The article examines the experience of Cossack organizations and military-patriotic clubs on patriotic and spiritual and moral upbringing in the course of youth military-patriotic meetings. Particular attention is paid to the humanitarian component of military-patriotic meets aimed at building-up the patriotic consciousness of youth on the basis of deepening historical memory. The military-patriotic training conducted at the initiative and with the participation of Cossack and other Russian Orthodox-patriotic social movements and associations has an enormous positive potential of this social initiative. The experience of the involved observation allows us to draw important conclusions regarding the socio-cultural role of the youth military-patriotic movement and other similar public initiatives. First of all, the youth military-patriotic movement acts as an important direction of growth for the development of public self-activity of young citizens and, in this regard, can become an important structural element of the Russian version of civil society. In the course of its further structuring, it is able to assume and successfully solve a wide variety of tasks, including such as helping law enforcement bodies in maintaining public order, various forms of social work, and participation in preserving the cultural and historical heritage. Invaluable is the role of this social initiative in the socialization of the younger generation, in overcoming various destructive tendencies in the youth environment on the basis of involving young people in positive activities as part of the traditional national-patriotic and religious values of the Russian people. The youth military-patriotic movement creates a basis for overcoming the disunity of people and their “social atomization”, restoration of sustainable social ties through the conscious reconstruction of the best elements of the communal and estate traditions of the Russian world. A full-scale humanitarian component of the youth military-patriotic movement, in particular, attracting public attention to not-so-well-known events and characters of Russian history, plays an increasingly important role in deepening and updating historical memory as a means of overcoming the value schism of modern Russian society on the basis of building a unified cultural and historical identity.

participant observation, patriotic upbringing, youth, the Cossacks

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