Publications

"Zholkovsky’s work—vast in scope and eclectic in methodology—has long been humanizing semiotics in both the Russian and American academy, giving it a face, a sense of humor, a stake in the real worlds we live by, but never losing its structuralist bedrock. The essays collected here, which range from Pushkin to Fyodor Karamazov, Okudzhava and Sedakova, from Peter the Great’s scandals abroad to Russian literary theory and filmmaking at home, are a goldmine by leading Slavists in North America, Europe, and Russia. A huge book of brilliant nuggets, it lights up the contours of our field today while paying perfect vignette-like tribute to Alik’s long non-conformist career, as fascinating and inscrutably flexible as it was often perilous.” (By Caryl Emerson). *** “This book is a wonderful gift not only for the 'jubilee celebrant' (for AZ it is impossible to imagine this phrase without quotes), but for all of us. The variety of topics, genres and authors might seem surprising were it not for the fact that this variety reflects the character of the book’s addressee. Its content, better than any manifesto or theoretical treatise, brings us good news: that a lack of intellectual inhibition, an unrestricted field of vision, and an enthusiasm that does not cloy are all so becoming to scholarship that, in essence, has as its sole palpable subject the infinity of creative choices. I have always liked Mayakovsky’s neologism: 'Do not jubilee!' (He himself, though, was very much concerned with his own anniversaries.) A / Z is completely devoid of the sedate smoothness of octogenaric jubilees, but it has a lot of panache and a spirit of intellectual adventure, and most importantly, fun. In this, the book bears a striking resemblance to its addressee.” (By Boris Gasparov).

The end of socialism in the Soviet Union and its satellite states ushered in a new era of choice. Yet the idea that people are really free to live as they choose turns out to be problematic.  Personal choice is limited by a range of factors such as a person’s economic situation, class, age, government policies and social expectations, especially regarding  gender roles. Furthermore, the notion of free choice is a crucial feature of capitalist ideology, and can be manipulated in the interests of the market. This edited collection explores the complexity of choice in Russia and Ukraine. The contributors explore how the new choices available to people after the collapse of the Soviet Union have interacted with and influenced gender identities and gender, and how choice has become one of the driving forces of class-formation in countries which were, in the Soviet era, supposedly classless.

The book will of interest to students and scholars across a range of subjects including gender and sexualities studies, history, sociology and political science.

This is an advanced guide to optimal stopping and control, focusing on advanced Monte Carlo simulation and its application to finance. Written for quantitative finance practitioners and researchers in academia, the book looks at the classical simulation based algorithms before introducing some of the new, cutting edge approaches under development.

The Caucasus is the place with the greatest linguistic variation in Europe. The present volume explores this variation within the tense, aspect, mood, and evidentiality systems in the languages of the North-East Caucasian (or Nakh-Daghestanian) family. The papers of the volume cover the most challenging and typologically interesting features such as aspect and the complicated interaction of aspectual oppositions expressed by stem allomorphy and inflectional paradigms, grammaticalized evidentiality and mirativity, and the semantics of rare verbal categories such as the deliberative (‘May I go?’), the noncurative (‘Let him go, I don’t care’), different types of habituals (gnomic, qualitative, non-generic), and perfective tenses (aorist, perfect, resultative). The book offers an overview of these features in order to gain a broader picture of the verbal semantics covering the whole North-East Caucasian family. At the same time it provides in-depth studies of the most fascinating phenomena.

This book discusses smart, agile software development methods and their applications for enterprise crisis management, presenting a systematic approach that promotes agility and crisis management in software engineering. The key finding is that these crises are caused by both technology-based and human-related factors. Being mission-critical, human-related issues are often neglected. To manage the crises, the book suggests an efficient agile methodology including a set of models, methods, patterns, practices and tools. Together, these make a survival toolkit for large-scale software development in crises. Further, the book analyses lifecycles and methodologies focusing on their impact on the project timeline and budget, and incorporates a set of industry-based patterns, practices and case studies, combining academic concepts and practices of software engineering.

Sustaining a competitive edge in today’s business world requires innovative approaches to product, service, and management systems design and performance. Advances in computing technologies have presented managers with additional challenges as well as further opportunities to enhance their business models.

