Opening address of editor-in-chief.

One of the urgent issues of modern international relations is the conjugation of integration processes of various levels and depths in the CIS space. Today it is important to consider the situation, taking into acoount that within the CIS there is a Free Trade Zone and the EAEU, which unites five CIS member states, and there is an initiative of the RF President on development of large integration initiatives in the South Asian area. At the end of 2017 — the year of Russia’s presidency in the CIS — President of the Russian Federation V.V. Putin at the informal meeting with the leaders of the CIS countries assured: “Deepening cooperation in various fields within the CIS framework meets the vital interests of the peoples of our countries. Together we’ll work to solve the tasks of social and economic development, strengthening stability and security of our states”. The state and prospects of increasing effectiveness of the Commonwealth of Independent States, the practical impact of its activities for all participating States, strengthening the international position of the Commonwealth — all these issues were discussed in the interview with the “ES” magazine by the Chairman of the Executive Committee — the CIS Executive Secretary Sergey Nikolaevich Lebedev.

President of the Russian Academy of Sciences academician Alexander M. Sergeev is a physicist, specialist in the field of high-temperature plasma, a graduate of the Nizhny Novgorod University, a pupil of the famous Nizhny Novgorod radiophysical school that appeared in the city on the Volga-river in the middle of the last century. His whole scientific life is connected with the RAS Institute of Applied Physics, where he came as a young specialist, and left as a director. Our conversation is about the past and future of the institute, as well as of the entire national science.

About joint work and friendship with Anatoly Alexandrov and Ronald Reagan, Alexander Sergeyev and Sergey Malyshev — in the stories of Valery Chichkanov, written by his grandson Roman.

The article analyzes three periods of the Russian economy: the transformation crisis of 1990–1998, characterized by depth and duration, the period of regenerative economic recovery in 1999–2008, during which a shift into nationalization and monopolization of the economy took place, as well as the period of 2009–2017, called the “lost decade” by the author, the period of deep financial and socio-economic crisis as part of the global world crisis. Possible prospects for development and ways of entrance into high-quality significant socio-economic growth are described.

Changing of a conjuncture index of “Economic strategies” (CIES) for 2017 is considered. The contribution of indicators of supply and demand in CIES is estimated. The analysis of industrial production is carried out.

The paper defines the essence of economic modernization, pinpoints its main types, reveals the causes of objective necessity for modernization of the Russian economy, analyses the key modernization problems and gives he author’s view on the considered issues.

To ensure political and economic stability in Russia the article proposes technology of convergent monitoring and personality programming within the system “bioelectric activity of the brain — psychosemantic subjectivity of the individual — imprinted reflexive matrices — information stimuli” based on its multi-parameter monitoring analysis. The authors study relationships between metastable states of individuals as a bifurcation point in developing intellectual dynamics of behavioral activity and interrelated political, economic, social and other processes that are determined by the influence of coherent-resonant clusters of manifestations having biophysical and information-cognitive nature. As a result of obtaining the forecast, it becomes possible to use both standard measures of preparation for possible extreme manifestations of different degrees of organization, and to implement communicative and other measures to “quench” the amplitude of coherent manifestations of biophysical and information-cognitive nature and to create conditions for their asymmetry in order to “dump” accumulated stresses within identified and unidentified aggregated groups of people due to a series of targeted information impacts, through changing communication mechanisms for obtaining information, etc.

At the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Russian representatives expressed the opinion that “development of artificial intelligence has become the event of 2017 in the world”, that Russia needs to create and to develop an ecosystem for promoting priority technologies (blockchain, quantum technologies, artificial intelligence). And at the Gaidar forum in the beginning of 2018 the RF Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev issued a word of caution that development of artificial intelligence may lead to reassessment of fundamental values, including in connection with reduction of personal space in human activities. The world is on the verge of a new long-term economic cycle — the sixth Kondratieff wave. As its driving forces, the specialists consider development of information and communication technologies, bio- and nanotechnologies and their convergence, the course for “environmental friendliness” of new developments and methods of management in general. According to Kondratieff’s theory of large cycles, which has become classic, social upheavals arise most easily in the period of the onslaught of new economic forces. So far, nobody managed to unequivocally answer the question: what awaits us if we learn to produce large numbers of robots with high intellectual abilities — a catastrophe or a blessing. Therefore, new research is needed to prove their benefit or harm to all of us. In the interview with Alexander Ageev, the editor-in-chief of the “ES” magazine, Professor Valery V. Ovchinnikov, Director of the Global Expertise Center of the Global Industrial Center in the countries of Latin America, Europe and China, Doctor of Economic and Technical Sciences tells about the history of creating microelectronics in our country and its innovation center in Zelenograd, the main problems in development of artificial intelligence, about international projects in this field, the brain drain problem and the inevitable social “accompaniment” of every technological revolution.

The present work focuses on the applications of decentralized network structures with split leadership to various spheres of society. They are denoted herein as hiramas (High-Intensity Research And Management Associations). Special emphasis is placed on the use of hiramas in the organization of nontraditional interdisciplinary creative labs and NGOs in civil society, interactive teaching, and in business. It is stressed that the importance of traditional hierarchical institutions exemplified by universities and academic research institutions is not diminished by the spread of alternative decentralized network structures. Hierarchical institutions are to be held responsible for the consolidation and self-identification of the national scientific community, for furthering the interests of the scientific community in the face of external and internal challenges, and for evaluating the performance of decentralized network structures to select the hiramas that should receive material and ideological support.