РУССКИЙ
18:26 26.10.2025 •
“The Russian people are Christian not only due to the Orthodox nature of their beliefs but also because of something even more heartfelt. They are so by virtue of their capacity for self-denial and self-sacrifice, which constitutes, as it were, the foundation of their moral nature.”
“As for the ancient, first Eastern Empire (Byzantium) ... it occupied only a fringe of the world destined for it by Providence.... It remained in a constant state of a sketch.... There was always a lack of solidity and depth to ensure the stability of its territorial position. The Turks took Constantinople in 1453, and nine years later, in 1462, the great Ivan III ascended the throne in Moscow.”
Fyodor Tyutchev
Russia’s status as a “unique state-civilization” received official recognition in the country’s Foreign Policy Concept of March 31, 2023, presumably owing to a decisive political break with the West, which had always regarded Russia as culturally and civilizationally alien (other). It may have seemed that Moscow acted abruptly and opportunistically, guided by geopolitical considerations. In reality, an issue that for centuries had been swept under the rug by every Russian government could not have been resolved otherwise – especially given that the West (historically – Europe) had fallen into a systemic crisis with an uncertain outcome, exhibited clear signs of ultra-liberal degeneration, and thus was simply losing its appeal as something Russia would want to join. Not to mention the fact that Western elites did everything to make it clear that there was no place for Russia in their community except on the condition that it accept “American leadership” and renounce its own uniqueness and history.
The decision to expand NATO eastward can now, 30 years later, be quite reasonably interpreted as a veiled declaration of war against Russia (it is hardly a coincidence that George Kennan called it the most fateful [decision]). The question of Russia’s cultural and civilizational self- determination outside the West has a long history, which speaks in favor of its inevitability.
This also signifies the end of the Euro-/Western-centrism of Russian governance over the past three centuries, regardless of its specific historical ideology, given that ideology itself, as a category of thought, is a product of Western civilization. It is the end of an illusion, of self-deception – including that of Soviet rule. As far back as 150 years ago, Tyutchev succinctly and precisely defined the geopolitics of Russia-West relations: Russia “by the very fact of its existence denies the future of the West.”1
The entire history of our relations, including the past 30 years, indicates that Western elites agree with this assertion and rightly perceive the existence of a sovereign Russia as an existential threat to themselves. This explains why the stakes were raised in the Ukraine crisis, which is evidently perceived in Western capitals as some kind of “final and decisive battle” – one that, if lost, would leave them with no choice but to accept the cultural and civilizational multipolarity of the new world order.
Russia and the West: The Identity Issue
In his 2022 book Leadership, which can be regarded as his political testament, Henry Kissinger, discussing the qualities of outstanding political leaders, pointed out that, in addition to strength of character and “deep literacy” (including a solid knowledge of history and philosophy, as well as a habit of reading as opposed to modern “visual culture”), they had an awareness of their own national identity. “Unlike their aristocratic forebears, these leaders [such as Nixon, de Gaulle, Adenauer, and Thatcher – Author] had a deeply rooted sense of national identity, which inspired them.... They did not style themselves ‘citizens of the world’... neither adopted a cosmopolitan identity. To them, the privilege of citizenship implied responsibility to exemplify the particular virtues of their nations. Serving their people and embodying the greatest traditions of their society was a high honor.”2
Notably, he cites Christopher Lasch, one of the first critics of the American liberal elites: “Whatever its faults, middle-class nationalism provided a common ground, common standards, a common frame of reference without which society dissolves into nothing more than contending factions, as the Founding Fathers of America understood so well – a war of all against all.”3
Thomas Hobbes took a minimalist view of the state, regarding it as a means to prevent this “war of all against all.” It is from that position that British philosopher John Gray in his study New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism4 criticizes the current condition of Western society, which is directly related to issues of the new world order. Not only does he write about the totalitarian evolution of liberalism into the form of the US Democratic Party’s ultraliberalism, where elites encroach not only on freedom of speech but also on freedom of thought (starting with universities), but he also acknowledges the universal significance of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s prophetic warnings in Demons. These warnings are directly relevant not only to Russia but also to Western society.
It is no coincidence that Gray devotes significant attention to Russian thinkers of the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. For instance, he references Konstantin Leontiev, now largely forgotten in Russia: Fearing that the “cult of individualism would threaten cultural diversity, he identified a pathology of liberal civilization. Diversity is richest when societies are divided into distinct classes.”5 In other words, its homogenization/unification, which is implied by the current trend of “wokeism” in the policies of the US liberal elites, is fraught with the “tyranny of the majority” and “authoritarian rule,” if we turn to Leontiev’s Western intellectual counterparts – Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer.
