This article examines the state of public morality in contemporary Russian society, and the challenges and threats that hinder the revival of traditional moral values ​​in the Russian mentality. The author differentiates and clarifies the concepts of «morality» and «ethics», which until recently were equated by most Russian social scientists, and notes that today a distinction is made between public morality, which is called «ethics», and individual morality. Public morality is characterized by a set of demands on human behavior imposed by society. Individual morality encompasses a set of internal attitudes that are manifested in a person’s behavior. Furthermore, it’s important to distinguish between morality and spirituality – that which is hidden from external view, that which resides within the very spirit of a person, and that which may be barely expressed or expressed almost imperceptibly.

This article analyzes in detail the causes of the devaluation of moral values, the most important of which is the general social degradation that became an integral component of the radical liberal reform process of the late 1990s. It also shows the evolution of this process. In particular, massive advertising, emanating from television screens, fashion magazines, and newspapers, became an important means of instilling social propaganda constructs into citizens’ consciousness and instilling «false» values ​​during the neoliberal reform period. Thus, «elite» goods and services, designed only for the wealth of the «super-rich», were most widely advertised. This promoted the well-known thesis of «consumer society» – that «an individualэs prestige in society is determined not by the quantity and quality of their labor, but solely by their level of material wealth». There was also a clearly deliberate propaganda campaign for «getting rich the easy way», a popular example of which is the MMM ad – «we sit back, and the money keeps coming» – through participation in financial pyramids, dubious investment campaigns, and joint-stock companies.

According to the author, the large-scale moral challenges to Russian civilization were largely based on the priority of a secular-humanistic (focused exclusively on the individual) over a religious-traditionalist (proclaiming the primacy of social solidarity and the symphony of the public and the private) type of civilizational development. One of the directions of attack against Russian civilization from the so-called «collective fervor» today was the disunity of people through social polarization and differentiation, the undermining of moral principles, the inculcation of spirituality, the spread of ethnic separatism, bureaucratization, criminalization, and the commercialization of social relations. The consequence of this – a marked disregard for generally accepted morality, as well as the deliberate infliction of moral harm on others – is currently evident. This justifies the need for Russians to return to traditional spiritual and moral values, which have found their unique, distinctive expression in the spiritual, historical, and cultural development of the multinational people of Russia.

Life («zhizn») as a value category is one of the central concepts in Russian culture, as evidenced by the widespread use of this concept in Russian texts from the 11th to the 19th centuries. The first article explores the main meanings of the concept of «life» in Russian spiritual and political discourse from the 11th to the 17th centuries, presenting and analyzing various interpretations of this concept during this period of Russian history. The study is based on a large corpus of Russian spiritual, historical, literary, artistic, and journalistic works, as well as on official documents and the search engine of the National Corpus of the Russian Language. In addition to the general scientific methodological framework, the main research methods were content analysis and political-textual analysis.

The article uses a large amount of factual material to show that, according to the ideas of people in the 11th–17th centuries, life («zhizn») is the highest value, a gift from God to man as His best creation, where the highest form of life is eternal blissful existence in the Kingdom of God. It is no coincidence that in Old Church Slavonic and Church Slavonic, the concept of «life» had several words for its expression (zhizn, zhitie, zhivot), and the concepts of earthly and heavenly life were separated and often expressed by different words: «zhivot» and «zhitie» often referred to a person’s earthly existence from birth to the end of their days, while «zhizn» often referred to their posthumous existence and eternal bliss in the divine realm.

The purpose of the article is to form the concept of the precariat of fluid modernity by Z. Bauman. Throughout his publication activity, the scientist has characterized the socio-economic prerequisites for the formation of the precariat, its characteristics and formed a mechanism on the basis of which the precariat exists as a relatively self-sufficient actor in the social structure of society at the end of the XX – beginning of the XXI century. is in a fragmented form. Special attention is paid to the criticism of the concept from the point of view of positioning the precariat as a social class, but not a new social strata. Understanding the concept of the precariat of liquid modernity allows us to study the process of influence of the socio-economic changes that occurred at the end of the 20th century in order to better understand the reasons for the emergence of the precariat as a new actor of the social structure in the form in which it exists today, and also opens up the possibility of conducting empirical studies that confirm or refute the concept of the last postmodernist of sociology.

The article is devoted to the study of the current state of Russian urban sociology as a special branch of sociological knowledge. The author identifies the methodological features of urban research conducted by sociologists in the Russian Federation.

The sociological understanding of the city in modern Russian society is characterized by a pronounced applied orientation associated with a general decline in interest in theoretical issues, which was observed already in the 1990s as a result of cardinal and large-scale changes in the social system in our country. Insufficient attention to the national urbanization theory is paid, and this circumstance, according to the author, is due to the small number of theoretical and methodological studies of Russian urban sociology.

