Russia between West and East: geohistorical experience and contemporary sociocultural context of spatial development
V.N. STRELETSKY1,2
1Institute of Geography, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia
2National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia
Keywords: West and East, historical and cultural geography, sociocultural space, regional and local identity, cultural regionalism
Abstract
Different patterns of historical evolution of Russian civilization area are compared; they are considered in the framework of four historical concepts: “Russia as a part of the global West”: “Russia as a part of the global East (Orient)”; “Russia as a cultural bridge between West and East”; “Russia as an organic Eurasian cultural realm”. Various arguments “pro et contra” are discussed and compared in favour of and against each of those concepts, from the standpoint of historical and cultural geography. It has been concluded that Russia is significantly more a “European” country than a “Eurasian” one. However, Russia has its own civilizational patterns, which greatly distinguish it from Western Europe. These differences are clearly manifested, among other things, in different types of their sociocultural spaces. In Western Europe, the regionalization of culture occurred as the developed space “densified” and “arranged”; in Russia, mainly as local cultures formed in the process of colonization of new territories and incorporation of foreign ethnic areas into the sociocultural space. In Russia, especially within the ethnocultural mega-core of the country (with a numerically predominant Russian population), the “vertical” polarization of space (differences “urban-rural”, “large city-small town”) is expressed more clearly than its “horizontal” differentiation (differences between cultural areas). Based on the analysis of the data from the All-Russian population censuses, the latest ethnostructural, ethnocultural and ethnoterritorial shifts in the Russian space, characteristic of the Post-Soviet period, are identified. At the end of the 20th - the first decades of the 21st centuries, the population of the majority of the national republics of Russia became “indigenized” (an increase in the share of “titular” nationalities and a decrease in the share of the ethnic Russian population in these republics). At the same time, the ethnic groups of Russia are increasingly “pulled together” into their national republics, concentrated within “their” ethnic territories. The trends in transformation of the sociocultural space indicate that the country is becoming more and more multicultural, which predetermines the demand for multi-vector development in Russia.
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