Westernism as a Disease of Russian Civilization

Seventh Session of the Philosophical Council, Historiosophy of the Russian Way

Quite recently, on the TV channel Spas, two very intelligent people were talking to each other - the preacher Andrei Tkachev and the historian and publicist Felix Razumovsky. In the course of this conversation the following thesis was put forward: unfortunately, the modern Russians have destroyed their national identity. It was lost in the upheavals and catastrophes of the 20th century. And now we can speak not so much of a national consciousness as of a subconsciousness: something reflexive, similar to the twitching of a baby's arms and legs, its babbling, etc. It seems to me that this is a working metaphor, and I will try to explain why.

Not so long ago, I held a seminar on Westernism with a group of young people who were interested, very active, and self-thinking. I tried to select for them more or less "digestible" articles by modern authors - from the 1990s, the early 2000's, maybe the 2010's - who deal with this subject, but in a critical way. The most reputable electronic database E-library provided me with several hundred titles. Imagine my astonishment when I discovered that these hundreds of articles were written from absolutely non-patriotic perspectives. This means that the representatives of the academic community, who are supposed to be the most conscious subjects forming the national consciousness, are in this respect an absolutely Westernized camp. I realized that our society treats Westernism very, very sluggishly when I started to compile a historiographical review. Strictly speaking, we see a critical attitude towards Westernism only among publicists, while the academic class is dominated by an absolutely Westernized discourse. I was going to write an essay about what Westernism meant in Russia and earlier in Rus', and what is negative about it. I would like to share these thoughts with you. Again, there is practically no modern critical research on Russian Westernism.

Let's start with the XVII century. In his treatise On Politics Yuriy Krizhanich - a Catholic, a Croat, a supporter of Slavic unity, one of the first pan-Slavists - introduces and defines the concept of "foreignness" (xenomania). “Xenomania - foreignness - is a frenzied love for other people's things and peoples, an excessive, frenzied trust in strangers. This deadly plague has infected all of our people." Obviously, he wrote about Slavs of the 17th century, but of course he also means Russians. That is, rather intensive contacts of the top of the ruling stratum with representatives of foreign states in the 17th century led to a sharp weakening of the defensive reactions, first of all, of the supreme power. The same Krizhanich writes: "It is not surprising that the foreignness of so many of our rulers drove them mad and deceived them." As a result, he argues, foreign interests, ideologies, and customs became more important to Russians than their own. I will quote from Krizhanich: "We have the greatest honor and income for foreigners... Helping, they ruin... They sow discord... They offend in trade... They enter into fraudulent agreements... They deceive with gifts... The benefits are false, expensive, malicious... Merchants drive us to poverty... They shame us with their ridicule and abuse... They sow confusion and heresy and turn us into slaves... They enjoy a quiet life, leaving us slavery and labor... Defeated with weapons, they win with speeches... They make alliances that harm us... They make clownish and ridiculous treaties with us... They mock our love and humanity... They deceive us under the guise of mediation... To our shame, they accept our citizenship... They teach luxury, vices, sins and superstitions... They seduce us with vain and untrue teachings... Heretics, in order to discredit the true faith, blaspheme our people and exaggerate its sins..." As we can see, the situation has changed little since the second half of the 17th century. On the contrary, we can say that it has deteriorated significantly.

Peter the Great's Time. A few decades after Krizhanich's On Politics, Peter I, according to the legend, formulated the goal of his reforms as follows: "We need Europe for several decades, and then we must turn our backs on it." Now it can be said in a very clear way that it was an empty and abstract declaration. In reality, Peter's passion for foreign "curiosities" (in Klyuchevsky's phrase) turned out not only to be a borrowing of undeniably necessary innovations for Russia - European science, navy, army organization, etc. - but also a dramatic increase the role of foreigners at the Russian court. The loss of a sober understanding of Russia's national interests in foreign policy, which turned out to be largely subordinated to the interests of foreign states for a long time. The abolition of religious and cultural traditions. The enslavement of the peasantry on an unprecedented scale. And, most importantly, the creation of an influential class of educated people whose main goal was to transplant the European model of civilization to the Russian cultural and historical soil. In a way, we can speak of an obsession with the West in the literal sense. "Foreignness" has become a constant of Russian life.

