2 - National identity and world mission

Summary

“The East is not the West”

The first stirrings of a Russian nationalist movement are to be sought in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The overriding issue that stimulated the Russian intelligentsia at this time to confront and wrestle with the thorny problems of national identity was the question of Russia's “Europeanness” and its general relationship to the West. To be sure, this relationship had become a concern for the Russians much earlier, indeed in the immediate aftermath of the Petrine transformations. Throughout the eighteenth century, the comparison and contrast between Russia and the West was a regular preoccupation for Russian intellectuals, as can be seen in the writings of notables such as Nikolai Novikov, Denis Fonvizin, and numerous others. What served to make the turn of the century into a watershed, therefore, was not the problem itself but rather the nature of the conclusions about the Europe–Russia contrast that began to be drawn. Despite whatever critique of European society that Russians might have entertained in the eighteenth century, they nonetheless remained steadfastly committed to the universalism of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. Russian society may well have differed from that of the West, in other words, but these differences could still be measured and evaluated within the common context of a single set of values and principles that were equally valid for and shared by all civilized societies.