When intellectuals and politicians begin speaking obsessively about their nation’s nice ‘originality’, ‘special path’ and a ‘unique mission in the world’, it’s a certain signal they’re going through mounting issues in forging a contemporary democratic polity, civic nation and respectable worldwide identification. Modern Russia is a living proof. Its new international coverage doctrine, signed into legislation by President Vladimir Putin on 31 March 2023, is an astounding doc declaring Russia’s civilizational uniqueness. By no means earlier than had a pacesetter formally acknowledged that Russia is a sui generis civilization. True, Catherine the Nice, identified for her occasional cockiness, was reported to have as soon as mentioned that ‘Russia itself is the universe and it doesn’t want anybody’. However the empress was fast to qualify her smug assertion, including that ‘Russia is a European country’. But Russian elites now seem prepared to chop their nation free from its European moorings.
This radical ‘civilizational’ reorientation is in fact the direct results of the conflict Russia has unleashed in opposition to Ukraine and the resolute and united response of Western democracies to the conflict. However Russian army aggression, pushed by the Kremlin’s nationalist obsession, is in itself a manifestation of post-imperial Russia’s deep identification disaster. Extra the 30 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, 4 key points stay unresolved: The place do the boundaries of Russia’s political nation run? Are Russians able to constructing a really democratic polity or are they ‘historically’ destined to be dominated by authoritarian leaders? Is Russia a federation – as characterised in its Structure – or is it a quasi-imperial entity? What’s the final goal of Russia’s historic growth?
Kremlin leaders don’t give clear and simple solutions to those questions. As an alternative, they obfuscate the true issues and set forth the concept of Russia as a ‘unique civilization’, whereas claiming that the West is in ‘terminal decline’ and ‘on its last legs’. The political implication of this rhetorical maneuver isn’t laborious to fathom: the suggestion is that Russia needn’t comply with ‘advanced’ Western nations because the latter are usually not forward of Russia however, quite the opposite, have misplaced their approach and located themselves at a ‘historical dead end’.
But the notion of a particular path (or Sonderweg), alongside the trope of the West’s decline, have a protracted mental pedigree. The Germans who coined the time period, have managed to reinterpret their complicated historic expertise and turned Sonderweg right into a analysis technique: a historiographical device, which has proved particularly useful within the subject of comparative research. Most Russians, nonetheless, proceed to view their historic expertise as ‘unique’, eagerly embracing the notion of Sonderweg as the idea for self-identification and self-understanding.
Russia’s historic yardstick
Catherine the Nice (element), Vigilius Eriksen, 1760, Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia. Picture by way of Wikimedia Commons
In his final letter to Pyotr Chaadaev from 19 October 1836, the place Alexander Pushkin critiqued his pal’s idiosyncratic view of the Russian previous, he additionally posed an intriguing query, questioning how a ‘future historian’ would see nineteenth-century Russia: Croyez-vous qu’il nous mettra hors l’Europe? (Do you assume he’ll place us exterior Europe?). Pushkin, a consummate European who corresponded with Chaadaev solely in French, appeared to have been considerably apprehensive about future historians characterizing Russia as a non-European nation. Little did he know that statements advancing the thesis of Russia’s particular path and proclaiming Europe ‘rotten’, ‘decrepit’ and even ‘dying’ would come from nearer quarters.
Mortally wounded in a fateful duel in 1837, Pushkin didn’t witness the start of the grand debate on Russia’s identification, distinctive options of its historic growth and its relation to Europe that was unleashed by the publication of Chaadaev’s first ‘philosophical letter’ – a debate that’s nonetheless ongoing. It wasn’t a future historian however one other nineteenth-century Russian poet Fyodor Tiutchev, 4 years Pushkin’s junior, who coined a paradigmatic components of Russia’s samobytnost’ (originality): ‘No ordinary yardstick can span her greatness: She stands alone, unique’.
