PATRIOTISM - FRIEND AND FOE: SETTING THE PROBLEM

Many think of patriotism as a natural and appropriate expression of attachment to a native country, an important component of our identity, the core of morality or the inevitable condition for socialization. While doing the research on patriotism it is only but natural to take into consideration all its positive connotations, but it won’t be good to ignore the opposite views according to which patriots are often blamed for “blind” non-alternative pursue to the duty and power and patriotism itself – for the separation from the universal values with their further substitution for nationalistic values. One more issue raised in the article deals with the discrepancy between the estimation of Russian youngsters’ level of patriotism by sociologists and officials on the one hand and that given by experts. One of the reasons for this is an attempt of many to simplify, and thus distort, the phenomenon of patriotism. To debunk the myth, the author attempts to analyze a number of different types of patriotism (alternative, non-alternative, constitutional) considering them from the point of view of Russian and foreign researchers as well as through the prism of official symbolic (coat of arms, flag, hymn) and various social installations expressed by Fatherland, Motherland and Homeland concepts.