Today’s independent Russia is a country that has risen anew. It has been obliged to solve, practically from scratch, the question of its place in the world — what unites the people who inhabit it, what kind of relationship these people have with the state and what they expect from it. During Putin's first term, the state did not try to impose its ideology, did not intrude into private life and created conditions for economic growth and new consumer opportunities. Even a series of catastrophes and tragedies in the early 2000s (the Kursk submarine sinking, the Nord-Ost hostage crisis, Beslan...