On the Volunteers and Volunteering: The Case of Russia

Abstract

The project mentioned below is aimed at the study of a possibility and forms of the civic volunteers’ participation in a mitigation or prediction of modern natural and environmental disasters in Russia. Such participation is necessary taking into account the huge size of its territory and variety of natural and built landscape as well as of types of small settlements including the nomadic ones. In spite of very shaky Russian history of the XX century there were a diversity of types of the state and civil society’s voluntary organizations. From the 1960s and up to now the environmental movement and its local grassroots and NGOs existed throughout the USSR/Russia’s territory. Nowadays, the interest of lay people to the state and prospects of their living environment is rapidly growing especially due to the emergence of a global network structure. The global world is becoming more unstable, unpredictable and therefore more risky, be it natural, social or artificially-constructed. The process of a gradual transformation of the biosphere into a sociobiotechnical sphere is rapidly going on. As social and natural sciences continue to develop separately, the citizen’s social science began quickly developing both in many parts of Russia and across the world, and the volunteer’s units took an active part in that process. The standard modes of rescuers’ activity came into contradiction with our movable and unpredictable world. Under such conditions the volunteers should be not only well-experienced but interdisciplinary specialists able to translate from one language, say local nomad people into two-three scientific languages.