Russia as Civilization: Ideological Discourses in Politics, Media, and Academia 9780367493851, 9781003045977

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“At the end of the Cold War, Samuel Huntington prophesized that national identities would increasingly involve a sense of belonging to larger culturalhistorical entities he called civilizations. Russia as Civilization: Ideological Discourses in Politics, Media, and Academia takes Huntington one step further, to explore how the image of a single nation can be constructed and perceived as a civilization unto itself. Through detailed examinations of Russian intellectual and creative practices as well as political discourses, gender debates, media, the fine arts, and the production of academic scholarship, the chapters shed light on the extraordinary potential of the civilization concept as a locus for mobilizing powerful senses of shared national identity. This collection is essential reading for all those interested in the cultural politics of Russian identity, and in contemporary Russian culture and politics more generally.” —Mark Bassin, Baltic Sea Professor in the History of Ideas, Center for Baltic and East European Studies, Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden “Using Russia as a case study, this book sheds new light on how and with what consequences the notion of civilizations has replaced that of nations as a conceptual foundation for constructing group identities worldwide. It makes a compelling case for understanding the proliferation of civilizational narratives in Russia as a transnational phenomenon and as a response to the challenges posed to the country by globalization.” —Vera Tolz, Sir William Mather Professor of Russian Studies, The University of Manchester, UK

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Russia as Civilization

Analyzing the use of civilization in Russian-language political and media discourses, intellectual and academic production, and artistic practices, this book discusses the rise of civilizational rhetoric in Russia and global politics. Why does the concept of civilization play such a prevalent role in current Russian geopolitical and creative imaginations? The contributors answer this question by exploring the extent to which discourse on civilization penetrates Russian identity formations in imperial and national configurations, and at state and civil levels of society. Although the chapters offer different interpretations and approaches, the book shows that Russian civilizationism is a form of ideological production responding to the challenges of globalization. The concept of “civilization,” while increasingly popular as a conceptual tool in identity formation, is also widely contested in Russia today. This examination of contemporary Russian identities and selfunderstanding will be of particular interest to students and scholars of Russian area studies and Slavic studies, intellectual and cultural history, nationalism and imperial histories, international relations, discourse analysis, cultural studies, media studies, religion studies, and gender studies. Kåre Johan Mjør is Associate Professor of Russian at the University of Bergen, Norway, and Senior Research Librarian at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences. Sanna Turoma is Professor of Russian Language and Cultural Studies at Tampere University, Finland.

Studies in Contemporary Russia Series Editor: Markku Kivinen

Studies in Contemporary Russia is a series of cutting-edge, contemporary studies. These monographs, joint publications and edited volumes branch out into various disciplines, innovatively combining research methods and theories to approach the core questions of Russian modernisation; how do the dynamics of resources and rules affect the Russian economy and what are the prospects and needs of diversification? What is the impact of the changing state-society relationship? How does the emerging welfare regime work? What is the role of Russia in contemporary international relations? How should we understand the present Russian political system? What is the philosophical background of modernisation as a whole and its Russian version in particular? The variety of opinions on these issues is vast. Some see increasingly less difference between contemporary Russia and the Soviet Union while, at the other extreme, prominent experts regard Russia as a ‘more or less’ normal European state. At the same time new variants of modernisation are espoused as a result of Russian membership of the global BRIC powers. Combining aspects of Western and Soviet modernisation with some anti-modern or traditional tendencies the Russian case is ideal for probing deeper into the evolving nature of modernisation. Which of the available courses Russia will follow remains an open question, but these trajectories provide the alternatives available for discussion in this ground-breaking and authoritative series. The editor and the editorial board of the series represent the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Russian Studies: Choices of Russian Modernisation. Russia as Civilization Ideological Discourses in Politics, Media, and Academia Edited by Kåre Johan Mjør and Sanna Turoma

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ series/ASHSER-1421

Russia as Civilization Ideological Discourses in Politics, Media, and Academia

Edited by Kåre Johan Mjør and Sanna Turoma

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Kåre Johan Mjør and Sanna Turoma; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Kåre Johan Mjør and Sanna Turoma to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mjør, Kåre Johan, editor. | Turoma, Sanna, editor. Title: Russia as civilization : ideological discourses in politics, media and academia / edited by Kåre Johan Mjør and Sanna Turoma. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge, 2020 | Series: Studies in contemporary Russia | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020006078 (print) | LCCN 2020006079 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367493851 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003045977 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Russia (Federation)—Civilization—Philosophy. | Nationalism—Russia (Federation) | Imperialism. Classification: LCC DK510.762 .R855 2020 (print) | LCC DK510.762 (ebook) | DDC 947.086—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020006078 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020006079 ISBN: 9780367493851 (hbk) ISBN: 9781003045977 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by codeMantra

Contents

List of illustrations List of contributors Preface Note on transliteration and translation

ix xi xv xxi



1 “Nation” and “civilization” as templates for Russian identity construction: a historical overview

27

OL GA M A L I NOVA

2

From socio-economic formations to civilizations: seeking a paradigm change in late soviet discussions

47

V E SA OI T T I N E N

3

Russia between a civilization and a civic nation: secular and religious uses of civilizational discourse during Putin’s third term

59

V IC T OR SH N I R E L M A N

4

“Civilization” in the Russian-mediatized public sphere: imperial and regional discourses

87

GA L I NA Z V E R E VA

5

“Clash of masculinities”? Gendering Russian-Western relations in popular geopolitics

115

TAT I A NA R I A B OVA

6

Re-imagining antiquity: the conservative discourse of “Russia as the true Europe” and the Kremlin’s new cultural policy M A R I A E NG S T RÖM

142

viii Contents 7

Civilizational discourses in doctoral dissertations in post-Soviet Russia

164

M I K H A I L SUSL OV A N D I R I NA KO T K I NA

8

An eternal Russia: Oleg Platonov, the Institute for Russian Civilization and the nationalization of Russian thought

186

K Å R E JOH A N M J Ø R

9

Contemporary civilizational analysis and Russian sociology

206

M I K H A I L M A SL OVSK I Y

Index

221

Illustrations

Figures 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5

Dmitrii Rogozin, “We have different values and allies,” 2014 123 “Our response to American sanctions” (T-shirt) 123 Souvenir mug 125 “We love Russia” (T-shirt) 126 #DraftOurDaughters #StandWithHer (meme) 131 Putin-Trump Kiss, street mural, Vilnius 134 The Russian Pavilion at the Fifteenth Venice Architecture Biennale, 2016 153 Aleksei Gintovt, Surfacing, 2005 153 Aleksei Gintovt, Apollo 1, 2017 155 Doping-Pong, Girl pioneer pulling out a splinter, 2018 156 Natalia Zhernovskaya, Parade, 2006 159

Tables 7.1

Russian doctoral dissertations

167

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Contributors

Editors Kåre Johan Mjør is Associate Professor of Russian at the University of Bergen, Norway, and Senior Research Librarian at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences. While working on this book, he was Research Fellow at Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Uppsala University, Sweden. He is the author of Reformulating Russia: The Cultural and Intellectual Historiography of Russian First-Wave Émigré Writers (Brill, 2011) and several articles on Russian philosophy and thought, including contributions to such journals as Studies in East European Thought, Slavonic and East European Review, Slavic and East European Journal, and Ab Imperio. Sanna Turoma  is Professor of Russian Language and Cultural Studies at Tampere University, Finland. While working on this book, she was Senior Research Fellow at Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki, Finland. She has authored and coedited monographs, specials issues, and articles in the fields of Russian literary, cultural, and area studies. Her research and teaching interests span the interactions between culture and society, intellectual histories, and imperial and spatial knowledge production in the Eurasian context.

Contributors Maria Engström is Associate Professor of Russian Language and Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden. Her research focuses on Russian neoconservative intellectual milieu, imperial aesthetics in contemporary literature and art, neocosmism and post-Soviet utopian imagination, and the role of the Orthodox Church in contemporary Russian politics. She has published widely in European, North American, and Russian journals, collective volumes, and books. Irina Kotkina holds a PhD in History from European University Institute (Florence) as well as in Cultural Studies from Russian State University

xii Contributors for Humanities (Moscow). She has worked as a researcher in academic institutions in Germany, France, and Sweden. In addition to Russian cultural studies and cultural politics, her research interests include the history of the Bolshoi Theater, Stalinist Soviet opera, and the building of national operatic traditions in Soviet republics under Stalin. She has published broadly on Russian culture, opera, and theater in edited volumes and international journals such as Revue des Etudes Slaves, Russian Review, Baltic Worlds, Digital Icons, and Transcultural Studies. Olga Malinova is Professor of Political Science at National Research University Higher School of Economics (Moscow) and Principal Research Fellow of the Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences, Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow). Her fields of interest include political ideologies and political discourse, symbolic politics, politics of memory, and Russian identity construction. She has published widely on these fields, most recently in such journals as Nationalities Papers and Problems of Post-Communism. Mikhail Maslovskiy is Lead Researcher at the Sociological Institute of the Federal Centre of Theoretical and Applied Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a professor at National Research University Higher School of Economics (Saint Petersburg). His research is in Soviet and post-Soviet Russian culture and politics. His articles have appeared in Europe-Asia Studies, Journal of Intercultural Studies, and European Journal of Social Theory. Vesa Oittinen is Professor Emeritus of Russian Philosophy and History of Ideas at the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki, Finland. He specializes in the history of philosophy (German, Scandinavian, Russian) and history of social theories, especially Marxism. He has published more than 100 articles and edited several books, most recently Dialectics of the Ideal (together with Alex Levant, Brill 2014) and The Practical Essence of Man: The “Activity Approach” in Late Soviet Philosophy (together with Andrei Maidansky, Brill 2016). A collection of his essays on Karl Marx and his intellectual legacy is forthcoming from Palgrave in 2020. Tatiana Riabova is Professor of Politics in the Department of History and Social Sciences at Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia (Saint Petersburg) and a co-coordinator of Research Committee on Gender Studies in Russian Political Science Association (RPSA). Her research has been supported by Fulbright Fellowship in Kennan Institute, Wilson Center, J. and K. MacArthur Foundation, Russian Scientific Foundation, and others. She has published articles in such journals as Problems of Post-Communism, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Polis (Politicheskie issledovaniia). Victor Shnirelman  is Senior Researcher in the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow). He is a cultural

Contributors  xiii anthropologist, whose research interests include nationalism, racism, ethnic conflicts, neo-paganism, cultural memory, politics of the past in the Soviet and post-Soviet world, eschatology, and conspiracy theories. He is an author of about 500 scholarly publications, including more than 30 books. Mikhail Suslov is Assistant Professor (tenure-track) of Russian History and Politics at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. His academic interests include Russian intellectual history, history of ideologies, geopolitical ideas, right-wing, and religiously motivated political thought in the historical context. His most recent publications are two coedited volumes: Contemporary Russian Conservatism: Problems, Paradoxes and Dangers (Leiden: Brill, 2019) and The Post-Soviet Politics of Utopia: Language, Fiction and Fantasy in Russia (London: I.B. Tauris, 2019). Galina Zvereva is Professor of History and holds the Chair in the Department of History and Theory of Culture at the Russian State University for the Humanities (Moscow). She has published in the fields of modern history and historiography, cultural studies, and media studies. Her research focuses on concepts of civilization, nation and nationalism, discourses of collective identity, practices of self-representation, and digital storytelling in social media.

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Preface

This book aims to answer the question why the concept of civilization plays such a prevalent role in current Russian geopolitical and creative imagination. By analyzing the uses of the concept in Russian-language political and media discourses, intellectual and academic production, and artistic practices, the book seeks to explore the extent to which the discourse on civilization penetrates the imperial and national configurations of contemporary Russian cultural identity. Although the chapters offer different interpretations and approaches, the research gathered in the volume suggests that current Russian civilizationism is a form of ideological production informed by the assumption that globalization poses an increasing threat to the ideal and practice of national uniformity. The concept of civilization reentered post-Cold War cultural and political debate with Samuel Huntington’s bestselling book The Clash of Civilizations (1996). Until then, it was not in intellectual vogue in the West, with the exception of certain strands of sociological science. Neither was it a key Soviet ideologeme. Despite being criticized for an over-simplifying use of such major concepts as culture, identity, and civilization, Huntington had a lasting impact on the post-Cold War think tanks and policy-makers not only in the USA but also in Russia. His essentialized understanding of religions and cultures can be regarded as a precursor to the subsequent rise of political conservatism and the isolationist tendencies of world powers such as Russia. Although part of the global trend, civilizational discourse in Russia has its specific local traits. Anchored in historic discussions about Russia’s modernization, with Petr Chaadayev’s Philosophical Letters triggering the nineteenth-century debates about Russia’s place between East and West, Russia’s civilizational distinctiveness has been reinterpreted many times. It has reemerged in various intellectual formations for diverse political ends from Danilevsky to Dugin, from the classical Eurasianists to Lev Gumilev’s disciples, and from the pre-revolutionary Avant-garde to post-Soviet arts, literature, and film. One domain in which the idea of civilization has become particularly prominent over the last years is the Russian state’s and the Orthodox church’s official opinions about Russian culture and national identity,

xvi Preface voiced in the speeches of both the head of state, President Vladimir Putin, and the head of the Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill. Recently, the conceptualization of Russia as a state-civilization has also entered legislative documents featuring, for instance, in the initiative for a new federal law on cultural policy. The contributions to this book discuss the civilizational discourse in today’s Russia from a wide range of analytical perspectives. An analysis of the concept in Russian intellectual and creative practices as well as political speech sheds light on the ideational and identitarian processes behind the resurrection of civilizationism in global politics. Meanwhile, such analysis helps to make sense of the peculiarities of Russian civilizationism and its many uses in today’s Russia. Olga Malinova’s chapter provides an historical overview of the interplay between civilizational, imperial, and national configurations of the Russian state. The current “civilizational talk,” as Malinova argues, reflects Russia’s imperial legacy as a multiethnic nation, while it is also a way of tackling Russia’s troublesome relationship with the West. For most of the nineteenth century, Russia was imagined as a nation different from the West yet part of the same, universal civilization. The relationship with the West determined debates about the Russian Idea, while the multiethnic character of the Russian Empire was less consequential. A shift occurred at the turn of the twentieth century, when national cohesion became a more urgent issue. In Malinova’s narrative, the Soviet Union marked the eventual turn to a civilizational template, as the Soviet elites sought to combine unity in the concept of the Soviet People, while acknowledging a degree of heterogeneity and national self-determination. The fall of the Soviet Union left the new Russian Federation with both nation and civilization as potential templates for self-understanding, and, as Malinova argues, the use of “mixed templates” will remain the norm for Russian identity-building in the predictable future. Vesa Oittinen’s chapter takes us back to Soviet debates within Marxism. In the late 1970s, Soviet philosophers and social scientists began to discuss the usefulness of the Marxist theory of socio-economic formations. To avoid socio-economic reductionism, they sought to complete (not replace) it by a theory of civilization. The concept of civilization served to stress the continuity of human culture across revolutions and ruptures. The “civilization discussion” of the late 1970s and early 1980s informed the ideas behind perestroika, such as the notion of “common human values.” This idea became one of the cornerstones of Gorbachev’s policy. Conceived initially as a supplement to the theory of socio-economic formations, the civilizational theory was eventually appropriated by the opponents of the Soviet Union— of Soviet rule as well as of Marxist ideology. Their use of civilization bore resemblance to Francis Fukuyama’s thesis of the “End of History,” which associated the road to civilization with the Western liberal-capitalist model, whereas the later patriotic and nationalist use of the term resembled Samuel

Preface  xvii Huntington’s approach. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Marxist debates and theorization about civilization were discarded. The concepts of civilization and culture came to replace the Marxist premise of material production forming the foundation of societies. Victor Shnirelman analyzes the civilizational discourse of Russian politicians and representatives of the Orthodox Church focusing on President Vladimir Putin and patriarch Kirill’s writings and speeches. Agreeing with those who see Putin as a non-ideological, pragmatic politician, Shnirelman argues that his use of civilizational rhetoric is purely instrumental. It is conveniently evoked when Russia needs to disassociate itself from the West but is not founded on any consistent ideology or worldview. The Russian Orthodox Church, by contrast, seems more consistent in its use of civilization, which often equals “Orthodox civilization.” Shnirelman suggests that civilization in general has a broader appeal within the Church, as the Church’s canonical territory is larger than the Russian state’s. The state exhibits expansionist tendencies, but the Church’s cultural and religious scope offers less complicated rationalization for reaching out to the “Russian World” (Russkii mir), i.e., an imaginary Russophone world beyond the country’s current borders, as the Church’s attempt to appeal to all Orthodox Eastern Slavs manifests. Given the general vagueness of the concept of civilization, however, it is ultimately an empty signifier for both politicians and clerics used to replace the more problematic notion of “empire” in contexts where there is a need for articulating internal unity. Galina Zvereva’s chapter discusses how the idea of Russia as civilization is reproduced in the mediatized public sphere (TV, print media, Internet, social media) by Russian politicians, officials, representatives of the Orthodox Church as well as public intellectuals. Zvereva shows that in the media sphere civilizational discourse serves several purposes. It allows public figures to connect contemporary Russia with previous Russian empires legitimizing the perception of Russian history as a continuous narrative distinct from the West. It serves also to present Russia as the defender and inheritor of Christian European values. This implies in turn that Russia should isolate itself from the rest of the world yet also lead the way by using conservatism as soft power. Despite the intention to present Russia as homogeneous, the country emerges in media as both regional and global, national and multiethnic, religious and secular, and ancient and modern; it is simultaneously a center and a periphery. To produce a consistent idea of Russia as civilization proves challenging, and the currently popular conceptualization of the regions as separate civilizations, i.e., “Siberian civilization,” “Bashkir civilization,” submits civilizational discourse to criticism and even mockery, especially in social media. Tatiana Riabova analyzes textual and visual representations of the idea of “clash of civilizations” in Russian, Western European, and American online media focusing on gendered textual and visual discourses about Russia-Western relations. Drawing on theories of masculinity and popular

xviii Preface geopolitics, she shows how gendered perceptions of the “other” are reshaped and reinforced in the Russian-Western dynamics. With Russia increasingly perceived as a separate civilization of “traditional values,” the West becomes a subject to pejorative descriptions as “Gayropa” and more generally as a “degenerating civilization.” In the narrative this Russian discourse produces, European tolerance for multiculturalism and unstable gender categories leads to false notions of true masculinity (or femininity) and, as a result, to a lack of societal order. The West is discursively demasculinized, while Russia is remasculinized. This is apparent in the popular and positive perception of Vladimir Putin as a muzhik, a contemporary nationalist construction of imaginary masculinity. However, the hypermasculinist discourse of Putin’s Russia is ambiguous in that it represents Russia as both distinct from the West and as truly European. Meanwhile, liberal American representations of Russia render it as a “backward civilization” precisely through its embodiment of “traditional masculinity.” Maria Engström analyzes recent Russian cultural practices, especially visual arts, to explore how Russian civilizationism is connected to the ideas of common European Christianity and European civilization understood as classical heritage. “Classical heritage” in this context refers to the resurgent interest in the Soviet legacy as a form of neoclassicism and hence “antiquity,” and to the prominent display of classical European art in Russian art exhibitions as well as in the recent exchange of art collections between Russia and Western Europe. This testifies to a widespread consumption of classical European art in today’s Russia, which coexists with the idea of Russia as the defender of European Christian civilization popular among Russian politicians and public intellectuals. Even geopolitical events such as Russian actions in Palmyra against the Islamic State, and Russia’s official support of the Assad regime, were interpreted in Russia within the narrative of Russia defending “the Russo-European civilization.” Likewise, the dialogue between the Russian Orthodox Church and Catholic Church underlines the image of Russia as true Europe. In the second part of the chapter Engström contextualizes the Russian preoccupation with classical heritage by evoking Timur Novikov’s 1990s project of “new Russian classicism,” which sets an artistic precedent for the current trends. Mikhail Suslov and Irina Kotkina explore the production of civilizationism in Russian academia, zooming in on Russian doctoral dissertations defended in 1998–2017. The ubiquity of civilizational rhetoric in academic research, as they argue, brings together compliant academics and intellectuals, the political elite as well as military and security officials. Among the most famous doctoral candidates encountered in their analysis are the minister of culture Vladimir Medinskii and the prominent politician Dmitrii Rogozin. Suslov and Kotkina contextualize civilizational rhetoric in contemporary Russian conservatism and its widespread use of organicist concepts. Civilizational rhetoric has become the default language

Preface  xix of pro-Kremlin ideologists for describing Russia, and the language is rehearsed in academic theses. Foundational texts are those of Lev Gumilev and Samuel Huntington. The securitization of Russian civilization, the aim being to protect it from “foreign” influence, figures prominently in dissertations by politicians and security officials. Civilizationism serves to portray Russia as self-sufficient and as possessing its own logic of historical development. The authors conclude that civilizationism in the present Russian academic world has blurred the distinctions between research, politics, and opinion journalism. Kåre Johan Mjør’s chapter is a case study of Oleg Platonov and the Institute for Russian Civilization, founded by Platonov in 2003. Mjør shows how Platonov, a key actor in the rise of Russian civilizationism and known for his extreme anti-Western and anti-Semitic views, not only disseminates his own works on the theory of Russian civilization, but also republishes Russian classics, in particular, nineteenth-century Slavophile works, in order to secure a broader audience for books he sees as supporting his views of Russia as a unique and self-sufficient civilization. Platonov’s Institute promotes distinctly different Russian thinkers as a unifying embodiment of “Russian national thought” and an alleged “ideology of the Russian people.” The chapter reviews Platonov’s contribution to contemporary Russian civilizationism and nationalism, while it also highlights the readiness of Russian nationalist production to include marginal, radical positions alongside the more moderate ones, forging a Manichean worldview through the promotion of an isolationist stance and a categorical rejection of the West. Mikhail Maslovskiy’s chapter explores civilization as a sociological concept. Rooted in the works of Norbert Elias, Shmuel Eisenstadt, and Johann Arnason, civilization has been used by sociologists to describe processes of modernization and the condition of modernity. During the last decade, this current has received some attention in Russian sociology. In sociological use, civilizational analysis has offered an alternative to the politicized, Huntington-inspired civilizationism, which many of the contributions to this volume address. Maslovskiy provides an introduction to civilizational analysis surveying its recent impact on Russian sociological scholarship. Maslovskiy suggests that the current use of civilizational rhetoric by Russian political leaders may be fruitfully analyzed from the viewpoint of sociological analysis as a product of intercivilizational encounters, i.e., Soviet encounter with Western modernity and its ideas of universality. Thus, sociology, by means of civilizational analysis, may offer a critique of the very ideology of civilizationism itself. *** The editors would like to thank the Academy of Finland Center of Excellence “Choices of Russian Modernization” for financial support.

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Note on transliteration and translation

Russian has been transliterated according to the Library of Congress system. Where established English spellings for names and places exist, these have been given preference (Yeltsin instead of Eltsin; Danilevsky instead of Danilevskii). This includes also the spelling of the names of the contributors. All translations from Russian are the contributors’ own.

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Introduction Russian civilizationism in a global perspective Sanna Turoma and Kåre Johan Mjør

In a recent study of populism, Rogers Brubaker (2017) delineates differences within pan-European and North Atlantic national populisms by drawing attention to the way the opposition between self and other is construed inside the movements. Analyzing the mechanisms of cultural identity-building, Brubaker notes that the concept of nation no longer necessarily dominates the populist imaginary, but national belonging is being “recharacterized in civilizational terms.” This trend is particularly apparent in Northern and Western Europe, where the national-populists, when separating the “outsiders” from “us,” pay less attention to “national differences (notably language and specifically national cultural particularities and tradition)” than they do to “civilizational differences (notably religious traditions and their secular legacies)” (Brubaker 2017, 1211). Transnational civilizationism offers, then, an ideological space for creating transnational populist allegiances, as manifested in the recent but short-lived courting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Here political practice tags along with political theory. Civilizational narratives, which since Henry Thomas Buckle, François Guizot, Nikolai Danilevsky, Oswald Spengler, and Arnold Toynbee seemed obsolete, made an unexpected comeback in academic research at the end of the millennium—“one of the astonishing features of 1990s political theory,” as Sebastian Conrad recently remarked (Conrad 2016, 57, see also Velizhev 2019, 138–139). Conrad discusses the civilizational turn in sociology, associated above all with Shmuel Eisenstadt—whose legacy in Russia is highlighted in Mikhail Maslovskiy’s contribution to this volume. Conrad gives due credit to Eisenstadt’s theory of “multiple modernities” and its critique of the Westernizing teleology of traditional modernization theory. However, Conrad points critically to the culturalist epistemology of sociological civilizationism, which, as Conrad notes, has had a particular appeal outside Europe, especially in the Islamic world and East Asia. In Russia—a country which remains outside both Brubaker’s view of Europe and Conrad’s view of the non-European world—the concept of civilization has emerged as one of the key concepts of contemporary political

2  Sanna Turoma and Kåre Johan Mjør and intellectual production. Since the early 1990s, Russian intellectuals, academics, and officials have produced a number of theories and doctrines about civilizations.1 This intellectual activity began independently of the concept’s reemergence in the West with Samuel Huntington’s bestselling book The Clash of Civilizations (1996), but it was subsequently reinforced by the popularity of Huntington’s views. Although Huntington initially received a mixed reception in post-Soviet Russia (the 1993 essay anticipating his book was soon translated into Russian, cf. Huntington 1994), his anti-universalist stance—the claim that Western civilization is local, not universal—has gained wide support among the Russian readership (Tsygankov 2003, 61–62). Many Russian thinkers share with Huntington the idea that civilizations are the main units of the world, whose borders are clearly defined by world religions—among which Russian Orthodoxy is regarded as a separate one. The idea that Russia forms an independent, self-sustained civilization has come to play a prominent role in public, academic, and, eventually, political and legal discourses in post-Soviet Russia. While the 1990s were dominated by various quests for the “Russian idea” (Sieber 1998), “Russian civilization” has been established since the turn of the millennium as a conceptual foundation for the recreation of a post-Soviet national, imperial, and geopolitical identity. What was initially formulated in scholarly and pseudoscholarly writings has eventually reached mainstream political discourse, just as it has in the West. Today, the notions of a “Russian civilization” (russkaia or rossiiskaia) and “Eurasian civilization”—in this context the terms are virtually synonymous—are ubiquitous to the point of rendering civilization something of an “empty signifier.” An empty signifier, as Ernesto Laclau’s original idea suggests, has no referent in external reality; rather, empty signifiers are produced discursively for political purpose—historical examples may be “liberation,” “democracy,” or “revolution,” which are goals (or illusions) rather than something real or attainable in actuality (Laclau 1996, 36–46; Freeden 2003, 111). Civilization appears to be just such a signifier, as Victor Shnirelman argues in his contribution to this volume. And yet the symbolic potential of the term continues to supply powerful imagery for world politics and global culture alike from presidential addresses to computer games. Not shunning the plurality or elusiveness of the meanings of civilization, and convinced of the concept’s global relevance, this volume will explore the field of significations evoked by the current use of civilization in Russia. As the contributions to this volume will show, and as we will reiterate in this introduction, an analysis of the use of the term in Russian intellectual and creative practices as well as in political speech sheds light on the ideational and identitarian processes behind the resurrection of civilizationism in global politics. Meanwhile, such analysis helps to make sense of the peculiarities of Russian civilizationism and its many uses and significations in today’s Russia.2

Introduction  3 The heightened interest in the concept of civilization, and the need to discuss Russian civilizational discourse, should not be seen, in this instance, as a methodological choice to highlight the country’s Sonderweg. Rather, the preoccupation with a civilizational imaginary and identity must be understood in the context of broader, global tendencies, while such preoccupation in Russia, as in any other country, is always rooted in the local intellectual context and its historical and philosophical premises. The reemergence of civilizational theories and doctrines in both Russia and the West in the last twenty years has undoubtedly been an interpretation of, as well as a response to, recent processes of globalization. The fact that the historical watershed of Soviet disintegration coincided with the digital revolution and an accelerating global integration with increasing transnational flows of capital, people, and ideas created a primary precondition for the latest phase of Russian civilizationism. Although globalization may have been a factor contributing to the fall of the communist world, this fall also furthered globalization by opening up the world behind the Iron Curtain to a new and increasing spread of economic, technological, and cultural influences. This, in turn, has led to specific forms of resistance, of which the promotion of Russia’s civilizational distinctiveness has become an increasingly important one. Moreover, civilizational imaginings and identity-building in Russia have often been accompanied by geopolitical claims for hegemony in post-Soviet space, another “turn” that has become popular after the collapse of Soviet Marxism (cf. Suslov 2013). In this Introduction, we will look at civilizationism as an ideological discourse, then move on to discuss three intellectual formations we identify as crucial frameworks for the rise of civilizationism in today’s Russia, and, finally, discuss the imperial anxieties of civilizational rhetoric in Russian nationalist and geopolitical imagination.