However how unique had been Tiutchev’s historiosophical musings about Russia’s originality? As a Russian diplomat, Tiutchev spent greater than 20 years overseas, principally on the Bavarian court docket in Munich, the place he got here underneath the robust affect of the German Romantic motion – a cultural phenomenon that was instrumental in Sonderweg’s emergence. In the course of the wars of liberation in opposition to Napoleon, the German nationwide consciousness and collective identification had been shaped in distinction to these of the French. Nineteenth-century historian Leopold von Ranke noticed German historical past as distinctive: ‘each nation has a particular spirit, breathed into it by God, through which it is what it is and which its duty is to develop.’ Furthermore, it was deemed ‘the most important’, as Germany was regarded as ‘the mother’ of all different nations. Enthused in regards to the founding of the brand new Reich in 1871 and happy with Imperial Germany’s financial energy, many historians and political thinkers got here to imagine {that a} ‘positive German way’ existed. They readily contrasted robust, bureaucratic German state, reform from above, public service ethos and their famed Kultur with the Western notion of laissez-faire, with revolution, parliamentarianism, plutocracy and Zivilisation.
Not not like their German counterparts, Tiutchev and different younger Russian nobles (who would quickly turn into identified underneath the moniker of Slavophiles) noticed an enormous upsurge of Russian nationwide feeling following victory over Napoleonic France. Twentieth-century thinker Alexander Koyré aptly wrote, ‘national reaction was quickly turning into reactionary nationalism’. Towards the backdrop of epic battles from 1812 to 1815, the representatives of early Russian Romanticism discovered the concept elaborated by their German mental gurus – Herder, Fichte and the brothers Schlegel – exceptionally interesting. They subscribed to the premise that German originality was primarily based on a particular kind of tradition, which couldn’t be conquered by brute pressure. The triumphant entry of Russian troops into Paris appeared to have upended the customary cultural hierarchy. The defeated French had been forged as ‘barbarians’, whereas the Russians’ victory was attributed to their ‘national spirit’ rooted within the Russian language, historic traditions and Japanese Christian values.
When the grand debate, provoked by Chaadaev’s controversial publication, kicked off within the late 1830s, it zeroed in on two principal questions: Ought to Russia be in contrast with Western nations or is it following its personal distinctive historic trajectory? And, are Russian methods superior or inferior to these within the West? Notably, each representatives of Russian ‘official nationalism’ and Russian Westernizers shared the view that Russia and Europe’s trajectories had been equivalent. Nevertheless, they sharply disagreed over who was within the lead: St. Petersburg imperial bureaucrats insisted on Russia’s superiority, whereas Westernizers argued that Russia was underdeveloped and lagging behind Europe. It was solely the devoted disciples of German Romantic thinkers – Russian Slavophiles – who spoke in favor of Russian exceptionalism and produced what could possibly be known as the primary interpretation of Russian Sonderweg.
The college of thought that exalted Russia’s divergence from Europe and the West, born from heated discussions from the 1840s to the 1850s, has remained central to the nation’s mental life ever since. Within the 1870s and Eighteen Eighties, Neo-Slavophiles/Panslavists developed core Slavophile concepts of cultural oppositions: idealism vs. materialism, sobornost’ vs. individualism, selfless collective work vs. profit-obsessed capitalism, deep spiritual feeling vs. amoral cynicism. Eurasianists then delivered a posh concept on the imaginative and prescient of ‘Russia-Eurasia’ as a novel world unto itself of their writings of the Nineteen Twenties and Thirties.
Two key facets of Eurasianist political philosophy are particularly influential on present-day Kremlin leaders. First, Eurasianists resolutely rejected a mannequin of the nation-state, arguing that ‘Eurasia’ is a geopolitical house destined for imperial rule: the Russian/Eurasian empire was thought-about a ‘historical necessity’ primarily based on a imaginative and prescient of the natural geographical, cultural and historic unity of the ‘imperial space’. Second, Eurasianists contended that Western-style parliamentary democracy was an alien establishment, ‘culturally’ incompatible with Russian/Eurasian political folkways. They argued that the Eurasian political mannequin was an ‘ideocracy’ – an authoritarian, one-party state dominated by a tightknit ideologically pushed elite.
Eurasianists formulated their extravagant theories whereas protecting a detailed eye on occasions within the Soviet Union; there isn’t any denying that Soviet insurance policies and practices strongly influenced Eurasianist theorizing. However what, extra particularly, of Soviet communism? Shouldn’t it even be analysed by means of the lens of the Russian Sonderweg paradigm? What’s the historic significance of the Soviet interval (1917-1991) if outlined in relation to each European political apply and pre-revolutionary Russian political growth?
