FALL 2006 51

Russian Studies in Philosophy, vol. 45, no. 2 (Fall 2006), pp. 51–68.
© 2006 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved.
1061–1967/2006 $9.50 + 0.00.
DOI 10.2753/RSP1061-1967450203

V.M. MEZHUEV

On the National Idea

The question of the Russian national idea is first of all an academic one. It
has an important and prominent place in the history of Russian philosophi-
cal and sociopolitical thought. The polemic surrounding what came to be
called “the Russian idea” continued throughout the greater part of the last
and present centuries, leading to various results. After the prohibition on
the study of the full scope of Russian philosophy was lifted, there was a
rebirth of interest in this theme as well. Initially, it expressed itself in the
reprinting of previously published texts and in commentaries on them. The
collection The Russian Idea [Russkaia ideia], which came out in 1992 under
the editorship of M.A. Maslin, may serve as an example. Also a number of
contemporary works on the subject appeared. One of the best of them, in my
view, is V.N. Sagatovskii’s monograph The Russian Idea: Shall We Continue
the Broken Path? [Russkaia ideia: prodolzhim li prervannyi put’?] (St. Pe-
tersburg, 1994). Thus no one doubts the necessity of turning to the given
question as an issue in the history of philosophy.
It is a different matter when the same question is posed with reference to
today’s Russia. After the President’s well-known appeal to the intellectual
community to work out such an idea for Russia, the question shifted from the
academic to the political plane and acquired practical relevance. In this con-
text it arouses contradictory judgments, including sharply negative ones. Here
is just one example. In his letter to the congress of the Yabloko party Acade-

English translation © 2006 M.E. Sharpe, Inc., from the Russian text © 1997 the Pre-
sidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) and the author. “O natsional’noi
idee,” Voprosy filosofii, 1997, no. 12, pp. 3–14. A publication of the Institute of Philoso-
phy, RAS.
Vadim Mikhailovich Mezhuev is a doctor of philsophical sciences and a principal
research associate of the Institute of Philosophy, RAS.
Translated by Stephen D. Shenfield.
51
52 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

mician D.S. Likhachev wrote: “An all-national idea as a panacea for all ills is
not simply silly but extremely dangerous.” Several other cultural and politi-
cal figures, belonging, as a rule, to the liberal-democratic camp, spoke out in
the same spirit. For them the national idea is virtually a synonym for an
emergent Russian nationalism that sets Russia on a course of confrontation
with other peoples and above all with the West.
Let us compare this opinion with another: “neither a person nor a nation
can exist without a supreme idea.” These words belong to Dostoevsky and
have been repeated after him by many other Russian thinkers who cannot in
any way be suspected of a narrowly understood nationalism.
Who is right here? What in reality is the national idea, nonsense or a
necessary condition for the existence of the nation? It may be said that
Dostoevsky lived in the last century while Likhachev is our contemporary,
and therefore his opinion is weightier, for it reflects new realities. True, the
liberalism that rejects the national idea was also not born today. The liberal
idea is just as old as the national one; they arose at roughly the same time.
But it is also true that our century has given ample reasons to be skeptical of
any ideas, including the national one, as soon as they combine with political
power and acquire the character of official ideology. Twentieth-century to-
talitarianism, after all, is also the claim of the state power to ideological
domination, to an unlimited monopoly of ideas. Hence too the hostility of
the democratic intelligentsia toward ideas: in every idea they see the embryo
of a new totalitarianism.
Political authority that appeals to an idea and tries to impose it from above
is, indeed, cause for apprehension. By declaring its adherence to one or an-
other idea, it is capable, in the final reckoning, of discrediting that idea in the
public consciousness. It took seventy years for the most educated part of our
society to develop an allergic reaction to the socialist idea, which had be-
come the official ideology and less than ten years to produce disillusionment
with liberalism, as it is interpreted and practiced by state authority. Will the
national idea not meet the same fate as soon as it becomes the new state
dogma? The constant ideological engagement of state power turns Russia
into a cemetery for all ideas that fall on its soil. It is precisely state power and
politicians who bear primary responsibility for the fact that in our country
ideas do not meet in open competition but devour one another. Our socialism
for some reason always has to be antiliberal and antinational, and our liberal-
ism antisocialist and, again, antinational. In the same way, our national idea
has to be antiliberal and usually, once again, antisocialist. In the West, where,
strictly speaking, we borrowed them, these ideas coexist as it were in a single
bunch, and if they clash, they do so in a political struggle waged in accor-
dance with democratic rules. In our country only one of these ideas—the one
 FALL 2006 53