From this intellectual commonality, one can derive yet another piece of evidence that Russian nihilism was fueled by ideas from European/ Western political thought. Indeed, what is the difference between Soviet “political expediency” and contemporary Western “political correctness”? The outcome is the same, as both are the fruits of the same “tree” of Western civilization. The Soviet leadership could not have been under any illusions about the ideological implications of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, effectively anathematizing it, while “old regime” philosophers helped dispel any lingering illusions about the possibility of incorporating it into their anti-capitalist, “proletarian” narrative.
In addressing the issue of Russian identity, two of Spengler’s fundamental premises are of key significance: the distinction between culture and civilization (the former marked by growth, flourishing, and destiny; the latter – decline and death, with a loss of self-development capacity); and the idea that the West and Russia [are notions that] contain real history, whereas (their shared) Europe is an “empty sound,” a misunderstanding.6 Regarding both propositions, particular attention should be paid to the initial reaction of Russian thinkers to Spengler’s work (collected in a 1922 volume7 in response to its first volume), which proved to be the final straw for the new Soviet government, prompting it to expel dissenting intellectuals from the country aboard the “philosophers’ steamships.”
Fyodor Stepun: Spengler’s task is to abandon this Ptolemaic perspective, to become a Copernicus of history, to stop revolving history around the illusory center of the Western European world, to gain a sense of distance from it. The opposition between culture and civilization is the central axis of all of Spengler’s reflections. He firmly believes that Europe has only one fate left – death; that in Europe, civilization is possible, but culture is not, and therefore, with his Roman-Prussian taste for the valor of the warrior and the man, he demands of contemporary humanity an embrace of death with open arms, a resigned service to civilization....
The essence of any civilization lies in atheism: in the dying out of myth, in the disintegration of symbolic art forms, in the replacement of metaphysical questions with ethical and practical ones, in the mechanization of life. All these themes are clearly present in the dominant currents of modern thought – Darwinism and socialism.... In this transformation, the religious vertical of the Faustian soul, around which European culture was built and revolved, is turned into the horizontally oriented atheistic axis of European civilization....
As for Russian philosophy, there is no need to discuss it – it is entirely devoted, from Ivan Kireyevsky to Vladimir Solovyov and Leo Tolstoy, to the question of the secularization of European culture, that is, to the question of European civilization. The success of this challenge psychologically presupposes a certain loss of faith in science as the supreme force of culture, and it clearly signifies an ongoing crisis of the religion of science in many European souls. At Verdun, science may have defended itself as the most powerful engine of modern life, but it also definitively discredited itself as its conscious driver ”
Semyon Frank: There is no such thing as something “universal to all of humanity” – not only are art, religion, and morality unique to each culture, but there are also no numbers “in general,” no truth “in general,” no space and time – these are fundamentally different in each cultural epoch. Of course, the very recognition of the moment of the death of Western culture in the phenomena of 19th-century “civilization” must be acknowledged as indisputable.
This idea of Spengler’s, unprecedented in its novelty and boldness within Western thought, does not strike us Russians as particularly new: A man of Western culture has, for the first time, become aware of what the great Russian Slavophile thinkers had long felt, seen, and spoken about. These pages of Spengler’s work, imbued with a passionate love for the true spiritual culture of Europe, which belongs entirely to the past, and with hatred for its decay and decomposition in the form of its modern bourgeois “civilization,” exude thoughts that are long familiar and dear to us – those of Kireyevsky, Dostoevsky, Konstantin Leontiev....
Nikolay Berdyayev: Spengler’s book has enormous symptomatic significance. It conveys a sense of crisis, a turning point, the end of an entire historical era. It speaks of the great malaise of Western Europe. We Russians have long been cut off from Western Europe, from its spiritual life. And because we are denied access to it, it appears to us to be more prosperous, more stable, and happier than it actually is.
