Andrey Teslya:"A New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia" was originally published in Ab Imperio, and has now been published as a separate publication in two volumes. This, regardless of the attitude to the content, is a big event in Russian historiography, since the authors, as I see it, claim to create a new big narrative - to replace Karamzin, the logic proposed by him is seen as dominant with all modifications to this day. This is both a summing up (of all the previous activities of the team of historians who gathered at different stages on the pages of the magazine), and the beginning of a new stage - a claim to go beyond the boundaries of the “workshop”, into a larger space. It is significant that on the very first pages of this work they polemically mention “The History...” of Boris Akunin, which clearly does not mean the professional community. At the same time, the authors declaratively claim that they have no claims to a new grand narrative - their goal is more specific: the deconstruction of the existing one, that which genealogically goes back to Karamzin. In your opinion, to what extent can we agree with the declared limited objectives of the course? After all, if we are talking about deconstruction, isn’t fragmentary writing more logical? The logic of demonstrating the gaps - rather than building a coherent course, which in any case sets some monological frame of description?
Ivan Kurilla: It seems to me that the authors are disingenuous when they claim that their goal is the deconstruction of narrative; They are quite good at designing something new. This new narrative is very interesting, sometimes controversial - but it is precisely a consistent presentation of the history of the region, which they prefer to call “Northern Eurasia.”
Tesla: How might you then characterize this narrative - especially from a comparative perspective? You just recently published a book about the concept of “history” that received the most approving reviews: in this optics, how can one evaluate/describe this undertaking, if we take a larger historiographical frame?
Kurilla: Thank you for your feedback - and yes, in the book you mentioned, I wrote about the request for new narratives, about the fact that the fragmentation of historical science into increasingly detailed topics and chronological segments, understandable if we proceed from the goal of a more in-depth analysis of specific problems, is increasingly alienating historians from potential readers of their works outside their own workshop. From this point of view, I cannot help but welcome the attempt to offer such a new narrative, which, I am sure, can be read by many educated people who have an interest in history, but not enough to read specialized monographs. At the very beginning of their text, the authors mention a parallel attempt by Boris Akunin, which was a response to the same reader request for a holistic story about the history of our part of the world. But there is also a certain trap here - the authors (unlike Akunin) are professional historians, but for that same non-professional reader they compete, first of all, with Akunin. We see that the authors have moved further away from the traditional structure of Russian history - but in the eyes of this general reader these differences are not so obvious. If you look at the narrative through the eyes of historians (not being a historian of Russia, I, alas, cannot fully appreciate how much the authors took into account modern research into Russian history), then a generalizing narrative is good if it encourages us to pose some questions in a new way; based on a broader chronological or geographical framework, see the opportunity to look at sources from a different angle. It seems to me that in some stories the proposed narrative stimulates such turns.
Ab Imperio, 2017
Tesla: In connection with the “New Imperial History...” a number of critics from the historical community recalled the course of M.N. Pokrovsky, etc. - accusing the authors of ideological bias and other sins. Without touching on this kind of topic for now, I want to ask you: how successful do you think the resulting project is - and what effects does it produce, in your opinion, based on its rhetorical model? After all, rhetoric in the case of an appeal to a general reader is one of the most important parts, and the course is deliberately presented as a “generalized voice”, without indicating the authorship of individual sections, without references, even with minimal ritual thanks that have come into modern use - that is, the course presented as a collective statement in which individual voices should not be heard, they should sound as a single choir.
Kurilla: The biggest difficulty I experienced while reading the text was precisely its deliberate “isolation” from the field of historical science: the authors do not formulate questions, do not indicate different assessments and interpretations, do not show the possibility of different readings of sources, instead offering a coherent narrative. If I am not an expert in the field that the authors write about (and I am not an expert in Russian history in general and I feel more or less confident only in the second third of the 19th century), then I would like to understand where the authors repeat generally accepted ideas, where they argue with them, and where they simply write something new “from scratch”, without regard to the existing historiography. You will remind me that this laboratory is of interest only to historians, and the authors, as I said a little earlier, wrote for the general reader - but here I do not agree. It seems to me that the most important goal of a historical course offered to the general reader should be to understand the possibility of different narratives and the existence of disputes both over sources and over assessments. This is not in the book, and this is its most important disadvantage.
The authors themselves write (at the beginning of the text) that their goal was “to create an internally logical and consistent narrative that overcomes the monologism and teleologism of standard survey courses”; I doubt that a “coordinated narrative” is even possible, except from the authors’ point of view, but it seems to me that they rather strengthened the monologism (at least in my understanding of the word).
Tesla: Since for the authors of the course its ideological sound is a conscious attitude, then - if we digress a little and again turn to broader historical discussions - can ideology not be “monological” in essence? And, on the other hand, to what extent can a story addressed to a general reader not be ideologically loaded - even if it is an “ideology of diversity”? If we consider our goal to be away from “ideology,” then what do you see as possible strategies for this movement?
Kurilla: I may have missed something, but I don’t see that the authors have a conscious focus on the “ideological sound of the course.” However, I agree that narratives, as a rule, are ideological to one degree or another. That is, in my opinion, the dependence is of the opposite nature: the point is not that ideology is monological, but that any monologue is ideological in its essence. This is why I miss spoken questions about the past in the text - in a monologue-narrative we see only answers to questions hidden from us. The open formulation of questions exposes what you called ideology, and thereby disarms it. A strategy for avoiding ideology could be an attempt to formulate several questions to the same material, asked from different (social, political, ideological) positions - but this probably still sounds utopian.
Tesla: The title of the text itself refers to the Eurasian (of course, greatly rethought and modified) concept of “place development”. Instead of political boundaries and political subjects of the present, projected into the past, here we have the experience of relying on the geographical - as relatively stable: within this geographical frame, various things happen, but the spatial boundaries themselves remain stable - especially in conditions when the boundaries of the relatively recent past have largely disappeared , and the new boundaries were clearly called into question. How successful and, most importantly, productive - capable of becoming a broad framework for subsequent work - does such an approach within the designated boundaries seem to you?
Kurilla: I quite agree that projecting modern boundaries into the past when writing history is a bad practice. However, the authors proceed from the fact that in the first millennium the region was formed, the history of which they are writing. It seems to me that this region (and especially its borders) was constantly redefined in the subsequent millennium. When the authors describe the Mongol invasion, for example, they include in the story the countries south of the region they initially described - both China and the territories south of the Caspian Sea. Then what is the value of the descriptive definition given at the beginning?
Nevertheless, the very attempt to write a text that is not tied to the decline and rise of Moscow, but describes the turn of events in other state (and proto-state) formations in the region, seems to me fruitful.
Tesla: Turning to your area of interest, what fruitful, original contemporary versions of “big history” would you name? Where do you see the most productive and at the same time interesting options for historical writing for a wide audience?
Kurilla: I’m afraid to look ignorant, but I know almost no modern examples of “big history”. There are works that belong, rather, to the genre of historical sociology, there is a book by B.N. Mironov about the social history of Russia during the imperial period - but I have doubts that it is easily read by a wide audience. Having tensed a little, I remembered an example that is no longer quite modern: in 1991, a work was published in several volumes under the general title “History of the Fatherland. People, ideas, decisions" - if my memory serves me right, its authors made an attempt to talk about each of the controversial issues of Russian history as a living dispute between historians: from the book one could gain knowledge both about the events of the past and about what the modern interest in these events, what are the main differences in approaches to them. This, from my point of view, is the most productive approach to historical writing for the general public.
Tesla: The immediate stated goal of the project is the development of a “new language” of description. Tell me how successful this attempt seems to you and to what extent there is really a need to develop a “new language” - after all, many of the description models used by the authors have a very respectable history and are already completely rooted, including thanks to the efforts of the authors of the “New Imperial History...” , into local soil?
Kurilla: It is difficult for me to appreciate the novelty of the descriptive language in this text. I see in some chapters the influence of constructivism, which is close to me (in others it is not) - and if this is a new language, then very good. There is probably a need to develop a new language. But it seems to me that this new language should have integrated social and political history, but this text retains the state-centricity characteristic of the classics, with which the authors seem to argue.
Tesla: It seems to me that any attempt at a coherent grand narrative, by the very laws of the genre, must have a certain center, something that will become the subject of description - as, for example, in an education novel it will be the story of a girl/boy on the path of growing up, “loss” or “ finding oneself. Who or what can become such a “subject” for us in relation to our experience over a long period of time? How might we try to describe our past selves—and how do you think we might productively think about this “us” who this story is about?
Kurilla: For the authors, the declared “subject” is a certain space in which human groups self-determine. Actually, they did everything so that the reader would not identify himself with the residents of R OU this land (as it was once described by Tamara Eidelman in the article “How we defeated the Khazar Kaganate”). It seems to me an interesting (although not controversial) proposal to imagine ourselves as heirs not of a specific (“ethnic”? state?) tradition, but of all the peoples who previously lived in Northern Eurasia - so that a resident, for example, between the Volga and Don rivers imagines himself as a successor only the Moscow archers sent there in the 16th century, or the peasants who fled to the Cossacks from enslavement, but also the inhabitants of the Golden Horde, the Pechenegs, and even the Sarmatians, who had previously developed this space in their own way. This idea makes our own past richer.
Tesla: Both in the title of the course and in the text, the claim to “novelty” is not only clearly, but even persistently stated - how justified is it, in your opinion? How much of this comes from the declaration - and how much from a real break with previous schemes? And if the latter, then what seems to you the most productive, and what is rather questionable?
Kurilla: And again, it is difficult for me to answer: I repeat, I am not a specialist in Russian history, and my assessment of the novelty will not be fair - for this you need to be much better familiar with the existing historiography. I liked the attempt to go beyond the history of Kievan-Moscow Rus', considering these state formations along with others, neighboring ones.
Tesla: Since the course is addressed to a wide educated reader, how successful do you think the idea of a consistent chronological “enlargement” of what is depicted is from a quick excursion into the distant past up to almost five hundred pages devoted to the last century or so of the existence of the empire? Thus, doesn’t it turn out that the closer the past is to us, the greater its significance for us - and thus history turns out to be focused on the “genealogy of modernity”, affirming the projection of modernity into the past? Isn’t too much devoted in this case to the understanding of modernity, which is not only not explicitly stated anywhere, but also by definition is not the subject of the authors’ special, professional knowledge - that is, don’t they risk reading the past from the angle of just a common understanding of modernity? It seems to me that in this case, a specific text allows us to reach a much more fundamental issue - the dependence of historical knowledge not only on modernity, but also on the fact that the historian, by definition, relates to modernity as a layman.
Kurilla: Yes, I also noticed the disproportionate ratio of individual chapters - as if the authors wrote about different periods in volumes proportional to the volume of sources available on them (and this is another hypothesis that does not connect the problem with the “genealogy of modernity”). Here, however, the authors are a little betrayed by the disclaimer at the beginning of the text - that they “managed to create the first modern historical narrative that does not encounter fundamental objections from local communities of historians in post-Soviet societies, which is a unique scientific and political achievement.” “Political Achievement” clearly places the text in the context of modern battles for history (I can’t say that I condemn this, but perhaps it would be worth stating it explicitly then).
Tesla: History, let me say something naively, is always a place of “battles” or “fights”, but in relation to us - where, in your opinion, are the most significant “front lines” for the historical community itself and how do you assess the immediate prospects for the development of events from the point of view of these confrontations?
Kurilla: Today, only the external “front” seems quite obvious - the defense of the historical community from the onslaught of presentist approaches that sacrifice history for the sake of convenient myths - political, ideological or sociocultural. There are many splits within the community, but it seems to me that there are no “fronts” here: historians do not fight each other, despite different methodologies, agendas, or even ideological predilections. Nevertheless, rivalry exists: for example, between history, say, more traditional for Russia, close to positivism in its distrust of theory and emphasis on careful work with sources, on the one hand, and more internationalized history, which poses unusual questions to the past (sometimes according to supporters of the first approach, to the detriment of thoroughness in processing sources), on the other. The authors of “The New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia” represent, of course, the second group - and it seems to me that it has a chance to shake the dominance of the first during the period of generational change in Russian historical science. However, I understand that this is a very simplified scheme - even in Soviet times, among domestic historians there were people capable of changing the research agenda (let me remember A.Ya. Gurevich as an example), and among those who bring new questions today there are many people who spent many years in archives and understand the significance and meaning of such work. Therefore, I still do not see a “front” or conflict here - rather, we are moving towards a new synthesis.
The 19th century was the century of historicism, which for us today often looks quite anachronistic, with an attempt to find the “source” of our history, the moment of beginning that would predetermine the future, and by looking into which we can best understand modernity. The past here played a dual role - as something that defines us and at the same time, which we can change, consciously or out of ignorance, from misunderstanding, insufficient awareness of our past. The awareness of history was thereby supposed to return the conscious person to himself - he had to find out who he is and thereby change.
In the sixth “Philosophical Letter” (1829) Chaadaev wrote:
“You have probably already noticed, madam, that the modern direction of the human mind clearly strives to clothe all knowledge in historical form. Reflecting on the philosophical foundations of historical thought, one cannot help but notice that it is called upon to rise in our days to an immeasurably greater height than the one at which it has stood until now. At present, reason can be said to find satisfaction only in history; he constantly turns to the past and, in search of new opportunities, derives them exclusively from memories, from a review of the path traveled, from the study of those forces that directed and determined his movement over the centuries.”
For Russian thought, debates about the past and the place of Russia in world history were directly addressed to the present - to place oneself in history meant for the 19th century, as in many ways for us today, to determine the situation in the world, to justify some hopes and discard others, to indulge in despair or be inspired by the enormity of the prospect. Determined by the present moment, the interpretation of the past in a reciprocal manner gives us an understanding of the present, and on the basis of it we act, that is, we take actions aimed at the future, and, therefore, no matter how correct or not our understanding of the past was, it turns out to be real in its consequences.
Interest in past disputes in the history of Russian thought is determined not so much by their apparent “enduring relevance,” but by the fact that to this day we speak largely through the intellectual vocabulary that arose in that era, use the oppositions that were defined then, and, meeting with them in the past, we experience the “joy of recognition,” which often turns out to be only a consequence of false identification.
The apparent relevance of the polemics of the past is due to the fact that we over and over again remove the texts of the past from their context - thus, “Westerners” and “Slavophiles” begin to meet far beyond the boundaries of disputes in Moscow living rooms and on the pages of “Otechestvennye zapiski” and “Moskvityanin”, turning out to be timeless concepts; equally used in relation to the 1840s; and by the 1890s; and to the Soviet disputes of the 1960s; “Asian despotism” or “eastern morals” begin to be encountered with the same success even in the 20th century. BC; at least in the 20th century. from R.H. The temptation to endow history with the function of clarifying the meanings of modernity leads to the fact that the historical references themselves turn out to be timeless - history in this case takes on the role of philosophy; as a result, turning out to be untenable as history; not as philosophy.
Against; if we talk about genuine relevance; then it consists primarily in the restoration of an intellectual genealogy - an idea; images; symbols; which seem to be, to a first approximation, “self-evident”; almost “eternal”; are revealed at the moment of their occurrence; when they are still just outlines, attempts to mark out the as yet undescribed “desert of reality.” About the deservedly famous book by Fr. George Florovsky’s “Ways of Russian Theology” (1938) Nikolai Berdyaev responded; that it would be more accurate to call it “The Lack of Russian Thought” - historical analysis all led to the fact that they thought wrong; not about that; not in that sequence or without it at all. But even if we suddenly agree with such a sad assessment; and in this case, turning to history will not be fruitless; after all, it’s not just about the verdict; but also in understanding the logic of the disputes of the past: “there is a system in his madness.” However; We ourselves don’t think so - disappointment is usually a consequence of previous charm; excessive hopes; expectations to find answers to the “last questions.” But; as Karamzin wrote (1815); “all History; even clumsily written; sometimes pleasant; as Pliny says; especially domestic. […] Let the Greeks and Romans captivate the imagination: they belong to the family of the human race, and are not strangers to us in their virtues and weaknesses, glory and disasters; but the Russian name has a special charm for us […].”
In the “Crossroads of Russian Thought” series, it is planned to publish selected texts by Russian and Russian philosophers, historians and publicists that are of decisive importance for the development of language, the definition of concepts and the formation of images that exist to this day, through which we comprehend and imagine Russia / the Russian Empire and its place in the world. Among the authors whose texts will be included in the series will be well-known figures such as V. G. Belinsky, A. I. Herzen, N. M. Karamzin, M. P. Katkov, A. S. Khomyakov, P. Ya Chaadaev, and less well-known now, but without acquaintance with whom the history of Russian social thought of the 19th century is clearly incomplete - M. P. Drahomanov, S. N. Syromyatnikov, B. N. Chicherin and others. The purpose of this series is to present the main milestones in the history of debates about the Russian past and present of the 19th century - the golden age of Russian culture - without ideological straightening and reading into the texts of the past the current problems of modernity. It is our deep conviction that acquaintance with the history of Russian public debates of the century before last without the desire to directly transfer them to the present is a much more urgent task than an attempt to use these texts of the past as a ready-made ideological arsenal.
Alexander Herzen: the first experience of synthesis of Westernism and Slavophilism
Herzen, as a gifted, sincere person, shows the evolution of an advanced person. He went to the West, thinking that he would find better forms there. There, revolutions took place before his eyes, and he developed disappointment in the Western system and a special love and hope for the Russian people.
For Soviet intellectuals for decades A.I. Herzen (1812–1870) was one of the few officially permitted “outlets” - with all the fluctuations in the course regarding the interpretation of specific figures, with the constant revision of the pantheon, the promotion of some and the exclusion of others, his place was secured thanks to a largely accidental article by V.I. Lenin, written for the centenary of his birth, in 1912. He was one of those who was part of the genealogy of the forefathers of the Russian revolution, along with the Decembrists, among the “noble, landowner revolutionaries of the first half of the last century.” And, like the Decembrists, for the Soviet world it was a legalized exit into another world - the world of noble life, other, far from “revolutionary ethics”, ideas about what should be, other ways of living with oneself and with others.
The book presents an attempt by historian Andrei Tesli to clear the history of Russian nationalism of the twentieth century from propaganda rubbish. The Russian nation was formed in unusual conditions, when those who could serve as its core were already the imperial core of Russia. The debate about the nation in the intellectual world of the Empire is a running theme in the essays of the young researcher, a regular contributor to Gefter.ru. The Russian nation in the classical sense of the word has not developed. But the variety of projects of the national movement, their struggle and opposition to them from the Empire to this day define the classic nature of Russian debates. Their concreteness allows us to get away from the falsehood of “generally accepted” readings, returning living ambiguity to the past.
A series: Notebooks Gefter.Ru
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by liters company.
About conservatism and nationalism in their conjunction
Conservatism, as is well known, arose as a reaction to the French Revolution - society began to move in a way that was directly accessible to observation and awareness, changing what had previously seemed unchanged - and therefore self-evident.