shared by state authority—is considered true; all the others are lies that are to
be eradicated. Such intellectual intolerance conceals an organic inability to
separate ideas from political power.
The reaction to the fusion of ideology with state power has led to the other
extreme—to what may be called intellectual nihilism, disillusionment with
all ideas, suspicion of any ideology. The past ideologization of conscious-
ness has given way to a fashion for deideologized consciousness, which ap-
peals to momentary interests, to the issue of the day, beyond which no broader
or more far-reaching prospects are visible. Thus, in the field of politics and
international relations people prefer to speak not of ideas but of interests,
which, of course, are not the same thing. Each state has its own national
interests, the protection of which is the predominant type of politics in the
contemporary world. In this sense Russia does not differ in any way from
other states. Even the most irreconcilable opponents of the national idea can-
not doubt that Russia has her national interests.
The question of the national idea, however, springs from a source other
than the simple awareness of national interest. Both the national idea and the
national interest are, undoubtedly, present in any policy, but this does not
mean that they fully coincide. The difference between them is hard to estab-
lish in the context of a single nation, but it becomes obvious once we pose
the question of a nation’s membership in a wider community of people, such
as a civilization. For all the divergence in their national interests, peoples
that share the same cultural background (European, for example) perceive
themselves as a single spiritual community, the meaning of which is ex-
pressed in an idea. It is useless to look for that idea in each European nation
taken separately (to speak, for instance, of a French, English, or Swedish
national idea), but it is present in the consciousness of each nation as an idea
of the European identity common to them all. It is possible to argue about
what exactly this idea is, but the fact that it exists cannot be denied. It is
national because it expresses such an important condition of national life as
the people’s affiliation with a particular civilization; without this there is and
can be no nation. Long ago K. Leont’ev was astonished at the fact that the
more European peoples acquired national independence, the more similar
they became to one another. It is this likeness that allows us to speak of an
idea that unites them. In this sense Europe is not a mechanical conglomerate
of countries and peoples divided by their national interests, but a definite
whole that has formed around a shared idea. Not only economic calculation
but also the presence of such an idea facilitates the current process of pan-
European integration.
Any European knows that while he belongs to a particular nation he is
also a European. He exists simultaneously, as it were, in a national and in a
54 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

pan-European space. His connection with his own nation is quite real and is
expressed in his consciousness of national interest, while his connection with
the European whole is predominantly spiritual or ideal, that is, is represented
by the corresponding idea. For all the conflicts and wars that have taken
place in history among the European peoples, they are united in the face of a
danger that threatens their civilization. Many of the West’s greatest thinkers
have written about this spiritual kinship of the peoples of Europe. In the
words, for instance, of Edmund Husserl, “No matter how hostile they may be
toward one another, the European nations nevertheless have a particular in-
ner kinship of spirit, which runs through them all and transcends national
differences. There is something like a sibling relationship, which gives all of
us in this sphere the consciousness of homeland.”1 It is this spiritual unity
that Husserl calls an idea.
An idea, consequently, is the presence in each nation of a system of val-
ues that has for it a more universal meaning than its national interests. It is
one thing to protect one’s national interest, and another to have an idea that is
addressed to the world community. In other words, an interest is what we
want for ourselves, while an idea is what we consider important and essen-
tial for everyone.
The world religions have long contained a universal meaning that raised
peoples beyond the bounds of their tribal cults and beliefs. An idea, however,
represents not so much a religious (cultic) as a cultural (that is, purely secu-
lar) community of people, characterized by their possession of common
models of consciousness, conduct, and communication. It obtains its ratio-
nal formulation within a special kind of knowledge—philosophical knowl-
edge, which has become a very important part of the spiritual history of the
European peoples. It is characteristic of them to define themselves, to distin-
guish themselves from other peoples not only by their faith but above all by
an idea, to identify themselves by means not of mythological and religious
but of philosophical consciousness. The same Husserl understood “the spiri-
tual shape of Europe” to mean “a philosophical idea that is immanent in the
history of Europe (spiritual Europe)”2 and traces its origin to the ancient
Greeks. In its philosophical interpretation Europe appeared not only as a
type of religious faith, not as a special economic and political formation, but
as an idea that welds together a definite spiritual community.
The problem of the search for such an idea also faced Russia—at least
from the moment when it began to perceive itself as a part of world, and first
of all European, humanity. After the victory over Napoleon, Russia was drawn
into the thick of European politics and acquired the status of one of the most
influential political forces on the European continent. This prompted think-
ing Russian people to ponder Russia’s relation to Europe, what connects
 FALL 2006 55

Russia and Europe and what divides them. It was precisely at that time that
people began to talk of the “Russian idea.” Without Europe there would have
been no Russian idea, just as there is nothing similar to it in countries situ-
ated beyond the bounds of the European world. It is therefore absurd to deny
Russia’s need for such an idea only because Russia, as our Westernizers
think, has no other prospect but to become a country of the European type, a
part of Western civilization. A pro-Western orientation, it seems to them, is
incompatible with a national idea. There can be nothing more mistaken than
such an opinion. The need for a national idea arises in Russia precisely as a
result of its entry into the world of European culture and civilization; it is a
direct consequence of this entry. In short, the Russian idea is the same Euro-
pean idea, but in its Russian reading and interpretation.
The search for a specifically Russian national variant of the European
idea proceeded in Russia also primarily within the framework of philosophi-
cal discourse, giving rise to an original and unique [samobytnyi] philosophy
of history. It is mainly philosophers, and not historians, sociologists, or econo-
mists, who have written about the Russian idea. The question of Russia,
Berdiaev wrote, is first of all a historiosophical question; this means that the
philosophical-historical vision of Russia takes precedence over all kinds of
positive knowledge about her. This kind of thought comes to the fore where
reality is still in a state of fermentation and has not yet assumed a finished
form, has not congealed into a definite civilizational identity, and therefore
cannot be the object of solely scientific analysis, which appeals exclusively
to present experience. That which lacks an object in experience can be ex-
pressed or represented only through an idea. The leading place occupied by
the philosophy of history in Russian thought of the nineteenth century points
exactly to the character of the problem under discussion. It concerned in the
first instance Russia’s self-definition in relation to the world and, first of all,
in relation to the West, her search for her place in world history.
In their time, the leading countries of Western Europe also went through a
similar historiosophical search as soon as they broke with the medieval past.
It was precisely this period that witnessed the flourishing of the philosophy
of history within which the all-European idea developed and came to con-
sciousness. Once the new order of things represented by that idea became
reality and established itself in life, historiosophical knowledge ceded its
leadership to scientific, positive knowledge. The first country to complete
this journey—from philosophy to economic and social science—was, of
course, Britain. Then it was France’s turn, where before the Great French
Revolution philosophers dominated public consciousness (the very term “phi-
losophy of history” was invented by Voltaire). The process dragged on right
up to the middle of the twentieth century only in Germany, and this shows
56 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

