Why do we step on the same rake time and again? Specifics of culture and economics in Russia

Abstract

The paper attempts at a demonstration that specifics of the Russian individual and the Russian society are based not in psychological traits or spatial characteristics of which writers of authority tell us, both Russophiles and Russophobes alike. The cause is different: the Russian prefers to believe that any social or political event, phenomenon, or process can be explained by a single truth (for which they have a different word, Pravda, meaning something like moral truth). This view leads the author to derive such traits of the Russian individual or society as a repeating track of authoritarian historical developments, lack of an independent justice system, the population lacking any will to fight for their civil rights, impossibility of innate technical innovations, a tendency of individuals to uncertainty and, sometimes, to inconsistency in their actions.