Actually, any era of radical political and social change (and, perhaps, political to a greater extent than social) gives rise to reflection, putting power and society on the table of the anatomical theater. What was previously hidden - or, more often, simply invisible due to the familiarity of the view, since it is almost impossible for us to distance ourselves from the situation in which we find ourselves, from the environment in which our life takes place - changes make obvious: it is given to the observer to see how power is lost and gained, how new social layers arise. What, under “normal” conditions, requires decades and centuries, in these periods proceeds at a speed commensurate with the dynamism of theatrical performance: a classical tragedy is given with its unities, when everything, no matter how complex and long its prehistory, converges in one point at one point in time. From the catastrophe of the 17th century, a philosophy of law was born, focused on public law - on the question of how public legal regulation is possible, trying to find the source and meaning of the state in law and thereby placing at the center of reflection the very phenomenon of “law”, the border that lies between law and lack of rights.
In the 16th–17th centuries, that same “political body” – the “people” – emerged, which can be represented in various ways: the monarch now becomes a representative, one of the possible. In Hobbes's reasoning, this idea is emphasized with all possible clarity: it does not matter what the state form will be - monarchy, aristocracy or democracy - this is a practical question, decided depending on the circumstances. Hence the tendency to equalize rulers - emperors and kings, princes and dukes - which will find its formulation in the Treaty of Westphalia, since every ruler is the one who exercises power over a certain territory, representing a certain community-people. To be extremely crude: previously, the status of the ruler was determined within the framework of the sacred hierarchy. The king may have been proclaimed “the emperor in his kingdom,” but the essential thing was that his imperium, unlike the emperor in the proper sense, turned out to be territorially limited and the sacred hierarchy acted in the Neoplatonic order of hierarchies - with a flow of energy from top to bottom. Moreover, each Neoplatonic level has partial autonomy, which makes sense only within the framework of the One, in relation to it. In the new logic, the power of the ruler is based on the lower, he does not “enter into negotiations” with the estates, since in the new logic he is the only political reality - that through which the “people” become visible.
In the French Revolution, the “people” becomes a “nation”, that is, something that has political reality, subjectivity in itself - the logic of representation confronts the logic of identity, the Rousseauian direct reality of the “general will”: 1) liberals move within the framework of “moderation”, the limitations of each of the possibilities, essentially multiple representation, when the nation is represented by both the monarch and parliament; 2) democrats, ideally determined by the logic of identity, in practice defend the only representative - parliament, returning to identity through the possibility of appealing to the nation as such “over the head” of parliament, resorting to a referendum or acclamation.
Conservatism as a reaction to the revolution turns out to be initially dual, expressed by two almost diametrically opposed figures:
1. Edmund Burke will formulate the position of “liberal conservatism”, based on the fundamental thesis: reality is more complex than any rational formulations. From this principle of complexity it follows that we cannot act based solely on our rational ideas about how the world works and how we should rebuild it, since any “reorganization plan”, by definition, must contain “an adjustment for the unaccounted for, unreflected reality " Rethinking the concept of the “social contract”, Burke introduces a time perspective - this contract now includes not only the current “fathers of families”, but also those who lived earlier and those not yet born: society does not begin with us and does not end with us; The goals we pursue go beyond the boundaries of our lives - starting with the fact that we take care of our children. Polemicizing with the cult of reason, universal, fundamentally the same for all people and justifying the possibility of universal forms of social and political organization, Burke formulates the “presumption of sanity” - if people’s actions seem senseless to us, then the problem, most likely, is that We We don’t understand the meaning of these actions. In other words, Burke insists on not accepting our understanding, the current boundaries of rational understanding, as reality as such; the meaningfulness of the world does not coincide with what we are able to comprehend at the moment.
This brand of conservatism is born of a simultaneous recognition of the fragility and importance of traditions and the fact that traditions are maintained by “local communities” - they exist only by being constantly reproduced. Hence the thesis about the absence of universal recipes and saving formulas in politics - each society solves its own problems, relying on its experience, its traditions, its established methods of interaction, therefore what has proven itself well in one country will not work in another or will act completely differently.
2. If Burke is a skeptic, for whom the first commandment in politics is “do no harm,” and political action is defined as the art of the possible, and not of achieving some ideal goal, for whom society is a given and the main task facing him is higher than any other – self-preservation, then the second father of conservatism, Joseph de Maistre, is almost its direct opposite. Power for him is a sacrament, irrational, transcendental to society, or rather, transcendental - that which is not social and through which the social comes into existence. Here the problematic of political thinking is stated, which is completely absent in the horizon of the 18th century, to which Burke belongs - politics is associated with the divine, and the Almighty manifests himself in politics through the inexplicable, paradoxical; It is no longer God who brings meaning; on the contrary, incomprehensibility is precisely the sign of His presence.
For de Maistre, the person closest to the figure of the monarch is the executioner, who is outside of society and at the same time embodies what allows society to exist, uniting it through violence, removed from the social and at the same time present in it: murder, prohibited in society, allowed to the executioner, who is a “legal killer,” just as the monarch exercises his power, creates the law, being himself removed from the scope of the law - power acts through the limiting and forbidden, through the right to transgress the border of law and thereby create this border. If Hobbes, thinking about the sovereign, builds an extremely rational system, then for de Maistre the main phenomenon is war with its irrationality at the level of the actions of individual soldiers; power is the force that makes a soldier sacrifice his life, obeying, and not “for the sake of something”, this is what takes possession of us. Where our agreement is limited to the rational, there is no society, there is a transaction, and if this image of a “society of merchants entering into contracts” seems convincing to us, then this is either blindness, or we happened to live in happy times when the nature of power is not exposed .
The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the first non-religious wars with a strong ideological component, provoked both nationalist and conservative reactions in the countries they faced (and, particularly in Vienna between 1805 and 1810, led to attempts to combine nationalism and conservatism - e.g. in the form of Friedrich Schlegel's "southern romanticism", which came to an end after 1810, when the Metternich government quite reasonably considered the nationalist movement too dangerous for itself to use situationally as an ally). Of course, in its pure form, none of the above-mentioned forms of conservative reaction became widespread - however, the impetus that de Maistre and the thinkers of the same group gave it turned out to be extremely productive: a secondary sacralization of monarchies took place, the emergence of “political Christianity” (first turn - Catholicism, becoming a powerful political force from the 1810-1820s).
The ideology of legitimism, which established itself after the Congress of Vienna, like any compromise ideology, tried to use a whole bunch of internally contradictory meanings - it allowed simultaneously the use of the logic of representation and, at the same time, a renewed sacralization of power (it is no coincidence that since that time coronation rituals have become widespread spread and increasing importance). However, the basis of legitimism was the recognition of law as a self-sufficient basis - all existing power was recognized and subject to protection, the principle of legitimism equally protected the absolute and constitutional monarchy, Christian power and power of other faiths; By virtue of this principle, it was necessary to preserve both the Polish constitution (until the rebels themselves violated it) and the power of the Turkish Sultan. Of course, in this sense, conservatism turned out to be the ideology of power - but not necessarily only it, since it also provided ideological support for the aristocracy in its resistance to the establishment of control through the bureaucratic apparatus or for local communities, which in conservatism found the basis for maintaining their special statuses in conflict with the state. power.
The radical semantic transformation of conservatism occurred in the 60s of the 19th century. Until this moment, the decisive opponent of conservatism was the national movement - nationalism, based on the fundamentally democratic ideology of the national body and its acquisition of political subjectivity, opposed the established political entities and authorities. Bismarck carried out a conservative takeover of the nationalist program in the 1860s, implementing the version of “Little Germany” and thereby creating a fundamentally new phenomenon - the conservative content of nationalism, which actively began to absorb irrationalist components, transforming them into the “mysticism of the nation”: the rhetoric of “blood and soil” gained the opportunity to appeal to current political traditions. As a result, by the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th century, an ideological basis arose for combining conservatism and nationalism in a radical project, as far as possible from conservatism in Burke’s understanding - that is, as opposition to modern society and a return to what were considered the values of traditional society, the latter being identified with national body. This turn spread primarily in those countries that had only recently emerged as nations - or were "nationalizing states" - and which were threatened either by alternative national projects or were in a difficult international situation that they perceived as an immediate threat (for example, Germany or Russia).
The First World War, having collapsed the previous traditional political systems and giving a chance to the Bolsheviks, who managed to take advantage of it, gave rise to the seemingly paradoxical phenomenon of “democratic conservatism”, which in fact had little in common with conservatism in the sense in which it was understood in the 19th century - that is, based on the existing socio-political hierarchy, on the aristocracy, whose power, as the real foundations were lost, was cemented by tradition, in need of constant renewal. The new “conservatism”, appealing to traditional values, no longer needed a complex system of autonomous groups and classes - the abolished history fit into the eternal supra-historical “body of the nation”, represented by the figure of the leader, whose authenticity was now certified by the vision of the crowds, given from the outside, in the eye of a film lens and from within, through presence as a particle of the “comprehensive whole.”
The bad repetition of Russian history
In the early 1830s, Chaadaev wrote about the emptiness and bad repetition of Russian history. Two generations later, Rozanov already reproduced similar reasoning - devoid of the totality of negation and the intensity of the vision set by the apocalyptic perspective, but this only added to its prevalence - as a “commonplace”:
“Our whole (Russian) history - especially in these two centuries, and the further, the worse - is chaotic; everything in it is “abundant”, “wide” - and everything is “unarranged”; we seem to live by aphorisms, without trying to connect them into a system and without even noticing that all our aphorisms contradict each other; So We Actually, our spiritual self is not definable, not perceptible to thought, and that’s why we do not develop.” (Rozanov, 2000: 309).
Perhaps the most widespread call, expectation and aspiration in all camps and directions of Russian thought since the middle
XIX century and up to the present day - to a “new beginning”. It doesn’t matter what exactly the “beginning” is – it could be a social revolution, or a return to lost origins, but the main thing here is the same logic of rupture, the desire for “refounding”, and in this respect the Slavophiles, for example, are no different from their opponents of the Westerners, since for both of them the present reality is subject to abolition - either through a return to the past with which the “Petrine Revolution” broke, or to the fact that again, following Peter I, as he appears in the eyes of Westerners, decide to “re-establish Russia in a European way.”
This sense of self is due to the overlap of two processes:
- firstly, the general process of modernization - the destruction of traditional social structures, customary economic and cultural structures, and this process, together with Russia, is going through all European societies, and if we talk about the societies of Central and Eastern Europe, then the process also takes place in very close chronological periods within;
– secondly, the situation of catch-up development – Russia was one of the first countries in the world to be involved in a large-scale process of catch-up modernization, when the modernization impulse comes from the outside, generated by the external situation, and not by the internal needs of society. The subject of modernization here is the state power, influencing society for the purpose of survival - since in order to survive in a changing world, and even more so to achieve goals that go beyond survival, the state must have means and resources that the current state of society does not provide it with. But society itself does not experience this need - the types of connections and interactions that exist in it satisfy its needs, changes come as an external requirement - state power rebuilds society. And hence the phenomenon of autonomy of power in societies of this type, power as the “only European”.
This same power gives rise to an interesting, many times described phenomenon - an educated society, part of which will later grow into the “intelligentsia”, a group that exists, on the one hand, to the extent that the government carries out its modernization project, and, therefore, does not have support in the rest of society, which remains in the traditional system of relations and undergoes the influence of power, on the other hand, in opposition to this power, which has monopolized power. This position has long been described through the concept of “orientalism”, introduced by E. Said, with subsequent complication through the concept of “internal orientalism”. The position of the “educated society” is determined in two ways: firstly, through distancing from the rest of the (“uneducated”) society, which is viewed as an object of colonial control - a passive, inert mass, devoid of subjectivity; secondly, the right to power is justified through belonging to a “other world” - they are “internal Europeans” brought into a non-European reality; thirdly, an ambivalent attitude towards “Europe” - it is the imaginary subject with which the “educated society” must identify itself, through this gaining the right to its status, it is also a source of tension, since it is necessary to prove and confirm one’s belonging to it, and at the same time, it is a source of external influence, that same orientalizing gaze into which the “inner Europeans” themselves fall.
The breakthrough of catch-up modernization was successful for us at least twice - in the 18th century, when by the beginning of the 19th century Russia in the European world occupied positions that previously belonged to Poland (an agricultural center), and again in the 20th century - within the framework of industrialization. The problem is that precisely those very traditions, the absence of which are usually regretted, turn out to not only exist, but only look different than we would like, and therefore are not noticed by the gaze, which in reality seeks to find only those traditions that it wants to find, - but also determining the logic of long-term development. Catch-up modernization turns out to be a way of action that no longer works (since the grounds on which it could be effective have disappeared), but which is steadily reproduced as the only conceivable and discussed model of behavior - no matter what particular sphere, economic, political, social or cultural, we say.
There is one curious detail hidden in the status of an educated society: in order to maintain it, it must constantly reproduce the distance that separates it from the rest of society, emphasizing its “non-European” character, reproducing non-subjectivity, through this gaining the right to power. In other words, the rest of society must remain an eternal “under”, something that requires efforts to civilize it over and over again and each time requiring new efforts of the same kind. The bad repetition and emptiness of history, strengthened in the consciousness, reflects this situation - history should be like this, since only through this the status of an educated society in relation to the rest is strengthened and this also dooms the educated society itself to experience the emptiness of the historical, since every effort must be self-cancelling in the consciousness , reproducing the previous pattern of relationships at a new level.
Catch-up modernization, having succeeded, presupposes - for the possibility of further movement along a different trajectory - and overcoming such a perception, with the justification of its status through the “imaginary Europe”; simple reproduction of already existing schemes and models will not give success, but will leave you in the framework of eternal catch-up, forcing you to now rely on the opportunity to offer “other” that does not yet exist, to transform your own experience, and not try to reproduce an already existing other. Actually, this is again the problem of experiencing one’s experience, living oneself in this place and time and, therefore, the need for “normalization” of history. Traditions, of course, “invent” - but only the term “invention” can remove us from the essence of the matter, since the very subjects of the tradition who create it experience it as “discovered”, something that is adequate to self-determination, which is recognized as part of their own identity – and “expropriation of the past”, “invention of tradition” turn out to be a special experience of “working on oneself”, making reality what was “only” an idea.
Nationality debate
This essay does not pretend to reveal the history of “Russian nationalism” (it is less usual, but it would be more accurate to talk about “Russian nationalisms” in the plural - both in historical sequence and in synchrony) - my task is to try to outline the general contours of the phenomenon. Since any such attempt can be called, due to the scale of the task, “an attempt with inappropriate means,” it is necessary to stipulate the fundamental guidelines that should correct the interpretation of the following text.
The essence of the “new imperial history” is described by supporters of this approach as follows: it is “dedicated to the study of empire not as a “thing,” a formal structure of power or economic exploitation, but as an “imperial situation.” It is characterized not just by the extreme diversity of society and the heterogeneity of the population, but by the fundamental irreducibility of this diversity to any single system.” (Empire and Nation, 2011: 8–9). With the same right, this applies to nation-building processes; options for the vision of the “nation” and disputes around it, public policy and public opinion - a “situation” in which the actions of numerous subjects unfold. The result of their actions often has little in common with the intentions of both the initiators and opponents - Russian nationalism(s) are formed in a difficult situation of simultaneous interaction with the empire that was actively transforming in the 19th century, national movements in other countries (in these foreign nationalisms are constantly looked back upon both by the empire and by national movements within it), by local national movements.
If the thesis about the constructive nature of the “nation” has become a common place in studies of nationalism, then in studies related to the issues of “Russian nationalism”, the latter often appears as a phenomenon of state policy mainly on the “outskirts” of the empire. The image of a nation introduced by B. Anderson as an “imaginary community” is often not used sufficiently thoughtfully, but in this sense, any community will be “imaginary”, acquiring reality only in the minds of its constituent individuals or external observers. Anderson puts a much stronger statement into his image - the “nation” is “imagined”, created through the efforts of some group, and then this image is transmitted, affirmed, experiencing corresponding transformations.
The subjects in most studies are, on the one hand, the imperial administration, which, as a rule, is poorly differentiated and acts as an abstract “power”, and on the other hand, local (“foreign”, “foreign”) communities reacting or actively influencing the state politics (this aspect is touched upon much less frequently). Even in the revolutionary work for Russian historiography by Alexey Miller ( Miller, 2006) the view “from above” prevails – that environment, those groups in which “images of the nation” are formed, which compete for social influence and for the opportunity to influence the national policy of the Russian Empire, are excluded from consideration.
As a result, there was “a clear bias towards the study of communities, mechanisms and discourses of governance, religious and other identities of the borderlands, while the “Russians” and the “center” (with some important exceptions) found themselves behind the scenes of this action<…>Accordingly, in the historiography of the empire there are “non-Russian” peoples, but “Russians” as subjects, and not abstract non-foreigners, never appeared. Analysts of socio-humanitarian research admit that the “center” and the “Russian question” as independent problems in relation to the history of the Russian Empire are now almost not studied.” (Vishlenkova, 2011: eleven). Russian nationalism was not only reactive, but also active in nature - intellectual and social movements, its components, largely determined the conditions of action of the imperial government, which, in turn, used these social forces in various ways: the experience of including Russian nationalism in the imperial agenda, attempts to transform a rather archaic empire into an empire based on a formalized “national core” were decisive for the situation of the 1880-1890s. Trying to find new support in Russian nationalism, the empire provoked conflicts with other existing or emerging national movements and at the same time deprived itself of most of the traditional means of resolving them. Russian nationalism carried within itself an initial conflict, being the nationalism of the “imperial nation”, defining itself in relation to the empire through identification with it and at the same time through disidentification: supposed to cement the empire through a new subject - the nation, it tore the empire apart through the isolation of certain elements, not capable (now or in principle) of becoming part of the nation.
“Nation” and “nationality” in their intertwining
The history of words is often able to tell more than a traditional historical narrative - especially in cases where words mean too much and texts separated by several decades, apparently talking about the same thing, when sufficiently close to the subject, turn out to be united only at the word level.
Arguments about the “nation” and appeals to it begin in the first decades of the 19th century - in the era of the revolution and the Napoleonic wars, in a period that for our eyes is often divided by the caesura of “unknown and incomprehensible events” between Thermidor and Brumaire, but which for contemporaries (especially those who watched it from the distance of St. Petersburg or Moscow) was a single “Revolution”. The “nation” in these conversations is a civil nation, the same “people” in other phraseology, which is the sovereign, the only source of power. However, this “nation”, which means a political nation with subjectivity, turns out to be intertwined almost from the very beginning with the “nation” of the romantics - not the one that should be created through the Constituent Assembly, but already given in history, for which time is political - just a moment of manifestation.
The political tension, sensitive to the authorities in the very word “nation”, will lead in the 20s to its ousting from the press, and it will be replaced by “nationality”, convenient for its vagueness. Alexey Miller, analyzing the history of the concepts of “nation” and “nationality” in the first half of the 19th century, notes: “In the 1820s, wariness gradually grew among the imperial elites, and from the beginning of the 1830s, a clearly expressed desire was formed to displace the concept nation and replace it with the concept nationality. With the help of this operation, they hoped to edit the content of the concept and marginalize its revolutionary potential.” (Imperium, 2010: 60).
