Nikita Sokolov. Slavery in the history

Being a property of another person, a slave does not belong to themselves, his individuality is eliminated, he becomes a living tool, speaking in terms of Roman law, — a res, a thing, i.e. a slave is always an object, not a subject of legal, economical or other kind of relations.

A special form of slavery  can be considered the condition of a person who was deprived of or refused voluntarily their being a historical subject, who only perceives themselves as an object of influence of forces that are beyond their will. 

Over the last two centuries, the image of Russian history is an inalienable part if the complex of ideas that form national identity. 

The image of the past perceived by the Russian society hinders the formation and cultivation of the citizens' feeling of being historical subjects in two ways. 

Firstly, the obstacle for this are the rudimentary remnants of the historical and philosophical schemes rejected by the science. Those schemes used to claim to explain the historical process as a whole, as though it were within the framework of a strict consistent pattern.

Secondly, the major mythological content of this image that remained almost intact since the  middle of the 19th century make people see the authoritarian state as the main actor in the historical stage. And this state  monopoly to dispose of all human, material and spiritual resources is justified by external threats, that always change but are constantly present. 

During the period of perestroika and in the beginning of the 1990s this image started transforming, but this process was never competed and after intensive "rewinding" returned to the form it had during Brezhnev's reign.