The article presents an analysis of the decline of traditional values in the USA and European Union as demonstrated by recent developments in redefinition of marriage and family. The author describes intellectual and political debates between liberal opponents and conservative defenders of traditional values. The main trend in his view remains growing secularization and liberalization of social life leading to further decline of traditional values. The article also focuses on the efforts of Russian diplomacy and the Russian Orthodox Church to defend and promote traditional values within international organizations.

The author examines historical roots of the current debates around the Higher Attestation Commission for Academic Degrees and Titles (the Russian acronym for it is VAK). Suggestions made by scientists and officials are mainly aimed at decentralization of the Russian system of scientific achievements attestation and at attachment of international character to this system. In fact, these suggestions exclude the necessity to retain the VAK in its present form. However the movement forward in this sphere is impossible without understanding of origins and causes that generated the current crisis of the thesis attestation business in Russia.

Based on rich material the article is the first comprehensive history of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) written by the Russian historian. It is a telling case study of the TVA creation in 1933 and its organizational evolution from the New Deal years to the final stage of the World War II. The author traces the central issue of the New Deal’s most dramatic project aimed to expand the governmental control over the economy and natural resources through public power, regional planning and new intellectual ideas for the transformation the New South area. President Roosevelt and the leading personalities in the board of directors of TVA (and among them David E. Lilienthal) had four principal goals. The first was to provide cheap electricity to homes and farms. The second was to provide jobs for unemployed. The third was to save from devastation the large territory of the depressed region in the South. And there was a fourth more ephemeral goal: that through public power, governmental ownership of some other services and publicly-owned distributorship could be created a model for a new and more prosperous form of society. Some contemporaries deeply believed that TVA was a big step to American sort of socialism.

The author considers a new hypothetical trend in the contemporary economic science, i.e. «the human life economics». He emphasizes that within the context of this notion the human life (the HL) is to be considered, in a greater extent, as an economic concept than as a self-sustained and self-sufficient value. The HL may be a subject of taxation and an item of purchase and sale. Due to that many problems of contemporary economic growth including those of rate of growth acceleration, control of migrant numbers, modification of the international currency system etc. may be solved. The author comes to the conclusion that by lapse of time the specific weight of components directly connected with skills of a person will decrease while the specific weight of parameters characterizing a person’s adaptability to the environment (psychological stability, ability to cooperate with a team, supremacy of corporate interests over personal interests, commitment to leaders etc.) will rise. Consequently, the humankind may come up with the universal dissemination of the new behavioral pattern based upon principles of Neo-Darwinism. Finally, the author answers the question: to what extent content of the article complies with the present day realities and to what extent it is a product of his own imagination.

The author considers some tendencies of the Russian political conscience and the Russian public politics degradation. The author thinks that these trends have brought about emergence of peculiar though not unique form of democracy, the will eruption democracy (or democracy of ecstasy, the ecstatic democracy). This type of democracy is so much different from the traditional, Western democracy that one cannot describe it as a deviation from the Western standard. Making of the ecstatic democracy is going on with no resistance. Moreover, this democracy has already spilled beyond the Russian boundaries and begun its triumphal march all over the world. Since the West and the USA in particular still cling to the archaic traditional democracy (though they contribute to making of ecstatic democracy elsewhere, in such countries as Russia and Serbia) Russia is far ahead of the whole world again.

The author asserts that standards of justice are prerequisite for survival of the Russians and normal existence of any society. In some fundamental sense, all the Russians need is the restoration of the very notion of justice. Events of the past 15 years, the miserable results of these events and the current deplorable situation which seems to be hopeless are caused by apostasy from the principle of justice which has been effectively corrupted by the Soviet and post-Soviet elite.