Civilizational Basis of Russian Modernization

Every country participating in the global modern age contest, has its own unique modernization profile, which is based on the country’s civilizational features. Speed and specifics of every country’s traditional societies evolution into the modern ones and further, are still subject to close analysis with a view to discover efficient methods, reasons, mechanisms, recipes and secrets of “progressive” and “accelerated” modernization development.

Russian modernization determinants are of a special interest because they hold back progressive, sustainable and effective growth. For over three centuries they have been recurring repeatedly, with great persistency and literality, and the modernization processes have been of inorganic, catching-up, tardy, mobilization, relapsing and recurrent nature. Their implementation procedure includes initiation not by society but by government using force. These processes are deeply rooted in Russian civilizational history and culture, as well as character and psychology; they are enormously powerful and no matter how much the government or population want it, they cannot easily “adjust” them.

These features of Russian modernization obstruct the transfer from tradition to modernity, and disable long-term and productive Russian modernization on a Western model, which would result in actual democracy, corruption level decrease, rule of law, and thereupon, in economic, environmental, cultural and technological achievements. Individual reforms and “modernization leaps” initiated “from the top-down”, can only lead to temporary and relative results. Specific version of traditional society based on recurrent waves and de-modernization elements of the largest modernization projects, keeps prevailing. There is “balancing” between the imminence of “catching-up” copying of certain elements from Western modernity, and “national peculiarity” as inability to implement this assimilation, as well as floating influenced by increase of one factor after another without a resulting vector.