that Germany’s journey to modern civilization was long and difficult. The
German idealism of the last century was to a large extent a product of a
German reality that had not yet taken shape and form as a civilization. Ger-
many made its way to a society of the Western type first in its head, in an idea
and then in practice.
Russian idealism is somewhat similar to German idealism. In our country
too, the search for an idea preceded, as it were, the real experience of mod-
ernization. The difference is that it has dragged on to the present day and still
rules our minds. Our own search comes at a time when in Europe it has
mostly ended and given way to a sense of “the end of history.” Russia, by
contrast, has been living with a sense not of the end but only of the beginning
of its own history and not necessarily of the history that has already been
completed in Europe. In L.N. Tolstoy’s famous expression, in Russia noth-
ing has yet taken shape and things are just beginning to take shape. All the
past century has lived in the consciousness of unavoidable approaching
changes and looked to the future with hope or foreboding. It was the desire
to invest this future with a more or less distinct prospect, to find an analogue
to it either in the past or in something that had never yet existed that forced
people to turn to the idea, which was formulated in different ways in the
radical and conservative milieus.
The very attempt to work out such an idea shows that we are moving in
the general channel of development of Western civilization for which it is
characteristic to define oneself through a philosophically postulated idea.
However, the absence of a public consensus around the given idea means
that we are still in the earliest phase of this movement. We are, as it were, on
a path analogous to the Western one, but not necessarily with the same end-
ing. It is possible that in our country it will lead to a result that does not
mechanically duplicate the Western experience but introduces into the latter
something fundamentally new. In any case, for so long as full clarity in this
regard is not achieved the question of the Russian national idea will retain its
topicality and acuity.
Its solution is complicated by another circumstance: for all its dissimilar-
ity from the West, it is hard to conceive of Russia as a civilization completely
different from the West, although such attempts are undertaken from time to
time. Russia is called an Orthodox, an East Slavic, or an Eurasian civiliza-
tion, depending on which indicator—confessional, ethnocultural, or geopo-
litical—is taken as the basis. Cannot each of them and all of them together
serve as a sufficient condition for the existence of a separate civilization? If
so, the question of Russia’s relation to the West would be resolved much
more easily and would not be experienced as one of the tormenting problems
of Russian history. In the consciousness of Russians, there constantly dwelt
 FALL 2006 57

the theme not only of their distinctness and uniqueness, but also of their
backwardness and insufficient development in comparison with the West.
This Westernizing theme, alongside the Slavophile and Eurasian themes, is
central to the history of our social thought, and today virtually dominates the
consciousness of those in power. It could never have arisen were Russia not
somehow a country of the European type, were it situated wholly beyond the
limits of the Western world. In order to compare oneself with Europe, even
in the latter’s favor, it is necessary in some sense already to be Europe. Coun-
tries outside the European region that are likewise undergoing the process of
modernization do not elevate their unlikeness to Europe into an all-national
problem or feel in this regard a sense of historical inferiority. We, by con-
trast, saw ourselves not even as a neighbor but as a relative of Europe, al-
beit—in the minds of the Westernizers—a poor relative, retarded in his
development.
The clash of these two basic Russian themes—uniqueness and backward-
ness (what the Slavophiles saw as uniqueness, the Westernizers saw as back-
wardness)—shows that Russia’s civilizational development is incomplete and
unfinished. In this sense, Russia is a country not so much of an established
civilization as of a civilization in the process of being established, the profile
and general contours of which are still only vaguely discernible in the intel-
lectual searches of its thinkers and artists. These searches embody diverse,
sometimes subjectively colored, conceptions of what Russia was, is, and will
be in world history.
The absence of a national consensus on the given question also lends the
political struggle in Russia the character of an irreconcilable conflict, ex-
cluding the attainment of any kind of reasonable compromise. The logic and
outcome of this struggle cannot be fitted into the same schemata as in West-
ern countries. For political parties in the West—liberals, conservatives, and
social democrats—in spite of their political divergences, there is no question
of what kind of civilization to live in, which of them to consider their own,
while in Russia this question remains open and introduces into society a split
of such depth and force that it cannot be overcome merely with the aid of
Western political technologies and methods of economic reform. Here it is a
matter not simply of flaws in the economic and political system within the
framework of a single—Western—civilization, but of the ability of the na-
tion in general to live by the laws of the given civilization. This is not so
much a technological issue as a question of worldview, touching the very
depths of our national existence.
What sort of consensus and reconciliation are conceivable when some
people are drawn to the bourgeois West and others to the communal, Ortho-
dox, and monarchical past, while yet others dream of the restoration of com-
58 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