Even before the World War, I strongly sensed the crisis of European culture, the approach of the end of an entire world era.… During the war, I wrote an article titled “The End of Europe,” in which I expressed the idea that Europe’s twilight was beginning, that Europe was ceasing to be the monopolist of culture, and that it was inevitable for culture to expand beyond Europe – to other continents, to other races… [Spengler] knows that culture is religious by its nature, which is what distinguishes it from civilization, which is irreligious. But he does not grasp the religious meaning within culture. He is doomed to feel himself a man of civilization precisely because he is irreligious. And yet, he was able to articulate the noblest thoughts that could be expressed by an unbelieving soul in our time. Behind his sense of civilization, his self-awareness as a man of civilization, one can sense the sorrow of a culture that has lost its faith and is heading toward decline....
We Russians cannot be shocked by these ideas. We have long known the distinction between culture and civilization. All Russian religious thinkers affirmed this distinction. They all experienced a kind of sacred dread at the demise of culture and the looming triumph of civilization. The struggle against the spirit of philistinism, which so deeply wounded A[lexander] Herzen and K. Leontiev – two people of such different backgrounds and directions – was based on this very motif. Civilization, by its very nature, is imbued with spiritual philistinism, with spiritual bourgeoisness. Capitalism and socialism are equally infected with this spirit. The hostility toward the West expressed by many Russian writers and thinkers was not hostility toward Western culture but rather hostility toward Western civilization.
Konstantin Leontiev – one of the most perceptive Russian thinkers – loved the great culture of the West. He loved the flourishing culture of the Renaissance, loved the great Catholic culture of the Middle Ages, loved the spirit of chivalry, loved the genius of the West, loved the powerful manifestation of individuality in this great cultural world. But he hated Western civilization – the product of liberal-egalitarian progress, the extinguishment of spirit, and the death of creativity in civilization.… True spiritual culture, having outlived its Renaissance period and exhausted its humanistic pathos, will have to return to certain principles of religious culture from the Middle Ages – not the barbaric Middle Ages, but the cultural Middle Ages.… In one aspect, Faust must entirely surrender himself to external material civilization, to civilized barbarism....
Ya. M. Bukshpan: Thus, Spengler helps us pinpoint the precise diagnosis of the spiritual illness of contemporary European culture: irreligious, skeptical, self-assertive rationalism. And it is in revealing this that his greatest artistic and philosophical merit lies.
The contributors to the collection sought to be optimists, unaware of what lay ahead for Europe in the 20th century. Standing on a par with Spengler but from a different perspective was Vasily Rozanov.8 In his book Apocalypse of Our Time, he simply acknowledged the obvious: “In European humanity (all of it, including Russian), colossal voids have formed where Christianity once was; and into these voids, everything collapses – thrones, classes, estates, labor, wealth.… But all of this collapses into the void of the soul, which has been stripped of its ancient substance.”9
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, our contemporary, also harbored no illusions about the state of the West. In his Letter to Soviet Leaders in 1973, he noted the “multifaceted dead end of Western civilization,” which we are doomed to share if we fail to come to our senses. “The greedy civilization of ‘eternal progress’ has choked and is nearing its end. And it is not ‘convergence’ that awaits us with the Western world, but a complete renewal and restructuring of both West and East, because both are at an impasse.”10
Solzhenitsyn appeals to those who had been “hounded as reactionary ‘Slavophiles,’ those who dared to say that a colossus like Russia, with its many spiritual traditions, peculiarities, and ways of life, could very well seek out its own distinct path among humanity; and that it is impossible for all of humanity to follow only one single, inevitable course” (a direct response to Chaadayev). It is fitting to note that in his Letter on Censorship in Russia (presumably a memorandum to the tsar), Tyutchev called for freedom of speech and public debate as a means of overcoming the Eurocentrism of autocratic rule, to which the Soviet regime proved to be a full successor in this regard – something from which we are only now emerging.11
In recalling the “dreamers of the Enlightenment,” Solzhenitsyn echoes the thinkers of the Frankfurt School, who “demonstrate that the emergence of totalitarianism, the horrors of Majdanek and Auschwitz, the hecatombs of victims – all these are products of the socio-liberationist aspirations of the Modern era, the result of Enlightenment propaganda and the struggle for democracy, which culminated in the victory of the masses. Hannah Arendt offered a slightly different theory, but her central idea was that totalitarianism, with all its horrors, and above all, mass killings and terrifying wars, is a product of our time and exclusively our time, that it was ‘woven’ from the many ideological currents and social trends characteristic of the 19th and 20th centuries.”12
Spengler can be regarded as a forerunner of postmodernists. Unintentionally, he initiated the dismantling of the Western metanarrative. Here is what Stepun wrote in the 1922 collection: “Spengler is a consummate skeptic; for him, the concept of absolute truth does not exist.… Ideas are as mortal as souls and organisms.… Spengler is at once a courageous prophet. The essence of his prophecy is the death of European culture.… The Decline of Europe [sic] is not crafted by Spengler from abstract concepts but from words that must be felt, experienced, and visualized by the reader.… What is causality? – Dead fate. What is fate? – The organic logic of being.”
