Abstract. This article offers a historical review of relations between Russia and the West as a series of civilizational projects beginning with the invitation of the Varangians and the Christianization of Rus to the present time. The author identifies watershed moments in Russia’s civilizational choices, stressing the role of the religious factor, as well as analyzing the relations between Russian culture and the Western Enlightenment. The author presents the views of Westernizers and Slavophiles on relations between Russia and the West; traces the development of these ideas in the projects of N. Danilevsky, K. Leontiev and V. Solovyov; and assesses the Soviet period in Russia’s history. In conclusion, the author looks at the critique of the phenomenon of Westernism in the works of A. Zinoviev, examines the current rift between Russia and the West, and expresses hope for renewed dialogue between Russia and the West with Russia as an equal partner and a civilization in its own right.
The question of whether Russia is a civilization in its own right or if its history can be reduced to a sum of Western and Eastern “influences” is somewhat artificial. All children have parents, but from a fairly young age they are not only the progeny of their parents, whom they must treat with respect and care, but independent personalities responsible for their own actions. This applies even more to a vast country whose statehood has existed at least 1,160 years, according to sources, and which in its successive stages of development – Kievan Rus, Muscovite Rus, Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the modern Russian Federation – developed vast spaces with diverse geographical landscapes and often harsh climates; civilized primitive tribes; repelled aggression by other often more technologically and militarily advanced states; and learned to defend its territories and develop relations with the world. Learning from the Western Christian world (Pax Christiana) and from the Christian East, assimilating in the process elements of classical Greek learning (which came to Rus not only via the works of the Church Fathers and early ascetics, but also via the treatises of Muslim Arab Aristotelians), Russia itself carried out the mission of spiritual enlightenment as it moved eastward, creating alphabets for small ethnic groups and translating the Bible into their languages.
The history of the Russian state traces back to the invitation to the Varangians: “Our land is vast and bountiful but has no order. Come rule and own us,” the Slavic tribes Chud, Vyatichi, and Krivichi told the mysterious Varangian Rus in the year 862 [26, p. 17]. Three Varangian princes – Ryurik, Sineus, and Truvor – came to Rus and began ruling Ladoga, the White Lake, and Izborsk. The Tale of Bygone Years chronicle gives a terse account of the event. Historians are to this day breaking lances over the Norman theory. In the past it had both advocates (Gerhard Müller, August Schlözer, Sergey Solovyov) and opponents (Mikhail Lomonosov, Vasily Tredyakovsky, Nikolay Kostomarov). The arguments were always fiercely ideological, connected with politics. Anyway, it is hard to ignore the many Varangian vestiges – indeed, the name Rus itself most likely comes from the Varangians. The names Olga, Oleg, Igor have Scandinavian origins, as do the Russian words for “anchor” (yakor), “flag” (styag), “whip” (knut) and even “snitch” (yabednik). This is not to say that the tribes the Varangians came to rule were wild and uneducated; the Ancient Slavs probably had rudiments of statehood. Princess Olga, the grandmother of the Kievan Prince Vladimir, was also a Varangian by origin. Her parents, who lived near Pskov, were “of the Varangian language.” But the chronicle states that she was baptized, and the Russian Church considers her Equal-to-the-Apostles.
Fateful for the young state was the choice of faith. Chronicles state that Prince Vladimir sent embassies to various countries “to test the faith.” Significantly, the decisive argument was aesthetic, having to do with “beauty”: In the German land, the envoys “saw various services in the churches, but no beauty.” By contrast, they were struck by the beauty of the worship at Hagia Sophia in Tsargrad (Constantinople): “We did not know whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendor or such beauty, and we have no words to describe it”; a further argument was that Vladimir’s grandmother, thought to be “the wisest of all people,” had embraced “the Greek faith” [26, p. 74]. Beauty has always been important to the Russian people, but it is inseparable from good and kindness. Hence the wonderful Russian icons, which seem to open up other-worldly mystical visions; breath-taking wooden churches with many domes; and the elegant trim and window shutters of Russian peasant huts. It is no wonder that when Dostoevsky learned about the fire in Paris during the Paris Commune in 1871, he wrote to Nikolay Strakhov that “the aesthetic idea must be completely clouded over in the modern mind” [8, p. 219].
There is a kind of beauty in martyrdom, which may seem puzzling and even strange in light of modern-day attitudes. The first Russian saints were Boris and Gleb, who accepted death at the hands of their brother rather than engage in conspiracy and bear malice. The baptism of Prince Vladimir in the font of Chersonesus, an ancient Greek polis in Crimea, followed by the baptism of Kievans in the Dnepr River, were exceedingly important for the development of civilization in Russia. Before it split into Eastern (Orthodox) and Western (Catholic) branches, the Christian church was formally united, but differences in rituals and likely powerful political considerations prompted Vladimir to choose the Greek rite. Rus did not distance itself from Europe, which by that time was already tightly knit by the influence of Christianity; it merely opted for the Eastern version of Christianity, which is more contemplative, mystical, and ascetic than the Western version, steeped in Roman political traditions.
