Russian society and Russian state: features of interaction in historical context

The Russian state has a very contradictory path of its historical development, meaning the "zigzag" changes of both statehood and public sentiment. Thus, a fairly long period of the Russian Empire with its absolutist political regime (more than two centuries) in 1917 ended with the collapse of the empire as a bourgeois-capitalist state, and the emergence, through the transitional Provisional Government, of the Soviet state with fundamentally different principles of statehood, namely, on the basis of the communist (socialist) idea. And at the end of the twentieth century. the USSR collapsed, and Russia returned to the bourgeois-capitalist direction of its development, replacing the former autocracy with a republic. This situation, of course, complicates the process of self-identification of Russia and Russians, including taking into account the difference from the collective West, to which Russia sometimes approaches, sometimes cools down. In this context, the article identifies the main trends in the development of Russian statehood in relation to Russian society, taking into account that the change of statehood was largely due to changes in public sentiment. The need for more active research of Russian identity is substantiated, which will probably be needed in the new Russian constitution in the foreseeable future.