Ahead of Uvarov's formula, in the journalism of the 1820s, “disputes about nationality” will begin with the opposition of “nationality” and “common people,” where “nationality” will be defined through “loyalty to the spirit of the people,” and not these or those specific historical forms. Nationality turns out to be both sought-after and ubiquitously present, something that can be “felt”, but difficult to define – a kind of “empty space” that allows it to be endowed with the necessary meanings. Already in the Manifesto of July 13, 1826, published after the completion of the trial of the Decembrists, there is a significant semantic twist:
“Let all fortunes unite in trust in the government.
In a state where love for monarchs and devotion to the throne are based on natural properties of the people(emphasis mine. – A. T.), where there are domestic laws and firmness in government, all the efforts of the malicious will always be vain and insane.<…>Not from daring dreams, which are always destructive, but from above, domestic institutions are gradually improved, shortcomings are supplemented, abuses are corrected.”
The Decembrist uprising is interpreted in the Manifesto within the framework of the contrast between “true” and “false” enlightenment typical of romanticism:
“Not to enlightenment, but to idleness of mind, more harmful than idleness of bodily strength, - to the lack of solid knowledge should be attributed that willfulness of thoughts, the source of violent passions, this destructive luxury of half-knowledge, this rush into dreamy extremes, the beginning of which is the corruption of morals, and the end - destruction."
The newly created III Department in its report for 1827 frightens the authorities with the “Russian party”:
« The youth, i.e. noblemen from 17 to 25 years old, make up the most gangrenous part of the Empire. Among these madcaps we see the germs of Jacobinism, the revolutionary and reformist spirit, pouring out in different forms and most often hiding behind the mask of Russian patriotism<…>Exalted youth, who have no idea either about the situation in Russia or about its general condition, dream of the possibility of a Russian constitution, the abolition of ranks, which they do not have the patience to achieve, and of freedom, which they do not understand at all, but which they believe is absent subordination" (Russia under surveillance, 2006: 22).
Uvarov, who received in the 1830s carte blanche on ideology, will make an ambitious attempt to “intercept” the romantic teachings about “nationality” that grew up in the atmosphere of the “war of liberation” in Germany (1813). In the Russian conditions of “nationality” there is no need to create a political subject - to restore the German Reich - since this subject is already present in the person of the Russian Empire. Quite the contrary, possible opponents of the authorities - the middle nobility, who felt their strength and acquired a corporate consciousness in the short period of the Napoleonic wars - find themselves in a situation where the possible rhetoric of “nationality” has already been adopted by the authorities, relying in this simultaneously on the emerging bureaucracy and philistinism . The ideological structure proposed by Uvarov, however, has a fundamental weakness - it fundamentally presupposes a limited and closed audience to which it is addressed - relatively speaking, those rising social groups that pass through Russian gymnasiums and universities, where they must undergo “processing” in the spirit of the “official nationality”; readers of the Russian-language press, tightly controlled by the Ministry of Education (Zorin, 2004: Ch. X). But this same ideological construction cannot include within its framework the western outskirts of the empire (the Baltic provinces and the Kingdom of Poland), it cannot be articulated as “own speech” by the highest ruling circles of the empire - fundamentally non-national, whose ideology remains the ideology of dynastic loyalty when local aristocracies they conclude an agreement of allegiance to the empire, but not to the “Russian people.”
Imprinted into Uvarov’s formula, “nationality” will become an “indefinite third”, gaining meaning through the first two terms – “Orthodoxy” and “autocracy”, giving them a flair of historical depth and “organicity”. A circular from the Ministry of Public Education dated May 27, 1847 explained that the “Russian nationality” “in its purity must express an unconditional commitment to Orthodoxy and autocracy,” and “everything that goes beyond these limits is an admixture of alien concepts, a play of fantasy or a guise.” , under which malicious people try to catch the inexperience and enthusiasm of dreamers" (Lemke, 1904: 190). To be an Orthodox, “devoted without flattery” subject of one’s monarch – this, in fact, is what “nationality” comes down to in practical interpretation, and this is where an apparently paradoxical situation arises when all voluntary interpreters of “nationality”, starting with Pogodin, turn out to be inconvenient for the authorities . The only correct thing here is to refrain from any interpretation, repeating “nationality” as a mantra and using the accusation of “non-nationality” against those who are already marked as political opponents.
The Empire in the 1830-1840s sought to tap into the potential of a possible “national direction,” but practical implementation was limited by the “Russian style” of K. A. Ton, coexisting with the pseudo-Gothic buildings of Peterhof Alexandria. What is important is not references to a specific past, but to the past as such. In the lining, the essential content is limited to the legitimism of the post-Napoleonic era: “nationality” should, in contrast to “nation”, remain an empty place, be a fixation of political lack of subjectivity.
Nation-building programs of the 1860s
The crisis of the empire in the 1850s, the external manifestation of which was the defeat in the Crimean War, led to a conscious choice in favor of radical reforms and simultaneous liberalization of the regime. The latter brought to the surface all those processes that were developing with varying degrees of intensity under the imperial façade striving for uniformity. The national question came onto the agenda: just as the uprising of 1830–1831 forced one to reckon with nationalism and try to accumulate and at the same time neutralize patriotic sentiments by putting forward the doctrine of “official nationality,” the liberalization of the second half of the 1850s – early 1860s revealed a whole range of emerging or national movements in the process of formation.
Until 1863, the growth of such peripheral nationalisms did not cause much concern - the future “pillar” of Russian nationalism Katkov willingly helped the Ukrainophile Kostomarov in the “Russian Bulletin”, and the editors of the Slavophile magazine “Russian Conversation” tried to please the leader of the then Ukrainophilism Kulish, seeking his stories for their publications The “Polish cause” found itself in the “area of silence” - it was unthinkable to oppose the Poles, and actively supporting them was equally impossible, since this would mean supporting claims to separation from the empire. Vague liberal-democratic aspirations of varying degrees of radicality were universal - old slogans and ideological symbols were abandoned, new ones were never defined. The desire for reforms and transformations was universal, the former imperial patriotism was destroyed in society by the catastrophe of the end of Nicholas's reign, new political values and meanings remained uncertain.
The year 1863 was decisive in the history of Russian nationalism - the January uprising in Poland stimulated the formation of national identity. If Russian educated society was not ready to oppose the Polish national movement, then the claims of the Polish uprising for the creation of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth within the borders before 1772, the actions of the rebels on the territory of the southwestern and northwestern regions contributed to the emergence of “defensive nationalism” in response to the threat, the formation of a primary political national identity in response to the possibility of losing territories that were perceived as part of “Russia”. Katkov, in the midst of almost absolute silence in Russian journalism, decisively spoke out against the rebels - and turned out to be the voice of the “silent majority.” Proclaiming the value of the state, supporting the position of the integrity of the empire and the fight against rebels, he for the first time used words that had previously had no place in Russian journalism: “nationalism” and “statism” outside the officialdom. This was the discovery of “public opinion”: suddenly for everyone - for the authorities and the opposition - it was discovered that there was a society in the country, and Katkov’s strength lay in his ability during these years to be its spokesman and guide. Katkov spoke on behalf of the nation - not formalized, but no longer exclusively an object of governance, acquiring its own subjectivity. And if at first this movement met with support from the imperial authorities, since it turned out to be a necessary support in a situation of external and internal political crisis, then soon contradictions began to grow rapidly due to the understandable impossibility of “managing” society without entering into dialogue with it, using exclusively "to the extent necessary."
The Polish uprising led to the formulation of several key political positions on the national question, which claimed the possibility of real implementation in state policy:
1. Katkov’s program, which assumed “culture” and nation-building oriented toward the French experience as a defining feature of a nation. In relation to the “Polish question” this meant the dominance of the principle real politician– keeping Poland under its rule, since any other solution would lead to even greater political costs (the emergence of an independent Poland with territorial claims to the lands of Ukraine and Belarus). Russians in this perspective were thought of as an “imperial nation”, open on a cultural principle and pursuing an active policy of assimilation of other national groups. The transformation of the empire was envisioned as the creation of a national metropolis - with an imperial policy towards the outskirts (the policy of “hegemony” in relation to Finland and Poland) and a colonization policy towards the “eastern” and “southern” colonies (Teslya, 2011a).
2. The Slavophile program, which envisaged the transformation of the empire with the formation of a “national core” like a nation state on a confessional basis (“Russian is primarily Orthodox”), which required ethno-confessional demarcation. To strengthen the national composition in relation to Poland, the goal was conceived as the formation of a Polish state “within ethnic boundaries”, and in the territories that were the subject of dispute, the “strengthening” (that is, the creation) of an all-Russian (“Russian”) identity (Teslya, 2011b).
3. “Valuevskaya” program, expressed in memos and specific actions of the Minister of Internal Affairs. It involved a bet on a “political nation” (in the terminology of the late 18th – early 19th centuries), that is, a compromise between aristocratic elites, and supranational politics - the incorporation of the “western outskirts” by granting political rights (the formation of a single political space coinciding with the borders of the empire) .
Each of these programs quite clearly recorded the social stratum on which it relied. This made the “projects of the future”, if not equally realistic, then at least suggesting specific political programs for the coming decades. The Valuev project was a bet on a smooth transformation of the empire, in which the highest government bought the support of local elites, giving them access to political power at the center through the creation of a limited representative system. In other words, to replace the previous policy of local government through local elites and personal incorporation into the central government, it was supposed to allow group incorporation with the possibility of further lowering the bar of representation - as more and more new social groups would be involved in public politics (Zakharova, 2011: 400–410).
The “Katkovsky” project, in contrast to the “Valuevsky” project, which relied on the high aristocracy and bourgeoisie, was focused on the bourgeoisie and middle strata of society. He proposed the formation of a modern nation, interacting with traditional imperial groups through a system of representation based on property qualifications.
The “Slavophile” program was conceived as a transformation of traditional society - with a focus on democracy (as opposed to Katkov’s elitist liberalism), where the central government was supposed to take on the role of initiator of reforms, maintaining its unlimited character with broad powers for lower communities. It was assumed that a nation would be constituted through an appeal to traditional confessional characteristics, when the former “external” confessionality was transformed into a conscious identity based on a modern type of religiosity.
As a kind of intermediate option between the “Katkov” and “Slavophile” projects, “pochvennichestvo” acted, relying not on the peasantry and nobility, but on the middle strata of society, adopting confessional criteria as a fundamental criterion.
The tension of the situation and the growth of local nationalism explain the readiness of the central government to discuss and partly even follow such programs, which manifested itself in politics in the northwestern region in 1863–1868. However, as the crisis situation passed and the problems were dealt with without the involvement of society, the willingness of the imperial authorities to follow the national policy in any of its two main variants (“Katkovsky” and “Slavophile”) decreased - individual measures taken remained episodic actions, and the actions of the repressive plan prevailed (Komzolova, 2005). Among other things, there was a lack of resources and conscious political will for a positive national policy. Nevertheless, the reluctance of the imperial power to move along the path of nationalist policy had very deep rational grounds. As Alexander II repeatedly noted, the main obstacle to the granting of any constitution was the doubt about the possibility of preserving the empire under constitutional rule. The central government resorted to a policy of delay, reacting to immediate problems and countering, to varying degrees, throughout the first half of the 1860s and early 1870s, both peripheral nationalisms and various variants of Russian national movements.
Problematic points of Russian nationalism
Russian nationalism was formed in the 1860-1870s in a situation of active confrontation and internal polemics not only, and often not so much with the traditional imperial project, but in clashes on several main problem points, where the composition of the warring parties and their programs were complex and diverse and were not reduced to simple schemes. Let's try to highlight the main ones.
1. “Polish question”. Poland was the “sore spot” of the Russian Empire - the Kingdom of Poland, created on the basis of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw by decision of the Congress of Vienna, turned out to be the most harmful acquisition in terms of consequences. Moreover, in this case, the empire had only itself to blame - even the official name of the territory, which revived the specter of independent Polish statehood, was chosen at the insistence of Emperor Alexander I (Austria and Prussia, other participants in the divisions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth tried in every possible way to dissuade Russia from such a decision). The new formation received its own constitution (which caused an explosion of indignation in Russian society - from extreme traditionalists like Shishkov to the extreme liberal Prince Vyazemsky), its own army (which became the core of the uprising of 1830), an independent financial system, etc. The imperial government discussed plans expansion of the territory of the Kingdom through the transfer of a number of provinces that became part of the empire as a result of Section III. Let us note in passing that the indignation at the “Polish policy” of Alexander I was an important moment in the formation of the Decembrist movement, for which the nationalist component (at that time rather weakly internally differentiated) was essential.
The Polish uprising of 1830–1831, which led to a turn towards “nationality” in domestic Russian politics in an effort to rely on patriotic public feelings, was suppressed by military force, but not resolved politically. The regime of military dictatorship established in the Kingdom of Poland during the governorship of Paskevich was actually a recognition of the inability to resolve the “Polish question”: the empire acted in relation to the Kingdom inconsistently, considering it either as an occupied territory or as an autonomous entity with its own quasi-constitutional rights (for example, in the financial field) . Poles were discriminated against in the territory of the Kingdom, many government positions were closed to them, the University of Warsaw was liquidated, but at the same time, Polish immigrants were actively appointed to government positions in other territories of the empire - according to the central authorities, this should have led to “Russification” Poles, allowing, on the one hand, in conditions of personnel shortage, to solve the problem of filling bureaucratic positions with qualified people, and on the other hand, to neutralize the “harmful tendencies” present in the Polish educated classes (including through the territorial erosion of representatives of these classes).
The liberal policy towards Poland, tried in the “era” of the Marquis of Wielopolski, only led to the January uprising of 1863, which put the empire on the brink of a diplomatic disaster and a pan-European war (at least that’s how the situation seemed at that time from St. Petersburg). The crisis situation opened up the opportunity for non-standard measures - under the leadership of N. A. Milyutin, the empire decided to affect the social balance in Poland, carrying out a peasant reform with huge preferences for the local peasantry. Having received him as an ally, the empire deprived this ally of the gentry (and thereby weakened anti-Russian sentiment in Poland for a long time) and at the same time opened the Polish economy to German (Prussian) capital, weakening Polish industrialists and rural owners.
However, all these tactically very effective measures could not solve the key problem. The empire included a national entity whose cultural and economic level significantly exceeded that of the metropolis and, no less important, where there was a developed national movement. Actually, in response to the latter’s challenge, a broad Russian national movement began to form, supported by the imperial authorities. It was obvious that in the northwestern provinces it was not enough to oppose the Poles, who were the culturally and economically dominant elements there, with the Russian administration. The problem that the emerging Russian nationalism faced was that it had little to oppose the Polish one. As I. S. Aksakov noted (and in which M. N. Katkov was forced to essentially agree with him, albeit more than reluctantly), Polish culture in these provinces turned out to be synonymous with culture as such, strong not only in itself, but and the fact that it acted as a “local form” of European culture. An increase in social status also meant a rapprochement with Polish culture. The fixation of the weakness of Russian culture encouraged, on the one hand, Russian nationalism to realize its internal problems, on the other, to develop sophisticated programs (the interaction of administrative and cultural measures, the simultaneous displacement of the Poles from the region and the expansion of Russian culture in it, attempts to break the connection between Catholicism and Polish national movement through the introduction of worship in Russian and Lithuanian).
Actually, the “Polish question” turned out to be a dead end in the interaction of Russian nationalism with the empire, as well as its main problem.
Firstly, Russian nationalism did not have any acceptable recipe for preserving the Kingdom of Poland within the empire - the most consistent, but practically impracticable program was I. S. Aksakov, which involved the forced limitation of Poland by its “ethnographic borders” and a “divorce” from the empire.
Secondly, traditional methods of imperial domination did not work in Poland: acquired through the Congress of Vienna, it turned out to be more developed than the metropolis, but at the same time too large a whole for all hopes of the possibility of independent existence to disappear. It could not function according to the “enclave” model, like the Baltic provinces, and equally could not be Russified, remaining a constant source of hidden or obvious threat to the empire until the First World War.
2. Ukrainophilism. With the “Ukrainian question” the situation looked much more optimistic than with the “Polish” one: if in the latter case one had to deal with a developed and formalized national movement, then in Ukraine it was mainly about “cultural nationalism”, which was at the first stage of its development - intellectual circles.
The logic of the actions that needed to be taken was quite obvious to part of the senior administration, focused on the experience of Western European nation-building. Local nationalism had to be deprived of a local base through the system of primary and secondary education, by introducing “Great Russian” culture: the peasantry, preserving the local culture, had to be drawn into the Great Russian culture as they received education, any advancement in the social hierarchy (schools, classical, real and military gymnasiums, universities) should have been accompanied by the assimilation of Great Russian culture. Thus, local cultural nationalism was supposed to lose its base - intercepted by the more developed urban Russian-speaking culture, the rising social strata would drop out from the number of potential supporters of Ukrainophilism; Russian as a language of government, culture, education and entertainment would have no alternative.
However, such logic (consciously oriented, in particular, towards the unified school policy of the Third Republic) encountered two difficulties:
– firstly, the confrontation in the southwestern region was not between “Great Russian” and “Ukrainian” culture - there was a third, Polish element there. Fears caused by Polish claims (armedly declared in 1830–1831 and 1863) led to the fact that the central government was ready to make compromises regarding Ukrainian nationalist movements, perceiving some of them as possible allies in the fight against Polish influence; in the struggle for cultural dominance, both the “Great Russian” and the Polish sides considered various trends of Ukrainophiles as potential allies, which led to contradictions in imperial policy; repressive measures were replaced by “relaxations”, as a result not so much counteracting as irritating and consolidating opponents of the government;
- secondly, if the desired policy was presented quite clearly, then much more doubt was raised about the ability of the authorities to implement it. Both the Minister of Internal Affairs P. A. Valuev (1861–1868), and the Governor-General of the southwestern region, Prince. A. M. Dondukov-Korsakov (1869–1878), speaking skeptically about the imperial policy in Ukraine, pointed out that in practice the empire has enough strength to take individual repressive measures, but the latter in themselves are fruitless, and one cannot count on a long-term positive program both due to a lack of funds (for example, for the development of primary education in the Great Russian language), and due to a lack of state will. Well acquainted with the practice of imperial government, they believed that there was virtually no hope for a policy that went beyond the reactive scheme (Miller, 2000: Ch. 7).
3. “The Baltic Question” traditionally occupied a large place in Russian nationalist rhetoric, since the Baltic knighthood had been one of the main suppliers of personnel to the highest Russian administration since the 18th century, and its cultural level, connections and group cohesion, together with its obvious foreign culture, made its role noticeable and irritating.
The Russian Empire continued to expand in the 18th century, using the traditional model of agreement with local elites - they retained their previous position and received more or less wide access to the central administration, and in return they paid loyalty. The peculiarity of the "Baltic Sea" people was that the central administration was interested in their services to a greater extent than in attracting any other groups to the central administration. As the traditional pre-modern empire entered into the conditions of modern politics, this model caused increasing irritation among the Russian elites, who considered themselves deprived in comparison with the Baltic Sea people (one can recall at least the textbook appeal of Ermolov, who asked the sovereign to “make him a German”).
