Aspects of Russian society

Foreword Since the beginning of 2011, Sergei Metelev is a Russian member of the Editorial Advisory Board of “European Union Foreign Affairs Journal”. From this time he has acquired some merits that the reflections of the Russian scientific community in and around his region are read throughout the European and world-wide readership of this paper. In addition, this compilation of his articles and papers is of great interest for every non-Russian scholar, showing problems in Russia’s and his personal view, and the ways of thinking of a Russian economic scientist in general. These short contributions focus on immigration, demographic tendencies, criminality, security, corruption, but also on Russian-European economic relations. Of course, other subjects could have been treated as well, but here and now the content had to be limited to these contributions. We are in a time when it should become a common view rather to talk with each other than about each other. Also between Russia and Europe, we need a more intensive dialogue above all on values, on what a state’s tasks are, on the borders between freedoms and collective action, on what democracy means, on the functions of a market and a social net, on the intellectual and de facto approach to what human rights mean, and what is the rule of law. This booklet is an interesting step on this way, and nobody is forced to agree with everything what another says, and vice-versa. But it is good if the contributions hereafter will cause interesting dialogues, at universities, in research, in policy-making, in other publications, in papers, in all kinds of discussion circles. Exactly this is the intention of the publisher, embedded in the yet new tradition of the European space of cultural exchange, research and common life-long learning between the European Union and Russia. November 2012 Hans-Jürgen Zahorka