UNCERTAINTY AS A RESOURCE FOR TRANSFORMATION IN POST-SOVIET RUSSIA

At the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, post-Soviet Russian society faced a deep crisis of traditional semantic guidelines and institutional foundations, which gave rise to a state of ontological uncertainty — a fundamental sense of the unpredictability of the future and the lack of reliable social anchors. In the framework of dominant research, this condition is often interpreted solely as a destructive factor leading to chaos and anomie. However, this work offers an alternative, productive interpretation, justifying uncertainty as an important and underestimated resource for social and cultural transformation, capable of stimulating new forms of subjectivity and social creativity. To achieve this goal, methods of philosophical analysis, interpretation of cultural texts, and sociological observation were used. The study shows that, contrary to the widespread notion of uncertainty as a passive state, it acted as an active space for the possible. In the context of an institutional vacuum and a crisis of meanings, uncertainty created unique conditions for ethical choice, cultural experiment, and everyday social creativity. Special attention is paid to the analysis of the identity transformation of the younger generation, which, forced to live in a regime of constant instability, developed flexible, situational and multidimensional strategies for self-determination. The results obtained expand the philosophical understanding of the nature of crisis epochs, demonstrating that they can be not only a time of destruction, but also a fruitful field for generating new ones. The proposed interpretation is of universal importance for analyzing the conditions of late modern instability, characteristic not only for Russia, but also for many other societies in a state of transformation.