Principles and Main Elements of
Social Strategy
E.Sh. Gontmakher, V.V. Trubin
1. When Russia undertook systemic reforms in the 1990s, it had a quite heavy burden
in the form of the people’s notion, established over decades, that the state has exclusive
responsibility for their fate and their living conditions. The conviction and belief in the duty
and ability of the state to provide for the social welfare of its citizens based on the ideology
and politics of the Soviet period were the dominant psychological tendencies of the majority
of the population. Incentives for personal action and initiative were practically eliminated,
and the people’s natural capacity for caring for themselves, including in social life, was
thwarted. Supremacy of the mass psychology of social dependency and passivity were the
chief factor predetermining the public’s reaction to the reforms begun in Russia and the
nature of the public’s participation in them, and largely predetermining their results and
consequences.