A century after Peter the Great began to transform, the first reactions to this phenomenon began to manifest themselves. In his famous Note on Old and New Russia, Nikolai Karamzin criticized Peter's activity. Karamzin began to talk about the fact that Peter was destroying the customs, about Peter's imitation, cosmopolitanism, lack of national education, and the bad influence of the foreign environment. Peter's reforms were seen by Karamzin as the fruit of the overheated imagination of a man who, having seen Europe, wanted to make Holland out of Russia. Karamzin also noted such things as the violent path of Europeanization - torture and executions, which served as a means of our state transformation. At the same time, Karamzin was one of the first Russian conservatives to emphasize that one state should borrow useful information from another and not, in principle, follow its customs. He could not understand how Russian national clothes, food, and beards could interfere with the establishment of schools, and even blamed Peter for the fatal division of the people into the highest, "foreignized" class and the lowest - the common people. He writes: "Since the time of Peter the Great, the higher social classes have separated from the lower ones. The Russian peasant, philistine, and merchant saw the Germans in the Russian nobles, to the detriment of the fraternal unanimity of the society." Karamzin was one of the first to say that the abolition of the Patriarchate and the rejection of their own traditions were at the heart of all these negative phenomena.

During the reign of Nicholas I, this argument was taken up by Slavophiles. It is interesting that none of them actually denied the necessity of this very learning from the West and condemned only the "foreignness" that led to the division of the Russian world, the destruction of Russian cultural traditions, and moral degradation. They found that the flip side of this phenomenon was, as they say today, internal Russophobia. It became the norm among a portion of the educated class to hate one's own and love all foreign.

It was in 1812 that the first great upsurge of Russian national thought took place. At that time, the conservatives who fought against gallomania were the victors. The "Russian Party" has contributed to a powerful wave of national energy. Such figures as admiral Alexander Shishkov and general Fyodor Rostopchin played an exceptional role in the Patriotic War of 1812. Russian thought begins to reflect intensively on the Russian identity, on its peculiarities that distinguish it from Europe. Metaphorically speaking, Europe and Russia were beginning to be seen as parts of a once united Christian galaxy that started to drift apart. The thesis that "Russia is not Europe" is gaining ground in Russian thinking. It was the historian Mikhail Pogodin who largely laid the foundation for this. This was a proclamation of the beginning of a fundamentally new stage in Russian history, a sign of Russia's superiority over the West. I must say that not only official ideologists like Sergei Uvarov or Stepan Shevyrev agreed with Pogodin, but many leading representatives of the free intellectual stratum such as Lyubomudrov, Venevitinov, Odoevsky, the mature Pushkin, Gogol, Tyutchev and the Slavophiles supported him as well. The question of the differences between Russian history and the history of Western Europe was raised clearly and unequivocally. They all actively participated in Russification of culture. It was the time of the mass transition of the elite from French to Russian. The era of apprenticeship and imitation came to an end to some extent, and Russian science and culture began to bear quite mature fruits.

Russian life in the middle of the 19th century is in a struggle between two diametrically opposed processes: the awareness and maturation of the original Russian civilization and the denial of Russian tradition and cultural heritage. The former can be found in various public, cultural and governmental spheres. Russian culture turned back to the Byzantine patristic heritage, after what Florovsky called "Western captivity". The phenomenon of the Optina desert, the works of mature Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Slavophiles (Danilevsky, Leontiev, etc.), the formation of original Russian religious and philosophical thought, the creation of the Russian style, and much more contributed to this process. All of this was in abeyance in 1917, because at the same time a fundamentally different process was under way. In the bosom of various trends of Westernism (I called it Gallomania, but there were other forms of radical "foreignness"), a kind of anti-system developed that denied everything connected with Russian traditions. In the process, sentiments and ideas that saw historical Russia as a subject to unconditional destruction, or at least radical transformation, gained the upper hand. The supporters of this point of view emphasized the backwardness of Russia in comparison with the reference Western civilization.

Chaadaev's first philosophical letter was the first manifesto of this kind of attitude. If we consider this document in isolation from Chaadaev's main body of work, which became known only in the thirties of the 20th century, then we can agree with the historian of the second wave of emigration Nikolai Ulyanov, who gives his interpretation of this philosophical letter. He writes: "Russia is a bastard by birth, she is a subhuman among the peoples. Anyone who did not notice these statements did not understand anything about the topic of "philosophical letters". The Russian national consciousness, in the process of self-improvement, has undergone, and probably will continue to undergo, the greatest self-denial, but going through this does not mean losing all self-consciousness...". Forgive Ulyanov his ignorance of Chaadaev's later letters. He talks about the perception of the first philosophical letter by the "educated" elites of that time. They perceived it as a national self-denial, which turned out to be the alpha and omega of Westernization. One can also recall the blasphemous poetic formula of one of the non-returnees of the Nicholas kingdom, who later became a Catholic monk, Vladimir Pecherin: "How sweet it is to hate one's native land, // And eagerly await its destruction! // And in its ruin to discern // The dawn of a new life for the world!".

