Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\nIn his last letter to Pyotr Chaadaev from 19 October 1836, where Alexander Pushkin critiqued his friend\u2019s idiosyncratic view of the Russian past, he also posed an intriguing question, wondering how a \u2018future historian\u2019 would see nineteenth-century Russia: Croyez-vous qu\u2019il nous mettra hors l\u2019Europe?<\/em> (Do you think he will place us outside Europe?). Pushkin, a consummate European who corresponded with Chaadaev exclusively in French, appeared to have been somewhat apprehensive about future historians characterizing Russia as a non-European country. Little did he know that statements advancing the thesis of Russia\u2019s special path and proclaiming Europe \u2018rotten\u2019, \u2018decrepit\u2019 and even \u2018dying\u2019 would come from closer quarters.<\/p>\nMortally wounded in a fateful duel in 1837, Pushkin didn\u2019t witness the beginning of the grand debate on Russia\u2019s identity, distinctive features of its historical development and its relation to Europe that was unleashed by the publication of Chaadaev\u2019s first \u2018philosophical letter\u2019 \u2013 a debate that is still ongoing. It wasn\u2019t a future historian but another nineteenth-century Russian poet Fyodor Tiutchev, four years Pushkin\u2019s junior, who coined a paradigmatic formula of Russia\u2019s samobytnost\u2019<\/em> (originality): \u2018No ordinary yardstick can span her greatness: She stands alone, unique\u2019.<\/p>\nBut how original were Tiutchev\u2019s historiosophical musings about Russia\u2019s originality? As a Russian diplomat, Tiutchev spent more than 20 years abroad, mostly at the Bavarian court in Munich, where he came under the strong influence of the German Romantic movement \u2013 a cultural phenomenon that was instrumental in Sonderweg<\/em>\u2019s emergence. During the wars of liberation against Napoleon, the German national consciousness and collective identity were formed in contrast to those of the French. Nineteenth-century historian Leopold von Ranke saw German history as unique: \u2018each nation has a particular spirit, breathed into it by God, through which it is what it is and which its duty is to develop.\u2019 Moreover, it was deemed \u2018the most important\u2019, as Germany was thought of as \u2018the mother\u2019 of all other nations. Enthused about the founding of the new Reich in 1871 and proud of Imperial Germany\u2019s economic power, many historians and political thinkers came to believe that a \u2018positive German way\u2019 existed. They readily contrasted strong, bureaucratic German state, reform from above, public service ethos and their famed Kultur<\/em> with the Western notion of laissez-faire, with revolution, parliamentarianism, plutocracy and Zivilisation<\/em>.<\/p>\nNot unlike their German counterparts, Tiutchev and other young Russian nobles (who would soon become known under the moniker of Slavophiles<\/em>) saw a huge upsurge of Russian national feeling following victory over Napoleonic France. Twentieth-century philosopher Alexander Koyr\u00e9 aptly wrote, \u2018national reaction was quickly turning into reactionary nationalism\u2019. Against the backdrop of epic battles from 1812 to 1815, the representatives of early Russian Romanticism found the idea elaborated by their German intellectual gurus \u2013 Herder, Fichte and the brothers Schlegel \u2013 exceptionally appealing. They subscribed to the premise that German originality was based on a special type<\/em> of culture<\/em>, which couldn\u2019t be conquered by brute force. The triumphant entry of Russian troops into Paris seemed to have upended the customary cultural hierarchy. The defeated French were cast as \u2018barbarians\u2019, while the Russians\u2019 victory was attributed to their \u2018national spirit\u2019 rooted in the Russian language, historical traditions and Eastern Christian values.<\/p>\nWhen the grand debate, provoked by Chaadaev\u2019s controversial publication, kicked off in the late 1830s, it zeroed in on two principal questions: Should Russia be compared with Western nations or is it following its own unique historical trajectory? And, are Russian ways superior or inferior to those in the West? Notably, both representatives of Russian \u2018official nationalism\u2019 and Russian Westernizers shared the view that Russia and Europe\u2019s trajectories were identical. However, they sharply disagreed over who was in the lead: St. Petersburg imperial bureaucrats insisted on Russia\u2019s superiority, while Westernizers argued that Russia was underdeveloped and lagging behind Europe. It was only the faithful disciples of German Romantic thinkers \u2013 Russian Slavophiles \u2013 who spoke in favor of Russian exceptionalism and produced what could be called the first interpretation of Russian Sonderweg<\/em>.<\/p>\nThe school of thought that exalted Russia\u2019s divergence from Europe and the West, born from heated discussions from the 1840s to the 1850s, has remained central to the country\u2019s intellectual life ever since. In the 1870s and 1880s, Neo-Slavophiles\/Panslavists developed core Slavophile ideas of cultural oppositions: idealism vs. materialism, sobornost\u2019<\/em> vs. individualism, selfless collective work vs. profit-obsessed capitalism, deep religious feeling vs. amoral cynicism. Eurasianists then delivered a complex theory on the vision of \u2018Russia-Eurasia\u2019 as a unique world unto itself in their writings of the 1920s and 1930s.<\/p>\nTwo key aspects of Eurasianist political philosophy are especially influential on present-day Kremlin leaders. First, Eurasianists resolutely rejected a model of the nation-state, arguing that \u2018Eurasia\u2019 is a geopolitical space destined for imperial rule: the Russian\/Eurasian empire was considered a \u2018historical necessity\u2019 based on a vision of the organic geographical, cultural and historical unity of the \u2018imperial space\u2019. Second, Eurasianists contended that Western-style parliamentary democracy was an alien institution, \u2018culturally\u2019 incompatible with Russian\/Eurasian political folkways. They argued that the Eurasian political model was an \u2018ideocracy\u2019 \u2013 an authoritarian, one-party state ruled by a tightknit ideologically driven elite.<\/p>\n
