From the editor

FROM THE EDITOR

This issue of Otechestvennye Zapiski has an unusual design, because we decided to conduct a kind of audit and revision. An audit of our more than ten years of attempts to explore domestic reality, to describe and think through the most important and most painful problems and phenomena from our point of view - economic, political, social, cultural. Create the most complete and unbiased portrait of them, find those who can offer the necessary expert knowledge and/or vision of appropriate strategies. In fact, all these years we have been creating an anamnesis. Based on the naive (why should we deceive ourselves) and even romantic, as is clear from our beautiful life today, the idea that a conscientious anamnesis is already halfway to a diagnosis, which, it seemed to us, would allow us to immediately begin treatment. Home-grown positivist orderlies, we tried to collect and process the tests.

As you know, our “trick” has always been monothematic - in each issue we singled out one topic and studied it with all the care available to us. I will give here an incomplete list of issues of OZ over the past years (do not forget about the almost three-year forced break in the publication of the magazine caused by objective circumstances): “State and Church” (2001); “Education: fetish or necessity” (two volumes), “Picture of the World: A View from Russia”, “Taxes: Philosophy and Practice”, “Space of Russia”, “Brilliance and Poverty of Russian Science”, “Army and Military Organization of the State” ( 2002); “Justice in Russia”, “The Social State”, “The End of the Media”, “Islam and Russia” (2003); “Unpromised Land”, “Administrative Reform”, “Mirages of Education”, “Migration: Threat or Good?”, “Appropriation of the Past”, “Property: An Experience of Understanding” (2004); “Property: the experience of transformation”, “Society in the mirror of language”, “Growing old in Russian”, “The price of culture”, “The future of war and the war of the future”, “Citizens without society” (2005); “Medicine and Social Mythology”, “Medicine and Social Reality”, “The World of the Young”, “The Age of Charity”, “Anatomy of the Province”, “Sports Complex” (2006); “In Ukrainian coordinates”, “Garbage culture”, “Working hands: supply and demand”, “Working hands: a fair price”, “Russia as another”, “Physiology of power” (2007); “Human Education”, “The Prison Component”, “The Breath of China”, “The Meaning of Memory: Places and Witnesses”, “Memory and Forgetting: The Battle for the Past”, “New World Order” (2008); “People.rf”, “Corruption Contract”, “City Organism”, “Shadow of Knowledge”, “Social Mobility”, “Rural Nov” (2012); “Crisis of Rationality”, “Managing Fear”, “Questions for Education”, “The Final Argument” (it’s about death), “Regime Change” (2013); “The Power of Reputations”, “The Boundaries of the Norm” are the numbers of the current year. Frankly, I am always impressed by this list (it shows all our mistakes and minor crimes, mistakes and drift of interests). Not to mention its physical embodiment - the black tower of our volumes, which is overwhelming in its grandeur (many complain about the overwhelming nature of “OZ” in this sense).

There is no single theme in this volume. Here we are doing an “agenda revision” in ten years. First, we voluntarily selected the topics to be revised, and then asked our experts to explain what has changed in those areas of social reality that we have already touched upon before, what new problems arise in connection with this, and what new issues would make sense to discuss in the future.

I will not hide that the result of this experiment exceeded my, as it seemed to me, quite realistic expectations. Because almost all today's authors, after carefully studying the patient's history, come to the conclusion that the patient is more likely dead than alive. It is especially interesting that our experts note almost tissue necrosis exactly where these tissues were going to be intensively treated and even treated a little.

That is why for the first time I am writing not an article “From the Editor”, but an article “From the Editor”. The fact is that I do not agree with the conclusion of the audit commission in everything; I consider many interpretations to be alarmist, and some conclusions to be politically charged. I'm afraid something like this always comes up with an audit, and not everyone can be happy with its results. However, I consider it necessary to testify to my vision of the situation: I believe that the patient is still most likely alive. Or rather, this: taking into account everything that is brewing and festering in it, taking into account ancient, modern and contemporary history, taking into account demographic processes and climatic conditions, taking into account technological backwardness, cultural barbarism, social savagery, multiple traumas and national immaturity, Taking into account the fact that it is not so much surgeons as butchers who benefit the patient, taking all this into account, I propose to admit that we are witnessing a miracle. The patient, oddly enough, is still there. And with a very wry smile he seems to hint: “You won’t wait.”

I haven’t understood much about my homeland over the years, I only learned that you don’t have to love the patient (although this is a beautiful fairy tale), but you definitely need to treat him. Especially when your own life depends on his condition. Recently, one of my smart interlocutors described the OZ mission as follows: “Ah, you’re heating up space... well, it’s good that you can afford it.” An extremely ambiguous characteristic: it can be interpreted both as an insult and as a compliment. After painful hesitation, I still decided to prefer the second interpretation. Meaning, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. We are engaged in minor assistance to the patient, and the fact that our efforts have not yet led to any noticeable effects, even cosmetic ones, does not mean that we will stop offering scalpels, clamps and tampons to those who wish, constantly refreshing their assortment. Whatever we can, as they say.

See you again!

PS The appearance of the section “Philosophy of the Hare” in this issue of the magazine is timed to coincide with the conference of the same name, held by the Pushkin House in St. Petersburg on June 19-21, 2014. The conference, like our “rabbit section,” serves as an ironic response and greeting to the Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky, who reproached the research institutes under his jurisdiction for being out of touch with reality. Meanwhile, experience shows that attempts to determine research topics that are not based on the opinion of the scientific community are always fraught with support for unfounded, and often downright charlatan projects. Science remains science; it will find prey everywhere, even in the form of a hare.

Tatyana Malkina