Civilizationism as an ideological discourse The Russian state’s cultural policy poignantly illustrates the recent rise of Russian civilizationism. It also shows how the concepts of culture and civilization constantly overlap and also lack clear definitions in political discourse.3 Launched in 2017 by Russia’s Ministry of Culture, a legislative initiative for a new federal law “On Culture” conceptualizes Russia as a civilization (see Minkul’tury 2017). The use of civilization in the legal initiative is not the first pronunciation of its kind by Russian officials: Vladimir Putin’s launch of the Russian state as a civilization, or “state-civilization” (gosudarstvo-tsivilizatsiia), during his 2012 presidential campaign constitutes an earlier landmark (Putin 2012). Nevertheless, it bears noting when a concept of such epistemological weight and magnitude enters the legislator’s discourse to be used as a point of the state’s self-identification. “Today, more than ever,” as the introduction to the initiative reads on the Ministry’s website, “there is a need for legislation that

4  Sanna Turoma and Kåre Johan Mjør looks at culture as a societal phenomenon which allows transmission of the system of values, understanding of morals and ethics, characteristic for the Russian civilization (prisushchie rossiiskoi tsivilizatsii), to future generations” (Minkul’tury 2019). Culture, as the text claims, “forms and translates the civilizational code of the nation.” This contention is in accordance with the 2014 presidential decree (ukaz) on the Russian state’s new cultural policy, which functions, as the Ministry’s website explains, as the foundational text for the proposed federal law. The 2014 presidential decree understands culture as a system of values and institutions, with the latter producing and protecting these values. It imagines culture as a fundamental force for Russia’s “civilizational originality” (tsivilizatsionnaia samobytnost’) as well as a foundation of a unified “mentality of the Russian people” (mentalitet rossiiskogo naroda). Meanwhile, it makes great claims about the ability of culture, imagined through the lens of a predominantly Russian-language cultural production, to unify the citizens of the Russian Federation and to instill a sense of Russian national pride in them across ethnic and religious boundaries (cf. Turoma and Aitamurto 2019; for the text of the decree, see Ukaz 2014). The 2017 initiative “On Culture” is planned to replace the 1992 “Basic Law of the Russian Federation on Culture” (for the latter legal text, see Osnovy 1992). According to the Ministry’s website, the initial goal of the 1992 law was to “exclude ideological influence,” while it also aimed at “protecting the cultural infrastructure created in previous historical periods” as well as at “preventing the flow of creative cadres out of the country” (Minkul’tury 2019). The exclusion of ideology from the 1992 law was in line with the 1993 Constitution of the Russian Federation, which forbids “state or obligatory ideology” and, instead, acknowledges “ideological diversity” as a constitutional foundation of the Russian state (Konstitutsiia 1993). The 1993 constitutional embargo on “ideology” illustrates the struggle with the Soviet legacy which the rebuilders of the newly established Russian state clearly experienced. Ideology, as used in this instance, refers to Marxism-Leninism, understood as a comprehensive and oppressive system of rule incompatible with the “democratic basis” which the Constitution sets as a foundation for the new state. As a result of Vladimir Putin’s successive terms as the president and prime minister of the Russian Federation, there has emerged a debate about whether the ideas and beliefs shaping his style of leadership and practice of rule amount to a new state ideology. In the “Millenium Manifesto,” Vladimir Putin’s first publication as the new key figure to follow Boris Yeltsin in 1999, Putin reinforced the ban on state ideology but then went on to propose three ideational components crucial for Russian identity: patriotism, “great-powerness” (derzhavnost´), and the primacy of the state (gosudarstvennichestvo) (Putin 1999). It is possible to conclude that Putin thereby rejected the idea of state ideology to present, instead, an idea of the state as an ideology. This ideology, when understood as such, has been pinned

Introduction  5 down by various political analysts as “statism,” state patriotism, nationalism, populism, isolationism, anti-Westernism, or, simply, “Putinism.” To analyze the “beliefs, emotions, and habits” which support Putin and his team’s modus operandi, Brian D. Taylor starts his recent study of the Russian president by toying with the idea of “Putinism” as an ideology in the sense of “Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, or Marxism-Leninism.” He quickly abandons this idea, since “Vladimir Putin seems like an unlikely founder of an ism,” and opts instead for the term “code” (taking his lead from Nathan Leite’s 1950s study of Bolshevism). Code, as Taylor argues, is “both more and less than an ideology; more, because it involves not just ideas but also other stimuli for action, and less, because it is not a coherent and encompassing system of thought” (Taylor 2018, 10). As for the beliefs that constitute the “Putinist code,” Taylor identifies three: the idea of the state as a great power (being more important than the society or the people), anti-Westernism (anti-Americanism), and conservatism (anti-liberalism) (Taylor 2018, 12–22). In another recent analysis of Putin’s style of leadership, Chris Miller (2018), too, hesitates to use the term ideology to pin down President Putin’s beliefs in maintaining power, influence, and economic stability. Yet the beliefs that Miller identifies, in strengthening government’s centralized control, in restraining social unrest by focusing on wage and pension security, and in counting on private enterprises as long as no contradiction arises between them and the first two strategies, can be interpreted as forming an ideological foundation which guides the leadership’s strategic decisionmaking. Marlène Laruelle and Jean Radvanyi, on the other hand, point to an absence of ideology “in the sense of a doctrine,” while they, too, acknowledge “a gradual structuring of a certain worldview, or Weltanschauung” in Putin’s Russia. This worldview is founded on patriotism and national pride, a Soviet nostalgia without a revolutionary impetus but with an emphasized anti-Western and anti-liberal stance (Laruelle and Radvanyi 2019, 62).4 Closer to our focus, Andrei Tsygankov (2016) describes the Russian leadership’s effort since the mid-2000s to introduce foreign and domestic policies based on “civilizational ideology,” that is, on the idea of Russia having its own distinct value system. In Tsygankov’s view, the fact that “the United States and the EU worked to keep Ukraine away from the Russia-dominant EEU [Eurasian Economic Union] convinced the Kremlin of the need to develop Russia’s own civilizational ideology” (Tsygankov 2016, 155). As this summary of recent political analyses of Putin’s Russia shows, there is no consensus among scholars on ideology’s role in the forming of Russian policies, foreign or domestic. Several prominent scholars do, however, emphasize the pragmatism and political instrumentalization of patriotism and other ideational constructs by Russia’s political leaders. Vladimir Putin, as Mark Galeotti recently asserted, “believes in power and pragmatism rather than in philosophy,” and his support for “traditional values” is “more instrumental than ideological” (Galeotti 2019, 73–74). In an analysis

6  Sanna Turoma and Kåre Johan Mjør of the political underpinnings of recent Russian films about the Chechen wars, Andrey Makarychev (2016) asserts in the same vein that the Kremlin’s “ideological articulations” are often void of “ideological authenticity” and amount to mere “moral rhetoric.”5 The claim of this book is that ideas matter. This does not mean that economic interests or the security matrix do not significantly shape political decision-making in Russia just as they do in any other country. However, as this volume aims to illustrate, specific ideas are produced by state actors, officials, policymakers, speechwriters, and pundits to win support and to influence the broader public. Moreover, the current rise of conservatism mentioned above, and more specifically the current Russian regime’s self-promotion as a bastion of conservative values (Christian, European; see Maria Engström’s, Tatiana Riabova’s, and Galina Zvereva’s contributions to this volume), has appealed to right-wing groups in the West. Paradoxically, it also appeals to certain leftists, since it involves a critique of liberalism and globalization (Laruelle and Radvanyi 2019, 121–132), a critique that emerged as a left-wing project in the 1990s but has more recently been hijacked by the conservative right. Meanwhile, Russia’s critique of Western (US, EU) global hegemony led some groups on the left to be sympathetic toward Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, seeing it as a revolt against “Ukrainian fascism” and Western expansionism (Wendland 2014). In other words, Russia may be seen as both fostering right-wing tendencies and combatting them. The ideas underlying these perceptions of Russia, then, are, as we claim, worth exploring further as a means to make sense of the world. In the current context, these ideas may be instrumentalized, but that does not mean that they are haphazardly and randomly chosen and reproduced. Exploring the question of civilizationism as Russia’s new ideology requires, first of all, a definition of ideology. Despite its promiscuous use, ideology is, in fact, a notoriously difficult term to define universally. Terry Eagleton identifies sixteen different ways of defining it (1991, 1–2), noting that many of the definitions are pejorative: Ideology is always what others have but rarely something one admits to having oneself. Communism was an ideology, but capitalism not so, as the Western mantra of the Cold War period had it. Indeed, much of Eagleton’s insightful ramification on ideology, published in 1991, reflects a need to challenge Western views popular at the end of the Cold War, views that were haunted by the same specter as the 1993 Russian Constitution, that is, Marxist ideology. As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz observed in 1973, it is “one of the minor ironies of modern intellectual history that the term ‘ideology’ has itself become thoroughly ideologized” (1973, 193). In this instance, we find it useful to recall Marx and Engels’ original approach to ideology. In The German Ideology, written in 1845, they located the emergence of ideology in the tension between the common and individual interests, as their argument has been interpreted by later Marxist scholars.6 The common interest is really an illusion of commonality, as it

Introduction  7 becomes an object of struggle for those aspiring for hegemony. Those in control of political power promote their own interest as the common interest, which is then represented as the state’s interest put forward as an ideology. Persuading and convincing the citizens that the state’s interest is their interest is the task of the “ideological state apparatus,” i.e., religious, educational, cultural, and media institutions, as Louis Althusser (1971) claimed in famously developing Marx’s theory in a Gramscian spirit. There is no doubt that civilizationism offers the Russian ideological state apparatus a means of not necessarily producing false consciousness but, at the very least, of distorting the complexity and diversity of the social and material life experienced by citizens (cf. Marx and Engels 1970, 47–48). To analyze the mechanisms of this ideological production, and to supplement the Marxist approach, we find it useful to recall Clifford Geertz’s ideas of ideology enunciated in connection with his anthropological study of culture as a system of symbols and meanings. Ideologies may function as many things, such as “disguises for ulterior motives,” but they are always “maps of problematic social reality” that aim to provide a matrix “for the creation of collective conscience.” They attempt to “render otherwise incomprehensible social situations meaningful, to so construe them as to make it possible to act purposefully within them.” This, as Geertz continues, “accounts both for ideologies’ highly figurative nature and for the intensity with which, once accepted, they are held” (Geertz 1973, 220). Viewed in this way, ideological symbols come across as useful tools for “manufacturing consent,” to use the concept advanced by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman in their study of media and propaganda in the American context.7 There are several powerful symbols in current Russian ideological production, and one of them is civilization. The figurative nature of ideological production calls attention to ideology as a discourse. Civilizationism is a discursive formation, and as such an ideological discourse, of which the Russian state makes apt strategic use both in domestic and foreign policy.8 The concept of civilization is one of the key ideologemes, i.e., one of the key semantic units, of both the civilizational and conservative discourses in contemporary Russia.9 As used by the Russian state apparatus, civilization is a totalizing and simplistic ideologeme, and as such it calls to mind Edward Said’s criticism of the concept in the aftermath of 9/11, when Samuel Huntington’s powerful metaphor of the clash of civilizations was re-evoked in global media. Huntington’s use of the concept concealed the disorderly reality rather than revealing the political and cultural complexity of its making, Said argued, and went on to conclude that the abstractions of civilization were “better for reinforcing defensive self-pride than for critical understanding of the bewildering interdependence of our time” (2001). The Russian state’s self-identification as a civilization does just this: Rather than making sense of the convoluted global interactions, it conceals, distorts, and disguises the global and local complexities, reinforcing, in

8  Sanna Turoma and Kåre Johan Mjør those susceptible to its call, defensive self-pride and isolationism. In this sense, the ideology of civilizationism offers Russia’s leader a tool to create a “map of problematic social reality” (cf. Geertz), in which the problems have been smoothed over by lofty discourse of a “highly figurative nature.” Yet, the ideology of Russian civilizationism, as articulated by state actors, conceals imperial aspirations and nationalist agendas alike by relocating the state in the semantic field of culture, values, and other ostensibly nonpolitical, or depoliticized, conceptual realms. The self-pronounced civilizational state-identity, with the emphasis on culture, traditions, and family values, generates civilizational self-sufficiency, which, in turn, serves as a distraction from societal and economic debates. These are debates about economic insecurity and inequality in global capitalism, civil liberties and freedoms, the role of the oligarchs in the Russian market society, and cronyism in the virtually one-party political system—all these constituting the reverse side of what informs the beliefs behind Putin’s three economic strategies as described by Miller (see above).

Civilizationism in intellectual production: culturology, Spenglerism, and Eurasianism Although the popularity of civilizational discourse in the current conservative climate may not seem as “astonishing” as its introduction to political theory did in the 1990s—attested by Sebastian Conrad’s book that we quoted at the beginning of this essay—it is worth asking how the concept reemerged in the writings of contemporary Russian academics and intellectuals to make its way from the intellectuals’ “big discourse” to the “small discourse” (cf. Kapustin 2009) of politicians, law and policymakers. How did the concept, regarded by many as a theoretical construct of the past, end up in Russian legislation? Before it entered the Russian political leadership’s vocabulary, civilization was advocated fiercely by various public intellectuals, academics, and journalists. Within the broad spectrum of post-Soviet intellectual production, we identify three specific contexts that have all fed into current Russian civilizationism. These are the academic discipline of culturology, Russian Spenglerism, and Eurasianism. Before taking a closer look into these formations, let us recall the intellectual roots of the current civilizational discussion found in the nineteenth-century debates about Russia’s place among the modern European nations. These debates were developed, again, in the broader context of European thought. The intellectual premises of contemporary civilizationism differ in many respects from those of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century civilizationism, advocated, for instance, by the influential historian and philosopher, and later conservative statesman, Franҫois Guizot (cf. Evtuhov 2003, 55– 56).10 Universalism and progressivism, typical of the historical versions of civilizationism, have been replaced by particularism and isolationism.

Introduction  9 Instead of the universal human spirit or universal civilizational ideal, and instead of the aspiration toward a proximity to this ideal (Eurocentric as this ideal was in the Age of Enlightenment and Romanticism), Russia—and any other country or region which adopts isolationist civilizationism—is currently imagined as a self-sufficient entity. It sets its own ideals to pursue progress, mostly understood in exclusively economic terms, not on a par but in conflict with others. At the same time, the very notion of progress, of forward movement, central to the historical forms of civilizationism, has been overshadowed by a preoccupation with the past. Intellectuals of the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century were engaged in debates about civilizational progress, i.e., a moral condition toward which humanity was striving (Kumar 2014, 821–822). The civilizational quest was a project for the future— progress toward a spiritual and material flourishing, both individual and collective, as in the ideas of Guizot (Velizhev 2019, 67). By contrast, contemporary civilizationism, the Russian version included, is anchored in the conceptualizations of local history and traditions.11 In discussing the roots of modern Russian identity-building, it is customary to refer to Petr Chaadaev’s work. Informed by German Romantic thought and the aforementioned Guizot, Chaadaev’s narrative of Russia’s lamentable separation from the West, articulated in his famous “First Philosophical Letter” of 1829, presented civilization first and foremost as something shockingly absent in Russia. Chaadaev’s largely negative judgement triggered the Slavophile response, which claimed that Russia did possess “civilization” (prosveshchenie) but that it was different from the Western European one (Evtuhov 2003). Meanwhile, Russian official nationalism, known as the Uvarov triad of autocracy, Orthodoxy, and nationality, which was also shaped under the impact of both German romantic nationalism and Guizot, saw Russia, on the one hand, as adhering to the European line of development, and, on the other hand, as potentially surpassing it intellectually in the future. Russia was both part of a common, universal civilization and a civilization of its own (Velizhev 2019, 84–96).12 In the late 1860s, Nikolai Danilevsky, in turn, proposed a grand “scientific” model of civilizational development—and now consistently using the Russified term tsivilizatsiia (civilization)—according to which civilizations of the past and present, or “cultural types” as he also called them, are “unique and incommensurable” (Danilevsky 1995, 70). For Danilevsky there was no common, global civilizational development in the singular, and the way in which he thereby challenged Eurocentrism through the very concept of civilization was quite remarkable at that time (cf. Tolz 2010, 200)—regardless of his otherwise questionable scholarly claims. Paradoxically, however, he proposed an analytical framework according to which civilizations possess the same morphological structure and logic of development, and so Danilevsky’s theory of civilization, too, revealed a universalist character. Thus, the emergent Slavic civilization, according to Danilevsky’s

10  Sanna Turoma and Kåre Johan Mjør vision, was about to become the most complete and advanced civilization ever seen, thus taking over the hegemony held by the West, or the “RomanoGerman cultural type” (Mjør 2016). In addition to these canonical works, the post-Soviet civilizational discourse has several other historical and ideational sources. After the Soviet disintegration, the idea that there exists an independent “Russian civilization” was brought forth in Russian-language intellectual production by the so-called “civilizational approach” (tsivilizatsionnyi podkhod), which in the early 1990s replaced the Marxist idea of global and unidirectional, or “formative” development. This shift occurred strikingly fast, and the new approach would soon become influential in post-Soviet academic and public discourses, i.e., in the humanities and social sciences, on the one hand, and in what Anastasiia Mitrofanova (2008) has aptly described as the apologetic “parascience” of public intellectuals, on the other. The distinction between these two types of scholarly and semi-scholarly discursive practices in post-Soviet Russia is not always easy to draw, and the “civilizational approach” has not contributed to making the difference clearer—quite the contrary, as the contribution to this volume by Irina Kotkina and Mikhail Suslov demonstrates. Vesa Oittinen’s contribution to the volume provides an important and often missing perspective on the rise of the civilizational discourse in the post-Soviet intellectual context: the viewpoint of academic Soviet Marxism. As Oittinen argues, the notion of civilization had already been introduced in late Soviet Marxist debates as a supplement to the Marxist scheme of world history. During the Perestroika period, civilizational ideas from the Marxist debates had an impact on the reformed Soviet discourse on “human values.” Soon, however, the Marxist ideology would fall into disgrace altogether, while the notion of civilization survived and became a new, leading conceptual frame for several branches of post-Soviet human and social sciences. The new civilizational paradigm would in fact be promoted by several former Marxists. Oittinen highlights the role of the Georgian-born scholar Miran Mchedlov in contributing to the late Soviet “civilizational turn” of Marxist thought. In post-Soviet years he produced several books on civilization and even “Russian civilization,” such as the seminal dictionary by that very title (1999). Today, the civilizational approach constitutes an institutionalized field of study in Russian academia with research clusters, administrative units, and scholarly journals.13 In the academic production of the 1990s, the concept of civilization was not only a scholarly and methodological question, but one that also involved a search for Russian national identity in the post-Soviet geopolitical confusion. The same can be said for the new post-Soviet discipline of “culturology” (kul’turologiia). In addition to appearing as an independent discipline, culturology also became an introductory course at Russian universities in the 1990s, replacing the obligatory courses in Marxism-Leninism (istmat and diamat). According to several critical accounts, culturology, developed

Introduction  11 and elaborated simultaneously with the civilizational approach, emerged as a substitute for Marxism (Scherrer 2003; Laruelle 2004; Shnirel'man 2006). In Marxist terms, the superstructure of culture replaced the basis of production. Culturology, with its particularizing and isolationist worldview, has played a crucial role in disseminating the civilizational mode of thought among a vast number of Russians who received an academic education in post-Soviet years. It promotes an idea of the world as made up of and divided into separate, unique cultures or civilizations (often overlapping with world religions) as constitutive units, with Russia and Russian Orthodoxy singled out as a distinct civilization. Civilization is no longer a universal and universalist project: What exists are civilizations in the plural with their distinct traditions and values. In general, the post-Soviet academic civilizational approach has been organicist, holistic, and essentialist, even if the concept of civilization itself is often used without any clear, explicit, or critical theoretical elaboration. It has served to challenge universalistic models that privilege Western modernity, while itself aiming at being an alternative universalistic model. However, the discipline of culturology, while appearing to pursue purely methodological interests, implicitly seeks, above all, to formulate a “civilizational identity” for Russia with reference to its political, cultural, and religious (Orthodox) traditions reconfigured as unique and particular to Russia (Scherrer 2003, 93–126). The most important non-Russian sources evoked in the Russian scholarly and semi-scholarly civilizational discourse are the writings of Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee. Together with “Russia’s own” Nikolai Danilevsky, these two European thinkers became remarkably popular in Russia in the 1990s, after having been deemed unacceptable in the Soviet Union— and after having gradually gone out of fashion in the West. Danilevsky’s Russia and Europe, Spengler’s The Decline of the West, and Toynbee’s A Study of History are now the foundational texts of the civilizational paradigm in Russia. Classical Slavophiles, with their juxtaposition of Russia to the West, are often also included in the canon of the civilizational approach. Their essentialist and isolationist premises deliver cultures or civilizations as isolated units rather than a field of variation, or, as the Russian émigré sociologist Pitrim Sorokin summarized their approach, they made the “error of taking for a civilizational-cultural system something that is no unity at all” (Sorokin 1950, 216). Spengler and other thinkers related to the European inter-war “conservative revolution,” such as Friedrich Meinicke and Carl Schmitt, have recently been re-evoked by intellectuals associated with the rise of radical conservatism and the “New Right” in Europe and the US (Drolet and Williams 2018). But Spengler’s popularity in Russia must be understood, again, in the local intellectual context. The Decline of the West was translated into Russian in 1922. The same year saw the publication of a volume of essays about Spengler’s work, which included chapters by philosophers such as Nikolai

12  Sanna Turoma and Kåre Johan Mjør Berdiaev, Fedor Stepun, and Semen Frank, who were soon forced to leave the Soviet Union and were subsequently excluded from the Soviet canon of Russian philosophy (Berdiaev et al. 1922). Viktor Lazarev, later a leading Soviet specialist in medieval art, also wrote a book about the German thinker titled Oswald Spengler and His Views on Art (1922). In the post-war Stalin period, Spengler more or less disappeared from the Soviet reader’s horizon. The second edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1950–1958) reveals the reasons behind Spengler’s denunciation. The entry on Spengler identifies him as a “predecessor of German Fascism” whose attitude toward “the rights of the working masses, Marxism, and proletarian internationalism” was “extremely hostile” (GSE 1957, 165). Remarkably, Spengler’s legacy nevertheless lived on in the Soviet Union, mostly in academic circles outside the Soviet mainstream, such as in the works of Lev Gumilev. The son of Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilev, two leading poets of early twentieth- century modernism, Gumilev was a target of the Soviet secret police but was rehabilitated in the Thaw period and came to identify himself as a “Russian Spengler” (Bassin 2016, 68). In the Russia of the 1990s, Lev Gumilev’s theories resonated well with Huntington’s thesis about the incompatibility of civilizations and their inevitable clash. (On Gumilev as a civilizationist, see Bassin 2016, 68–71.) Another important source for maintaining and restoring Spengler’s reputation was the cultural historian Sergei Averintsev. He lectured on Spengler and authored an essay on him, published first in a 1968 issue of the academic journal Voprosy literatury and again in 1981 in the US as a chapter in the émigré edition of Averinstev’s essays (Averintsev 1981). He was also the author of an entry on Spengler in the third edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1969–1978). Averintsev sought to debunk what he undoubtedly saw as a Soviet bias by highlighting Spengler’s refusal to work with the Nazis and also by contextualizing his work in the tradition of German philosophy. In Averintsev’s estimation, tailored for the Soviet reader, Spengler’s understanding of culture as a structure tied him with Herder, Hegel, and Marx. Averintsev’s essays as well as Gumilev’s work made Spengler’s ideas available to the Russian-language intellectual readership, both in the Soviet Union and outside it, and secured his intellectual legacy for years to come. The Decline of the West has been retranslated and republished several times; the first post-Soviet edition came out in 1993. When considering contemporary Russian Spenglerism, it should be kept in mind that Spengler was one of the Western canonical thinkers who had been left outside the Soviet canon, and thus his popularity, in the post-Soviet years, must be understood in the context of Russian readers’ vast interest in Western literature, philosophy, and religious thought that had not been available to them in the Soviet period and that was considered by many as a once-lost and now-retrieved European cultural heritage.14 Moreover, the appeal of Spengler’s thought in the current Russian civilizational spirit undoubtedly owes something not only to the rise of conservatism and the epitomic metaphor of Europe’s, or the

Introduction  13 West’s, “decline” but also to Spengler’s isolationist bent. Spengler promoted the idea that cultures do not interact with each other but develop as closed entities. The preoccupation with long-term curves of civilizational-cultural development (growth-peak-decline) unites today’s civilizationists with Spengler, Danilevsky, and Gumilev.15 What may seem as an unexpected selling point, used by the publisher of the 2009 Russian edition of The Decline in a new translation, is the presentation of the book to the Russian reader as “a fresh look at things we thought we knew long since” (Shpengler 2009). The third intellectual context important for civilizationism in postSoviet intellectual production is Eurasianism—both the classical Russian émigré movement of the 1920s and the late Soviet and early post-Soviet “neo-Eurasianism” of such thinkers as Lev Gumilev, Aleksandr Dugin, and Aleksandr Panarin. Although “civilization” was not a key concept in the writings of the leading figures of classical Eurasianism, their ideas and theories were “civilizational,” or are now understood as such, in that they contrasted Russia with Western European civilization, often conceptualizing the contrast in terms of religion and culture, while seeing Russia as actively interacting with the other cultures of the Eurasian continent, in particular, the Turkic ones.16 Post-Soviet neo-Eurasianism is a highly diverse phenomenon, where a main distinction should be drawn between the Russian, or Russocentric, version and the Eurasianism encountered in Central Asia and other Muslim countries, especially Kazakhstan. As for the Russian version, it often serves as an “ideology of empire” (Laruelle 2008), promoting a Russia-led empire as the appropriate form of statehood for the Eurasian space. This means that, in the post-Soviet context, Eurasianism has become an ideology for reintegration of the so-called post-Soviet countries by maintaining their alleged social, cultural, historical, and, consequently, political unity. Perhaps even more important to Russian neo-Eurasianism, however, is the opposition of Russia/Eurasia to the West, which has led to a strong focus on geopolitics, of which the writings of Aleksandr Dugin are the most representative (Laruelle 2008, 115–120). Aleksandr Panarin’s neo-Eurasianism consists above all in his firm rejection of globalization as a process led by the West and creating cultural uniformity across the globe (see, e.g., Panarin 1998). His vision of Eurasia represents an alternative historical project centered on civilization and empire as safeguards of cultural pluralism. As for “Eurasia proper,” it should be noted that Eurasia for Panarin means first and foremost the Eurasian space as dominated by Russian statehood, the Russian people, and Orthodoxy, rather than a genuine symbiosis with, for instance, Turkic peoples (Laruelle 2008, 93, 101–103). Thus, what one encounters in Panarin is the postcolonial legacy of classical Eurasianism and its anti-colonial rejection of Western hegemony (cf. Glebov 2017, 3, 78–110) rather than an intense engagement with the cultures of the East. This brings Panarin closer to such nationalist thinkers as Nataliia Narochnitskaia, with whom he shares the

14  Sanna Turoma and Kåre Johan Mjør belief in a “thousand-year-old Russian civilization,” understood primarily as an eternally Orthodox, transhistorical “Third Rome,” and seen as constantly threatened by the West and globalization, but still able to survive various attacks by other civilizations (Mjør 2016, 2019; Østbø 2016). For both Panarin and Narochnitskaia, civilization, or rather the diversity of civilizations, appears as the best alternative to globalization. Panarin’s and Narochnitskaia’s writings highlight the imperial and civilizational significations often imbedded in Russian nationalist imagery, also testifying to the Eurasianist legacy present in them. Russia’s multiethnic character is integral to Russia’s statehood and to its sphere of influence, which Narochnitskaia (2003, 399–454) terms “post-Byzantine space.” For Panarin, Russia is both an Orthodox nation and a Eurasian empire, and for Panarin to conceptualize this vision, the notion of civilization proved particularly attractive. Thus, the imperial understanding of the Russian state as civilization has become increasingly central to Russian intellectual production after the initial “culturological” phase, which focused mainly on culture and religion. The concept of culture remains important, but it is merging with the state as an ideological construct and a point of national and imperial identification.

