The article deals with the evolution of the Russian emigration processes at the turn of the 21st century. Based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the Russian emigration flows over the past 25 years, the authors highlighted five emigration waves characterized by their main emigrant categories and emigration channels. Attention has been given not only to the size of the emigration flows but also to the emigration flow’s own compositional characteristics, especially age structure. The authors’ benchmark analysis of the Russian emigration data provided by the Federal State Statistics Service of the Russian Federation and the data on Russian immigrants provided by the national statistics services of foreign countries showed the overwhelming quantitative discrepancies in the migration flows set out in the Russian statistics, thus underestimating the intensity of emigration.

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The article analyses development regularities of human system and investigates possible social and economic development models in the era of digital transformation. The article demonstrates that there are three models that can be applied in the conditions of Industry 4.0 technological revolution with its rapidly emerging digital devices and technology breakthroughs of the 21st century. These models are shaped in accordance with their development purposes, which can establish different relations between state, society, business, and specific individuals. The authors convincingly show that there is only one model capable of providing sustainable development and creating a new model for economic development, which corresponds to digital technologies of the 21st century.

The objective request for the compliance of all spheres of life with the requirements of the information society has accelerated processes determined by the restrictive measures of the covid-19 pandemic. Almost all sectors of the economy were forced to switch to remote working; however, the education system was the most affected. The mass transition to distance learning revealed a number of challenges and contradictions in distant forms of the higher education programs and made the Russian education system respond to the challenges of the digital society. This required a deep analysis of various aspects of distance learning, readiness of all education actors to work remotely, availability of material-technical facilities, methodological support and software, and also an assessment of prospects and scenarios for the development of the Russian education system after the pandemic. In May 2020, the Center for Education Development Strategy at Lomonosov Moscow State University and the RUDN Department of Sociology, with the support of the Russian Professors Assembly, conducted a survey of the academic personnel to study universities transition to distance learning. The survey data reveled the real situation in the education system, features of the forced transition to remote working and challenges of such an educational format, and allowed to reconstruct a portrait of the teacher most skeptical to distance learning. The study helped to make a number of recommendations on improving forms and methods of learning and on developing education technologies in universities; to identify the main risks of distance education and to suggest possible forms of mixed learning in Russian universities.