Postmodernists saw the cause of Europe’s tragedies in the metanarrative of Western civilization and thus sought to dismantle it by every means possible, including logocentrism in literature (as deconstructed by Jacques Derrida) – to which the alternative was the polyphonic novel of Dostoevsky, whose entire body of work affirmed a Christian understanding of human freedom. At the same time, it must be acknowledged that the categories of postmodernist philosophy – above all, Jean Baudrillard’s in Fatal Strategies13 – offer the most adequate description of the current state of Western society.
At one point, [in an article] commemorating Friedrich Nietzsche, Francis Fukuyama wrote that Western philosophy has yet to overcome “the denial of the equality of human dignity”14 – an assertion directly relevant to the cultural and civilizational incompatibility of Western civilization and its elites.
Russia and Europe: The Question of Culture
THUS, in the 20th century, culture did not save Europe, but Russia was saved by culture – culture inherited from Europe and transformed by it. Why did this happen, and what are the consequences? Here arises the question of Russian culture and its European heritage. How should it now be interpreted, when it is evident that we can no longer identify ourselves solely with European culture? When the West is canceling Russian culture – and culture in general? Is culture itself now slipping away beneath the feet of the West, while in Russia, it remains intact? Does Russia, then, become the guardian of European culture, as was, in fact, the case even during the Soviet era? How should the meanings embedded in our culture be correlated with those of European culture?
For example, Professor Yuri Slezkine adheres to the proposition that “it is difficult to imagine our culture without the European landscape,” that “above Russia is the umbrella of a shared civilization with Europe. It is easier for Russia to say that it is defending Europe from Europe than to renounce its connection with it.”15 At the same time, he leans toward the idea that civilization is unified by a common literary canon, which the West no longer possesses. Now, each nation has its own, and we, presumably, are no exception. One cannot disagree with the following assertion: “In the USSR, the Russian literary canon effortlessly triumphed over Marxism- Leninism.” The influence is evident – for example, Pushkin, as our most European writer, and the American J.D. Salinger, as the most Russian.
In this debate, one may turn to Virginia Woolf, who saw a fundamental difference between Russian literature and English literature in that the former is entirely about the soul and its torments, whereas “the ‘soul’ is alien” to the English reader. She continues: Chekhov’s method “now appears the result of an exquisitely original and fastidious taste, choosing boldly, arranging infallibly, and controlled by an honesty for which we can find no match save among the Russians themselves.… In consequence, as we read these little stories about nothing at all, the horizon widens; the soul gains an astonishing sense of freedom.”16
Drawing applicable parallels, one could argue that during the brief Elizabethan era, the English distilled the essence of three centuries of continental Renaissance and immediately created, in the person of Shakespeare, world literature, bypassing the stage of national literature. Shakespeare’s language, in its richness and integration of words from other European languages along with their connotations (as well as the plots and settings of his plays), clearly transcends national boundaries. It is worth noting that the rigid stance of the British establishment (which resembles certain Soviet experiences) obstructs a fuller understanding of the content and meaning of Shakespeare’s works – an understanding that would be possible if one approached the question of authorship with an open mind, including the various perspectives on this highly successful and undoubtedly greatest literary mystification in the world. We, for our part, created national literature as world literature.17
André Malraux, in his speech at the Salle Pleyel on March 5, 1948, speaking about the “crisis of European consciousness,” nonetheless proposed that Russia be regarded as Russia, not as Europe.18 On the same occasion he also presented a highly productive thought: “Medieval civilization was, above all, a culture of the soul; the civilization of the 18th century – a culture of the mind. Era after era, these cultures, addressing different facets of humanity, successively layered upon one another; but their true unification occurs only in their inheritors. True inheritance is always linked to transformation.” In his view, at the time, the US, the Soviet Union, and Europe all laid claim to such transformation. Naturally, he recognized such rights for Europe, which had endured all the catastrophes of the 20th century yet “still preserved the highest values of the human spirit to be found anywhere in the world.”