Imperial anxieties of a multireligious state Rogers Brubaker’s discussion of the major differences between the nationalpopulist movements in the US and Europe focuses on their respective and hostile responses to Islam. The ironies of the current European populism are captured in Brubaker’s final conclusion: As Europe becomes more secular, it is increasingly represented as (Judeo-) Christian, in constitutive opposition to Islam. Christianity is celebrated as the matrix of liberalism, secularity, and gender equality. Seemingly nationalist projects and parties may be less nationalist than civilizationist. And even as the European project falters—with the Eurozone, Schengen, and the EU itself in deep crisis—a European identity, defined in religio-civilizational terms, has come to figure more centrally in political rhetoric. (Brubaker 2017, 2012) Civilizationism, then, is not taking the place of nationalism but, as Brubaker concludes, is combining with it. Despite the many parallels between the Euro-American national populism and the populism of the Russian state apparatus, there are obviously several differences, too. For one, Russian identitarian Christianism (Russian Orthodox Christianism) as the state’s populist strategy is used not to celebrate liberalism but to carve out a position in opposition to European liberalism. For Vladimir Putin “liberalism has become obsolete,” as he

Introduction  15 declared in an interview at the G20 summit in Osaka in June 2019 (Financial Times 2019), referring clearly to identity politics associated with Western liberalism. Putin’s slur about the “excessiveness” of gender identities and his critique of liberal migration regimes would appeal to at least some constituencies of Northern and Western European populists, despite his ostensibly anti-Western stance. But, more importantly, there are contextual differences that rise from societal and historical factors informing Russian attitudes and worldviews about religions and Islam. The multinational make-up of the Russian Federation sets Russia apart from European national contexts as well as from the US. There are more than 180 nationalities recorded in contemporary Russia, and such ethnic nationalities as Adygei, Avars, Azeris, Balkars, Bashkirs, Chechens, Cherkess, Dargins, Ingush, Kabards, Karachai, Kazakhs, Kumuks, Laks, Lezgins, Tabasarans, Tajiks, Tatars, Turkmen, Turks, and Uzbeks identify as Muslims, with a total of nine republics of the Russian Federation having a Muslim majority (Simons 2019). This is related to Islam’s status as one of Russia’s “traditional religions,” which in legal terms means that Islam, among the other traditional religions, is protected by the 2013 legislation on “insulting religious feelings.” Russia’s multinational demographic make-up and the place of Islam and Muslim communities within this multinationalism follows from the Russian Empire’s historical expansion over the Eurasian landmass. This brought the predominantly Orthodox Russians into close connection with the region’s Muslim populations. These interactions have shaped individual lives and state policies for centuries.17 The Soviet Union struggled with the legacies of the Russian Empire’s colonizing processes and civilizing mission, while Soviet nationality, language, and cultural policies, in addition to post-Soviet economic and military developments, have informed the social realities, cultural imagery, and political rationalities of the Chechen wars, the Crimean annexation, and Central Asian migration.18 Islam’s status as one of the four “traditional religions” of the Russian Federation—the other three being Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism— does not mean, obviously, that there is no Islamophobia in today’s Russia. Islam is protected against offence while its activities may also be restricted, as Kaarina Aitamurto shows in her recent case study of anti-Muslim action against building mosques in Moscow and of the reception of Charlie Hebdo in Russian media (Aitamurto 2016). Vladimir Putin’s often-quoted article “The National Question” (2012) illustrates how Russia’s leadership instrumentalizes religiosity and appropriates the “traditional religions” as a source of Russian traditional morality and conservatism. In this speech Putin appealed to the religious communities, calling for an active involvement of Russia’s traditional religions in the dialogue [about the formation of national policies]. The foundations of the

16  Sanna Turoma and Kåre Johan Mjør Christian Orthodox Church, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism—with all their differences and peculiarities—include basic shared moral, ethical, and spiritual values: compassion, reciprocity, truth, justice, respect for elders, family and work values. (Putin 2012) In line with the doctrine of civilizational distinctiveness, Russian politicians and officials tend to support local and national forms of Islam, at least when regarded as moderate, while transnational Islam is understood as a security threat to Russia (Aitamurto 2019). Meanwhile, state-appointed Islamic authorities are eager to present Islam as a national asset, and the discourse of Islamic leaders seeking an authoritative position resembles that of Russian Orthodox leaders (Kemper 2019; Sibgatullina 2019). Russia’s religio-civilizational plurality is, however, easily dismissed by Russian nationalists’ vision of the Russian civilization. Envisaging the rebirth of Russia in the early 1990s, nationalist thinkers such as Oleg Platonov and Evgenii Troitskii adopted the civilizational approach. In that decade Troitskii, often labeled a neo-Slavophile, published numerous books preoccupied first with the “Russian idea” and then increasingly with “Russian civilization.” The goal of his books was to contribute to the “complex study of the Russian nation,” which was the title of his “Association,” under the heading of which he published his books and organized a series of seminars. Platonov, who as early as 1992 published a book titled The Russian Civilization—republished many times since—is the director of the “Institute for Russian Civilization,” founded in 2003 (see Kåre Johan Mjør’s contribution to this volume). Central to both Platonov’s and Troitskii’s definitions of “Russian civilization” is an imaginary Russian Orthodox spiritual unity based on values such as collectivism and anti-materialism, which they firmly oppose to the individualism and materialism of Western civilization. Although they developed these ideas simultaneously with Huntington—the latter’s thesis of “the clash of civilizations” got an immediate favorable response from Troitskii (1994, 8)—the difference between the Russian thinkers and Huntington is striking: Instead of envisaging multiple civilizations competing for global domination, the geopolitical imagination of the Russian thinkers was trapped in the opposition between Russia and the West, a struggle with a long tradition in Russian imperial and nation-building discourse. In the 1990s, the leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Gennadii Ziuganov, President Boris Yeltsin’s main political opponent, expressed ideas similar to those of Platonov and Troitskii but combined them with his particular version of statism. Like Troitskii, he, too, shifted gradually from the use of “Russian idea” to “civilization” in order to capture what he saw as the defining characteristics of Russia: strong statehood, Orthodox spirituality, and a Russian ethnic core of a multiethnic empire. These ideas were formulated in explicit opposition to the hegemonic Westernization of

Introduction  17 Russia allegedly advanced by the political elite of the 1990s. In addition, Ziuganov promoted the idea of regional and local civilizations in order to defend Russia’s geopolitical claims for its “lost” territories in the “near abroad” (blizhnee zarubezh’e) vis-à-vis the West. There were several similarities between Huntington, the Western “New Right,” and the new Communist Party of the Russian Federation, which in the post-Soviet context had become a conservative, nationalist force (Jokisalo and Oittinen 1998; Mjør 2019, 291–294). Since then, Russian public intellectuals have increasingly sought to combine the idea of “Russian civilization” as the manifestation of an independent Russian-Orthodox spiritual culture with notions of statehood or empire, continuing thereby Ziuganov’s efforts of the 1990s. According to Aleksandr Verkhovskii and Emil Pain (2010), the Russian civilizational approach of the new millennium, or what Verkhovskii and Pain call “civilizational nationalism,” is characterized precisely by the attempt to combine or blend ethnic and imperial nationalism. The civilizational paradigm has therefore had widespread appeal among Russian neoimperialists, including the thinkers associated with neo-Eurasianism. Aleksandr Dugin, one of the leading proponents of this ideology, sees “core Russia” as “the empire’s constitutive nation,” while being an ardent supporter of the myths about Russia as an Orthodox, Eurasian empire (Laruelle 2008, 138–141; Clowes 2011, 43–67; Østbø 2016, 124–161). And civilizationism appeals to the contemporary Russian Orthodox Church, whose notion of an “Orthodox civilization” operates with ethnic and Orthodox Russia(ns) as a core—both of an Orthodox world (which extends to the Orthodox Balkans) and of the multiconfessional Russia. The Orthodox Church, too, understands religion and faith as interconnected with geographical space (Laruelle 2009, 165; Richters 2012; see also Victor Shnirelman’s contribution to this volume). Therefore, apart from “culture” and “values,” post-Soviet intellectual civilizationism has been obsessed with territory, in particular, the “lost” territory which saw the creation of new, independent states in 1991. Even when presented as “Eurasian,” “Russian civilization” means “civilization defined according to lands” (Verkhovskii and Pain 2010, 172; Meduzhevsky 2012, 169), where the aim is nevertheless to signalize that Russia is more than an ordinary country, i.e., it is exceptional. By implication, Russian post-Soviet civilizationism is a flexible phenomenon that accommodates both nationalism, with its emphasis on allegedly distinctive, separate cultures and values, including the state itself, and a pride in religious diversity and multiethnicity.

Conclusion Although the local intellectual contexts were crucial in shaping the civilizational models in the 1990s, the “substitution hypothesis” (civilizationism as a substitute for Marxism) cannot fully explain why the civilizational paradigm has remained so popular in Russia. The impact of Russia’s identity

18  Sanna Turoma and Kåre Johan Mjør crisis of the 1990s may still be discernable in Putin’s fourth term, but Russia is no longer headed toward what Mikhail Gorbachev called the “common European house.” After the turn of the millennium, Russia saw unprecedented economic growth, regained some of its lost authority in international politics, and entered into new conflicts with the EU and the US. Thus, the roots for the persistent appeal of civilizational models in Russia must be sought in the geopolitical context and its response and resistance to the processes of globalization. These models serve to formulate a Russian identity and maintain its sovereignty in a globalized world and in opposition to that world. Meanwhile, at the end of the 2010s, Russian civilizationism resonates with civilizationism in other parts of the world, where similar discontent with globalization, often understood as an increase in migration, has become prominent. The idea Vladimir Putin put forward in his 2012 article about Russia as a “state-civilization” was by no means his own invention. In fact, the concept of state-civilization had been coined by Mikhail Remizov (2005), a young conservative specialist in political philosophy. Thus, Putin’s articulations about Russia as a civilization are an example of how, to evoke Kapustin’s terms, the “big discourse” made up of academic, public, and ideological writing entered the “small discourse” of politics.19 With this, one may conclude, Russian civilizationism at present is no longer that of the defeated, as it may have been in the 1990s when articulated by Troitskii, Ziuganov, Dugin, and others, but is now the hegemonic voice (cf. Laruelle 2009, 200–201). However, this hegemonic voice at home presents itself as resistance to another kind of hegemony—resistance to Western dominance under the umbrella of globalization. This reveals the paradox of civilizationism à la russe: It insists on adhering to its own path (Sonderweg), but it is part of a broader phenomenon, seeks to be influential internationally, and, above all, is highly dependent on the alleged colonizer (the West). It cannot but conceive of itself in relation to the West, or to put it in other words, Russia and the West remain mutually constitutive in the Russian state’s identitybuilding process (cf. Morozov 2015). And, in one more paradoxical note, the political elites’ anti-globalization stance is formed in a position in which they benefit from what they ostensibly resist, i.e., cultural and economic forms of globalization. The civilizational turn has been a conservative turn. The civilizational approach holds that civilizations cannot be subject to substantial reforms or temporal transformations but are rather unique and isolated self-sustained entities with immutable interests that must be protected. Influential among conservative thinkers, a label that in this context must be extended to include post-Soviet communists and apologists of the Soviet Union (who are not necessarily Marxists anymore) such as Ziuganov (2009) and Sergei Kara-Murza (2011), the civilizational ethos is, thus, quasi-utopian in Karl Mannheim’s sense (1936, 206–212, see also Clowes 2011). It is aimed at the preservation of, defense of, and, when needed, return to the old order.

Introduction  19 In the post-Soviet case, it has been a response to, and even “counter-attack” against, the introduction of Western liberalism on Russian soil, and it is this moment of reaction that, according to Mannheim, justifies calling conservatism “utopian,” although the “conservative mentality as such has no utopia” (Mannheim 1936, 206). During perestroika “civilization” represented transformation and reform, but already in the 1990s the ideologeme of “Russian civilization” had become a plea for returning to an old order and former greatness. Thus, we draw the conclusions that civilizational discourse is deployed by the Russian state apparatus to smooth over Russia’s uncomfortable hybridity, the ambiguity of its statehood, the perpetual oscillation between the West and the East as well as between a nation state and an empire, tensions that Olga Malinova explores in her contribution to this volume. Since the birth of modern nation states, empires have been seen as aggressors and violators of national sovereignty: No state can identify as an empire. The lofty, positively high-minded, and historically affirmative connotations of civilization, on the other hand, make it a lucrative concept to be capitalized on in terms of popular support by the citizens. Who, after all, does not want to be part of a civilization?

Notes 1 For a sympathetic and not particularly critical attempt at an overview of all civilizational conceptions circulating in Russia by 2013, see Kostiaev and Maksimova 2013. For instance, the chapter entitled “The specificity of Russia’s civilizational process” lists 113 names and their approaches (Kostiaev and Maksimova 2013, 140–202). 2 For a recent but different way of using “civilizational identity” as a framework for analyzing current political attitudes in Russia, see Hale 2019. 3 The distinction between civilization and culture, or their terminological indistinctiveness, is a large topic. The fact alone that the two concepts have different meanings in different linguistic contexts and intellectual traditions makes it a challenging question. For a discussion of the distinction, see Williams 1988, 57–60 and 87–93; Botz-Bornstein 2012. 4 In a telling comment on Vladimir Putin’s famous Crimea Speech (March 2014), Laruelle maintained that the “critical argument” there was Russia’s geopolitical situation vis-à-vis the West and the role of Ukraine in that respect, as well as the threat of NATO expansion, whereas “the russkii nature of Crimea,” i.e., that it is “Russian land” in an ethnonationalist sense “arrived only as a supplementary bonus” (Laruelle 2016, 276). For the current Russian regime, as Laruelle seems to claim, then, geopolitical interests are more important than ideas. 5 Makarychev sees the Kremlin’s effort to formulate “a national idea/l” as a failure to produce “ideological authenticity,” and, instead, the Kremlin rhetoric offers little else than “vague and loosely articulated ideas of the ‘Russian world’ as a family-like organic community, or Russia’s civilizational self-sufficiency” (Makarychev 2016, 132). 6 We are grateful for Vesa Oittinen’s comments on the preparation of this manuscript and found useful his Finnish-language essay “Marxin ideologiateoria— kiistoja ja tulkintoja” (Marx’s theory of ideology—debates and interpretations)

20  Sanna Turoma and Kåre Johan Mjør

7 8

9

10

11

12

in Oittinen (2018, 85–117). Vesa Oittinen’s collection of essays on Marx is forthcoming in English from Palgrave 2020. For the original discussion of “manufacturing consent” in an American context, see Herman and Chomsky 1988. See also Chomsky’s update and reference to Russia in Herman and Chomsky 2009. We find useful Eagleton’s approach to ideology not as consciousness or ideas but as “a discursive or semiotic phenomenon,” which “at once emphasizes its materiality (since signs are material entities), and preserves the sense that it is essentially concerned with meaning. Talk of signs and discourses is inherently social and practical, whereas terms like ‘consciousness’ are residues of an idealist tradition of thought” (Eagleton 1991, 194). Eagleton’s take on ideological formation, which he draws from the Russian philosopher V.N. Voloshinov and the French linguist Michel Pêcheux, is equally informative. According to Eagleton, a discursive formation “can be seen as a set of rules which determine what can and must be said from a certain position within social life; and expressions have meaning only by virtue of the discursive formations within which they occur, changing significance as they are transported from one to the other. A discursive formation thus constitutes a ‘matrix of meaning’ or system of linguistic relations within which actual discursive processes are generated” (Eagleton 1991, 195). On ideology as discourse constituted by ideologemes, see also David-Fox 2015, 91, 94. Civilizationism in today’s Russia overlaps with the current conservative discourse and practice. This fact recalls to mind Michael Freeden’s (2003, 97–100) distinction between “micro-ideologies” and “macro-ideologies,” classical examples of the latter being socialism, liberalism, conservatism, communism, and fascism. “Macro-ideologies” address the broad spectrum of social and economic phenomena, whereas “micro-ideologies” are potentially expansive in terms of new fields to include, with cultural policy as one example. A microideology ­(civilizationism) can inscribe itself into a macroideology, such as conservatism. For ideologemes, see Fredric Jameson’s well-known definition of an ideologeme as “the smallest intelligible unit of the essentially antagonistic collective discourses of social classes” (1981, 76; see also Zweerde 2017). On the conceptual history of civilization and its significations in the age of Enlightenment, see Monnier 2008 and Velizhev 2019, 24–69. On civilization as understood by European and Russian thinkers in the first half of the nineteenth century, see Evtukhov 2003. The concept of civilization as it emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was increasingly “temporalized” in Reinhart Koselleck’s (1979) sense: It became a “concept for the future” (Zukunftsbegriff ) that referred to a universal project, addressing an increasing number of domains without specifying what was subject to the civilizing process. In other words, “civilization” with its increasingly totalizing character was what Koselleck has described as a Kollektivsingular (1979, 76), a process that went hand in hand with that of conceptual temporalization, both highly characteristic of the political language of modernity. Postmodernity, by contrast, is characterized by a pluralization and particularization of concepts, e.g. a reversal of the processes analyzed by Koselleck with respect to the period 1750–1850 (Khapaeva 2005). The post-Soviet concept of civilization is a case in point, in our view. In Western European thought by the time of Guizot and his contemporaries, there also emerged the notion of civilizations in the plural (civilizations in an ethnographic sense), Europe being one (and the foremost) among several. However, this meaning remained secondary to civilization as individual perfection and social progress (Kumar 2014, 822–824). Russian thinkers began the pluralization of civilization at the same time, for instance in the writings of Ivan

Introduction  21

13

14

15

16

17

18 19

Iastrebtsov (1830s), who is credited with introducing the very term tsivilizatsiia in Russian, in a context where it would “compete” with prosveshenie, obrazovanie and grazhdanstvennost’, depending on which meaning was intended (Velizhev 2019, 77–84). The process of pluralizing the notion culminated with Danilevsky, who was far more radical in this respect than his Western contemporaries. See, for instance, the recently established journal Problemy tsivilizatsionnogo razvitiia (Problems of civilizational development) by the Institute of Philosophy at RAN (Russian Academy of Science) https://civstudies.ru. See also Footnote 19. For a typical reference to Spengler in a Russian culturological production, see https://kultyres.ru/stati2/tsivilizatsionniy_podhod.html. Among the many recent Russian reflections on Spengler by Russian conservative thinkers and journalists, see, for instance, Mezhuev 2016, 2018. However, although they express support for models of long-term curves of civilizational-cultural development à la Danilevsky, Spengler, Toynbee and Gumilev—in particular, with regard to Western “decline”—contemporary Russian civilizationists tend not to operate with such models for Russia to the same extent. Russia, by contrast, is expected to recover and be regenerated from the post-Soviet turmoil and move towards former greatness. See Mjør 2016. There is a large body of literature on Eurasianists, the classical and the more contemporary currents; see, for instance, Laruelle 2008; Bassin, Glebov, and Laruelle 2016; Bassin and Pozo 2017 (the latter focuses particularly on contemporary versions); and Glebov 2017. There is a large body of literature about Russia’s imperial expansion and colonization processes. The work that most likely initiated the wide interest today was Kappeler 1992. A recent broad overview of Russia’s imperial history is Kivelson and Suny 2017. The contributions to the special issue “The Image of Islam in Russia” in Religion, State, and Society (47/2, 2019) offers useful and informative perspectives on Islam in contemporary Russia. For a recent example of how the “big discourse” of academia is currently responding favorably to the “small discourse” of politics (official rhetoric), see Spiridonova, Sokolova and Shevchenko 2016. (See also Footnote 13.) This book is an example of the tendencies discussed in Mikhail Suslov and Irina Kotkina’s contribution to this volume.

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Introduction  23 Jameson, Frederic. 1981. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Jokisalo, Jouko, and Vesa Oittinen. 1998. “Huntington erhält Beifall von rechts und links.” In Frieden konkret: Dialog der Zivilisationen—Kultur des Friedens, edited by Volker Bialas, Endre Kiss and Wolfgang Scheler, 28–42. Dresden: DSS. Kappeler, Andreas. 1992. Russland als Vielvölkerreich: Entstehung—Geschichte— Zerfall. Munich: Beck. Kapustin, Boris. 2009. “Some Political Meanings of ‘Civilization’.” Diogenes 56 (2–3): 151–169. Kara-Murza, Sergei. 2011. Rossiia i zapad: Paradigmy tsivilizatsii. Moscow: Akademicheskii proekt. Kemper, Michael. 2019. “Religious Political Technology: Damir Mukhetdinov’s ‘Russian Islam’.” Religion, State, and Society 47 (2): 214–233. Khapaeva, Dina. 2005. Gertsogi respubliki v epokhu perevodov: Gumanitarnye nauki i revoliutsii poniatii. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. Kivelson, Valerie A. and Ronald Grigor Suny. 2017. Russia’s Empires. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Konstitutsiia. 1993. Konstitutsiia Rossiiskoi federatsii: Razdel pervyi: Osnovnye polozheniia. http://www.constitution.ru/10003000/10003000-3.htm (accessed 22 July 2019). Koselleck, Reinart. 1979. Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Kostiaev, Aleksandr, and Nadezhda Maksimova. 2013. Sovremennaia rossiiskaia tsivilizatsiologiia: Podkhody, problemy, poniatiia. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo LKI. Kumar, Krishan. 2014. “The Return of Civilization—and of Arnold Toynbee?” Comparative Studies in Society and History 56 (4): 815–843. Laclau, Ernesto. 1996. Emancipation(s). London: Verso. Laruelle, Marlène. 2004. “The Discipline of Culturology: A New ‘Ready-Made Thought’ for Russia.” Diogenes 51 (4): 21–36. Laruelle, Marlène. 2008. Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press. Laruelle, Marlène. 2009. In the Name of the Nation: Nationalism and Politics in Contemporary Russia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Laruelle, Marlène. 2016. “Russia as an Anti-Liberal Russian Civilization.” In The New Russian Nationalism: Imperialism, Ethnicity and Authoritarianism, 2000– 2015, edited by Pål Kolstø and Helge Blakkisrud, 275–294. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Laruelle, Marlène, and Jean Radvanyi. 2019. Understanding Russia: The Challenges of Transformation. Lanham, MD: Roman & Littlefield. Lazarev, Viktor. 1922. Osval’d Shpengler i ego vzgliady na iskusstvo. Moscow: Mironov. Makarychev, Andrey. 2016. “The War in Chechnya in Russian Cinematographic Representations: Biopolitical Patriotism in ‘Unsovereign’ Times.” Transcultural Studies: A Journal for Interdisciplinary Research 12 (1): 115–135. Mannheim, Karl. 1936. Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1970. The German Ideology. New York: International Publishers. Mchedlov, Miran, et al. (ed.). 1999. Rossiiskaia tsivilizatsiia: Etnokul’turnye i dukhovnye aspekty: Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’. Moscow: Respublika.

24  Sanna Turoma and Kåre Johan Mjør Meduzhevsky, Andrey. 2012. “Conservative Political Romanticism in Post-Soviet Russia.” In Power and Legitimacy: Challenges from Russia, edited by Per-Arne Bodin, Stefan Hedlund and Elena Namli, 169–187. London: Routledge. Mezhuev, Boris. 2016. “Po Shpengleru konets istorii—Podavlenie bunta tsennosti protiv zhizni.” September 21. https://mezhuev.su/articles/165-interv-ju/ 54123-po-shpengleru-konets-istorii-podavlenie-bunta-tsennoste-protiv-zhizni (accessed 6 July 2019). Mezhuev, Boris. 2018. “Russkii ‘tsivilizatsionnyi kod’: ‘Opravdanie otssov’?” Russkaia!dea: Sait konservativnoi politicheskoi mysli, September 17. https:// politconservatism.ru/articles/russkij-tsivilizatsionnyj-kod-opravdanie-ottsov (accessed 6 July 2018). Miller, Chris. 2018. Putinomics: Power and Money in Resurgent Russia. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Minkul’tury. 2017. “Min’kultury Rossii predstavilo zakonoproekt ‘O kul’ture v Rossiiskoi Federatsii.” Ministerstvo kul’tury Rossiiskoi Federatsii, October 6. https://www.mkrf.ru/press/news/minkultury-rossii-predstavilo-zakonoproekt-okulture-v-rossiyskoy-federatsii20171006173558/?sphrase_id=2475855 (accessed 22 July 2019). Minkul’tury. 2019. “Kontseptsiia proekta federal’nogo zakona ‘O kul’ture’.” Ministerstvo kul’tury Rossiiskoi Federatsii, March 23. https://www.mkrf.ru/press/current/ kontseptsiya_proekta_federalnogo_zakona_o_kulture/ (accessed 22 July 2019). Mitrofanova, Anastasiia. 2008. “Natsionalizm i paranauka.” In Russkii natsionalizm: Sotsial’nyi i kul’turnyi kontekst, edited by Marlène Laruelle, 87–102. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. Mjør, Kåre Johan. 2016. “A Morphology of Russia? The Russian Civilisational Turn and its Cyclical Idea of History.” In Philosophical and Cultural Interpretations of Russian Modernisation, edited by Arto Mustajoki and Katja Lehtisaari, 56–70. London: Routledge. Mjør, Kåre Johan. 2019. “‘Russia’s Thousand-Year History’: Claiming a Past in Contemporary Russian Thought.” In Contemporary Russian Conservatism: Problems, Paradoxes, and Perspectives, edited by Mikhail Suslov and Dmitry Uzlaner, 281–303. Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill. Monnier, Raymonde. 2008. “The Concept of civilisation from Enlightenment to Revolution: An Ambiguous Transfer.” Contributions to the History of Concepts 4: 106–136. Morozov, Viatcheslav. 2015. Russia’s Postcolonial Identity: A Subaltern Empire in a Eurocentric World. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Narochnitskaia, Nataliia. 2003. Rossiia i russkie v mirovoi istorii. Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia. Oittinen, Vesa. 2018. Marx & moderni: Jatkuvuuksia ja katkoksia Marx-kuvassa. Tampere: niin & näin. Osnovy. 1992. “Osnovy zakonodatel’stva Rossiiskoi federatsii o kul’ture.” http:// pravo.gov.r u /proxy/ips/?docbody=&nd=102018866& intelsearch=%CE% F1%ED%EE%E2%FB+%E7%E0%EA%EE%ED%EE%E4%E0%F2%E5% EB%FC %F1%F2%E2%E0+%D 0%EE%F1%F1%E8%E9%F1%EA%EE% E9+%D4%E5%E4%E5%F0%E0%F6%E8%E8+%EE+%EA%F3%EB%FC% F2%F3%F0%E5 (accessed 6 July 2019). Østbø, Jardar. 2016. The New Third Rome: Readings of a Russian Nationalist Myth. Stuttgart: Ibidem.