Eurasianists formulated their extravagant theories while keeping a close eye on events in the Soviet Union; there is no denying that Soviet policies and practices strongly influenced Eurasianist theorizing. But what, more specifically, of Soviet communism? Shouldn\u2019t it also be analysed through the lens of the Russian Sonderweg<\/em> paradigm? What is the historical significance of the Soviet period (1917-1991) if defined in relation to both European political practice and pre-revolutionary Russian political development?<\/p>\nQuestioning Russia as exception<\/h2>\n
Soviet exceptionalism is a tricky case. On the one hand, as scholar Martin Malia perceptively notes, it \u2018represents both maximal divergence from European norms and the great aberration in Russia\u2019s own development.\u2019 Yet, while departing from European ways in terms of its practices and institutions, the Soviet Union was very much European ideologically. The combination of Marxist precepts and Russia\u2019s poor socio-economic conditions ultimately shaped the Soviet experiment. Paradoxically, some Russian \u00e9migr\u00e9 thinkers suggested that the European far-left ideological foundations of the Soviet state might even force dyed-in-the-wool Russian conservative nationalists \u2013 the champions of \u2018Holy Russia\u2019 and detractors of Western publics\u2019 \u2018godless materialism\u2019 \u2013 to reevaluate their anti-Western attitudes and embrace the \u2018West\u2019 they were living in. After the 1917 Revolution, poet Georgii Adamovich wittily noted, \u2018the West and Russia seemed to have changed roles\u2019: the renewed (communist) Russia \u2018suddenly bypassed the West on the left\u2019, abandoning its Christian vocation, while the West came to represent Christianity and Christian culture. \u2018Very soon,\u2019 wrote Adamovich sarcastically regarding Russian \u00e9migr\u00e9s, \u2018we, with our Russian inclination towards extremes, would probably hear about \u201cWest the God-bearer.\u201d\u2019<\/p>\n
The official position within the Soviet Union, however, supposed that it represented a higher stage of universal civilization, much superior to that of the \u2018capitalist West\u2019. Even in the supposedly ideologically monolithic communist system, the old debate on Russia\u2019s \u2018uniqueness\u2019 hadn\u2019t died out. After a series of earlier iterations \u2013 Slavophiles vs. Westernizers, Populists vs. Marxists, Eurasianists vs. Europeanists \u2013 the notion resurrected in the form of a vibrant discussion between those who supported the idea of \u2018building socialism in one country\u2019 and the champions of \u2018communist internationalism\u2019. The discussion produced an intriguing paradox. Mikhail Pokrovskii, a leading Marxist historian, backed Stalin\u2019s vision of \u2018socialism with Soviet characteristics\u2019, while Leon Trotsky called for the need to de-emphasize the idea of Russian historical peculiarity. Ironically, when Pokrovskii formulated his theory of merchant capitalism in the early 1910s, he was a staunch opponent of Russian exceptionalism and denied not only the existence of any significant Russian socio-economic samobytnost\u2019<\/em> but also that of Russia\u2019s backwardness vis-\u00e0-vis European nations. Trotsky, for his part, in his \u2018German articles\u2019 from 1908 and 1909, emerged as a strong supporter of Russian exceptionalism, emphasizing Russia\u2019s divergence from Western ways.<\/p>\nThe collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, heralding the end of Soviet exceptionalism, seemed to provide Russia with the opportunity to demystify its homegrown Sonderweg<\/em> thesis and return \u2013 according to the phrase, popular with both rulers and citizens in the early 1990s \u2013 to \u2018the family of civilized nations\u2019. Even historian Richard Pipes, who placed a special premium on Russia\u2019s \u2018un-Western\u2019 traits, appeared convinced that Sonderweg<\/em> was at an end for Russia. \u2018I think that now Russia has only one option left \u2013 turning West\u2019, he argued in a short essay written in 2001 for the European Herald<\/em>, a liberal, Moscow-based journal. By \u2018West\u2019 he intended a political community that comprises not only the US and the European Union but also such \u2018Eastern\u2019 nations as Japan, Taiwan and Singapore. \u2018Nowadays it seems to me that for Russia a \u201cspecial path\u201d makes no sense.\u2019 Dismissing the notion out of hand, he wrote in conclusion, \u2018I don\u2019t even know what it actually means.\u2019<\/p>\nRussia\u2019s cultural borrowing<\/strong><\/p>\nAnd yet, 20 years on, the idea of \u2018uniqueness\u2019 and demonization of the \u2018collective West\u2019 are all the rage in Putin\u2019s Russia. Why is this? The reason, I think, is twofold. First, unlike in 1960s and 1970s Germany, post-Soviet Russia didn\u2019t see a vigorous nationwide debate among the country\u2019s historians on the fundamental issues of Russia\u2019s historical development. Some promising discussions that began during the twilight years of Mikhail Gorbachev\u2019s perestroika didn\u2019t bear much fruit and petered out in the chaotic era of the early 1990s. Second, as the Russian political regime has become increasingly authoritarian under Putin, the Kremlin has come to believe it is expedient to deploy the notion of Russian exceptionalism to buttress its position both domestically and internationally. Ukraine favoring \u2018Europe\u2019 has motivated Putin\u2019s regime to rethink its international identity.<\/p>\n