Software Engineering for Enterprise System Agility: Emerging Research and Opportunities is a collection of innovative research that identifies the critical technological and management factors in ensuring the agility of business systems and investigates process improvement and optimization through software development. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as business architecture, cloud computing, and agility patterns, this publication is ideally designed for business managers, business professionals, software developers, academicians, researchers, and upper-level students interested in current research on strategies for improving the flexibility and agility of businesses and their systems.

This volume arises from the international conference 'Hymns of the First Christian Millennium — Doctrinal, Devotional, and Musical Patterns' held in June 2014 at the Institute of Classical Studies in conjunction with King's College London. The original scope of the conference has been re-scaled to focus particularly on late antique Christian devotion as it manifests itself in hymns; experts on a variety of topics of early Christian hymnody have been invited to boost both specificity and depth of discussion in the proposed volume. The resulting collection of papers covers a range of aspects of literary, social, doctrinal, musicological, and devotional patterns of Christian hymnic texts, their liturgical and pious use in the period of late antiquity.

The volume presents several papers on Mehweb, a one-village language spoken in the central part of Daghestan, a republic of the Russian Federation.

Intended to bridge the gap between the latest methodological developments and cross-cultural research, this interdisciplinary resource presents the latest strategies for analyzing cross-cultural data. Techniques are demonstrated through the use of applications that employ cross-national data sets such as the latest European Social Survey. With an emphasis on the generalized latent variable approach, internationally prominent researchers from a variety of fields explain how the methods work, how to apply them, and how they relate to other methods presented in the book. Syntax and graphical and verbal explanations of the techniques are included. Online resources, available at www.routledge.com/9781138690271, include some of the data sets and syntax commands used in the book.

The Report predicts that the coming five years will witness the five countries keep improving in national innovative competitiveness, with China and Russia maintaining their strong growth momentum, India growing at a moderate rate, and Brazil and South Africa gradually picking up speed and climbing out of the trough. It estimates that the five countries’ national innovative competitiveness will be keeping steady growth by 2030.  The General Reports part presents a comprehensive analysis of the current status and achievements of STI cooperation between China and other BRICS countries and proposes priority areas of BRICS STI cooperation to provide valuable decision inputs for the BRICS countries to accelerate the improvement of their national innovative competitiveness. The Country Reports part respectively analyzes and makes predictions on the national innovative competitiveness of the BRICS countries based on a survey of their STI development and STI cooperation within the BRICS framework. The Thematic Reports part focuses on four thematic areas closely related to STI, i.e. digital economy, financial inclusion, energy, and agriculture, and offers detailed analysis of the STI development and potential of the countries in relevant areas, providing additional inputs for a further understanding of the national innovative competitiveness of the BRICS countries.

Since the advent of digitization, the conceptual confusion surrounding the semantic galaxy that comprises the media and journalism universes has increased. Journalism across several media platforms provides rapidly expanding content and audience engagement that assist in enhancing the journalistic experience. Exploring Transmedia Journalism in the Digital Age provides emerging research on multimedia journalism across various platforms and formats using digital technologies. While highlighting topics, such as immersive journalism, nonfictional narratives, and design practice, this book explores the theoretical and critical approaches to journalism through the lens of various technologies and media platforms. This book is an important resource for scholars, graduate and undergraduate students, and media professionals seeking current research on media expansion and participatory journalism.

Providing a comprehensive overview of Russia’s foreign policy directions, this handbook brings together an international team of scholars to develop a complex treatment of Russia’s foreign policy. The chapters draw from numerous theoretical traditions by incorporating ideas of domestic institutions, considerations of national security and international recognition as sources of the nation’s foreign policy. Covering critically important subjects such as Russia’s military interventions in Ukraine and Syria, the handbook is divided into four key parts:

Part I explores the social and material conditions in which Russia’s foreign policy is formed and implemented.

Part II investigates tools and actors that participate in policy making including diplomacy, military, media, and others.

Part III provides an overview of Russia’s directions towards the United States, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Eurasia, and the Artic.

Part IV addresses the issue of Russia’s participation in global governance and multiple international organizations, as well as the Kremlin’s efforts to build new organizations and formats that suit Russia’s objectives.

