The humanities and social science

This article reviews theoretical works of Russian legal scholars on pub­lic law entities and analyses several provisions of the Constitution of the Rus­sian Federation and the Charter of the Kursk region. The author reflects on the rep­resentational functions that public law entities perform in public relations. The article aims to study the terminology and essential characteristics of legal entities in public law. The author considers the widely discussed problem of the juridical person as a legal fiction and explores it proceeding from the methodological assumption that Russian legislation recognizes the legal standing of the juridical person (public law entity). The author performed a comparative semantic analysis of the terminology and used a formal method of legal research revealing the constitutional foundations of the representational functions of public law entities in public relations. Many legal scholars have demonstrated the fallacy of separate terms in public law and have drawn at­tention to the increasing number of arbitrary provisions in public legislation. In their works, they have noted a growing number of fictitious legal construc­tions and relations that complicate the assessment of the legitimacy of the in­dividual’s conduct.

The authors discuss the problem of a comprehensive legal regulation of social relations. This issue is relevant due to the active social policy pursued by the state. This policy aims to develop social institutions and improve the quality of life of Russian citizens. The authors studied the state and coherence of social legislation in Russia and abroad. The correlation and regulatory fea­tures of different legal systems are analysed. Special attention was paid to the level of systematization of social legislation, its accessibility and the feasibility of its implementation. Legal regulation of social relations is considered against the background of other factors and the links between them. The proposed sys­temic approach to studying social relations at various levels of legal regulation allowed the authors to identify a number of problems and suggest ways of solving them. The article substantiates the need to harmonise Russian social legislation, which should include both measures of social support of the popu­lation and the mechanisms of reducing social inequality. It is proposed to adopt a legislative codified act regulating social relations in the Russian Fed­eration and to determine the basic principles and directions of regional social policy.

The article analyses the behaviour of the participants of the world gold market. Special attention is paid to the London gold fixing and its replacement by the London electronic auction in an attempt to establish the benchmark price of gold under the influence of short-term geopolitical impulses. The au­thor puts forward a hypothesis that different impulses of geopolitical process­es, their frequency and the level of manifestation influence differently the dy­namics of the world gold market. These factors determine the movement and distribution of gold reserves in different geographical places, ‘safe havens’, and can lead to an increase the number of gold bars, futures contracts or, on the contrary, to get rid of them. They can determine the fluctuations of the world price of gold. The author substantiates the idea that short-term geopolit­ical disturbances have an impact on the process of revaluation of the precious metal. The second part of the article aims to identify the main regularities of the impact of geopolitical impulses on the behaviour of participants of gold pricing. This aim is achieved by using observation, analogy, comparative and retrospective analysis. The author analyses the behavioural reaction of partic­ipants of the London gold fixing and the London electronic auction to the emergence of new centres of military conflicts and "colour revolutions, as well as the intentions of some world leaders to break the existing military and stra­tegic balance of forces in an attempt to introduce a new world order. The au­thor determines the conditions, which allow participants of the world gold market to become subjects of modern geopolitics.

There is an increasing need for the assessment of urban development rates in the world. In modern Russia, this need is reaffirmed by the transfor­mation of regional economies, the economic acceleration of many major cities, and by the active introduction of strategic management tools (KPI, etc.). The article anal­yses the current indexes and rankings of urban development. The author ex­plored the main methodological approaches to the assessment of the rate of urban development. One of the topical issues of contemporary research on this subject in Russia is an attempt to create comprehensive methods of as­sessing urban de­velopment without taking into account the specifics of urban management and the scale of regional economy. In this regard, the paper pro­vides a critical analy­sis of approaches to urban development indicators, index­es and rankings. The author drew conclusions about the most optimal ap­proaches towards the for­mation and use of data in city management in Russia. The author used gen­eral scientific research methods (logical and structural analysis and the meth­od of generalization), and statistical analysis (grouping, comparison and gen­eralization). The results of the study include recommen­dations for city data management and for decision-making in knowledge man­agement.

