DOI: https://doi.org/10.33917/es-1.181.2022.146-149

Review of the book by A.S. Galushka, A.K. Niyazmetov, M.O. Okulov “Crystal of Growth: Towards the Russian Economic Miracle”, published in 2021 by Nashe Zavtra CJSC with support of Rostec State Corporation, Siber JSC and RT-Security JSC.

In August 2019, we will celebrate the 85th anniversary from the birth of one of the Soviet science titans, academician Yury Anatolyevich Ovchinnikov, who played a decisive role in development of Russian bioorganic chemistry, physical and chemical biology and biotechnology. And in February, the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry named after M.M. Shemyakin and Y.A. Ovchinnikov, which had been headed by Yury Anatolyevich for 18 years, celebrated its 60th anniversary. These anniversary dates are the reason to look back and to pay tribute to the memory of an amazing person whose deeds and accomplishments were future-oriented.

On March 1, 2018 President of Russia V.V. Putin in his annual address to the Federal Assembly said: “To move forward, to develop dynamically we must expand the space of freedom, strengthen the institutions of democracy, local government, structures of the civil society, courts and be a country open to the world”. However, Russia’s experience of the last quarter of the century shows that in fact, having opened to the world and strengthening democracy, we have only lost resources, dispersed and lost forces and almost lost “the will for daring labor”. The poor people are far away from daring work, they hardly survive with pasta and potatoes, the rich are bogged down in hedonism and consider “this country” only as a source of superprofits, and the power is wrapping the absence of a real working strategy and its own political will in beautiful verbal covers speaking about democracy, a free market and endless long-term and medium-term strategies and programs that have never been implemented. To practice the strategy of opening to the world, when the United States have already declared to all, in point of fact, a trade war, to put it mildly, is short-sighted. Yet no country has succeeded in creating or reviving industry without protecting its own producer. Is a new industrialization possible in such conditions and who can and should become its driving force?

Commercialization of medical assistance means giving up great idea of the people’s health care as a duty of the Russian state to the citizens.

The Russian reality, which has nothing to do with the social system and economic opportunities of the European countries, will inevitably transform the health services market into mechanism of apartheid.

How an one describe today the spiritual state of “personnel” in Russia? Our conception of man is still imbued with faith in the stability of his value matrix. We often hear discussions about “national character”, “Russian mentality”, “conciliarism” and the like, but actually Gorbachev and Yeltsin came – and quickly broke down both the Russian character and the Soviet mentality. It turned out that society is seriously ill and there is no simple and obvious way to overcome the crisis.

Today we are increasingly in favour of the idea that the first to describe the coming catastrophic crisis without encouraging reservations and without distinguishing those right and guilty, was Russian by origin Pitirim Sorokin.