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SARS-CoV-2 pandemic caused dramatic impact on social life and medical care. Anti-COVID-19 highly ideological public policy measures, such as lockdowns, switching off economies, closing borders, casting off dissentaneous medical experts from media sphere, chastising public disobedience to newly introduced undemocratic rules etc., were told to be introduced to curb the virus spread. Their role in curbing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is still dubious. Instead, they provoked public panic and partially caused healthcare crises in many countries, including Russia. Healthcare systems of most countries of the world were unprepared to such enormous stress. However, considerable threat to medical care was represented not by the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen itself, but by the consequences of the situation when the public policy struggle with the virus was transferred to the ideological field. Public policy initially proposed by the majority of countries was defective and abusive towards the majority of population, including medical workers. Governments and media created the universal ideological narration of the virus deadliness without statistical evidence. This deadliness must have been overcome only by the collective obedience to governmental power structures with forswearing many constitutional civil rights. Those people who accepted the ideology uncritically and declared themselves "needy" and incapable of working due to the pandemic, were favoured by public policy steps, e.g. they might have been given government subsidies, alms and assistance. Those who questioned consistency of governmental steps or even opposed them, were punished and sometimes deprived their constitutional and democratic rights farther, including medical care specialists. Not professional qualities of clinicians and medical personnel were key factors of this "carrot and whip" policy, but unquestioning adherence to the dominant ideology, even in the states whose governments call themselves democratic. This was also true for Russia, especially Moscow. The ...

WHO metrics on COVID-19 spread and consequences "Confirmed cases" and "Confirmed deaths" are highly deceptive. They delude not only the general public, but, what is more dangerous, leading world politicians. Their wrong coverage by mass media provokes unseen quarantine and self-isolation measures around the world, that may threaten the world economy and social order. A more comprehensive approach to withstanding the ideology of the Doomsday, is proposed in the article.

Despite SARS-CoV-2 being a closest genetic relation of SARS-CoV that caused SARS 2002-2004 pandemic, its spread was not managed to contain at the very beginning in China, as it was done with SARS-CoV. Worldwide dissemination of SARS-CoV-2 ensued and gave rise to the current media and political infodemic. The virus is mainly thought of as a something novel, unseen thus far by humanity. Our brief note reveals the real situation and debunks this myth. A concise comparative ecological and epidemiological analysis is performed, where COVID-19 pandemic is opposed to eleven major pandemics the humanity survived, with the major epidemiological characteristics are taken into account. SARS-CoV-2 is demonstrated to be one of the least dangerous viruses in terms of fatality and contagiousness. A hypothesis is proposed that rapid spread of the virus around the world and high percentage of the infected persons, are mainly accounted for by purely social and demographic factors, not by epidemiological nor ecological ones.

The fact that Eurasia is currently precisely at the crossroads, led us, a group of similarly thinking persons, to establish a new scientific journal Eurasian Crossroads for discussing most urgent and up-to-date issues emerging from Eurasian political, legal and social oscillations around this crossroads. The Journal fits the scope of Area Studies category of social sciences. We invite all scholars who would like to understand and formulate the most appropriate ways of Eurasian development and possibly present them further as political initiatives. I hope that the first issue will kick a fresh start to our discussion with notable contributions of Wolfgang Sassin (Austria), Igor Likhomanov (Russia), Lady Cecily Grey (United Kingdom) and Lucille Dupont (France).

Extimity as a socio-psychological phenomenon that was created and matured in European political discourse and social programmes, during the last ten-fifteen years became a product of exportation from European Union to the whole of Eurasia. It is widely depicted by media and many politicians as a part of the worldwide gender equality movement, but in fact it represents a political means of pre-designed formation, attribution, consolidation and transformation of gender social roles and statuses in Eurasia. Such use of extimity is performed according to common mould that presumably reflects a centripetal force which has to additionally unify Eurasian population across a common idea shared by the majority, ultimately the idea of the global unified humanity. In the instrumental aspect, extimity is associated with the re-transmission of neo-liberal gender communicative stereotypes and behaviour models in non-European parts of Eurasia. In the paper, we analyse social and political implications and consequences of such extimity exportation from EU to the rest of Eurasia.