The Routledge Handbook of Russian Foreign Policy is an invaluable resource to students and scholars of Russian Politics and International Relations, as well as World Politics more generally.

What is first philosophy today? In Unity and Aspect, the questioning begins with a new (old) approach to metaphysics: being is implied; it is implied in everything that is; it is an implication. But then, the history of philosophy must be rethought completely—for being implies unity, and time, and the other of time, namely, aspect. The effect on the self and on self-understanding is radical: we can no longer be thought as human beings; rather, reaching back to the ancient Greek name for us (phos), Haas seeks to rearticulate us as illuminating, as illuminating ourselves and others, and as implicated in our illuminations. Unity and Aspect then, provokes us to problematize words and deeds, thoughts and things—and this means reconsidering our assumptions about history and survival, meaning and universality, sensibility and intimacy, knowledge and intentionality, action and improvisation, language and truth. And if Haas suspends the privilege enjoyed by our traditional philosophical concepts, this has implications for fields as diverse as ontology and phenomenology, ethics and aesthetics, education and linguistics, law and politics.

For the first time after D. H. Müller’s pioneering studies of the 1900s, a large body of folklore texts in Soqotri becomes available to the Semitological scholarship. The language is spoken by ca. 100.000 people inhabiting the island Soqotra (Gulf of Aden, Yemen). Soqotri is among the most archaic Semitic languages spoken today, whereas the oral literature of the islanders is a mine of deeply original motifs and plots. Texts appear in transcription, English and Arabic translations, and an Arabic-based native script. Philological annotations deal with grammatical, lexical and literary features, as well as realia. The Glossary accumulates all words attested in the volume. The Plates provide a glimpse into the fascinating landscapes of the island and the traditional lifestyle of its inhabitants.

Opening ceremonies for new manufacturing plants are commonplace and yet, they are surprisingly under-documented. Although these ceremonies may, at first glance, appear to simply serve as celebrations to mark the successful completion of an industrial project, they are based on symbolic actions, and usually very well planned and executed. Consequently, their underlying meaning is more complex. A study of the opening ceremonies of 56 manufacturing facilities in Russia by foreign multinationals shows that opening ceremonies also serve to demonstrate mutual acceptance of the differing motives of both the foreign investors and the local authorities for building the plant. The analysis points to recommendations regarding the timing and design of the ceremonies, as well as participants’ behavior, that can ensure that such events contribute to the attainment of organizational goals.

This article investigates the role of boards in founder-managed firms with concentrated ownership in emerging markets. The literature frequently suggests that in this type of companies, boards have little influence on the corporate decision making. The article conducts a case study of AFK Sistema—a large Russian founder-managed firm with concentrated ownership. We observe that, contrary to the expectations, in this company, the founder provided real authority to the board, at the same time focusing on recruiting independent (mainly foreign) members. Based on this case, we argue that selectively empowering boards in this type of ownership setting could be beneficial for the firm: Selective empowerment is a source of intrinsic motivationfor the independent board members, making them proactively search for new projects and assist in their implementation on behalf of the firm. As a result, the company can overcome a number of important barriers in its development.

The effect of an interplay between electrostatic and excluded volume interactions on the conformational behavior of a dipolar chain has been studied theoretically and by means of molecular dynamics simulations. Every monomer unit of the dipolar chain comprises a dipole formed by a charged group of the chain and an oppositely charged counterion. The counterion is assumed to freelymove around the chain but keeping the distance between oppositely charged ions (the dipole length) fixed. The novelty of the developed mean-field theory is that variations of the dipole parameters (the dipole length and the counterion size) have been accounted for in both electrostatic and excluded volume contributions to the total free energy of the dipolar chain. It has been shown that conformational transitions between swollen and collapsed states of the chain can be induced by fine-tuning the balance between electrostatic and excluded volume interactions. In particular, in lowpolar media not only globule but also extended coil conformations can be realized even under strong electrostatic attraction. The results ofMD simulations of a dipolar chain with variable dipolar length support theoretical conclusions.