munism? In our space different Russias, as it were, clash and argue among
themselves; at times it is hard to discern anything that they have in common.
Some accept nothing that is connected with the West; others regard the very
word “patriotism” as an expletive. We either daydream about our past or
curse it. While democrats-Westernizers in a burst of national self-abasement
sometimes fall into open Russophobia, a falsely understood patriotism often
turns patriots into vehement xenophobes and nationalists. Both these extremes
are merely a distortion of the essence and meaning of the national idea.
By the national idea, I repeat, must be understood not only that which
distinguishes one people from another, but also that which connects and unites
it with other peoples within one or another supranational community. In the
words of V. Solov’ev, who was one of the first to formulate the essence of the
“Russian idea”: “The meaning of the existence of nations lies not within
themselves, but in humanity,” which is not an abstract unity but for all its
imperfection “really exists on earth,” “moves toward perfection . . . grows
and expands externally and develops internally.”3 One may disagree with
how Solov’ev understood this unity or with what he saw as its priorities, but
if one denies it then one cannot understand the cause of the existence of a
nation.
The nation is, as it were, the connecting link between the tribal and ethnic
division of people and their supranational unification in the world space. It
arises in the gap between the local and the universal, between the special and
the general, being the synthesis or combination of the two. The entire chain
in which the nation exists can be represented schematically in the following
formula: “ethnos—nation—supranational unity.” As a nation, a people is not
simply dissolved in the supranational space, but is incorporated therein at
minimal loss to itself.
Despite the given formula, nationalism, which is frequently taken for the
national idea, excludes from the concept of the nation its connection with the
universally human and denies the general in favor of the particular. In ex-
treme forms of nationalism (such as fascism) the nation is again reduced to
the ethnos, to the purity of “race and blood,” to the special anthropological
characteristics of one or another people.
It was for the purpose of bringing out the connection between the particu-
lar and the general in the life of the Russian people that the “Russian idea”
was formulated. At its birth it contained no nationalism, did not justify the
superiority of one people over another, and did not call for Russia’s national
isolation or self-closure. On the contrary, it linked Russia’s greatness with
the overcoming of its national egoism in the name of cohesion and unity of
all peoples on the basis of universal moral values. Here lies the meaning of
Solov’ev’s celebrated formula according to which “the idea of a nation is not
 FALL 2006 59

what it thinks about itself in time, but what God thinks about it in eternity.”4
Solov’ev conceived the Russian idea as the necessity for Russia to live in
accordance not only with its own national interests, but also with those prin-
ciples and norms that are common to the entire Christian world and comprise
the essence of Christianity.
Of course, there were also different versions of the Russian idea that inter-
preted it in a nationalistic spirit, emphasizing the dissimilarity between the
Slavic cultural type and all others. Solov’ev rightly saw such an interpreta-
tion of the Russian idea as the “degeneration of Slavophilism,” which at its
emergence had not denied the spiritual closeness between Russia and Eu-
rope. Russian nationalism was born under the direct influence of its Western
counterpart and as a counterweight to the latter. Berdiaev was right when he
remarked that “the latest form of nationalism is undoubtedly a Europeaniza-
tion of Russia, conservative Westernism on Russian soil.”5 Now as in the
past, reconciling the general and the special meaning of our national idea,
while avoiding the extremes both of nationalism and of national nihilism,
turns out to be no simple matter. Here, properly speaking, lies the essence of
the given question that Russia will have to resolve for itself sooner or later if
it wishes to survive in the modern world and occupy a worthy place therein.
True, today the Russia toward which the Russian idea was once oriented
no longer exists. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Russians
have found themselves alone, gradually retreating to the borders from which
the Russian Empire once started. The presence of a 15 percent non-Russian
minority of the population does not change the picture. What sort of national
idea is conceivable now, when only memories remain of the old Russia?
Would it not be better to renounce it altogether and recognize the complete
victory of the West over us and, accordingly, the superiority of its idea over
our own? All we need to do is to protect our national interests, and to let
those who are more enlightened and developed than we think about ideas
capable of uniting peoples. This is roughly how our Westernizers argue, greet-
ing with hostility any attempt to pose the question of a national idea.
An idea, however, is not something that can be thought up, invented, im-
posed from above as a “panacea for all ills” or, conversely, thrown out as an
inconvenience. It exists irrespective of any wishes or protests as an expres-
sion of a definite cultural continuity in the spiritual history of a people, and
cannot be rejected in accordance with any considerations of economic and
political expediency. Its renunciation is equivalent to a renunciation of our-
selves. If someone does not like the word “idea,” it can be replaced by a
different word, but that does not change the essence of the matter: without
the thing that this word expresses Russia is just a contentless, empty space,
open to any experimentation upon itself. If besides an interest it has no idea,
60 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