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1

“Nation” and “civilization” as templates for Russian identity construction A historical overview Olga Malinova

In recent decades, the term “civilization” has reached beyond academic and intellectual discourses as a category of identity construction and policy description. Samuel Huntington’s seminal work (Huntington 1993) became both a mark and an influential driver of this tendency. A proliferation of “civilizational talk,” i.e., various discourses narrating civilizations as developing cultural units and competing geopolitical actors, gives rise to “civilizational politics” (Bettiza 2014, 1), which makes such “imagined communities” a social fact capable of guiding and structuring social action at national and international levels. The concept of civilization is not a new tool for identity construction. Both “civilization” in the singular and “civilizations” in the plural have been used for that purpose. Civilization in the singular marks a distinction between civilization and barbarism and describes the development of the universal (Western) civilization. Civilizations in the plural, developed especially by Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee after the end of World War I, provided firm grounds for rising nationalisms, first in anti-colonial and later in post-colonial contexts. In a non-Western context, the concept of civilizations worked as “the spiritual, moral, and universal core” that furnished new nations “with the same kind of authenticating and authorizing function that Civilization furnished for Western imperialist nations” (Duara 2001, 107; see also Bradley 2004; Duara 2004). However, it was after the end of the Cold War and collapse of “the second world” that the “narrated civilizational imaginaries” became visible as factors shaping formal institutions and patterned practices in international arenas and empowering actors who claim to speak in their name (Bettiza 2014, 23). In the Russian case, civilizational talk (Bettiza 2014, 5) demonstrates a specific dialectic of domestic and foreign policy aspects. Since the 1990s, the concept of “civilization” has been used increasingly for descriptions of post-Soviet Russian identity in academic and public discourses (Shnirel’man 2007). It has also penetrated into political rhetoric. In particular, it played an important role in re-interpretation of the Soviet historical narrative by post-Soviet Communists (see Malinova 2015, 50–51). In the 2000s, an evident rehabilitation of the imperial legacy in Russian public discourse

28  Olga Malinova (Malinova 2010; Miller 2010) facilitated its further proliferation. Scholars trace a formation of the civilizational discourse in ideas expressed by such different public figures as Patriarch Kirill, former Minister of Railroad Transportation Vladimir Iakunin, and Communist Party leader Gennadii Ziuganov (Tsygankov 2016, 150), as well as Vladislav Surkov, a prominent official in Putin’s Administration, and public intellectuals such as Boris Mezhuev, Sergei Karaganov, and Mikhail Remizov (Ferguson and Akopov 2019). From the domestic perspective, this discourse provides a specific conception of Russian identity. A civilizational description of the identity of the multinational people of the Russian Federation (as it is termed in the Constitution) allows an emphasis on its Russian cultural core, avoiding the contentious alternative—the term “Russian nation” (russkaia natsiia), which has a strong ethnonationalist connotation (Tolz 1998; Shevel 2011). Some scholars fairly describe such discursive practice as “civilizational nationalism” (Pain and Verkhovskii 2010). From the foreign policy perspective, constructing Russia as a “distinct civilization” supports its presumed great power status and emphasizes its role as vis-à-vis “the West” and “the East” (Tsygankov 2008). These perspectives are interconnected, as the civilizational discourse not only shapes the shared perception of the Western “other” but also works as a tool of political mobilization. The emergence of civilizational talk in the discourse of high public officials is particularly remarkable, as it reflects some changes in both domestic and foreign policy. On the one hand, it appeared as a reaction to the opposition from the Russian nationalists who were an active element of the protest movement in 2011–2012. In the new context, the ruling elite felt it was necessary to break with the tactics of playing down the natsional’nyi vopros (nationalities question) and provide a more explicit articulation of the official position (see Laruelle 2016; Linde 2016a). Representing Russia as a “state-civilization” became an opportune solution. On the other hand, it is hardly a surprise that “the civilizational turn” in the official discourse preceded the dramatic deterioration of Russia’s relations with the West that started with suspicions about foreign support of the anti-Putin opposition in 2011–2012 and developed into a full-fledged crisis after the annexation of Crimea in 2014. As Ian Ferguson and Sergei Akopov demonstrate, the idea of Russia’s civilizational interests is now at the heart of a rather influential current in foreign policy thought (2019). Of course, the term “civilization” has been a part of the lexicon of all Russian presidents, but until 2012 it was used mostly in the singular, denoting the “all-human” civilization. It was in 2012, during Vladimir Putin’s electoral campaign, that Russia became conceptualized in opposition to other civilizations, as “a unique multi-ethnic civilization that is fastened by the Russian cultural core” (Putin 2012a). Since then Putin has come back to this idea several times in his speeches and interviews, thus giving a kind of semi-official blessing to the concept of the “civilizational” nature of Russian identity (Linde 2016b; Ferguson and Akopov 2019).

Russian identity construction overview  29 There are various explanations of the observable proliferation of civilizational talk in Russian political discourse. Victor Shnirelman, who has studied the development of the idea of “the Russian civilization” in academic discourse and school textbooks since the 1990s, interprets it as a “substitute” for the Marxist concept of socio-economic formation combined with Russian nationalism (Shnirel’man 2007). Fabian Linde considers Putin’s adoption of civilizational rhetoric as further development of the statist aspiration that he had demonstrated earlier (2016a, 25). According to Andrei Tsygankov, Putin’s use of civilizational categories should be considered a signal of cultural backlash to pressure from the West, as well as to the radicalization of the Islamic world (2016, 147). Marlène Laruelle argues that Putin’s use of civilizational discourse results from the complete development of “the ideological posture”1 based on a certain “civilizational grammar.” According to Laruelle, in the Russian context “there is a triple choice of identity: being a European country that follows the Western path of development; being a European country that follows a non-Western path of development; or being a non-European country” (Laruelle 2016, 278). She argues that, as early as the second half of the 1990s, the Russian ruling elite made a choice for the second option, which allows them “to rehabilitate Russia as the other Europe, making it possible to reject Western liberalism while claiming to be the authentic Europe” (Laruelle 2016, 295). But it took almost two decades to construct “an ideological posture, cemented around the concept of conservatism” that allows them to represent Russia as “an anti-liberal European civilization” (Laruelle 2016, 295). To continue Laruelle’s argument, I will not only look into particular ideological choices made by political actors but also probe further into the historical and discursive contexts that shape a range of meaningful options. I argue that the attractiveness of the concept of “civilization” in the Russian case is grounded on the symbolic resources that took shape over time. Two aspects of the historical tradition are particularly important here. The first is Russia’s imperial legacy, which involves a competition of different nationalisms and impedes a consolidation of the multiethnic nation. At the same time, it provides cultural and symbolic resources that make it tempting to use a supranational, or civilizational, template. The second aspect is a long tradition of constructing Russian identity through correlation with Europe/ the “West,” a tradition that produced a rich repertoire of ideas, symbols, and narratives facilitating Russia’s representation in civilizational terms. A construction of Russian identity should be considered the historical process of a (co)relation with external and internal “others,” involving questions of status, comparison and assessment, mutual attitudes, and emotional reactions (Tsygankov 2008; Malinova 2014). It depends on intersubjective understandings, i.e., results not only from “observable” differences and similarities between “self” and “the other” but also from current modes of their interpretation that have taken shape over time. In other words, identities come as discursive constructions that may be structured by various

30  Olga Malinova “templates.” According to Benedict Anderson’s influential postulation (Anderson 2006), nations can be understood as imagined communities. But they are not the only available model of imagining modern macro-political communities, i.e., bodies of people “constituting” a particular state. Imperial identity can be considered an alternative model of such an imaginary.2 In the twentieth century, with the decline of the idea of the universal civilization, the imperial principle has significantly lost its moral attractiveness. However, this is not the case with the idea of civilizations in the plural that comes as “the source of authenticity or truth” for many nations (Duara 2001, 106). If so, it makes sense to look at civilizational identity as a distinctive template of imagination of community that has much to do with imperial legacy but cannot be reduced to it (cf. Malinova 2012b; Akopov 2015). Empires, as political bodies integrating a culturally heterogeneous population of waste territories, contributed greatly to the emergence and development of what we now call civilizations. However, empires cannot be equated with civilizations as distinctive spiritual, moral, and cultural principles that, according to Arnold Toynbee’s conceptualization, had strong connections with major world religions. In the final analysis, not every empire was able to create a civilization. The fact that Europe/the “West” has been a significant reference point for Russia’s self-identification for a long time does not necessarily mean that the political community constituting the Russian state at its various historical stages was imagined according to the civilizational model. There is a remarkable area of scholarship demonstrating that the imperial context did not actually exclude an adaptation of the idea of nation (Miller 2008; Maiorova 2010). In the same way, arguing about Russia vis-à-vis Europe/the “West” does not necessarily involve a “civilizational” model of imagination. As I try to demonstrate below, such an argument could be compatible with the “nationalist” template as well. To distinguish between imperial and national, and between national and civilizational, visions and elements of Russian identity, we need to look carefully at particular texts and contexts. As the scope of this article does not allow me to present a comprehensive study of such dialectics in a proper sample of texts, I shall try to describe the general historical patterns of discursive construction of Russian/Soviet identity, focusing on the ideas of nation and civilization as competing templates of imagination. I argue that the disposition of the contemporary ruling elite to use both national and civilizational terms for the description of post-Soviet Russian identity is a result of a long tradition of its construction according to mixed templates, without fully fitting either one. According to Franklin and Widdis, Russianness “lies, in a sense, on a fault line between imperial and national identities; or more precisely, between geo-political and ethno-cultural criteria of self-definition” (2004, 5). Undecidedness on that matter contributes to the often-established uncertainty in Russian identity policy (see Zevelev 2008; Shevel 2011).

Russian identity construction overview  31 I start with preliminary theoretical assumptions concerning the ideas of nation and civilization as competing models of identity. Then I try to describe the dialectic of these models in the discursive construction of Russian identity since the nineteenth century. My observations are based on a body of texts produced in the context of debates about Russian identity vis-à-vis its European/Western other (see Malinova 2008, 2009, 2014). These texts comprise a broad spectrum of political and social thought that is relevant to the issue of Russian identity, which allows me to make some observations, even if their verification requires further research. In the conclusion, I raise a question about the conditions that could support a construction of Russian identity according to the civilizational template.

“Nation” and “civilization” as the templates of collective identity The modern political understanding of the world is significantly shaped by nationalism. I find useful Craig Calhoun’s definition of nationalism as “a discursive formation” that provides an influential “way of talking, writing, and thinking about the basic units of culture, politics, and belonging” (Calhoun 2007, 27). As a result, identities of the macro-political communities are often considered “national.” At an everyday level, nationalism informs the way we group people together, create political maps, or treat “societies as bounded, integral, wholes with distinctive identities, cultures, and institutions” (Calhoun 2007, 40). However, in some cases it is rather difficult to adjust identities of the macro-political communities that constitute already-existing states to the idea of nation. It might be because of competition between mutually exclusive projects of nation-building within one territory, but it might also be because of the availability of cultural and symbolic resources that tempt people to construct their identities according to supranational or civilizational models. Both these reasons apply to Russia. Benedict Anderson’s conception of nations as imagined communities is the theoretical point of departure for my analysis of the national and civilizational elements of the historical discourses about Russian identity. According to Anderson, “nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artefacts of a particular kind” that “became ‘modular’, capable of being transplanted, with varied degrees of self-consciousness, to a great variety of social terrains, to merge and to be merged with a correspondingly wide variety of political and ideological constellations” (Anderson 2006, 4). The question is how the adoption of such “modular” construction happens in the context where a competition between alternative modes of imagination of the same community takes place? To distinguish between these modes, we need some definitions. Unfortunately, there are no clear conventions concerning meanings of the terms “civilizational” and “national identity” in the literature. So, the operational

32  Olga Malinova descriptions provided below should be considered analytic tools based on selective analysis of various definitions. By Samuel Huntington’s definition, a civilization is the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have short of that which distinguishes humans from other species. It is defined both by common objective elements, such as language, history, religion, customs, institutions, and by the subjective self-identification of people. (Huntington 1993, 24) However, this definition provides no specific feature of civilizations as a mode of the imagination of community. The only exclusive characteristic in Huntington’s definition is the fact that civilization is “the broadest cultural entity.” But does this mean that civilizations are imagined in the same way as the other “distinct cultures at different levels of cultural heterogeneity” (Huntington 1993, 24)? A thorough look at the literature provides some additional suggestions for answering this question. The idea of civilization stems from the historical development of religious, cultural, and/or ideological projects that were capable of extending their influence over large areas (along with the political control of the empires that were their drivers). This model of a societal vision combines a locally fixed center and a potentially boundless periphery. According to Vadim Tsymburskii, a civilization is arranged according to the principle of the “sacred vertical”: The community that composes “the center” of the civilization is represented as a bearer of some specific ideas and cultural practices that match “the transcendental destination” of mankind (Tsymburskii 2001). The civilization is imagined as a hierarchy. In contrast to the idea of nation, the idea of civilization does not emphasize the homogeneity of an in-group contrasted to an out-group (people could be civilized in varying degrees) and does not insist on the symbolic equality of its members. However, in Huntington’s interpretation the idea of civilization becomes as exclusive as the idea of nation, because its opposite is not “barbarism,” but other “civilizations.” This “civilization” obtains a connotation of exclusiveness that, originally, is peculiar for the idea of nation. We may distinguish the following elements of nation as a mode of imagining a community. First, embeddedness in the historical territory that is perceived as a common Motherland (though its borders might be a matter of contestation). Second, a principle of cultural homogeneity based on common language, historical memory, cultural traditions, religion, etc. (the list of features is variable). The reverse side of this principle is the notion of the essential difference between “us” and the other communities that are considered nations. Third, the idea of nation supposes a pursuit of political, legal, and economic unity within the boundaries of “our own state” and development on the basis of its common civic culture. Fourth, it calls for

Russian identity construction overview  33 equal responsibility of the members of the nation for its “destiny” and for their equal right to take part in its determination (cf. Smith 1983, 20–21; Hobsbawm 1990, 19–20; Anderson 2006, 6–7; Coakley 2012, 6). Thus, the most important way in which the two modes of imagination of a community differ is that one calls for the hierarchical and potentially boundless structure of a civilization based on the idea of the “sacred vertical” (Tsymburskii) vs. the horizontal, and the other calls for the culturally homogeneous structure of a nation that does not allow for in-group variations and emphasizes outgroup distinctions.

The discourse about Russia and Europe/the “West” and adoption of the idea of nation in imperial Russia The idea of nation became a part of the Russian intellectual horizon at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century (Greenfeld 1992; Tishkov 2007). At least until the 1880s the central point of the Russian discourse about nation (the term of Kennedy and Suny 1999) was the maintenance of the “distinctive character” of the nation (samobytnost’) in the context of “catching-up modernization.” Anthony Smith delineates three “burdens” of nationalism: national autonomy, national unity, and national identity (1998). The last one clearly dominated in Russia for most of the nineteenth century, whereas the issue of national autonomy was not relevant for the discursive construction of Russian identity until the end of the nineteenth century. It was brought to the public agenda at the beginning of the twentieth century, in different versions. On the one hand, there was the slogan “Russia for the Russians” (Rossiia dlia russkikh) articulated by the ultra-nationalist Black Hundred Movement and the right-wing All-Russian National Union Party (1908–1917). It reflected an important shift in the discourse about nation since, for the new Radical Rights, the inner other (inorodtsy) appeared more important than the external one—the “West” (see Kotsubinskii 2001). On the other hand, there was the project of the “expanding Russian nation” within the empire, proposed by Petr Struve, which supposed a development of a modern nation at the core of the empire. As for the “burden” of national unity, it also played a significant role in this discourse, but until the end of the nineteenth century it was considered mostly in the context of overcoming the socio-cultural gap between the educated and Westernized elite (obshchestvo) and the people (narod). The difference between Russia and Europe/the “West” was not generally perceived in civilizational terms. Of course, such interpretations were expressed: The most prominent cases were Nikolai Danilevsky’s theory of “cultural types” and Konstantin Leontiev’s Byzantism—the original expressions would later become the concept of civilizations in the plural. But they were not widely shared by contemporaries.3 The main reason for this fact was the absence of a clear set of special ideas and cultural practices that could be considered a basis of a “sacred vertical” that would be obviously

34  Olga Malinova different from that of West-European/Christian civilization. The majority of the Russian intellectual class shared an idea of civilization in the singular. Even the Slavophiles who emphasized Russia’s distinctiveness from the “West” saw it as an Orthodox part of the genuine (European) Christian civilization. In the mid-nineteenth century, the ethnic and confessional pluralism of the Russian empire was not felt as a major obstacle for developing the Russian nation. Paradoxically, constructing Russian identity vis-à-vis Western Europe facilitated a maintenance of the idea of the homogeneity of the “state composition” (gosudarstvennyi sostav) of Russia as its historically peculiar feature. Mikhail Pogodin’s theory about peaceful accession (prizvanie) of the Varangians (see Maiorova 2010, 56–61) played a major role in establishing the myth of the indigenous (tuzemnyi) character of the population of Russia. It was contrasted to the vision of Europe as an arena of struggle between the “races” of conquerors and the oppressed, which was inspired by Augustin Thierry’s theory (Pogodin 1846, 57). In the 1850s–1860s, this myth was a kind of truism which could be found in the texts of many writers. For example, in 1859 Alexander Herzen emphasized the role of the ethnically homogeneous peasant community as the national feature of the Russian people by writing: With exception for its remote areas, Russia presents a total unity as it is homogeneous in terms of blood, language and spirit. Every Russian recognizes himself a part of his state, feels a kinship to the whole people that is educated in the same rural way of life, with the commune order and redistribution of the land. (Herzen 1958, 20) A few years earlier, in 1855, Boris Chicherin wrote to support his idea about the lack of an organizing principle in the Russian people: The Russian people is not composed of distinctive elements that live their own independent life and have their own special features; it makes up more or less a homogeneous mass that fills the whole space and does not have clear differentiation. The only exception is Little Russia, which was separated from Russia because of historical circumstances. It is a distinctive entity with some special features. Being spread across boundless space, this homogeneous mass lacks any inner focus. (Chicherin 1975, 54) So constructing Russian identity vis-à-vis the “West” had clear advantages because it allowed “forgetting” about the actual cultural heterogeneity of the empire and representing Russia as a culturally homogeneous society: ethnically Russian, Orthodox, shaped by the “historical” statehood of Kiev, Muscovite Russia and Imperial Russia.

Russian identity construction overview  35 During the rise of the national liberation movements in Central and Eastern Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, Russian intellectuals actively adopted the “nationalist” vision of the world as a sum of organic nations that strove for their own states. However, this idea was not applied to Russia, even in writings that were not intended to pass censorship. For example, in 1855 the liberal essayist Nikolai Mel’gunov argued, in his manuscript intended for public circulation, that Russia should not take Austria as a model for its domestic and foreign policy because Russia’s conditions were totally different. Its distinctive features were “a rare organic unity, a natural composition of its parts, and a homogeneity of the dominant race that is unprecedented in Europe in terms of common language and religion, as well as its multiplicity (mnogochislennost’)” (Mel’gunov 1974, 66–67). The idea of the “homogeneity of the dominant race” at the core of the empire was shared by many Russian publicists in the mid-nineteenth century. It was hardly a result of ignorance, considering the development of the ethnography of the empire fostered by the Russian Geographical Society, founded in 1845; publications of essays of travelers in journals for the educated public; and personal experience. Rather, it was an ideological vision inspired by the dominating way of thinking about Russian identity through co-relation with the European/Western other. Of course, this does not mean that integration of the ethnic minorities was not an issue. In the context of co-relation with Europe/the “West,” the most discussed cases were Poland and Finland as the most “Europeanized” and obviously culturally different parts of the Romanov Empire. However, even a mere awareness of the ethnic heterogeneity of the empire was enough to make many participants in the discourse about nation conscious of the risks involved in the contraposition of imperial and national identity, and they thus preferred to be vague about it. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, Russian identity was constructed by a mixed template that combined elements of the ideas of nation and civilization, in the abovementioned sense. At least until the 1880s, the issue of national distinctiveness (samobytnost’) vis-à-vis the “West” played a major role in the discourse about nation. In a way, it facilitated the application of a national template to the imperial context, insofar as it focused public attention on external othering and produced myths that helped the public to imagine “us” as a homogeneous community. At the same time, this pattern of identity construction created a symbolic repertoire for imagining Russia as a counterpart of the “West,” as a civilizational entity. At the turn of the new century, things changed. The issue of co-relation with Europe/the “West” was overshadowed by more urgent problems. In the years of the revolution of 1905–1907, economic modernization was supplied by certain steps toward political “Europeanization.” Now Russia had features such as political parties, a parliament, and more liberal censorship. Even if practically no political group was satisfied with the results of the first Russian revolution, it irreversibly changed the character of the political process. At the same time, as soon as the competition between different

36  Olga Malinova nationalisms in the empire became more visible, the focus of “the national question” increasingly turned into an issue of ethno-cultural pluralism. The “civilizational” aspect of a co-relation with the “West” became less salient (see Malinova 2012a). Not only liberals-Westernizers such as Pavel Miliukov but also the rightwing Russian nationalists such as Mikhail Menshikov thought that the problem of “national originality” and “cultural borrowings” would not be an obstacle to sustaining the nation. In 1897, in his public lecture about the disintegration of Slavophilism, Miliukov described the idea of the “originality of any national life” as the Slavophiles’ achievement. But he also emphasized that, for contemporary science, “the issue of borrowing is not a metaphysical issue about a destruction of the national principles but just a matter of practical use” (Miliukov 1903, 304). The same “practical” approach to the problem of “national originality” was expressed by the publicist of the newspaper Novoe vremia, Menshikov, a protagonist of the idea of Russia’s “temporary isolation” from the West. In 1902 he argued that Russia “could not catch up with the West as long as its borders are open.” But he explained the advisability of the isolation with the fact that “we already have Europe by us at home; we are not Asia anymore and never will be again” (Menshikov 1991, 39–40). The othering of Europe/the “West” was no longer a central point of the “national question” in Russia. In the first decade of the twentieth century, as it shifted its focus from the “burden” of national identity vis-à-vis the West to the “burdens” of national unity and national autonomy, the Russian discourse about the nation was as close as ever before to a differentiation of the mixed templates. But this change had happened in a new intellectual context: In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, “liberal era nationalism” (Hobsbawm 1990) was succeeded by ethnonationalism, with romantic and integrationist tendencies. It made the principle of coincidence of the boundaries of nations and states a source of threat to ethnically heterogeneous polities that did not succeed in adopting the idea of nation in its civic version. In the context of the crisis caused by the World War I, the fierce competition between different projects of nation-building became one of the factors in the collapse of the Russian empire.

The October revolution of 1917 and transformation of the frame of reference The year 1917 dramatically changed the whole frame of reference for Russia’s collective self-identification. It looked like it had a chance to re-write its relationships with the “West” and the “East.” The task was facilitated by the crisis of European identity caused by World War I. The generations that survived the war were willing to reconsider the “old” principles; the idea of progress became less evident. The “West” had lost a great deal of its former attractiveness. In the 1920s and 1930s there were some efforts to redefine

Russian identity construction overview  37 Russian identity vis-à-vis the “West.” These efforts took place in discourses of the Bolsheviks and their opponents, as discussed below. The most radical redefinition of Russian identity was proposed by the Eurasianists—the intellectual and political movement within the Russian émigré community that focused on the geopolitical concept of Eurasia (Malinova 2009, 60–81; Torbakov 2011; Laruelle 2012; Bassin, Glebov and Laruelle 2015). The Eurasianists defined Russia as a self-reliant cultural world that lay between Western Europe and Asia and that was neither European nor Asiatic, but synthetic of both. Insofar as the Eurasianists wanted to break the pattern created by “imitative” Westernizing thinking, they especially accentuated the “Asian” aspects of Russian collective identity. They criticized the Euro-centric concept of progress and Western cultural imperialism. The October Revolution was interpreted in their writings as a culmination of the Westernization of Russia and at the same time as its final point. As Petr Savitskii wrote, in spite of the declared aims connected with Europeanization, the Revolution actually “signified Russia’s escape from the frame of European being” and its stepping onto its own, original way (Savitskii 1922, 14). At the same time, the Eurasianists redefined the ethnonational component of Russian identity. They insistently argued that the Russians are not exclusively of Slavic descent and emphasized the role of the “Turan element.” With this term they referred to various ethnic groups originating from the Ural-Altaic macroregion. In Nikolai Trubetskoi’s words, “the symbiosis of the Russians and the Turans runs through all of Russian history,” and as a result, “it is difficult to find a Great Russian who does not have a good deal of Turanian blood” (Trubetskoi 1995, 141). Meanwhile, the Eurasians considered Russian Orthodoxy a religious and cultural center of the Russian-Eurasian world, providing a symphonic unity to multiple confessions. The Eurasianists proposed a radically new model of Russian identity that was very close to a civilizational template. The Russians-Eurasians were represented as a heterogeneous collective body that is nevertheless united by “symphonic” principles and is potentially capable of providing these “principles” to all of humanity. This potential was particularly important in the context of the crisis experienced by Europe/the “West.” Critical of the Soviet regime, the Eurasianists nevertheless found some of its innovations important. For example, they considered the Soviet itself a political form that “eliminates the dangers that are peculiar to Western democracy, i.e., a domination of professional politicians and the pluralism of parties, as its consequence,” and they praised the Soviet federation as the best expression of the Eurasianist idea (Evraziistvo 1926, 52–53). It should be noted that the Eurasianist “civilizational” model was elaborated in the same age as the map of Europe was (selectively) reshaped according to the principle of “national self-determination.” Meanwhile, the fate of the Romanov empire happened to be different from that of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires—it

38  Olga Malinova was rebuilt in the new form that Terry Martin called the “affirmative action empire” (Martin 2001). The way the new macro-political identity was re-interpreted in the discourse of the Bolsheviks was nonetheless remarkable. For those who shared the Marxist concept of progress, it would be natural to reconsider Russia’s position vis-à-vis the West as soon as it became the first country that saw the victory of a socialist revolution. But it actually took a great deal of time before such a redefinition of the collective identity happened. In the first years of the new regime, Russia was still seen as a “backward” country that only “circumstantially” and even temporarily, before the victory of the revolution in more “developed” countries, would become the first on the road to socialism. Only in 1924, when Joseph Stalin proclaimed the “building of socialism in one country,” was the relationship with the “West” redefined: Soviet Russia became not a “backward” but a “forward” country. In the long run, the Soviet model of identity also solved the “national question” in a way that notably resembled the civilizational template. The Bolsheviks, who at first declared the principle of national self- determination in the most radical way, finally managed to reintegrate most of the former Romanov empire into the USSR. Their ideology combined formal adherence to the principle of “self-determination” (which resulted in political institutionalization of ethnicity) with the universalist idea of the class struggle. The latter seemed to have good potential as a Weltanschauung, a secularist “sacred vertical” for communist movements. The concept of the “Soviet people” as “a new historical community” (sovetskii narod kak novaia istoricheskaia obschnost’), coined in the 1970s, may be interpreted as a combination of the two templates. A specific interpretation of the idea of nation was included in the matrix of civilizational identity by being subjected to the universal categorizing idea of class. However, even if the Soviet people was considered a subnational macro-political community, it was quite often described in terms that relied on the Russian prerevolutionary tradition, particularly in that it defined itself in opposition to the “bourgeois West” (Agursky 1980; Mitrokhin 2003; Yurchak 2005, 158–206; Malinova 2009, 84–90). So official Soviet ideology actually continued the tradition of blurring two templates, but in new terms.