And yet, all the intellectual groundwork for deconstructing the idea of Russian uniqueness had already been laid by the time the Soviet Union collapsed. Several generations of pre-revolutionary Russian, \u00e9migr\u00e9, Soviet, and international scholars had amply demonstrated that Russia is no more unique than any other country. Russia\u2019s historical process, its social structure, state-society relations and political culture are indeed marked by sundry peculiarities, but these stem from Russia\u2019s geopolitical position on the periphery of Europe: it sits on the eastern edges of the European cultural sphere and extends all the way to the border with China and the Pacific Ocean. Like many other countries, Russia borrowed its high culture from elsewhere, and did this twice: first, from Byzantine Constantinople; and then, in the late seventeenth to early eighteenth centuries, from the more advanced Western European cultural model. In both cases cultural norms, values and practices came from without. Russian cultural development should be understood as the process of mastering a \u2018foreign\u2019 experience.<\/p>\n
Cultural borrowing does not mean, however, that Russian culture lacks a creative element. When Russia adopted certain aspects from another culture, the borrowed cultural models would find themselves in a completely different context, reshaping them into something new. These cultural phenomena would differ from both the original Western models and \u2018old\u2019 Russian cultural patterns. Perceptive Russian scholars like Boris Uspensky and Mikhail Gasparov note this paradox: it is precisely the orientation toward a \u2018foreign\u2019 culture that contributes to the originality of Russian culture.<\/p>\n
Yet such orientation contains significant tension in itself: the gravitation toward a \u2018foreign\u2019 culture is dialectically, and antithetically, linked with a desire to protect one\u2019s own \u2018authenticity\u2019 and shield oneself from foreign cultural influences. The following dynamic ensues: the emerging inferiority complex gives rise to prickly nationalism, the search for a special path, mythologization of history, messianism and assertion of one\u2019s special mission in the world. There is another paradox here that Uspensky also notes: it is precisely this nationalist backlash against a \u2018foreign\u2019 cultural tradition that is usually the least<\/em> national and traditional. Craving for \u2018authenticity\u2019 and \u2018national roots\u2019 is most often the result of foreign influences \u2013 in the Russian case, the influences of Western culture that Russian intellectuals sought to repudiate. This is what puts early Slavophiles and German Romantics on the same page: the Germans felt they were culturally \u2018colonized\u2019 by the French and rebelled; the Russians borrowed the philosophical language of German Romanticism and applied it to their own situation. In both cases, this was a Sonderweg <\/em>point of departure.<\/p>\nUnexclusive difference<\/h2>\n
But if we reject the existence of a sharp dividing line between \u2018West\u2019 and \u2018East\u2019 or between \u2018Europe\u2019 and \u2018Russia\u2019, acknowledging them as social constructs, what would a more suitable model explaining similarities and dissimilarities between national trajectories across the Eurasian continent be? The West-East \u2018cultural gradient\u2019, an understanding that there is a softer gradation and unity as one moves from Europe\u2019s Atlantic coast eastwards all the way into the depth of Eurasia, is one option. Pavel Miliukov introduced the idea in his multivolume Essays on the History of Russian Culture<\/em>, which he thoroughly reworked in the 1920s and 1930s when in exile in Paris. Conceptually, the essays are based on two main theoretical principles. First, Russia\u2019s historical evolution repeated the same stages through which other \u2018cultured peoples of Europe\u2019 had passed. Second, the process of this development was slower than in other parts of Europe: \u2018not only in Western but also in Central Europe\u2019. Miliukov\u2019s bottom line was this: there was nothing particular or unique about Russia in this respect. \u2018Peculiarity is not an exclusive feature of Russia. It shows up in the same manner in Europe itself, in a growing progression as we move from the Loire and the Seine to the Rhine, from the Rhine to the Vistula, from the Vistula to the Dnieper, and from the Dnieper to the Oka and the Volga\u2019.<\/p>\nMiliukov\u2019s ideas were further developed by \u00e9migr\u00e9 economist Alexander Gerschenkron, who positioned the European gradient at the basis of his highly influential model of industrial development. Gerschenkron\u2019s thesis suggests \u2018the farther east one goes in Europe the greater becomes the role of banks and of the state in fostering industrialization, a pattern complemented by the prevalence in backward areas of socialist or nationalist ideologies.\u2019 Gerschenkron exerted a powerful intellectual influence on Richard Pipes\u2019 lifelong opponent Martin Malia \u2013 a prominent Berkeley historian who perfected the concept of the West-East gradient. It became the essence of Malia\u2019s exposition of the process of Russia\u2019s social, intellectual and cultural development. \u2018The farther east one goes,\u2019 Malia contended, \u2018the more absolute, centralized and bureaucratic governments become, the greater the pressure of the state on the individual, the more serious the obstacle to his independence, the more sweeping, general and abstract are ideologies of protest or of compensation\u2019. \u00a0While Malia understood \u2018Europe\u2019 as a more or less coherent cultural sphere including Russia, he maintained that \u2018Russia is the eastern extreme \u2026 she is the backward rear guard of Europe at the bottom of the slope of the West-East cultural gradient.\u2019 Another useful concept, as antidote to the discourse on backwardness, is Maria Todorova\u2019s idea of \u2018relative synchronicity within a longue <\/em>dur\u00e9e<\/em>\u00a0development\u2019. In analysing various European nationalisms within the unified structure of modernity, Todorova redefines the \u2018East\u2019 \u2013 Eastern Europe, the Balkans and Russia \u2013 as part of a common European space.<\/p>\nThe European bloc<\/h2>\n
By the end of the 1980s, conceptualizing Russia within the pan-European context had become mainstream among Moscow governing elites. One of the key aspects of Mikhail Gorbachev\u2019s \u2018new thinking\u2019 was the idea of a \u2018common European home\u2019. Boris Yeltsin talked of the need to \u2018rejoin the European civilization\u2019. Remarkably, as late as 2005, in his state of the nation address, Putin contended that Russia is \u2018a major European power\u2019, which for the past three centuries has been evolving and transforming itself \u2018hand in hand\u2019 and \u2018together with other European nations\u2019.<\/p>\n
