Social isolation challenge: Russian context

The article considers the main trends and features of the impact of social isolation measures in a global pandemic on the life of modern society. The author notes that the practice of implementing measures of social isolation distinguishes certain social strata, pushing others to the periphery of managerial attention and support; aggravates feelings of social inequality of opportunity, changes space and intensity of individual and social mobility; affects the authority of local and regional government and attitudes towards them. The article describes various aspects and difficulties of individual and social adaptation to the pandemic. The carried out comparative analysis of European and Russian sociocultural context, in which social challenges of the pandemic are manifested, shows their common features: aggravation of problems of social adaptation, different degrees of readiness for it, an asynchronous development of integration processes, an authoritarian-conservative turn in the mass consciousness. The characteristic of the main trends of changes in consciousness and behavior is given, in which the response of Russian society to the challenges of new living conditions and the pandemic reformatting of the social communications space is manifested. The attention to the multidirectional character of adaptation strategies of the population is drawn. The author expresses the opinion that the choice of the optimal variant of society’s adaptation to global environmental, including pandemic, challenges is determined both by the elite’s ability to transform social institutions and by a change in the dominant personality type. An atomized type of individual, focused on the values of early modernity, in whose subconsciousness authoritarian-paternalistic attitudes are preserved, should be replaced by a type of personality, with qualities and abilities corresponding to the imperatives of a complex and dynamically changing modern society.