On the issue of socio-cultural specifics of the development of running practices in Russia

Abstract

The importance of research on the national specifics of running practices is due to the fact that in a global context, they allow us to identify the most effective of the proven forms of using running to ensure human well–being, and in an ethnic perspective - to better understand the cultural characteristics of a particular society. The subject of this study is the socio-cultural conditionality of diverse running practices that existed earlier and are still inherent in the population of Russia. The author defines their determination by various ideological complexes, social processes and actors, and also analyzes the variations and semantic transformations inherent in running activities in the dynamic field of national culture. The main conclusions of the study are: 1. In the mytho-religious public consciousness of antiquity (pre-Petrine era), legs as part of the bodily bottom had a negative connotation, which caused mainly negative labeling of running as an attribute of evil spirits. Competitive and ritual running practices were condemned as a manifestation of pagan games and ways to "appease" evil spirits, in carnival folk culture running was associated with the lower levels of the social hierarchy: children and women. 2. The Westernization of Russian society (the period from the reforms of Peter I to 1917) led to the applied use of running practices in military affairs and pedagogy. At the end of the XIX century, running in Russia became a kind of amateur sport, used for health-saving mainly by women, and in a competitive form it exists mainly in the male environment of the Western-oriented intelligentsia of large cities. 3. During the formation and development of the USSR, sports and wellness running was used by the state as an element of eugenics, a way of developing productive forces, a means of cultural construction and agitation. In the post-Soviet period, there is a commercialization, massization and humanization of amateur running in Russia against the background of the crisis of high-performance sports running.