Rus accepted Christianity not in the Greek or Latin, but in its native language. The role of Cyril and Methodius, the “Apostles to the Slavs,” is rightly highly regarded. They created the Church-Slavonic alphabet and script, modeled on the Greek. However, a language cannot be invented; the Slavic brothers adapted the script to the existing language spoken by the Slavic tribes. The admonitions of even very learned philosophers that Russia would be closer to Europe had it adopted [the Greek] faith together with the language are naïve and groundless. Doing so would have obliterated the original culture that existed in 988, at the time of Christianization. Prince Vladimir had pagan idols flogged and thrown into the Dnepr, but does not the survival of centuries-old folk rites, so-called “dual faith” (dvoyeveriye) prove that the new faith had not come to a wasteland? One such rite is the worship of Mother Earth, which in the popular mind goes hand-in-hand with the Christian veneration of the Mother of God. Russians bow down to the Earth; they plead with the Earth to forgive them, as Raskolnikov does in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment [7]; they swear by the Earth and carry a handful of native soil with them when they leave their country. Russians’ biggest dread has always been to die without penance and in a foreign land; they have associated all their aspirations and hopes with their native land. In the grim days of the Great Patriotic War, this image blended with the towering image of the Motherland that is under threat and needs the protection of its people.
After protecting Europe from murderous hordes of Mongols, Rus itself faced Western aggression: We remember the battle of Saint Prince Alexander Nevsky against Teutonic knights on Lake Chudskoye in 1242. In the 16th century, Ivan the Terrible waged a debilitating and bloody war in a bid to gain access to the Baltic Sea. Early Russian history was not idyllic. Along with scientific and theological books that made their way into Rus, bringing knowledge of philosophy, logic, physics, cosmography, and astronomy, came heretical ideas similar to those that existed in the West that questioned church and secular authorities, as well as Orthodox rites and canons.
Even so, contacts began to be established more than a thousand years ago with the Orthodox monasteries on Greece’s Mount Athos and the island of Cyprus: The millennium of the Russian religious mission on the Holy Mountain was marked in 2016. Books by learned monks, and sometimes translations of and commentaries to Greek philosophers reached us directly from there or via Bulgaria. Centers of monastic learning and spiritual education sprang up not only in Kiev, but also in Novgorod, Pskov, Vladimir, and Pereslavl. That period in Rus is sometimes called neveglasiye – i.e., ignorance or silence [22]. But it was “clever silence,” as the Hesychasts, headed by Gregory Palamas, who contemplated uncreated Taboric Light, called their tradition. It was this “ignorant” and “silent” Rus that produced the icons of Andrei Rublev, Theophanes the Greek, and Dionysius; such literary monuments and masterpieces as The Tale of Igor’s Campaign and Daniil Zatochnik’s Supplication; and the monastic Bartholomew, who in his early youth left his parents’ home in the small Radonezh Principality to become Hegumen Sergius, whose role in spiritually uniting Russian principalities in the face of the Mongol yoke was noted by Vasily Klyuchevsky. It was he who blessed the young monks Peresvet and Oslyabya to perform their feat of valor in the Battle of Kulikovo Field. In the mid-19th century, the Slavophile Ivan Kireevsky wrote about this spiritual enlightenment, comparing it to the Western scholasticism (the philosophy of religious schools): “This enlightenment was not brilliant, but profound; not luxurious, not material, or aimed at creature comforts, but inner, spiritual” [16].
The outcome of the Council of Florence and Ferrara, which saw the signing of the Florentine Union, was a sign of Russia’s civilizational difference from the West. Metropolitan Isidore of Kiev and All Rus, who took part in the Council, held in 1439, eagerly signed the document that would unite the churches around Rome and the Pope. But when Isidore, who had become a Catholic cardinal, arrived in Moscow and served a liturgy in the Kremlin that mentioned the Pope, he was arrested. He fled to Lithuania and then to Rome, continuing his service as a Catholic cardinal. The rejection of the Western rite was prompted not so much by differences over dogma as by differences of administering the liturgy (communion with unleavened and not yeast bread, the use of white and not red wine, and so on). Yet these are precisely the markers that distinguish what is “ours” from what is “theirs.”
Shortly after the signing of the Florentine Union in Novgorod, in the Chamber of Facets, under Metropolitan Euthymius, an icon of the Sophia of Novgorod was created: On a throne sits a winged angel with a feminine face, surrounded by Mary, John the Baptist, and in a nimbus above them – Christ. It is a symbol of the sobornost principle: The Church is ruled not by the Pope but by Jesus Christ himself, with all believers united in it as in a single organism. The late 15th or the first half of the 16th centuries saw the appearance of “The Story of the Novgorod White Cowl,” in which the symbol of church power presented by Emperor Constantine to Pope Sylvester makes a perilous journey via Constantinople to Novgorod and Rus is referred to as the Third Rome. The author of the epistle sees the Roman Church and its head as defiled because they have fallen into heresy. This is how the unknown author describes the Roman pontiff:
“The Pope, upon reading them and learning that the Patriarch has a white cowl and holds it in great esteem and wants to send it to Novgorod the Great in the Russian Land, groaned from pain, his face was distorted and he became ill: so much did the pagan Pope dislike the Russian Land because of its Orthodox faith that he would not hear about it. And his body began to decay, two sores sprang on his chest on both sides and other sores spread from them all over his body from head to foot. And he exuded putrid smell and many worms were born in his body and his back doubled. Many doctors came to him but they could not heal him. With goggled eyes, he constantly screamed and talked nonsense, and wailed and howled like a wolf, and he grabbed his excrements and stuffed them in his mouth and ate them. He continued to do so for days, suffering gravely, and everyone around was seized with fear. Someone of those who surrounded his bed took a towel and wanted to wipe his mouth, but he clenched the towel between his teeth and shoved it down his throat, and his body became swollen and he burst because he was fat and ugly. And so, his sinful life came to an end” [25].
