MODERN INFORMATION WARFARE AND SPIRITUAL SECURITY OF RUSSIA: THREATS AND LIMITING STRATEGIES
Authors: A. Medyanik Igor , A. Bogdanova Oksana , V. Abovyan Ashkhen , R. Barashyan Liana , M. Shevchenko Olga 
Published: October 2019

Purpose of the study: We analyze the specifics of modern information wars and their impact on the spiritual sphere of Russian society. The innovative technologies of modern information warfare have a huge destructive potential. These technologies have an impact on the minds of people and may change their value orientations, impose alien cultural systems and destructive ideas forming models of social behavior. All that determines the need to study the main spiritual security threats that faces Russian society and strategies to resist them.

Methodology: The methodological basis of the study is the concept of the information society, which allows understanding the specifics of new information reality. The risk logical approach is methodologically significant for the study of threats associated with the new information reality. All that gives an opportunity to analyze the new social spiritual security threats associated with development and operation of new information technologies.  The theory of information warfare is conceptual for the study, as it considers the modern ways and means of information impact on individual and social consciousness. Information warfare is treated as a new type of geopolitical confrontation in the modern world.

Results: The study concludes that in the context of modern geopolitical confrontation, the spiritual sphere of Russian society becomes one of the main objects of destructive information impact, manifested in the devaluation of traditional cultural values, introduction of Western liberal ideas, spread of mass culture and consumerism ideology. Such a destructive information impact leads to atomization of society, to a socio-cultural split on social, intergenerational and ethnocultural grounds. Substitution of the national spiritual and moral tradition with the values of Western mass culture leads not only to destruction of historically developed social behavior models but to reformatting the cultural code of society.

Applications of this study: The results allow us to understand the destructive potential of information impact on spiritual sphere of Russian society and the need to develop an effective strategy to resist information threats that undermine the foundations of Russian statehood. The limiting strategy of information risks should include not only legal measures implemented by the state, but social reflection on the principles of transparency, borders, and mechanisms of its compliance and, above all, the mechanisms of protection from destructive impact of information for the individuals.

Novelty/Originality of this study: The spiritual sphere of Russian society is characterized by extreme instability and lack of ideas, able to integrate it. The society faces a crisis evidenced by such trends as the mutual alienation of society and state, political indifference of citizens; weakening of social solidarity, ethnic tension, underdevelopment of civil society institutions. The main survival condition for the Russian society in new historical realities associated with globalization of the information sphere is restoration of stable spiritual life, preservation of the value-ideological core, formation of ideology shared by the majority of citizens.