We consider interior and exterior initial boundary value problems for the three-dimensional wave (d’Alembert) equation. First, we reduce a given problem to an equivalent operator equation with respect to unknown sources defined only at the boundary of the original domain. In doing so, the Huygens’ principle enables us to obtain the operator equation in a form that involves only finite and non-increasing pre-history of the solution in time. Next, we discretize the resulting boundary equation and solve it efficiently by the method of  difference  potentials  (MDP).  The  overall  numerical  algorithm  handles  boundaries  of general shape using regular structured grids with no deterioration of accuracy. For long simulation times it offers sub-linear complexity with respect to the grid dimension, i.e., is asymptotically cheaper than the cost of a typical explicit scheme. In addition, our algorithm allows one to share the computational cost between multiple similar problems. On multi- processor  (multi-core)  platforms,  it  benefits  from  what  can  be  considered  an  effective parallelization in time.

The purpose of this project is to develop a reliable and valid field survey research instrument to assess national cultural cognitive templates of preferred leader behaviour dimensions to facilitate education, development, and training of managerial leaders operating across diverse organisations.

We show that the weighted coloring problem can be solved for {P5,banner}-free graphs and for {P5,dart}-free graphs in polynomial time on the sum of vertex weights.

In this essay, we use the word “processual,” the adjectival form of “process,” to mean “relating to or involving the study of processes rather than discrete events”. Understanding this processual model is critical for readers of this journal because, in many ways, Complexity Theory studies the patterns that emerge as phenomena evolve in a processual world. And, so, in this essay, we want to examine how using the tools of complexity thinking enabled us to recognize how fundamental a processual model is to understanding the globalized world culture now developing. To do so, we shall, first, explain the emerging processual worldview and contrast it to the older mechanical view, then discuss how we used complexity tools to recognize this worldview, and conclude with some comments on the insights that emerged from viewing the world this way.

The effect of health on labor force participation is an established fact. This research hypothesizes the endogeneity of health stemming from the reverse effect, reporting bias and unobserved factors. The relationship between health and labor force participation of elderly Russians is modeled with simultaneous equations using data from World Health Organization Study on Global Ageing and Adult Health, Wave 1 (WHO SAGE, 2007–2010). A strong and non-linear effect of health on labor force participation is confirmed. Unlike for a complex health measure, endogeneity, confirmed by the correlation of unobserved shocks in the system of equations, is found for single-question health measures. The results show that the official retirement age has a moderate effect on labor force participation for women and a weaker or no effect for men. Nevertheless, the health of elderly Russians does not impose strong limitations on the increase of the retirement age.

Clausal complements are generally taken to be free from formal licensing conditions such as the Case Filter. In this paper, I discuss the distributional restriction of čto-clause complements of N to restructuring V-N collocations earlier proposed in Knyazev 2016, where it was explained by a formal licensing requirement for čto-clausess. I present the results of an experimental study that used a factorial definition of the restriction adapted from studies of island effects (see Sprouse et al. 2013). The results provide evidence for the restriction and indirectly support the licensing requirement proposed earlier.

This paper investigates the epistemological import of Johann Friedrich Herbart’s contribution to a post-Kantian theory of knowledge and the mind. The investigation highlights the advantages of Herbart’s pluralism, which promotes a methodologically informed realism with a holistic structure. The paper argues that Herbart’s psychologico-mathematical approach to the mind allows for a new understanding of the subject-object relation in functionalist terms, which overcomes pre-Kantian abstract associationist models. As a function of representational series, the Self is for Herbart only a blank position: it changes continuously, depends upon the dynamics of contents, and dispenses with all substantial substrata. This is one of Herbart’s most notable contributions in the wake of Kant’s critical philosophy. 

In the second quarter of the 20th-century Russian émigré philosopher Georgii Fedotov coined the description of a personality type termed the “Russian European”. He distinguished the creative type of “Russian Europeans” loyal to both Russian and European cultural values from two other negative types: the “autocratic-despot” and “anti-state-nihilist”. In this chapter I look at how this concept was further theorised in works of Vladimir Kantor and Alexei Kara-Murza and relate it to an anti-war message developed in a 2002 Russian film The Cuckoo.