Two problems, however, weighed against Russia\u2019s smooth identification with Europe. One was the age-old quest for status: Russia\u2019s self-understanding as derzhava<\/em> (a great power). The awareness of the derivative nature of Russia\u2019s modern culture and of its \u2018civilizational\u2019 dependence on Europe clashed with the grand idea of Russian greatness. As Russia grew richer and stronger during the 2000s, the Kremlin leadership found it increasingly difficult to perceive themselves as \u2018learners\u2019 going to school with Europe. \u2018Great Powers do not go to school\u2019, quipped political scientist Iver Neumann. \u2018On the contrary, they lay down the line and teach others.\u2019<\/p>\nThe other problem, which is relatively recent, concerns how \u2018Europe\u2019 is constructed. In the late nineteenth century, the autocratic Russian Empire, even when it was looked down on by the liberal elites of Great Britain and France, could still be regarded as perfectly \u2018European\u2019 in the company of other Old Regimes, being part of Dreikaizerbund<\/em> (League of the Three Emperors) together with Wilhelmine Germany and Habsburg Austria-Hungary.<\/p>\nYet in the late twentieth to early twenty-first centuries, the situation changed drastically. The emergence of the European Union and its expansion eastward, along with the parallel expansion of NATO, another \u2018Euro-Atlantic institution\u2019, meant that institutionally Russia was being set apart from what came to be understood as \u2018Europe\u2019. This process of the institutionalization of \u2018Europe\u2019 presented Russia with a tough dilemma: either join this \u2018European bloc\u2019 or revisit the issue of self-identification. The issue has been exacerbated by Moscow\u2019s tense relations with its ex-Soviet neighbours \u2013 above all with Ukraine \u2013 who are seeking association with the EU, and ultimately membership. A tough question started haunting Kremlin strategists: if European orientation is fully compatible with Russian identity, then on what grounds is Moscow preventing other post-Soviet nations from joining the EU? Various conservative political thinkers called Russia\u2019s politics of identity \u2018deeply flawed\u2019 and clamored for an urgent conceptual rethink. Predictably, the suggested solution was to proclaim that Russia and Europe are distinct civilizations, each producing a gravitational pull and possessing its own sphere of influence.<\/p>\n
This is precisely what Russia\u2019s new foreign policy doctrine has done.<\/p>\n
Back to square one<\/h2>\n
But if Russia is not \u2018European\u2019, what is it? Kremlin spin-doctors tell us it is following its special path as a unique \u2018Russian civilization\u2019. However, it isn\u2019t clear, as the late Richard Pipes notes, what that actually means. Remarkably, Kremlin-friendly political thinkers promoting the idea of Russian \u2018uniqueness\u2019 appear to be confused about this issue themselves. At the discussion held in late April 2023 on the eve of the XXXI Assembly of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy for Russia\u2019s elite group of top security analysts, speakers acknowledged that Russia\u2019s departure from its European self-identification and the former foreign policy tradition occurred \u2018partly by her own will, partly because of unfavorable external circumstances\u2019. Although Russia was viewed as a country \u2018marked by originality\u2019, it was considered \u2018premature to assert that the Russian civilizational basis has already been formed\u2019. Revealingly, some analysts argued that \u2018Russia does not yet know exactly what it wants, its goals and desires are yet to be formulated.\u2019 To fulfil this difficult task, analysts paradoxically highlighted \u2018an urgent need to turn to the Russian intellectual legacy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries\u2019, specifically to the works of Russian anti-Western and nationalist thinkers such as Fyodor Tiutchev, Nikolai Danilevskii, Konstantin Leont\u2019ev, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Lev Gumiliov and Vadim Tsymburskii.<\/p>\n
And so, we appear to be back at square one. Like in the mid-nineteenth century, current calls for the Russian Sonderweg<\/em> remain a rhetorical figure, a metaphor meant to conceal Russia\u2019s perennial inability to transform itself and finally come to terms with (European) modernity. Yet there is hope. In his 1930 lecture delivered in Berlin, at the time of Stalin\u2019s \u2018Great Break\u2019, Pavel Miliukov presciently noted: \u2018The Russian historical process is not ending; it is only being interrupted at this point\u2026 Despite [social] earthquakes and eruptions, and most often with their assistance, history continues.\u2019<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
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Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[ad_1] When intellectuals and politicians start talking obsessively about their country\u2019s great \u2018originality\u2019, \u2018special path\u2019 and a \u2018unique mission in the world\u2019, it\u2019s a sure<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":221581,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[154],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221580"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=221580"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221580\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":329941,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221580\/revisions\/329941"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/221581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=221580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=221580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=221580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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<\/p>\n![Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\nIn his last letter to Pyotr Chaadaev from 19 October 1836, where Alexander Pushkin critiqued his friend\u2019s idiosyncratic view of the Russian past, he also posed an intriguing question, wondering how a \u2018future historian\u2019 would see nineteenth-century Russia: Croyez-vous qu\u2019il nous mettra hors l\u2019Europe?