It is clear that ideological confrontation and the geopolitical imperatives of the Cold War encroached upon and distorted the discourse of European culture. But now, with the policy of Western elites to “cancel” Russian culture and, along with it, Orthodoxy,19 there is every reason to turn to the idea of inheritance and transformation – this is precisely what provides an understanding of who we are in relation to European culture. Dostoevsky did not resolve this question – he merely posed it, even in his Pushkin speech, where he envisioned for us a “synthesis” of all the best that Europe had produced. At the same time, he essentially recognized [Pushkin’s] Little Tragedies as a kind of mini-Shakespeare (just as Alfred Barkov draws parallels between Eugene Onegin and Hamlet).
Among other things, the process of shedding the legacy of our liberation movement, which traces back to Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, necessitates a reassessment – at the level of literature and spirituality – of St. Petersburg and its role in our history. Here, Malraux’s categories of inheritance through transformation, as well as that of the “guardian of the highest values of the human spirit,” are applicable, particularly given the city’s sanctification through the sacrifices of the Siege. Oleg Karavaychuk, with his extraordinary creative vision, expressed a noteworthy opinion: “Petersburg was conceived by Peter the Great, the greatest poet of spatiality. He was not a tsar – he was something beyond, almost a god.… This is the abstraction of the great Kazimir Malevich. If one looks at Peter’s Petersburg from above, one can pray. It is an icon.… In general, Petersburg itself is a dissonance. But a dissonance that undergoes a great metamorphosis – so that people, on the contrary, hear harmony.”20
At roughly the same time as Malraux, Georgy Adamovich wrote: “What the West, reluctantly, sullenly, and grimly lets slip from its grasp, Russia must one day return in a transformed form, enlightened by all its experience, having learned much that the West has never known at all.”21 To this, one may add Alexander Herzen: “With the monumental phenomenon of Pushkin, Russia responded to the challenge of Peter’s reforms.” But also Berdyaev: “Dostoevsky is the greatest value by which the Russian people justify their existence in the world – the one thing they can point to at the Last Judgment of nations.”22
If we turn to Spengler’s idea (from the second volume of The Decline of the West, published in 1922) regarding the pseudomorphic nature of Russian culture,23 it provides yet another argument for viewing Romance- Germanic Europe and Russia as civilizationally distinct from one another. There is a certain logic in the idea that the Victory in the Great Patriotic War, as if drawing a final line under all of Russia’s preceding sacrificial history, became the greatest spiritual heritage of modern Russia.24 The Russian scholar Sergey Korolev, examining our history through the lens of Spengler’s concept of pseudomorphosis, notes that all of Russia’s historical consciousness was pseudomorphic – from the invitation of the Varangians and the Christianization of Rus to the Great Patriotic War, when “around 1943, the Russian and the European found a second life in the pseudo-imperial” phase.
The author cites Vadim Tsymbursky: “This pseudomorphosis, I readily admit, produced astonishing cultural achievements. It truly gave rise to ‘flowers of extraordinary beauty.’ But at the same time, it was characterized by constant tension between European forms and non- European meanings.… In Russia, a geopolitical tradition is developing that correlates its fate with the fate of Europe, constructing narratives in which Russia is destined to play a decisive role in the fate of the world – first the European world, then the global world, built and shaped by the Euro-Atlantic.”25 It is difficult to agree with the latter assertion.
Russia’s International Positioning
The famous memorandum submitted by former Minister of Internal Affairs Pyotr Durnovo to Nicholas II in February 1914 is of particular note.26 His prediction that the war would be prolonged and lead to revolutions in both Russia and Germany in the event of their defeat proved entirely accurate – he even specifically foresaw a socialist revolution in Russia. In other words, he tacitly acknowledged that the Russian Revolution faced a dual task: carrying out an experiment with socialist ideas while preventing Germany from dominating the continent. To this, one could add the emergence of a breakthrough in the arts through Russian avant-garde movements and a radical resolution of the status of women in society – [the latter of] which, to this day, remains unattainable in most Western countries.
Durnovo based his argument on the premise that Germany and Russia represented the “conservative foundation of civilization” and therefore should have stood together. However, by that time, the die had already been cast regarding the war and Russia’s participation in it. As for the idea of Russia adopting a pro-German stance in European politics, Durnovo’s own analysis makes it clear that Russia could not expect equal footing with Germany – especially if we had allowed it to dominate Western Europe, effectively abandoning France to its fate. Such a course would have been fundamentally at odds with all the tenets of geopolitics and with the very logic of German aggression, with its concept of Lebensraum in the East.