Interpreting The Cuckoo this chapter, in particular, shows how various scenes from the movie overlap with ideas of “dialogism” and help to deconstruct what Mikhail Bakhtin called an “authoritative discourse”. I also explore how concepts like “life knowledge” and “all-unity” (by Semyon Frank) enable us to speak up against war and political violence today.

 

Most research on the use of national identity in marketing focuses on their anticipated and actual effects, while relatively little is known about their prerequisites. Under what conditions do businesses decide when and how to play the national identity card? How do they find and verify information about the population’s national identity attitudes and translate these notions into believable manifestations of everyday nationhood? These questions are particularly hard to answer for post-Soviet countries, with their winding paths of transition prompting frequent changes of mind both on nation-building and the free market economy. In the present study, the author combines her field observation data and insider knowledge of the business environment to reveal the background of national identity-themed advertising in Russia and Belarus. The results show that in both the ex-core and ex-periphery of the former empire businesses implicitly rely on state-transmitted version of nationality as a primary source of information about the population’s attitudes. Businesses see conventional sources of marketing research, such as opinion polls, as much less trustworthy – paradoxically, because pollster organizations supposedly suffer from either censorship or control from the same government. By drawing upon a number of cases from the early 1990s to the present, the study reveals that businesses increasingly rely upon the official representations of national identity when governments become not more but less friendly to the private sector. This dynamics is due to the business owners’ view of themselves as a struggling elite minority contrary to the government following the well established notions of the post-Soviet masses. As a result, vivid images used in advertisements translate the abstract language of nationalist propaganda into specific role models and patterns of everyday nationhood. Thus, the practices of consumption of advertisements and products themselves play a crucial role in creating a post-Soviet version of banal nationalism alongside the open indoctrination.

Presburger arithmetic PrA is the true theory of natural numbers with addition. We study interpretations of PrA in itself. We prove that all one-dimensional self-interpretations are definably isomorphic to the identity self-interpretation. In order to prove the results we show that all linear orders that are interpretable in (N,+) are scattered orders with the finite Hausdorff rank and that the ranks are bounded in terms of the dimension of the respective interpretations. From our result about self-interpretations of PrA it follows that PrA isn’t one-dimensionally interpretable in any of its finite subtheories. We note that the latter was conjectured by A. Visser.

The chapter examines the ideology, goals and instruments of the soviet, post-soviet and current family policy in Russia, and  discuses the principal ways what's to be done to improve the performance of the demographic and family policy in response to the social and demographic challenges of the 21st century.

Family policy in contemporary Russia has inherited many of the policy objectives and instruments of the former Soviet Union, while also preserving certain archaic aspects of pre-Soviet Russian family policy. Indeed, because Russian family policy has historically been contradictory in both its ideological underpinnings and its demographic and social consequences—often mythologising past social and demographic realities—post-Soviet family policy in Russia has no clear cementing ideology and is woven together from poorly structured and disjointed elements.

 

The paper describes the morphology of the verb in Mehweb, a Dargwa lect of central Daghestan, Russia. The description is partly based on previous research (Magometov 1986, Sumbatova unpublished) and partly on the field data the author has been collecting from 2009 to the present. Mostly, formal morphology of synthetic verb forms and complex verbs are discussed.

This chapter looks into two paradoxes of the post-Soviet Russian gender order and post-Soviet

Russian masculinities. The first paradox is a large-scale, well documented structural

contradiction which has persisted throughout the entire post-Soviet period of Russian history:

despite the fact that military service remains a constitutional duty of male citizens in Russia, only

a minority of men in the draft pool end up serving in the armed forces. The second paradox,

commonly known but underexplored, relates to the symbolic dimensions of gender relations in

Russia. I addressed this issue in my relatively small-scale qualitative research project on

contemporary Russian masculinities: I found that despite harsh criticism of the contemporary

Russian army and personal unwillingness to serve in the military, only a small number of the

research participants expressed consistent antimilitary sentiments and/or considered military

service as unnecessary and pointless. My research also showed that the military and militarism

remain a crucially important gendered terrain on which Russian masculinities are contested and

achieved. This is evident even in the context of a severe crisis of the national military, and even

for men who have no experience of military service.