The epistle refers to the Russian land as the Third Rome: The first Rome fell away from Christianity “through pride and self-will”; Christianity would also fall in the second Rome, which had been seized by the Muslims. The “three Romes” theory is developed in the epistles of Philotheus of Pskov to the Reverend Misur Munehin and then to Ivan the Terrible. “Two Romes have fallen, the third one stands, and there will be no fourth.” There is no claim to national exclusiveness in this rhetoric. Rome was associated with an empire; when it turned Christian, it came to be seen as the power securing the world against the advent of the Antichrist, the end of the world. In history, like in a folk tale, the third time is lucky. It is the third son, Ivan, who spends the first 30 years of his life loafing about and doing nothing, who gets Fair Vasilisa as his wife. So the Moscow Tsardom knew that after the fall of Constantinople and the collapse of the Byzantine Empire, it would become the custodian of the true faith.
In the 16th century, when the Ryurik dynasty came to an end, the prevailing ideological construct was that of “Muscovy as the Third Rome,” which accompanied the formation of the Moscow Tsardom and the unification of the Russian lands around it. In the following century, Patriarch Nikon built a replica of the Jerusalem Church of the Holy Sepulcher in New Jerusalem outside Moscow. This signaled a new model of civilizational self-identification. The Patriarch saw Rus as a new Holy Land; even rivulets and villages were renamed after places in Palestine visited by Christ. Fast-forward to the beginning of the 18th century and we see Peter I, who demanded that he be called “the Great,” building a city at the site of the Swedish Nyenschantz fortress and naming it after St. Peter – i.e., a kind of Fourth Rome. Catherine II, who vied with Peter in grandeur and the scale of her deeds, was planning to build a new city called Sophia outside Petersburg and to build a church there that would rival Constantinople’s Hagia Sophia – the main church of the Orthodox East, which became a mosque after the Turkish conquest. These projects speak of a search for a Russian civilizational identity, putting it on a par with the great centers of world civilization of the West and the Christian East.
At the same time, the need arose to prevent Russia from being sidelined in the world, to keep it abreast of modern enlightenment and new scientific developments. This was important for ensuring the Russia’s security and defending and strengthening the country. So Russia turned to the West, which it saw as “a land of holy wonders,” to quote Khomyakov – though the wonders were not always holy. This period witnessed great geographical discoveries, Columbus’s voyages, the replacement of the Ptolemaic system of the world by the systems of Newton and Galileo, and great scientific discoveries. Russia could not afford to be left behind. Isolationism is not a trait of Russia’s civilizational character. Russians are gifted, curious, and inquisitive. As early as 1602, Boris Godunov sent 18 children of noble families to study science in England, Germany, and France. After Godunov’s death came the Time of Troubles, and the students were simply forgotten. When they were remembered, they could not be brought back to Russia. One of them became an Anglican vicar.
Earlier, in the pre-Petrine 17th century, there occurred what Georgy Florovksy, a historian of Russian thought, described as “enchantment with the West” [11]. The boyar Rtishchev opened a school at Moscow’s Andreevsky Monastery, and Symeon of Polotsk, a poet and scholar who would develop the first religious academy, came to Moscow. Lomonosov would study the Psalter from its poetic rendering by Symeon. In 1687, the Slavic-Greek-Latin Academy would open at the Zaikonospassky Monastery, Russia’s first higher education institution that would become Lomonosov’s alma mater. Arguments were often sparked not by esoteric principles of science, but by liturgical issues: for example, the “bread-worship heresy” – the Catholic view of transubstantiation of the Eucharistic sacrament. The disputes between the “Latin” (Kievan) party, heavily influenced by Catholicism, and the “Greek” party did not always end peacefully. For example, Medvedev, Symeon of Polotsk’s disciple, was beheaded in 1691. Granted, the punishment was due in part to Medvedev’s involvement in a Streltsy mutiny and support for the disgraced Queen Sophia. In 1689, Quirinus Kuhlmann, a German poet and Protestant Pietist who had come to the German village in Moscow to preach the mystical doctrine of Jakob Böhme to his fellow Germans, was burned alive along with his books on Red Square. Incidentally, he had been denounced by his fellow Germans. Before he moved to the city on the Neva River, Peter I liked to throw parties in the German Village in Lefortovo (named after the doctor Franz Lefort).
The next batch of students was sent to Europe under Peter I in 1697, shortly before Peter himself under the pseudonym Pyotr Mikhailov led a Grand Embassy to Holland to study various crafts, especially shipbuilding. A ruling monarch doing a stint as an apprentice was unheard of. In 1705, under Peter’s decree, a book titled Symbola et Emblemata was published in Amsterdam. It contained 840 etchings with captions in nine languages, including Church Slavonic. The images were used in heraldry, and the captions were used by the navy that was being built. The Slavophiles disliked Peter because he veered toward Europe too abruptly and, in their view, betrayed the traditional patriarchal Russian order. However, it is a feature of Russian civilization that a calm and relatively slow period is followed by a mighty civilizational surge like a volcanic eruption or a pulsar. Peter’s reforms were like that. Peter corresponded with the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, with whom he discussed his plans to found an Academy of Sciences, which would be established in 1724. Attached to the academy was a university. The Academy invited the famous Marburg philosopher Christian Wolff, who turned down the offer but sent the brothers Niklaus and Daniel Bernoulli, as well as Georg Bilfinger.