then it is not so much a historical as a geographical concept, and heaven

knows why the enormous territory. The country exists, it is marked out on
the map, but it has no meaning. Such, strictly speaking, is the chief conclu-
sion that follows from the rejection of the national idea.
This conclusion, however, is opposed by a mighty tradition of Russian
culture, long recognized by the world. Here lies Russia’s soul, the principle
that shapes its meaning. Here too we must seek out the essence of what is
called the national idea. It is fed not by the imperial past, not by the tradi-
tional and in many ways archaic foundations of economic and political life,
not by the special anthropological characteristics of the “Slavic race,” but
precisely by the culture that has predominantly defined the face of Russia, its
spiritual makeup. And today, in reforming Russia, we must not neglect its
idea—that which it has sought and affirmed on the cultural plane.
It is no secret that Russian culture represents a rather complex alloy of the
most diverse strata and elements that do not in all respects form an organic
unity. It includes the pagan heritage of the Slavic tribes, the Orthodox-
Byzantine tradition, an Asiatic graft from the time of the Tatar-Mongol yoke,
and a secular culture (science, art, education) similar to that which exists in
Europe. But if we speak not of the history but of the philosophy of Russian
culture, then we can see in it a certain common basis that permeates its gen-
eral thought. It is thanks to this basis that Russian culture appears as a unique,
original, and at the same time universally significant phenomenon of world
culture.
Like Europe, Russia has sought and tried to express in its culture a certain
universal principle capable of uniting individuals and peoples on a planetary
scale. In this respect Russia is a European country, although in a somewhat
different sense than the countries of the West European region. They resemble
one another, in the first instance, in the striving for world and human univer-
sality, bequeathed them by their shared predecessors, Rome and Jerusalem,
which first introduced into human history the consciousness of its unity.
The idea of a united humanity, of a universal civilization did, indeed, first
emerge in the West. Sometimes it is called the “Roman idea.” Starting with
the “first Rome,” the history of the West became the history of its practical
embodiment in life, although by different means at different stages. To the
West itself it seemed that its mission was to finish forever with the barbarism
of former times and demonstrate to the world the sole possible form of uni-
versal human integration. However, in its contemporary phase—the phase of
the existence of industrial society—features of this civilization have been
revealed that have forced people to speak of the “new barbarism.” The origi-
nal opposition of “barbarism—civilization” has given way at its concluding
stage to other oppositions no less dangerous and acute: on the one hand,
 FALL 2006 61

“civilization—nature,” and, on the other hand, “civilization—culture.” The

conflict of industrial civilization with nature and culture, otherwise known
as the ecological and spiritual crisis, has not only marked out the limits to the
growth of this civilization, but also exposed its unacceptability as a planetary
model of future development.
The first symptoms of the spiritual crisis that has struck the West were
recorded as early as the last century. At that time there was already talk of the
“death of God,” the advent of the “age of nihilism,” the “tragedy of culture,”
and the like. Some resolved the essence of the designated conflict between
“life” and “culture” in favor of “life,” others in favor of “culture.” But in any
case, the conflict itself was recognized as an immanent characteristic of
Western civilization. The latter was increasingly taken as a synonym for the
complete despiritualization of life, its ultimate rationalization, the discredit-
ing of religious and moral values, the victory of the pragmatic principle over
ideal impulses and goals, and a shift in the center of gravity away from the
spiritual and toward the material sphere. Even the idea of civil society, put
forward by the Enlightenment, ended up, thanks to industrialization, as the
so-called mass society, in which the autonomous self is replaced by the face-
less “We.” Hence the crisis of Enlightenment consciousness with its reliance
on the reason and free will of the individual. Reason, placed at the service of
exclusively economic goals (and not moral ones, as the Enlightenment thinkers
had supposed), turned out to be a synonym not of man’s individual freedom
but of his new dependence on faceless forces and relations. The mass society
is characterized by the growing role of organizational, administrative, and
planning structures (if not at the level of the state, then at the level of private
monopolies and corporations), which take under their total control all kinds
and forms of individual decision making. Real power in society, externally
democratic, passes into the hands of a financial elite and of the political elite
that serves the former; these elites manipulate people’s consciousness through
the electronic mass media. Hence too, incidentally, the definition of the mass
media as the “fourth branch of power,” which is not a democratic formula.
The chief value of mass society is not individual freedom but power. It is
precisely power that is the focus of philosophical reflections, scientific re-
search, and newspaper journalism. People of power have become the true
heroes of the day, relegating to the background the heroes of the past—the
dissidents, the fighters for freedom and personal independence. Although
power in mass society is different from the traditional power wielded by
monarchs and hereditary aristocracies, its ability to subordinate people to
itself far exceeds the latter. As a kind of compensation for the narrowing
scope of personal freedom, the bounds of consumption have widened. To a
large extent, however, consumption too is imposed, by means of advertising
62 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