We construct a mininal Lefschetz decomposition of the bounded derived category of coherent sheaves on the isotropic Grassmannian $\IGr(3,7)$. Moreover, we show that $\IGr(3, 7)$ admits a full exceptional collection consisting of equivariant vector bundles.

After inspections by Public Prosecutor’s Office in 2017, the question of lawfulness of compulsory learning of republican languages at school received widespread сoverage. This article addresses the question of whether Russian republics have the right to establish a duty to learn the state language of the republic in schools. The right of republics to establish their own state language, stipulated by the provisions of the Russian Constitution, federal legislation, and the national-territorial principle of the formation of republics in Russia, presupposes the republic’s ability to establish the compulsory study of its language in the state and municipal schools on its territory. Since 2007, this right has been formally blocked by the Federal State Educational Standards (FSES) approved by the Russian Ministry of Education and Science. The de facto prohibition of compulsory language learning significantly limits the republics in the full realization of the right to establish their state language.

This article aims to add to the exiting poststructuralism literature on Russian sovereignty two more dimensions. In the first part of the article we show the evolution of the symbolic representations of sovereignty in speeches of three Russian presidents and make their comparative analysis. The second part of the article highlights issues of “blame” and “moral duty” and to what degree they enable Russian elites to authoritatively claim to be the agent of its people. Analysis of key metaphors of Russian sovereignty is also exploring whether symbolic representations of sovereignty could be considered a Russian version of “state simulacrum”. Based on inductive approach this research explores sovereignty as a discursive practice narrated as part of official political discourse of Russian Federation. We seek to answer who and how is talking about Russian sovereignty, what are symbolic practices and new frames of its articulation. As an empirical base paper uses 1994-2018 Addresses of Russian president to Federal Assembly as well as several other principal text on sovereignty. 

This paper continues to investigate legal corporate governance issues. Over the last decade few topics in corporate law have proven as alluring and as elusive as the connection between information technologies (IT), corporate governance (CG) and corporate law.  The dynamics of the development of modern law are determined by many factors, one of which is the rapid involvement of IT in all spheres of life. Everything in physical life can become a digital sign. We are in the era of successful "small" firms whose business models are built on a combination of software platforms, telecommunications technology and commercial transactions conducted "outside the firm". IT allows them to remotely carry out various business transactions, including corporate actions, providing participation in the governance of the corporation. The term IT covers a large array of electronic vehicles from software to artificial intelligence. Due to technological development, IT has quickly entered corporate governance structures in a large number of corporations. Some scholars argue that artificial intelligence will also be the new reality of corporate life in the very near future. Several questions are raised in connection with this. For example, do current laws need any changes? What are the prerequisites for modern corporate law. There has been a progressive revision of the fundamentals of corporate law over the last few decades, considering that key provisions of corporate law were created during and after the industrial revolution. I explore two paths of legal research in CG and corporate law: using IT for CG procedures, and an adjustment of CG rules for e-corporations. In addition the question is raised whether a virtual corporation has to have a corporate structure similar to the structure of a modern corporation. This new outline of corporate law is a new understanding of current corporate law.

In this paper, a method of virtual simulation of physical processes for early stages of design of onboard electronic means (OEM) has been developed and investigated. The corresponding virtual model is an integrated model that implements the simultaneous interaction of heterogeneous physical processes: electrical, thermal, mechanical, aerodynamic. This interconnection of physical processes allows for the first time to completely display the dynamic physical state of the supporting structure and the electronic components of the circuit located on it in the virtual model. At the same time, the output functional characteristics of OEM in virtual simulation take natural values that cannot be obtained in full-scale tests, because this full-scale tests are carried out separately and alternately. The visual images of the design and electronic components of OEM with superimposed color fields of temperature distribution, deformation or mechanical accelerations obtained with integrated virtual simulation allow on early stages of design to identify the most stressed and therefore dangerous places of possible overloads.