Post-Soviet Russia: between the ideas of nation and civilization The ideological shifts initiated by perestroika opened up a way for a new round of redefining collective identity. After the collapse of the USSR, all new independent states have faced the problem of construction of their national identities within the new borders. In the case of Russia, this task was complicated by several factors. First, there was an uncertainty about the geopolitical and cultural/symbolic boundaries of the new macro-political community. This uncertainty manifested itself in numerous projects of reintegration of post-Soviet space that ranged from extremist plans for

Russian identity construction overview  39 restoration of the USSR that were cherished by some “imperial” nationalists (especially in the 1990s) to various conceptions of a gradual convergence of some former Soviet republics by means of international treaties (the Commonwealth of Independent States, the Collective Security Treaty Organization, later the Eurasian Economic Union). As a result, there were different approaches to the construction of Russian identity, based on cultural and linguistic grounds (Tolz 1998). Second, the Soviet tradition of institutionalizing ethnicity impeded the perception of the macro-political identity of the community that constituted the new Russian state as a nation. Thus, efforts aimed at constructing national solidarity over ethnic and confessional borders gave reason for concern about “violation of the rights” of “nationalities” that made up the “multinational” Russian state (Zevelev 2008). Third, in the changing international environment, the interpretation of the Western “other” also became a matter of controversy. The opposition between the new Westernizers and the new conservative nationalists has been one of the most salient ideological watersheds in post-Soviet Russia (Malinova 2012a). Besides, Russia, unlike most of the other post-communist countries, found it problematic to blame an “other” for the troubles and difficulties that had fallen to its lot, and this became a serious problem for the collective self-perception. Fourth, the structure of the Russian Federal Socialist Soviet Republic provided fewer resources for developing its “specific” identity than the other “national” republics did. The identification with the new state was, from the very beginning, weaker. Of course, there was a large stock of symbolic resources that could be used for (re)constructing a Russian identity, but this legacy was burdened by dramatic conflicts. In particular, none of the grand narrative “ready-for-use” versions of Russian history could provide a basis for a new national identity—not the pre-revolutionary or Soviet versions of imperial narratives, and not the alternative versions that had been developed in tamizdat and samizdat literature. So, all attempts to reinterpret the collective past caused heated debates. Fifth, the declaration of Russia as a legal successor of the Soviet Union created the uneasy problem of distinguishing between the “Russian” and the “Soviet” domain. Because of these and other factors, the building of a new macro-political identity for post-Soviet Russia took rather contradictory forms. Nevertheless, the post-Soviet condition represented a new opportunity to construct a Russian identity according to the national template. After all, ethnic Russians make up about 80% of the population of the Russian Federation. Probably even more importantly, in the 1990s the country entered on a path of democratic reforms, and its ruling elite was enthusiastic about making Russia “a normal European country.” This gave rise to the official project of the Russian (or “Rossian,” rossiiskaia) civic nation. However, this project has never been carried out consistently. Confronted by non-Russian and Russian ethnic nationalists (see Tishkov 2007), the ruling elite avoided definitions of the macro-political identity in explicit national terms. The constitution of 1993 established an ambiguous formula, “the multinational

40  Olga Malinova people (mnogonatsional’nyi narod) of the Russian Federation.” The term “nationality” was reserved for ethnic groups, while “sovereignty” was ascribed not to such groups but to the Russian (Rossian) people as a whole. So, to preserve Russian integrity in the face of expanding ethnic conflicts, the ruling elite preferred to follow the Soviet tradition and define the collective identity of its citizens as supranational. However, the project of a Russian civic nation was not totally abandoned. The term rossiiskaia natsiia is still used in public rhetoric and in official documents.4 But a consistent redefinition of a macro-political identity by means of the model of nation is dependent on difficult choices related to the dilemmas mentioned above. Unprepared for making clear decisions due to the entailed risks, Russian politicians prefer a pragmatic balance between the ideas of nation and civilization. As was mentioned above, the civilizational approach to Russian identity took a clear shape in the official and semi-official discourse since Putin’s electoral campaign in 2012 and the coining of the new formula for the macropolitical identity—“a unique multi-ethnic civilization that is fastened by the Russian cultural core” (Putin 2012a; for a more detailed analysis, see Linde 2016a). At the beginning, this idea seemed like an ad hoc reaction to the activity of the Russian ethnonationalists in the protest campaign in 2011– 2012. However, later, in the context of the crisis in the relationship between Russia and the Western countries, it became a systemic solution. While the relations with Western partners deteriorated after Putin’s inauguration because of accusations of foreign support for the anti-Putin opposition in 2011–2012, they developed into a full-fledged crisis with the Maidan revolution in Ukraine, the annexation of Crimea by Russia, and the subsequent sanctions. It is easy to note that, in the new context, “civilizational talk” fulfills a double function in the official discourse: It gives a “politically correct” definition of the multiethnic community that defines the Russian state by emphasizing its Russian ethnic core, and it describes Russia’s principal opponents on the international arena as civilizational rivals, thereby legitimizing an anti-Western turn in Russian foreign policy. For example, in 2012, in his first Address to the Federal Assembly after being reelected, Putin justified Russia’s assertiveness in the international arena by referring to “a new balance of economic, civilizational and military forces.” Arguing in this way, Putin securitized Russian “civilizational identity.” A little later, he described Russia as “a multi-ethnic state, a civilization-state bonded by the Russian people, Russian language and Russian culture native to all of us” (Putin 2012b, italics added, OM), thus endorsing the vision typical for Russian nationalism. It was remarkable that Putin used different terms for characterizing Russian identity. He spoke about Russia as a nation (natsiia) in an international context, in order to emphasize that Russia should “preserve its national and spiritual identity, its sense of national unity.” However, when addressing the domestic issues of inter-ethnic relations, he preferred to talk

Russian identity construction overview  41 about Russia as a “civilization-state,” a “multi-ethnic people” (in the Russian original: mnogonatsional’nyi narod) and “the Russian people” (russkii narod) (Putin 2012b). This combination of domestic and foreign policy perspectives might have important implications as soon as a development of the civilizational model for Russian identity becomes dependent on symbolic resources for the construction of a “sacred vertical.” As we can see from the analysis above, such resources became more accessible when there were grounds for a principle-based criticism toward Europe/the West. So, the current alienation from the West makes a civilizational template more convenient. But is that a sufficient condition for success? We can see that since 2012 the Russian ruling elite has striven to construct a consistent ideological “posture” (to use the term of Marlène Laruelle, 2016) that takes a conservative shape. The criticism of the West as a betrayer of “the genuine European values” and the idea of Russia being an “alternative” or “other Europe” play a significant role in this ideological construction. However, this construction is hardly a plausible basis for the civilizational “sacred vertical” as long as the proposed “alternative” remains dependent on the West. As Viatcheslav Morozov puts it, “Russia does not represent any ‘alternative’ modernity: as a nation, it has fully internalized the neoliberal capitalist model of development and does not possess any type of consciousness other than Eurocentrism” (Morozov 2015, 5). So, even if the twists and turns of both foreign and domestic policy give urgency to the civilizational template, it can hardly be consistently realized.

Conclusion: the problems and perspectives of the two templates As we can see, the willingness of the Russian intellectual and political elites to imagine Russian identity according to the mixed templates that I have outlined in this chapter has historically shaped structural grounds. The idea of the nation in the Russian context is a principle that is difficult to adopt, and the idea of civilization is an enticing but unrealizable temptation because of a lack of ideological and symbolic resources for representing Russia as a source of distinctive ideas and cultural practices that would have universal significance. In general, both models have advantages and shortcomings. The civilizational model relies on the legacy of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, both of which provide relevant symbolic resources. It is flexible, it can embrace other identities, it supports Russia’s claims to great power status. But it faces a challenge in that it lacks the resources for a “sacred vertical.” The recent attempts to elaborate a conservative response to what is perceived as Western hegemony lacks a strong universalist common denominator. This is also the case with the identity discourse produced by the Russian Orthodox Church. Besides, in the contemporary context the civilizational template does not prevent the risks that arise when drawing sharp symbolic

42  Olga Malinova and spatial boundaries between the “self” and its “others.” In short, the drawback of the civilizational model in the Russian context is the rise of anti-Westernism. The national model has serious limitations in the Russian context. First, there are many competing projects of nation-building driven by activists of various ethnonationalisms, and any decisive attempt at nation-building on a macro-political level will result in new conflicts. Second, there is no consensus about the principles of belonging to a macro-political community. Would it mean citizenship or “Russianness” with reference to cultural and linguistic characteristics, for instance? Third, the weakness of political institutions and civic society impedes the development of constitutional patriotism, i.e., a macro-political identity based on civic solidarity and loyalty to a democratic state. Fourth, it remains ambiguous whether the concept of the nation can be used for describing a macro-political community constituted by the Russian state or, alternatively, should be reserved, in accordance with the Soviet tradition, for groups claiming recognition of their political and cultural rights, i.e., the Russians, the Tatars, the Chechens, and so on. As a result of these incentives and limitations, we may assume that in the long run Russian identity will continue to be imagined by a combination of templates, i.e., as both a nation and a civilization. This means that, even if a contingent emphasis on one or another model may give a signal about some new tendency in the course of Russian policy, it does not indicate a fundamental shift in the discourse about Russian identity. Therefore, we may speculate about when and under which conditions its trajectory will change to another pole. The ambiguity of the official position concerning the macro-political identity is hardly surmountable in the foreseeable future.

Notes 1 According to Laruelle, this term “designates an approach or an attitude embedded in broad terms and scattered perceptions, and that offers a certain degree of normativity.” Ideological posture can “be materialized” in different “declensions,” i.e., “the more precise state-run policies that aim to set the public agenda in terms of values, principles and behavioral standards,” without building a fullfledged ideological doctrine (Laruelle 2016, 277–278). 2 Cf. Turoma and Waldstein’s observation about imperial situations in the Soviet and Russian context: “[Soviet and Russian] history calls for problematizing Benedict Anderson’s ‘assumption that the category “nation” is the sole available slot for an imagined community after the advent of print capitalism’ [quote from Nancy Condee, OM]. Unburdened by essentialist and binary assumptions, the studies of Russia and the Soviet Union foreground the diversity of other imagined collectivities in the modern world, an imperial community included. These studies demonstrate that nation is not the only possible way of imagining a modern political community; that the imperial principle can be experienced as legitimate and can compete for legitimacy with the national principle (metropolitan or subaltern)” (Turoma and Waldstein 2013, 12). 3 According to Boris Baluev, the major discussion of Danilevsky’s book Russia and Europe, which was first published in 1869, took place after his death, in the 1880s–1890s (Baluev 1999, 60–61).

Russian identity construction overview  43

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44  Olga Malinova Huntington, Samuel. 1993. “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72: 22–49. Kazarnovskii, Pavel. 2017. “Zakon o rossiiskoi natsii pereimenovali iz-za negotovnosti obschestva.” RBK. http://www.rbc.ru/rbcfreenews/58be037c9a7947ec1775ca3e (accessed 10 June 2019). Kennedy, Michael D. and Ronald G. Suny. 1999. “Introduction.” In Intellectuals and the Articulation of Nation, edited by Ronald G. Suny and Michael D. Kennedy, 1–51. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Kotsubinskii, Dmitrii A. 2001. Russkii natsionalism v nachale XX stoletiia: Rozhdenie i gibel’ ideologii Vserossiiskogo natsional’nogo Soiuza. Moscow: ROSSPEN. Laruelle, Marlène. 2012. Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Laruelle, Marlène. 2016. “Russia as an Anti-Liberal European Civilization.” In The New Russian Nationalism: Imperialism, Ethnicity and Authoritarianism 2000–15, edited by Pål Kolstø and Helge Blakkisrud, 275–297. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Linde, Fabian. 2016a. “State Civilization: The Statist Core of Vladimir Putin’s Civilizational Discourse and Its Implications for Russian Foreign Policy.” Politics in Central Europe 12: 21–35. Linde, Fabian. 2016b. “The Civilizational Turn in Russian Political Discourse: From Pan-Europeanism to Civilizational Distinctiveness.” The Russian Review 75 (4): 604–625. Maiorova, Olga. 2010. From the Shadow of Empire: Defining the Russian Nation through Cultural Mythology, 1855–1870. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Malinova, Olga. 2008. “Creating Meanings and Traps: Competing Interpretations of the Idea of Nation in the Debates of the Russian Slavophiles and Westernizers in the 1840s.” European Review of History/Revue Européenne d’Histoire 15 (1): 41–54. Malinova, Olga. 2009. Rossiia i “Zapad” v XX veke: Transformatsiia diskursa o kollektivnoi identichnosti. Moscow: ROSSPEN. Malinova, Olga. 2010. “Defining and Redefining Russianness: The Concept of ‘Empire’ in Public Discourses in Post-Soviet Russia.” In The Challenges of EthnoNationalism: Case Studies in Identity Politics, edited by Adrien Guelke, 60–77. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Malinova, Olga. 2012a. “Russia and ‘the West’ in the Twentieth Century: A Binary Model of Russian Culture and Transformations of the Discourse on Collective Identity.” In Constructing Identities in Europe: German and Russian Perspectives, edited by Reinhard Krumm, Sergei Medvedev and Hans-Henning Schröder, 63–79. Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft. Malinova, Olga. 2012b. “Rossiiskaia identichnost’ mezhdu ideiami natsii i tsivilizatsii.” Vestnik Instituta Kennana v Rossii 22: 48–56. Malinova, Olga. 2014. “Obsession with Status and Ressentiment: Historical Backgrounds of the Russian Discursive Identity Construction.” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 47: 291–303. Malinova, Olga. 2015. Aktual’noe proshloe: Simvolicheskaia politika vlastvuiushchei elity i dilemmy rossiiskoi identichnosti. Moscow: Politicheskaia entsiklopediia. Martin, Terry. 2001. The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mel’gunov, Nikolai V. 1974. “Mysli vslukh ob istekshem desiatiletii.” In Golosa iz Rossii 1 (1), 62–151. Moscow: Nauka.

Russian identity construction overview  45 Menshikov, Mikhail O. 1991. Iz pisem k blizhnim. Moscow: Voennoe izdatel’stvo. Miliukov, Pavel. 1903. “Razlozhenie slavianofil’stva: Danilevskii, Leont’ev, Vl. Solov’ev.” In Iz istorii russkoi intelligentsii, 266–306. St. Petersburg: Znanie. Miller, Alexei. 2008. The Romanov Empire and Nationalism: Essays in the Methodology of Historical Research. Budapest and New York: Central European University Press. Miller, Alexei (ed.). 2010. Nasledie imperii i buduschee Rossii. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. Mitrokhin, Nikolai. 2003. Russkaia partiia: Dvizhenie russkikh natsionalistov v SSSR v 1953–1985 gody. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. Morozov, Viatcheslav. 2015. Russia’s Postcolonial Identity: A Subaltern Empire in a Eurocentric World. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Pain, Emil A. and Aleksandr Verkhovskii. 2010. “Tsivilizatsionnyi natsionalism: rossiiskaia versiia osobogo puti.” In Ideologiia “osobogo puti” v Rossii i Germanii, edited by Emil A. Pain, 171–210. Moscow: Tri kvadrata. Pogodin, Mikhail. 1846. “Parallel’ russkoi istorii s istoriei zapadnykh evropeiskikh gosudarstv, otnositel’no nachala.” In Istoriko-kriticheskie otryvki, vol. 1, 57–82. Moscow: Tipographia Avgusta Semena. Putin, Vladimir. 2012a. “Rossiia: natsional’nyi vopros.” Nezavisimaia gazeta, January 23. http://www.ng.ru/politics/2012-01-23/1_national.html (accessed 10 June 2019). Putin, Vladimir. 2012b. “Address to the Federal Assembly.” President of Russia, December 12. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/messages/17118 (accessed 10 June 2019). Savitskii, Petr. 1922. “Dva mira.” In Na putiakh: Utverzhdenie evraziitsev, 9–26. Berlin: Gelokon. Shevel, Oxana. 2011. “Russian Nation-Building from Yel’tsin to Medvedev: Ethnic, Civic or Purposefully Ambiguous?” Europe-Asia Studies 63: 179–202. Shnirel’man, Viktor. 2007. “Tsivilizatsionnyi povorot kak natsional’naia ideia.” In Natsionalizm v mirovoi istorii, edited by Valerii Tishkov and Viktor Shnirel’man, 83–105. Moscow: Nauka. Smith, Anthony D. 1983. Theories of Nationalism. New York: Holmes & Meier. Smith, Anthony D. 1998. Nationalism and Modernism: A Critical Survey of Recent Theories of Nations and Nationalism. London and New York: Routledge. Tishkov, Valerii. 2007. “Rossiiskaia natsiia i ee kritiki.” In Natsionalizm v mirovoi istorii, edited by Valerii Tishkov and Viktor Shnirel’man, 558–601. Moscow: Nauka. Tolz, Vera. 1998. “Forging the Nation: National Identity and Nation Building in Post-Communist Russia.” Europe-Asia Studies 50: 993–1022. Torbakov, Igor. 2011. “From the Other Shore: Reflections of Russian Émigré Thinkers on Soviet Nationality Policies, 1920s–1930s.” Slavic & East European Information Resources 4 (4): 33–48. Trubetskoi, Nikolai S. 1995. Istoriia. Kul’tura. Iazyk. Moscow: “Progress.” Tsygankov, Andrei P. 2008. “Self and Other in International Relations Theory: Learning from Russian Civilizational Debates.” International Studies Review 10 (4): 762–775. Tsygankov, Andrei P. 2016. “Crafting the State-Civilization: Vladimir Putin’s Turn to Distinct Values.” Problems of Post-Communism 63 (3): 146–158. Tsymburskii, Vadim. 2001. “Tsivilizatsionnaia identichnost’.” In Novaia filosofskaia entsiklopedia, edited by Viacheslav S. Stepin. Moscow: Mysl’. Online version: http://dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enc_philosophy/8373/%D0%98%D0%94%D0%95

46  Olga Malinova %D0%9D%D0%A2%D0%98%D0%A7%D0%9D%D0%9E%D0%A1%D0%A2% D0%AC (accessed 10 June 2019). Turoma, Sanna and Maxim Waldstein. 2013. “Empire and Space: Russia and the Soviet Union in Focus.” In Empire De/Centered: New Spatial Histories of Russia and the Soviet Union, edited by Sanna Turoma and Maxim Waldstein, 1–28. Farnham: Ashgate. Yurchak, Alexey. 2005. Everything Was Forever, Until it Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zevelev, Igor. 2008. “Sootechestvenniki v rossiiskoi politike na postsovetskom prostranstve: nasledie imperii i gosudarstvennyi pragmatizm.” In Nasledie imperii i budushchee Rossii, edited by Aleksei Miller, 241–93. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie.

2

From socio-economic formations to civilizations Seeking a paradigm change in late soviet discussions Vesa Oittinen

One of the most influential doctrinal frameworks in the social theory of Soviet Marxism-Leninism was the concept of socio-economic formations, a term coined by Marx himself. The standard work Fundamentals of Marxist-Leninist Philosophy (Russian edition of 1979, published in English in 1983), for example, refers to the theory of “social-economic formations” as the “corner-stone of the materialist understanding of history” (Konstantinov et al. 1982, 240). The concept is indeed one of the key ideas of Marxist historical materialism. Based on the idea of the determining influence of material production on the rest of society, it explains the course of human history as development and transition from one social formation to another. The Soviet canon differentiated between five socio-economic formations: primitive communism, the ancient slave society, feudalism, capitalism, and socialism/communism. There was discussion of a possible “Asiatic mode of production,” and some smaller revisions of the formational succession were proposed now and then, but in the main, this five-phase scheme, dubbed by its critics as the piatichlenka, remained the basic formulation of the theory. The formations covered long periods— hundreds, if not thousands of years—with the exception of capitalism, which was conceived as a rather short-lived stage, emerging in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and leading toward the transition to socialism from the twentieth century on. Although proponents of the theory claimed it was built on Marxism, in fact it was in its rigid doctrinal form a product of Soviet philosophy and historiography. Of course, the term itself (ökonomische Gesellschaftsformation) was from Marx. The locus classicus in which it occurs is the Foreword to his A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, published in 1859. He wrote: In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society. (Marx 2010, 263)

48  Vesa Oittinen However, this famous and often-cited passage from 1859 is almost a hapax legomenon in Marx’s oeuvre. He used the expression ökonomische Gesellschaftsformation rarely and, intriguingly, when he did use it, it was most often in the singular. One can assuredly claim that Marx did not develop the idea of socio-economic formations into a full-fledged theory and that he used the expression more as a metaphor than a strictly defined concept of social science. Actually, the “formation” concept was borrowed from geology and paleontology.1

The “civilization vs. formation discussion” of the 1980s Although Soviet philosophers and scholars did not question the MarxistLeninist interpretation of socio-economic formations in itself, they voiced strong discontent with its overly dogmatic and inflexible application in social sciences and history. One of the main problems seemed to be the reductionism to an economic perspective that followed from the primacy of production forces/production relations inherent in the concept. The bane of vulgar-materialistic or economistic reductionism—which had afflicted Soviet social and humanist sciences since the October Revolution—was present already in discussions of the “sociologism” of the 1920s, which purported to reduce the protagonists of culture, art, and philosophy of previous centuries to simple marionettes of “class interest.” Indeed, if the main focus of attention in history and culture studies was to be on the contradictions within socio-economic formations and changes from one formation to another, it would result in a one-sided over-emphasis on historical breaks and class struggles. Every formation constituted its own special ruling class, which in turn presented its narrow interests as the only possible values, thus creating the ideological illusion that bourgeois or feudal interests, for example, reflected the only true general human morality. Attempts to ward off such kinds of reductionism made the need for more appropriate categorical tools to analyze the historical process acute. As a reaction against the reductionism of the “formation approach,” Soviet scholars began to develop an alternative “civilizational” approach in the late 1970s and early 1980s. These attempts to specify a fundamental category of historical materialism did not contain any intention to replace the concept of social formation with the category of civilization. “Civilizations” were simply viewed as complementaries to the “formations.” The first results of the discussions came to light in 1980 when Miran Mchedlov published a book on socialism as a “new type of civilization” (Mchedlov 1980),2 and a little later the Academy of Sciences of the USSR initiated an extensive research project involving dozens of Soviet scholars from different fields in the humanities. The results of this project were disseminated, for example, in reports delivered by members of the Soviet delegation at the 17th World Congress of Philosophy in Montreal in 1983.3 A preliminary balance sheet of the theoretical discussions on this subject was then published

From socio-economic formations to civilizations  49 at the “round table” discussion in Voprosy filosofii in autumn 1989 (Formatsiia 1989). This publication came out at the height of perestroika, and it was already marked by the abandonment of initial Marxist positions. The Soviet discussion was not the only one of its kind. A similar evaluation of the Marxist concept of socio-economic formations was attempted in the German Democratic Republic when a group of researchers led by Ernst Engelberg and Wolfgang Küttler published a massive volume entitled Formationstheorie und Geschichte (Engelberg and Küttler 1978). Unlike the Soviet researchers, however, the East German scholars focused exclusively on analyzing the socio-economic formation and did not reflect on its relationship with the concept of “civilization” (the word Zivilisation occurs only three times in this 747-page volume). Before perestroika, the quintessential discussions of the 1980s could be characterized as an attempt to find a balance between the traditional Marxist concept of a socio-economic formation, on the one hand, and the idea of culture/civilization, on the other. Miran Mchedlov formulated the sought-after balance in his above-mentioned book from 1980, Socialism— The Emergence of a New Type of Civilization, as follows: In examining the relationship between the concepts of “civilization” and “formation,” we point out that the concept of “civilization”—in all its applications—always focuses directly on the level of material and spiritual culture that has been reached in a certain society (obshchnost’) as the primary factor of the nature and level of social progress. Accordingly, it sums up the results of social and cultural activity, bringing them together with general human values (s obshchechelovecheskimi tsennostiami), with their position in the united and progressive movement of world history. Despite the fact that it is as yet somewhat disputable, one could nevertheless assert that, whereas the theory of formation largely focuses on the discrete, interruptive (prerivnyi) side of a united world-historical process, the theory of civilization emphasizes its continuity, the unity of humankind, the problem of how general human achievements are inherited, preserved and enriched. (Mchedlov 1980, 58–59) The synthesis thus seems clear enough and quite in accordance with the basic tenets of historical materialism. On the one hand, the concept of a socio-economic formation describes human societies as constituting material production forces and production relationships. Given the ongoing tension between these constituents, which tends to break up into revolutionary convulsions, the progression from a socio-economic to another formation is disjointed and non-continuous in character. History is seen as a series of “breaks,” revolutions or at least severe social upheavals, in which one ruling class is replaced with another that rejects the values and ideologies of the ruling classes in the previous formation. Thus, for example, the bourgeois

50  Vesa Oittinen revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that led to the capitalist socio-economic formation brought about the negation not only of the economic basis but also of the values and the culture of feudal society. On the other hand, the concept of civilization stresses the continuity of the progress of human culture. Not all ideas and cultural values of previous epochs are negated in revolutions, and there is a cultural “substance” that remains and becomes enriched in the course of history. Greek art and Roman law, for example, which were civilizing achievements of the ancient mode of production, do not lose their importance despite revolutionary changes in modes of production: Rather, they prevail as constituents of civilization (in this case, Western civilization). Marx noted this problem of continuity as early as 1857/1858 in Grundrisse, in which he discusses the question of why Greek and Roman art still had the capacity to please, even though the socio-economic presuppositions that prevailed when that art was produced had disappeared for good. This synthesis from the 1980s of the formational and civilizational approaches in Soviet Marxism seemed plausible, it being rather easy to find support for such a synthesis in the texts of Marx and Engels. It is true that the “classics of Marxism” never purported to deliver an exact definition of what “civilization” was supposed to mean.4 Nevertheless, there were other concepts in Marx that could be connected to the idea of a “civilizational substance” in human societies, such as the concept of “social wealth” (gesellschaftliches Reichtum). As Marx made clear in Grundrisse, the bourgeois form of wealth, namely capital and commodities, should not be seen as the definitive form of human wealth: In fact, wealth is “nothing other than the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces, etc., created through universal exchange” (Marx 1973, 488). In sum, social wealth as the material basis of a civilization can be seen as something “universally human” beyond bourgeois, feudal, and other forms of culture.