<\/em> (Do you think he will place us outside Europe?). Pushkin, a consummate European who corresponded with Chaadaev exclusively in French, appeared to have been somewhat apprehensive about future historians characterizing Russia as a non-European country. Little did he know that statements advancing the thesis of Russia\u2019s special path and proclaiming Europe \u2018rotten\u2019, \u2018decrepit\u2019 and even \u2018dying\u2019 would come from closer quarters.<\/p>\nMortally wounded in a fateful duel in 1837, Pushkin didn\u2019t witness the beginning of the grand debate on Russia\u2019s identity, distinctive features of its historical development and its relation to Europe that was unleashed by the publication of Chaadaev\u2019s first \u2018philosophical letter\u2019 \u2013 a debate that is still ongoing. It wasn\u2019t a future historian but another nineteenth-century Russian poet Fyodor Tiutchev, four years Pushkin\u2019s junior, who coined a paradigmatic formula of Russia\u2019s samobytnost\u2019<\/em> (originality): \u2018No ordinary yardstick can span her greatness: She stands alone, unique\u2019.<\/p>\nBut how original were Tiutchev\u2019s historiosophical musings about Russia\u2019s originality? As a Russian diplomat, Tiutchev spent more than 20 years abroad, mostly at the Bavarian court in Munich, where he came under the strong influence of the German Romantic movement \u2013 a cultural phenomenon that was instrumental in Sonderweg<\/em>\u2019s emergence. During the wars of liberation against Napoleon, the German national consciousness and collective identity were formed in contrast to those of the French. Nineteenth-century historian Leopold von Ranke saw German history as unique: \u2018each nation has a particular spirit, breathed into it by God, through which it is what it is and which its duty is to develop.\u2019 Moreover, it was deemed \u2018the most important\u2019, as Germany was thought of as \u2018the mother\u2019 of all other nations. Enthused about the founding of the new Reich in 1871 and proud of Imperial Germany\u2019s economic power, many historians and political thinkers came to believe that a \u2018positive German way\u2019 existed. They readily contrasted strong, bureaucratic German state, reform from above, public service ethos and their famed Kultur<\/em> with the Western notion of laissez-faire, with revolution, parliamentarianism, plutocracy and Zivilisation<\/em>.<\/p>\nNot unlike their German counterparts, Tiutchev and other young Russian nobles (who would soon become known under the moniker of Slavophiles<\/em>) saw a huge upsurge of Russian national feeling following victory over Napoleonic France. Twentieth-century philosopher Alexander Koyr\u00e9 aptly wrote, \u2018national reaction was quickly turning into reactionary nationalism\u2019. Against the backdrop of epic battles from 1812 to 1815, the representatives of early Russian Romanticism found the idea elaborated by their German intellectual gurus \u2013 Herder, Fichte and the brothers Schlegel \u2013 exceptionally appealing. They subscribed to the premise that German originality was based on a special type<\/em> of culture<\/em>, which couldn\u2019t be conquered by brute force. The triumphant entry of Russian troops into Paris seemed to have upended the customary cultural hierarchy. The defeated French were cast as \u2018barbarians\u2019, while the Russians\u2019 victory was attributed to their \u2018national spirit\u2019 rooted in the Russian language, historical traditions and Eastern Christian values.<\/p>\nWhen the grand debate, provoked by Chaadaev\u2019s controversial publication, kicked off in the late 1830s, it zeroed in on two principal questions: Should Russia be compared with Western nations or is it following its own unique historical trajectory? And, are Russian ways superior or inferior to those in the West? Notably, both representatives of Russian \u2018official nationalism\u2019 and Russian Westernizers shared the view that Russia and Europe\u2019s trajectories were identical. However, they sharply disagreed over who was in the lead: St. Petersburg imperial bureaucrats insisted on Russia\u2019s superiority, while Westernizers argued that Russia was underdeveloped and lagging behind Europe. It was only the faithful disciples of German Romantic thinkers \u2013 Russian Slavophiles \u2013 who spoke in favor of Russian exceptionalism and produced what could be called the first interpretation of Russian Sonderweg<\/em>.<\/p>\nThe school of thought that exalted Russia\u2019s divergence from Europe and the West, born from heated discussions from the 1840s to the 1850s, has remained central to the country\u2019s intellectual life ever since. In the 1870s and 1880s, Neo-Slavophiles\/Panslavists developed core Slavophile ideas of cultural oppositions: idealism vs. materialism, sobornost\u2019<\/em> vs. individualism, selfless collective work vs. profit-obsessed capitalism, deep religious feeling vs. amoral cynicism. Eurasianists then delivered a complex theory on the vision of \u2018Russia-Eurasia\u2019 as a unique world unto itself in their writings of the 1920s and 1930s.<\/p>\nTwo key aspects of Eurasianist political philosophy are especially influential on present-day Kremlin leaders. First, Eurasianists resolutely rejected a model of the nation-state, arguing that \u2018Eurasia\u2019 is a geopolitical space destined for imperial rule: the Russian\/Eurasian empire was considered a \u2018historical necessity\u2019 based on a vision of the organic geographical, cultural and historical unity of the \u2018imperial space\u2019. Second, Eurasianists contended that Western-style parliamentary democracy was an alien institution, \u2018culturally\u2019 incompatible with Russian\/Eurasian political folkways. They argued that the Eurasian political model was an \u2018ideocracy\u2019 \u2013 an authoritarian, one-party state ruled by a tightknit ideologically driven elite.