Questioning Russia as exception
Soviet exceptionalism is a difficult case. On the one hand, as scholar Martin Malia perceptively notes, it ‘represents both maximal divergence from European norms and the great aberration in Russia’s personal growth.’ But, whereas departing from European methods by way of its practices and establishments, the Soviet Union was very a lot European ideologically. The mix of Marxist precepts and Russia’s poor socio-economic circumstances in the end formed the Soviet experiment. Paradoxically, some Russian émigré thinkers prompt that the European far-left ideological foundations of the Soviet state may even pressure dyed-in-the-wool Russian conservative nationalists – the champions of ‘Holy Russia’ and detractors of Western publics’ ‘godless materialism’ – to reevaluate their anti-Western attitudes and embrace the ‘West’ they had been dwelling in. After the 1917 Revolution, poet Georgii Adamovich wittily famous, ‘the West and Russia seemed to have changed roles’: the renewed (communist) Russia ‘suddenly bypassed the West on the left’, abandoning its Christian vocation, whereas the West got here to symbolize Christianity and Christian tradition. ‘Very soon,’ wrote Adamovich sarcastically concerning Russian émigrés, ‘we, with our Russian inclination towards extremes, would probably hear about “West the God-bearer.”’
The official place inside the Soviet Union, nonetheless, supposed that it represented the next stage of common civilization, a lot superior to that of the ‘capitalist West’. Even within the supposedly ideologically monolithic communist system, the outdated debate on Russia’s ‘uniqueness’ hadn’t died out. After a sequence of earlier iterations – Slavophiles vs. Westernizers, Populists vs. Marxists, Eurasianists vs. Europeanists – the notion resurrected within the type of a vibrant dialogue between those that supported the concept of ‘building socialism in one country’ and the champions of ‘communist internationalism’. The dialogue produced an intriguing paradox. Mikhail Pokrovskii, a number one Marxist historian, backed Stalin’s imaginative and prescient of ‘socialism with Soviet characteristics’, whereas Leon Trotsky known as for the necessity to de-emphasize the concept of Russian historic peculiarity. Mockingly, when Pokrovskii formulated his concept of service provider capitalism within the early 1910s, he was a staunch opponent of Russian exceptionalism and denied not solely the existence of any important Russian socio-economic samobytnost’ but in addition that of Russia’s backwardness vis-à-vis European nations. Trotsky, for his half, in his ‘German articles’ from 1908 and 1909, emerged as a powerful supporter of Russian exceptionalism, emphasizing Russia’s divergence from Western methods.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, heralding the tip of Soviet exceptionalism, appeared to supply Russia with the chance to demystify its homegrown Sonderweg thesis and return – in response to the phrase, common with each rulers and residents within the early Nineteen Nineties – to ‘the family of civilized nations’. Even historian Richard Pipes, who positioned a particular premium on Russia’s ‘un-Western’ traits, appeared satisfied that Sonderweg was at an finish for Russia. ‘I think that now Russia has only one option left – turning West’, he argued in a brief essay written in 2001 for the European Herald, a liberal, Moscow-based journal. By ‘West’ he meant a political neighborhood that contains not solely the US and the European Union but in addition such ‘Eastern’ nations as Japan, Taiwan and Singapore. ‘Nowadays it seems to me that for Russia a “special path” makes no sense.’ Dismissing the notion out of hand, he wrote in conclusion, ‘I don’t even know what it really means.’
Russia’s cultural borrowing
And but, 20 years on, the concept of ‘uniqueness’ and demonization of the ‘collective West’ are all the fad in Putin’s Russia. Why is that this? The rationale, I believe, is twofold. First, not like in Sixties and Seventies Germany, post-Soviet Russia didn’t see a vigorous nationwide debate among the many nation’s historians on the basic problems with Russia’s historic growth. Some promising discussions that started through the twilight years of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika didn’t bear a lot fruit and petered out within the chaotic period of the early Nineteen Nineties. Second, because the Russian political regime has turn into more and more authoritarian underneath Putin, the Kremlin has come to imagine it’s expedient to deploy the notion of Russian exceptionalism to buttress its place each domestically and internationally. Ukraine favoring ‘Europe’ has motivated Putin’s regime to rethink its worldwide identification.