The specificity of the Baltic Sea situation was that the ruling elite had a foreign culture to the majority of the population of the provinces - it could not rely on it, but used it as a resource of pressure on the authorities, and therefore the main source of power of the Baltic Sea people became their unique position in the state apparatus . They received the right to almost uncontrolled control of the provinces in exchange for dynastic loyalty - the empire used them as ideal imperial administrators, loyal to the government as such. Actually, problems began to grow with the intensification of German political nationalism - as the Second Reich took shape and gained strength, the Baltic subjects became less and less comfortable, since now (unlike the situation of “Germany as a geographical concept”) their loyalties were divided. For some time the situation remained relatively stable, but already from the late 1870s, after the alliance with Germany came into question, and even more so since the change in foreign policy orientation towards an alliance with France in the 1880s, the imperial government began to increasingly support “Russification” ” moods, and then actively put them into practice.
4. “Slavic question”. In foreign policy terms, Russian nationalism of the 1860s-1870s offered, at first glance, a very seductive transformation of the traditional imperial agenda - the “southern project” was turning into a Slavic-Orthodox one, simultaneously suggesting the possibility of turning it both against the Ottoman Empire and its potential use against Austria.
The eastern direction of Russian foreign policy in the 18th – first half of the 19th centuries traditionally had a pronounced confessional component; it was familiar with the idea of using the sympathies of fellow believers against the Ottoman Empire (Zorin, 2004: Ch. I; Proskurina, 2006). On the contrary, “Pan-Slavist” ideas caused at least wariness; not only Slavophiles such as F.V. Chizhov or I.S. Aksakov, but also the loyal M.P. Pogodin were viewed with suspicion in this regard - Chizhov was arrested after a trip to the Slavic lands and interrogated about connections with the Slavs (Pirozhkova, 1997: 96), when Aksakov was imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress in 1849, they took testimony about pan-Slavist ideas ( Aksakov, 1988: 505–506) - the “Slavic question” at that time looked more attractive for revolutionary projects, as it was in the eyes of M. A. Bakunin (Borisyonok, 2001).
The failure in the Crimean War, the loss of influence in the Ottoman Empire and the simultaneous transformation of Austria from an ally into a potential enemy, and at the current moment at least into a competitor in the Balkans, led to the fact that it turned out to be promising for the empire to try to use the national movements of the Western and Southern Slavs in its own interests. It was not about a radical turn in policy, but rather about considering the possibility of using Slavic movements as one of the instruments of foreign policy (Aksakov, 1896: 17–24). Throughout the 1860s and the first half of the 1870s, the “Slavic” movement had very limited influence - the Slavic charitable society, founded in 1858 (from 1877 - a committee), attracted few enthusiasts; The “Slavic department” in Aksakov’s “Den” existed solely as a reflection of the views of the publisher, without meeting the interest of the public. So, telling about the success of his publication among the public, I. S. Aksakov wrote to M. P. Perovsky
04.XI.1861: “My newspaper is a positive success<…>and is read like hot cakes: even the Slavic section is read!” (Russian conversation, 2011: 438). In the eyes of the government, the “Slavic” movement within the country and the foreign policy opportunities associated with it were a convenient tool that could, on occasion, be effectively used to achieve its goals in Ottoman affairs or as a means of influencing Austria (Austria pursued a somewhat similar policy towards the Poles and Ukrainians). Thus, with all the public sympathy for the Bulgarians during the Greek-Bulgarian church feud, the government refrained from supporting the “Slavs”, preferring not to unambiguously take the side of any one of the participants in the church schism.
The national movement showed its strength in 1876–1877 when, using influence at court to obtain permission to publicly propagate its views, it managed to actually drag the empire into a war with Turkey, despite the resistance of almost all members of the government. Thus, for the first time, the possibility of rapid mobilization of public opinion and its political influence was demonstrated (Milyutin, 2009; Valuev, 1919: 5-10). The unexpectedly difficult course of the war and the Berlin Treaty, perceived as “shameful,” convinced the highest authorities that the national movement was not such a convenient object of control and its goals could radically diverge from the direction of government policy. The unusual experience of interacting with public opinion also caused an unjustifiably harsh reaction to Aksakov’s speech against the Berlin Treaty, when not only Aksakov himself was subjected to expulsion (which was still in keeping with the tradition and expected by the culprit of the events himself), but the closure of the Slavic Committee in Moscow followed (Nikitin, 1960). The experience of the Russian-Turkish War of 1877–1878 and subsequent Balkan events, on the one hand, for a long time freed the government from the temptation to use the “Slavic card” in large-scale imperial policies (Polovtsev, 2005: 407; Milyutin, 2009), on the other hand, it undermined the influence of the remnants of Slavophilism in determining a specific program of government action in the context of the nationalist turn of the 1880s (Teslya, 2011c).
Style Russe
The 1880s bring a new agenda, with tensions within nationalist agendas and the ways in which imperial and national policies intersect at center stage. They do not remove the problems considered, but they transfer their discussion into a qualitatively different format, which is expressed in the characteristic appearance of the era of Alexander III, radically different from the previous one.
The reign of Alexander III at first glance may seem to be the “golden age” of Russian conservatism and the Russian nationalist movement. All the external signs are there: the formula “Orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality,” which had been half-forgotten in the 1860s and 1870s, was restored to its rights, liberal reforms were ended after a short hesitation, ministerial appointments served as a symbol of readiness to act without regard to public opinion. One appearance of the new emperor already served as a ready-made program - the beard (which he received the right to wear as a participant in the Russian-Turkish War of 1877–1878) within the framework of the semiotics of everyday behavior was in itself a very meaningful sign; changes in form, persistent use of only the Russian language in communication; rudeness in treatment was interpreted by well-meaning observers as patriarchal simplicity of morals. To replace his father’s “scenario of love,” Alexander III proposed a “scenario of strength,” starting with the most banal thing - physical strength, emphasizing his own data as a manifestation of natural power, which, however, soon began to be hampered by the early onset of excess fatness. If the image of “Concentrating Russia” was proposed by Gorchakov two decades before the accession of Alexander III, then the latter gave this image artistic credibility. Lev Tikhomirov recalled at the end of his life:
“Emperor Alexander III knew how to evoke a high rise in national feeling in Russia and become a representative of national Russia. He also achieved streamlining of government affairs. Without changing image government, he managed to change way rule, and under him the country began to develop and prosper more and more every year. Under such conditions, no one wanted to join the revolution.” (Tikhomirov, 2000: 460).
The conservative camp (with all the uncertainty of this term) greeted the accession of Alexander III as a new hope - at a time when, it would seem, all hopes had to be abandoned. At the end of the 1870s, the public atmosphere was almost completely captured by liberal sentiments of varying degrees of extremeness and certainty - and the highest bureaucracy was no exception. In the situation after March 1, the continuation of the previous course seemed to have no alternative - if not for the decisive actions of Pobedonostsev, who managed to convince the young monarch of the opportunity to follow “his own will.” The beginning of the turn was marked by the seemingly meaningless April manifesto, which signified the rejection of the “policy of concessions to society.”
The first years of the reign of Alexander III turned into a “honeymoon” of Russian conservatism - the most diverse right-wing forces at that time were united in the need to break with the inconsistent policies of the previous reign, suppress the revolutionary movement, and “pacify” the country. But by 1883–1884, the unity of the conservative camp was destroyed: in 1883, Aksakov’s “tactical unanimity” with Katkov ended, in 1884, the relationship between the two pillars of government conservatism, Pobedonostsev and Filippov, radically deteriorated (Prophets, 2012: 272), discord between Pobedonostsev and Aksakov occurred back in 1882 (Polunov, 2010: 181, 245). What happened, of course, is completely unsurprising - the unity of the conservative camp was based solely on the “negative agenda.” When it was generally implemented, the question arose about choosing a further path. A need arose for a positive program, and it turned out that Russian conservatism is an even more motley and complex phenomenon than the liberal camp.
Actually, three directions emerged almost immediately, initially united by a tactical alliance.
The first direction, which can conventionally be called “bureaucratic” conservatism, is not of serious interest. It was focused on an idealized and retouched image of Nicholas's reign, curtailing previous reforms where they limited the possibilities of administrative intervention (zemstvos, universities, etc.), but without having any program for further action.
Much more interesting is “religious conservatism,” a prominent figure of which was Tertiy Ivanovich Filippov, popular among the hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church (the popularity and rumors about his candidacy as a possible patriarch became one of the obstacles to his taking the post of Chief Prosecutor of the Holy Synod). For this wing, Orthodoxy was more important than the state - the goal was the “liberation of the Church,” getting rid of the “Theophanes” legacy, and the revival of Russia as an “Orthodox kingdom.” The reform of the church itself, spoken of as a return to the canonical structure, implied a reliance on the highest church hierarchs - in contrast to the Slavophil ideas about the need for parish reform.
The third direction, “nationalist,” in turn, was represented by two main programs: Katkov’s and Aksakov’s. They have already been briefly discussed above, but since the 1860s quite significant changes have occurred, affecting primarily the Aksakov program. For Aksakov in the 1860s, it was about the formation of a nation based on the confessional principle, which made it possible to talk about a large “Russian” nation, including large, small and Belarusians. However, the development of local nationalism, on the one hand, and the obvious weakening of the confessional principle, on the other, made this program clearly unrealistic by the 1880s: confessional identity was losing its defining role before our eyes, and no alternative was foreseen in Aksakov’s scheme.
For Aksakov’s vision of the national program, society played a decisive role - it was it that had to become an active subject, in fact, the core of the nation. Despite all the contradictory opinions of Aksakov, his approach remained fundamentally liberal - a minimal state with the development of the zemshchina; a society that exercises its pressure on the authorities not through constitutional guarantees, but through the “power of opinion” - in the person of the Zemsky Sobor, the free press, etc. (Teslya, 2011c).
On the contrary, Katkov’s vision of the nation presupposed the consistent implementation of the “Napoleonic program”: a government operating in a regime of “popular dictatorship”; the formation of national unity as a cultural, legal and economic unity (active Russification school policy, the formation of a single economic space, “railroads” that should unite “Great Russia”, just as they created the unity of “Belle France”) (Sankova, 2007).
The Zemsky Sobor, the convening of which was discussed in 1881–1882, was supposed, from the point of view of representatives of the “Slavophile camp,” to enable society to consolidate in the face of power, and for power to gain support in the face of society. It is hardly productive to discuss how such an initiative by the authorities could turn out in practice, but in 1882–1883 the choice was made in favor of the Katkov program. In practice, however, it turned into a policy of aggressive Russification, stimulating local nationalism rather than achieving its goals: the state apparatus took upon itself to Russify and form the Russian nation. Society was assigned one function - to approve and support; even those social groups that adhered to conservative and nationalist positions turned out to be inconvenient - the authorities believed that they needed executors, not allies. The history of the conservative press is very characteristic in this regard: Moskovskie Vedomosti, after Katkov’s death, quickly turned into a muted officialdom; “Russian Affair,” which Sharapov started publishing after the cessation of “Rus” with the death of Aksakov, underwent a series of censorship ordeals; Sovremennye Izvestia, also awarded censorship purgatory, closed with the death of Gilyarov-Platonov; Only the “Citizen”, based on the personal connections of Prince Meshchersky with the sovereign, could afford relative freedom of judgment (however, of very dubious value) of a conservative sense. “Russian Review”, which Prince Tsertelev tried to turn into a broad platform for expressing right-wing ideas, degenerated into another officialdom, avoiding any “risky ideas”, after the forced departure of the editor, who was replaced by A. A. Alexandrov, who atone for financial dishonesty with “correct” views .
Disillusionment with counter-reforms revealed in the 1890s (Kotov, 2010: 208–217), leads to attempts to formulate a program of action that takes into account new social forces. L. A. Tikhomirov’s interest in workers’ associations is characteristic (Repnikov, 2011: Ch. IX), S. F. Sharapov’s reasoning about the dictator as a figure mediating between the emperor and the people, bypassing both the “bureaucracy” and society (Teslya, 2012). Similarities with Italian fascism are rightly noted in such programs (Repnikov, 2011: 328–329). Explaining the concept of the novel “After Half a Century” (1902), Sharapov wrote:
“I wanted, in a fantastic and, therefore, rather irresponsible form, to give the reader a practical set of Slavophile dreams and ideals, to portray our political and social program as if realized. This served as a kind of test for her. If the program is correct, then there will be no nonsense in the novel; all the hooks will fall into place. If there are fundamental defects in the program, they will inevitably be revealed...
I know very well that nothing like this will happen.
I just wanted to show what could have happened if Slavophile views had become guiding principles in society and in the ruling spheres.” (Sharapov, 2011 (1902): 308).
However, the fantasy he depicts turns out to be surprisingly recognizable, ultimately reminiscent of the depiction of Soviet society in a socialist realist novel or rather Italian fascism: society is divided into small communities-fascio, based, however, on parish divisions, political rights are linked to religion (and thus not included in the parish are deprived of political rights), the community controls almost all the life activities of the citizens, which is especially convenient due to the fact that all their funds depend on the parish treasury. The empire expanded to the line “formerly Danzig, now Gdansk” to the Adriatic, subjugating all of Eastern and part of Central Europe. At the head of the empire, having pushed aside the tsar, is a leader whom the characters refer to as “the brilliant Fedot Panteleev,” so that “brilliant,” it must be understood, is his unofficial “title”: “a simple, small nobleman, completely ignorant. He was sitting in his village, in the Saratov province, and appeared in St. Petersburg quite unexpectedly<…>The wave promoted him to the post of minister, and several years before the last great European war, reforms in Russia were completed.” (Sharapov, 2011 (1902): 364). “.He was awarded the state chancellor, and as a special favor he asked the Emperor not to appoint anyone in his place, but to abolish the ministry itself, creating a special Department of State Security for the police<…>He is now about 70 years old, but he is completely healthy and vigorous and works tirelessly.” The approximate age of the “genius Fedot Panteleev” (he is “about 70”) and the very power of his leader type, eliminating institutions, are also characteristic; In a remarkable way, despite his own monarchism, Sharapov in the “fantastic political-social novel” manages to practically eliminate the figure of the monarch, who is present in a dim background behind the “brilliant Fedot”, evoking stable associations with Victor Emmanuel III.
A similar dream of a dictator, put in the title, is superimposed on the current events of 1907 in a “political fantasy”, where Ivanov the 16th, an unknown colonel, becomes the rightful ruler of the state - and surprisingly, without canceling the existing hierarchy, retaining the chairman in his place The Committee of Ministers, which P. A. Stolypin remains, - its power, again, rests on extra-legal foundations, building not so much “above” as “besides” the existing authorities and institutions.
As if planning to mock the “history of the future,” Sharapov also describes humiliating and ridiculing punishments of political opponents (Sharapov, 2011 (1908): 535), referring to the frightening carnival of the first days after the “March on Rome”, designs camps for dissidents with forced labor, allotting them a place near Semipalatinsk (Sharapov, 2011 (1907): 401–402) and combined with punitive psychiatry: “the halo of the hero is replaced by a simple straitjacket” (Sharapov, 2011 (1907): 401). The patronizing state replaces “unauthorized” workers’ unions:
“Get away with all these unions, professional organizations and so on! The interests of the worker must and will be protected by the law and the government, and not by various crooks who creep into your confidence and rebel you. There are self-interested breeders who want to exploit the worker. The worker’s only protection from them is the law. The law must ensure working hours, and the safety of the worker, and the protection of his health, and a good apartment, and food, and insurance against accidents, and school for children, and a pension for old age. The law, and no one else, must ensure complete freedom for both the employer and the worker. I consider strikes of workers as unacceptable as any syndicates of employers, unions and lockouts. And with a firm hand I will restore legality to you, and the very first workers will thank you for this.” (Sharapov, 2011 (1907): 407–408; see below for a similar appeal to manufacturers).
The utopia of the “Dictator” ends in fact with self-exposure - the Slavophiles, whom Ivanov the 16th convenes, renounce his program, the dictator turns out to be powerless, unable to find even a few assistant collaborators. Sharapov comes as close as possible to the program of the future “conservative revolution”, but there remains an abyss between him and her - the imaginary dictator, acting outside of state institutions, at the same time has no support in the mass movement; Moreover, by dispersing the Russian Assembly and the Union of the Russian People, he actually turns out to be a loner, a doomed, powerless figure:
“Some kind of infirmary, some kind of cemetery, and not a living and vigorous country! But - away with despondency! You force me to act alone, you dump all the work on me alone - okay, let's work alone!
“Minister of the Interior,” the adjutant reported.
“Ask, ask.” (Sharapov, 2011 (1908): 567).
Sharapov’s utopia turns out to be what is left of Slavophilism, of the image of the “past”, which, in fact, was never Sharapov’s past, which he read and invented - “fathers from well-fed nobles with a deep laugh in good wide fur coats and knitted scarves” (Sharapov, 2011 (1896): 599–600), which was a noble arcadia, a dream that he cultivated in himself. However, Russian nationalist movements until the revolution of 1917 remained outside the “politics of the masses” - the few experiments of this kind, such as those undertaken by the Union of the Russian People, remained unsuccessful and not entirely conscious experiments: only the experience of the Bolsheviks will teach the European right (including the Russian emigration ) the role of the masses and will give rise to European fascism.
However, the results of the nationalist policy of the reign of Alexander III, which were basically continued, as far as was possible in changing conditions, by his successor (until 1905), are far from so clear-cut. The image of the nation, created by state propaganda in the 1880-1900s, became the actual basis of Stalin’s “national-Bolshevism”: from iconography to recognizable rhetorical turns (Brandenberger, 2009). During this era, the national project for the first time went beyond the boundaries of “educated society” (where the programs of the 1860s competed), nationalist propaganda and the first contours of national education addressed to the broad masses, who were assigned a decisive role already in the 20th century, were formed.
Political philosophy of the Slavophiles: the movement “to the right”
“Slavophilism,” like a number of other, collective and personal, trends in Russian thought of the 19th – early 20th centuries (from “pochvennichestvo” to “Eurasianism”), remains relevant insofar as there are regular attempts to turn to it in search of ideological guidelines and specific programs. Although, of course, such “naive” appeals work with the meanings of the current time, however, since they appeal to holistic ideological programs, then, regardless of desire, they become involved in the logic of the system. The fact that these attempts at direct borrowing are so popular also means, in our opinion, that the semantic complexes they form, at least partly, make it possible to comprehend the current reality and act in it, and therefore, the study of concepts of the past that have a significant range supporters in our days, also allows us to see more clearly modern ideological and ideological approaches. On the other hand, each ideological, socio-philosophical and philosophical-political system is a description of the society in which it is created - accordingly, the analysis of Slavophile political philosophy allows us to better understand the very structure of Russian society of the 1840-1880s and the trends of its development.
Let us note that Slavophilism is quite difficult to analyze as a holistic doctrine: there was no strict “ideological” dictate in it, the views of the participants in this direction often diverged; Of course, there are also significant changes not only in the emphasis of the concept, but also in key provisions over time, because the history of the Slavophil movement goes back about fifty years - from the late 1830s to the mid-1880s, when the last representatives of “classical” Slavophilism went to their graves (cm.: Tesla, 2012).
