- What challenges do exist for culture today as a sphere of management and sphere of influence on the country’s future?
Some people tend to understand culture as a set of arts, as artistic creation, some people understand culture as a line in budget that is formed on the residual principle, for others culture is cultural and character environment that pulls together areas (countries, in particular), withstands entropy, in other words, it restrains collapse.
While analysing big and small territories but ethnically and confessionally motley such as the Balkan Mountains, the Caucasus, and the Russian Volga region you understand: if common culture is lost, it is extremely difficult to keep unity and peace, especially.
Country integrity and its unity are often kept due to some negative factors or the feeling of fear. For example, for Daghestan nomenclature it is terrifying to drop out of Russia because they feel that they would get into a dreadful slaughter.
Unfortunately, Russia doesn’t lack for fear. Russia lacks for sense. Why should we be together? Modern Russia doesn’t know the answer to this question. Europe knows how to answer and we see how countries dropped out of Moscow clutches hand over their sovereignty to Brussels with pleasure.
Russia continues to lose the post-soviet areas. The EU doesn’t have plenty of those who wish to join the project of united and safe Europe.
The historical aim of cultural policy is to form a civil nation. If it doesn’t happen then contradictions and emotions tear the country off! In the cultural sense present Russia can’t integrate a part of its own territory. Any inquiry shows that Russian part of Russia doesn’t consider representatives of the Northern Caucasus to be a part of the nation. And it is not possible to change it by the Criminal Code or Party discipline. It is necessary to change cultural codes. Or rather to turn back to the codes that permanently act in Russia since the time of Moscow coming to the Volga region.
- What key notions do you imply at that?
Challenges that we face make us reflect upon something that is going on with the notorious Russian character.
I take the Romanov dynasty’s myth about Slavonic origin of Russian people sceptically. Russians are not Slavonic. They undoubtedly have a strong eastern and Slavonic stuff. But Russian person is a mixture of three parts: Slavonic part, Turkish and Finno-Ugric ones. So to say, Russians are constructed ethnos. The ethnos that was created by colonisation.
One of the imperatives of our ancestors’ character is intrepidity concerning the strange things. They are able to go to meet the unknown, to challenge the fate, to feel a strong desire to absorb everything new and to imbibe everything outlandish, to go further all the time. And this is a part of the Russian character but not Slavonic one. Russian tribe always made headway to the North, to the East, and further to the Caucasus and the Middle Asia adsorbing new nations and thus constantly changing itself.
At the moment when Russia captured Kazan and Astrakhan it stopped being a mono-ethnic state. Since that time the number of Russians has never exceeded 52% in the total population of the country. And when in 1991 a break-up of the USSR occurred it turned out that there are 82% of Russian people in the suddenly shrunk country. The situation was incredible because Russia had never lived like this!
And at that moment (when the part of Russian people became maximum) we see that Russian people start to have a mass psychosis because they think that they are few and that “migrants are a threat for Russia”, that “Russia is only for Russians!” For so many centuries it was enough Russians in the total number of population to consider themselves to be a state-forming and cementing nation.
It is important to ask ourselves a question: where has this fear come from?
It is a fear of population that “cooled down”. Russia has never known such a fear while Russian people were like a lava-stream when for a little over hundred years they came across the whole Siberia, came to Alaska, then down to California and settled there the first forts. There were merchants among Russians that equipped ships to strengthen trading stations and control over the Pacific Ocean up to the Philippines. These Russian people acted forcefully, bravely and desperately.
These were the times of Russian expansion triumph. But by the XIX century it became clear that such a long transport distance at scarcely populated areas is impossible to hold. It was clear that if the English Navy interfered Russia wouldn’t be able to hold Alaska that’s why it was decided to sell it to American Ally.
The basic destruction in the history of the Russian nation occurred in the middle 1960s of the XX century. At that time without any administrative decisions or some obvious and objective reasons suddenly the population changed the course that lasted for more than five hundred years and moved at diametrically opposite direction – to the homeland. The first ones came from Transcaucasia, in the 1970s the Central Asia joined this process, though there were still some demographic outbursts to the North and Far East. Since the 1980s the rest of the territory started to move implacably. After 1991 everybody can note a clear outline of the so-called “western drift” even without intent peering. Russian trend of five hundred from the center to the periphery appeared to be finished.