And but, all of the mental groundwork for deconstructing the concept of Russian uniqueness had already been laid by the point the Soviet Union collapsed. A number of generations of pre-revolutionary Russian, émigré, Soviet, and worldwide students had amply demonstrated that Russia isn’t any extra distinctive than another nation. Russia’s historic course of, its social construction, state-society relations and political tradition are certainly marked by sundry peculiarities, however these stem from Russia’s geopolitical place on the periphery of Europe: it sits on the japanese edges of the European cultural sphere and extends all the best way to the border with China and the Pacific Ocean. Like many different nations, Russia borrowed its excessive tradition from elsewhere, and did this twice: first, from Byzantine Constantinople; after which, within the late seventeenth to early eighteenth centuries, from the extra superior Western European cultural mannequin. In each circumstances cultural norms, values and practices got here from with out. Russian cultural growth must be understood as the method of mastering a ‘foreign’ expertise.
Cultural borrowing doesn’t imply, nonetheless, that Russian tradition lacks a artistic factor. When Russia adopted sure facets from one other tradition, the borrowed cultural fashions would discover themselves in a totally completely different context, reshaping them into one thing new. These cultural phenomena would differ from each the unique Western fashions and ‘old’ Russian cultural patterns. Perceptive Russian students like Boris Uspensky and Mikhail Gasparov notice this paradox: it’s exactly the orientation towards a ‘foreign’ tradition that contributes to the originality of Russian tradition.
But such orientation comprises important rigidity in itself: the gravitation towards a ‘foreign’ tradition is dialectically, and antithetically, linked with a need to guard one’s personal ‘authenticity’ and defend oneself from international cultural influences. The next dynamic ensues: the rising inferiority complicated offers rise to prickly nationalism, the seek for a particular path, mythologization of historical past, messianism and assertion of 1’s particular mission on this planet. There’s one other paradox right here that Uspensky additionally notes: it’s exactly this nationalist backlash in opposition to a ‘foreign’ cultural custom that’s often the least nationwide and conventional. Longing for ‘authenticity’ and ‘national roots’ is most frequently the results of international influences – within the Russian case, the influences of Western tradition that Russian intellectuals sought to repudiate. That is what places early Slavophiles and German Romantics on the identical web page: the Germans felt they had been culturally ‘colonized’ by the French and rebelled; the Russians borrowed the philosophical language of German Romanticism and utilized it to their very own scenario. In each circumstances, this was a Sonderweg level of departure.
Unexclusive distinction
But when we reject the existence of a pointy dividing line between ‘West’ and ‘East’ or between ‘Europe’ and ‘Russia’, acknowledging them as social constructs, what would a extra appropriate mannequin explaining similarities and dissimilarities between nationwide trajectories throughout the Eurasian continent be? The West-East ‘cultural gradient’, an understanding that there’s a softer gradation and unity as one strikes from Europe’s Atlantic coast eastwards all the best way into the depth of Eurasia, is one possibility. Pavel Miliukov launched the concept in his multivolume Essays on the Historical past of Russian Tradition, which he completely reworked within the Nineteen Twenties and Thirties when in exile in Paris. Conceptually, the essays are primarily based on two foremost theoretical ideas. First, Russia’s historic evolution repeated the identical phases by means of which different ‘cultured peoples of Europe’ had handed. Second, the method of this growth was slower than in different elements of Europe: ‘not only in Western but also in Central Europe’. Miliukov’s backside line was this: there was nothing specific or distinctive about Russia on this respect. ‘Peculiarity 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’.
Miliukov’s concepts had been additional developed by émigré economist Alexander Gerschenkron, who positioned the European gradient on the foundation of his extremely influential mannequin of business growth. Gerschenkron’s thesis suggests ‘the 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.’ Gerschenkron exerted a robust mental affect on Richard Pipes’ lifelong opponent Martin Malia – a outstanding Berkeley historian who perfected the idea of the West-East gradient. It grew to become the essence of Malia’s exposition of the method of Russia’s social, mental and cultural growth. ‘The farther east one goes,’ Malia contended, ‘the 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’. Whereas Malia understood ‘Europe’ as a roughly coherent cultural sphere together with Russia, he maintained that ‘Russia is the eastern extreme … she is the backward rear guard of Europe at the bottom of the slope of the West-East cultural gradient.’ One other helpful idea, as antidote to the discourse on backwardness, is Maria Todorova’s thought of ‘relative synchronicity within a longue durée development’. In analysing numerous European nationalisms inside the unified construction of modernity, Todorova redefines the ‘East’ – Japanese Europe, the Balkans and Russia – as a part of a typical European house.