This brings to mind Alexander Pushkin’s lines in the “The Bronze Horseman” [19, p. 70]: “Fate’s mighty master! Was not this / How you, with curb of iron halting / Her flight, reined Russia back from vaulting / Into the bottomless abyss?”
Peter I was a seminal ruler of Russia but also controversial due to the methods he used to implement his reforms. It cannot be denied that reforms were overdue and that after Peter, Russia entered a new era and became an Empire. However, Pushkin asks another memorable question: “Where are you galloping, proud horse, / And where will those hooves plunge and trample”? [Ibid.]. That question has yet to be answered.
Lomonosov, who at the age of 20 came to study in Moscow from Arkhangelsk Gubernia, walking on foot with a train of wagons carrying fish, was among the students who, after graduating from the Academy and studying in Moscow, Kiev, Petersburg, and in the few other higher education centers, went to Germany to study at Marburg University and then Amsterdam. He married a German Lutheran and was briefly an army recruit. His path to knowledge in some ways strikingly resembled Peter’s, although unlike Peter, he was a commoner. All the same, he was a product of Peter’s era. He reformed Russian poetry, writing in verse about the uses of glass; built a glass works; corresponded with Leonhard Euler on the conservation of matter and substance; reflected on the weight of bodies; thought about the nature of the Aurora Borealis; discovered atmosphere on Venus; laid the scientific foundations of navigation; invented a method for making smalt for mosaics; wrote a manual on rhetoric; reflected on the propagation of the Russian people; quarreled with the Synod, urging it not to be too harsh toward science in church sermons; and last but not least, he developed the “first Russian university” (Moscow University, which Empress Elizabeth Petrovna established in 1755). Lomonosov famously made pronouncements on the Russian language: “I cannot rejoice enough at the fact that our Russian language is as upbeat and heroic as Greek, Latin, and German” [18]. Lomonosov noted that the Russian language combined “the grandeur of Spanish, the liveliness of French, the robustness of German, the tenderness of Italian, plus the richness and powerful conciseness of Greek and Latin.”
In Europe, the 18th century was the age of Enlightenment; the same is true of Russia, except that the anticlerical and antichurch thrust was less pronounced there. It was the age of the emergence of mundane culture, the age of philosophers. Even Catherine the Great wanted to be seen as a “philosopher on the throne” and composed her Nakaz (set of instructions) using the ideas of the French philosopher Montesquieu and the Italian legal scholar Beccaria; she invited Denis Diderot – an anticleric and editor of the Encyclopedia of Sciences, Arts and Crafts – to visit St. Petersburg for six months. She patronized the sciences and for a while was friendly toward Rosicrucian masons, though not after the French Revolution. So embedded in Russian culture is the image of a nobleman philosopher who muses about all and sundry in his country estate, collects books and paintings, and writes some long treatise, that there are echoes of it even a century later, in Goncharov’s Oblomov. Voltaire, with his skepticism and blasphemous tirades against the church, became a cult figure for the Russian nobility, who flocked to see the sofa on which he died at his estate of Ferney (Catherine’s collection at the Hermitage Museum has a detailed mockup of his estate), and the French language threatened to displace Russian among the educated nobility. This situation is described by Smerdyakov, an (anti-) hero of Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov:
“In the year twelve there was a great invasion by the emperor Napoleon of France, the first … and it would have been good if we had been subjected then by those same Frenchmen: an intelligent nation would have subjected a very stupid one, miss, and joined it to itself. There would be quite a different order of things then, miss.”
But history took a different course. In 1812, the Masonic Emperor Napoleon, who had crowned himself at Notre-Dame de Paris, despite his superior force, fled from Russia with the remnants of his army across Russia’s snow-covered plains while the Russians, after a fierce onslaught, entered Paris: In 1814, Emperor Alexander I was handed the keys to the surrendered French capital. This was the first object lesson for one of the most advanced European countries, which had decided that it had the right to dominate its continent. Now, along with Western influences in Russia, Russian influences were appearing in the West – for example, the word bistro entered the French vocabulary. According to a popular theory, Russian Cossacks who entered Paris urged on waiters at Paris’s restaurants and cafés using the word bystro (“quickly”). Among those who entered Paris was the young lieutenant Pyotr Chaadayev, a friend of Pushkin and the prototype of Eugene Onegin (“My Eugene, a second Chaadayev…”). In his “Philosophical Letters,” written in French between 1829 and 1831 and addressed to a lady, Chaadayev expressed doubt that Russia had chosen the right historical path:
“Standing alone in the world, we have given nothing to the world, we have not added a single idea to the mass of human ideas; we have made no contribution to the progress of the human reason, and everything that has come to us from that progress, we have disfigured” [4].
Pushkin, who idolized his older comrade, upon receiving his friend’s handwritten text, and then, reading the Russian translation of the first letter published in the journal Teleskop [Telescope] in 1836, promptly took issue with him:
“As for our history being nil, I absolutely cannot be of your opinion. The Wars of Oleg and Svyatoslav, and even the wars of appanage – are these not that life of adventurous effervescence and of ruthless, pointless activity which characterizes the youth of all peoples? The invasion by the Tatars is a sad and a grand picture. What? Are the awakening of Russia, the development of its power, its march toward unity (Russian unity, of course), the two Ivans, the sublime drama begun at Uglich and concluded at the Ipatiev Monastery – is all this to be not history, but a pallid and half-forgotten dream? And Peter the Great, who in himself alone is a universal history! And Catherine II, who placed Russia on the threshold of Europe? And Alexander, who led us to Paris? And (cross your heart) do you find nothing impressive in the present-day situation of Russia, nothing which will strike the future historian?” [20] (quoted from [21 p. 780]).