Ideas of civilization and the ideology of perestroika The synthesis of formational and civilizational approaches that was created in the 1980s by writers such as Miran Mchedlov and Lidiia Novikova resulted, above all, from academic discussion. It is nevertheless obvious that it responded to the growing need of the socialist society to define itself in a ­ more sophisticated manner than with reference only to its socio-jeconomic and class base. The question of how socialist societies should relate to their historical and cultural heritage in respective countries had assumed importance since the end of the 1960s, and it was by no means accidental that Mchedlov’s book was soon translated into German in the GDR, where the discussion of what was called Erbeaneignung had been especially intensive.5 The idea that a cultural heritage worth preserving in socialism would consist of all that was “general human characteristics” (in Russian:

From socio-economic formations to civilizations  51 obshchechelovecheskii; in German: allgemeinmenschlich—there does not, as yet, seem to be an established English equivalent of this important term) was a very appropriate solution to the problem. However, events soon took a different turn. The seemingly abstract ideas of Soviet philosophers unexpectedly assumed strong political relevance. When Mikhail Gorbachev was elected General Secretary of the Politburo of the CPSU in 1985, he set in motion the political processes that led to perestroika and, ultimately, the demise of the Soviet Union. One of the areas in which fundamental changes began to take shape was that of Soviet foreign policy. Since the birth of the USSR, and especially during the Cold War, international politics were essentially characterized by confrontation between the West and the socialist countries—and on the socio-economic level this was generally interpreted as a confrontation of two socio-economic formations, the capitalist and the socialist. For Gorbachev and his staff, it was vital to find theoretical justifications for a new kind of foreign policy that would overthrow the old view of history as a series of breaks and conflicts, and instead lay stress on continuity and the general interests of humanity instead of the logic of bloc thinking. Gorbachev’s staff re-visited the civilization discussion of Soviet scholars and found the arguments they needed. As later memoirs of Gorbachev’s assistants reveal, this adoption was superficial and ad hoc, but it seemed to work for a while. The “new thinking” in foreign policy, the famous novoe myshlenie, which was intended to change the face of the whole world, was essentially grounded on the results of the civilization discussion of the 1980s. In 1986, for example, Gorbachev formulated its principles thus: The real dialectics of the present development lies in the strengthening tendency towards a mutual interdependence of the states forming the world community. Just in this way—by the struggle of opposites, overcoming difficulties, by trial and error—does a world emerge which is contradictory, but nevertheless unified by several mutual interdependences, a world which in many respects forms a totality. (Gorbachev 2008a, 306) If one were to point out the principal concept of the perestroika period, its “core idea,” so to say, it would undoubtedly relate to “general human values.” However spectacular Gorbachev’s new initiatives and proposals were—they were much more radical than Khrushchev’s concept of “peaceful coexistence” twenty-five years earlier—he did retain enough Marxism in his evocation to seek in such supra-national politics a common basis of interest in humanity in general. The basic objective was material existence (thereby satisfying the demands of Marxist analysis), and it could only have become dominant at the current stage in the development of productive forces (even this demand was fully in accordance with the prerequisites of Marxist analysis). This common basis of interest would unite men irrespective of the

52  Vesa Oittinen socio-economic formation in which they happened to exist: The unity was civilizational rather than “formational.” According to Gorbachev, the new “world situation” in itself meant that it would no longer be un-Marxist (read: “idealistic,” ignoring analyses of the material interests of the people) to speak about the survival of humanity as a “species question” (a Gattungsfrage), disregarding class differences. He compared the current situation with the situation during the Second World War, when the socialist Soviet Union and arch-capitalist countries such as the USA and Great Britain were allied in order to overthrow German fascism: If in the past an alliance of the first Socialist country with Capitalist states in order to combat the fascist menace was possible, so does not from that fact flow a certain lesson for the present, when the whole world is facing the danger of a nuclear catastrophe, the necessity to guarantee the security of nuclear energy and to overcome the ecological threat? (Gorbachev 2008b, 448) It is obvious that, as such, the theory of civilization and obshchechelovecheskie tsennosti (“general human values”) is not incompatible with Marxism. Viktor Il’in and Aleksandr Razumov angrily pointed this out during the heyday of perestroika in an article about the state of Soviet philosophy, entitled “Dogmatism of Theory—Lack of Responsibility” (a title succinctly summarizing its contents), which was published in the main theoretical organ of the CPSU, Kommunist, in August 1988. According to Il’in and Razumov, Marx’s famous sixth “Thesis on Feuerbach,” stating that Man is not an isolated individual but a social being, in no way implied that the idea of a general human essence—Man as a Gattungswesen, to use the phrase of the young Marx—was obsolete (Il’in and Razumov 1988, 66). Although their point is true, the discussion on civilization theory in the first half of the 1980s could also, in fact, be interpreted as either a further development of Marxism or its dissolution—it all depends on one’s viewpoint. In any case, it seems to me to be too hasty to announce that the inglorious end of Gorbachev’s perestroika simultaneously demonstrated the incapacity of Marxist theory to renew itself. There were other, more practical reasons why the concept of obshchechelovechnost’ (“general humanity”) disappeared from the public discourse so quickly after 1991: Even at the height of the perestroika process, there were indications of the difficulties to come. When Soviet politicians and analysts of current events began to speak about “general human values” and “civilization,” they began at the same time—nolens volens—to cement ties with a tradition that had been supplanted by Marxism-Leninism, namely the Kantian tradition. Kant was an Enlightenment thinker who, although opposed to feudalism, defended the same ideas of a “general humanity” as the civilization theoreticians of the 1980s. It seems to me no accident that Gorbachev, in a speech from 1988, characterized the demand of the new epoch as a “categorical imperative,”

From socio-economic formations to civilizations  53 using a Kantian phrase (Gorbachev 2009, 161). The whole concept of “new thinking” and obshchechelovechnost’, in the form used by the reformists led by Gorbachev, indeed has something Kantian in it. For example, the idea that the new developmental stage of humanity had made wars obsolete echoes Kant’s famous passages in Zum ewigen Frieden, in which international co-operation and interdependence (in Kant: the “spirit of commerce,” der Handelsgeist) are expressly perceived as the way in which Nature “guarantees by the mechanism of human passions a perpetual peace.”6 Some Russian philosophers have noted the affinities between Gorbachev’s politics and Kant’s moral philosophy. As Erikh Solov’ev, speaking at a symposium in Germany in 1991, stated, the political turn initiated by Gorbachev “can without effort be interpreted in the sense of Kant’s philosophy.”7 Indeed, when one reads the speeches of leading perestroika protagonists, one sometimes has the impression that the “ethical,” neo-Kantian Socialism of the late 1800s and early 1900s had suddenly been resurrected, demanding revenge for the decades-long ban by means of which official Marxist-Leninist ideology had suppressed it. Finally, Gorbachev himself seemed to affirm suspicions about the affinity of his political philosophy to Kant in the speech he made upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo at the end of 1990: In his time Immanuel Kant prophetically showed the dilemma before which humanity sooner or later would stand: either mankind will unite on the basis of a true international union of nations, or it will come to a destructive war, which will lead to a “perpetual peace” on the cemetery of mankind. The moment of such an “either—or” has now arrived on the threshold of the third millennium. (Gorbachev 2013, 309)

“Civilization” overruns the “formation” However, simultaneously with the adoption of this “Kantian” position, the difficulties inherent in the obshchechelovechnost’ concept gradually became visible, initially in a seemingly purely theoretical form. In a speech to representatives of UNESCO in October 1988, Eduard Shevardnadze stated, Man, his life, his dignity and the development of society remain higher than everything else, just as the general human values have to be put higher than all other values […] These general human values are formed in the intellectual sphere.8 This gave West German Marxist Wolfgang Haug good reason to comment: “What here is insisted is that the ‘general humanity’ has a superior position and spiritual character; not that it should stand in a dialectical relation to the destruction of community in a class society” (Haug 1989, 93).

54  Vesa Oittinen In other words, talk about obshchechelovechnost’ had begun to present itself as a deviation from Marxism in general, and not only from dogmatic Marxism-Leninism. As Haug continues, these deviations became discernible in the speeches and statements of other politicians such as Aleksandr Iakovlev and Shevardnadze, and not so much in what Gorbachev said. It now seems, with the benefit of hindsight, that one of the reasons was the tendency in substantial parts of the Russian political elite to lose faith in the “socialist option,” to which Gorbachev still obstinately clung. This is a problem that can be expressed in purely Kantian terms, however, without needing to resort to questionable expressions such as “deviation.” One could say that the “Kantianism” of perestroika ideology was spontaneous and un-reflected in a way, and in this respect open to different interpretations, even to manipulation according to the political needs of the day. Kant’s concept of Man was more sophisticated than the simple idea of obshchechelovechnost’ used by perestroika ideologists. According to Kant, it is necessary to distinguish between Man as an empirical, sensual being of the phenomenal world (homo phaenomenon) and Man as a rational being in the intelligible world (homo noumenon).9 I will not go into philosophical subtleties here: Suffice it to say that “general humanity,” obshchechelovechnost’, is only represented in Kant by noumenal man, whereas man living in the empirical world pursues his singular interests and is thus very comparable to the representatives of exclusive class interests in Marxist theory (exclusive in the sense that these interests are non-general from the viewpoint of the human Gattungswesen). Be that as it may, around the year 1989 the concepts of “Man in general” and “civilization” began to attract increasingly so-to-speak “undialectical” interpretations, in other words, interpretations one-sidedly accentuating one horn of the Kantian dilemma, homo noumenon, at the cost of empirical Man and his real interests. As early as 1989, the well-known and much respected ex-dissident Andrei Sakharov spoke in favor of convergence between capitalism and socialism: The convergence is a real historical process, in which the capitalist and socialist world systems are drawn nearer to each other; it is a result of coinciding changes towards pluralism in the spheres of economics, politics, social life and ideology. The convergence is a necessary condition for solving the global problems of peace, ecology, social and geopolitical justice. (Sakharov 1989, 17) Beautiful words, of course, but it strikes the mind that here it is the abstract concept of “convergence” that will produce a new united social system; actually, the idea of convergence seems to have the role of the acting subject of world history—not the real people!

From socio-economic formations to civilizations  55 Hand in hand with the increasing abstractness and even emptiness of the concepts “civilization” and obshchechelovechnost’, Marxian positions in general (not only Marxist-Leninist) were abandoned in the discussion in favor of Western-style capitalism as the only “adequate” form of human civilization. As Iurii Burtin wrote in 1989, the “Achilles heel” of Marx’s concept of history was that he underestimated the ability of capitalism to renew itself and change, a fact that was clearly visible, as it is nowadays (Burtin 1989). Such an assessment might have seemed provocative in 1989, but the general discussion climate changed rapidly in 1990/1991 from the scientific to the ideological, as heralded in some seminal papers published at that time. In 1990, politologist Aleksandr Tsipko published an article in the prestigious journal Novyi mir with the evocative title “Are Our Principles Indeed Good?” He declared that the entire Soviet period of Russian history was nothing other than a hopeless cul-de-sac, producing during the 70 years of socialist experiment “many more horrible things than the old civilization based on private property could produce in three centuries” (Tsipko 1990). It is difficult to imagine a clearer rebuttal of Gorbachev’s “socialist option.” In addition, from Tsipko’s position it would logically follow that the “old (i.e., capitalist) civilization” should be seen as the general paradigm of mankind’s progress. A little later, in early Autumn 1991, politologist Aleksandr Panarin published an article in the journal Filosofskie nauki, entitled “Return to Civilization or ‘Formative Loneliness’?” in which he asserted, inter alia: All the failures of perestroika in the socio-economic field have their origin in the formation dogmatism promoting home-spun self-sufficiency ( formatsionno-samobyticheskii dogmatizm) in an attempt to deviate from the general path of civilization that universal experience has proved is the right one. (Panarin 1991, 11–12) As Vladimir Shevchenko wryly notes in the same issue of Filosofskie nauki, Panarin’s thesis of a “general road of civilization” echoed Francis Fukuyama’s famous “end of history” paradigm, presented at that same moment. Fukuyama saw only one possible direction in which human societies could develop, namely in line with the Western liberal-capitalist model. Attempts to create alternative forms of sociability (which Russia, for example, tried by experimenting with socialism) were doomed to fail sooner or later. For Panarin and other critics of the Marxist theory of formation, Soviet socialism, the result of a pitiable “formational dogmatism,” was but a parenthesis, a deviation from Russia’s path toward the one and only civilization. Coincident with this trend of turning the concepts “civilization” and “Man” into abstract and increasingly ideological (in the pejorative, Marxist sense, not in the Leninist sense) clichés, a seeming countercurrent (but

56  Vesa Oittinen in fact as much of an ideologizing tendency) was discernible in the emerging camp of conservative “patriots.” They, too, began to use the concept of “civilization,” but in a sense diametrically opposed to that of the “liberals,” who saw in Western civilization the universal goal for all mankind. Writing at the end of the 1990s, Sergei Kara-Murza typically represented the position of the conservatives, stressing the uniqueness of Russia’s own civilization based on Orthodox Christianity. This implies, of course, that the concept of “humanity in general” and obshchechelovecheskie tsennosti must be ruled out, and in fact Kara-Murza does not leave any room for ambiguities in this respect: “Values cannot be generally human (tsennosti […] obshchechelovecheskim byt’ ne mogut) because they are historically determined products of culture. What is common for Man as a biological species is only instinct” (Kara-Murza 2001, ch. 5, footnote 21).

By way of conclusion One could thus say that concepts such as “general human values” and “civilization,” initially so promisingly employed in theory by Soviet social scientists in the early 1980s and then by Gorbachev and his staff in practice, echoing Kantian perspectives of a “perpetual peace,” were turned into ideological concepts in the course of perestroika. However, later development soon showed that adherents of a civilizational approach were split between two camps. Those in the “liberal” camp continued to interpret these concepts very much in the spirit of Francis Fukuyama’s End of History, seeing the model of obschechelovechnost’ in Western civilization, Western man and Western values. The conservative-patriotic camp of the latter-day pochvenniki, in turn, clung to an interpretation that closely resembled the one given in Samuel Huntington’s book The Clash of Civilizations, according to which humanity is irreparably divided among different cultures and all talk of “Man in general” is sheer nonsense. In both cases, the concepts “civilization” and “Man” have turned into ideologemes, which played the same role in the subsequent demolition of the Soviet Union and the creation of a new, Yeltsinian Russia of oligarchs as the “heroic illusions” in previous historical revolutions. Perestroika conjured up the spirit of Kant, only to abandon it when the contours of a new—and in no way idyllic—social formation became discernible in the years 1989–1991.

Notes 2 A German translation was published three years later in the GDR (Mtschedlow 1983).

From socio-economic formations to civilizations  57

References Bagaturiia, Georgii, Viktor Vaziulin, and Evgenii Lismankin. 1983. Teoriia obshchestvenno-ekonomicheskoi formatsii. Moscow: Nauka. Burtin, Iurii. 1989. “Akhillesova piata istoricheskoi teorii Marksa.” Oktiabr’ 11: 3–25; 12: 3–48. Engelberg, Ernst, and Wolfgang Küttler (eds.). 1978. Formationstheorie und Geschichte: Studien zur historischen Untersuchung von Gesellschaftsformationen im Werk von Marx, Engels und Lenin. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag. Formatsiia. 1989. “Formatsiia ili tsivilizatsiia? (Materialy ‘kruglogo stola’).” Voprosy filosofii 10: 34–59. Gorbachev, Mikhail. 2008a. “Politicheskii doklad Tsentral’nogo Komiteta KPSS XXVII s’ezdu Kommunisticheskoi Partii Sovetskogo Sojuza, 25. fevralja 1986 g.” In Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 3. Moscow: Ves’ Mir 2008. Gorbachev, Mikhail. 2008b. “Oktiabr’ i perestroika: revoliutsiia prodolzhaetsia.” In Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 8. Moscow: Ves’ Mir. Gorbachev, Mikhail. 2009. “Rech’ na zavtrake v Bol’shom Kremlevskom dvortse […] v chest’ Nikolaiu Chaushesku (October 5, 1988).” In Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 12. Moscow: Ves’ Mir. Gorbachev, Mikhail. 2013. “Predsedateliu Norvezhskogo Nobelevskogo komiteta […] 10. dekabria 1990 g.” In Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 23. Moscow: Ves’ Mir. Haug, Wolfgang Fritz. 1989. Gorbatschow: Versuch über den Zusammenhang seiner Gedanken. Hamburg: Argument-Verlag. Il’in, V., and A. Razumov. 1988. “Dogmatizm teorii – defitsit otvestvennosti.” Kommunist 12: 60–72.

58  Vesa Oittinen Kant, Immanuel. 1968. Zum ewigen Frieden. In Kants Werke. Vol. 8. Berlin: De Gruyter. Kara-Murza, Sergei. 2001. Sovetskaia tsivilizatsiia, tom 2. Moskva: Algoritm 2002. Quoted from the Internet version at: https://www.e-reading.life/book.php?book=25437 (accessed 10 June 2019). Konstantinov, Fedor et al. 1982. The Fundamentals of Marxist-Leninist Philosophy. Translated by Robert Daglish. Moscow: Progress. Marx, Karl. 1973. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Marx, Karl. 2010. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. In Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Collected Works, vol. 29. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Mchedlov, Miran. 1980. Sotsializm—stanovlenie novogo tipa tsivilizatsii. Moscow: Politizdat. Mtschedlow, Miran. 1983. Der Sozialismus—Ein neuer Zivilisationstyp. Berlin: Dietz Verlag. Novikova, Lidiia. 1982. “Tsivilizatsiia i kul’tura v istoricheskom protsesse.” Voprosy filosofii 10: 53–63. Novikova, Lidiia et al. (eds.). 1983. Tsivilizatsiia kak problema istoricheskogo materializma, Part 1–2. Moscow: IFAN. Panarin, Aleksandr. 1991. “Vozvrashchenie v tsivilizatsiiu ili ‘formatsionnoe odinochestvo’?” Filosofskie nauki 8: 3–16. Sakharov, Andrei. 1989. “Konvergentsiia: Mirnoe sosushchestvovanie.” In 50/50: Opyt slovaria novogo myshleniia, edited by Iurii Afanas’ev and Marc Ferro. Moscow: Progress. Shemiakin, Iakov. 1991. “Problema tsivilizatsii v sovetskoi nauchnoi literature 60– 80-kh godov.” Istoriia SSSR 9: 86–103. Solowjew, Erich J. 1992. “Sowjetische Kantforschung gestern und heute.” In Kant und der Frieden in Europa: Bericht über eine Tagung der Ostsee-Akademie […] in Travemünde vom 12. bis 15. Mai 1991. Baden-Baden: Nomos-Verlagsgesellschaft. Tsipko, Aleksandr. 1990. “Khoroshi li nashi printsipy.” Novyi mir 4: 173–204.

3

Russia between a civilization and a civic nation Secular and religious uses of civilizational discourse during Putin’s third term1 Victor Shnirelman

The 1990s in Russia were characterized by lively debates about Russia’s national idea and national identity. As a result, Russia was imagined by the Church and state officials as well as some intellectuals as a distinct civilization (Humphrey 2002; Shnirelman 2007). This view was partly based on a scholarly interest in a civilizational approach, popular among Russian historians and specialists in culture studies (kul’turologiia) in the post-Soviet period (Scherrer 2003; Zvereva 2003a; Laruelle 2004; Shnirelman 2007, 2009a; Kaplan 2013). More specifically, in some cases, this view drew on the Russian historian Lev Gumilev’s pseudo-scholarly constructions, which received unexpected support from the American political scientist Samuel Huntington’s idea of a “clash of civilizations.” Ever since, in the Russian dominant discourse, embracing certain scholars, educationists, journalists, clerics and politicians, founding fathers of Marxism-Leninism were replaced by those of the civilizational paradigm, such as Nikolai Danilevsky, Oswald Spengler, and Arnold J. Toynbee. These authorities are mostly referred to by those who imagine Russia as a “distinct civilization.” A civilizational approach often presupposes that the world is divided into several independent civilizations with their own paths and traditional values. Yet, two interpretations of “civilization” should be distinguished: First, a scholarly one that was developed since the 1980s as an attempt to overcome the reductionism of the Soviet theory of socio-economic formations, and second, a national-patriotic one that viewed a civilizational paradigm as an appropriate solution for an ideological crisis caused by the collapse of the Soviet Grand Narrative (Shnirelman 2007, 2009b).2 In contrast to the more sophisticated first approach, the second one is essentialist by nature. In addition, one has to distinguish between two streams within the nationalpatriotic interpretation—one promoted by highly politicized ideologists and the other by clerics. The former focus on the state with its institutions, army, and borders as the key dimensions, and the latter are preoccupied by an image of a spiritual community that transcends state borders. An analysis of these two approaches makes up the core of this chapter. The questions posed in this chapter are as follows: What makes a civilizational discourse important for the Russian higher authorities and clerics?

60  Victor Shnirelman When and why was this discourse taken up by the secular as well as the clerical elite? How has it been used by Putin and Metropolitan, later Patriarch, Kirill, what was similar and different in their usage of the civilizational paradigm, and how was it received by their adherents? And, finally, is there any demand for a “civilizational approach” as Russia enters a new decade? One important point concerns the term “Russian,” the meaning of which differs depending on the context. First, it has an inclusive meaning with respect to civil society, or national identity (in the Western sense), and it is in this sense that the terms rossiiane and rossiiskii are used in Russian. Second, there is also an exclusive meaning focused on ethnic Russians, which is covered by the terms russkie and russkii. Historically, the issue is even more complex since the term russkie had sometimes an inclusive meaning in the Russian empire. Moreover, certain contemporary authors mean russkii even when they use the term rossiiskii. At the same time russkii can also have an inclusive meaning covered by the “Russian (russkii) world,” or the “Russian (russkii) geographical society,” which refer to language and culture regardless of any ethnic origins (Komarova 2018). Hence, one has to be very careful with these terms and sensitive to any particular discursive context (cf. Anisimov 1997; Tishkov 1997, 246–271). In the Soviet period the West was viewed within a social class paradigm and was seen as being controlled by “capitalists” and “imperialists,” who were hostile to the Soviet state. Instead, the civilizational approach shifts the emphasis from social class to cultural-religious dimensions. In the early 1990s, this view was actively promoted by the Metropolitan of St. Petersburg and Ladoga Ioann. His follower, Oleg Platonov, identified the “key collision of nowadays” as a “confrontation between the Western and the Russian civilizations” (Platonov 1992, 13).3 In the late 1990s, this theme was picked up by the influential philosopher Aleksandr Panarin, who thereby completed a shift from the liberal agenda of the 1980s to the conservative one of the 1990s. An active participant in the civilizational discourse, Panarin helped it to become mainstream. Panarin was irritated with the New World Order threatening the diversity of civilizations and religions, in particular, Orthodox Christianity and Islam. He claimed that the “world hegemony” wanted to destroy Russia. For a successful resistance Russia badly needed a “Great Civilizational Idea.” The idea of Russia’s civilizational distinctiveness and a need to expand its impact made up the core of his last book on the “Russian Orthodox Civilization” (Panarin 2002). In his view, what seemed to be a class conflict in the Soviet period was in fact a civilizational one based on incompatible values. In fact, he married the Soviet class paradigm with the non-Soviet civilizational one and argued that the main confrontation had shifted from the level of social groups to that of international relationships (see Laruelle 2008, 83–106). An analysis of the numerous definitions of what “civilization” might mean is beyond the scope of this chapter. Suffice it to note that many Russian advocates of the civilizational approach believe that a dominant religion

Russia between civilization and civic nation  61 makes up the basis of a civilization. The Church sticks to this view, and, despite its religious diversity, Russia is imagined by clerics as the “Orthodox civilization.” This discourse uses such formulations as “to be a Russian means to be an Orthodox” or “a state-shaping people,” and the “Russian (russkii) culture as a cultural core of the Russian (rossiiskii) entity.” All of these convey an imperial ideology rather than a scholarly message (Zvereva 2003b). First, however, not all ethnic Russians are Orthodox, and most of those who identify themselves as such rarely attend services and follow religious rules even less so (see Dubin and Malashenko 2012; Kochergina 2017). As a result, Orthodoxy proves to be a cultural identity rather than an interiorized value. Second, people of various origins took part in the development of the Russian state. Therefore, multiethnic Russian people rather than ethnic Russians alone should be called the “state-shaping people.” Third, while emphasizing the leading role of Russian culture within Russian civilization, the advocates of the civilizational paradigm neglect the essence of this culture, which is a Russian-speaking urban Europeanized culture rather than a traditional rural culture. And it was developed by people of various ethnic origins rather than by ethnic Russians alone.

“Civilization” and “nation” in the Russian elite political discourse In the last twenty years or so, Russian authorities have adopted the politicized civilizational paradigm of the Eurasianist tradition4 and from time to time used it extensively in their rhetoric.5 Before his visit to the meeting on Asia-Pacific economic cooperation in November 2000, President Putin published a programmatic article which claimed that “Russia always felt it was a Euro-Asiatic country.” During his visit to Brunei he called Russia a “Eurasian state” for the first time (Putin 2000). At the 6th World Russian People’s Assembly (WRPA) in December 2001, he spoke against “stirring up a conflict of civilizations and religions.” He referred to the “power of our unity and historical relatedness,” a “thousand year experience of mutual understanding and life in multiethnic and multiconfessional Russia,” which “united Eurasian peoples, Orthodoxy and Islam, Buddhism and Judaism” (Gusev 2001).6 This talk fits perfectly with WRPA’s agenda, which focused on the intercommunication between civilizations. In addition, five postSoviet states including Russia organized the Eurasian Economic Community (Soobshchestvo) in October 2000 (Pivovar 2010, 85; Pozo 2017, 166). Yet, initially there was no room for any Eurasian culture in Putin’s mind, and in January 2002 he informed a Polish journalist that Russia was viewed as a “Euro-Asiatic country” only geographically, and, regardless of its distinctiveness, it was a European country in terms of culture (Medvedev 2004, 481–482; Clover 2016, 266). Later on, in March 2005 he has acknowledged that, for him, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) was no more than an appropriate mechanism for a “civilized divorce” (Putin 2005).

62  Victor Shnirelman Definitions of Russia are often ambiguous and ambivalent in Putin’s speeches. For example, the term “Russian civilization” replaced Eurasia in his rhetoric in fall 2006, and later on he began to talk of the “Russian nation.” He stood against nationalism in December 2007 (Putin 2007), yet in March 2008 he confessed to Chancellor Angela Merkel that he and Dmitry Medvedev were nationalists (“in a good sense” though) (Putin 2008). Indeed, at his meeting with the deputies of the Russian parliament in January 2011, Medvedev referred to the Russian (russkii) people and the high role of the Russian Orthodox Church, and the imperialist-minded writer Aleksandr Prokhanov appreciated this talk as being close to his own ideas (LiveInternet 2011). In February 2016, Putin presented patriotism, i.e., “good nationalism,” as the only national idea suiting Russia. And in October 2018 at the Valdai Discussion Club he promoted himself as an “effective nationalist” who aimed at the maintenance of Russia mostly in the interests of the “state-shaping” Russian people (Prezident Rossii 2018).7 And once again his politics was glorified by Prokhanov, who underlined the military advancements of contemporary Russia (Prokhanov 2019). However, a sophisticated journalist, Georgii Peremitin, has found contradictions in Putin’s talks over the years and noticed that Patriarch Kirill, by contrast, identifies the national idea with holiness (Peremitin 2016). A civilizational idea got a new start after the ruling “United Russia” party officially identified itself as a bearer of the “conservative ideology” at its 11th Congress in November 2009. The new program titled “Russia to be maintained and developed!” represented Russia as the “Great state,” a “country with a unique cultural-historical heritage,” a “common cultural and geopolitical space,” rather than a civilization (Edinaia Rossiia 2009). Nonetheless, United Russia organized a car race titled “Great track of the Russian civilization” from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok in October–November 2009, which demonstrated that an idea of civilization was also appreciated. The year 2010 became a turning point when a Customs Union was established by Russia, Belorussia, and Kazakhstan, and a year later they were planning to shape a “Eurasian economic union” (Korolev 2015). Eventually, Putin launched the idea of the Eurasian Union in fall 2011.8 The initiative implied civilizational aspects, which constitute a Eurasian space. In his speech at the United Russia Congress in September 2011, Putin argued that the Customs Union united all the three states into a single Eurasia, and predicted that it would soon be integrated by common economic ties leading to a political unification. Later, he underlined that a common economic space consolidated Russia, Belorussia, and Kazakhstan and presented the Eurasian Economic Union as a super-state organization. He called the Customs Union a “historical landmark” for the entire post-Soviet space and presented the Commonwealth of Independent States as a model that “had helped to maintain a great number of civilizational, spiritual threads that united our peoples.” He viewed the future Eurasian Union as a supernational unity, a “living organism.” At that time, he saw no contradiction

Russia between civilization and civic nation  63 between this project and a choice of particular countries for a European integration and put forward an even more ambitious plan to develop a common economic space “from Lisbon to Vladivostok” (Putin 2011; see also Menkiszak 2013; Pozo 2017). On the eve of the presidential elections in 2012, Putin represented Russia as both a “multicultural state” and a “unique civilization,” whose core was identified with the Russian (russkii) people and Russian (russkii) culture. While arguing against Russian ethnic nationalists, he claimed that the “self-determination of the Russian people was a multiethnic civilization bound by the Russian cultural core.” He depicted the Russian people as “state-shaping” and once again emphasized a “civilizational identity” based on “Russian (russkii) cultural dominance.” To describe this he even used the term “cultural code,” and, in his view, this code had to be preserved and secured from those who wanted to destroy it (vzlomat’). In addition, the “state-civilization” aimed at an “integration of various ethnic groups and religious denominations” (Putin 2012a). Putin came back to this idea in his Address to the Federal Assembly in December 2012, representing Russia as a “state-civilization bound by the Russian (russkii) people” (Putin 2012b; see also Linde 2016a, 23–24). He also emphasized “spiritual bonds,” an idea that was supported by the then head of the Presidential administration, Viacheslav Volodin (Zygar’ 2016, 305–307). An independent journalist noted that in his rhetoric Putin was moving along the path already carved by the conservative Izborsk Club (Gogin 2013; see also Laruelle 2016a).9 The Izborsk Club has advocated a project of “Eurasian (Russian) civilization” with its own “Eurasian elite” and a “civilization code” based on “our thousand-year civilization.” It is worth noting that “Eurasian” and “Russian (russkii)” has been used interchangeably in this project, described by its authors as “neo-imperial.” Reconciliation between the “Soviet patriots (Reds)” and “patriots-traditionalists (Whites)” was one of their main goals. A “struggle of civilizations” was depicted as the pivot of world history. The Russian empire and the USSR were called the “two stages of the development of our great civilization” on the way to the ideal “Fifth Empire,” in Prokhanov’s terms. The project demanded the “realization and rescue of the dominant majority’s traditional values and meanings” as well as the “provision of the Russian (russkii) people with a state-shaping status in the Russian Federation.” In fact, the project drew on the idea of a single national leader, a single political party, and a single nation (Izborskii klub 2012, N.d.; Averianov 2013), which brought it close to fascist ideology and practice. All these ideas could reach Putin through his old friend the tycoon Vladimir Iakunin, who sponsored a think-tank (the “Center for Problematic Analysis and State-Management Projects”), which provided the Kremlin with analytical materials and published a book containing all the aforementioned ideas (Bagdasarian et al. 2009). In the beginning of 2012 Putin focused on the building of the Eurasian Union (Evraziiskii Soiuz). He has made this goal one of his most important

