According to ex-President of Dagestan Abdulatipov, today's nationalisms in the former Soviet Caucasus seem to nullify traditions, harking back to medieval origins of feudal disintegration, without taking into account the ‘historical, cultural and human experience of inter-ethnic and inter-religious integration’.
Russian fossil fuel producers are investing in new technologies in the conviction that at least until 2050 extractive materials will remain crucial in the world economy. Renewable energies will be used more and more, but in parallel with the oil share, as cars become increasingly popular in Africa and Latin America.
Russian economists insist on the prevalence of ‘locality’: a marketing strategy common to all sovereignisms, but one that works in a very limited way in Russia, being a country that is not exactly advantaged in its agricultural and industrial production capacities. And which - from gastronomy to so many aspects of social development - has historically always assimilated elements from abroad.
Putin is but the latest in a line of varjagi in Russian history, who tried to ‘bring civilisation’ to the lands across the border and around the world. Today, annexation is calculated not so much in square kilometres, but in sums of ‘traditional values’ such as the socialist revolution or the tsarist defence of autocracies might have been in the past.
A report in Novaja Gazeta documents the dramatic situation of the Russian and Ukrainian refugees. Governor Aleksej Smirnov stated that their number exceeds 150,000 people, abandoned by the authorities as the military defence of the area is already problematic.
The Faculty of Philosophy at Moscow’s main university held a forum on current events in Russia where speakers expressed positions that were not obvious and unambiguous. Without openly criticising the country’s power structure, philosophers show that they do not want to give up on the true dimension of the Russian soul, that of openness to all variants of the spirit.