After his letter was published, Chaadayev was declared insane and placed under house arrest for a year. His letter became a symbol and a manifesto of the Russian Westernizers. Granted, the West Chaadayev dreamed of was not the West of revolution and godlessness of his time, but rather the medieval West, a kind of retrospective religious utopia prompted by the French traditionalists who wanted to restore the monarchy. This did not prevent Alexander Herzen from reprinting the letter in 1855 in the first issue of his London almanac Polyarnaya zvezda [Polar Star] adorned with the portraits of five Decembrists who had been executed. Chaadayev for his part wrote “Apology of a Madman,” in which he pleaded that he had been misunderstood and that he saw a great future for Russia, for it was free of some of the West’s shortcomings.
In the late 1830s, public controversy arose between the Westernizers and the Slavophiles. These were two social groups or “parties” (not to be confused with political parties) that engaged in fierce arguments about the future of Russia. Both sides were for reforms; Herzen even called them a “two-faced Janus” (a Roman god with two faces looking in opposite directions). The Slavophiles advocated adherence to Tradition, the treasures of the Orthodox faith and eastern Christianity, which were little-known to the broad masses even in an Orthodox nation where the educated elite liked to read French novels and Voltaire’s works. Politically, they looked back to patriarchalism and the monarchy as a form of social contract, and to some aspects of the pre-Petrian social order. The Westernizers, on the other hand, championed European-style modernization, curbs on or even abolition of the monarchy, the introduction of parliament and other democratic institutions, the separation of church and state, and accelerated secularization.
The Slavophiles were not opponents of Europe and the West. Aleksey Khomyakov’s programmatic poem “The Dream” (1835) begins with the words: “Oh, how sad am I! Thick darkness / Settles in the distant West, the land of holy wonders” [15].
Initially, they spoke about the contemporary West as being infected by the germ of revolutionary manslaughter and misanthropy. But as they searched for the causes, the Slavophiles delved into the West’s spiritual history and found deeper reasons. In the West’s history, cleavages ran deep: First it was reason versus faith, and then faith itself was supplanted by rationalism. Catholicism introduced new dogmas derived through Aristotelian logic, while Protestantism downplayed the sacraments, turning Christianity into a professorial religion. The character of a culture is based on the dominant faith. Khomyakov wrote:
“Every nationality is a living entity, like every individual; and its inner life is nothing if not the development of some moral or intellectual principle – adhered to by society – the principle that determines the fate of states by elevating and fortifying them by its inherent truth or destroying them by its inherent lie” [14].
The Slavophiles’ main thesis was that modern man had lost spiritual integrity and lived mainly by intellect, considering it the highest human faculty, oblivious to such human qualities as conscience, faith, love, and will. The Slavophiles called on Russians to be ascetic, believing that heroism consists in “patience, love, and prayer.” Slavophilism, in spite of its national character, owes much to European Romanticism: Hegel’s teaching on the “world spirit,” embodied in various symbols ranging from “the flying troika” [reference to a three-horse sleigh in Gogol’s Dead Souls – Trans.] to the Russian “beard”; Fichte’s teaching that a nation is defined not by blood and native soil, but by cultural factors such as language, religion, and philosophy; and Schelling’s teaching on the soul of the world and the importance of myth and revelation for the highest forms of human thought. Khomyakov rightly noted that apprenticeship to the West instilled in Russians low self-esteem. We only pay attention to our achievements when somebody in the West mentions them. This is a far cry from humility, extolled by Christians as a virtue; this is self-abasement.
The people who visited Russia were also of various stripes – for example, the notorious Astolphe de Custine, author of Russia in 1839. After several scandals in Europe associated with nontraditional sexual behavior, he came to Russia driven by genuine sympathy for Emperor Nicholas I and wishing to shore up his anti-republican, pro-monarchy views. Upon his return to the West, he tried to become famous by publishing his notes in which he presented Russia as a land of “barbarians” and “slaves.” The book was a financial success and well received by Russian Westernizers. However, not all visitors to Russia were so critical of the country. The famous novelist Alexandre Dumas wrote a glowing three-volume account of his travels in Russia in 1858-1859; in addition to Moscow and Petersburg, he visited the Nizhny Novgorod Fair, Kazan, Derbent, Kizlyar, Baku, and Tiflis. In 1867, the mathematician Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carrol, author of Alice in Wonderland, visited Russia on a mission to establish relations between the Anglican and Orthodox Churches. Between 1871 and 1882, the French historian Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, author of a three-volume study Empire of the Tsars and the Russians, made four trips to Russia. He met with prominent personalities, writers, scientists, and philosophers. These are just some of the Europeans who, after visiting Russia in the 19th century, left their hearts there.