Our task is to explicate the foundations of Slavophile views, moving away from the descriptive nature of the history of social thought. When analyzing Slavophile views, we need to distinguish two levels (and, accordingly, two research strategies): 1) situational, when the positions they put forward are considered in the context of the era - in their meaning “here and now” and within the framework of the goals that they were persecuted (in this regard, the fight against “bureaucracy” has a very specific political content, just as the distinction between “autocracy” and “absolute monarchy” pursues not so much the goals of political analysis, but through rhetorical demarcation it seeks to create new opportunities for political action - rhetorical demarcation in the future, it can become the basis for a real distinction; the difference in concepts can create a distinction between phenomena, even if the initial distinction was arbitrary); 2) philosophical, withdrawing from time - and then the judgment, which has a very specific practical meaning at a certain moment in time, turns out to say more than what was intended to be said - “time is being spoken out” (in both senses “to be spoken out”). We are not talking, of course, about the banal opposition of philosophical and historical meanings - on the contrary, the tension that expands the sphere of meanings available to us arises only under the condition that the philosophical is thought of as manifesting itself through the historical - it involuntarily affects situational texts, just as the philosophical text turns out to be carrier meanings, greater or different in relation to those that were consciously invested in them by the authors themselves. We will try to use the technique of “shuttle movement”: from the situational to the philosophical and back, when the specific thought of the Slavophiles opens up into the space posed by questions external to it, and thereby allows, when returning to the historical, to rethink the situation itself.
The philosophical origins of Slavophilism relate primarily to German philosophy of the first third of the 19th century, characterized by a fundamental deepening of political and legal thought - when the political theorizing of the 18th century was replaced by a deepening similar to the 17th century, when the question refers not to this or that political phenomenon, but to the very nature of the political. Russian Slavophilism is a local variant of pan-European romanticism, which set out to find nations and reconstruct their past in the light of its understanding of the present and the expected future. It should be noted that the thought of the romantics is far from the form of nationalism that took shape much later, in the second half of the 19th century, for which a given nation closes the horizon of thinking and removes the problem of the universal - after all, nationalism, which sees something finite in the uniqueness of its nation, actually identifies the nation with the ideal empire - a stoic cosmopolis that has nothing outside itself, or to skepticism caused by the realities of many nations, each of which turns out to be an atom, recording the presence of others through the “emphasis”, the experience of the border.
Romanticism resides in the complex dialectic of the One - the Many - the Individual, where a specific nation acquires its meaning only as a form of the One, its implementation - and its meaning - consists in the disclosure of the One, the universal (see: Magun, 2011). And if the Leibnizian model of “harmony” - the embodiment of the whole through the diversity of parts - is echoed in Herder, a unique figure of his time, a kind of pre-romanticist, then in Hegel we again encounter a linear view that identifies the individual and the One, where the final individual (“Germanic world” ) turns out to be at the same time the final adequate realization of the One, where the meaning of the whole is given through historical development and the meaning of the individual is not guaranteed: “non-historical peoples,” having the factuality of existence, turn out to be deprived of its meaning. The romantic space of thought turns out to be paradoxical; Thus, the “historical school of law” finds the specific content of German law in the reception of Roman law.
From this perspective, the key content of Slavophilism in its own eyes becomes clear - to find the meaning of the national (folk), so that through this the universal can be revealed, as well as vice versa, since the national acquires meaning only through the universal. Dmitry Khomyakov, the son of Alexei Stepanovich, already at the beginning of the 20th century, trying to comprehend and summarize the ideological content of Slavophilism, noted that the Slavophiles, having accepted the officially proclaimed formula “Orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality,” discovered in it a meaning very far from what was present in the minds of its creators. For the latter, the central point of the formula was “autocracy,” understood as the absolutist power of the emperor, and “Orthodoxy” was interpreted as the traditional faith of the main people of the empire, the sacred legitimation of the monarch; “nationality” hardly had any specific meaning additional to the first two. A circular from the Secretary of Public Instruction to the trustees of educational districts dated May 27, 1847 stated: “<…>The Russian people in their purity must express an unconditional commitment to Orthodoxy and autocracy.<…>everything that goes beyond these limits is an admixture of foreign concepts, a play of fantasy or a guise under which malicious people try to catch inexperience and captivate dreamers” (quoted from: Yankovsky, 1981: 181). A. L. Zorin notes that within the framework of Uvarov’s “official nationality”, “a Russian person is one who believes in his church and his sovereign.<…>If only a member of the ruling church who professes a “national religion” can be Russian, then those excluded from the body of the people are Old Believers and sectarians in the lower strata of society and converted Catholics, deists and skeptics in the higher strata. In the same way, if nationality necessarily presupposes commitment to autocracy, any constitutionalists, and even more so republicans, are automatically denied the right to be Russian.” (Zorin, 2004: 366).
The Slavophiles, having accepted the formula of “official nationality,” change the significance and content of its elements: “nationality” and “Orthodoxy” come to the fore, while “autocracy” becomes the “Russian form of government”, and in the future, to an ever greater extent undergoing corrosive historicization, turning not into a transhistorical form that finds adequate expression in a certain historical period, but only into a specific historical form, at a certain point in time corresponding to “national principles” (and therefore, from which it is not only possible to retreat, “fall away” ”, but which can also be overcome by remaining faithful to the “nationality”). Only two of Uvarov’s three principles – “Orthodoxy” and “nationality” – claim supra-historical status in the mature Slavophil concept, and the relations between them remain unclear throughout the existence of Slavophilism. If in the most complete and thoughtful, a kind of “official” formulations, primacy is unconditionally given to “Orthodoxy” as the true faith (which makes it possible to bring the Slavophil teaching to a universal level, and gives the Slavic peoples, primarily the Russian, the status of “historical” peoples), then in specific situations, “Orthodoxy” is often interpreted (or, in any case, there are grounds for such an interpretation) as a “tribal faith,” an expression of the “folk spirit.” We emphasize that, although a theoretical balance between the two principles can be maintained, in practice the emphasis clearly shifts in favor of “nationality” (which will become a fundamental point of demarcation from the Slavophilism of Vl. Solovyov and K. N. Leontyev): Slavophiles were often accused of identifying “Orthodoxy” and “Russian Orthodoxy”, reducing “Orthodoxy” to local religious practice and local religious understanding. However, in the opinion of the Slavophiles themselves, there was no contradiction between these theses, since everything universal can only be manifested in specific forms limited in time and space. “Orthodoxy” as such can only be given to us as Russian, Greek, Bulgarian, etc. Orthodoxy - some of these forms may turn out to be more adequate, others - further from expressing the content of Orthodoxy, but in any case we cannot have the ability to talk about “Orthodoxy” as such, in addition to its specific historical forms. The path to the general must be through realizing the identity of the content in all the diversity of forms, where each of them, with its concreteness, allows us to see what turns out to be invisible in the other - and in this sense, “Orthodoxy” and “Russian Orthodoxy” practically really turn out to be identical already in that the reason that Orthodoxy becomes accessible to us only through its specific form inherent in us. Another thing is that, in the opinion of Slavophiles, the matter is not limited to such a neutral thesis - “Russian Orthodoxy” turns out to be not only “one of” the historical forms of Orthodoxy, but also the most adequate to its eternal content - it is closest to the essence of the teaching. The concrete revelation of Orthodoxy turns out to be nationality - as a way of life, which is “faith expressed in life” (Khomyakov, 2011: 210).
To a first approximation, the Slavophiles’ understanding of the state can be likened to Augustine’s - its purpose is exclusively negative, it is designed to preserve civil peace, to satisfy needs in a form that society is incapable of. The state is interpreted by K. S. Aksakov as a temptation - and the choice in its favor, made by Western peoples, acts as a parallel to the Fall, the inability to resist the temptation of “power”. If traditionally the literature emphasizes the peculiar “legal (legal) nihilism” of the Slavophiles (see, for example: Valitsky, 2012), then, in our opinion, this assessment should be adjusted: Slavophiles, and in particular K. S. Aksakov, see what, in the opinion of liberal philosophy of law, is the value of law, however, in their opinion, the price that has to be paid for it is too great - the dominance of external legality, jurisprudence, frees one from moral responsibility, external convenience is bought at the price of the soul. In a review of volume VII of “History.” S. M. Solovyova Aksakov writes in 1858: “Man, as a public person and as a people, faces the path of internal truth, conscience, freedom, or the path of external truth, law, bondage. The first path is the public path, or, better, the zemstvo path; the second way is the state way. The first path is the path of truth, the path of a completely worthy person. – Everything has only a price, how much it is done sincerely and freely. – But it is difficult for a person to stay on the first path. Not everyone can be stopped by conscience alone, and unscrupulous people bring anxiety and confusion into human society; it sees that for those for whom conscience is not enough, internal judgment is not enough, external judgment and punishment are needed. The person resorts to a different path.<…>This is the path not of internal, but of external truth, not of conscience, but of law. The principle underlying this path is the beginning of bondage, the beginning that kills life and freedom. First of all, a formula, whatever it may be, cannot embrace life; then, no matter how true it is, when imposed from the outside, it destroys the most important force, the power of inner conviction, its free calling. Further, thus giving a person the opportunity to rely on the law, it lulls the human spirit prone to moral laziness, easily and without difficulty calming it with the fulfillment of ready-made specific requirements and eliminating the need for internal moral activity, moral wakefulness.” (Aksakov, 1889: 241). Although this fragment was excluded by K. S. Aksakov during the final processing of the article, the considerations that led to this author’s decision do not relate to the essence of the provisions expressed - this is confirmed by even harsher wording contained in the article of 1859: “The state weakens the inner truth , and even turns honest people into soulless, therefore immoral, formalists. The state seems to be saying: I will arrange external truth in such a way with my institutions, that there will be no need for internal truth, that people will be honest without having to actually be that way. I will arrange everything in such a way that there will be no need to be moral.” (Aksakov, 1889: 286). Here the rhetoric speaks for itself: the state is extremely close to the “satanic temptation”, and “the triumph of external truth is the death of internal truth, the only true, free truth” (Aksakov, 1889: 287). Unable to resist the temptation of power, the people cease to be the people: “When the people are the Sovereign, then where are the people?” (Aksakov, 1889: 288). Therefore, the choice of the Russian people, according to K. S. Aksakov, cannot be assessed as a choice of the best form of organization from the point of view of a “well-maintained community”, but as the best for the soul - where there is no “crutch of the soul” in the form of a law, where conscience should make decisions yourself, without shifting your work to an external norm.
The substantive center of all social reality is the people. Actually, in order for it to exist and develop the potential inherent in it, the state is necessary as an external, formal anchor that allows the people to get rid of constant concern about the affairs that are now in charge of the state. This two-term scheme was proposed by K. S. Aksakov, and he was the first to actually deepen it, in the article “Experience of synonyms” (1857), distinguishing between the concepts of “public” and “people”, understanding by “public” “false people”, “mummers” ”, a certain intermediate sphere that arose as a result of Peter’s coup - cut off from the people and existing only at the expense of the state, only by its non-nationality, and at the same time not being the state itself. The public gaze identifies her with the people - and the state interacts with her (it doesn’t matter - in agreement or in opposition), taking her for the people (Aksakov, 2009: 237–238).
Ap. Grigoriev, analyzing Zagoskin’s novels, wrote: “For Zagoskin<…>and of the direction of which he was the most gifted representative in literature, there was only one quality among the people - humility. And besides, humility itself is not in the Slavophil sense of complete community And legality- but in the sense of simple sheepish submission to every existing fact" (Grigoriev, 1876: 524). In this contrast of “humility” among the Slavophiles and among the representatives of the “official” camp that are seemingly close to them, the highlighted Ap. Grigoriev’s semantic shades, which in the future, throughout the 1860-1880s, will intensify, increasingly moving Slavophile “humility” away from “submission” in political terms (the difference in ethical and religious terms initially - for Slavophiles “humility” is included in another type of religiosity, personal, as opposed to the much more traditional, “non-reflective” religiosity toward which, for example, M. P. Pogodin or M. N. Zagoskin are oriented). “Humility” is understood as first instinctive (in relation to the behavior of the people in ancient Russian history), and then a conscious limitation of one’s will: characters from one of the most Slavophile works of the gr. A. K. Tolstoy “Prince Serebryany”: boyar Druzhina Andreevich Morozov and Prince Nikita Romanovich Serebryany. “Humility” appears as a renunciation of autocracy according to the famous formula of K. S. Aksakov: “the power of power is for the king, the power of opinion is for the people.” “The people” (and “society” - in the concept of Yu. F. Samarin and I. S. Aksakov) voluntarily renounce power (which, in fact, makes this refusal a moral feat, otherwise it would be a simple fixation of powerlessness), but at the same time retains freedom of opinion, and the latter becomes a force with which the government must reckon if it wants to remain a “people’s” power. Humility as a result turns out to be the highest tension of the will, a feat, that is, the direct opposite of “submission,” since this humility is not before power, but before that for which this power exists - humility, which gives strength to be free, “for the fear of God delivers from any fear,” as K. S. Aksakov said in a speech at a dinner in honor of the Sevastopol hero gr. D. E. Osten-Sackena in 1856. (Yankovsky, 1981: 203).
The Slavophiles themselves sought to practice this behavior, realizing “freedom of speech and thought,” the most important right of the “land” in the Slavophil concept, in person, as in the case of submitting an address to the Moscow Duma in 1870. Then Yu. F. Samarin, in response to a letter from Prince. D. A. Obolensky with a description of the reaction of St. Petersburg, wrote: “Do you really think that we all, and especially Cherkassky, did not expect such an impression that he made, and that none of us thought of everything that could be said about the untimeliness of such a statement”; but it is necessary to “educate society and admonish the government, raise the question and carry it out, fire at the ears and put the mature intention in the form of a report. Our bold hopes puzzled and irritated us - so be it, but the spoken word leaves a mark, and the repetition of the same word will have a different effect and little by little we will get used to it” (quoted from: Dudzinskaya, 1994: 199). Ivan Aksakov would do the same in 1878, making a famous speech against the decisions of the Berlin Congress, for which he would be expelled from Moscow, and the Slavic Society, one of the founders of which he was in the late 1850s and under whose leadership it operated during the most tense period Balkan conflict in 1875–1877, dispersed. Aksakov was firmly aware of the likely consequences of his speech (Tyutcheva, 2008: 540–541), which did not prevent him, however, from saying those words that he considered it his duty to pronounce, and Koshelev from publishing them in Germany. However, the Slavophiles were not limited to isolated performances - within the same position there are also much less striking, but requiring not isolated, but everyday, regular efforts, actions for the foreign uncensored book publishing of Samarin and Koshelev (who invariably sent them to the sovereign emperor, accompanied by a loyal letter, as he acted with the publication of Aksakov’s speech), in the journalistic activities of Ivan Aksakov, for persistently defending his right to say what he thinks, called “the passion-bearer of censorship of all eras and trends” (Tsimbaev, 2007: 440).
And yet, the weakness of the scheme proposed by K. S. Aksakov was obvious - the people in it turned out to be silent, the “great dumb”, which is incomprehensible and, what is much more painful, cannot be understood, since the voice belongs to the “public”: remains only to unravel what is hidden behind the silence of the people - and this gives rise to the perception of everything emanating equally from the state and from the “public” as “false”, unpopular - and, therefore, essentially empty. The consequences of such a view were clearly manifested in the unfinished article by K. S. Aksakov “On Russian Literature,” published posthumously in No. 2 of “Den” in 1861 (a newspaper published by the brother of the deceased, I. S. Aksakov) and which evoked a sharp response from F. M. . Dostoevsky, who wrote in the article “Latest literary phenomena: the newspaper “Den”” from “A series of articles on Russian literature” that thereby the view of the Slavophiles becomes indistinguishably similar to the caricatured image of the “Westerner” they created, because it is actually denied, declared empty and unnecessary , it turns out that the entire Russian culture of the last century and a half, the entire history since the time of Peter, turns out to be a mistake - or, if an inevitable historical stage, then incapable of giving rise to something truly popular. F. M. Dostoevsky polemically sharply called this position another form of nihilism - where in the name of an undetectable, almost fundamentally not fixed object, everything present is rejected: and in such a perspective, it is no longer particularly important whether the existing is rejected for the sake of the past or the future - much more What is essential is the universal nature of negation, which leaves only emptiness, nihil, in the present, present. This polemic had a content that significantly went beyond the scope of the dispute about literature, since Dostoevsky accurately and painfully for the Slavophiles recorded the fundamental difficulty of their position - the absence of a subject who could be an active bearer and exponent of what for the Slavophiles came under the name of “nationality”.
The noted conceptual difficulty was also noted by the Slavophiles themselves - and in the early 1860s, I. S. Aksakov formulated a concept designed to remove this difficulty [Yu. F. Samarin played a significant role in the formation of the concept of “state – society – people”, but the key texts belong to I. S. Aksakov, who left the only complete presentation of it]. He proposes a three-part formula: “state – society – people”, in which “society” is understood as “the organ of comprehension of the people’s existence”, the subject that has self-awareness and is able to translate the “nationality”, organically given in the “people”, into the language of consciousness - in society, people become aware of themselves, gain consciousness and consciousness. The productivity of this concept, among other things, is that it allows us to answer a significant reproach of the “soilists,” not to mention the representatives of the “Western” orientation: the reforms of Peter and the subsequent era also receive their positive meaning - they are now conceptualized as a time of formation “ society,” the time of preparation of public self-awareness, the absence of which explains both the hypertrophy of the state in the “Petrine period” and the inability of the pre-Petrine state to solve the problems that faced it: now the latter situation is interpreted as a consequence of the unconsciousness of the people, who were unable to find an “organic” solution and forcing the state, in order to save itself and the people, to undertake reforms.
Thus, the perspective also changes: society must be constituted, become what it should be - an “organ of self-consciousness”, gain full-fledged subjectivity, so that the state can cease to be absolute and at the same time destructive. The destructiveness of the modern state follows, according to Aksakov, from the fact that it is forced to be “everyone”, to take on the functions of an absent society - but it is only able to act formally, grasps only the external side of relations and is not capable of creativity in accordance with the demands of the people. Instead of demanding something from the state, for example, expansion of self-government, one should first of all take care of the development of society - otherwise the state will inevitably seize more and more new spheres of social life, since existing needs push it to do so, because in order to for self-government to become real, state will is not enough, just as it was not enough to create self-government of the nobility. The most valuable thing in the socio-political thought of the Slavophiles is their attention to the problem of “society” and “social action”.
