Russia's road to modernity
By: Jerzy Gierus.
Publisher: Instytut Studiów Politycznych Polskiej Akademii Nauk
Published: 1998
Place of publication: Warszawa
Language: eng
Number of pages: 107
Subjects: Social change -- Russia (Federation); National characteristics, Russian.; Russia (Federation) -- Social conditions.
First sentence: The present work is an attempt to look at Russian social change through the prism of modernisation theory. Now that the communist experiment has been totally discredited and the countries which were involved in it are wholeheartedly reaching for the values of western-type liberalism and market economy, a broad conceptual framework is needed to interpret the forces which drove them into communism and those which are at work during post-communist transformation. It is the thesis of this work that the forces operating in the first and the second case are the same. They  are the dynamics of modernity and the world system as one of the main institutional expressions of it. To understand the processes of the present day social transformation it is crucial to know what society is being transformed and in what circumstances this transformation is taking place.
Our understanding of modernisation in this work is very broad. We see modernisation as a spread of rational attitudes and practices since Judaism and early Christianity, being most fully expressed in the formation of the ethics of Protestantism and reaching their structural fruition in the form of modern institutions. The term "transformation" as it is used in this work is also broad and means social change as such. Our work thus examines how the mechanisms of modernity influenced social change in Russia at a wide time span. The most crucial point of change, when the driving forces of modernity were particularly vivid, was the turn of the twentieth century. We therefore devote to this period our special attention. Much of what happened in Russia thereafter - the communist rule and the breaking out from it - cannot be clearly seen otherwise than in the light of the trends and the events of the turn of the century.
Description: Communsm in Russia and Eastern Europe was a "Baron Muenchausen syndrome" - a venture similar to that of a personage of a fairy tale who boasted to be able to lift himself up by grabbing hold of his own hair. Post-communist transition still involves social, cultural and political engineering since fundamentally it is a transition to modern saciety in the conditions of an assertive and sometimes forceful presence of ready-made western institutional formats. Such is the challenge facing Russia in the epoch of globalisation.