Such sentiments were superimposed by socialist ideas, which began to actively penetrate into Russia in the forties of the 19th century and assumed the elimination not only of private property, but also of national statehood, religion, family and individuality. A combustible mixture was created, an extremely dangerous ideological "concoction" that was absolutely uncritically perceived. The implementation of such ideas on Russian soil was to lead to a kind of semblance of the Kingdom of God on earth. We can say that in the second half of the 19th – beginning of the 20th century, ideologies that are definitely Westernized in nature and genesis, i.e., liberalism, Marxism, populism, etc., dominated. They monopolized the public discourse. The media supported these ideas, too. The situation was similar in many university departments. Conservative publications that tried to defend what they called national interests and called for the creative development of the national tradition, with the rarest exceptions, led a miserable existence, were subjected to deformation, moral terror and harassment, and were in fact largely marginalized. Of course, it was a crisis.

Russian monarchical statehood was by no means distinctive, conservative, and so forth. The Conservatives had only an episodic impact on state policy, but its significance should not be exaggerated. In 1917, what was supposed to happen did happen. Various political parties and movements with a Western orientation have been given an unprecedented opportunity to implement their projects in Russia with the support of the Western political forces. The months of February and October of 1917 mark the realization of these projects. It can be said that all the negative aspects of the events of 1917-1953 are largely due to this circumstance.

It should be noted that since the 1930s a kind of pseudo-conservative, traditionalist coup had been taking place within the system itself. After the political and then physical destruction of a significant part of the Left, Soviet patriotism, appeals, (especially in military propaganda) to the facts of the historical past, on the one hand, and to the images of grand dukes, tsars, and generals (censored by the party to some extent), on the other hand, became important elements of situational pseudo-conservatism of that time. Nevertheless, the denial of a number of fundamental, classical, and traditional values still prevailed. For example, property rights and the rule of law were denied; there was a constant struggle against religion; the principle of internationalism was proclaimed, etc.

In one way or another, these processes deepened. In the 1960s, a traditionalist reaction began. The Russian party that puts the protection of the rights of the Russian people, traditions and culture, the primacy of national interests over international ones, etc. in the foreground emerged. Russian writers glorified the Russian countryside. The illegal part of the Russian party appealed to the Russian cultural, intellectual, and religious pre-revolutionary tradition. However, these tendencies did not have a chance of realization in the political sphere and were the subject of persecution at the end of Yuri Andropov's rule. The ground was prepared for implementing another Western project.

The triumph of a liberal-Western project, and a globalist one at that, is what happened in 1991. There was another disaster, a civilizational split. The Russian people, many of whom turned out to be located outside the Russian Federation, have been divided. As a result, there was a change of identity that took place during the Soviet period with a very significant part of Russians living on the territory of Ukraine and Belarus.

We can see that the greatest danger at the present time is such a disease of the Russian nation as "Ukrainism". But this is also a kind of vulgar "peasant" Westernism that radically distanced itself from what was developing the identity of the Russian world and relied on the European choice, radical Russophobia, and the practice of Nazi collaborators. Now that Ukraine has become anti-Russia, this is what we see.

The phenomenon I've tried to describe has become embedded in a political and cultural tradition. It is Westernism that produces the most dangerous and challenging forms of political and cultural "foreignness" and conflicts, which are only partially contained at the moment. It can be said that for the creative class in power today, history lessons are for the future because of their vital existential interests. That is why we need to focus on the understanding of this phenomenon. As a historian, I can say that there is not a single monograph, not a single satisfactory modern collection of papers in which Westernism is critically analyzed. There is no coherent history of this phenomenon. I would like to emphasize the obvious - it is impossible to question the very necessity of studying and borrowing from the achievements of the West. These are absolutely necessary and normal procedures. Without them, a significant part of humanity would not be able to live. Russia, like any other country, owes a lot to apprenticeship, but it is also obvious that borrowing in the scientific, technical and cultural spheres should first and foremost strengthen Russia and its civilization, not weaken and divide it in the interests of geopolitical rivals. Only a clear understanding of this phenomenon will allow us to formulate a clear strategy for developing Russia in all vital areas. This is one of our modern intellectual community's main tasks.

Translated by Sophia Polyankina