<\/p>\nEurasianists formulated their extravagant theories while keeping a close eye on events in the Soviet Union; there is no denying that Soviet policies and practices strongly influenced Eurasianist theorizing. But what, more specifically, of Soviet communism? Shouldn\u2019t it also be analysed through the lens of the Russian Sonderweg<\/em> paradigm? What is the historical significance of the Soviet period (1917-1991) if defined in relation to both European political practice and pre-revolutionary Russian political development?<\/p>\nQuestioning Russia as exception<\/h2>\nSoviet exceptionalism is a tricky case. On the one hand, as scholar Martin Malia perceptively notes, it \u2018represents both maximal divergence from European norms and the great aberration in Russia\u2019s own development.\u2019 Yet, while departing from European ways in terms of its practices and institutions, the Soviet Union was very much European ideologically. The combination of Marxist precepts and Russia\u2019s poor socio-economic conditions ultimately shaped the Soviet experiment. Paradoxically, some Russian \u00e9migr\u00e9 thinkers suggested that the European far-left ideological foundations of the Soviet state might even force dyed-in-the-wool Russian conservative nationalists \u2013 the champions of \u2018Holy Russia\u2019 and detractors of Western publics\u2019 \u2018godless materialism\u2019 \u2013 to reevaluate their anti-Western attitudes and embrace the \u2018West\u2019 they were living in. After the 1917 Revolution, poet Georgii Adamovich wittily noted, \u2018the West and Russia seemed to have changed roles\u2019: the renewed (communist) Russia \u2018suddenly bypassed the West on the left\u2019, abandoning its Christian vocation, while the West came to represent Christianity and Christian culture. \u2018Very soon,\u2019 wrote Adamovich sarcastically regarding Russian \u00e9migr\u00e9s, \u2018we, with our Russian inclination towards extremes, would probably hear about \u201cWest the God-bearer.\u201d\u2019<\/p>\nThe official position within the Soviet Union, however, supposed that it represented a higher stage of universal civilization, much superior to that of the \u2018capitalist West\u2019. Even in the supposedly ideologically monolithic communist system, the old debate on Russia\u2019s \u2018uniqueness\u2019 hadn\u2019t died out. After a series of earlier iterations \u2013 Slavophiles vs. Westernizers, Populists vs. Marxists, Eurasianists vs. Europeanists \u2013 the notion resurrected in the form of a vibrant discussion between those who supported the idea of \u2018building socialism in one country\u2019 and the champions of \u2018communist internationalism\u2019. The discussion produced an intriguing paradox. Mikhail Pokrovskii, a leading Marxist historian, backed Stalin\u2019s vision of \u2018socialism with Soviet characteristics\u2019, while Leon Trotsky called for the need to de-emphasize the idea of Russian historical peculiarity. Ironically, when Pokrovskii formulated his theory of merchant capitalism in the early 1910s, he was a staunch opponent of Russian exceptionalism and denied not only the existence of any significant Russian socio-economic samobytnost\u2019<\/em> but also that of Russia\u2019s backwardness vis-\u00e0-vis European nations. Trotsky, for his part, in his \u2018German articles\u2019 from 1908 and 1909, emerged as a strong supporter of Russian exceptionalism, emphasizing Russia\u2019s divergence from Western ways.<\/p>\nThe collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, heralding the end of Soviet exceptionalism, seemed to provide Russia with the opportunity to demystify its homegrown Sonderweg<\/em> thesis and return \u2013 according to the phrase, popular with both rulers and citizens in the early 1990s \u2013 to \u2018the family of civilized nations\u2019. Even historian Richard Pipes, who placed a special premium on Russia\u2019s \u2018un-Western\u2019 traits, appeared convinced that Sonderweg<\/em> was at an end for Russia. \u2018I think that now Russia has only one option left \u2013 turning West\u2019, he argued in a short essay written in 2001 for the European Herald<\/em>, a liberal, Moscow-based journal. By \u2018West\u2019 he intended a political community that comprises not only the US and the European Union but also such \u2018Eastern\u2019 nations as Japan, Taiwan and Singapore. \u2018Nowadays it seems to me that for Russia a \u201cspecial path\u201d makes no sense.\u2019 Dismissing the notion out of hand, he wrote in conclusion, \u2018I don\u2019t even know what it actually means.\u2019<\/p>\nRussia\u2019s cultural borrowing<\/strong><\/p>\nAnd yet, 20 years on, the idea of \u2018uniqueness\u2019 and demonization of the \u2018collective West\u2019 are all the rage in Putin\u2019s Russia. Why is this? The reason, I think, is twofold. First, unlike in 1960s and 1970s Germany, post-Soviet Russia didn\u2019t see a vigorous nationwide debate among the country\u2019s historians on the fundamental issues of Russia\u2019s historical development. Some promising discussions that began during the twilight years of Mikhail Gorbachev\u2019s perestroika didn\u2019t bear much fruit and petered out in the chaotic era of the early 1990s. Second, as the Russian political regime has become increasingly authoritarian under Putin, the Kremlin has come to believe it is expedient to deploy the notion of Russian exceptionalism to buttress its position both domestically and internationally. Ukraine favoring \u2018Europe\u2019 has motivated Putin\u2019s regime to rethink its international identity.