64  Victor Shnirelman political projects and did his best to gain public support for it. On April 22, 2012, a Public Confederation for “Eurasian integration” was established in Moscow, and the Russian officials began talking more confidently of a Eurasian political unity. Since February 2012 a new speaker in the Russian Parliament, Sergei Naryshkin, advocated the idea of a super-national Eurasian parliament, which was appreciated by certain politicians in Belarus (Elfimov 2012, 3). At the Council for Interethnic Relationships held in Saransk in August 2012, Putin articulated its goal as the “consolidation of Russia as a unique world civilization.” A project of the Russian Federation’s national policy adopted in September 2012 claimed that a “unique social-cultural civilizational community had been shaped on the historical territory of the Russian state,” which was identified with a “multiethnic Russian (rossiiskii) nation.” The “civilizational identity of Russia” and the “Russian (rossiiskii) civilization” were also mentioned. The project acknowledged the participation of many peoples in shaping the Russian state and culture, but the Russian (russkii) people were called a “system-shaping core,” and their culture was presented as “dominant” (Iarex 2012). The presidential decree (ukaz) “On the strategy of the state national policy of the Russian Federation for the period up to 2025” adopted in December 2013 also referred to a “common cultural (civilizational) code” as though it made up the basis of the culture-historical heritage of Russia’s peoples. Notably, the document associated this code with such moral imperatives as an “aspiration for truth and justice” rather than with culture. Yet, it is unclear where one can find this aspiration in contemporary Russia with its high level of corruption (Barry 2009; Dawisha 2014; Nadykto 2016; Makarov 2017; Galeotti 2018), falsified elections, and a deep gulf between wealth and poverty (News Mail 2013; Tkachev and Makarov 2017; Novye izvestiia 2018; Petukhova 2018; Pitalev 2018), which makes Russia one of the most corrupt countries in the world and one where social injustice prevails (BBC 2017; see also Milov and Iashin 2018). Moreover, the document aimed at building the nation on a cultural-historical rather than a civic-political foundation. After 2010, the idea of the “Russian (rossiiskii) civilization” began to attract politicians, top bureaucrats, and journalists. For example, at the meeting of the Presidium of the State Council in Ufa in February 2011, the then governor of the Rostov region, Vasilii Golubev, talked of the “original Russian civilization,” which he identified with the “Russian (rossiiskii) nation” (Prezident Rossii 2011). The former United Russia functionary, Sergei Zhelezniak, supported Putin’s idea of the “Russian civilization” and underlined the multiethnic and multiconfessional nature of the Russian state sharing a “common cultural code” based on Russian culture. He noted that only this approach could ensure a development and consolidation in the Russian environment in contrast to the “nationalist one,” i.e., the kind of ethno-nationalism that consolidates regional elites and represents thereby the threat of state dissolution. Only this project could secure ethnic and

Russia between civilization and civic nation  65 religious diversity (Zhelezniak 2012). This view was shared by the former Minister of ethnic issues and regional politics and the present Chair of the Department for Ethnic and Federal Relationships at the Institute of State Management (in the Russian Academy of National Economy and State Service), Viacheslav Mikhailov. In his talk at the Council for Interethnic Relationships in Moscow in February 2013, he referred to Nikolai Danilevsky and Konstantin Leontiev who, in his view, elaborated this approach as a basis for a civil reconciliation (Prezident Rossii 2013). A project for developing Russia as a distinct civilization based on Putin’s speeches was discussed in the Russian parliament in April 2014. The document aimed at maintaining traditional moral values and fostering patriotism and was promoted especially by the Ministry of Culture and confirmed by President Putin in December 2014 (Gordeev 2014; Rustamova and Ulianova 2014; Osnovy 2015; Turoma and Aitamurto 2016). Although Putin’s talks focused mostly on business, he had a more ambitious strategic goal—to build up a political unity for the future. In September 2013, at the Valdai Discussion Club, he accused “Western civilization” of abandoning its Christian values, which meant that he linked civilization with religion. Referring to Konstantin Leontiev, he presented Russia as a “state-civilization,” yet called for the shaping of a uniform civic identity. He also represented the Eurasian Union as a “project for maintaining peoples’ identities” and claimed that it would be built on the principles of cultural diversity (Putin 2013). However, he focused mostly on social consolidation and integrity, and all his talks made reference to “civil society” implying that state authorities were actively promoting its development. After 2013 Putin rarely used the term “civilization.” When explaining Russia’s reasons for annexing Crimea, he referred to its “civilizational and sacred importance” (Putin 2014). He viewed the warfare in Ukraine as being caused by its location at the conjunction of civilizations (TASS 2014). In addition, in his Address to the United Russia Congress in June 2016, he returned to the idea of a “unique Russian (rossiiskii) civilization,” though without any further elaboration (Putin 2016a). Finally, at the Council for Interethnic Relationships in late October 2016, he supported Viacheslav Mikhailov’s suggestion to develop a law “On the Russian (rossiiskii) nation and the management of ethnic relationships” (Prezident Rossii 2016a). Evidently, his care for Russian state integrity was one of the main reasons for this law, a civilization project manifesting a state-centric agenda (Tsygankov 2016; Linde 2016a). Indeed, in his short speech on November 4, 2017, Putin appealed to the unity of the Russian nation and even to its “genetic code,” yet failed to mention any “civilization.” And it was Mikhailov who reminded him of his contribution to the construction of the image of Russia as a “harmonious and flourishing civilization” (Putin 2017a). Later, Putin imagined Russia as the “largest Eurasian power,” yet distinguished it from Greater Eurasia (Putin 2017b). Somewhat earlier, at the “Open lesson” given for schoolchildren in the city of Yaroslavl on September 1, 2017, he recalled

66  Victor Shnirelman a millennial Russia, which he described with such terms as “great power,” “our country,” “our people” possessing “passionarity” (Lev Gumilev), “native culture,” but not “civilization” (Putin 2017c). And in his Address to the Federal Assembly in February 2019 he mentioned “Russian civilization” only in passing as being based on its own identity with long traditions (Putin 2019a). When discussing “civilization” many Russian politicians and intellectuals alike repeatedly confuse exclusive “ethnic Russian” (russkii) with inclusive “civic Russian” (rossiiskii, see, for example, Kozin 1996; Prokhanov 2019). Igor Ionov’s textbook describes the “spirituality of the Russian (rossiiskii) civilization” with a reference to Russian Orthodoxy as well as ethnic Russian traditional norms and values (Ionov 2003, 8, 52–53). And it was no accident that in a comment on Putin’s Address to the Federal Assembly in December 2012 a journalist wrote about “Russian ethnic (russkii) civilization” instead of the “Russian civic (rossiiskii) one” (Isaev 2012). Mikhailov, meanwhile, has referred to Patriarch Aleksii the Second as having associated the Russian (rossiiskii) state with purely Russian (russkii) values and traditions (Prezident Rossii 2013). Indeed, while elucidating his recent suggestion on the law of the Russian nation, he defined the latter as an “ethnic” rather than “civic-political one.” He even believed that the term “ethnic” had to be introduced into the National Constitution (Mikhailov 2016). Thus, as far as an ethnic group is commonly defined with a reference to language and culture, this paradigm made the “Russian (rossiiskii) nation” a code word for the “Russian (russkii) people” (Blakkisrud 2016, 260, 267; Gaaze 2016). Indeed, Mikhailov claimed that the “law project had to serve the Russian (russkii) nation and its integrity” [tsel’ proekta—russkaia natsiia i ee ob’edinenie] (Mikhailov 2016). Likewise, the Russian Orthodox Church’s advocates persistently underline the importance of the “Russian world” and of legalizing the Russian people’s “state-shaping” role (Gorodetskaia 2017). There is, however, no unanimity among specialists. At the same meeting of the Council for Interethnic Relationships, academician Valerii Tishkov and Professor Leokadia Drobizheva advocated a political and civic concept of the “nation” (Prezident Rossii 2016a; see also Kolstø 2016a, 32–33, 38; Filippova 2018, 85–87). Moreover, politicians in certain republics called the law “On the Russian nation” into question (Kommersant 2016). In his talk at the Valdai Discussion Club in 2013, Putin also called for shaping a civic identity that should not be reduced to an ethnic one (Putin 2013), yet he evidently wanted to ride two horses—imperial nationalism and ethnonationalism (Kolstø 2016a, 38–39, 2016b, 6). A shift from liberalism to conservatism in the elite discourse during the last two decades or so, as Marlène Laruelle (2016b, 282–294) argues, is also evident. Yet, one should acknowledge that both streams develop side by side, and from time to time they change place within the discourse from the mainstream to the margins and back. Sometimes their components such as statism and

Russia between civilization and civic nation  67 ethnonationalism (see Blakkisrud 2016) can blend up to the point where Russia is imagined as both civilization and some “other Europe,” as in Putin’s speeches in 2012–2013. It is worth noting that a social demand for changes and a will for political reforms were revealed by sociologists between 2017 and 2019 (Novye izvestiia 2017; Volkov and Kolesnikov 2017; Nezavisimaia gazeta 2018b; Dmitriev 2019). In his Address to the Federal Assembly in December 2016, Putin put forward the claim that “we are a single people, we are one people” (Putin 2016b). He did not refer to a specific nation or civilization. On the same day he signed a decree on the “Concept of the foreign policy of the Russian Federation.” The Concept aimed at the promotion of the Russian language and national historical heritage, the advancement of national culture and the cultural originality of the peoples of Russia, a consolidation of the “Russian diaspora” and protection of “compatriots abroad.” The document focused on “national priorities” and “national interests” rather than on “nation,” and Russia was presented as “one of the centers of influence in the contemporary world,” a “multiethnic and multiconfessional state” rather than a “civilization,” although a diversity of “cultures and civilizations” and their dialogue were mentioned. However, competition in the world was viewed as a “civilizational one” caused by a “rivalry of values.” Significantly, the document acknowledged the existence of a “world civilization” in addition to “local civilizations” (Prezident Rossii 2016b). Having met strong resistance in the regions, the initiators and compilers of the “Law on the Russian nation” concluded that Russian society was not ready for the idea of a single nation. They therefore suggested arranging multilateral consultations, discussions and education focusing on interethnic relationships. Renaming the Law the “Law on the basics of the state national politics” with a special section on the Russian nation was also suggested (Gorodetskaia 2017). Thus, the “Law on the Russian nation” has apparently been postponed (Rustamova 2017). It seems that Putin and his assistants use the term “civilization” instrumentally rather than conceptually. They use it when social consolidation is at stake and when there is a need to set Russia against the West. That is why one can hardly talk of any long-term “civilizational turn” in the Russian policy and ideology having taken place since 2012, as certain specialists have argued (Tsygankov 2013; Engström 2014, 371–376; Linde 2016b). A closer look at Putin’s speeches and relationships with the world’s leaders over the last few years reveals permanent attempts to get rid of the sanctions and to come back to the commonwealth of Western civilization, yet without losing face and on his own grounds.10 That is why, in my view, it makes more sense to talk of a temporary and superficial twist rather than of a long-term “civilizational turn.” This was particularly evident in 2017, when I was working on the first draft of this article. However, a hardening of sanctions in 2018 made Putin conclude that the new situation manifested an alleged permanent state of

68  Victor Shnirelman affairs regarding Russia’s relationships with the outer world and has taken shape “forever.” He articulated this idea at a press conference on December 20, 2018 (Putin 2018a). As Konstantin Gaaze has pointed out, It was assumed that Putin views the period of sanction conflicts as warming-up before a reconciliation, before a new status quo can be established. Yet, after the press conference of December 20 there are reasons to have doubts about this. (Gaaze 2018) Be this as it may, I agree with Andreas Umland that “the current Kremlin leadership is not genuine nationalism or deeply felt traditionalism, but rather a form of power politics whose cynicism, randomness, and lack of principle are, for some Western observers, difficult to comprehend” (Umland 2016). While being partly or entirely shared also by Yuri Teper (2016), Charles Clover (2016, 265) and Aleksandr Verkhovskii (2017), this view perfectly corresponds to Stanislav Belkovskii’s argument that Putin is a pragmatic politician who avoids following any particular ideology. He uses terms and quotations instrumentally and throws them away immediately after he has used them (Ekho Moskvy 2017). Recently this view has also been supported by Françoise Thom (2018). Finally, it was confirmed by Putin’s visit to Italy in early July 2019, when he claimed that Russia and Italy have a “common civilizational code” (Putin 2019b).11 This, once again, demonstrated Putin’s instrumental usage of the concept without any clear meaning, rather the concept was used simply to underline the solidarity between the two countries. It is evident, however, that a temporary shift in priorities has been an impulsive and emotional short-term reaction to challenges, whether they are external (the global financial crisis, war with Georgia supported by the West, and the “Arabic spring”) or internal (a break with the liberal wing) (Iakovlev 2016). With the economic decline of late 2016 and through 2017, the authorities have evidently realized the failure of this strategy and have done their best to backtrack, yet without losing face. This was evident in the phone-talk between Presidents Putin and Trump on January 28, 2017 when Putin articulated his hopes for an improvement in Russian-American relationships (Prezident Rossii 2017), and also at Putin’s meetings with Trump at G20 in July and at APEC in November 2017. Even Putin’s aggressive speech at the Federal Assembly on March 1, 2018 can be interpreted as an attempt to invite the Western leaders, most of all the Americans, to negotiations (Remchukov 2018; Trenin 2018). In this context, the term “civilization” is losing its confrontational content and is becoming less convenient, and it is therefore doomed to banishment from the discourse. It is noteworthy that it has almost entirely disappeared from Putin’s speeches and official documents in recent times. It is also telling that during the last few years the intellectual centers where Russian ethnonationalists used to promote a “civilization code” were closed by the state (Iliushchenko 2019).

Russia between civilization and civic nation  69 Nonetheless, the civilizational idea was not set entirely aside, and on May 15, 2018, an All-Russian conference in the Russian parliament focused on “the civilizational track of Russia: culture-historical heritage and a strategy of development.” The notion of “Russian civilization,” its borders and values, its cultural heritage and a strategy for its maintenance and development were subjects of discussion. In particular, certain participants talked about the “alien nature” of Western civilization, the “challenge from the West,” and what the Russian response should be (Russkaia narodnaia liniia 2018; Vsenovosti24 2018). And corrections to the “Strategy of the state national politics for a period up to 2025,” which was adopted in December 2018, secured the ideas of the “state-shaping people” and a “single (civilizational) code,” implying that the latter was shared by all the peoples of the Russian Federation.

The Russian Orthodox Church and the “civilizational identity” The “civilizational identity” of Russia attracted the interest of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) in the early 1990s, the idea of close ties between civilization and religion being even more important for ROC clerics than for Russian politicians and bureaucrats. Metropolitan Kirill addressed Eurasian ideas in his talk at the World Russian People’s Assembly (WRPA) in May 1993 (Kirill 1993, 14, 1995). This discourse developed for a while within a so-called “dialogue of civilizations” paradigm and was covered by the panel “Russia: faith and civilization” at the 6th WRPA in December 2001 (Gusev 2001). Having been an ardent advocate of “Russian civilization,” Metropolitan Kirill became Patriarch in 2009, after which Russian priests and theologians began to actively develop a concept of the “civilizational identity” of Russia (Filatov and Lunkin 2010). In 2007 the WRPA discussed the “Russian doctrine,” a program that suggested that Russia should develop on the basis of “spiritual-moral values, traditional principles of Russian civilization” (Platonov 2016, 8–9, 20). The “Russian doctrine” aimed at the close cooperation of Church and state, an idea that was approved by Kirill (Solodovnik 2013, 22–23). He himself mentioned a “civilizational project” in his talk in Kiev in summer 2009, where he identified this with the notion of “Holy Rus’” (Slepynin 2011). A TV movie titled “The Fall of the Empire. The Byzantine Lesson” produced by the then archimandrite Tikhon (Shevkunov) was an important landmark on this path. The movie was shown by the “Russia” TV channel on January 30, 2008, and it promoted a view of several independent civilizations, including the Orthodox one, as developing along their own historical tracks. All civilizations should preserve their own “cultural codes” (Shevkunov 2008). On March 29, 2011, the WRPA Discussion club arranged a panel titled “The Russian people and the unity of the peoples of Russia.” Its organizer, Aleksandr Rudakov, suggested viewing the Russian (rossiiskii) civic nation

70  Victor Shnirelman through the lenses of Russia as a unique and self-sustained civilization. To put it another way, Russian identity had received a civilizational meaning yet without abandoning the distinct “national identities” of the peoples of Russia. Moreover, a “patriotic cult of Russia” had to be developed. All this aimed at the amelioration of interethnic relationships. One speaker ascribed to ethnic Russians the role of a master of a communal house (Chaplin 2011; Pravmir 2011). A year and a half later the idea was positively received by the 16th WRPA held in October 2012. It was discussed in the context of “information wars,” which were compared with the bloodiest wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The speakers referred to plotters wanting to steal the Russian identity and, thus, to disintegrate Russia. The ROC was depicted as the spiritual backbone of Russia, and a “civilizational identity” was strictly tied with the Orthodox faith. The bureaucrats assured the WRPA participants that the authorities would protect the believers’ sentiments (Newsru 2012). While talking of the “Russian (russkii), Orthodox, East-Christian civilization” the archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin called the Russian people to address the world on behalf of “our civilization” and underlined a victory over the European forces that have abandoned their Christian roots (Chaplin 2012). Significantly, he failed to mention the Rossiiskii nature of the Russian state as well as its religious diversity. Since 2011 all the WRPA Congresses have consistently discussed the idea of “civilization.” “Russia as a country-civilization” was the key theme at the 17th Congress held in 2013. The idea was promoted by Patriarch Kirill, who focused on the “Russian (russkii) civilization,” but also described it as a “multiethnic entity,” a “symphony of ethnic groups” and the “great civilizational space.” He ascribed it with independence, particular values, and also “its own model of social cohesion and state, its own historical and spiritual system.” Notably, he put “spiritual sovereignty” above state sovereignty, and presented the Russian (russkii) people as the main builder of “Russian (russkii) civilization.” In addition, the Patriarch evoked the image of an enemy, noting that some evil agents wanted to see “Russia without (ethnic) Russians,” though without elaborating further. He concluded with a call to shape a civilizational entity (Kirill 2013). In fact, he followed the Constantinople Patriarchy’s traditions of the Late Byzantine period, which promoted “global,” i.e., imperial, values against the interests of the national state (Petrunin 2009, 71–74, 113–114). Moreover, this was an outcome of the statist ideology, which Kirill shared as an adherent of the “right-wing” interpretation of his tutor Metropolitan Nikodim’s (Rotov) views (Mitrokhin 2006, 181). A year later the 18th WRPA Congress lamented the weakening of Russian (russkii) identity that was being undermined by multiculturalism.12 The Congress called for “building up the Russian (rossiiskii) civic entity consolidated by the Russian (russkii) people.” While emphasizing the close ties between Russian (russkii) culture and Orthodox Christianity together with

Russia between civilization and civic nation  71 other traditional religions, it called to secure the “Russian (rossiiskii) civilizational code” evidently based on traditional values. On the one hand, they took care of the “national well-being of the Russian (russkii) people,” seeing it in terms of “state-shaping,” yet on the other hand, the peoples of Russia were described as a “multiethnic” entity (ROC 2014). Whereas the clergy had also focused on the “shaping of civilization” earlier, the rhetoric radically changed in 2015. The 19th WRPA Congress aimed at the glorification of Prince Vladimir the Great. It underlined his “civilizational choice” of Christianity, which allegedly made him the genuine “founder of the Russian (russkii) civilization.” True, the Congress acknowledged that, besides the Russian (russkii) people, this civilization had also embraced various other peoples and traditional religions as a basis for cooperation (ROC 2015). However, Patriarch Kirill pointed out that a religious choice has nothing to do with a civilizational path because Christianity cannot be constrained by any particular culture, whereas a civilization should be identified (after Danilevsky) with a “culture-historical type,” “a phenomenon of a social and cultural rather than a sacred nature.” Thus, several distinct civilizations could co-exist within a Christian world. Hence, Kirill divorced civilization from religion, and according to this view, baptism did not demand the abandoning of “national cultural identity” (Kirill 2015a). Evidently, Kirill confused the issue, in so far as Vladimir’s “civilizational choice” had nothing to do with a civilization, which maintained its basic cultural peculiarities regardless of baptism, and, thus, it is unclear why he should be called the “founder of Russian civilization.” Moreover, the Church’s belief in religion as a basis of civilization is undermined by this confusion. One also wonders whether the “civilization” in question has emerged before baptism, and thus, whether “Russian society” already represented an “ideal of moral community and state” in the pagan period. If so, Vladimir’s great contribution to the development of civilization becomes doubtful. Moreover, if the Russian civilization had emerged that early, Kirill’s call for a “shaping of civilizational entity” nowadays makes no sense. Otherwise this means that this shaping is still in project. Yet, if this is so, it makes no sense to talk of the “Russian civilization,” let alone a “civilizational heritage.” In addition, according to the Patriarch, the “Russian civilization” embraces numerous peoples with their own religions, and, thus, this civilization is “by no means purely ethnic Russian and Christian Orthodox” (Kirill 2015a). In this case, it is incorrect to call it the “Russian (russkii) civilization” rather than, say, the “Eurasian” one. Finally, the Patriarch’s argument of the “national cultural identity” in the pre-Christian period evidently contradicted contemporary scholarly views. In 2015 the Patriarch published a book on Prince Vladimir’s “civilizational choice,” where he omitted the point he made previously that Christianity could not be constrained by any particular culture. Instead, the Prince’s wise choice was underlined as though it had radically changed a trajectory of Russian history. The “civilizational choice” was linked with borrowing

72  Victor Shnirelman faith and culture from Byzantium, which has determined the emergence of a single strong state that shifted to European cultural life. Of course, the state was strong already in the pre-Christian period, but it was “small and less important” at that time. Only baptism has made Russia a “countrycivilization” and an “Orthodox Christian civilization” (Kirill 2015b, 29, 55). The unbridled pagan life had gone, and since then nobody could change this civilizational choice, the Patriarch claimed (Kirill 2015b, 47–50). To be sure, Kirill acknowledged that this choice had nullified neither injustice, nor wars, nor bloody conflicts, nor paganism. Therefore, he noted, Holy Rus’ would always be an ideal, and people can still make their “civilizational choice” (Kirill 2015b, 65–66). The Patriarch took care not of Christianity as a whole, but of the East Slavic peoples’ future, who had to follow the route designed by Prince Vladimir. Such controversies and paradoxes—an ambiguous definition of civilization and its variable imaginary foundation, its connections with an ethnic entity or political organization, its ties with religion and culture, whether it has emerged long ago or is still to be built up, etc.—are endemic in an essentialist civilizational paradigm whose advocates are driven by emotions rather than by rationality (for further details, see Shnirelman 2007, 2009c; Tsygankov 2007; Filatov and Lunkin 2010). At the opening ceremony of Prince Vladimir’s monument in Moscow on November 4, 2016, Putin failed to recall the “civilizational choice,” and talked instead of the establishment of a strong centralized state on a moral basis. Patriarch Kirill, for his part, had evidently forgotten his earlier speech about Christianity being associated with more than a single civilization and once again linked Vladimir’s choice to a “civilizational identity,” which he opposed to “pagan ignorance” (ROC 2016). When visiting Sevastopol in August 2017, Putin talked in turn of the “site where the centralized Russian state was born” rather than of the baptism of Rus’ (Putin 2017d). Both Putin and Kirill, when talking of “civilizational unity,” are interested in social cohesion rather than scholarly arguments or real culturalhistorical issues. Therefore, when they talk of a “civilizational unity,” they go far beyond the religious issue and disregard scholarly approaches to the question. Indeed, Patriarch Kirill presented Prince Vladimir as a symbol of the unity of the “peoples of historical Russia,” who live now in various states. Evidently, he emphasized a cultural and historical entity rather than religion, and he certainly had in mind the ROC’s canonical territory, which extends beyond Russia’s current borders but is called into question nowadays, not least in Ukraine. Certain priests go even further and see the world as divided into distinct civilizations for eschatological purposes, i.e., as a “hindrance for an implementation of the Devil’s plan to unite all the humanity in the theomachist Antichrist kingdom” (Veniamin 2004). For example, the priest Aleksandr Kruglov has claimed that God has divided humanity into peoples and states, and that this is why anyone who wants to undermine them violates God’s will (Kruglov 2004, 152). In this way a holy truth justifies nationalism.

Russia between civilization and civic nation  73 For his part, the late Metropolitan Ioann simplified the civilizational approach, presenting it as a struggle between two civilizations—Good (Orthodox) and Evil (“Judeo-Masonic”)—where the former worked on behalf of Jesus Christ and the latter worked on behalf of the Antichrist (Ioann 1995, 75). Later, the Orthodox philologist-monarchist Vladimir Semenko viewed Russia as a “civilization ‘that now restrains’ (katechon), preventing a final victory of Evil and enthroning the Antichrist” (Semenko 2010, 241).13 Yet, in contrast to more radical fundamentalists he did not view the contemporary world development as a “war of civilizations” and he hoped to avoid the “end of history” (Semenko 2010, 127). The theme of Evil within the context of Russian–Western relationships was brought up by Patriarch Kirill at the 20th WRPA Congress in 2016. He disagreed with the idea of the incompatibility of the Western and the Russian world. Yet, he warned against a blind borrowing of “alien worldviews and political models,” as this could only lead to catastrophe. He complained about the decline of “Western civilization” as a result of its abandoning of traditional values, and he was alarmed by both de-Christianization and the disappearance there of ethno-cultural diversity. In his view, this led to a growing gap in values between Russia and the West. Kirill, moreover, associated international terrorism with an “inadmissible radical secularism” rather than with any “conflict of civilizations.” Thus, the main problem was the “clash of the transnational radical secular globalist project with traditional cultures and local civilizations” (Kirill 2016).14 He mentioned neither the “end of time,” nor the Antichrist, nor “he who now restrains,” but his talk evidently contained all these ideas since he presented Russia as a bearer of some “eternal spiritual-moral values,” being obliged to bring them back to a Western world that had lost its way on account of loss of faith.

“Civilization” as both a Russian Orthodox and a political project In accordance with the sources discussed above, Putin uses the notion of “civilization” instrumentally to justify particular interests. He focuses on state integrity—the security as well as the durability of the state borders. To be sure, he would not object to territorial expansion through an integration of certain fragments of the former Soviet Empire (Crimea for one). Yet, his priority has been political integrity. In this sense, “civilization” proves to be a code word, or a substitute, for empire. “National state” is less appropriate because “nation” is commonly viewed in Russia in ethnic terms with exclusivist connotations. The notion of “civilization” is important for Russian foreign policy, which promotes the idea of “multipolarity” against an alleged hegemonic unipolar system, which proves to be anti-Western in practical terms (Curanović 2019, 220–221). In contrast to the state, the notion of “civilization” is attractive for the Russian Orthodox Church because it transcends national boundaries.