The Russian Westernizer movement was very broad, comprising Russian liberals, advocates of progress (understood as the adaptation of Western values and achievements in policy, science, and technology, as well as in mindset), socialists (avid readers of European utopians Charles Fourier, Henri Saint-Simon, and Robert Owen), and an assortment of radicals and terrorists such as members of “Land and Freedom” and “Black Repartition” (Chyornyy peredel). The 1830s saw the emergence of circles whose members discussed Western literature, first philosophical and later also social. Among their members were Alexander Herzen, Nikolay Ogaryov, and Mikhail Bakunin, who would leave for Europe and join the European revolutionary movement in the early 1840s. “The passion for destruction is also a creative passion,” Mikhail Bakunin wrote in a German yearbook [1]. However, disenchantment soon set in. Herzen was disappointed with the bourgeois ideals of the sans-culottes and members of the third estate who fought on the barricades. They were seeking the same material comfort and contentment enjoyed by the bourgeoisie; it was all about re-dividing property. “Here you bump into the limits of the world completed,” Herzen would write in My Past and Thoughts [13], expressing his disenchantment with Europe. In “Letters from France and Italy,” he writes:
“All Europe … will plunge into chaos, borders will be changed, peoples will form themselves into other groups, nationalities will be broken and insulted. Cities, taken by storm and looted, will become poor, education will decline, factories will grind to a halt, villages will be deserted, land will remain untended, tired and exhausted peoples will submit to anything, military despotism will replace all legality and all governance” [12].
Looking at the Russian peasant commune from Europea, Herzen sees it as an embryo of a future social order, which resonated with the Slavophiles’ views.
Enthusiasm for Western socialist ideas cost many talented and educated people their freedom and even life. Nikolay Chernyshevsky, author of the novel What Is to Be Done?, spent 20 years in penal servitude and internal exile. Upon his return, he managed to translate Georg Weber’s 12-volume Basic World History. Dostoevsky, arrested for taking part in the socialist Petrashevsky circle and circulating Belinsky’s seditious letter to Gogol, received a death sentence, which was commuted to eight years in a forced labor camp, followed by internal exile in Omsk. Reading the Bible and mixing with the common people, Dostoyevsky experienced a conversion. He returned to the capital a champion of the “native soil,” convinced that, while not casting aside Peter’s reforms and all that they gave Russia, it was necessary to turn to one’s own people, its faith, and its truth, which included not only peasants but also urban dwellers. All his works, his novels that have become part not only of Russian but world cultural heritage, became a record of that conversion. In spite of refusing in principle to write a philosophical treatise, Dostoevsky became one of the foremost world philosophers owing to his insights into human nature. After Dostoevsky, it is impossible to claim that Western influence on Russia was one-sided. Russia was now influencing the West, helping to discover in humanity, in its existence, that which transcends nationality and religious faith.
Dostoevsky’s “Pushkin speech,” delivered at the unveiling of a monument to Pushkin in Moscow in 1880, was his ideological testament. Dostoevsky noted that Pushkin started his creative journey as an admirer of Western Romanticism who imitated Byron and Shelley before entering his “Russian” period in which he wrote remarkable tales and the poem “Ruslan and Lyudmila.” Pushkin’s mature period, according to Dostoevsky, was marked by “universal responsiveness” and the ability to “reincarnate in his spirit the spirit of foreign peoples.” Dostoevsky considers this to be the prophetic feature of the poet’s work. “For what else is the strength of the Russian national spirit than the aspiration, in its ultimate goal, for universality and all-embracing humanitarianism?” [9] (quoted from [10, pp. 978-979]). Although Dostoevsky’s speech was a triumph for him (he had some six months left to live), not everyone agreed with him; some saw in his speech a renunciation of Russianness and patriotism. And yet, Dostoevsky was right: Russians do not confine themselves to their own comfort and well-being; they are on a quest for universal truth. Only the Russian language has two words for “truth”: pravda and istina: Pravda is istina in action; it is justice. The violation of justice always cuts a Russian to the core. That is why Nikolay Mikhailovsky, Dostoevsky’s contemporary, said that pravda is twofold, including both objective truth (pravda-istina) and moral truth (pravda-spravedlivost) – truth as justice.
The Crimean War, which began in 1853 over Middle East holy places (the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem), once again pitted Russia against Europe, represented by Great Britain, France, and their ally Turkey. Fighting took place in the Crimea and the Caucasus, as well as in the Baltic, White, and Barents Seas. An English cruiser shelled the Solovetsky Monastery, which had no miliary significance. To this day, the monks there still show the holes from English cannon balls. The collapse of two empires, the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian, greatly altered the political map of Europe, with Russia vigorously supporting the independence of the Slavs, above all the Serbs and the Bulgarians. The Russian soldiers who gave their lives in battles in Shipka and Plevna to liberate the Bulgarian people from the Ottoman yoke forever sealed Slavic brotherhood with their blood. Russian support for the fraternal people of Serbia was the main motive for Russia’s entry into World War I. Europe, fractured and internally divided, was not in a position to help the Slavs. This prompted the idea in Russian thought of a new civilizational era – the Slavic era – that was about to dawn in history.
Along with the idea of linear progress, there emerged a sense that history is a succession (or coexistence) of distinctive cultural-historical types that pass through the same phases as the human organism – birth, growing up, maturity, old age, and death. Biologist Nikolay Danilevsky in his book Russia and Europe (1871) identified 10 cultural-historical types and predicted that the Germanic-Roman, or European, type would be replaced by the Slavic one in which the liberated Slavic peoples would unite around Russia. Danilevsky stressed that the cultural-historical type includes various development areas – political, economic, cultural, and religious – with each civilization bringing something of itself to world culture, if only in one of those areas. He hoped that the new type would be “tetrabasic” [5].