and fashion. For this reason mass society is also called consumer society, in
which “to have” is the equivalent of “to be.”
A society that has made material well-being the meaning of people’s ex-
istence does not necessarily lead to universal abundance. Not all people will
be able to live as they live in the West (if only by virtue of the limits on
natural resources), and, indeed, the West, looking to its own interests, will
hardly allow all people to live as it lives. But the peoples on whom Western
models are imposed will also want to have Western standards of consump-
tion. This truly is the road into the ecological abyss. In the words of the
German philosopher W. Hesle, “the universalization of the living standards
accepted in the West . . . would lead the earth to ecological catastrophe. . . .
The catastrophe toward which we are slowly moving would have arrived
long ago if all the planet’s inhabitants were consuming energy, piling up
refuse, and ejecting harmful substances into the atmosphere at the same rates
as the inhabitants of developed countries of the West. Hardly anyone will
venture nowadays to dispute that the Western industrialized societies cannot
develop further in such a fashion; otherwise ‘we shall fall into the abyss.’”6
The Russian Westernizers and Slavophiles—the reformers and conserva-
tives of the nineteenth century—were among the first to react to the negative
consequences of the development of Western civilization, which by that time
were already manifest. For them the chief result of this development was
philistinism, the dictatorship of a mass depersonalized in its needs and de-
sires. So there were already some people for whom the bourgeois West could
in no way be equated with Christian civilization. A civilization—yes, but not
a Christian one, but rather a civilization of the Antichrist. The philistine spirit
that had prevailed in that civilization was not even the West for them but the
West’s betrayal of itself, of its own Christian sources and principles. Hence
the conservative desire to guard Russia from the “pernicious influence of the
West,” the search for a Russian idea that would be able to withstand private
and national egoism, and also the resort to different varieties of socialism—
from Christian to atheist and from peasant to proletarian.
The dualistic attitude toward the West that took shape in the conscious-
ness of educated Russian people, combining a recognition of its undoubted
achievements in the fields of political freedoms, popular education, science,
art, and technology with the rejection of a civilization that had degenerated
into philistinism (they had never equated the culture of the West with its
civilization), determined the meaning of their own search for paths of de-
velopment for Russia, for what she could and should be in her real exist-
ence. The essence of this search can be defined as follows: to take from the
West all that is of value, and at the same time not to duplicate the West, but to
go further in the direction of more humane and morally justified forms of
 FALL 2006 63

life. A great deal may be said concerning the idealism and utopianism of
such a search, but therein lies the source of Russia’s cultural uniqueness and
spiritual greatness.
In Russia’s complex and contradictory makeup one cannot but observe a
certain discrepancy between its soul and its body, between its striving for
universal human truth and its still inadequate level of civilization—in
economy, politics, and simply daily life. On the one hand, it is characterized
by an unmistakable backwardness in comparison with the developed coun-
tries of the West, which it has striven to overcome by strenuous efforts at
modernization. On the other hand, it has tried not simply to catch up with
these countries but to become better than they, to avoid their flaws and de-
fects, and to raise itself to what it saw as a higher level of development. If,
indeed, fate had decreed that Russia should “enter modern civilization” later
than others, why also duplicate all that was bad in the latter and had already
come to the surface? Hence the daring attempt, as it were, to race ahead of
the times, to break through into the future before others, always and in every-
thing to be “ahead of the whole planet.” In the age of national states, she
dreams of the unity of mankind, and to the “spirit of capitalism” counterposes
its own ideal of self-sacrificing service to the common cause. Another ques-
tion: what was the cause of our current crisis—our backwardness compared
to the West or our renunciation of the desire to be ahead of it on a course of
development free of modern civilization’s contradictions?
This discrepancy sometimes prompts the detached onlooker to open mock-
ery. What kind of people are they who deliberate upon the fate of the world
and of humanity but are still unable to sort out their own life, to secure el-
ementary well-being and comfort for themselves? There is a great deal of
justice in such an observation, but even while taking care of the “body” and
civilizing it, we cannot neglect our own soul and renounce what the best
people of Russia believed in and hoped for. And in the current crisis the
cause for greatest alarm is not even the economic difficulties, but the break
with the cultural tradition that inspired Russian thought to seek the formula
of a life worthier than that achieved in the West. If our faith in such a life is
lost, if our minds do not work for an improvement on what exists, then no
reform will help to overcome our backwardness. We shall be trying to catch
up throughout our remaining history. Russia is doomed, as it were, both to
catch up with the West, overcoming its own backwardness, and to move ahead
of the West in those areas where the West has found itself in a critical situa-
tion, in crisis.
A national idea that is acceptable for Russia cannot, consequently, be ex-
pressed either in the concepts of a purely Westernizing ideology (for ex-
ample, liberalism) or in terms of Slavic or some other kind of separateness
64 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

