Social Arch Instead of Social Art. A New Money-Intensive Profession Has Emerged in Russia

This publication was prepared by the media project “Country and World — Sakharov Review” (project Telegram channel – “Country and World”).

In early August in Crimea, representatives of the Kremlin Agitprop discussed a new money-intensive specialty: in a country of dilapidated housing and rising construction costs, social architects are replacing traditional architects. It’s roughly the same as “engineers of human souls,” but not only from the writers’ corps.

The profession (and even “industry”) is described in lofty and meaningless wooden words, structurally and grammatically borrowed from English. The purpose of the specialty is unclear, but there are already those eager to engage in social architecture and undergo training according to an existing program and “standard.” Not even crane operators or AI specialists have entered life this quickly.

It’s easier to destroy a house than to build one. But you can easily draw an imaginary house, invent a fictional reality, construct an imaginary world, promising the impossible and unfeasible. Engineers of the impossible and unreal, new Saint-Simons, Fouriers, and Owens. You take the human mass and build something organized from it, in columns of three, moving together. Essentially, it’s the same Mussolini or Franco corporatism: the whole society is divided into corporations, herded under complete state control into their niches.

So if this is social engineering, it’s “reverse” – that is, copied from others or taken from their own past.

Historical examples exist: Stalin’s USSR, Mussolini’s Italy, Franco’s Spain, and so on. The cult of technology and technique is mandatory. The poster new man, looking into the distance and ready to die for traditional values, is mandatory.

In Hayek’s terms, this is harmful arrogance – it’s impossible to construct reality without the prerequisites; you can’t build a dream society from dung and sticks, you get a straw plane from a cargo cult. Strategic, tactical, pinpoint management of society under conditions of conscious self-deception and refusal to understand the social fabric is an illusion. Deception through playing with statistics and hiding them, deliberately misleading interpretation of sociological data as a propaganda tool – weak social engineering.

An image of the future in a country engaged in hostilities, fighting inflation, and dealing with a state that takes away familiar means of communication is an unthinkable entity. And what is this image of the future – robots painted like the dress of the Children’s Rights Commissioner with Gzhel patterns, seven sitting on benches waiting to be drafted into the armed forces? The dream of oligarch Malofeev and political scientist Karaganov.

There is no profession, but there are educational programs and standards: starting September 1, the Higher School of Social Architecture opens at the Financial University, fortunately not named after Ivan Ilyin. Although Kafka and Orwell would deserve such an institution even before it starts functioning. But that’s not enough – at the same time, MGIMO will open its own Center for Social Architecture. This specialty will begin to be taught right in the cradle of “scientific Putinism” – “Foundations of Russian Statehood,” at the Faculty of Political Science at Moscow State University.

They also now teach Western studies there, that is, conspiracy theory in the Dugin version. And the gathering of social archs called “Social Architecture: Conceptual Understanding and Socio-Political Dimension” took place a couple of weeks ago at Sevastopol State University with support from the same MSU faculty.

Head of the Russian President’s Department for Monitoring and Analyzing Social Processes Alexander Kharichev made everything perfectly clear:

“Today significant changes are happening in geopolitics, communications, technology, and the economy. In such conditions, it is necessary to accurately forecast changes and their impact on the social fabric of society, as well as to design a ‘future image’ and implement projects that actualize traditional values and solve problems at all levels – municipal, regional, and federal. Specialists are needed for this.”

After such a clear definition of the profession, replacing the cursed Russian questions “Is there life on Mars?” and “Who are the Indian yogis?” comes another question: “Who are social architects?” On this topic, a round table was held by the Kremlin Expert Institute of Social Research (EISI). According to its materials, “our society is rapidly changing. At the dawn of Russian democracy, the main demand was for political technologists and consultants, but now it’s time for specialists of a new quality. On January 14 [2025], a social architects competition organized by EISI started, with about 1,500 people already registered.”

The frenzied demand indicates great financial prospects and a broad professional symbolic capital: you were a political technologist – now you’re a social architect. From technologists to chief engineers!

“Social architects must be able to combine online and offline formats of people’s activities. War correspondents are a vivid example of social architects,” noted Vladimir Tabak, CEO of the ANO “Dialogue.” Right, they form a special reality, manipulate people’s consciousness, turn – exactly Orwellian-style – all moral concepts upside down. Now it’s clearer who they are, these social architects.

The Cultural Code of the Nation

It would be strange if social architects didn’t work with yet another fiction – the cultural code of the nation. An uncoded, encoded nation needs even deeper immersion into mythological reality, learned indifference, and historical amnesia. Architects must be able to master this programming, write cultural PIN codes that allow them to enter homes, souls, minds, and beds of people without knocking or special forces.

Sexual architects are also present – they fight abortions, pay money to pregnant schoolgirls and students, and intend to check the fertility of boys and girls as early as kindergarten. Infertile ones will likely be culled, as in ancient Sparta.

Nonexistent traits of the Russian people, attributed to them by documents and presentations (including in Sevastopol) of Kremlin managers and ideologists, are known to every Russian: spirituality, disregard for the material, collectivism, special kindness, and so on.

Less known is something else. This something else appeared in an old article by director Konstantin Bogomolov, in some remarks by Putin, as well as in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s speech about Alexander Pushkin in 1880 and the presentation “The Cultural Code of the Russian People” by the head of VCIOM Valery Fedorov. According to the Kremlin sociologist and curator of the social-architectural “industry,” the cultural code of the Russian people can be represented in different ways: a return to the values of agrarian society (one might as well immediately switch to the Asiatic mode of production according to Marx) and simultaneously to the values of the industrial phase of development (for some reason called collectivism, but there was no place found for proletarian internationalism).

So the flight of social architecture is normal, expressed in a very successful slide of the presentation depicting the “self-portrait” of the Russian people.

The peasantry and working class are present; only the last part of the tripartite structure remains to be restored – the intelligentsia layer. And here it is: “Appropriate European modern values, declaring Russia their guardian. We defend European modern values, which Europe itself abandoned in favor of postmodernism!”

So here you have social architecture: again, like two hundred years ago, borrowed values, Westerners arguing with Slavophiles again; Europe is declining, but the upper class somehow prefers to spend time “at the spas.” The program code of an agrarian-proletarian nation, singing bawdy folk songs in an ushanka hat, is disrupted by the cargo cult of all things European. The black, scabby cat of Europe has crossed the road of Russian collectivism and sobornost.

Karl Popper, author of “The Open Society and Its Enemies,” wrote that capitalism according to Marx was no more real than Dante’s Hell. But imagining elements of Dante’s Hell as a paradise on earth – that’s the task for real social architects. Money and unscientific imagination are not spared for this: the theology department at MEPhI now seems a lesser oxymoron than the social architecture program at the Financial University, MGIMO, and MSU. The layer of people depicted in the famous “autocracy pyramid” by artist Nikolay Lokhov (1901) on the floor labeled “We fool you,” urgently needs replenishment with fresh cynical cadres.