Dear readers!

We are pleased to present to you the final issue of the current year of the journal "Patria". The fourth issue of the second volume is dedicated to the themes of civilizations and religion. Undoubtedly, religious life has had—and continues to have—a significant influence on the specific character of various civilizations, hence it is logical to consider these themes in conjunction. The importance of this stated problematics for researching traditional values, as well as the challenges these values face today, is also evident.

The issue as a whole, and specifically the "Studies of Civilization" section, opens with the article "Reflection on Western Civilization" by Chen Aieru and Chen Yuchen (Institute of Marxism, Chinese Academy of Governance, China), dedicated to a critical analysis of Western civilization. The authors acknowledge that Western civilization, as one of the many civilizations created by humanity, has played a progressive role in the history of human development, but they emphasize that today the West is facing a crisis. This crisis is analyzed from a Marxist standpoint: the problems of the Western world are interpreted as a result of the fact that in capitalist countries, over time, the negative factors inherent in the capitalist system have begun to dominate. The authors state that modern Western countries must answer the questions "progress or degradation?" and "to be or not to be?" at the level of human civilization, "competition or cooperation?" and "war or peace?" at the level of nation-states, "liberation or dependence?" and "freedom or slavery?" at the individual level. The project of building a community with a shared future for humanity can help in resolving these questions.

Since modern science and technology represent one of the most important dimensions of civilization, the philosophy of technology proves to be a promising direction for reflecting on the specifics of civilization. This theme is explored in the article by Mikhail Bogatov (Saratov State University) "The Time’s Silent Caesura: Technology As a Matter of Thought", written as a reflection on the book by Alexander Mikhailovsky "The Pendulum of Modernity: Discussions on Technology in Germany." The author believes that Mikhailovsky's book raises a number of questions. How do discourses on technology relate to actual technological progress? What are we doing when we criticize the technological achievements of modernity or unconditionally trust them? How does the technology of the early 20th century differ from modern digital technology? What intellectual resources do we have in the modern world, when humanity entrusts its present, future, and past to technology? The article also touches upon the question of the national and political contexts of the philosophy of technology.

Another important part of civilization studies is the study of the history of philosophy, particularly the concepts of thinkers who influenced the formation of the Western type of worldview. In this field lies the English-language article by Thomas Steinbuch (Zhejiang University of Science and Technology, China) "The Creative Will: Kant and Nietzsche on Moral World-Making", which is a comparative study attempting to identify a continuity in the thinking about the will from Kant to Nietzsche and to present an original interpretation of each of their positions regarding the role of the will in creating the world. The article claims that in Kant, the practical laws that the will establishes for itself as arbitrium (choice/will) themselves become laws of synthesis, creating the phenomenal world, so that the moral agency of arbitrium, acting autonomously, creates the world as a world-for-us in the sense that our rational ethical aspirations towards a kingdom of ends are realized. The author indicates that Nietzsche presents the will to power as world-making and again according to the same scheme—as a world-for-us, albeit in a sense different from Kant's. The article also considers Nietzsche's critique of nihilism and the spiritualization of revenge.

The next two studies are combined in the section "Religion and Traditional Values." The first of them is the article "Minorities, Epistemology, Humanities: Who Is to Blame and What Is to Be Done" by Vsevolod Zolotukhin (National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow) and Maria Kaminina (Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow)—dedicated to a critical analysis of those trends in modern Western religion and theology that deviate from traditional Christianity. The article traces the prehistory of the emergence of wokeness in the humanities; the authors distinguish such stages as liberal Protestantism, the epistemological crisis of the first half of the 20th century, the subsequent epistemological relativism and anarchism, and the sexualization of humanities topics after 1968, paying special attention to the figures of Popper, Feyerabend, and Foucault. At the same time, as the authors point out, Western religious organizations and communities adopted the growing agenda of protecting minorities because they were concerned with preserving their already low number of parishioners. This agenda also successfully served as a vaccine against socialist ideas: shifting the struggle for equality from the material sphere to the symbolic sphere minimized the danger of social protest. The article argues that wokeness is one of the natural products of the development of Western culture against the backdrop of its high level of material and technological progress and the epistemological crisis of non-classical science, and emphasizes: for Russian intellectuals, the fact that the described agenda is not transferable to a non-Western context without significant distortion is particularly important, as it instrumentalizes the traumas of specifically Western history. The authors conclude that ideological opposition to wokeness should involve familiarity with the Western history of ideas of the 20th century (since wokeness can only be explained based on it), and argue that an alternative domestic proactive agenda should be opposed to wokeness.