The Europeanization of legal scholarship and legal education facilitates the emergence of comparative legal science as a promising new tool to discover similarities and differences between two or more jurisdictions and their past development. Yet, the specific methodology of such studies is still not clear. Some legal historians hold that comparative legal history does not or should not have its own methodology other than that of comparative law. Others warn against imposing a contemporary agenda and toolbox on legal history. The author of this article aims to clarify this debate by examining the prospect of applying one of the most popular methods of comparative law – the functional method – to the domain of legal history. On the basis of several examples from the European legal past he claims that examining the functions (the social purpose) of legal norms can help legal historians in three ways: first, to determine the objects of comparison and the sources of analysis, despite the variety of verbal shortcuts (the initial stage of research); second, to analyse legal norms from the perspective of solving social problems in the past – to study the 'law in action'; and third, to arrange the results of the research according to meaningful criteria at the final stage.

This article in the form of "reflections" is devoted mainly to the reception of Heidegger in Russia as a thinker of being, a conservative critic of late modernity and a "post"-philosopher. On the one hand, due to French postmodernism influence on late Soviet and post-Soviet philosophy Russia has developed a special interest in Heidegger's deconstruction theory. On the other hand, the reception of Heidegger's criticism of European nihilism, totalitarianism and machine technology as the manifestations of modernity has shaped significantly the account of the "political". The current discussion about recently published "Black notebooks" shows the fact of existence of a separate language of description and analysis in Russian philosophical field.

Comparative legal history is a fashionable new discipline which aims at a better understanding of the law's past by comparing similarities and differences of legal phenomena in two or more jurisdictions beyond the limits of national legal histories. Despite its popularity in Europe, it still lacks comparative projects that cover both Western and Eastern areas of the Continent, not least because the methodology of such comparison requires proper consideration and cannot be simply copied from comparative law or national legal histories. The present article evaluates the applicability of the dominant method of today's comparative law (the functional one) in the domain of the general contract law of the first codifications in the major jurisdictions of Continental Europe (Austria, France, Germany, Russia) during the 'long 19th century'. This subject matter is chosen by way of example as a 'legal cross-road' of legal concepts and models, more susceptible to changes, innovations, borrowings, and closely linked to social needs. In the main part of the article, it is argued that the adaptation of the functional method to the needs of comparison in legal history becomes plausible due to at least two factors. First, comparatists mitigated the rigid assumptions of the 'classical' functionalism of the 20th century (rejecting its privileged status and purely functional perception of law, irrebuttable presumptions of similarity and unification of compared legal systems etc.). Second, many legal historians, like the drafters of the first civil codes in Western and Eastern Europe, also believe that law is more than minimally connected to social problems and manifests itself primarily through its actual application. On the basis of such premises, the author of this article discusses potential benefits and limitations of researching general contract law in the selected jurisdictions with the functional method. At the preparatory (descriptive) stage, it can be useful to assure comparability of contract law in the selected civil codes, to identify omissions in the codified general rules on contracts, and to arrange legal provisions around practically relevant issues. At the stage of analysis, functionalism can be coupled with teleological interpretation of legal norms to enable us to understand better the link between the application of the legal rules, their legal purposes, and the practical social problems serving as tertium comparationis for all the compared jurisdictions. A sketch of such an analysis in the final part of the article allows to conclude that a research with the help of the functional method narrows our perception of law as a cultural phenomenon and breaks the inner doctrinal logic, but in return, it offers a starting point for a much needed dialogue of legal historians with a wider legal community.

A vital aspect of improving governance involves spearheading its strategic dimension and making current policy activities more closely aligned with the goals and objectives of sustainable growth. At the same time, implementation of strategic management is associated with considerable costs for the drafting, cross-cutting coordination and monitoring of strategic planning documents. These costs are often not taken into account. This article aims at showing that the costs of developing strategic plans can be significant. This is confirmed by survey data that allowed for estimating costs of drafting strategic planning documents in Russia

