The history of any nation is based on certain ideas. It is historians and poets who invented the Roman idea. Livy and Virgil told in the form of a historical treatise and a poetic myth about who the Romans were and what their historical importance was. For this reason they became the creators of Roman self-awareness. Likewise, telling stories about ourselves, we create our own biography. Having embraced Catholicism and considering themselves successors to the Roman political ides, the Franks originated a new Europe. When a row erupted between popes and emperors in the Middle Ages, this split Europeans into two big camps. Later on, this split assumed the shape of a face-off between the “German” and the “Roman” ideas – from Martin Luther’s struggle with Rome to Franco-German conflicts throughout the 19th century until the middle of the past century.
To tell the truth, it was sometimes not so simple with “great” ideas. The Germans failed to understand for a long time who they were. In the 13th century, German students were trying to prove in disputes with their French counterparts that they were the Mongols who had come from the greater steppe. But in the 14th and 15th centuries, they were telling a different story: they were the Germanics that Roman historians described in their treatises. The very word “Deutsch” derives from “theodiscus” (“popular” or “of the people” – it was about vernacular dialects in general). The first to use this word was a Carolingian bishop who reported to the pope in 786 that synodal decisions were read out in the West in both Latin and vernacular dialects. As the Hellenes coined the word “barbarian” to apply to all those who did not speak Greek, so later some barbarians (Franks) gave a name to other barbarians (Germans). In the 17th-18th centuries, the word “German” was applicable to the language only, while the Muscovites applied it to all the foreigners who did not speak Russian (in Russian, “German” sounds as “niemets” and is consonant with “niemoi,” i.e., “mute”). In the foreword to his grammar of the German language, Jakob Grimm calls New High German a “Protestant dialect” (because it was Luther who attached a general cultural importance to German). But the true father of German nationalism was philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte who published his famous Addresses to the German Nation (“Reden an die deutsche Nation”) in 1808. His nationalism was full of anti-French and anti-Napoleonic bombast. This young German nationalism did not suit the taste of Goethe who noted in a conversation with Johann Peter Eckermann in February 1826: “Our earliest history lies too much in obscurity, and the later is without general native interest, through the want of one ruling dynasty.”
But it is the “Russian idea” that had the worst luck. The idea of “Moscow, the third Rome,” ascribed to the elderly monk Filofey (he spelled it out in his messages in 1523 and early 1524), came out of rather notable sources. Byzantinist Sergey Ivanov describes this as follows: “In the 15th century, Italians pondered on how to hide from the Ottomans and were devising all kinds of coalitions. At last it dawned upon them to try to tempt Muscovites with their imaginary Byzantine succession – let them think they possess the rights to the Byzantine throne. This was even enshrined in a 1473 Venetian Senate decision. But the Muscovites did not fall for this at all – the Grand Principality of Moscow was still a local state. The only people who took notice of this idea were the Greeks who were running to Moscow from the Turks: in a comment on the Paschal canon in 1492, Metropolitan Zosima called the Moscow tsar the new Constantine and Moscow the new Constantinople. But, again, this aroused no interest among the Muscovites, while the Greeks reminded the Muscovites all the time that they were the last Orthodox in the world.” In other words, the idea of “Moscow – the third Rome” was invented by Italian Catholics for one purpose and picked up by Orthodox Greek emigrants for another. Both times, the plan did not work immediately but received an unexpected continuation 30 years later in the person of a mysterious and semi-legendary Filofey (there is a suspicion that he himself is a politically-colored myth), and then in the Russian Empire’s policies of the late 18th – early 20th centuries.
The vague Muscovite idea of the “collection of lands” began to be gradually shaped as sort of a “grand worldwide mission.” “Greed for land” received a theological justification. For example, in the late 1770s, Catherine II conceived the so-called Greek project (without influence of Filofey who was unknown to Catherine). The plan was simple: to destroy the weak Ottoman Empire and restore the Byzantine one which would comprise Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Greece). Catherine’s grandson Constantine was to rule this empire (he was so named for the sake of the future mission). All was confined to the seizure of Crimea and Ochakiv and the foundation of Kherson, but the feeling of a great mission only began to grow. An empire short of ideas suddenly felt it was an instrument of divine providence.
In his “Philosophical Letters” of 1829-31, Pyotr Chaadayev criticized the marginality of and lack of ideology in Russian history. In the mid-19th century, by combining the ideas of German philosophers (mostly Schelling) and those of the German Catholic theologian Johann Adam Moehler, the Slavophiles attached for the first time some conceptual features to a vague national world-view. But the “house they built” looked strange and awkward. The amateurish projects of first-wave Slavophiles (Kireyevsky, Khomyakov, the Aksakov family) stirred up biting criticism from Vladimir Solovyov, Konstantin Leontyev, and the Rev. Pavel Florensky.