Today, there is a diversification of research directions in Russian urban sociology, manifested in the consideration of city in the context of various social processes determining the specifics of modern societies (globalization, digitalization, etc.). At the same time, many sociological urban studies conducted by Russian scientists in recent years are highly specialized, which leads to fragmentation of the Russian urban sociology subject field.

The author also points out that one of the trends in the sociological urban study by modern Russian thinkers is interdisciplinarity, which, on the one hand, expands the sociologists’ cognitive capabilities, and on the other hand, causes the blurring of disciplinary boundaries between Russian urban sociology and other sciences.

It is concluded that the modern period in the history of Russian urban sociology is characterized by the presence of crisis phenomena in its development, which is primarily due to the lack of a unified theoretical framework for the sociological development of urban issues in Russia. At the same time, this state of affairs, according to the author, allows to outline areas for future urban research in the context of Russian sociology. In conclusion, the prospects for the development of Russian urban sociology are determined.

This article attempts to reconstruct the normative types of social time traced in the Russian philosophical and sociological traditions. The corpus was formed according to two criteria: the explicit temporal problematic and the implicit temporality of social-theoretical works. Reconstruction is understood here as an analytical model, rather than the retrospective construction of a «school» or canon. It is shown that the rejection of temporal monism and a multi-layered understanding of time form a common thread throughout the corpus, extending from the natural-scientific projects of the early 20th century to the late Soviet sociology of biography and émigré sociological thought. Based on this material, five main levels of temporal normativity are identified: cosmo-noospheric, historical-eschatological, civilizational-cyclical, resource-based, and biographical. Each of these levels defines its own criterion of timeliness and its own form of obligation. P.A. Sorokin's methodological concept of social time and Georges Gurvitch’s models, which intersect all levels. Their analytical value lies in their ability to describe conflicts and mutual absorptions between levels – that is, situations where biographical time is reduced to planned time, eschatological time breaks through institutional time, and cyclical time restructures the structural positions of the world-system. Challenges for testing the model were identified empirically – using data from current sociological surveys on planning horizons, reproductive expectations, and the age structure of Russian society. These surveys reveal a desynchronization of temporal levels in contemporary Russian everyday life. It is concluded that the concept of the normativity of time can become a rallying point for the sociology of time, overcoming its disintegration into the philosophy of duration, budget statistics, and the psychology of timeliness.

This article is an understanding of the specifics of the implementation of youth policy in the Russian Federation, after the constitutional reform of 2020 and the adoption of the Federal Law of the Russian Federation N 489-FZ of December 25, 2020 «On youth policy in the Russian Federation». The author of the article draws attention to the essence and content of the concepts of «youth policy», «youth» in science, as well as in modern Russian legislation. Analyzes the basic concepts and content of existing regulatory legal acts in the field of youth policy in the Russian Federation, pointing out a certain kind of conflict in the legal sphere of its regulation. Then he proceeds to the analysis of youth policy models in the Russian Federation: three models of state youth policy in the Russian Federation (federal, regional and municipal) and four models of public youth policy (confessional youth policy, youth policy of political parties and movements, youth policy of public associations and organizations, youth policy of large economic associations (corporations)).

The article proposes an alternative interpretation of the revolutionary subject that goes beyond traditional class-based and ideological explanations. It argues that the key factor in the formation of revolutionary potential is a state of social disintegration resulting from large-scale and institutionally unmanaged migration processes. The revolutionary subject is conceptualized not as a stable social group, but as a product of a transitional condition characterized by the loss of previous social ties and insufficient integration into new social structures.

The theoretical and methodological framework is based on the concepts of anomie developed by Emile Durkheim, social mobility by Pitirim Sorokin, and crowd psychology by Gustave Le Bon. Their synthesis allows migration to be interpreted as a fundamental mechanism of social transformation.

The empirical analysis includes historical cases such as Ancient Rome as an early model of a demographically open city, revolutionary processes in France and the Russian Empire, as well as institutional practices in the USSR, Israel and China as models of migration management.

The study concludes that revolutions emerge under conditions of mismatch between the scale of population movement and the capacity of society to ensure institutional integration. Revolutionary potential increases proportionally with the number of individuals experiencing social «placelessness». The findings provide a new perspective on both historical revolutions and contemporary challenges related to global migration and urbanization.

Research on the impact of international relations on educational migration is relevant today. The subject is closely connected to contemporary geopolitical transformations. The aim of this study is to identify the features of educational migration to Russia, as well as to assess the impact of international relations on this process. The theoretical and methodological framework of the study are based on the scholarly works of Russian and foreign researchers. A systematic approach is adopted to the study and combined with general scientific and specialized methods, including the analysis of academic articles, monographs, legal acts, statistical data, as well as comparison and synthesis. The author has identified the main factors that influence the scale and flows of educational migration. Moreover, the factor of international relations is particularly emphasized. The study has revealed that, despite the tense geopolitical situation in the world and the complexity of Russia’s relations with hostile states, the flow of educational migrants to Russia is growing every year. This became possible due to the development of educational cooperation with the CIS countries (Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan) and with non-CIS countries (China, India). The results of this study may be of interest to government agencies and the academic community, particularly to those involved in regulating educational migration and improving the higher education in Russia.

