Images of Russian Self-Consciousness: History and Culture

Abstract

The article examines in detail the cultural and historical prerequisites for the formation of national self-consciousness in the context of its specificity. Its specificity is predetermined by the historical destiny of the people, the geographical location of the state and the worldview of Russian people. Attention is focused on three bases of the formation of this phenomenon: “their” faith, power and rigid ethno-social distance with the poles “we” and “they”. The dynamics of the mythologeme of “anti- Westernism”, the transformation of religious consciousness, as well as the specific manifestation of tolerance, conditioned not by origin, but by the common space of settlement, are analyzed separately. It is emphasized that these structural elements of national self-consciousness in various forms existed in all periods of Russian statehood: from ancient Russia to the present. The author’s reflections are illustrated by the data of interdisciplinary sociological research conducted in the period from 1995 to 2021 under the guidance of the author by the team of the Laboratory of Ethnic Sociology and Psychology of the Faculty of Sociology of St. Petersburg State University. The peculiarity of their presentation is the analysis of the dynamics of people’s worldview and behavior under the systemic impact of social and political transformations of the external environment.