Concept of mindset and attempts to localize the range of its values

The author examines the structure of the mentality, its characteristics, the history of study, concepts similar in content - national character, national spirit, soul or spirit of the people. An important place in the work takes the analysis of the reasons for the comprehensive appeal of the national science to the problem of mentality at the end of the 20th century, which were primarily conditioned by the following moments: an important stage in the self-awareness and self-assertion of the nation, the need to study and prevent interethnic conflicts, the country's movement towards democracy, market economy with its reorientation in the mental dichotomy of the West-East. But economic and political reforms, carried out according to the Western patterns, in our conditions began to give unexpected and, very often, negative results, since they did not take into account the specific features of the Russian mentality.