Russian Economical Culture: Historical Traditions and Transformations

Abstract

The authors provide generalization and typification of the Russian economic culture historical characteristics, within their three “reevaluations” in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries: capitalist, socialist and “returnable” capitalist. This work is carried out on the basis of an analysis of the traditional features of the cultural and historical development of Russia, their economic significance in the light of the basic concepts of the generic quality of economic culture: attitudes towards labor, private property, wealth and consumption, manifested in adequate phenomena. On this theoretical and methodological basis, the phenomena of traditional (feudal) economic culture are presented “in their pure form” and conceptually systematized, including their pre-Soviet, Soviet and post-Soviet transformations. Taking into account the essential inconsistency of the domestic economic culture at all stages of the historical existence of its qualitative, generic unity as the foundation of species transformations, the conclusion is drawn about the quality of the present transitional state of economic culture as mutational. The study suggests an interdisciplinary methodology of its modern “reformatting” — sorting and new “assembling” of phenomena of all historical types of this culture (preserving the necessary, stopping the “harmful” and forming the new ones) as a prospect of its modernization, adequate to the tasks of sustainable development of Russia in modern conditions.