“Path Dependence” or “Creative Amnesia”: North Caucasus in Modern Russia’s Civilizational Process

The article deals with the long term, “civilizational” dimension of the current sociocultural encounters of Russia and North Caucasus. Drawing on the ideas of A.J. Toynbee the author posits that their mutual in?uences and counter- in?uences are making up the single experience of destruction of one’s local social heritage and searching for the forms of new life, common life. The probable results of this process depend on the way of its further development: would it be ungovernable or associated with cultural-historical re?exivity and with founded on it rational politics.