The problem of the American Civil War participants’ place in family rela­tions is frequently raised by scholars specializing in the cultural and social history of the conflict. Despite this fact, the dynamics of economic relation­ships between the Federal servicemen on the front and their relatives lacks proper attention. This article aims to define the types of the Union troops’ par­ticipation in the household economy. For this purpose, their letters and diary entries were analyzed in both formal and content-related aspects to find statements concerning the economic well-being of their families. These state­ments were put into the context of a soldier’s or officer’s rank in the family hi­erarchy and their antebellum economic activities. The main results are follow­ing. Firstly, the direct control over the family economics took forms of the real estate purchase and direct instructions concerning family business. It is wor­thy to note that there is a direct correlation between the serviceman’s place in the family and the width of the direct control area. Secondly, many of the farm-owners who joined the army ranks were forced, with some important ex­ceptions, to shift the control over their farms to their wives. Thirdly, the young Union soldiers did not participate in household economy planning. Ra­ther they sent their wages home, gave non-imperative advice and made mo­derate requests.

The article examines the causes and results of mass repressions of Arme­nians in the Ottoman Empire at the end of the XIX century. The connection of the national liberation movement in Western Armenia and Crete was re­vealed. The power methods of diplomacy in European countries were ana­lyzed.

The authors analysed the lists of immigrants to the Pravdinsky district in 1946, which are stored in the State Archive of the Kaliningrad Region. The ar­ticle describes the main features of compiling echelon lists of immigrants and receiving echelons from Russia and Belarus. The authorsstudied the differ­ences in the design of similar documents and the difficulties that arise when extracting information from them. A wide variety of sources available in the archive makes it possible to obtain diverse and informative material for the da­tabase on the settlement of the region by Soviet people during the first years after the Second World War.

The author justifies a conceptual provision that social capital can be com­posed of not only positive but also negative elements. Most researchers, in­cluding economists, sociologists, and psychologists stress the importance of the formation and development of human capital in modern society. However, they focus on the positive content and application. Without rejecting this ap­proach, the author proposes to proceed from the assumption that the inclina­tion and abilities, education, will, value preferences of the individual, i. e. eve­rything that can be included in the personal capital, can be used not only for the benefit of society, social groups but also against it. Negative social ele­ments can damage social connections and relations and lead to desocialisation of the individual. At the same time, the value dominants that characterize the state of society at the moment of its development play an important role. For instance, if selfishness and money as the only conditions for success begin to dominate in society, the available personal capital starts to be used in an anti­social way. The task of sociology, together with other social and human scienc­es, is to identify adverse trends not only in the process of personality for­mation but also in social processes as a whole, in order to timely redirect the creative potential of the individual, his or her social capital and use it for the benefit of society.

The topicality of this pilot study is predetermined by the necessity to op­timize cross-cultural interaction in polyethnic regions by means of revelation of its subjects’ sociological portrait. In this research, the author attempts to experimentally investigate the nature of cross-cultural interaction in master­ing a macro-mediator language in the academic discourse. A sce­nario of the standardized interview has been used as a method of research. The sce­nario features various factors of personality self-actualization during mas­tering macro-mediator language. Among many topics discussed during the inter­views, there were the following ones: “Existential orientation towards the pre­sent or the past / future”, “Aims and means of activity”, “Solidarity with soci­ety as a whole or with a particular group”, “Degree of autonomy / conformism towards cultural-group influence”, “Predominant focus on positive / negative experience”, “Detachment / involvement in the process of cross-cultural inter­actions”. Qualitative differences in the system of values of young representa­tives of the main ethnocultural groups of Crimea, Russians and Crimean Ta­tars, towards mastering the Russian language as a macro-mediator have been defined. Having analysed the data obtained during the interviews, the author described the following aspects: a) attitude to language’s norms and stan­dards, their compliance and preservation; b) culturally defined functionality and the status of the language. The author revealed the correlation of the con­tent of the examined aspects of self-actualization of respondents and their cul­tural and linguistic attitudes. The research demonstrated differences in the types of strategies for mediating cultural and linguistic environment. The identification of similarities / distinctions in the ways of self-actualization of the personality, most widespread in intercultural interaction, allows the au­thor to forecast the pragmatics of the impact of various linguistic and cultural stimuli on the character of civilisational processes in multinational regions.