For some time now the country has resembled a train lost between the past and the future: the crew moves the traction locomotive first to the beginning of the train, then to the end. And the rails too: with each change of course, the old track is dismantled. Turning to the past cancels the project of modernization that has never begun – and vice versa. The supposedly traditional values of the bonds have no future; the projects of the new Russian modernism do not have their own, modernization, history of Russia – it has not been written.

Such fluctuations are nothing new to us. The era of stagnation left to the sounds of music: "We are waiting for change!" People did not get tired of change as quickly as it sometimes seems: in the early 2000s there were still attempts at institutional reforms. Then oil money plunged the country into "stability", but the government learned the lessons of Brezhnevism: no matter how stagnates, the population should not be bored. By 2008, the country was invigorated by the ideology of modernization - a change in vector from raw materials to innovation - and it again rushed forward. Mentally and briefly: three years later, the traditionalism of spirituality and bonds was replaced by official modernism, becoming the second edition of "stability".

And now, at the turn of 2017–2018, the fourth re-election of the president hints at a second edition of modernization. Russia is once again boldly looking into the future of artificial intelligence and the digital economy. However, the amplitude of fluctuations is shrinking: the new modernism is noticeably paler than the previous one, Medvedev's. Freedom is now no better than unfreedom, and the oil needle remains where it is stuck and is almost no longer a concern. Getting off it is now problematic, which means that others will have to answer for the inevitable breakdown.

There is a special type of car owner – the afterburner. People buy up ruined cars and masterfully keep them running until the product rots away completely. We are literally seeing a similar pattern forming before our eyes – the modernism of Afterburning, living out the rest of its life. But when this political-economic machine finally stops, there will be no money to buy another one, even the most frail one.

The philosophy of cautious modernism is combined in this scheme with fierce traditionalism, although these two things are incompatible. From the point of view of the situation, this is understandable: the president of all Rus' is supposed to meet the expectations of both the conservative and liberal segments of the electorate, at least until the elections. Protective conservatism in its pure form may again be in demand later, when the idea of transition from a closed access society to a limited one is closed again, and all futurology will run into the domestic arithmometer with a pen.

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This does not negate the importance of including modernism and reformism in strategic planning – with all understanding of the scale of the simulation. Paradoxically, this works even in cargo cult mode: faith in the miracles of straw planes is still more humane than human sacrifice. This is life. It is easy to dream of cruel political maximalism – the faster and stronger it takes off, the better – from abroad, from the position of an external observer. Here, everyone generally understands why progressivism turns out to be moderate and politically correct. When it disappears altogether, the train will not stay in place, but will tear back with redoubled force. In addition, liberal ideas, even in programs far from implementation, really affect the environment and quality of life on the train itself. Sometimes this resembles the plot of a famous painting by Nikolai Yaroshenko: a baby feeds birds from a barred window of a carriage, surrounded by the Madonna, the Apostle and the Magi. The painting is called “Life is Everywhere”.

That stabilizing modernity is all the more important when the ideological and political reverse pulls the stopcock and gets out of control. The element of reaction raises from the bottom that which tomorrow will again turn out to be nothing, therefore they fight for obscurantism here as for life, including against those who started this reaction and stirred up this bottom. After the story with the schoolboy from Novy Urengoy, one can talk at the highest level about the attitude of parents to prisoners and call what is happening bullying - even such signals do not work. Grassroots hysteria rises to the top in the reaction of the vertical itself, right up to the ministries, departments and central channels. The holiday of disobedience is increasingly approaching the very throat of the political leadership.

Another illusion is connected with the assumption that progressivism is being implanted faster than the inertia of conservatism and reaction is being overcome, and that if absolutely necessary, the idea of modernization can be launched into the masses by reorienting the television. In order to know the population's real readiness for change, it is necessary to measure other layers of the collective unconscious using other techniques. Signals of readiness for change do not guarantee readiness as such. It may turn out that work with the consciousness of society is required to be much longer and deeper than can be judged by the verbal reaction in surveys. If archetypes and value systems do not change, progressive educational programs will not achieve much under any circumstances. With the same success, you can teach a person advanced sexual techniques without taking into account his orientation.

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Normal people need to understand why they need all these reforms, apart from the dubious pleasure of living in an era of change once again. The political narcissism that is widespread in our country, including mass narcissism, reacts furiously to criticism, and therefore allows changes only as an improvement of the ideal. We still have a vague sense of a tunnel at the end of the world, but there is no longer even that meaningful drama that distinguished the ideology of modernization of the first edition, in the drafts for Strategy-2020 and especially in the Insor projects. Calls to seriously change something in order to live "even better" do not mobilize well. Only reasonable alarmism encourages serious changes: the understanding that a little more and it will be impossible to live like this at all, not metaphorically, but literally. Everything that is necessary on this matter has already been said - more than once and from the very top. This is the ideological - at the same time rational and moral - impulse, without which any changes always lack ideas and energy. However, the current return to the future stubbornly refuses to see in this very future the imperatives of elementary survival and the risks of failure. The afterburners also prefer to think that their repainted ruins are eternal.

A separate problem is the driving social force of change. This year, the All-Russian Civil Forum, held under the auspices of the Civil Initiatives Committee, was not accidentally devoted to the theme of "Russia of the Future". This is both an accompaniment to new strategies being developed and a recognition of the social essence of modernization. In our case, we cannot rely on the well-known versions of modernization "only from above": we have a different economy of politics and bureaucracy. Therefore, it is not enough to say that modernization for us is a matter of civil society, the activation and assembly of non-governmental initiatives. For us, the formation of civil society is the main matter of modernization - starting with its project. Only in this way is there a chance to ensure at least theoretical irreversibility, when it will no longer be possible to cancel everything from above overnight, once again deciding that the energy superpower will last for our lifetime and there is no need to take risks.

Civil society is the necessary ferment that simultaneously activates reforms and stabilizes society in the face of the threat of upheavals. While the government sees it as alien and a threat, the real threat matures in “their own” and “ours.” So they sit out until cold civil wars, and then until revolutions – thanks to the efforts of their own fighters on the ideological front.

But be that as it may, for now our express is noisily skidding in place, making convulsive jerks in ideology both forward and backward. On a siding.

Alexander Rubtsov - Head of the Center for Research of Ideological Processes

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