At the same time, the conceptual role of the “people” is preserved: it allows you to combine an appeal to the past, to tradition with simultaneous active participation in a rapidly changing life, without dooming you to the role of retrogrades - precisely due to its “muteness”. S. F. Sharapov, an employee of “Rus”, who tried to act as a successor to I. S. Aksakov until the end of his days, in a letter to E. M. Feoktistov dated April 8, 1888, sending the first issue of “Russian Case”, wrote: “ My direction not liberal that is, not destructive, there is no doubt about that, but not conservative either, i.e. not protective. As Ivan Sergeevich used to say, we have nothing to protect. The ideas of autocracy, nationality, and faith are too strong and do not need to be protected, for they are preserved by the Russian people - a force greater than that of newspapers; our private modernity, which is protected by “conservatives” with all their might - but where is it good for? This modernity is leading the country straight to stagnation and decay” (quoted from: Fetisenko, 2012: 416). In other words, precisely insofar as the “people” can be taken as a constant, it allows for a critical attitude towards both modernity and the past - since any past is justified only in coincidence with the “spirit of the people”, and not in itself.
The political and legal among the Slavophiles turn out to be not identical to the state - they are primary in relation to it, and it is from this perspective that the strange indifference of the Slavophiles to issues of state structure, public administration becomes understandable - from their point of view, these are technical issues, secondary in relation to fundamental political decisions , following them, and therefore the decision of the first will naturally redefine state realities. Among the Slavophiles we can see in a naked form the connection between the political and the theological - in fact, this nakedness of thought is what aroused the interest of the same Schmitt, who, analyzing the political, turns to European conservatives of the 19th century: what in the liberal doctrine turns out to be hidden in the area of the “indistinguishable” , conservatives find themselves in the space of speaking - since for them it is a question of problematizing the “self-evident” and, therefore, their counter-strategy reveals the fundamental premises. Law here is not a technique, not a certain set of norms, but an action (similar to how Malinovsky will interpret myth as an action, and not a story): norms themselves are not “technical,” as I. S. Aksakov emphasizes in the context of disputes around judicial reform - they carry values, a certain cultural choice. Hence, out of fear of error, resistance to any “formal” law arises: the more the law is based on practice, grows out of the existing understanding of just and unjust, the more effective it will be. Ultimately, any “formal law” is unfair for Slavophiles - since it is unable to take into account the diversity of reality, driving it into a limited number of norms, and thereby violates the classical Aristotelian formulation of justice, treating unequals in an equal way, thinking as identical non-identical situations. Thus, for the law to be fair (and justice for Slavophiles is of much greater value than legal correctness), it is necessary that it have an extra-legal regulator, which is the tsar.
This particular case allows us to better understand the Slavophil concept of autocracy. If the state is by definition a formal force, then for it to act meaningfully, it is necessary that its head be transcendental in relation to it - the autocrat is beneficial in that he is not a government, he is not “part of the state”, but its “head”, that is personality - if it is impossible to address the state with an ethical demand, if the law cannot be asked or belittled, then the personality is capable of giving a personal response. Yu. F. Samarin, in an open letter to Alexander II, stated: “If in the minds of all subjects of the Empire, enlightened and dark, the image of the Supreme Power did not differ more or less clearly from their idea of the government, an autocratic form of government would be unthinkable; for no government would ever rise to the height at which the Supreme Power stands in our concepts, and on the contrary, this power, having descended to the level of government, would immediately lose the beneficial charm of its moral power.” (Samarin, 1890: XIX).
In this understanding of autocracy, the noble character of Slavophilism is clearly manifested - typical hostility to the bureaucracy, to the “police (regular) state” built by Nicholas I, where the bureaucracy replaces the nobility in its role as the executor of the state will, but this reaction, recording the emerging and rapidly gaining strength of the “bureaucratic state", at the same time looking for an alternative to it on the path of "direct rule", which will manifest itself in the strange and conceptually curious reign of Alexander III, when the "reaction" uses forms that anticipate future leader states, and an attempt to mobilize the masses in the subsequent reign, as well as and the desire to find alternative forms of sources of information and control, through informal contacts and various monarchical parties and organizations, will turn out to be a precursor to the theory and practice of the “conservative revolutions” of the 20th century. If initially the Slavophiles (1840–1850s) can be unambiguously classified as liberal schools of thought (in which most researchers agree, see: Tsimbaev, 1986; Dudzinskaya, 1994), then the later development of Slavophilism demonstrates the growing tension between liberal foundations and increasing conservative gravity. This tension also manifests itself personally: if A. I. Koshelev shifted from the 1860s towards “zemstvo liberalism” and remained in these positions until his death in 1883, then I. S. Aksakov is characterized by a much more complex dynamic, an attempt to reconcile the original position with a new context, which had acquired quite rigid outlines by the 1870s.
The essence of the “conservative” shift of late Slavophilism (due to which, in retrospect, Slavophilism itself often begins to be assessed entirely as a direction of a conservative plan) is associated with the transformation of (European) conservatism itself, which underwent radical changes in the 1860s. Until this moment, the decisive opponent of conservatism was the national movement - nationalism, based on the fundamentally democratic ideology of the national body and its acquisition of political subjectivity, opposed the established political entities and authorities (and in this sense, the conservative camp in the Russian Empire, for example, clearly perceived Slavophilism as enemy, and the severity of repressions against the Slavophiles was much more unambiguous and rapid than similar actions against Westerners, especially considering the small number of Slavophiles at that time). Later, Slavophilism acts in a situation where conservative thought and nationalism increasingly gravitate towards the formation of ideological complexes - and since nationalism acts as a semantic concept that defines the Slavophil concept, this causes semantic shifts in Slavophilism, attempts to combine these ideological complexes into a new whole.
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The given introductory fragment of the book The first Russian nationalism... and others (Andrey Teslya, 2014) provided by our book partner -
Andrey Teslya – Candidate of Philosophical Sciences, expert in the field of Russian social thought. His research interests include: the history of Western European political and legal thought of the 17th-19th centuries. (primarily conservative and reactionary doctrines); Russian socio-philosophical and social thought of the 19th century; Russian civil law XIX – early. XX century.
I feel bad where there is no powerful river, sea or ocean
– You were born and worked for a long time in Khabarovsk, and will soon move to Kaliningrad. You are one of the few people I know who, with their geography of life and work, seem to intellectually unite Russia. You travel a lot, travel a lot, including abroad. Please tell us about yourself.
– I am a native Far Easterner in the third generation. This is quite a rare occurrence, because the city itself was founded in 1856 as a military post, and it officially became a city quite late, and in fact even later. Therefore, the main urban population, as in many cities of this type, in Khabarovsk, the oldest residents are those whose local roots go back to the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries, and the second and third waves are the 1930s and then the 1950s - 1960s. These are those who are usually called indigenous Far Easterners, with a certain degree of convention, of course.
I myself, and my ancestors on my mother’s side, and on both sides of my wife’s side, constantly lived in the Far East. It rarely happens that three generations of two families live in one city in the Far East. Because usually there are always some trajectories of movement at least within the Primorsky, Khabarovsk territories or the Amur region.
“On autopilot” I wanted to say that I really love the Far East... But then I thought and decided that, apparently, it would be more correct to say that I really love Khabarovsk and Vladivostok. My hometown is located on the banks of the Amur, and I can hardly imagine myself without big water. I'm used to living near a huge river, so I feel bad in places where there is no powerful river, or sea, or ocean.
In this regard, even when I managed to travel around Russia, I was always surprised if there was no big river in the city. I remember when my wife, already at a fairly mature age, first came to Moscow and was amazed. After all, they always say: “Moscow River”, “Moskva River”. And they call it a river?
Andrey Tesla with his wife.
Photo from personal archive
Then we traveled along all the famous European rivers - the Vistula, Oder, Rhine... Well, yes, the formal criteria are met, these are rivers, but in the Far East you get used to the fact that something completely different is called a river. You begin to understand that the word “river” has several meanings. It is difficult to explain to a person who has not seen our Amur expanses how, in principle, this river can look like, how this space is structured.
The landscape in which you grow remains fundamental to you. And we’re not even talking about attachment to our small Motherland. You may not like this landscape, but you evaluate everything else on its basis; it becomes a natural norm for you.
The place where you were born acts as a natural environment for you.
It is important to note that Far Eastern cities are different, and the space, for example, in Khabarovsk is arranged quite curiously. Khabarovsk has traditionally always functioned as a military-administrative center. It can be considered a city only with some reservations: on the one hand, it is the administrative capital, where the residence of the Governor General, now the presidential plenipotentiary, is located, where the representative offices of most central departments in the region are located, on the other hand, it is the headquarters of the command of the Far Eastern Military District and endless military units in and around the city. It turns out that everything else that exists, it either exists in connection with this, or between this, in some crevices that have arisen.
– What were your school years like for you?
– I am immensely grateful to the school, and in many ways precisely because I did not study there. The school I graduated from had a wonderful director, a close friend of our family, and an excellent teacher of Russian literature. And thanks to him and his goodwill, I had the opportunity to take a significant part of the subjects as an external student.
One of the most pleasant memories is very specific literature lessons. First, I wrote an essay on some classical text, and then for an hour we discussed the corresponding texts. In 9th grade we read and discussed War and Peace and the essays turned into essays.
The novel “War and Peace” was my first great literary love, and it was a love for Tolstoy’s philosophy, which schoolchildren usually do not like. But this resistance to Tolstoy’s position still seems strange to me - the desire to skip these long discussions, to quickly move on to the military scenes or the family romance in the novel. I liked the historical optics he chose, and how he builds it, when he talks about time, when he talks about action in time.
But I discovered Dostoevsky very late. Of course, as part of the school curriculum, I had a chance to read “Crime and Punishment,” it seems, even before him, by chance, “The Brothers Karamazov,” his first novel turned out to be “The Village of Stepanchikovo...”, which somehow came to hand, but Dostoevsky remained for a long time foreign to me. Maybe this is for the best.
At one time it seemed to me that Dostoevsky was such a social fantasy, that the people and situations described did not exist, that people did not speak or interact like that. And then, much later, a different vision and a different attitude towards Dostoevsky came. I would say that the return to Dostoevsky was again predetermined by my studies at school. School here is a determining factor in the sense that I was very lucky that it was not a standard education, but an opportunity to study externally.
Photo: Andrey Teslya / Facebook
– How did you choose the university? How did you decide on your area of scientific interest?
– After school, I had a fairly standard path. I went to study as a lawyer at the Far Eastern State University of Transport. It was jurisprudence, and jurisprudence in transport. And at first I was interested in civil law - that is, I initially had and remained a civil law specialization, and then I became increasingly interested in the history of Russian civil law.
Even before university, children developed a great interest in history. Then, at the stage of growing up - this is what everyone, apparently, experiences with very few exceptions - I became interested in philosophy. So, largely thanks to a wonderful mentor, the then head of our graduating department, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Kovalchuk, a specialist in the history of railway law, it was possible to combine all these hobbies. He was sympathetic to my then very disparate hobbies and in every possible way encouraged my interest in the history of law and the history of political doctrines - that is, what made it possible to fruitfully connect the three main areas of my interests: history, philosophy and law.
In this sense, all my subsequent intellectual movements in disciplinary terms were an attempt to unite and combine my three basic interests: interest in history, law, philosophy and social thought in general.
Therefore, on the one hand, judging by the formal rubricator, there were advances in my scientific interests, but, by and large, there was no fundamental change. I do the same thing all the time, but with different accents, sometimes a little more in one direction, sometimes a little more in the other.
I'm interested in how intellectual communication works, how ideas function in a social environment, how they are discussed and interact with other ideas.
In this regard, I am still interested in what was stereotypically pompous in the 19th century in magazine jargon called “eternal thoughts”, “eternal ideas”: I have always been interested, on the contrary, not in the “eternal”, but in the temporary – as in The same words, the same phrases, convey completely different content.
For example, when they talk about Western European medieval Christianity, one would like to ask what is meant by Christianity at this moment. What does it mean to be a Christian, for example, in the 12th century? In the 18th century? What does it mean to be Orthodox, for example, for a Russian landowner of the 18th century? For a peasant of the 19th century? Or for us now? These are completely different and sometimes divergent things, although it seems that here, and there, and there we are talking about Christianity. But it turns out that all this is completely different.
– Can you give an example of how this was perceived before and how it is now?
– I would say that this is a topic for a huge separate conversation, it is incredibly interesting. In particular, the one who is doing this phenomenologically is Konstantin Antonov and the circle that is associated with him, with the Orthodox St. Tikhon University, modern researchers of the philosophy of religion, Russian 19th century. In my opinion, Konstantin Mikhailovich has a very beautiful idea that can be cited precisely as an example of the difference. That during the first half of the 19th century we observe how the language of the Church, with which it addresses its audience, and the language of educated society diverge. Moreover, the point is not that they talk about different things, the point is that they, in principle, speak differently.
If you like, the change in language that occurs in secular society, in the language of magazines, in the language of educated society does not occur in the Church. As a result, when people from theological academies speak, they speak, perhaps very precisely and very correctly, but in a language that others do not hear.
Accordingly, when the same Slavophiles (here I turn to the thoughts of Konstantin Antonov) begin to talk about secular theology, when they strive to do their own thing, then their rejection from the Theological Academy is connected not only with the fact that they do not agree with something specific, how much with the fact that it seems to them that these are all words. The reaction of spiritual circles is similar in many ways - this is a reaction largely conditioned by different cultural environments: there is a catastrophic misunderstanding between the two sides, they speak different languages.
Andrey Teslya.
Photo: Irina Fastovets
Faith becomes a matter of individual choice
– When did this misunderstanding arise?
– If we look at the 18th century, we will see that this is one cultural space, the active figures here are people from the spiritual environment, and there is no wall here yet. In the second half of the 19th century, in order to find yourself in modern times, you must reject your past: you must leave the seminary, break with your past, or at least you must move away from it in many ways.
To break with my past - I, of course, exaggerated, because there is an absolutely wonderful work about the Popovichs, which traces what happened to them: this is the recently published very talented work by Laurie Manchester, “Popovichs in the World”... They themselves are immigrants, fugitives from the clergy , subsequently evaluating their experience, described how they placed themselves in a different cultural context. And there we are talking about much more complex behavior patterns.
Accordingly, for the 19th century one of the important problems is the problem of the second Christianization, the problem of the transition to individual confession. At this time, the question “Why are we Christians” is replaced by “Why am I a Christian? How can I be a Christian?
That is, a mass problem arises of how to combine those principles and those ideas that a person theoretically accepts, but now he introjects them as his own, personal - not as abstract principles that calmly rest in the field of abstractions, but somehow what should permeate all everyday life: how to reconcile these principles, theoretical beliefs with accepted practices of behavior.
How can one be Orthodox in life, being, for example, a guards officer? This is a question that for the previous type of religious consciousness was posed only in very rare, individual cases. But in the 19th century it is clear that this and similar questions became relevant, everything began to move. We can say that in each era not only and not so much the answers change, but the very lines of posing the question change, new oppositions appear. Therefore, a mixing effect occurs when at different times the same words seem to be used, but these words now express something completely different.
– It turns out that the modern church has become much more difficult; it has to work with people on an individual level, and not with the masses, as before.
- Yes. I would say that here we are talking specifically about the church in the social sense, the church with a small C. Moreover, I would emphasize that individualization itself is also a kind of generalization. As we begin to look closely at the details, it becomes clear that the individualization of attitudes towards religion became relevant mainly for the educated strata in the 19th century, and in the 20th century it became relevant for everyone. Faith becomes a matter of individual choice. Even if I inherited it from my parents, in any case I must give myself an account of why I remain in it?
In this sense, for the same peasant of the 18th century, the question was not posed this way. If it was staged for someone, then it was unique. But a person of the 20th century already needs to give an answer, and the answer is aimed not only at changing his faith, but also at preserving it. Even if I am simply in the same position, I must articulate to myself why this is so? I must give this answer to myself, and the most important thing is that this answer should not just be rhetorically acceptable, but internally convincing.
– Where do you think this leads? From mass character to individuality, and then? What will happen in 100 years to religion, to individual faith?
- Don't know. It's very difficult for me to make predictions. I have no doubt that both religion and faith in God will continue. In this sense, there is no question here. It’s just that if we talk about this within the framework of Christianity, then it is easy to see that over the course of two thousand years of history this is an ever-changing answer, this is an ever-changing truth. And in such a perspective it is very difficult to talk, because 100 years is very close to us. We see a really long-term trend, and often what seems important and striking to us is actually secondary or just an element of much more important things. 
– What did the emergence of social networks and the Internet give you as a thinking person?
– First of all, responses to my statements and books. They provide a vision of diversity. This has been said many times, but I think it is a very important thing. On social networks, everyone builds their own politics and builds their own way of viewing. I understand well those who create a comfortable communication environment for themselves - they communicate with those who are deeply pleasant to them, with a small circle of friends and acquaintances, for whom this is a space for discussion in their circle.
For me, social media is often the exact opposite tool: it’s a way to hear the voices of people I probably wouldn’t hear if I were in my “natural” social circle. Facebook provides an opportunity, not only to hear the opinions of people from different parts of the country and the planet, but also to hear a lot of voices that are obviously absent from your social circle, if only because you will not be able to personally communicate with these people for a long time.
– Do you ever block your readers on social networks, perhaps for some radical positions?
– I probably block in extremely rare cases, and then I have to try very hard. I prefer to ban only in cases where they are already directly insulting, and not me, but other friends. But I’m very afraid to make this decision, I’m very afraid to clear my feed of people who think differently. I am very afraid to create such a comfortable position, when nothing will irritate me, when there will only be views that suit me, only positions that I share, when we will argue only about commas, or on a specific situational issue, because in general we agree on everything .
It is very important to me that there is no such agreement in general. Let me emphasize again that these are very rare cases. If it’s completely overlapping. In this regard, even if two friends who have had a strong quarrel sort things out between themselves, then this is their right. As a last resort, let them mutually ban each other.
I thought that the peak of mutual aggression and mutual irritation in 2014 would be difficult to surpass, but the events of recent months surprise me.
It seems to me that the level of irritation and desire to enter into conflict is now stronger than ever. Today, in social networks, it is precisely the readiness for conflict in the absence of a reason for it that prevails.
Very unpleasant incidents arise, which have to be observed many times, when the parties take advantage of a random excuse to break off relations with each other. When some completely random thesis, some random formulation, which, in principle, does not attract much attention, suddenly turns into a subject for a showdown, for very deep quarrels and conflicts.
In this sense, the desire for conflict, the readiness for conflict is much greater than the existing reason - and the reason is only being sought. Accordingly, a constant tension is felt, ready to come to the surface when a suitable reason is found for everyone, when there is no need to look for it.
– Is there a cold civil war going on?
“I wouldn’t exaggerate, because if there really was a civil war going on, we couldn’t help but notice it.” Now, thank God, we manage to notice it only thanks to Facebook.
On Facebook, with its speaking function, the interlocutor often finds himself in a situation where he cannot or does not consider it possible not to notice the statement. Facebook has a trait - it promotes speeches "to the city and the world" addressed to everyone. Therefore, there are always those for whom these words are not intended.
Moreover, it simultaneously promotes an appeal to the city and the world, while maintaining a certain individual intonation. This unusual state of both public and private speech arises, and it is unclear where the border between them lies. I can say that this is my private space, I express exclusively my own, not even just a private opinion, but a private feeling.
Photo: Maria Marey / Facebook
– Yes, but feelings, irony and humor are often not read through the Internet, and the statement is perceived as harsher and more categorical than the author might have intended.
