The debate about the concepts of ethics no longer applies solely to an individual’s moral principles and self-knowledge. Ethics has become an engineering problem. The question then arises, what principles should we build in to autonomous machines that operate and make decisions in the real world?

Even today, ages-old folk culture can serve as a basis for collective identity by bringing together people who share this interest and underlying values, as evidenced by Russia's folk heritage movement. According to Rostislav Kononenko, Senior Lecturer at the HSE's Department of General Sociology, and Evgenia Karpova, Master's student at the HSE, the folk heritage movement in Russia is driven by urban intellectuals working to preserve and promote authentic folk culture.

Nationalism in the post-Soviet republics did not arise solely as a result of the economic and political crisis in the Soviet Union. The longstanding policy of the Soviet elite aimed at forming a multinational state is what enabled it. Authorities sought to use ethnic diversity to strengthen the state structure, but the result was exactly the opposite. A study by Andrey Shcherbak, senior research fellow at the HSE’s Laboratory for Comparative Social Research (LCSR)*