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Objective: To describe the mental health care system in Russia against the background of rapid social, economic and political change since the late 1980s. Method: Indicators of social stress and deteriorating population mental health and official data on service provision are presented. Results: In the current system of psychiatric care dispensaries take a central position. Key issues of the discussion on mental health care include ways of coping with social stress disorders, strategies to redefine psychiatric rehabilitation in a changed social-economic context and steps towards strengthening social support networks for people with mental illness. Following political abuse of psychiatry, professionals have had to face justified and unjustified accusations, and been faced with a general challenge to their role. Conclusion: Tackling problems of social stress, the integration of mental health care in the general medical care system and the building-up of general hospital in-patient psychiatric units are of strategic importance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to describe some episodes from the life of Konishi Masutaro (1862–1940), a Japanese scholar and psychologist who obtained his theological and psychological education in Russia and who played a role in the development of psychological science in Russia. Masutaro is mostly known as a translator of Lev (Leo) Tolstoy, and the psychological side of his biography is not well studied. Masutaro's life and work in Russia occurred in the context of great political and cultural changes. He was one of the first authors who translated fragments from Eastern philosophy (works by Laozi and Confucius) into the Russian language. Personal and scientific details of the life of this educated scholar are also given in the present paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Societal changes involving power reversal may pose challenges to system justification by a subordinate minority group that had previously held a more privileged position. Derived from originally exploratory qualitative investigation, this paper presents an account of endorsement of justifying the status quo versus the voicing relative deprivation in the context of post-Soviet Estonia. Experiences of alternative societal arrangements in history were actively deployed by (minority ethnic) Estonian Russians to generate temporal comparisons with the past as a cognitive alternative to the present status quo and give voice to experiences of relative deprivation. A struggle for positive social identity was interpreted to motivate Estonian Russians to mobilize the past as a cognitive alternative to delegitimize the status quo. By contrast, Russians were portrayed as invaders, and the Soviet past was represented as unjust by (the majority ethnic) Estonians, whereas the present system was depicted as fair and equitable. Mutually, polemical representations of history and narratives of identity provide the lenses through which the legitimacy of new societal arrangements following the major social change is interpreted. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much has been written to explain the collapse of the former Soviet Union. Little attention, however, has been paid to understanding why post-1991 Russia has maintained stability despite continued economic and political turmoil throughout the 1990s. This paper attempts to answer this question by applying an integrated model of territorial disintegration to examine the political, economic, demographic, and geopolitical changes in the pre-1991 Soviet Union and post-1991 Russia. The integrated model is constructed by synthesizing Goldstone’s demographic-structural model, Skocpol’s and Collins’ geopolitical model, and a modified version of Collins’ argument of the destabilizing potential brought about by rapid market development as three alternative routes to territorial disintegration. It is found that improvement in Russia’s geopolitical condition after 1991 is largely responsible for the decline in disintegrative potential. Slower population growth also rendered the demographic route less disintegrative during the 1990s. More effective taxation and the availability of foreign loans enabled the Russian state to handle its financial crises, thereby curbing the development of destabilizing forces through the dynamics proposed by Collins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses some of the problems created by a rapidly changing interaction between the political and the economic spheres in society. In periods of condensed social change this interaction is profoundly different from customary evolutionary developments. In Russia various political economic concepts during the last century have led to profound shifts in economic mechanisms and structures (first toward a planned economy, later toward a market one). A knowledge of this experience (and the new problems that surface) might be useful if globalisation, environmental issues and the transition to a post-industrial society should lead to periods of condensed socioeconomic change in the West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with combined crises of the 1990s and 2000s in post-Communist Russia and the evolution of a conservative fiscal anti-crisis policy to address them. Against the background of transformation restructuring, external shocks, cyclical downswings, and, sometimes, social unrest, policy makers consistently aimed to foster economic growth, while controlling inflation. Successive crises resulted in a gradual shift of emphasis from transformative institutional change to stability, a choice of self-insurance via the Reserve Fund and Welfare Fund. There is indirect support for our argument in Schularick and Taylor's 'Credit Booms Gone Bust' (2012), which shows a global trend toward safer policies, caused by the severity of the impact of crisis in a modern market economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with a change in self-definition among a group of Siberian Eskimo. Such a change, which has begun over the last generation,may be traced to a concomitant series of conditions which has affected the group. In the years between 1940 and 1955 the Eskimo people living in the small Bering Sea coastal village of Gambell have come into intensive contact of both a personal and impersonal nature with the white world; they have been given opportunities for jobs and new forms of satisfaction of basic wants; they have been subjected to many "stressor agents" of different types; and they have continued to observe and draw reasoned conclusions about conditions which affect their lives. These factors have combined to bring about a change in the function of the mainland with reference to themselves. The mainland no longer supplies only material goods; it now also supplies basic criteria of choice and models for the identification of self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research