The Image of Power in Russia and Its Basic Characteristics

The problem raised in the article lies in the contradiction between the idea of political power reforms in Russia, which are reflected in the Constitution of the Russian Federation, and the actual process of their implementation, which was not realized according to the plan. The democratic ideology borrowed from Western political culture faced unforeseen difficulties of a sociocultural nature. The power structures began to reproduce features common for the Russian tradition, but not peculiar to the democratic idea. The author aims to identify the reasons for the reproduction of traditional Russian schemes and principles of power relations contrary to the original plans of the reformers. The author analyzes the image of power peculiar to the Russian political culture and identifies its basic characteristics: personification, centralization, hierarchy, autocracy and others. It is proved that each political culture has its own image of power which was formed as a result of a long historical process. The theoretical and methodological basis of the research is a set of different approaches: sociocultural, structural and functional, comparative-historical. The sociocultural approach determined the specificity of the theoretical concept of the developing mechanism of attitude to power formation and the essence of the main categories used in it. The structural and functional approach was used to determine the structure-forming elements of the power image; it contributed to their operationalization in the research theoretical concept and empirical verification of the original sociological concepts. The comparative-historical method allowed to substantiate the historical conditionality of the basic characteristics in the mechanism of attitude to power formation and to compare the models of the power image in different cultures. The author analyzes the public opinion obtained from sociological surveys of both national and local character, compares the basic features of the power image characteristic of the Russian and Western political tradition and concludes that they are opposite to each other since they are based on different historically conditioned, cultural, religious, national and ethnic traditions reflected in values and norms. The author proves that attempts to introduce the power image formed in a different cultural tradition into a destroyed society switch on the mechanism of social regeneration that restores aspects of destroyed social relations. The author comes to the conclusion that the political reforms carried out without taking into account the historically formed attitude to power of most of the country's population will not provide a democratic way of Russian society development. The article proves that the dominance of a basic model's particular type of power image (traditional or modern) in the mass consciousness predetermines the vector of sociopolitical changes.

Keywords

Authors

References