<\/p>\nAnd yet, all the intellectual groundwork for deconstructing the idea of Russian uniqueness had already been laid by the time the Soviet Union collapsed. Several generations of pre-revolutionary Russian, \u00e9migr\u00e9, Soviet, and international scholars had amply demonstrated that Russia is no more unique than any other country. Russia\u2019s historical process, its social structure, state-society relations and political culture are indeed marked by sundry peculiarities, but these stem from Russia\u2019s geopolitical position on the periphery of Europe: it sits on the eastern edges of the European cultural sphere and extends all the way to the border with China and the Pacific Ocean. Like many other countries, Russia borrowed its high culture from elsewhere, and did this twice: first, from Byzantine Constantinople; and then, in the late seventeenth to early eighteenth centuries, from the more advanced Western European cultural model. In both cases cultural norms, values and practices came from without. Russian cultural development should be understood as the process of mastering a \u2018foreign\u2019 experience.<\/p>\nCultural borrowing does not mean, however, that Russian culture lacks a creative element. When Russia adopted certain aspects from another culture, the borrowed cultural models would find themselves in a completely different context, reshaping them into something new. These cultural phenomena would differ from both the original Western models and \u2018old\u2019 Russian cultural patterns. Perceptive Russian scholars like Boris Uspensky and Mikhail Gasparov note this paradox: it is precisely the orientation toward a \u2018foreign\u2019 culture that contributes to the originality of Russian culture.<\/p>\nYet such orientation contains significant tension in itself: the gravitation toward a \u2018foreign\u2019 culture is dialectically, and antithetically, linked with a desire to protect one\u2019s own \u2018authenticity\u2019 and shield oneself from foreign cultural influences. The following dynamic ensues: the emerging inferiority complex gives rise to prickly nationalism, the search for a special path, mythologization of history, messianism and assertion of one\u2019s special mission in the world. There is another paradox here that Uspensky also notes: it is precisely this nationalist backlash against a \u2018foreign\u2019 cultural tradition that is usually the least<\/em> national and traditional. Craving for \u2018authenticity\u2019 and \u2018national roots\u2019 is most often the result of foreign influences \u2013 in the Russian case, the influences of Western culture that Russian intellectuals sought to repudiate. This is what puts early Slavophiles and German Romantics on the same page: the Germans felt they were culturally \u2018colonized\u2019 by the French and rebelled; the Russians borrowed the philosophical language of German Romanticism and applied it to their own situation. In both cases, this was a Sonderweg <\/em>point of departure.<\/p>\nUnexclusive difference<\/h2>\nBut if we reject the existence of a sharp dividing line between \u2018West\u2019 and \u2018East\u2019 or between \u2018Europe\u2019 and \u2018Russia\u2019, acknowledging them as social constructs, what would a more suitable model explaining similarities and dissimilarities between national trajectories across the Eurasian continent be? The West-East \u2018cultural gradient\u2019, an understanding that there is a softer gradation and unity as one moves from Europe\u2019s Atlantic coast eastwards all the way into the depth of Eurasia, is one option. Pavel Miliukov introduced the idea in his multivolume Essays on the History of Russian Culture<\/em>, which he thoroughly reworked in the 1920s and 1930s when in exile in Paris. Conceptually, the essays are based on two main theoretical principles. First, Russia\u2019s historical evolution repeated the same stages through which other \u2018cultured peoples of Europe\u2019 had passed. Second, the process of this development was slower than in other parts of Europe: \u2018not only in Western but also in Central Europe\u2019. Miliukov\u2019s bottom line was this: there was nothing particular or unique about Russia in this respect. \u2018Peculiarity is not an exclusive feature of Russia. It shows up in the same manner in Europe itself, in a growing progression as we move from the Loire and the Seine to the Rhine, from the Rhine to the Vistula, from the Vistula to the Dnieper, and from the Dnieper to the Oka and the Volga\u2019.<\/p>\nMiliukov\u2019s ideas were further developed by \u00e9migr\u00e9 economist Alexander Gerschenkron, who positioned the European gradient at the basis of his highly influential model of industrial development. Gerschenkron\u2019s thesis suggests \u2018the farther east one goes in Europe the greater becomes the role of banks and of the state in fostering industrialization, a pattern complemented by the prevalence in backward areas of socialist or nationalist ideologies.\u2019 Gerschenkron exerted a powerful intellectual influence on Richard Pipes\u2019 lifelong opponent Martin Malia \u2013 a prominent Berkeley historian who perfected the concept of the West-East gradient. It became the essence of Malia\u2019s exposition of the process of Russia\u2019s social, intellectual and cultural development. \u2018The farther east one goes,\u2019 Malia contended, \u2018the more absolute, centralized and bureaucratic governments become, the greater the pressure of the state on the individual, the more serious the obstacle to his independence, the more sweeping, general and abstract are ideologies of protest or of compensation\u2019. \u00a0While Malia understood \u2018Europe\u2019 as a more or less coherent cultural sphere including Russia, he maintained that \u2018Russia is the eastern extreme \u2026 she is the backward rear guard of Europe at the bottom of the slope of the West-East cultural gradient.\u2019 Another useful concept, as antidote to the discourse on backwardness, is Maria Todorova\u2019s idea of \u2018relative synchronicity within a longue <\/em>dur\u00e9e<\/em>\u00a0development\u2019. In analysing various European nationalisms within the unified structure of modernity, Todorova redefines the \u2018East\u2019 \u2013 Eastern Europe, the Balkans and Russia \u2013 as part of a common European space.<\/p>\nThe European bloc<\/h2>\nBy the end of the 1980s, conceptualizing Russia within the pan-European context had become mainstream among Moscow governing elites. One of the key aspects of Mikhail Gorbachev\u2019s \u2018new thinking\u2019 was the idea of a \u2018common European home\u2019. Boris Yeltsin talked of the need to \u2018rejoin the European civilization\u2019. Remarkably, as late as 2005, in his state of the nation address, Putin contended that Russia is \u2018a major European power\u2019, which for the past three centuries has been evolving and transforming itself \u2018hand in hand\u2019 and \u2018together with other European nations\u2019.