activities related to social informatics (SI) are expanding, even as community fragmentation, topical dispersion, and methodological diversity continue to increase. Specifically, the different understandings of SI in regional communities have strong impacts, and each has a different history, methodological grounding, and often a different thematic focus. The aim of this article is to connect three selected perspectives on SI—intellectual (regional schools of thought), methodological, and thematic—and introduce a comparative framework for understanding SI that includes all known approaches. Thus, the article draws from a thematic and methodological grounding of research across schools of thought, along with definitions that rely on the extension and intension of the notion of SI. The article is built on a paralogy of views and pluralism typical of postmodern science. Because SI is forced to continually reform its research focus, due to the rapid development of information and communication technology, social changes and ideologies that surround computerization and informatization, the presented perspective maintains a high degree of flexibility, without the need to constantly redefine the boundaries, as is typical in modern science. This approach may support further developments in promoting and understanding SI worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rising global prices for agricultural commodities have led to the inflow of capital to rural economies and to transfers of land ownership to new agricultural operators (NAOs) in developing and post‐Soviet countries. How capital inflows affect rural communities is often explained with the variable of institutional strength, an explanation aligned with the good governance approach to economic development: Capital inflows have positive developmental effects, if strong domestic institutions vet land deals and regulate NAOs. Contra the focus on institutional parameters as exogenous variables, this article highlights the role of political projects in shaping local outcomes and driving institutional change. Evolving political priorities are important to understand domestic rural transformations because they lead to interventions that privilege some actors as agents of change, while others are sidelined—hence transforming local economies. This theoretical suggestion is based on a study of Russia's rural transformation that followed a significant influx of capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At present, culture is one of the most important factors in the scientific, technological, and, subsequently, economic development of national economies. Culture encompasses more than just extensive opportunities for exchanges and collaboration between countries - it catalyzes the formation of new opportunities for cultural synthesis that can change its creative potential and forms of engagement in regional and transnational collaboration. The attitude towards national culture as a phenomenon of which aspects can be reconceived and reformulated in terms of international collaboration as aspects of politics, economy and culture opens up both new potential for its mobility, and also its transformative creative power. In this context, discourses of collaboration between agents serve not only as factors for the organization of a collaborative sociocultural environment, but also as prerequisites for a cultural and creative hybridity, which is actively formed in environments where cultural boundaries are less pronounced. Through a new public diplomacy, studying the cultural prospects of relations between the Republic of Korea and Russia allows us to discuss the concept that forms of cultural synthesis that arise in the course of development of long-term humanitarian exchanges (educational, scientific, and others) provide the foundation for us to address the prospects of South Korean-Russian relations from the new angle of cultural hybridity in the 21st century. The buildup of culture at the hands of representatives of Russian and Korean culture produces a uniquely creative experiment in cultural collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attempt to see what lessons can be drawn from Russian experience for a better understanding of social change in general, and in particular for the elaboration of strategies and policies of social transformations. In contrast to the growing individualism of Western approaches, Russian thinking tends to view society as a product and at the same time as an indispensable condition of human existence. Human potentialities and society constantly co-evolve. The first specific feature of Russia is well known. Society in Russia has historically been much less open than in most other countries. Moreover, there exists a tremendous inertia in society; social change has always had to move great masses and overcome long distances. Accordingly, Russia often lagged behind in the creation of social institutions, which more intensive development patterns forced on Western European societies at an earlier stage. A very prominent and important feature of Russia is that, traditionally, political power has never been seriously restrained by existing social and legal institutions, by set divisions of functions and responsibilities and so on. When Western societies were already far advanced into a flexible, democratic pattern of development, Russia still remained for a long time a rigid survival-oriented society. This has led to social structures, power relationships, attitudes and mentalities that will undoubtedly continue to influence future developments in Russia for a long time to come.

Two sets of Russian messianisms, religious and revolutionary, have many similar, if not identical, characteristics, and both have immensely contributed to the dominant cultural values in the Soviet Union today. In doctrine and in structure, the revolutionary movements were profoundly influenced by the religious messianism and also consistently exhibited an impressive number of undeniably religious characteristics. Both sets served very important functions in the social change surrounding the events of 1917. Paradoxically, then, the new rulership after the November 1917 coup-d'etat did not need Karl Marx or any other Western ideologist to convince their subjects of the messianic religion-like quality of monism and collectivism leading to the inevitable salvation of the millennium through twain cosmogony and other eschatological means. The Russian cultural heritage was much more congenial and, for the purpose of legitimizing the not-so-new system, vastly superior than anything Rousseau, Saint-Simon, Comte or Marx could offer. It appears then that the non-Russian Communist-ruled nations in Eastern Europe (and perhaps China) are rejecting precisely the Russian cultural heritage represented in the messianisms when they are rebelling against the Russian domination in their own cultures (or countries). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]