The religious theme, considered through the lens of the history of civilizations, is continued by the article by Aidar Faryakhutdinov (Kazan (Volga Region) Federal University) "On the Question of Periodization of the History of Islam in Japan", which concludes the research section. The author aims to provide an overview of the gradual establishment of Islam in Japan, for which he refers both to original Japanese sources from the studied periods and to the research results of Japanese Islamic scholars. The article identifies four starting points from which one can speak of the beginning of the history of Islam in Japan. The reason for there being more than one starting point is, according to the author, the fact that the history of Islam in Japan has a discontinuous continuity: at each new stage (national isolation, the opening of Japan, World War II, and the financial bubble of the 1980s), Islam had to rebuild its relationship with Japan anew. The author points out that the first contacts between Japan and the Middle East occurred in the 8th century, and around this time Muslims visited the country for trade; later, the Japanese encountered them in China, and during the isolation period, a temporary group of Malay Muslims lived in Nagasaki. In the second half of the 19th century, the first Japanese Muslims appeared in Japan, and research on Islam began; in the 1920s, communities of fleeing Tatars formed in the country. After the war, the Tatars left Japan, and the second wave of migrants occurred during the financial bubble, leading to a rapid increase in the number of Muslims and places of worship in the country.

This issue features for the first time in our journal the section "From the Archives of National Thought." In our view, archival work, especially in the field of Russian intellectual history, is of particular importance for the study of traditional values. Furthermore, the published text itself is directly related both to the general thematic of the journal and to the theme of the issue: it is the article by the Severodvinsk poet, philologist, and journalist Ilya Georgievich Pavlov (1954–1992) "Tyutchev's Mountains and Waters (Myth and Symbol in Tyutchev's Lyrics)," written in 1984. The creative legacy of I. G. Pavlov is not as well known to researchers of late-Soviet intellectual history as the legacy of iconic figures like A. F. Losev, S. S. Averintsev, or V. V. Bibikhin, which is largely due to Pavlov residing in a closed military city, as well as his early death. The publication of the article "Tyutchev's Mountains and Waters..." was prepared from a typescript from the archive of the poet's late mother. The version of the text presented to the readers was sent by I. G. Pavlov to the journal "Voprosy Literatury" (Questions of Literature), where, however, it was not accepted during Soviet times due to its religious content. The fact that we can now publish this article is particularly valuable and historically just. In the introductory text "I. G. Pavlov’s Poetic Thought in the Late Soviet Intellectual History" by Ilia Pavlov Jr. (National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow), who prepared the typescript for publication, the creative legacy of I. G. Pavlov is considered in the context of late-Soviet intellectual history, and the significance of "Tyutchev's Mountains and Waters..." for reconstructing I. G. Pavlov's religious-philosophical worldview, as represented in his poems, is analyzed.

In the "Practicum" section, we are pleased to present the text by Yuri Nosov (Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library, Moscow) "Classification of Human History in the Context of the Theory of Human Cultural Evolution." It is especially significant for us that the article contains reflections from a practitioner of library science—the director of a Russian national digital library. Proposing a version of historical classification, the author bases his thought on distinguishing three stages of human cultural evolution and emphasizes that we now live in the binary-hardware stage, where digital assistants play a special role, and therefore, within this stage, electronic libraries, interactive exhibitions, and the like are of particular importance for preserving cultural memory.

Furthermore, the section features a review by Nikolay Afanasov (Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences) of the All-Russian Scientific and Practical Conference "Between Philosophy and Politics" (Makhachkala, September 18-19, 2025), dedicated to the 85th anniversary of the first President of the Republic of Dagestan, Chief Researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences Mukhu Gimbatovich Aliyev. The author notes that the conference articulated the ethnic and religious diversity of the Russian state-civilization, which combines traditional values, respect for a uniquely rich and diverse history, with a distinct political culture.

In the "Invitation for Discussion" section, we publish a conversation with the American economist, Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, whose name, we dare say, is well known to our readers. The conversation with Sachs was conducted by Ruslan Gagkuev (Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Russian Historical Society, Moscow). In the interview, Sachs shares memories and reflections on Gorbachev's role in the collapse of the USSR and on the economic reforms in Yeltsin's Russia, as well as reflections on the current state of international relations.

The criticism and reviews section is represented by Taras Varkhotov's (Lomonosov Moscow State University) response to the collective monograph "rom Past to Future: Human Rights in the Modern World", published in 2025 under the editorship of Valery Fadeev and Aslan Abashidze. The review notes the relevance (remember, human rights are our traditional value) and significance of the monograph, examines its structure, as well as the key observations and conclusions of each chapter.

With the fourth issue, we conclude the second year of the journal's work. We dare to hope that this issue, as well as the other issues of the second volume, will contribute to the research of both traditional values directly and the broader scientific field of social sciences and humanities, and will be of interest to our readers. Thank you for being with us!

Alexander Pavlov