<\/p>\nTwo problems, however, weighed against Russia\u2019s smooth identification with Europe. One was the age-old quest for status: Russia\u2019s self-understanding as derzhava<\/em> (a great power). The awareness of the derivative nature of Russia\u2019s modern culture and of its \u2018civilizational\u2019 dependence on Europe clashed with the grand idea of Russian greatness. As Russia grew richer and stronger during the 2000s, the Kremlin leadership found it increasingly difficult to perceive themselves as \u2018learners\u2019 going to school with Europe. \u2018Great Powers do not go to school\u2019, quipped political scientist Iver Neumann. \u2018On the contrary, they lay down the line and teach others.\u2019<\/p>\nThe other problem, which is relatively recent, concerns how \u2018Europe\u2019 is constructed. In the late nineteenth century, the autocratic Russian Empire, even when it was looked down on by the liberal elites of Great Britain and France, could still be regarded as perfectly \u2018European\u2019 in the company of other Old Regimes, being part of Dreikaizerbund<\/em> (League of the Three Emperors) together with Wilhelmine Germany and Habsburg Austria-Hungary.<\/p>\nYet in the late twentieth to early twenty-first centuries, the situation changed drastically. The emergence of the European Union and its expansion eastward, along with the parallel expansion of NATO, another \u2018Euro-Atlantic institution\u2019, meant that institutionally Russia was being set apart from what came to be understood as \u2018Europe\u2019. This process of the institutionalization of \u2018Europe\u2019 presented Russia with a tough dilemma: either join this \u2018European bloc\u2019 or revisit the issue of self-identification. The issue has been exacerbated by Moscow\u2019s tense relations with its ex-Soviet neighbours \u2013 above all with Ukraine \u2013 who are seeking association with the EU, and ultimately membership. A tough question started haunting Kremlin strategists: if European orientation is fully compatible with Russian identity, then on what grounds is Moscow preventing other post-Soviet nations from joining the EU? Various conservative political thinkers called Russia\u2019s politics of identity \u2018deeply flawed\u2019 and clamored for an urgent conceptual rethink. Predictably, the suggested solution was to proclaim that Russia and Europe are distinct civilizations, each producing a gravitational pull and possessing its own sphere of influence.<\/p>\nThis is precisely what Russia\u2019s new foreign policy doctrine has done.<\/p>\nBack to square one<\/h2>\nBut if Russia is not \u2018European\u2019, what is it? Kremlin spin-doctors tell us it is following its special path as a unique \u2018Russian civilization\u2019. However, it isn\u2019t clear, as the late Richard Pipes notes, what that actually means. Remarkably, Kremlin-friendly political thinkers promoting the idea of Russian \u2018uniqueness\u2019 appear to be confused about this issue themselves. At the discussion held in late April 2023 on the eve of the XXXI Assembly of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy for Russia\u2019s elite group of top security analysts, speakers acknowledged that Russia\u2019s departure from its European self-identification and the former foreign policy tradition occurred \u2018partly by her own will, partly because of unfavorable external circumstances\u2019. Although Russia was viewed as a country \u2018marked by originality\u2019, it was considered \u2018premature to assert that the Russian civilizational basis has already been formed\u2019. Revealingly, some analysts argued that \u2018Russia does not yet know exactly what it wants, its goals and desires are yet to be formulated.\u2019 To fulfil this difficult task, analysts paradoxically highlighted \u2018an urgent need to turn to the Russian intellectual legacy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries\u2019, specifically to the works of Russian anti-Western and nationalist thinkers such as Fyodor Tiutchev, Nikolai Danilevskii, Konstantin Leont\u2019ev, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Lev Gumiliov and Vadim Tsymburskii.<\/p>\nAnd so, we appear to be back at square one. Like in the mid-nineteenth century, current calls for the Russian Sonderweg<\/em> remain a rhetorical figure, a metaphor meant to conceal Russia\u2019s perennial inability to transform itself and finally come to terms with (European) modernity. Yet there is hope. In his 1930 lecture delivered in Berlin, at the time of Stalin\u2019s \u2018Great Break\u2019, Pavel Miliukov presciently noted: \u2018The Russian historical process is not ending; it is only being interrupted at this point\u2026 Despite [social] earthquakes and eruptions, and most often with their assistance, history continues.\u2019<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n[ad_2]\nSource link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[ad_1] When intellectuals and politicians start talking obsessively about their country\u2019s great \u2018originality\u2019, \u2018special path\u2019 and a \u2018unique mission in the world\u2019, it\u2019s a sure<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":221581,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[154],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221580"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=221580"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221580\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":329941,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221580\/revisions\/329941"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/221581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=221580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=221580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=221580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}](\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Catherine_II_by_Eriksen_(Hermitage,_2021-01-12)_03.jpg\"){kind=link}