Danilevsky’s book became a manifesto of later Slavophiles. Danilevsky believed that each civilization should build its own street and not jostle in a common square. The idea had something of the spirit of Western thought. Fifty years after Danilevsky’s book, Oswald Spengler, a German, would put forward a similar theory in his book The Decline of the West (1919). One might think that Danilevsky anticipated events, looking at history from a national standpoint, but there were many examples of the West being criticized from within Western culture. Europe would look to the East to try to find a solution there for its own conflicts and antagonisms. One such example is Walter Schubart’s book Europe and the Soul of the East. It should be noted that the West has been the birthplace of the most murderous theories and strategies: Racism, Nazism, Fascism, and even communist totalitarianism have their roots in West European theory.
Konstantin Leontiev, Danilevsky’s contemporary, attempted to reorient the political vector from pan-Slavism to Byzantinism. He argued that policy should not be based solely on ethnic and linguistic kinship, and that nationalism is successfully used as a weapon of destruction. Leontiev, who had worked for 10 years as a diplomat in Middle East countries, was not enamored by his contemporary West, which after the epoch of revolutions had entered what he called a state of “secondary incestuous simplification,” degeneracy, and deterioration. He found evidence of this in everything, even in European clothing, which had lost their national character. Russia’s salvation, according to Leontiev, could be a Byzantine-type empire based on Orthodoxy, autocracy, narodnost [national spirit], and life aesthetics. Leontiev considered the empire to be a viable model of cultural development that could enable many nationalities to preserve their identities. Leontiev has often been called a prophet, and not only in Russia but also in the West. He predicted the demise of the Russian Empire under the onslaught of the united West, but believed in Russia’s resurgence, albeit based on a “new despotism” of a uniting idea [17].
Unlike Danilevsky and Leontiev, Vladimir Solovyov proposed the idea of empire as theocracy (rule of God). A philosopher of all-unity, he tried to combine the logical rigor of Western thought and the spiritual wisdom of the East. This led him to the idea of establishing unity among the churches, which he promoted strenuously, forging contacts with representatives of the Catholic Church and frequently traveling to Europe. He believed that an empire could take the form of a union between the Russian Emperor and the Pope under the spiritual guidance of a prophet [23]. But although Solovyov’s ideas attracted attention in the West and even served as the foundation of modern ecumenism, they found little support among politicians. Solovyov established a distinct genre of the “Russian idea” – reflections on Russia’s civilizational mission. He said that the idea of a nation consisted not in what the nation thinks about itself in time, but in what God thinks about it in eternity. Ultimately, Solovyov’s concept of the “Russian idea” proved too limited: Russia’s mission is not to bridge East and West or to reconcile them. It is neither East nor West; it is a civilization in its own right.
The most significant of Solovyov’s writings is the apocalyptic presentiments contained in his last book, Three Conversations, written on the cusp of the 20th century [24]. The modern age arguably brought Russia closer to the West than ever before. European universities were open to Russian students, and study there was practically mandatory for those considering a career in science. Joint journals, societies, and projects were established. Russian literature, poetry, philosophy, art, and architecture were becoming known and fashionable in the West. Cosmopolitan unity and “eternal peace” seemed within reach. The short period before World War I would later be called the “Russian religious renaissance,” and some contemporaries would call it the “third, Slavic renaissance” – the third after the Italian renaissance and German renaissance. A renaissance implies a revival of something. The Russian renaissance combined diverse elements, like late Alexandia, where a syncretism of cultures flourished. Antiquity, the Italian Renaissance, German Romanticism, French Decadence. Few people were bothered by the notion that the array of cultural influences could overshadow indigenous culture. Russia was gradually becoming a “city of Kitezh,” which submerged into Lake Svetloyar to avoid falling into enemy hands.
The 1917 revolutions were a complex phenomenon that fundamentally altered Russia’s historical path. Although carried out according to Western blueprints and with the assistance of Western powers, especially Germany, with which Russia was at war, they were not a purely Western phenomenon. It is no coincidence that the period after the revolutions saw a groundswell of support for the ideas of “Eurasianism,” “Scythianism,” and “Change of Landmarks,” all of which stress Russia’s distinctiveness from the West and Russia’s Asian, steppe, and Turanian elements. Alexander Blok wrote in 1918:
“Mere millions – you. We – teem, and teem, and teem. / You want to fight? Come on, then – try it! / We’re – Scythians – yes! With Asiatic mien / We watch you, gloating, through our slit-squint eyelids [3]” (quoted from [2, p. 118]).
The authors of the theory of social revolution, first and foremost Karl Marx, despised Russia as a backward Asian tyranny dominated by the Asian mode of production, and they did not believe that Rusia could implement any of the schemes devised for the overdeveloped capitalist economy. Inevitably, the question arose of Russia’s “special path” and the possibility of “building socialism in one country.” Leon Trotsky and his ilk pinned hopes on the world proletariat, calling it to an uprising and seeking to fuel “permanent” world revolution. The Bolsheviks had no reverence for Russia and its history. During World War I, they wished defeat for their government, and after seizing power they railed against Great Russian chauvinism and gave away chunks of Russian land to other national republics – a measure whose consequences reverberate in bloody conflicts to this day. The notion that workers have no motherland and that Russia’s history was beginning from scratch, ushering in a new era, did not add luster to the new Bolshevik power. However, that power managed to put an end to chaos, educate the people, and moving gradually from suppression to creative endeavor, bring about the industrial modernization of the country.
