The article presents an analysis of the BRICS countries climate policies at the global and national levels. The authors consider the positions of these states within the framework of both international climate conferences (Conference of the Parties) held under the auspices of the UN since 1992, and the summits of BRICS member states in the years 2011-2020. The paper covers strategies and results of national climate policies implemented in these countries. Using structural, comparative, and content analysis methods, the authors emphasize that BRICS countries play a key role in stabilizing the climate of our planet today. It is impossible to achieve the main aim of the Paris Agreement without a comprehensive transformation of environmental practices in these societies. BRICS adheres to the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities in its position towards international climate policy; the BRICS countries stand for sustainable economic growth through the introduction of new environmental technologies, and against restrictive measures that impede their economic development. At the same time, the Russian economys dependence on the extraction and export of fuel resources complicates environmental transformation. Russia is dominated by a negative narrative of climate change, where the urgent ecological modernization of the economy is seen as a threat to key sectors (oil and gas) of the economy. The implementation of international agreements to reduce the carbon intensity of the Russian economy, the creation of conditions for the transition to climate-neutral technologies, would contribute not only to the fight against global climate change, but would become a powerful incentive for the modernization of the economy, accelerating innovation and increasing its competitiveness.

This article examines how the historical memory of World War I emerged and developed in Russia, and also compares it to how Europeans have thought about the conflict. The author argues that the politics of memory differed during the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. In the wake of the 1917 Revolution, Bolshevik efforts to re-format the memory of the Great War were part of its attempt to create a new society and new man. At the same time, the regime used it to mobilize society for the impending conflict with the 'imperialist' powers. The key actors that sought to inculcate the notion of the war with imperialism into Soviet mass consciousness were the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Communist Party, the Department of Agitation and Propaganda, and, in particular, the Red Army and Comintern. The latter two worked together to organize the major campaigns dedicated to war anniversaries, which were important both to reinforce the concept of imperialist war as well as to involve the masses in public commemorations, rituals and practices. The Soviet state also relied on organizations of war veterans to promote such commemorative practices while suppressing any alternative narratives. The article goes on to explain how, under Stalin, the government began to change the way it portrayed the Great War in the mid-1930s. And after the Second World War, Soviet politics of memory differed greatly from those in the West. In the USSR the Great Patriotic War was sacralized, while the earlier conflict remained a symbol of unjust imperialist wars.

The article examines theoretical preconditions, as well as the political and ideological priorities of Bolshevik eff orts to engineer of the "New Man" in the early Soviet period. The author shows the Marxist origins of the Bolshevik project and their transformation in the works of V.I. Lenin and other leaders of the Communist Party and the Soviet state. It describes the principal mechanisms and tools used to design the New Man, as well as practice of social mobilization and exposure to the political culture of Bolshevism. Emphasis is given to the role of the legacy of World War I in the Bolshevik institutionalization of social engineering, coercion and violence to create new human material. The article also shows disagreements among the Bolshevik leadership during the period from 1917 until the late 1920s regarding the ways of designing the New Man in the context of the proletarian culture, the role of the moral character concept for an ideal communist person as the builder of new society. Analysis is given to the gender aspect of the problem, the Bolshevik vision of the ways to design the New Woman and reshape the old way of life. The article traces the transformation of the Bolshevik leadership's vision of the New Man and the New Woman throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The author singles out two stages in the Bolshevik engineering of the New Man in the early Soviet period (1917-mid-1920s, late 1920s-mid-1930s), and describes the project's evolution.