The existential focus of Russian identity: three steps to yourself

The problem of authenticity, even when reduced to the problem of identity, is among the most crucial for human life and its understanding. Today, however, socio-anthropological practices and theories that attempt to downplay the role of stable identities are also influential. This situation is particularly acute for the generation that migrated from Soviet to post-Soviet society, with visible human losses. Belonging to this generation, the author sets himself a challenging task: having affirmed the value of stable self-identification, to present a philosophical reconstruction of his own experience of this kind. The existential approach is employed to elucidate the “red” version of Russian identity in the paper. With respect to the identification procedure, the claims of the political factor are limited, and the ambiguity of the social factor is noted. The inconsistency and stubbornness of Russian man are explained by the belief in ontological contingency and the absolutization of its consequences. As a methodological aid, the author uses a blend of dialectics and hermeneutics. The reasoning which is constructed forms a conceptual thread that could be called a “step-by-step return to oneself”. The verifiability of the calculations is ensured, to the extent possible, by correlating them with initial intuitions and with judgments from the cited references.