SLAVS IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to present in general terms the picture of the Slavs at the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century, as a totality of Slavic peoples and cultures, in the light of the crisis in which the modern world, in particular the Slavic, is immersed. In the first part of the work, special attention is paid to cultural, religious, demographic, and other issues, problems of identity of modern Slavs, as well as centrifugal and centripetal processes that determine its present and future. In the second part of the article, the focus is on those processes in the modern world that significantly affect the fate of the Slavs in general and individual Slavic peoples in particular. Most of these processes are characterized by a crisis nature, while ideological, political, economic, educational, cultural, military, and other forms of their manifestation are mainly of a spiritual and eschatological nature. This оpposition of the form and essence of global problems determines the actual confrontation between the dominant worldviews, value systems, archetypes, and cultural codes in the modern world. Without diminishing the importance of national and cultural Slavic identity, as well as scientific, cultural, economic, and any other inter-Slavic cooperation, the author claims that for the Slavs in the modern world it is extremely important to assert and support everything that leads to the spiritual unity of the Slavic peoples as much as possible in the current crisis period at the junction of historical and civilizational eras.