– Yes, and at the same time it turns out that it is still addressed to a circle of people, both personally familiar to you from a variety of contexts, and strangers.
– I am upset by statements on Facebook, for example, when someone generalizes and says something on the topic “liberals are all like that,” and then some kind of odious quote is given, although liberals can be very different. Perhaps, when you write something negative about liberals, then all this should be read in an ironic way, but it can be heard as a kind of verdict.
– In recent years, I have been trying not to use the term “liberals” itself, although, in my opinion, this is also a huge problem, because we are succeeding... I will again generalize now, perhaps extremely unreasonably, but nevertheless. If we speak at the level of such conditional generalizations, it turns out that, on the one hand, there is some kind of community of people with fairly recognizable views. There is some kind of identification between “friends and foes” and “roughly our own”.
On the other hand, what should we call this community? Well, the “liberal” is read differently, it is clear that this does not work. Okay, but how else? Moreover, each side always uses exactly one technique.
The wonderful Evgeniy Gubnitsky, a translator, not long ago had a striking remark about the peculiarities of how we build the image of our group and how we perceive others. What do we always do in public debate if we are correct, careful, etc., etc.? In relation to our own, we always understand that our own are different, our own are completely diverse. We understand that there are inveterate ones, but they do not characterize us. We always make allowances for the fact that even if he, in principle, is not inveterate, but there are some extreme statements, extreme positions, then even they are generally not characteristic of him, and so on.
We imagine others as a totality in which we not only do not distinguish shades, but also prefer to pay attention to the extremes, to the bright, to what stands out. If we want to fight them, we, as a rule, choose adherents of extreme views and so on.
As a result of small amendments, it turns out that through a series of such light and, I emphasize, completely non-malicious movements, we create a situation where the difference between two positions at one moment becomes obvious at times. When it turns out that we are complex, we are diverse and, of course, we are guided by the principle of reality, and our opponents are completely the opposite. Let me emphasize once again that this is all done in good faith, even if we are not aimed at conscious overexposure.
Photo: Andrey Teslya / Facebook
We strive to divide people into ours and not ours
– You studied in detail the history of Russian thought of the 19th century. When you read contemporary discussions between liberals and conservatives, between people of different beliefs, do you now see echoes of the debate between Slavophiles and Westerners?
– Yes and no – that’s what I would say. Yes, there are echoes, but I would like to clarify which ones exactly. These are echoes of a common language. We still use the language of public speech, the language of discussion, which was created by Russian intellectuals in the 19th century. Another thing is that we often put other meanings into it. Since we were talking about echoes, yes, of course, they exist. Another thing is that the illusion arises that we are not dealing with echoes, but with the same ever-repeating dispute.
– Developing in a spiral.
– Of course, we use the same words in many ways, but as soon as we start turning to history, we see that the meanings that we pack into these words are different. This was discussed at the very beginning of the conversation. In this case, a false recognition effect occurs. When we turn to 19th-century texts by rote, what happens? We strive to divide people into ours and not ours, to understand who was there in the past, who can be built in our line, and who in another? Although in fact they fought in other wars, played other games, discussed other problems. The dead, of course, can be recruited into our army, but it is still important to understand that we do the recruiting. In this regard, we do not find like-minded people in the past, but create them.
– But have the issues changed globally? What to do? Who is guilty? Is Russia Europe or not Europe? How Asia-Europe is it? Or did they think differently?
“In many ways they thought differently. Moreover, if we look at the Slavophiles, then yes, they think within the framework of “world eras”; for them, after the German world, the Slavic world must come. In this sense, this is such European logic.
In other words, if we very briefly define the Slavophile position, then, in their opinion, if we want to be a historical people, then we can only be like Russians. In this sense, Russians can only be a historical people as Russians; it just won’t work out any other way.
Accordingly, it will not be possible to become a European in the sense that there are no Europeans at all. There are Dutch, Belgians, French and so on. Therefore, the desire to turn from Russians into Europeans is a strange desire. In this sense, you can only be a European if you are not in Europe, and from this perspective, the desire to be a European is precisely a demonstration of a gap, a demonstration of non-involvement. Like, I want to be a representative of European culture in a non-European space, in a non-European environment.
If you think that you are in a global space (and for Slavophiles, as well as for people of the 19th century in general, it practically coincides with the European one), then it’s somehow strange to define yourself as a European, you will still define yourself somehow more locally , somehow more specific. Accordingly, you will no longer relate to European culture as a whole, but you will argue with something much more specific.
Therefore, yes, the concept of the West is very important for Slavophiles, but it is important to note that this is a religious West. In this sense, the border still often passes not according to the logic of “West-East”, but according to the logic of “Catholic Rome - Orthodoxy” with further distinctions. Let me remind you of a classic Slavophile favorite motif - the idea that England is especially close to Russia.
In this sense, when we talk about the “West,” then, for example, England is often excluded from the “West” - it has its own special place, which requires reservations. When we begin to specify what the West that Herzen talks about is, it turns out that this West does not include Italy and Spain. It turns out that the West that Herzen seems to consider the West is France, Germany and, to some extent, England.
– The United States did not play such a role even then.
– Yes, the USA has a special status here - for example, for Kireevsky in the early 1830s there are two new peoples, Russians and Americans, who can act as bearers of new principles, but advantage is given to the Russians, since the Americans are constrained by the one-sidedness of Anglo-Saxon education. Therefore, we can say that we can see how the familiar pattern arises - both the disputes between Westerners and Slavophiles, and subsequent discussions are connected with this strict demarcation, but in the form that is familiar to us, we will not find it among them.
We won’t find it at all in any disputes between any people. We will find it in the version of a non-substantive serious conversation; we can find it only in extremely ideologically simplified concepts. Here, yes, it turns out that when we begin to simplify more and more, to schematize more and more, such schemes can coalesce at the output.
– How could you describe the position of the Westerners?
– Firstly, the Westerners were called Westerners by their opponents, so this kind of cross-naming happened. Secondly, it depends on who you take as Westerners. In short, the Westernizing camp consists of such figures as Vissarion Grigorievich Belinsky, Timofey Nikolaevich Granovsky. From the younger generation, of course, Konstantin Dmitrievich Kavelin. What is noteworthy here is that they conceive of Russia as part of that very West, according to the unity of world history.
If you like, the gap in position here lies in the fact that for Slavophiles we are talking about a new word, about a new principle, but for Westerners we are talking about the possibility of a new modulation of already existing principles. A more significant political distinction is that for the Slavophiles their optics are the optics of national construction, and for Westerners it is the imperial optics.
By the way, in our modern and very painful context, it is noteworthy that, within the framework of their national project, the Slavophiles were much more not just tolerant, but often provided direct support and assistance, for example, to the Ukrainophiles. In turn, for the Westerners of the 1840s, the Ukrainophile movement was completely unacceptable.
In this sense, the angry anti-Ukrainian philippics in the 19th century originally came from the camp of Westerners, not Slavophiles, but for the latter these are completely recognizable and familiar things. Therefore, it is interesting to see how the historical confrontation is changing. Where we seem to be ready to see the usual pattern from our current distinctions, we see that in the situation of the 40s and 50s everything happened almost exactly the opposite.
– Can we say that after the revolution of 1917 these debates did not end, but were only interrupted for 70 years, and now you are trying to clear these discussions of modern stereotypes?
– I wouldn’t pose the task so pretentiously. Here everything is much simpler and more specific. Firstly, every time brings many questions that we turn to the past. In this sense, the changed historical experience, the changed understanding of the 19th century does not provide answers that cancel the previous ones, but raises new questions and, accordingly, gives new answers to other questions. In the previous formulations we suddenly hear something that was not heard before, or maybe our experience makes us more sensitive to the previous meanings? In the same regard, it turns out that we always speak from our time. Our experience and our situation determine the questions that are addressed to the past.
The most striking example here from a completely different area is classical studies. New research and new answers do not cancel previous research, but they pose another question to us - for example, for Rostovtsev after the World War and the 1917 revolution, this is the task of understanding the society and economy of the Roman Empire as a very large-scale, pathetic and powerfully working historical project.
In any historical work, as soon as it goes beyond the technical, this word always appears - in the worn-out academic language it is called relevance. It is clear that, bound by academic canons, we all react nervously to the question of the relevance of the research, but if we talk about living content, this is precisely what prompts us here and now to ask these questions of the past.
The previous answers are no worse, but they are starting to seem irrelevant to us. The questions may be good, and the answers are excellent, but these are questions that are not particularly interesting to us now. Maybe it’s our problem that they are no longer interesting to us. It may be that things are very bad with us that now it has gone out of focus.
Andrey Teslya.
Photo: Irina Fastovets
Conservatism is an awareness of the fragility of the existing
– Your area of scientific interest is the conservative and reactionary doctrine of the 18th-19th centuries. What is the reason for such interest in these doctrines - conservative and reactionary? What are you looking for there? What answers do you find?
– I was initially interested in one thing about conservatives and reactionaries - this is what, it seemed to me and seems to me now, they are simply little studied. This is that part of Russian intellectual life which, on the one hand, has been poorly studied, and secondly, without it it is impossible to understand the whole. In this regard, even if you are not specifically interested in conservatives, if we simply want to understand the intellectual space and discussions of the 19th century, then we need this, I say again, regardless of our preferences, to see exactly how the debate was conducted, how exactly it was structured talk. So even within the framework of interest in the Russian 19th century, in order to put the whole together, it is necessary to restore the entire context of the discussions of those years.
Now for a more personal answer. Russian conservatives are interesting to me because in many ways they are trying to make their own way, they think in an original way. In this regard, Russian liberalism, again I will allow myself a value judgment, is boring for the vast majority. It's boring, at least for me, because it's often just a repetition of existing positions. Russian liberals are the mouthpieces of what other white people have said, this is such a correct retelling of all that is good.
It is possible that in these reflections, in fact, everything is good and wonderful. Perhaps everything that is said is absolutely true. But I am interested in my own thought - most likely incorrect, but my own. Let them go at random, but on their own. Here Russian conservatives present a very original picture, they are almost all interesting people, they almost all live separately, they do not sing common songs. They are not all people of common thought. It turns out that even the conservatives of the second plan are an attempt to invent some interesting design (even if we think we know that they are trying to reinvent the wheel).
- An unusual train of thought! It turns out that you are not interested in the bike itself, whether it goes fast or how reliable it is, but does it have our Russian wheels? Sorry, I'm exaggerating a little.
- Yes, if you like. It seems to me that, from the point of view of intellectual history, it is not so interesting to listen to retellings of other people's opinions. If we are interested in these judgments themselves, then let's turn to the original source. This is the first thing. In my opinion, this is a much more logical approach. Secondly, the main question that conservative thought asks is the question that - well, okay, let’s say, with the general scheme, with ideals and aspirations, we have decided, we are for everything good. The question is different: how will these schemes work here, on the spot?
In this regard, the most striking example of a discussion between conservatives and liberalism is Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev, who created the “Moscow Collection” - a text that is incredibly interesting in design. For the most part, Pobedonostsev does not speak in his own voice, he collects other people’s texts, and the texts are often of characters in relation to whom it is difficult to expect Pobedonostsev to place them, and this is again significant for the compiler. He places there not just the voices of others, but the voices of those who are important to his opponents. This is the same Herbert Spencer, these are authors who do not belong to the conservative circle.
The main message of the Moscow Collection is conservative. It is as follows. Traditionally, we compare Russia with the West. But Pobedonostsev says that let’s compare real Russia not with the imaginary West, but with the real West, let’s see how it works there.
This is not about how we should all live, but the question is what it will look like if we transfer the wonderful principles from the West to Russia, because they will certainly work not as in the textbook, but taking into account our conditions. Accordingly, what will be their effect?
The conservative question is still largely connected with the recognition of the enormous value of what exists. You can talk about the disorder of the existing world as much as you like, but it has one huge advantage - it simply exists. We somehow exist in this situation, we succeed. The alternative to all this always has one huge disadvantage - this alternative does not yet exist. Accordingly, we always compare reality with the ideal. The big question is what will happen when we really try to implement this very alternative.
– The fact is that Russia was not given a chance to realize this prospect. We have had almost no normal elections, no decades of normal economics, no decades without war. Conservatives argue: let's leave everything as it is, in Russia everything is valuable. It would make sense to talk about this if we had at least once tried to live like a European, and this project would already have failed.
– Here it is worth specifying the conservative position. Let's start with the fact that, firstly, conservatism, like liberalism, has existed for a couple of centuries. And there are a lot of different positions in it. Moreover, when we talk about the fact that there are conservative views of Valuev and conservative views of Pobedonostsev, and we say that Aksakov is also a conservative, the question arises: what do they agree on? If we bring in a few more conservatives from the outside, then we will have almost a universe of meanings in front of us. We will find a variety of answers.
One of the conservative interpretations is not that what exists is beautiful. You can talk as much as you like about the problems with existing things.
The point is that any change should be based on the principle of responsibility, on understanding: if we change something, the main thing is not to make it worse. This is the main conservative message, not that what exists is good.
There is an old joke that I really like to tell because it expresses the conservative position well. When a pessimist looks at the situation and says: “That’s it, it can’t get any worse.” An optimist flies in and says: “It will be, it will be.” In this joke, conservatives play the role of optimist. They are always confident that no matter how terrible the current situation is, it is always possible that it will be even worse. Therefore, to the proposal: “Let’s change something, because it probably won’t get worse,” the conservative will say: “Your imagination is bad.”
Andrey Teslya.
Photo: Irina Fastovets
– But how then to make changes?
– It follows that if we change something, then we must, if possible, create conditions when we can reverse or compensate for losses, if necessary. Hence the traditional conservative logic that changes should be introduced slowly, they should be introduced first in some limited form. Conservatism is, rather, the assertion that what exists has value simply by virtue of the fact that it exists, and we always have something to lose. This does not mean that we have nothing to gain, it means that we are not starting with a clean slate and what exists is fragile.
We do not appreciate or understand what exists precisely because it seems to us as natural as air. In this sense, conservatism is an awareness of fragility. Everything that exists, our entire social, cultural fabric is very thin. The active transformer view is that we can always change something, on the assumption that the tissue will persist. In this sense, conservatism is much more alarming, it says that if there was confidence in this, it would be wonderful, but there is no confidence in this, and everything can fall apart, everything is very fragile.
We can say that the key commandment of conservatism is: “Do no harm, do not destroy what exists.”
Yes, we can say that what exists is bad and insufficient. You can try to improve it, but the main thing is to understand that all changes, if possible, should not injure or destroy the existing environment, because it may not be possible to create it anew. The snow avalanche goes down very quickly.
– Can we say that reactionism is an extreme degree of conservatism?
- Not really. This can be either conservatism or what is called radicalism or revolution on the contrary. Conservatism presupposes the preservation of what exists, while reaction implies the opposite. Reactionaries completely agree with opponents on the opposite side that what exists is no good. Only some argue that you need to run in one direction, and others in the opposite direction, but they agree on the thesis that there is no value in the present order. Conservatives are just the opposite: they argue that yes, no matter where we move, whether we try to rewind everything back or move forward, we always have something to preserve. This is the key position of conservatism.
– Are you a conservative?
- Yes. Conservatism comes from an understanding of the fragility of existing things. Our Russian social experience teaches us how thin the social and cultural fabric can be. Therefore, I am ready to immediately agree with any critical reproaches against the existing one; I am much more interested in something else - when trying to improve, is it sufficiently taken into account that something living will remain?
I will emphasize that in the practice of action, radicalism, to a large extent, in our country, as a rule, demonstrates power.
Conservatism is not a support or justification of any existing power, it is a recognition that power in itself is valuable.
Again, one of the key conservative values is that all power, mind you, the key word here is “all”, any set of reproaches can be listed, but all power is already a blessing, because there are always options for the absence of power.
– Here, as I understand it, this is a parallel with “all power is from God,” right? Is very similar.
- Certainly.
– To this, liberals will answer that we must first look at what this government is doing, how accountable it is to the people, and so on.
– I wouldn’t say. Again, if we talk about intellectual experience, both Western, Central European, and Russian, then... You asked me before this, am I a conservative? Yes, of course, but then we need to introduce shades: am I a conservative liberal, or am I a liberal conservative, which comes first? But in this sense, liberalism as the prevailing ideology presupposes certain combinations with conservatism, in any case it does not exclude them.
The conservative position always tends to exaggerate the risks of social transformation. Just as the opposite side tends to underestimate them and say that in any case something needs to be changed, something will still change for the better. A conservative position always assumes that we primarily expect bad things from such transformations. And then we can talk about shades.
Again, if we take the textbook image of the 19th century, then in order for a normal discussion to exist in society, it is necessary that there be both liberals and conservatives. In the end, if conservative logic itself is on autopilot ready to move towards the option that nothing needs to be changed, then, accordingly, the opposite logic is ready to stimulate changes.
It is this very confrontation, this very debate that determines which changes there is consensus on and which ones cause too much concern. In some ways, a conservative can be convinced by showing that some planned action, apparently, does not pose any danger; here the fears are not so great. But for others - no, this is too disturbing an event dangerous for the preservation of the social fabric, and here a compromise is hardly possible.
Andrey Teslya.
Photo: Irina Fastovets
I'm more interested in understanding that time than acting in it
– If you imagine that there is a time machine, and you were transported to the 19th century, which Russian thinker do you see yourself as? Who could you be there: Herzen or Aksakov? Do you see yourself in the shoes of any of them?
- No, no way. All these characters are doers. I still occupy the position of an observer. It’s fundamentally different - they are interesting to me, but it’s more interesting for me to understand that time than to act in it. For me personally, the feeling of the distance that exists between us is very important, so I don’t think of myself as one of them.
But Aksakov is perhaps the closest to me of all of them. I'll explain in what terms. Not in terms of specific provisions, which I wrote about in the book “The Last of the “Fathers”” and in articles. Ivan Aksakov seems to me to be a very nice person, like most of the Slavophiles. What I like about the Slavophiles, among many other things, is that they are very good people.
- Compared with…
- No, why? Just on their own. These were very good people and a very good environment, even if you do not agree with their views... After all, you do not have to agree with the political position of a virtuous person, he is good in himself.
– You mean that you didn’t cheat on your wives, didn’t lie, didn’t deceive others?
-What does this have to do with wives?
– Was everything difficult in your personal life?
- As always. Everything is not so wonderful, these were still living people, made of flesh and blood - one did not cheat on his wife, for example, the other - alas, turned out to be the lover of a friend’s wife, if we take the example of wives. Let's just say these were people who lived well. They had strength.
They are not saints, of course, but where they committed offenses, where they sinned, they were capable of active repentance, in this they were strong. They truly strived to be virtuous people. They strived not for anyone, but for themselves. They, if you like, had practically no work to do in public.
– How was the work on the book about Aksakov going? Have you worked in archives? Where did you get the materials from? Are there any unique materials that were not previously known?
– I worked on the book for quite a long time. Thanks to the presidential grants that made this work possible. Accordingly, quite a significant part of the work took place in the archives. First of all, in the archives of the Pushkin House of the Institute of Russian Literature, the book uses many previously unpublished materials, and in this case I tried to quote them abundantly.