Paradoxically, the history of the Russian émigré community after the October Revolution, the so-called russkoye zarubezhye [the “Russian diaspora”], is also proof of the singularity of the Russian civilization. More than three million Russians fled the country as a result of the revolutionary upheavals. Some escaped with the retreating White Army, sailing to Constantinople; some were exiled as an alternative to being shot, like the passengers aboard the “philosophical ships” in 1922; others went to work temporarily in the West and never returned to Russia. The important thing is that they did not lose their language and faith, did not blend into the culture of the country they came to, and overwhelmingly did not betray their country and did not support the Nazi aggressors in 1941. Ivan Bunin, Sergey Rachmaninov, Nikolay Berdyaev, Ivan Ilyin, and many others created wonderful works in exile, and returned to Russia and enriched Russian culture. Exposure to the West made them more conscious of belonging to Russian culture.
History will never forget how Russia helped France by sending an expeditionary corps to the Battle of the Ardennes during World War I, thus stopping the Germans from breaking through to Paris; the Normandie-Niemen Fighter Regiment, whose airmen fought side-by-side with Soviet fighter pilots against the Nazis; the meeting of Russian and American soldiers on the Elbe, which marked the meeting of the two fronts; and the lend-lease humanitarian aid program. And yet before the war was over, the Americans in a show of force dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The intended audience of that demonstration is fairly obvious.
The Cold War saw confrontation and at the same time competition between the socialist and capitalist systems. The existence of the socialist system in Europe as a consequence of World War II compelled Western leaders to think about social conditions in their own countries and enter into competition with that system. The operation to eliminate a rival was tied to the need to destroy the main opponent, the USSR; to undermine its social and political system; and to use the tool of credit debt to turn the independent states formed on its territory into Third World dependencies. By using first “soft power” and establishing all sorts of Western foundations, an aggressive campaign was launched to sell the advantages of the Western way of life to Russian citizens. The rules of the market economy were relentlessly spread everywhere – to culture, sports, family life, gender relations – with “the invisible hand” of the market (Adam Smith) being almost equated to the hand of God extended to Adam in the Michelangelo fresco.
After the fall of the USSR, it once again seemed that there were no barriers between Russia and the West. Although visa-free travel never materialized, a trip to the West was all in a day’s work, while well-to-do people bought real estate in the West and sent their children there to study. The philosopher and sociologist Alexander Zinoviev, expelled from the USSR in the 1970s for criticizing socialism, spent more than 20 years in Germany and got to know Western society well. He coined the Russian term zapadnism (“Westernism”), which sounds uncomfortably like another Russian word, zapadnya (“a trap”). The problem with the West is not that it is the West, but that it considers its way of life to be the only way possible and the norm that everyone should emulate, and it seeks to “Westernize everyone else.” This is how Zinoviev described this process in his book Zapad [The West], published after his return to Russia:
“The tactics of Westernization are perfidious and hypocritical: to discredit all the main attributes of the social system of the country to be Westernized. To destabilize it. To promote a crisis of the economy, the state apparatus, and ideology. To split the population into feuding groups, atomize it, back any opposition movements, bribe the intellectual elite and the privileged strata. Simultaneously to propagandize the virtues of the Western way of life. To get the people in the country being Westernized to envy Western affluence. To create the illusion that they, too, can quickly achieve such affluence if their country embarks on Western-style transformations. To infect them with the vices of Western society, depicting vices as signs of true freedom of the individual” [27].
Another critic of the West in those years was Aleksandr Panarin, who believed that Western civilization was based on a Faustian activism that engendered technocraticism, mechanism, and technological imperialism characteristic of consumer society. The world is becoming increasingly bland and depersonalized, and people are becoming atomized and selfish, having been thrown into a world in which they have no friends or loved ones and where they must constantly adapt themselves to something. In contrast to the extrovert Westerners, Russians are introverts: They think more about their inner world, the soul; they care for their close ones and see their country through their family, kin, and their circle. Panarin advocates an Orthodox civilization in the modern world that he also terms a “civilization of the poor.” It is called upon to uphold the qualities that make people human: love, attachment, conscience, mutual help, and social responsibility toward the elderly and children – and thus to restore the image of God in man.
Russia is living through tragic and at the same time historic times. We are witnessing a cleavage with the West, perhaps the most dramatic in our country’s history. In the West, Russian culture is being “canceled.” This is obviously an attitude that is being foisted on people and externally controlled. It is just as difficult for a Westerner to stop loving Tchaikovsky’s music as for a Russian to stop listening to Mozart and Bach. Not to mention that despite the sanctions against it, Russia, a fabulously rich country with untold resources and superb human capital, is firmly integrated in the world economy, and this is a guarantee that dialogue with the West will continue. Indeed, the West itself is not homogeneous: There are still those who value our rich history, our contribution to world culture, the kindness and responsiveness of the Russian people, and their capacity for friendship. But it is important that we conduct this dialogue with the West as a sovereign actor and an equal partner. My French colleague, Professor Maryse Dennes of Bordeaux Montaigne University, thinks that the West is always chasing after novelty, latches onto it, appropriates and develops it, while the essence of Russian culture is that it seeks to return to itself, to its source – irrespective of any influences.
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