post-reform period’ that provided some opportunities for the democratization of society and its capitalist development. The author underlines the social-political differences of two stages: the eve of bourgeois reforms and first years after the abolition of serfdom; and the 1880s and beyond. The article focuses on the specific changes of the costume in the Russian society in general (for example, adoption and adaptation of the European urban costume) and in different (urban) strata (petty bourgeois, nobility, merchants, etc.) including generational, gender and other features of costume transformations.

The sector of sociology of the Institute for Mongolian, Buddhist and Tibetan Studies of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences organized the All-Russian scientific seminar “What do We Know about Contemporary Russian Suburbs?” on June 2-3, 2017. Based on the seminar results, the collection of papers with the same title was published. The idea of the meeting was to allow the experts to discuss the regional diversity of the suburbs of Russian cities, the scale, sources, directions and conse-quences of the Russian suburbanization. Despite considerable prospects for theoretical and empirical analysis, this field of social research is still ignored by Russian scientists, which determines serious problems in con-ducting comparative and generalizing studies to ensure a broader understanding of the nature of the Russian suburbanization. Developing a common research field, setting research aims and hypotheses, summarizing international discussions on suburban studies, search for optimal concepts and approaches to the analysis of the Russian suburbanization, developing new methods for studying suburbs and adaptation of the existing ones, critical analysis of sources, collecting and systematization of regional data, generalization, typologies and comparative analysis of regional cases, discussing the results of today’s studies - these are just some issues set by the experts in the suburban studies.