It seemed to me that this was better than giving cuts and retelling in my own words. Finely chopping quotes is possible, but, in my opinion, it is deadly. The texts of that time must retain their breath. Maybe I overused this somewhat in the book, but it was a completely conscious decision - to give the opportunity to hear Aksakov’s voice as much as possible. The book contains, in my opinion, the most interesting letters - these are letters from Ivan Aksakov to Mikhail Koyalovich, a key figure in Western Russianism, and the correspondence spans more than 20 years.
Just speaking about the character of the Slavophiles, I tried to give them the opportunity to speak for themselves, because, it seems to me, this is how the peculiarity of the nature of these people is conveyed. For example, in the appendix to the book there is a rather small fragment - these are letters from Ivan Aksakov to his fiancee Anna Fedorovna Tyutcheva, the poet’s daughter. He writes wonderful letters to Anna Fedorovna, where he explains his view of their future life together. On what a future wife should be like, what a husband should be like. These are very touching texts.
– Have the answers been given?
- Unfortunately no. The letters are touching, because, on the one hand, he is trying to talk about the proper position - he should, and on the other hand, a very careful and warm feeling is felt behind all this, so he does not maintain his position as a giver of instructions, he suddenly switches to a much warmer and lyrical style. It seems to me that this is a very Aksakovian trait: on the one hand, he has an idea of how he should speak, what he should do, and on the other hand, this human kindness is reflected.
Once again I want to emphasize that this is not a opposition of one to the other. The Slavophiles were a narrow circle, and they had a unique position - other people could not enter this circle, it was a very closely connected circle of communication.
Westerners as a whole were a much more rarefied environment, had a much less dense network of contacts among themselves, they were not so intertwined with each other. It is impossible to characterize all the members of the magazine's editorial board and say that they have shared common features of lifestyle or something similar over the decades. This is not only impossible, it is completely redundant, because people communicated on some specific occasion, they converged at some specific point. In the case of the Slavophiles it is completely different. It was in many ways a life lived together in close communication.
– In the spring, a collection of articles by Alexander Herzen from the series “Crossroads of Russian Thought” was published. Can you talk about this series and this first collection in particular?
- Yes. This is a wonderful project. I hope he will develop. This is a project of the RIPOL-Classic publishing house. Its goal is to present Russian social thought of the 19th century, addressing a fairly wide range of authors. Moreover, the texts are both well-known and not particularly familiar to non-specialists. It is clear that there will be no innovations there for the scientific community, but for the general reader this may be of interest. The goal of the project is to show the versatility of Russian thought of the 19th century and the roll call of the intellectual movement.
At the suggestion of the publisher, I wrote introductory articles to these collections and determined the content of the books. Introductory articles are quite large in volume. In the first book, the article is compact and overview; subsequent texts will be more voluminous. The purpose of introductory articles is to show the authors in the context of controversy, not in the context of the era, these are not biographical sketches, but to show them in the context of the public debate of their time.
Of the planned volumes, Herzen was chosen as the first author precisely because his figure is at the crossroads of both Westernism and Slavophilism. His mature views are an attempt to carry out their synthesis, therefore the texts included in the collection demonstrate his theoretical position in evolution from the late 1840s to the last year of Herzen’s life. It is quite predictable that Chaadaev’s texts will soon be published.
Then there is the much less predictable and, in my opinion, completely undeservedly underheard and underread Nikolai Polevoy. Next is the journalism of Nikolai Kostomarov. If the series survives, then I hope that other authors will be published... The task here, on the one hand, is to present familiar figures from new angles, and on the other hand, characters that are not very familiar to the general author, or familiar from other angles. If we take the figure of Nikolai Ivanovich Kostomarov, then we all read him. But Kostomarov as a publicist, Kostomarov as a participant in long-term political polemics in the Russian Empire - this is not his most famous incarnation. I think this is very interesting.
– Are you going to create a textbook on social thought of the 19th century in order to somehow present people with the views of different sides?
- Yes. There is a good saying: if you want to make God laugh, tell Him about your plans. I really hope that this will happen, but it’s better to talk about it when such a book appears. 
We are afraid of the word “Russian” for no reason
– On the one hand, I admire, on the other hand, it frightens me that you are not afraid to use the word “Russian” in texts, books and even on the cover. Now the word “Russian” is often replaced by the word “Russian”. How do you distinguish between situations when you need to write “Russian” and when “Russian”?
– The fact is that I learned about all the intensity of passions around these two words at a fairly mature age. It was quite funny when, at one of the department’s seminars or at a small conference (either at the end of university, or at the beginning of graduate school), a discussion suddenly flared up over whether it was possible to say “the history of Russian philosophy”, or “ history of Russian philosophy", or "history of philosophy in Russia". And I remember my amazement when it turned out that this was a painful question, because until that time I perceived the words “Russian philosophy” as a completely neutral statement.
There is Russia, there is Germany. The book is called “The History of French Literature” - of course, the history of French literature. “History of French philosophy” is also understandable. So, how is it in Russia? "History of Russian Philosophy". Where is the subject for debate? It never occurred to me to see nationalistic or any other ideas in this. It seems to me that anything can be read in any word, but if we are talking about Russia, if we are talking about Russian culture, then I don’t understand why we should jump away from this word, moreover, in its modern meaning?
Yes, we can say that in the 18th century the word “Russian” was actively used, but this is a high syllable.
Now it’s clear that when we talk about Russian, we talk about citizenship. We emphasize the legal status of people or organizations. But when we talk about culture, it is somehow strange to determine cultural affiliation by registration.
It’s somehow strange to include in this cultural space only those who were born within the current geographical borders, for example. Or, suppose, introduce some strange formal criterion, which rather refers to the wonderful title of a textbook on the history of the USSR. Do you remember there was one for pedagogical universities, “History of the USSR from Ancient Times”? The map of the Soviet Union was projected over the entire thickness of millennia.
If we want to have fun further, then we can create a work called “Intellectual History within the Borders of the Russian Federation” and, along the contour of the map, assign everyone who was brought here at any time. But it is quite obvious that when we talk about the narrow intellectual space of the 19th century, we will not say that this is the intellectual space of the Russian Empire.
Russian debates of the 19th century are not synonymous with debates in the Russian Empire, because the debates of the Russian Empire will, of course, include Polish journalism. This is a completely working concept. When we try to remove the word “Russian”, talking about disputes specifically in the Russian cultural space of the 19th century, it seems to me that, firstly, we are afraid of the word for no reason, and secondly, we are losing some of the meanings, we are losing these very demarcation lines. Or we begin to invent substitute words, because we still need to somehow describe the intellectual space, and we begin to use more streamlined formulations.
Perhaps I’m wrong, but I’ll emphasize once again that I don’t see in this word something to be afraid of. I can easily imagine the concerns that are associated, for example, with the growth of nationalist movements - this is easy to understand. But at the moment when the word “Russian” begins to be tabooed, I experience an attack of ill will, not the kindest feelings awaken in me, which I had not felt until that moment... Sometimes they say that I should avoid this word, precisely in order not to provoke conflict. But it is at this moment that the conflict begins to unfold. It is here, it seems to me, that boundaries grow between people of different nationalities.
Photo: Sergey Aloff / Facebook
– Is it necessary to distinguish between legal aspects and some essential ones?
- Certainly. We easily understand that a person of Russian culture can easily be a citizen of any other state; these are different questions. Just as a person who does not identify himself with Russian culture can legally be a citizen of Russia, this in itself is not a problem.
– The excellent Japanese scholar Alexander Nikolaevich Meshcheryakov writes books about Japan. He has already published the books Staying Japanese and Being Japanese. He is currently writing the third book in the continuation of this series. I asked him: “Would you like to write the books “Be Russian” or “Stay Russian”?” He says: “I’m not that well-read and don’t have that many sources, although that would be interesting.” Would you like to write a book “Remain Russian”, “Be Russian” to show people what it means to be Russian in a good sense?
– No, I’m afraid that the status of a professional Russian is a little different.
– My question is related to the fact that they sometimes write about you and define you as a Russophile. Do you consider yourself a Russophile?
- Yes, if you like. I know this word irritates some people, although I don't really understand why. Not so long ago there was a conversation about this very issue in Warsaw. The word “Russophile” irritated some of the audience very much, and one of the discussion participants threw me the following question as an option: “How can you use the name “Russophile” for your website? After all, you wouldn’t publish on the Polonofil website?”
I didn’t really understand the question, because personally I don’t have the slightest problem publishing on a site with that name. I would be much more interested in what it is filled with, what exactly this polyphilism consists of. Perhaps, given one version of interpretation, I would not even come close to this. Let’s say, I don’t understand what can be feared here from the words “Polonophilism” or “Russophilism.”
Who am I? Naturally, I am a person of Russian culture. Naturally, I am a person of the Russian space. I am completely here. Yes, in my opinion, it is one of the few great cultures that exist. There are not many such great cultures. Therefore, it is understandable that we experience various mixed feelings about our culture, but it is strange not to have warm feelings for it, it is strange not to love our native land.
I remember how Karamzin begins “The History of the Russian State,” where he says that the history of the Russian state may be of interest to others, but there are boring parts in it. (“Foreigners may miss what is boring for them in our ancient History; but aren’t good Russians obliged to have more patience, following the rule of state morality, which places respect for ancestors in the dignity of an educated citizen?..”)
- He didn’t write “The History of the Russian State.”
– I was just talking about this, that the language of that time was high style in this case. “Russian” here is a common expression, but if we want to elevate, talk about something high, we talk about “Russian”. In modern times, this use is rare. By the way, this is where the conversation began - how the meaning of words moves. It is clear that he has changed a lot.
Karamzin in “The History of the Russian State” said that for another reader there may be boring passages, but the heart of the Russian reader, among other things, cannot be cold to the history of his Fatherland, because in any case he is attached to it. Therefore, the only reproach that is possible here is that Russophilia still presupposes a certain distance.
If we want to find something to blame here, it is this very distancing. In this sense, one can say as a reproach that it is natural for a person of Russian culture to love Russian culture. Therefore, why spell it out separately here? Isn’t this the default? But considering that such articulation itself causes a certain tension, apparently it makes sense if it touches so much. This means this is some kind of significant question, because otherwise there was a calm and even reaction here.
The February Revolution is a complete disaster
– This year there is a lot of talk about 1917, the centenary of two revolutions. In your opinion, what lessons do the Russian revolutions give us, what can we understand from this 100-year experience? What failed the February Revolution?
– The February Revolution, as we know, was a success: the sovereign signed the abdication, the Provisional Government came to power – everything was a success.
- Well, how? We wanted to build a democratic Russian republic, but the Bolshevik republic came...
– I don’t know who wanted it. Let's clarify.
– We recently talked with mathematician Alexei Sosinsky, and his grandfather, Socialist Revolutionary Viktor Chernov, the first and last chairman of the Constituent Assembly, wanted this.
– The February Revolution was a complete disaster. In this sense, when we talk about February 1917, we are talking about the great catastrophe that happened to Russia when everything went wrong. Another thing is that everything went wrong largely thanks to the previous many years of government policy. There was an old Soviet joke that in connection with the 50th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution, the Order of the October Revolution was awarded posthumously to citizen N.A. Romanov for his outstanding contribution to the organization of the revolutionary situation.
Imagine the collapse of the supreme power in a situation of a severe world war - in this sense, it does not matter how you feel about the previous government or anything else, it really was a catastrophe. This story could not end well. Another thing is that the previous one in time could not have ended in anything good. Generally speaking, the general impression of the Russian Empire, especially since the 80s of the 19th century, is that of a train that has gone downhill and is picking up speed. There is only one path in front of him, there are no more arrows.
– Where was the bifurcation point? Where else did Russia have a moment of choice?
- I don't know. But let me remind you what the reaction of the extreme right was when the Bolsheviks came to power. On the one hand, they believed that this was good, because the revolution would discredit itself. On the other hand, that this is at least some kind of power. We have already said that conservatives have the thesis that any power is better than no power. This is not about the Bolsheviks being good. The point is that they have become at least some kind of power.
In a situation of complete loss of control, complete loss of power, the Bolsheviks are better, I emphasize once again - this is not to say that the Bolsheviks are good. This is about something completely different, about the fact that it turns out that in this regard they received some kind of support from the extreme right.
– Do you have any regrets that Russia failed to become a bourgeois democracy?
– Yes, there is such regret, but in this sense it is certainly not February 1917, then Russia certainly could not have become a bourgeois democracy. In February 1917, Russia no longer had such a chance.
– Why – there were no leaders, no idea?
- No. In those days, the discussion was about what kind of social catastrophe would unfold in the coming months. As in the old obscene joke: well, yes, horror, but not horror-horror-horror. You can choose between horror options - completely terrible or just terrible. This is a question for great discussion. The last chance to reach agreement could be seen in the first couple of years of the reign of Alexander III.
We can say that the first years of his reign were lost years for the Russian Empire. Another thing is that it is also clear why they were missed. Why did representative bodies of government encounter such resistance in the 60s and 70s of the 19th century? I will emphasize that this is not only clinging to power, these are completely objective problems, these are problems of how, with general imperial representation, the preservation of the imperial whole is possible. Resistance to the introduction of a representative body of power was not only situational, not only selfish, it was associated with serious problems.
But the entire era since 1883 in the political sense is already unambiguous, all significant political issues are pushed under the skin of society. Then everything only gets worse, the level of mutual rejection increases. The level of confrontation that exists at the beginning of the 20th century presupposes any impossibility for either side to act. Another problem here is that the so-called representatives of the public cannot compromise with the authorities for objective reasons.
This is wonderfully explained by Dmitry Nikolaevich Shipov, the leader of the zemstvo movement. When he is called to the government, he says: “This is useless. You don’t call me specifically Shipova. You need community support. If I accept your proposal, I will lose my support, at that moment I will become a concrete person, I will lose all my reputation, all my importance, and you will gain nothing. This will not be a useful action." The level of confrontation by this time was such that few could imagine how to break out of this impasse. As we know, they never came out of it. And 1917 was its consequence.
Andrey Teslya.
Photo: Irina Fastovets
I look with interest and concern at what is happening
– Do you feel like you’re writing into space? Are you getting the response to your books that you need to continue your research?
- Yes, definitely. I receive a wide variety of responses - books give me the opportunity to communicate with colleagues, the opportunity to express myself. And it’s not just books, in fact, this is how any scientific communication works – different types of communications, different types of communication, testing of ideas. Moreover, any text is always written from the perspective of an imaginary reader or in a situation of either real or implied conversation. Therefore, if it were not for the social function of authorship, then on the cover it would be worth writing in some cases really familiar interlocutors, and in some cases even virtual ones.
– Does it help or hinder you that you live not in Moscow, not in St. Petersburg, but in Khabarovsk?
– As usual, there are pros and cons here. First of all, this is my hometown. Secondly, my family, my friends, my acquaintances are there. This is my favorite place. This is an opportunity for quiet work. These are their own books, their own well-trodden library paths. On the other hand, yes, quite obvious problems are the territorial remoteness and the complexity of communication, including the banal, the time difference and the cost of transport costs. So it’s hard for me to say what the balance is here. At a certain moment, when you need something, it gets in the way. In another situation, it turns out that the same thing becomes a plus.
– In a sense, your gaze is geographically directed to the west, and not to the east or south. Maybe you are planning to look east or south in the near future?
– I would say, of course, to the west. I'll give you one example. Khabarovsk has tourism potential, and not only potential, but reality, because Khabarovsk turns out to be a regular place for Chinese tourists to visit. What logic? Because Khabarovsk is the closest European city accessible to Chinese, partly Korean or Vietnamese tourists. In this sense, it is important to note that when we talk about the West or the East, about Europe and Asia, physical geography is one thing, mental geography is another matter.
In this regard, I will emphasize that for most Chinese colleagues, movement to Khabarovsk is also movement to the east, northeast, in fact, if according to the compass. Moving east, they find themselves in a European city, in European space.
- Very interesting. And the last question. We are currently conducting a conversation for the Orthodoxy and Peace portal. Can you talk about how the relationship between Orthodoxy and the world is changing, what it was like in the 18th-19th centuries and what it is like now?
– This is a very broad topic, and we need to think about it responsibly. In short, I don’t understand, I don’t really imagine what the possibilities of the political dimension of faith will be in the future, in new, clearly changing conditions. On the one hand, to demand freedom from politics or to demand that politics be free from faith is a strange demand. We have to assume such an amazing autoanatomization of the subject, in which he must somehow be able to remove his faith from himself.
On the other hand, the background to this requirement is quite transparent. I look with interest and concern at what is happening. As Baroness Jacobina von Munchausen said in Grigory Gorin’s script: “We’ll wait and see.” In this sense, the main thing is to have the opportunity to see with your own eyes some tangible new trends and evaluate them - preferably from a safe distance.
Video: Victor Aromshtam
Teslya A.A. Russian conversations: Persons and situations. - M.: RIPOL-Classic, 2017. - 512 p.
The book can already be purchased at the 19th non/fiction book fair. And from the end of next week it will appear in major bookstores, and within the next 2 weeks - in online stores.
The Russian 19th century is significant for us today at least because it was at this time - in disputes and conversations, in mutual understanding or misunderstanding - that public language and that system of images and ideas with which we, willingly or unwillingly, fortunately or To our own detriment, we continue to use it to this day. The series of essays and notes presented in this book reveals some of the key themes of Russian intellectual history of that time related to the question of the place and purpose of Russia - that is, its possible future, thought through the past. The first book in the series focuses on such figures as Pyotr Chaadaev, Nikolai Polevoy, Ivan Aksakov, Yuri Samarin, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Afanasy Shchapov and Dmitry Shipov. People of different philosophical and political views, different origins and status, different fates - all of them, directly or in absentia, were and remain participants in the ongoing Russian conversation. The author of the collection is a leading specialist in Russian social thought of the 19th century, senior researcher at Academia Kantiana at the Institute of Humanities at IKBFU. Kant (Kaliningrad), candidate of philosophical sciences Andrey Aleksandrovich Teslya.
Preface. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Instead of an introduction. About memory, history and interest. . . 8
Part 1. NOBLE DISPUTES. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
1. Chaadaev’s immutability. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
2. Russia and “others” in the views of Russian conservatives. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
3. Retarded person. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
4. “The Myth of the Jesuits” in the absence of the Jesuits. . . . . 171
5. Yuri Fedorovich Samarin and his correspondence
with Baroness Edita Fedorovna Raden. . . . . . . . . 221
6. Positively wonderful Russian people. . . . . . 254
7. “Ladies’ Circle” of Slavophilism: letters from I.S. Aksakova to gr. M.F. Sollogub, 1862-1878 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 268
Part 2. ACTION AND REACTION. . . . . . . . . . . . . 335
8. Russian fate. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337
9. Russian conservative: about the system of political views of K.P. Pobedonostsev 1870-1890s. . . . 366
10. “Starozemets” D.N. Shipov. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 407
11. Conservatives in search of the future. . . . . . . . . . . 469
12. Publicist of failed Russian fascism. . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 494
List of abbreviations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 505
Information about the articles included in this publication. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 506
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 508