The European bloc
By the tip of the Nineteen Eighties, conceptualizing Russia inside the pan-European context had turn into mainstream amongst Moscow governing elites. One of many key facets of Mikhail Gorbachev’s ‘new thinking’ was the concept of a ‘common European home’. Boris Yeltsin talked of the necessity to ‘rejoin the European civilization’. Remarkably, as late as 2005, in his state of the nation tackle, Putin contended that Russia is ‘a major European power’, which for the previous three centuries has been evolving and reworking itself ‘hand in hand’ and ‘together with other European nations’.
Two issues, nonetheless, weighed in opposition to Russia’s easy identification with Europe. One was the age-old quest for standing: Russia’s self-understanding as derzhava (an excellent energy). The notice of the spinoff nature of Russia’s trendy tradition and of its ‘civilizational’ dependence on Europe clashed with the grand thought of Russian greatness. As Russia grew richer and stronger through the 2000s, the Kremlin management discovered it more and more troublesome to understand themselves as ‘learners’ going to high school with Europe. ‘Great Powers do not go to school’, quipped political scientist Iver Neumann. ‘On the contrary, they lay down the line and teach others.’
The opposite downside, which is comparatively current, considerations how ‘Europe’ is constructed. Within the late nineteenth century, the autocratic Russian Empire, even when it was regarded down on by the liberal elites of Nice Britain and France, might nonetheless be thought to be completely ‘European’ within the firm of different Outdated Regimes, being a part of Dreikaizerbund (League of the Three Emperors) along with Wilhelmine Germany and Habsburg Austria-Hungary.
But within the late twentieth to early twenty-first centuries, the scenario modified drastically. The emergence of the European Union and its enlargement eastward, together with the parallel enlargement of NATO, one other ‘Euro-Atlantic institution’, meant that institutionally Russia was being set other than what got here to be understood as ‘Europe’. This strategy of the institutionalization of ‘Europe’ introduced Russia with a troublesome dilemma: both be part of this ‘European bloc’ or revisit the difficulty of self-identification. The problem has been exacerbated by Moscow’s tense relations with its ex-Soviet neighbours – above all with Ukraine – who’re searching for affiliation with the EU, and in the end membership. A troublesome query began haunting Kremlin strategists: if European orientation is totally appropriate with Russian identification, then on what grounds is Moscow stopping different post-Soviet nations from becoming a member of the EU? Varied conservative political thinkers known as Russia’s politics of identification ‘deeply flawed’ and clamored for an pressing conceptual rethink. Predictably, the prompt answer was to proclaim that Russia and Europe are distinct civilizations, every producing a gravitational pull and possessing its personal sphere of affect.
That is exactly what Russia’s new international coverage doctrine has performed.
Again to sq. one
But when Russia isn’t ‘European’, what’s it? Kremlin spin-doctors inform us it’s following its particular path as a novel ‘Russian civilization’. Nevertheless, it isn’t clear, because the late Richard Pipes notes, what that really means. Remarkably, Kremlin-friendly political thinkers selling the concept of Russian ‘uniqueness’ look like confused about this subject themselves. On the dialogue held in late April 2023 on the eve of the XXXI Meeting of the Council on International and Protection Coverage for Russia’s elite group of prime safety analysts, audio system acknowledged that Russia’s departure from its European self-identification and the previous international coverage custom occurred ‘partly by her own will, partly because of unfavorable external circumstances’. Though Russia was seen as a rustic ‘marked by originality’, it was thought-about ‘premature to assert that the Russian civilizational basis has already been formed’. Revealingly, some analysts argued that ‘Russia does not yet know exactly what it wants, its goals and desires are yet to be formulated.’ To fulfil this troublesome process, analysts paradoxically highlighted ‘an urgent need to turn to the Russian intellectual legacy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, particularly to the works of Russian anti-Western and nationalist thinkers reminiscent of Fyodor Tiutchev, Nikolai Danilevskii, Konstantin Leont’ev, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Lev Gumiliov and Vadim Tsymburskii.
And so, we look like again at sq. one. Like within the mid-nineteenth century, present requires the Russian Sonderweg stay a rhetorical determine, a metaphor meant to hide Russia’s perennial lack of ability to remodel itself and eventually come to phrases with (European) modernity. But there may be hope. In his 1930 lecture delivered in Berlin, on the time of Stalin’s ‘Great Break’, Pavel Miliukov presciently famous: ‘The Russian historical process is not ending; it is only being interrupted at this point… Despite [social] earthquakes and eruptions, and most often with their assistance, history continues.’
