| Summary: | The problem of the value consolidation of the Russian nation is that its actual historical basis is the collapse of the USSR and defeat in the Cold War. Therefore, political elites, as inventors of a new Russian tradition, are forced to shift the foundation of the Russian nation to the distant past of the abstract and contradictory thousand-year history of Russia, which in fact has exhausted the explanatory, symbolic and legitimizing potential for modern Russian society. Or to symbolically fund the birth of the Russian nation during the Soviet period, primarily by the victory in the Second World War. The third alternative could be the rejection of everything Soviet in the formation of the identity of the new all-Russian "we", which remained an unsolved problem after the collapse of the USSR. Attempts to solve it in the 1990s through anti-Sovietism and imaginary annexation to some kind of free world proved to be a failure. Russian political elites have never been able to assemble the universal ideological coordinates of the Russian nation as a modern society based on a grand historical narrative. As a result, the place of the central value system is taken by inconsistent rhetoric, based on an equally contradictory configuration of the politics of memory, which plays to lower the level of collective identity. The actual values of the Russian nation consist of a particular ethics of virtues that sets differentiated standards for different social groups; selective legitimation through the highest Soviet achievements, divorced from the context of Soviet values, thanks to which they were realized. All this confirms the absence of a modern historical narrative that political elites could convincingly substantiate through the universal hierarchy of values embedded in it. Accordingly, the foundations of the legitimacy of the political order, consolidating values and new historical traditions of the Russian nation remain situational and local from the point of view of the principles of reproduction of a large (modern) society.
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