Russian politics modernization: A sociocultural approach

The intent of this paper is to draw attention to some correlations indicating that some aspects of sociocultural differentiation in contemporary Russian society are reactions to the process of its modernization. These aspects are reflections of the contradictions in the society resulting from the clash of sociocultural features that are normally associated with different stages of historical process of social modernization. Social modernization means a transition from traditional society to modern society. Technological changes are at the core of the process of this transition. The politics modernization means a transition from politics of traditional society to politics of modern society.This work is based on the understanding of culture following the lines laid out in the works of L. White, P. Bohannan, A. Montague etc, and defined, loosely, as a system of non-biological regulators of human behavior. Culture adapts human behavior to environment. The adaptation has temporality. The main contradiction arises from the inertness of cultural regulators that fail to keep up with the faster, and ever increasing in speed, processes of technological and social modernization.Just a few generations ago the majority of Russian population was rural, lived in the countryside environment and was engaged in natural-subsistence economy. Their culture corresponded to the low-level technological environment characterized by manual labour. The process of modernization has changed economy and other sides of environment in just a few dozen years, leaving the cultural adaptors far behind. People experience conflict with impacts and challenges of modernization such as market economy, new models of division of labour, changes in gender roles and relations, etc. There are a number of groups with different levels of culture modernization and different reaction to continuation of modernization. We can see culture stratification and contradiction among the groups belong to different periods.