from the West. Russia, if it is destined to remain in world history, will un-
doubtedly swim in the same stream of historical development as the West
with its universalizing tendency, but will preserve itself only by reinterpret-
ing this tendency in the spirit of its own cultural tradition. Russia confronts
the universalism born in the West not as its antipode, but as a special type of
that universalism, represented by a corresponding idea. Her idea has not ne-
gated the “Roman” idea, but has become a unique continuation and develop-
ment of the latter on Russian soil.
I do not lay claim here to an exhaustive formulation of this idea. The most
interesting thing about it is not even what various people think of it, but what
compels them to think on this theme and constantly return to it. Such at-
tempts do not arise out of nothing but bear witness to the existence of other
priorities and values, different from those of the West. In their most general
form, they consist, apparently, in the affirmation of a special type of human
solidarity that is not reducible to political-legal and economic ties and rela-
tions. What is distinctive of it is an ethical conception of collective salvation
fundamentally different from, for instance, the “Protestant ethic”; in this con-
ception each person is concerned not only with himself but also with others,
and sees his personal salvation as dependent on the salvation of one and all.
Such a conception may be called the “Orthodox ethic”; Russian thought
wanted to make it the “spirit” of the world social order. The social ideal that
it expresses did not simply reproduce the civic structures of the democracy
of the ancient polis, but appeared as a kind of “spiritual commune” that con-
nected people in spite of their private and national interests by relations of
mutual love and universal salvation. The idea of the just reward of each per-
son for his work and deeds (“to each according to his works”) is supple-
mented here by the idea of mercy, which recognizes the right of everyone to
a human life and to human dignity. No one can be deprived of this right, and
only its observance gives moral justification to any individual action. To live
not only for oneself but also for others, to consider one’s own all that com-
prises the goal and meaning of the existence of any people, in human rela-
tions to be guided by the principle of the greatest possible freedom from the
material selfishness of the individual and from national egoism—this is how
we may define the general essence of the national idea that Russia has sought
for itself and on which it has tried to base its interaction with the outside
world.
The dissimilarity between Russia and the West within the framework of
general European history can be attributed in many respects to their diver-
gent understanding of the meaning of the lesson that Rome taught the world,
of the very essence of the “Roman idea.” They gave different answers to the
question that disturbed both the Middle Ages and the modern period—“Why
 FALL 2006 65

did Rome fall?” Even the founding fathers of the United States and creators
of the American Constitution asked themselves the same question. And they
all saw the cause of the fall of the “first Rome” in its betrayal of republican
ideals, which in the final reckoning led to Caesarism, personal tyranny, and
the destruction of civic rights and freedoms. Their sympathies were with the
Roman Republic and against the Empire. They sought a political antidote to
such degeneration in the restoration of republican and democratic institu-
tions and values. Although Europe’s road to democracy was not simple or
quick and involved the repeated recreation and disintegration of various imi-
tations of the Roman Empire, on the whole it marked a return to the prin-
ciples of civic society and the law-based state once proclaimed by Rome.
The legal order is, indeed, the universal principle of world order and human
unification sought by the West.
Russia adhered to a different version of the fall of Rome. In its solution to
the problem it was more oriented toward the Orthodox Rome (Byzantium)
that arose after the Roman Empire adopted Christianity and moved its capi-
tal to Constantinople. According to this version, the cause of the fall of the
“first Rome” was its pagan character, that is, from the Christian point of view
its lack of spirituality, which led to the moral degradation of political power
and citizenry. Rome, consequently, is the source not only of the tradition of
the law-based state but also of that of the Orthodox state, in which the su-
preme authority assumes the function of political and military protection of
the true faith, obtaining ideological legitimization in exchange.
As is well known, the attempt to create something similar in the Catholic
West (in the form, for instance, of Charlemagne’s empire) ended in failure,
laying the foundations for the formation of independent national states. The
separation between church and state, political and spiritual power forced
the secular authorities to appeal not to the religious but to the national
unity of their subjects, understood as the commonality of language and
ethnic origin. Religious strife and conflict gradually gave way to prolonged
and bloody national wars, although for a long time the latter remained inter-
woven with the former.
Russia took a different path. Following in the footsteps of Byzantium, it
based its statehood not on national and legal but on confessional and dynas-
tic principles (Orthodoxy and autocracy); as a result, the Russians perceived
themselves not as a secular but rather as an Orthodox nation, united in their
faith and in service to God. The Orthodox and the national merged into a
single concept. Laying claim above all to the role of protector and guardian
of the Orthodox faith (Holy Rus), the state vied with the church for the right
to spiritual leadership of its people. In the people it saw not so much citizens
invested with personal rights as the collective bearer of a particular symbol
66 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

of faith (the “God-bearing people”). The chief obligation of the latter was
patiently to perform its religious duty in relation not only to the “city of
God” but also to the “earthly city,” that is, to the state. The two cities closely
coincided. Service to the state was itself filled with religious meaning and
content and bore witness to adherence to the Orthodox faith. Giving up their
lives “for the faith, tsar, and fatherland,” Russian people did not draw clear
distinctions among these concepts in their consciousness. Hence their high
spiritual motivation in worldly affairs and capacity for self-sacrifice in the
name of the common cause, on the one hand, and their lack of individual
self-consciousness and awareness of their own interest, on the other.
The sanctification of supreme power may, indeed, be considered Russia’s
“Byzantine heritage” that impedes her progress toward democracy and the
law-based state, in which power comes not from God but from people. But
even in Byzantium the deification of the state was an effect not of Orthodoxy
but of the pagan heritage that had not been overcome. For this reason
Byzantium can be called not only an Orthodox but also an Oriental civiliza-
tion, typologically close to the non-Christian civilizations of the East. In the
eyes of the “enlightened” West, which had passed through the stage of secu-
larization, such sanctification served as proof of Russia’s indubitable back-
wardness as a civilization bearing the imprint of its barbarian past. But even
as we follow the West along the path of desanctification and secularization
of the state and place the latter at the service of purely worldly goals and
tasks (giving it, in other words, a purely secular character), we must not at
the same time abandon Russia’s search for an organization of social life fun-
damentally different from that of the West.
In turning the state into an agency at the service of national and private
interests, we do not necessarily have to reduce social life itself to these inter-
ests and deny it a higher and more universal meaning. The idea of society as
a universal community of people that unites them around not only mate-
rial—economic and political—but also spiritual goals of human existence is
the real content of the Russian idea. It should not be confused with idealiza-
tion of the patriarchal commune or with the primitive collectivism of ab-
original peoples. Communal life and psychology may at best facilitate the
emergence of the spiritual community of people but cannot substitute them-
selves for the latter. Russia has tried not simply to formulate the idea of such
a community, but also to bring it to life, sometimes at enormous cost and loss
to itself. But so long as this idea lived in the consciousness of Russians,
Russia too lived.
Utopian though such a social project may appear, it contains the only
perspective of development worthy of man. This perspective presupposes
not the rejection of civic society and the law-based state, but evolution to-
 FALL 2006 67