Another guiding principle should be the preservation of the capacity for historical creativity. Becoming part of the German Empire or entering its political orbit would have meant abandoning both, a complete break with the choice made and repeatedly reaffirmed by our ancestors. It can only be attributed to the inscrutable paths of history that the atheist Soviet Union became a means of preserving our spirituality and commitment to our own role in European and global affairs. The bipolarity of the Cold War ensured the continued dominance of Western civilization (and European culture) in world affairs, since the ideology of each side was based on different products of European political thought. This explains the convergent moments in the interwar period and after World War II.
From an economic standpoint, as Mikhail Khazin27 notes, on the eve of World War I, Russia was part of the German technological zone, which suggests that Berlin could have participated in Russia’s economic rise but instead chose to restrain it by igniting a European war. In Berlin, it was believed – just as Washington now believes regarding China – that the most effective means of control was military containment. As a result, after the 1917 Revolution, the Soviet technological zone was created, only to disappear with the collapse of the USSR. Khazin offers his own well- reasoned answer to the question of why, after the Treaty of Rapallo, the USSR and Germany did not unite to form a single technological zone and were instead doomed to another war. In any case, it is enough to recall Toynbee’s reminder that Germany, whether under the Kaiser or the Nazis, was part of the West.
Indeed, history has proven the futility of attempts to establish a German- Russian system within European politics, primarily due to the very nature of unified Germany as a substitute for Western world perception – one that absorbed the essence of three centuries of European colonialism and imperialism, yet did so in an exaggerated and absurd manner, devoid of even a hint of moderation. The League of the Three Emperors came to nothing, and in the War Scare of 1875, St. Petersburg played a key role in containing Germany.
The Treaty of Björkö, like the tactic described by Kissinger in his book Diplomacy, in which the Germans tried to lure London into an alliance in case of a “French attack on the British Isles,” comes across as outright farce. But the primary factor is civilizational. Had the Russian government aligned with Germany, the country could have become part of an extensive corporate space stretching across Eurasia – from the English Channel to Japan, which itself underwent modernization, the Meiji Restoration, following the Prussian model (as noted by Francis Fukuyama in his book Political Order and Political Decay, 2014). Spengler himself recoiled in horror when he encountered the German corporate state in practice – in the form of Nazism.
Now there are grounds to believe that the creative, transformational potential of Western civilization is nearing exhaustion, and its liberalism has exposed its limits. The regional elections in Germany in the second half of 2024 demonstrate that the experience of East Germany has created a kind of civilizational foothold for Russia in Central Europe. As the ultraliberal revolution continues to unfold in the West, a similar imprint may emerge in Eastern European countries, as already indicated by the internal developments in Hungary and Slovakia. As for the Western countries themselves, including the US, the majority of the population, particularly the middle class, clearly longs for the normalcy of the 1950s-1960s – a time when they were on the rise, filled with optimism, free from today’s extremes and absurdities, yet grounded in traditional values, as described by Lasch.
When discussing Russia’s destiny and historical mission, one inevitably returns to the Eurasianists. As early as 1921, Nikolay Trubetskoy wrote about the inevitability of a neocolonial status for Soviet Russia. No matter how one evaluates it, the USSR’s existence within the Western system of coordinates – including its currency limitations, trade structure, and conditions – ultimately doomed the Soviet Union to collapse, and there is no other way to classify it. But is everything truly so dire? In his article “The Russian Problem,” Trubetskoy wrote: “In the distant haze, the prospect of the future liberation of oppressed humanity from the yoke of the Romano- Germanic predators seems to emerge. One senses that the Romano- Germanic world is aging.… Under these conditions, the entry of a new colonial country – vast Russia – into the ranks of colonial nations, a Russia accustomed to existing independently and viewing the Romano-Germanic states as more or less its equals, could become the decisive catalyst for the emancipation of the colonial world from Romano-Germanic domination. Russia could immediately take the lead in this global movement. And it must be acknowledged that the Bolsheviks … have, at the same time, prepared Russia for this new historical role.”28
Further developing this idea of the 1917 Revolution’s awakening of Asia, later acknowledged in the Soviet Union (and, we should add, by Zbigniew Brzezinski), he wrote: “From now on, Russia’s interests are inextricably linked with those of Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan, India, perhaps China, and other Asian countries. The ‘Asian orientation’ becomes the only possible path for any Russian nationalist.” The Soviet Union’s role in the decolonization process later confirmed the accuracy of this perspective.