The Slavophiles were the first to interpret the face-off of Russia and the West as a global ideological dispute. They thought that, in this dispute, Russia was destined to accomplish the honorable mission of the West’s “new Christianization.” Fyodor Dostoevsky raised this idea to a new level in A Writer’s Diary (November 1877). He says that Rome sold out Christ for the sake of earthy domination and “begot” socialism. Then we read: “The lost image of Christ has been preserved in all the light of its purity in Orthodoxy. It is from the East that this new Word will be carried to the world to counter the future socialism; and it may be that this Word will again save European humanity. That is the mission of the East… But to accomplish such a mission, Russia needs Constantinople, since it is the center of the Eastern world.” These lines were written in the heat of the 1877-78 Russian-Turkish war. In Dostoevsky’s reflections, the old ideas of Italians and Greeks, the obscure ideas of the elder Filofey, and Catherine’s ambitious “Greek project” assumed the outlines of an integrated image. Geography and economics (“collection of lands”) merged with theology, philosophy, and historiosophy. Alien concepts were adopted and prepared for “practical consumption.” It does not matter that this ended up “the other way round.” The liberated Slavs did not wish to be part of an anti-Western project. Socialism with its claim to “earthy domination” won not so much in the West as in the “truly Christian” East. But in the summer of 1916, a year before the Bolshevik coup, a commission on preparations for a future world conference of the “winners” was set up on the initiative of Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich. Sergey Oldenburg wrote: “Russia was to get Constantinople and the Straits, as well as Turkish Armenia. Poland was to reunite as a kingdom in a personal union with Russia. Eastern Galicia, Northern Bukovina, and Carpathian Rus’ were to become part of Russia.”
But when the empire collapsed and the “Orthodox people” began to ruin temples and kill their priests, Russian emigre intellectuals hit upon a new, “compensatory,” idea. They claimed that the Bolshevik victory was also the result of a struggle against the perfidious Rome. The Bolsheviks are the new Mongols who will save the holy Rus’ and prepare it for an eschatological battle against the West. This concept came to be known as “Eurasianism.” The “last Eurasian,” Lev Gumilyov, expressed his credo in the shape of short formulas in an interview with the journal Nashe naslediye (1991). Eurasianism is based on “ideoacracy,” i.e. the power of ideas. But what ideas is it all about? First of all, there is no such thing as “common human culture.” Gumilyov quotes Nikolai Trubetskoy, one of the chief ideologues of Eurasianism, as saying: “The nationalism of individual peoples of Eurasia must be combined with pan-Eurasian nationalism.” Trubetskoy describes the West as a ruinous force: “The cherished dream of every European (!) is depersonalization of all the peoples on the globe (!), ruination of all the original cultures except for one, European, which wishes to win the fame of being the universal one and to turn all the rest into second-rate cultures.” The only thing that can resist this depersonalizing force is the “spiritual” East which respects the originality of all cultures. It is a great Eurasian union. In Trubetskoy’s opinion, “Eurasian peoples are tied up with a common historical destiny. A nation can only be separated from this unity by way of artificial violence over nature and will result in sufferings.” In other words, Trubetskoy and then Gumilyov view “Eurasian unity” (and Gumilyov explains between the brackets – the USSR) as a natural organic union. These ideas are just a step away from “the 20th century’s gravest geopolitical tragedy.” Pseudo-philosophical and pseudo-theological constructs are being suddenly complemented with a natural-scientific (to be more exact, pseudo-scientific) concept. Theology and philosophy are finding a biological foundation. History itself is being interpreted biologically.
This kind of ideas may seem to be unscientific and even nonsensical to some of today’s readers. I think I agree to this. But… These ideas are seeing a revival now (in all probability, before sinking to oblivion forever). They are being used again for political purposes. The barbaric idea of “collecting lands” is being combined again with the “great civilizational mission” of “struggling with the West” and the idea of a “new Rome” which Christianity carries to the “rotten” liberal civilization. But the main problem of these ideas is that they are totally secondary. What brought them about were the cunning of Venetians and the greed of Greek emigrants. They were picked up by the rulers of a new empire, who saw the expansion of borders as their chief goal. These ideas have nothing to do with reality. There was no “integrative Christianity” of the Slavophiles. Instead, there was synodal Orthodoxy with powerless priests and forcible rites. There has been no “new Word” which, according to Dostoevsky’s prophecy, the East should utter to the world. There are only pipedreams and ravings that can enchant one with the force of a beautiful myth or an intricate literary plot but have nothing to do with reality. The simple reason is that this wonderful “East” has nothing to say to the “West” because all ideas came from the latter.
Old ideas bring forth new temptations. But they and what is based on them are only phantoms, only the play of shadows. Nothing real can come out of them…