ward more universal ties and relations in the spiritual, cultural, and, above
all, moral spheres of human existence. The principles of civic particularism
and spiritual (Christian in origin) universalism that Europe and Russia re-
ceived from their historical predecessors are not mutually exclusive but mu-
tually complementary, although for a certain time they did follow divergent
historical paths and take the form of an opposition between culture and civi-
lization. In this confrontation Russia, as it were, stood on the side of culture,
while bourgeois Europe preferred the path of civilization, at times to the
detriment of culture. Neither of these paths is self-sufficient or exhausts all
the possibilities of historical progress. The civilization of the future has equal
need of the practical reason of the West and of the spiritual experience of
Russia. How, concretely, are the two to be combined? How is the right of
each people and each individual to remain themselves, to live in accordance
with their own interest to be reconciled with the necessity for all to live to-
gether? Even today, perhaps, there is no final answer to this question, but this
is the only way to solve the problem once set by Rome—the problem of
human unification.
Here a special role belongs to culture, to its interrelations with other spheres
of social life. While economics and politics divide people and place them in
a definite hierarchy in which the strongest and best-adapted end up on top,
culture brings them together in relations of equality. It is Russia’s historical
mission, it seems to me, to uphold the priority of culture over other spheres
of social life, including the economy and the state. Culture here is not that
which divides people in space and time and raises impassable barriers be-
tween them, as civilizations do, but that which unites them on an all-histori-
cal and planetary scale. It is a synonym for intercourse, dialogue (it is not in
vain that the idea of the “dialogue of cultures” has received such develop-
ment in Russia), and universal communication between people in opposition
to all forms of separation and isolation. Russian culture has invariably fol-
lowed this principle, seeing in other cultures not adversaries but interlocu-
tors, new occasions for encounters and discoveries. In its culture Russia is a
much more open country than is customarily thought. Dostoevsky rightly
called this quality “universal responsiveness”—the ability to be with all people
and to reincarnate oneself in all people.
And so, in Russia and the West we have two types of development of one
and the same civilization that lays claim to universality. The West appeals to
the realm of private and national interests, in which victory is won by the
strongest. It is precisely this realm that has priority for the given type. How-
ever, the principle of private interest on which this type is based discovers its
limit upon coming into contact with nature and culture. Nature and culture,
as it were, pose a challenge to this principle in its claim to universality. The
68 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

other type appeals to culture, to its primarily moral foundations, and gives
priority to the realm of individual interests in which each person is equal not
to the part but to the whole. Here there is no division into what belongs to
oneself and what belongs to others—everything belongs to everyone. Sci-
ence, art, sport, creative endeavor in all its forms, conservational activity—
all that which belongs to each and therefore to all—plays the decisive role in
this type. In other words, the given type is guided by the interests and goals
of culture, making the latter the chief landmarks for economics and politics.
To the extent that these criteria have priority the last obstacles on the road to
universal integration disappear.
It is hard to conceive of a different logic of civilizational development.
Everything else leads to a dead end, is fraught with clashes and crises. Rus-
sia will either take up this challenge of history or vanish into the historical
void. Lagging behind the West in economic terms, she has—precisely for
this reason—beaten the West in recognizing the necessity of a transition to a
qualitatively new state (albeit one that flows out of the preceding state) in
which some priorities give way to others—ecological and cultural. I empha-
size again that the need for such a transition arises not from special Russian
conditions but from the entire logic of civilizational development, which in
Russia—by virtue of its specific history—has found greater possibilities of
realization. The task Russia faces can therefore be formulated not as the
negation of Western civilization and the creation of something completely
different, but as the continuation of the project, initiated by the West, of
building a universal civilization, only in the direction of its reconciliation
with the cultural and natural foundations of human existence.

Notes

1. E. Gusserl’ [Husserl], “Krizis evropeiskogo chelovechestva i filosofiia,” in

Kul’turologiia XX veka: antologiia (Moscow, 1995), p. 302.
2. Ibid., p. 301.
3. Vl. Solov’ev, “Russkaia ideia,” in Russkaia ideia (Moscow, 1992), p. 192.
4. Ibid., p. 187.
5. N.A. Berdiaev, Dusha Rossii: Russkaia ideia, p. 300.
6. V. Khesle [Hesle], Filosofiia i ekologiia (Moscow, 1993), p. 17.

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