The relevance of studying the «ideal portrait of the head of a lawyer’s office» is determined by the requirements for the professional and personal qualities of a lawyer, which are established by Russian legislation in the Federal Law «On Advocacy and Advocacy in the Russian Federation». An analysis of the results of scientific research conducted in recent years has revealed a number of requirements for the personal and business qualities of successful lawyers. The scientific literature «reveals the personality qualities of a modern lawyer that contribute to his successful professional activity in the context of the informatization of the Russian legal profession. These are interest (in the chosen field of activity), morality, communication skills, punctuality, and stress tolerance». But at the same time, an urgent methodological issue remains unresolved about ways to identify and measure the qualities of real employees, candidates for positions of lawyers. We have developed a method for identifying the personal qualities of the head of the law office, which correspond to the characteristics obtained as a result of scientific research by Ph.D. P.E. Korotkova and other scientists; ways and methods of verifying the identified requirements are shown; an applied empirical model of the «ideal portrait of the head of the law office» has been developed. Research has shown that the ideal portrait of the head of a lawyer’s office contains its own unique features.

Platform employment, which has gained significant traction in the context of society’s digital transformation, represents a complex socio-economic phenomenon. On one hand, it brings to the forefront historically rooted forms of informal, contract, and casual labor; on the other hand, it acquires qualitatively new features through technological platforms that act as intermediaries. This study focuses on the central paradox of this phenomenon: while being an institutionalized form of precarity, platform employment demonstrates a high level of subjective satisfaction among its workers.

This paradox is revealed through the analysis of a fundamental contradiction: digital platforms do not create fundamentally new labor issues but rather reinterpret and exacerbate traditional labor market imbalances (information asymmetry, competition, economic instability), masking them under the rhetoric of freedom, flexibility, and entrepreneurship. The methodological foundation of this work is a qualitative content analysis of a large volume of user reviews collected from open internet platforms. This allows for a shift from abstract models to empirically grounded typologies of key actors.

Algorithms, being the technological core and key advantage of platforms, simultaneously act as the main source of new forms of dependence and alienation. They do not so much solve the old problems of labor relations as translate them into the plane of individual responsibility and adaptive competence of each participant. Platform employment, therefore, marks not a break, but a profound transformation of the traditional logic of work, where the burden of managing risks and uncertainty is redistributed from institutions (government, corporations) onto the shoulders of an individual who is forced to constantly prove his competitiveness in an algorithmically controlled market.

The article analyses the main trends in the current labour market for graduates of sociology programmes. Based on a review of job vacancies, the demands of the labour market are identified. Training programmes for sociologists at leading Russian universities are examined, and data from publicly available studies on the requirements for sociologist training are reviewed. The article raises the question of balancing academic theoretical disciplines with practical training in conducting empirical research. Today, the demand for specialists holding a sociology degree can be assessed as high. Approximately 10 to 25 per cent of graduates find employment in empirical sociology, sociological research and marketing research. Sociological education is valued in government and municipal service, as well as in managerial positions within commercial organisations. Such professionals are expected to formulate research briefs correctly and evaluate the resulting deliverables. University programmes implement three educational models, defined by varying combinations of theoretical courses and applied disciplines and conventionally designated as follows: a classical academic model characterised by a substantial volume of fundamental theoretical training; an applied professionally oriented model offering early specialisation in fields such as economic sociology, social urban studies and HR analytics; and a research-analytical model with an emphasis on advanced mathematical training.

The article examines consumption as a mechanism for the formation and public validation of the digital identity of contemporary youth. The study analyzes the transformation of youth culture under the conditions of social media expansion, visual platforms, and algorithmically organized digital environments. It is argued that in the digital era consumption no longer performs solely an economic function but increasingly becomes a system of symbolic communication through which individuals convey information about their social status, lifestyle, cultural affiliation, and perceived success. Particular attention is paid to demonstrative consumption, the aestheticization of everyday life, staged well-being, and visual self-presentation practices on social media. The article explores such digital aesthetics as «old money», «quiet luxury», and «clean girl», as well as «fake lifestyle» practices as forms of symbolic identity construction. The influence of platform algorithms on the reproduction of normative models of appearance, behavior, and consumption is also examined. Special attention is devoted to the specifics of Russian youth culture, the adaptation of local models of digital identity, and the role of bloggers and influencers in shaping the contemporary economy of symbolic consumption. The article concludes that under conditions of digital modernity consumption is transformed into a universal language of social communication and one of the key instruments for the production of public identity.