- What can serve as a basis of the happened system changes, the witnesses of which we are?
Our Russian contemporary was made for some definite type of activity – an engineer, scientist, officer – he studied the necessary schools, universities, parents’ and school upbringing. This man could have been effective in the above-mentioned niches but in the early 1990s these niches were destroyed, professional activity was devalued. And the Russians were not fit to the activity niches of lower level. And that’s why they became uncompetitive as against non-Russians. But it is not because they are basically like that and, as some affirms, they are separate, lonely and the eastern and southern nations live in diasporas, families. The traditional forms of living together are for more primitive types of activity.
In its time Great Britain experienced the similar situation when all residential population was moved away from the specific market field (small street shops). Why? Because the residential population is a nuclear family that is accustomed to work eight hours a day, after that it closes the shop, is busy with family affairs, goes to the theater, hurries up to parties. But a large Pakistan family, in which there are nine hard-working members of family, comes and opens a twenty-four-hour shop: they can replace each other. It turns out that the traditional family is more competitive.
Something like this happened in Russia. Many Russian people who worked in Transcaucasia and in Central Asia and were special people there heading departments, works, workshops, scientific schools, suddenly sank in the status. They became less well-to-do than a lucky salesman of pomegranates or oranges. The social system fell to the more sure-footed floors – such kinds of activity as trade are not destroyed, after all. In our country it was nearly tabooed kind of activity for 70 years. That is why it is natural that our population cultivated neither skills nor competence. But many things are renewed. The generation that is skillful in trade has grown up among the Russians.
- Is the culture able to “sew together” territories and large communities strengthening state, administrative borders or, on the contrary, acting above them?
Language, faith and tradition as an element of culture let a person, living in different spaces, be himself. But at the same time, the common language, faith and success tradition do not guarantee the integral force – look at the situation in the countries of Arabian world.
The expansion of stronger cultural norms and ideas from the West turned out to be destructive for eastern cultures. It split this cultural space, infected it with its ideas of good and political form. Something similar can happen to Russia. The search of the national idea is an attempt to find a cultural strainer, a supporting frame, to form a backbone for the biggest country body in the world.
We should understand what value totality shared by nations living in our territory makes great people of these nations stifle impulses of separatism for the sake of the unity saving. The cultural policy must give the answer. Are we able for such cultural policy? It’s both yes and no.
- What its functions are?
The leading function of culture is to legalize and to uphold the variety. Culture strives to popularization, plays in diversity, teases consumer, traumatizes the creator and as a result of this common cultural growth occurs. Cultural Revolution is a jump to future. The difficulty of management of this process is that not every opposition is creative and not every one is safe. Let’s not interpret dialectic word for word proclaiming every opposition a development source. In life one opposition can be heuristic and begets a new cultural product or moral phenomena, another opposition can beget a war. And in this sense culture contains prerequisites both to the peace and to the war. And if it is so than who is responsible for the consequences of the Cultural Revolution?
I can hardly imagine cultural managers realizing cultural policy, picking out one or another culture element deliberately, that are able to compose (like with the help of puzzles) one or another picture of peace or war.
Cultural policy about which we are trying to speak out loud doesn’t concern the process of budget recipients reshuffle or the question of the state support of cultural figures or objects volumes. It’s more likely ability to beget transcendent senses, extra-national values and universal mega-projects. As a rule, the latter have the Utopian character: the project of building the Third International and the projects of modern political Islam and western liberalism were like this. But all of them are universalism projects at the same time. It is extremely important for Utopia to have a clear organizational project, for Utopia commissars were able to work on a scale, in other words able to expand their ideas on large territories and people masses.
In the Soviet Union the system of values was built on the quite definite Marxist ontology which is in the response with expectations of millions of people that’s why Soviet Russia influenced the situation in the whole world. There is no such a system of values in the modern Russia, political establishment is ontologically empty and morally flabby that’s why Russian authorities don’t affect the forming of the world agenda. Meanwhile it only learns to assert its interests (often too personal ones). And nothing more. As a result the Russian World shrinks like shagreen leather.
Our civilization space is being finished off from all the sides not because our enemies that are historical competitors of Russia have more strength but because in a cultural sense we are still a frightening “black hole”.
