Industrial and trade experience of Great Britain in the 1850s-1860s in the opinion of Russian contemporaries

The article considers the problems of perception of industrial and trade experience of Great Britain in the 1950s-1960s by Russian contemporaries. The authors attempt to analyze the poorly studied aspects of public opinion of Russia and to explore stable stereotypes of perception of Britain and the British by Russians. The authors note that in the years under review the actual needs of reforming the domestic economy formed the task to understand in detail the similar processes observed in the British Isles. At this time the public opinion of Russia considers Great Britain as the modern scientific and technical, industrial and trade power, as the workshop of the world and world fair. At the same time, the Russian society also met the critical opinions of the commercial and industrial activities of Great Britain. The authors suggest that the causes of this phenomenon were rooted in the peculiarities of the national psychology of Russians and their values of non-possessiveness, collectivism, and mutual aid versus the British values, based on the Protestant ethics of personal prosperity. It is worth emphasizing that in the 1850s-1860s negative features of perception did not dominate and did not affect the positive basis of the industrial and trade image of Britain.