Issue #45

Abstract: The article gives an affirmative answer to the question: is there a crisis in modern Russia that began in the spring of 2022? And a concept is put forward, according to which the basis of the crisis is the split between culture (the guardian of historically established conciliar-authoritarian values) and society (the generator of democratic ideas and personal interests not recorded in a thousand-year-old culture), in short, between values and interests. The concept set forth in the article is based on the image of the split in two-century Russian fiction (XIX–XX centuries), in science and journalism of the revolutionary period (1905–1918), in the concepts of the split of our contemporaries: Zborovsky G.E. (Ural State University), Akhiezer A.S. (1929–2008), Sedova N.N. (Institute of Sociology of the Federal Scientific Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences), Chesnokov S.V. (Institute of Sociology of the Federal Scientific Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences/Higher School of Economics), a team of researchers from the Institute of Sociology of the Federal Scientific Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who studied under the guidance of Gorshkov M.K. and Tikhonova N.E. the social situation in the country in March 2022, that is, a month after the start of the SMO. The main conclusion is that the socio-cultural contradiction lives permanently in the thousand-year-old Russian culture and cyclically aggravates in the form of a split in society, when the state disappears and society breaks up — the threat of just such a crisis arose in the bifurcation spring of 2022. The article pays special attention to the group of so-called “new Westerners” — young people under the age of 25 who believe that they can survive without state support and do not support the SMO. The results obtained allow us to better understand what choice we have come to today: to continue to adapt to the split, as the patient adapts to his illness, periodically falling into social crises, or to fight the split in order to prevent society from collapsing into another catastrophe.