One way or another, Russia, albeit not immediately, came to the inevitable realization that it is part of the non-Western World Majority. This positioning is also valid in reverse: To become part of the West on its terms would mean participating in the neocolonial plunder of the rest of the world, not to mention that Russia would still remain in a colonial status despite its military-political power – after all, even the USSR had nuclear deterrence parity, yet this merely concealed an extremely unfavorable status quo for the country.
It is worth noting that Toynbee, in the articles cited above, predicted a clash between Western civilization and the rest of the world – as a kind of “counteroffensive” or “countereffect” that “the victims will have produced in the life of the aggressor,” whom he saw as the expansionist West. This countereffect, including the “move made by the offshoot of Orthodox Christendom in Russia,” would, in his view, have a spiritual dimension. Moreover, “the present encounter between the world and the West is now moving off the technological plane on to the spiritual plane.” Alongside the Eurasianists, he also foresaw a special role for Russia, referring to its historical precedent: “Peter [the Great] is the archetype of the autocratic Westernizing reformer who, during the last two and a half centuries, has saved the world from falling entirely under Western domination by forcing the world to train itself to resist Western aggression with Western weapons.” (Is modern China now repeating this Russian experience?) Of course, the factor of neocolonial dependence is present, and it was difficult for Toynbee to assess it accurately in the context of decolonization.
However, no less valuable and relevant for contemporary Russia is André Malraux’s remark in his Salle Pleyel speech that France should follow the example of the era of Louis XIV, when the country was “turned toward all of humanity” – “not closing in on itself, but universal by its very nature.” This resonates with Dostoevsky’s Pushkin speech on Russia’s “universal humanity,” which is called upon to “finally resolve Europe’s differences.” Placed in an intercivilizational context, this proposition also aligns with Eurasianist thought. Ultimately, the discussion is about the emancipation of all peoples: Without universal emancipation, Russia will not be liberated, and without Russia’s liberation, universal emancipation will not occur. It is easy to assume that this very issue is now being resolved in the conflict between the West and Russia in Ukraine.
* * *
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Ukraine crisis, provoked by the West in its attempt to preserve the global status quo, has become a powerful catalyst for Russia’s awakening – an awakening to the awareness of historical continuity in its development and mission in history. Unintentionally, the West is doing everything to frame this conflict as its “hybrid” war against Russia, so that within Russia itself it is perceived as a Patriotic War, but now fought solely on a national basis and with a sharp decline in the West’s referential influence or appeal in Russia’s domestic development. A side effect of this is the establishment of rather strict standards for conducting modern warfare, which, in themselves, constitute a powerful deterrent – in addition to nuclear deterrence – at the level of conventional weapons and armed forces.
This qualitatively new situation in global and Euro-Atlantic politics necessitates a comprehensive analysis of intercivilizational relations – an analytical tradition that has existed for the past 150 years in both Russia and the West but has remained in the shadows on both sides due to well- known ideological and other reasons. Now that it has become clear that foreign policy is a policy of identity, the time has come to turn to this legacy. Otherwise, it is impossible to understand what is happening in the world, to build an effective foreign policy strategy, or even to forecast the further development of events.
NOTES
1 Tyutchev F.I. Rossiya i Zapad. Moscow: Kulturnaya revolyutsiya; Respublika, 2007, p. 17.
2 Kissinger H. Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy. UK, Allen Lane/Penguin Books, 2022, pp. 400-401.
3 Lasch C. The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. New York: Norton, 1995, pp. 48-49.
4 Gray J. The New Leviathans. Thoughts After Liberalism. UK, Allen Lane/Penguin Books, 2023.
5 Ibid., p. 60.
6 Spengler O. The Decline of the West. Vol. 1, trans. Charles Atkinson. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1947, p. 16. It is worth adding that the source of misunderstandings was the incorrect translation of the title of Spengler’s work as The Decline of Europe, while the author himself insists: “It is thanks to this word ‘Europe’ alone, and the complex of ideas resulting from it, that our historical consciousness has come to link Russia with the West in an utterly baseless unity – a mere abstraction derived from the reading of books – that has led to immense real consequences. In the shape of Peter the Great, this word has falsified the historical tendencies of a primitive human mass for two centuries, whereas the Russian instinct has very truly and fundamentally divided ‘Europe’ from ‘Mother Russia’ with the hostility that we can see embodied in Tolstoi, Aksakov or Dostoyevski. ‘East’ and ‘West’ are notions that contain real history, whereas ‘Europe’ is an empty sound.”
