Russia: from the past to the future (round table on the book by b.n. Mironov)

B. N. Mironov, a permanent author of "Historical Sociology" section of our magazine, in his work "Russian Modernization and Revolution" (2019) went beyond the chronological framework of the social history of Russia during the empire period (XVII century – February 1917), expanding the discussion of the essence and results of the entire history of the country through the Soviet decades into the future. The author showed potential of sociological tools in solving such problems, possibilities of historical sociology, which, nominally existing in our scholarship, still seems to be an unsettled enterprise. The editorial board of the journal invited historians, sociologists, and social philosophers to speak on this range of issues in order to clarify efforts of socio-scientific thought to understand current and future problems of our country, the complexity and painfulness of which always makes us turn to the past, to the origins of today. The discussion of the book revolved around two key problems: databases created by B. N. Mironov in the course of his research, and modernization theory (created in the 1950–60s by the American sociologist T. Parsons), as a theoretical framework for understanding and interpreting the country's social progress in B. Mironov's book. The discussion on the second problem showed that this framework is not able to fully serve as a basis for developing ways of moving modern Russia into the future.