The temporal dynamic characteristics of mood play an important role in various aspects of our lives including our psychological health and well-being. It is assumed that the individuals with high emotional intelligence (EI) are characterized by more positive and stable moods. However, most studies analyze how EI is related to emotional traits or momentary assessments of mood; there are almost no findings on EI relationships with mood dynamics. The present study fills this gap. Two research questions were asked. How mood dynamics characteristics are related to each other and to what extent are they independent? Which aspects of EI are related to particular characteristics of mood dynamics? Method. To collect data on mood dynamics, an experience sampling procedure was implemented. Twenty-six female participants reported their mood for two weeks, three times a day, using the EmoS-18 questionnaire. Their emotional intelligence was measured with the EmIn questionnaire. Mean mood scores calculated across all measurement points were regarded as static characteristics showing a mood background typical for the participant. Also, three dynamic characteristics of mood were calculated, namely variability, instability, and inertia. Results. Mood variability and instability were found to be very closely related to each other, measuring essentially the same construct. Inertia is relatively independent. EI was not related to mean mood scores which contradicts the results of other studies and can be explained by the use of the experience sampling procedure. EI was positively related to the inertia of a positive mood with high arousal and a negative mood with low arousal. In addition, a negative relationship between EI and the instability of tension was found. Most of the correlations were low. Further studies with higher statistical power are needed for more decisive conclusions. However, the results show that experience sampling provides new important insights on the role of EI in mood

The well-known modern dimensional models of affect include two or three dimensions. They are typically based on self-reports using English emotion terms. It remains unclear to what extent these models can be applied to different cultures and languages. The present study is aimed at finding the dimensions underlying the descriptions of emotional states in Russian and suggests a structural model of affect based on these findings. At the first stage, a comprehensive list of Russian nouns denoting emotional states was compiled. It comprised 330 words and was reduced to a list of 56 words. At the second stage, participants rated their emotional states using this list. The exploratory factor analysis yielded three dimensions that underlay participant descriptions of the emotional states – negative affect with low activation, positive affect with high activation, and tension. This model is compared to other structural models of affect and its special features are discussed. This model can be used for developing Russian-based measures for the assessment of mood.

We present a sequent calculus for the Grzegorczyk modal logic Grz allowing cyclic and other non-well-founded proofs and obtain the cut-elimination theorem for it by constructing a continuous cut-elimination mapping acting on these proofs. As an application, we establish the Lyndon interpolation property for the logic Grz proof-theoretically.

This paper presents a novel combinatorial approach for voting rule analysis. Applying reversal symmetry, we introduce a new class of preference profiles and a new representation (bracelet representation). By applying an impartial, anonymous, and neutral culture model for the case of three alternatives, we obtain precise theoretical values for the number of voting situations for the plurality rule, the run-off rule, the Kemeny rule, the Borda rule, and the scoring rules in the extreme case. From enumerative combinatorics, we obtain an information utilization index for these rules. The main results are obtained for the case of three alternatives.

The Russian Constitutional Court (RCC) has over time developed a practice of adopting so-called “positive dismissals” (Pozitivnoe Opredelenie) which complements (but also undermines) the existent formal procedure of only delivering decisions on merits with Rulings (Postanovlenie). The paper explores the uses of this peculiar practice. I show that Positive Dismissals are used by the Court to overcome the rigidity of the formal procedure where this is necessary for reasons of intraorganizational or political expediency. To do that I construct and analyze quantitatively a unique comprehensive dataset of all decisions handed down by the RCC roughly in the first two decades of its existence (1995-2015, N=22334). I show that “positive dismissals” are used whenever the case is deemed too important to be simply dismissed (for example, if it is submitted by a powerful petitioner), or when the Court cannot dismiss a case but wants to keep low profile to avoid political risks (for example, with the politically salient cases during election years).

We prove that the family of all connected n-dimensional real Lie groups is uniformly Jordan for every n. This  implies that all algebraic groups (not  necessarily affine) over fields of cha\-racte\-ristic zero and some transformation groups of complex spaces and Riemannian manifods are Jordan.

We consider explicit two-level three-point in space finite-difference schemes for solving 1D barotropic gas dynamics equations. The schemes are based on special quasi-gasdynamic and quasi-hydrodynamic regularizations of the system. We linearize the schemes on a constant solution and derive the von Neumann type necessary condition and a CFL type criterion (necessary and sufficient condition) for weak conservativeness in $L^2$ for the corresponding initial-value problem on the whole line. The criterion is essentially narrower than the necessary condition and wider than a sufficient one obtained recently in a particular case; moreover, it corresponds most well to numerical results for the original gas dynamics system.