7 Berdyayev N.A., Bukshpan Ya.M., Stepun F.A., Frank L.S. Osvald Shpengler i zakat Yevropy. Moscow: Bereg, 1922.
8 see [6]. It is important to note, however, that in the second volume Spengler would write that Dostoevsky’s Christianity belongs to the next millennium. And earlier, he wrote that Dostoevsky ought to be counted among the apostles of early Christianity. In other words, he is close to the idea that Dostoevsky’s works are the Gospel of the era of the de-Christianization of the West. Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, in turn, defines Dostoevsky’s work as a certain kind of icon (see: Williams. Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction (The Making of the Christian Imagination). Baylor University Press, 2011).
9 Rozanov V.V. Apokalipsis nashego vremeni. Moscow: EKSMO, 2015, 640 p.
10 https://www.solzhenitsyn.ru/proizvedeniya/publizistika/stati_i_rechi/v_sovetskom_ soyuze/pismo_vojzdyam_sovetskogo_soyuza.pdf
11 see [1].
12 Quoted by Leonid Ionin in his preface to the Russian translation of Elias Canetti’s book Crowds and Power. (Massy i vlast. M.: AST, 2022. 704 pp.)
13 Bodriyyar Zh. Fatalnyye strategii. Moscow: Ripol-Klassik, 2018, 288 pp. Jean Baudrillard actually has a Hobbesian definition of the role of the state: Power is always a subtle and ambiguous exercise in its own disappearance (p. 110) – i.e., power should not be equal to itself.
14 Fukuyama F. “Nietzsche: A Philosophy in Context,” The New York Times, May 7, 2010. 15 Quoted from a lecture by Yu.L. Slezkine, delivered at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow on May 29, 2023.
16 Vulf V. “Russkaya tochka zreniya (esse)” Vulf V. Obyknovennyy chitatel (sbornik esse). Moscow: Nauka, 2012, 776 pp.
17 Regarding the connection with European literature and literary mystification, of interest is Alfred Barkov’s opinion about Eugene Onegin as a Pushkin mystification and Menippean satire, referring to the stylistic and compositional influence of Laurence Sterne (his Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey); see: Barkov A.N. Pushkin. Progulki s Yevgeniyem Oneginym. Moscow: Rodina, 2021, 416 pp. The theme of Menippean satire was first developed by Mikhail Bakhtin in relation to Dostoevsky’s poetics.
18 quoted from Malro A. Zavoyevateli. Korolevskaya doroga. Moscow: Progress, 1992, 336 The speech is in the Afterword to the novel The Conquerors.
19 It is appropriate to note that Samuel Huntington in his Clash of Civilizations (1994) characterizes Russian civilization as Slavic-Orthodox, which gives grounds to consider the current war of the West against Russia a civilizational one. Arnold Toynbee wrote earlier about the role of Orthodoxy and religion in general in his articles “Encounters Between Civilizations” and “Russia and the West”; see: Toynbee A. Civilization on Trial. Oxford University Press, 1948, and The World and the West. Oxford University Press, 1953.
20 Karavaychuk O. Tri stepeni svobody. Muzyka. Kino. SSSR. St. Petersburg: Poryadok slov, 2022, pp. 146-147.
21 Adamovich G.V. Odinochestvo i svoboda. Moscow, 1996, p. 209.
22 Berdyayev N.A. Filosofiya tvorchestva, kultury i iskusstva. T. 2. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1994, p. 150.
23 see [6].
24 Toynbee recognizes the important role of spiritual tools like creeds: “[T]hese are the most potent that Man has made” and “weighed as heavily against … Western competitors’ material tools.” See his article “Russia and the West,” cited in [19].
25 Korolev S.A. “Psevdomorfoza kak tip razvitiya: sluchay Rossii,” Filosofiya i kultura, No. 6 (2009), pp. 72-85.
26 https://on-island.net/History/Durnovo.htm (retrieved on October 15, 2024).
27 Khazin M.L. Vospominaniye o budushchem. Idei sovremennoy ekonomiki. Moscow: Ripol-klassik, 2023, pp. 200-208.
28 Trubetskoy N.S. Yevraziystvo. Izbrannoye. Monografiya. Moscow: INFRA-M, 2023, pp. 218-219.
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