74  Victor Shnirelman What matters for ROC is canonical territory, which extends far beyond Russia’s state borders. This was underlined at the 16th WRPA Congress where “humanitarian sovereignty” was put above “state sovereignty.” The former was identified with identity and spiritual values, which should be protected from “alien agents aimed at world supremacy.” It is also telling that the “Orthodox civilization” was discussed in connection with the “legal status of the Russian (russkii) people” (ROC 2012). Notably, Patriarch Kirill sometimes talks of an “ethnically Orthodox population,” thus, indiscriminately blending Orthodoxy with ethnicity (Kirill 2011a).15 He also argues that the Orthodox faith shapes the Russian “national character” (Kirill 2010). However, the notion of “Russian civilization” may also be used as analogous to that of the “Russian World” (Russkii mir, see Suslov 2017; Komarova 2018), an ambiguous concept less frequently referred to by Putin himself, but actively used by other politicians and clerics. For example, for Patriarch Kirill this notion covers the countries sharing the Russian language, Russian culture, and a common historical memory, which turns them into some super-national civilizational unity (Kirill 2009). “Russian civilization,” by the same token, refers to a historical space with its own values and a special historical path (Kirill 2013). Yet, he means first and foremost “historical Russia” as encompassed by “Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians and many others who belong to the single Church in the vast Eurasian space” (Kirill 2015d). To put it another way, in contrast to more careful politicians the Orthodox priests usually speak of the “Russian (russkii) Orthodox civilization” rather than any “Russian (rossiiskii) [multireligious] one.” For Kirill, Holy Rus’ is a spiritual category rather than a geographical or political one that is not bound by state borders. He argues that although political bodies rose and fell in this territory, and their borders changed, spiritual unity survived for more than a thousand years as a dominant value (Kirill 2015c). This view helps to promote Russian (russkii) values and consolidates an evidently ethno-nationalist trend within Russian Orthodoxy, which is expressed through the term “Russian civilization.” At the same time, Kirill is well aware that ROC’s canonical territory embraces more than a dozen countries with their own cultures and languages (Kirill 2017). From a more careful perspective, “Russian civilization” proves to be an empty signifier because it focuses on a loosely defined territory or geography patronized by a ruler (secular or religious) but it lacks a subject, i.e., an active civil society with an elaborated agenda for the future. Furthermore, its values are not only poorly defined but are not unanimously shared within Russia and are often not followed by people in their real life. Thus, basically, these values do not work. For example, while discussing integration, many advocates of the civilizational paradigm never explain what they mean by integration, how a religious diversity can flourish within “Russian (russkii) Orthodox civilization” and how numerous languages and cultures can survive under “Russian (russkii) cultural dominance.” For example, how can a plurality of

Russia between civilization and civic nation  75 historical views co-exist within a uniform textbook in history? And how can a European choice be reconciled with a Eurasian one? A contradiction between this rhetoric and political reality is demonstrated nowadays by the Russian authorities’ fierce anger with the European choice of Ukraine, which has chosen to break away from the Eurasian track (Tsygankov 2015; Shkliarov 2017). Yet, an ambition to annex Ukraine as an “integral part of the Russian World” is still alive, encouraging Russian imperialism (Laruelle 2016c; Portal-Credo 2018), and certain Church parishes provide youngsters with military education (Mel’nikov 2018). Nonetheless, Ukraine’s shift westwards and the adoption of autocephaly by the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in January 2019 has broken down all such dreams. Noteworthily, while putting an emphasis on religion as a basis of civilization, the civilizational paradigm actually delegitimizes the Russian state, which through the centuries seized certain regions where non-Orthodox and non-Christian religions dominated in earlier times and still dominate, i.e., parts of “alien” civilizations that, according to the civilizational paradigm, are incompatible with the Russian Orthodox one. If so, they can reasonably demand to leave Russia and join their “genuine civilizations.” In fact, this problem alarmed Nikolai Trubetskoi as early as the 1920s (see Shnirelman 1998, 62). Thus, the question remains why contemporary Russian authorities need such a controversial and confusing civilizational approach. One way of answering this question is to understand it as Orwellian language, in which the idea of “state-civilization” serves as a substitute for an empire, which is still overloaded with negative connotations despite all the attempts of the Russian statists to see it in positive terms. As for the ROC, “Russian civilization” is a means to legitimize its claim to a canonical territory. In both cases the idea of “civilization” has to consolidate society on the cultural (rather than a political) basis and to block any oppositional or separatist movements. Nonetheless, recently “Russian civilization” has evidently become a less important concept for both the Russian authorities and the Church. It is telling that it was not exploited by President Putin in the election campaign in late 2017 and early 2018, and he mentioned neither “Russian civilization” nor conservative values in his Address to the Federal Assembly on March 1, 2018 (Putin 2018b; Vinokurova 2018). Likewise, Patriarch Kirill made no mention of it in an interview in January 2018 (Kirill 2018). Meanwhile, the Eurasian Union remains weak, as manifested at the 2018 Astana conference of the five Central Asian republics, to which Russia was not invited (Mekhtiev 2018). And evidently Russia’s former allies are moving along different tracks (Nezavisimaia gazeta 2018a; Rostovskii 2019) and resist shaping a joint political body as was demonstrated by the RussianBelorussian dispute in early 2019 (Shraibman 2019; Khodasevich 2019, 5) and negotiations in December 2019 (Samorukov 2019). Moreover, at the time of writing, the idea of Russia-Eurasia is losing its support, and certain experts are constructing a new idea of a Greater Eurasia encompassing all Asia but focusing mostly on China and India (Lukin 2019).

76  Victor Shnirelman

Notes

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Russia between civilization and civic nation  85 TASS. 2014. “Putin ne iskliuchil cheredy ostrykh konfliktov s uchastiem krupnykh stran.” TASS, October 24. http://news.mail.ru/politics/19933593/?frommail=1 (accessed 28 October 2014). Teper, Yuri. 2016. “Official Russian Identity Discourse in Light of the Annexation of Crimea: National or Imperial?” Post-Soviet Affairs 33 (4): 378–396. Thom, Françoise. 2018. Comprendre le poutinisme. Paris: Desclée De Brouwer. Tishkov, Valery. 1997. Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict in and after the Soviet Union: The Mind Aflame. London: Sage Publications. Tkachev, Ivan, and Oleg Makarov. 2017. “‘Zolotaia sotnia’ Forbes: Pochemu miliardery iz Rossii vnov’ bogateiut.” RBK, March 21. http://www.rbc. ru/business/21/03/2017/58d017f 79a794717eb78b5f4?from=newsfeed&utm_ source=news_feed (accessed 12 June 2019). Trenin, Dmitrii. 2018. “Kogda sviazisty vazhnee raketchikov.” Vedomosti, March 14. Tsygankov, Andrei. 2007. “Finding a Civilizational Idea: ‘West’, ‘Eurasia’, and ‘Euro-East’ in Russia’s Foreign Policy.” Geopolitics 12 (3): 375–399. Tsygankov, Andrei. 2013. “Vladimir Putin’s Civilizational Turn.” Russian Analytical Digest 127: 5–7. Tsygankov, Andrei. 2015. “Vladimir Putin’s Last Stand: The Sources of Russia’s Ukrainian Policy.” Post-Soviet Affairs 31 (4): 279–303. Tsygankov, Andrei. 2016. “Crafting the State-Civilization: Vladimir Putin’s Turn to Distinct Values.” Problems of Post-Communism 63 (3): 146–158. Turoma, Sanna, and Kariina Aitamurto. 2016. “Renegotiating Patriotic and Religious Identities in the Post-Soviet and Post-Secular Russia.” Transcultural Studies 12 (1): 1–14. Umland, Andreas. 2016. “The Putinverstehers’ Misconceived Charge of Russophobia: How Western Apology for the Kremlin’s Current Behavior Contradicts Russian National Interests.” Harvard International Review, January 21. Veniamin. 2004. “Na volne global’noi smuty.” Russkii vestnik, November 30. Verkhovskii, Aleksandr. 2017. “Russkoe tango s pravymi. Rev.: Anton Shekhovtsov: Russia and the Western Far Right: Tango Noir.” Colta, September 7. http://www. colta.ru/articles/literature/15907 (accessed 12 June 2019). Vinokurova, Ekaterina. 2018. “Vladimir Putin prochital poslanie dlia samogo sebia.” Znak, March 1. https://www.znak.com/2018-03-01/ekaterina_vinokurova_o_ tom_pochemu_prezident_posvyatil_svoyu_glavnuyu_rech_raketam_i_ssha (accessed 12 June 2019). Volkov Denis, and Andrei Kolesnikov. 2017. My zhdem peremen: Est’ li v Rossii massovyi spros na izmeneniia? Moscow: Moskovskii tsentr Carnegie. Vsenovosti24. 2018. “V Moskve sostoialas’ vserossiiskaia nauchno-prakticheskaia konferentsiia ‘Tsivilizatsionnyi put’ Rossii: Kul’turno-istoricheskoe nasledie i strategiia razvitiia’.” Rossiiskie novosti, May 15. http://vsenovosti24. ru/v-moskve-sostoyalas-vserossijskaya-nauchno-prakticheskaya-konferenciyacivilizacionnyj-put-rossii-kulturno-istoricheskoe-nasledie-i-strategiya-razvitiya/ (accessed 12 June 2019). Walters, Philip. 2007. “Turning Outwards or Turning Inwards? The Russian Orthodox Church Challenged by Fundamentalism.” Nationalities Papers 35 (5): 853–879. Zhelezniak, Sergei. 2012. “Putin raskryvaet unikal’nyi potentsial rossiiskoi tsivilizatsii.” Edinaia Rossiia, January 23. https://er.ru/news/72477/ (accessed 12 June 2019).

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4

“Civilization” in the Russianmediatized public sphere Imperial and regional discourses Galina Zvereva

Conspicuously devalued by its frequent use in a variety of contexts to mean a variety of different things, the concept of “civilization” (tsivilizatsiia) is, however, widely used in the discourse of politics, social science, journalism, and education in Russia today. The concept entered the popular vocabulary in Russia in the 1990s and early 2000s. At this time, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian society saw the creation of new ideological guidelines on state-building and the possible directions for the development of post-Soviet Russia. According to one of these scenarios, developed primarily within the auspices of the liberal “Westernizing” philosophy of history and supported mainly by “pro-Western” political reformers, Russia faced the difficult but inevitable task of joining the community of world civilizations (Kantor 1997, 2000; Iakovenko 2007, 2008; Kondakov, Sokolov, and Khrenov 2011). According to the second scenario, Russia had to adopt a middle position in the world civilizational system, involving a combination of signs of civilizational similarity to the West and of a distinctively Russian course of cultural development (Erasov 1995, 1999, 2002; Mezhuev 2000, 2011; Davydov 2010). A third scenario, which found a foothold primarily among the neo-traditional and neo- conservative Russian intelligentsia, envisaged a “special path” whereby a distinctive Russian civilization was destined to play its own role in world history, fulfilling a sacred mission (Platonov 1992; Panarin 1994, 1996, 2002; Troitskii 1994; Dugin 1999, 2001; Mozhaiskova 2002; Remizov 2005, 2016). This last scenario found strong support among the statist political and business elite, i.e., among those advocating a strong, centralized state. During the 2000s, the idea of a distinctive Russian civilization gradually gained predominance in Russia and acquired the status of the state’s official ideological policy. The discourse on civilization is reproduced persistently within the state system of academic scholarship and school education. The idea of a distinctive Russian civilization with its own unique history and its own special fate is seen widely in current academic dissertations in social sciences and humanities (Feofanov 2005; Shemiakina 2011; Reshetnikova 2012; Lepekhin 2015),1 and in school and university textbooks published under similar titles (Mchedlova 2008; Timiriasov 2012; Viktorov 2015).

88  Galina Zvereva Currently, the concept of civilization likewise plays an important role in Russian global geopolitical positioning and in the construction of a national state-identity (Shnirel’man 2004, 2007, 2009; Zvereva 2005, 2010; Dubin 2007, 2011; Ionov 2007; Pain 2010; Malinova 2012a, 2012b; Lubskii 2015). Various civilizational constructs are in constant circulation in the mediatized public space.2 These include (a) “The Russian World”—a unified civilizational, socio-cultural and supra-national space beyond the state borders; (b) the idea of Russia as a state and a civilization (in the cultural and historical contexts of Eurasia and Byzantium); and (c) Russian civilization as a multiethnic community which has grown up historically around a Russian nucleus. Imaginary spatial and civilizational communities are used in creating semi-official propaganda and educational products in both offline and on-line social communications. They are produced and promoted in print and electronic journals, on television and radio, on the Runet, and in social media. This chapter will analyze the ways in which the concept of “Russian civilization”3 is employed by official, government representatives as well as civil and church actors within the mediatized public space to construct spatial communities on the Runet and, in particular, in the Russian-language segment of social media. It will focus on the media-based activity of those actors whose views are in line with official Russian government policy on nation-building and on global geopolitical positioning. These pro-state actors represent a very broad range of ideological positions but subscribe, mainly, to neo-traditionalism, conservatism, sovereign patriotism, and right-wing extremism. We should also bear in mind that the way these actors identify themselves ideologically in the socio-political space is highly provisional. As for liberal civilizational discourse, at present its position in the Russian-mediatized public space looks marginal. By “liberal” in this instance, I mean conceptualizations of Russian civilization which approach it from an alternative methodological perspective and emphasize the idea of the “peripheral,” “borderline,” “unformed,” and/or “heterogeneous” character of Russian civilization.4 These conceptualizations do not fit into the mainstream official discourse, since they do not stress Russia’s civilizational uniqueness or its global importance. The liberal civilizational discourse is poorly represented in both old and new media, and its media influence is limited primarily to the academic audience. It is my contention that pro-state actors use the idea of Russian civilization as an important cornerstone in constructing a new shared sense of empire with both an “external” (“foreign”) and an “internal” (“domestic”) form. The “external,” imperial, geopolitical form of this idea is based on a discourse about Russia’s “special path” as a state and a civilization, and its mission within world history.5 The “internal” form of this shared sense of empire is created by means of a discourse on regional civilizational diversity within a united, multiethnic Russia.6 The construction of both these ideas is closely linked.

“Civilization” in Russian-mediatized public sphere  89 The purpose of this study is to ask how the concept of “civilization” is used in creating and consuming discourse about this new shared sense of empire within the digital environment and, in particular, on social media platforms. It analyzes materials from portals, websites, and web pages as well as political and social organizations’ and opinion leaders’ online channels on the Runet and social media (YouTube, Facebook, VKontakte). These resources have been selected based on a consideration of the dynamics of Russian political and social contexts between 2014 and 2017.

The actors of civilizational discourse in the public media The main actors involved in the production of civilizational discourse in the public media are political and social organizations related either directly or indirectly to the Executive (the Presidential Administration and the Government), to government legislative bodies (the State Duma, with its many committees and commissions), and to the Russian Orthodox Church. These are specialized institutions and centers, targeted and specialist funds, whose managers, as a rule, tend to hold prestigious positions in public institutions and organizations close to secular or ecclesiastical power. These organizations are involved in expertise, analysis, consultation, politics, technology, and propaganda, drawing up a topical “agenda” for society and fine-tuning the language used for relaying messages from the authorities. They are in possession of powerful information resources on social media (LiveJournal, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Vkontakte) and have excellent opportunities to promote their products online. Among them are such institutions and funds as the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies,7 The Institute for National Strategy,8 the Izborsk Club,9 the Byzantine Club,10 the Institute for Russian Civilization,11 and the Russkiy Mir Foundation.12 Many conservative, “patriotic” far-right organizations and movements are taking part in forming discourses on “civilization” within the media. These include the International Eurasian Movement,13 the Eurasian Youth Union,14 the Great Fatherland Party,15 the “Essence of Time” movement,16 the National Liberation Movement (NOD),17 and the Scientific Centre for Political Thought and Ideology,18 as well as specialized information and analysis portals of radical conservative and neo-traditionalist orientation, such as Russkaia Narodnaia Liniia (Russian Popular Line) or Russkaia Liniia (Russian Line).19 A characteristic feature, not only of these organizations and movements but also of their leaders and active members, is that they are closely linked to one another, either institutionally or through joint projects and activities. Thus, the International Eurasian Movement and Eurasian Youth Union are institutionally linked to the activities of the international not-for-profit foundation “The Centre for Geopolitical Expertise.”20 The director of this foundation, the political analyst, and journalist Valerii Korovin is deputy director of the International Eurasian Movement and editor-in-chief of the “Eurasia” research and information portal.21 He is also a permanent

90  Galina Zvereva member of the Izborsk Club.22 The philosopher, political analyst, and columnist Aleksandr Dugin, director of the International Eurasian Movement and of the Eurasian Youth Union, is the president of the “Centre for Geopolitical Expertise,” editor-in-chief of the research and information online publishing channel “Tsargrad TV,”23 and a permanent member of the Izborsk Club.24 At the same time, he actively promotes himself on various social media platforms.25 The social philosopher and commentator Andrei Fursov works as a Director of the Institute of Systemic and Strategic Analysis and runs the Centre for Methodology and Information at the Institute of Dynamic Conservatism, while also participating in activities of the Izborsk Club as a permanent member.26 Andrei Fursov has personal accounts on Facebook and Vkontakte, as well as personal channels and blogs on YouTube and other social media.27 A number of these organizations have close business and personal ties with the Russian Orthodox Church and its clergy. For instance, some high officials of the ROC are included in the category of elite members of the Izborsk Club (e.g., Bishop Augustin (Anisimov) of Gorodetsk and Vetluzhsk and Bishop Tikhon (Shevkunov)) and of the Byzantine Club (e.g., Metropolitan John of Belgorod and Staryi Oskol).28 It is worth noting that several activists in organizations engaged in producing civilizational discourse are also professors, heads of departments, and faculty heads within Russian universities and specialized institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences. For example, Andrei Fursov is a professor at Moscow State University as well as in the independent Moscow University for the Humanities, where he is head of the Centre for Russian Studies and the School of Analytics.29 The founder of the Byzantine Club, the scholar and economist Valentin Katasonov, is a professor at the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) and the President of the Sharapov Russian Economic Society (REOSh).30 The mathematician Georgii Malinetskii, also a permanent member of the Izborsk Club, is director of one of the departments of the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics in the Russian Academy of Sciences and works as a professor in several Russian universities (MEPHi, Bauman Moscow State Technical University, People’s Friendship University of Russia). He is also author of a blog in the electronic version of the Communist newspaper Zavtra.31 All this creates a strong online interconnectedness between the socio-political, propaganda-related, journalistic, academic, and educational activities of the members of the state organizations mentioned above. These actors’ relations generate a network. The aim of this network is to establish discursive influence over the Russian mediated public space. Such a network is designed to construct meanings that are powerful for mass audiences. Civilizational discourse is now being used in the articulation of a radically conservative, neo-traditional agenda not only by institutions, organizations, and movements with a strong online and offline presence but also by ambitious public opinion leaders who make frequent pronouncements on various social media platforms. Aware that the media environment is a

“Civilization” in Russian-mediatized public sphere  91 powerful field for political communication that allows them to test out new verbal and visual methods of influence on a mass audience, these actors also have a prominent presence in the mediatized public space (Latenkova 2012). The “orders of knowledge” created in diffuse form online by political actors in the media are designed to subtly realign, direct, and control public sentiment (Pastukhov 2016). One of the leaders of the Izborsk Club, Vitalii Averianov, has given quite an accurate account of such a projective strategy: Today, in the field of religion and the humanities, we are able to suggest qualitatively new, comprehensive solutions. We have friends at the head of the Ministry for Education and Science, and the Ministry for Culture. Certain attitudes can also be observed in the nationwide media. The Izborsk Club has people who would be able to carry out something like a micro-revolution in these areas. And these micro-­ revolutions would, undoubtedly, spark off a chain reaction of change in other fields. (Averianov 2017) Such a political statement from a famous Russian conservative ideologue, suggesting that it is possible to shape and influence discourse within the field of religion and the humanities in Russia, is a wholly realistic one. And this is not only because influential state-led institutions have at their disposal considerable information and media technology resources with which to promote conservative, neo-traditional, and radically right-wing values and agendas. But it is also because, in communicative practice, the broad concept of civilization offers an empty conceptual and discursive space, which the actors and consumers of civilizational discourse—from members of the political elite to ordinary citizens—can invest with their own meanings, demands, interests, and expectations.

The Russian state as a civilization with its own “special path” and global mission Various actors on various new media platforms are now suggesting that it is quite natural that Russia be revived today as a spatial and spiritual world empire. This idea is supported by arguments advocating the restoration of a lost historical continuity and the revival of an unbroken history of the centuries-old Russian empire. Such arguments rely on the idea of a unique Russian civilizational paradigm as the basis of imperial unity and as an essential condition for Russia to fulfil its special mission in today’s world. For instance, a live broadcast which was screened in March 2016 on the conservative television channel Tsargrad-TV and which was uploaded onto YouTube, where it received over five thousand views, featured a special discussion on the topic “Russia—is empire an inevitability?” The presenter, journalist Andrei Norkin, and the other participants—the famous social

92  Galina Zvereva commentator Egor Khomlogorov and the philosopher and political analyst Aleksandr Tsipko—answered questions which had been formulated at the start of the broadcast as follows: Should we aim for the restoration of the Russian Empire and the monarchy, perhaps not in its absolute and dynastic form but, for example, a constitutional, elected monarch? Are the imperial ambitions of which we are so often accused, especially in the West, as important to us as they once were? Should we restore the Russian Empire within the precise territorial boundaries that existed before 1917? Which model is closer to Russian citizens’ sense of their own national identity—the imperial model or the desire to become a fully-fledged, democratic secular state? (Khroniki Norkina 2016) In the course of the debate, Egor Kholmogorov spoke in favor of restoring the empire and autocracy. He argued about the need to preserve the particular civilizational foundations of the Russian state: “We are a huge ­country—a civilization which has taken upon itself a terribly difficult mission: to create great literature, great art, great science and scholarship, and an advanced civilization within a spatial reality that is cold, glacial, Siberian.” Kholmogorov’s opponent Aleksandr Tsipko, while considering projects to restore the empire and revive the autocracy to be unrealistic, nevertheless argued that such ideas are supposedly archetypical for Russians. The presenter stated a certain conceptual similarity between the positions of both participants in the discussion, and he formulated a question that looked like the key political request: “Does it mean that the empire is an absolute common good for our country, and we should try to recreate not the USSR, but that empire …?” At the end of the discussion, Kholmogorov’s point of view that “in 20–25 years we will live in the Russian Empire” prevailed. In their comments on the video, ordinary users also expressed their sympathy with the “imperial” position: “Yes, it’s high time to return all our lands! We are in favor of the Empire” (Khroniki Norkina 2016). Within conservative and neo-traditionalist civilizational discourse, the idea of Empire is interwoven with assertions about Russia’s great global civilizational mission and its role as a defender of genuine European and Christian values, constantly in confrontation with and opposition to the “corrupt” West. A good example of this sort of argument can be seen in the public pronouncements of Leonid Reshetnikov (a retired lieutenant-general in the foreign intelligence service and former director of the Institute for Strategic Research), which are actively promoted on various social media platforms. The propaganda films on YouTube in which Reshetnikov features tend to have titles that are persuasively emotional and ideologically unambiguous: “Russia is a spiritual power in defense of eternal values” (Reshetnikov 2016b), “Demons sense the rebirth of Russia” (Reshetnikov 2016a), and so on. The principal ideas expressed in these presentations is

“Civilization” in Russian-mediatized public sphere  93 that Russia is a distinct, alternative civilization in today’s world and that the end of the Russian Empire in 1917 was a catastrophe: “We need to get back onto our historical path”; “This path lies within our civilization”; “Western people tell us ‘You are our last hope’.” A constant topic of the pro-state actors’ media statements is the geopolitical confrontation between Russian civilization and the civilization of the West. To support such statements, references are usually made to Samuel Huntington’s famous concept of the conflict of civilizations. For instance, Victor Efimov, professor and former rector of the Russian Agrarian State University, in an address to the academic conference “The National and Civilizational Foundations of the Russian World,” available on YouTube, talks of the unique mission of Russian civilization in conjunction with the idea of opposition between Russia and the West. He emphasizes that Russian civilization represents a threat to today’s globalizers, who would reduce humanity to a mental state on a par with animals. To wipe out codes of equality and to destroy Rus’ as their bearer within the matrix of world civilization—this is the ultimate aim of global politics, which can be observed both in the distant past and in what has happened during the Maidan in Kiev. (Efimov 2014) The message of the inevitability of a conflict between Russian and Western civilizations, fraught with a cold or hot war, can be traced in the broadcasting of Nikolai Starikov, social commentator and leader of the “Great Fatherland” Party, on the Orthodox TV channel Spas (“Saviour”): “Today, war has been declared on Russia. The West wants to do in Russia what it has done in the Ukraine. We must go on the attack. Wars are not won by defense” (Starikov 2015). A more extensive expression of a similar position can be seen on the patriotic information site “Dvizhenie Russkii soiuz” (“The Russian Union Movement”) in the article “The message of Russian civilization in the holy war in Syria.” Here, the author, Archpriest Oleg Trofimov, announces: At the start of military intervention, the Russian Orthodox Church declared this to be a holy war [...]. Russia’s participation in this war is geopolitically highly significant: at a time when NATO has surrounded our country on all sides with its bases, the displacement of the Russian presence in Syria, and from the Middle East in general, strategically deprives Russia of allies and makes possible a still more painful reprisal in the global war […] in this war, Russia is acting as a representative of the civilization of Jesus Christ—Holy Rus’. Even a secular event, the concert given to mark the liberation of Palmyra, confirmed Russia’s image as the defender of global cultural heritage from absolute evil. Every drop of Russian blood spilled makes up part of a shared treasure-house

94  Galina Zvereva and is laid at the foundation of the Great Russian Empire and the spiritual phenomenon of Holy Rus’. The Christian world, the Islamic world, the right-thinking world, looks to Russia with hope. The global war against Russia has never ceased but has moved from a passive stage into an active stage. No matter how these wars are unleashed upon her, Russia bears the global mission of the Katechon. (Trofimov 2016) In this statement by a prominent representative of the Russian Orthodox Church, the idea of an active military counteraction by Russian civilization to global threats coming from the West is linked to the idea that Russia is a defender of genuine, traditional European values that have been lost in the modern world.32 It should be noted that the articulation of the position according to which Russia is a “different Europe” (either the center of Eurasia or the heir of the Byzantine Empire) is by no means a rarity in the modern Russian conservative civilizational discourse (Zvereva 2014; Laruelle 2016). These ideas reach their fullest expression in the discourse about the Russian state and civilization as the defender and inheritor of Eastern Christendom and in the revival of the idea of Moscow as the Third Rome. Recently, the expression and promotion of such ideas in the media has been increasingly apparent. In an interview given to a journalist at the university forum of the Kant Baltic Federal University, Oksana Gaman-Golutvina, professor at the Moscow State Institute for Foreign Affairs and president of the Russian Association of Political Sciences, made the following position statement when asked about Russia’s place in the world today: Russia has been forced into the position of protector of European values. Russia is an Eastern Christian civilization, a very large state with its own rich culture. The shared hierarchy of Christian values takes a form here that is naturally inherent in our civilization. One feature of this is, loosely speaking, its multi-cultural, multi-faith and multinational character. And this tolerance […] is a typical Russian feature, a feature of Russian civilization that was evident back at the time when the nation-state was formed, when territories brought into the orbit of the Empire were not subjugated by fire and sword but were given substantial preferences by the center. (Gaman-Golutvina 2015) The Byzantine Club is one of the most persistent promoters of this version of civilizational discourse in the mediated public space. The leaders of the Byzantine club present the club’s vision as “asserting and reinforcing the values of Eastern Christian civilization within the modern world. The Byzantine Club is a forge for new ideas, ideas that shape new approaches to national politics based on a historical continuity with Byzantium.” In their public appearances and addresses, prominent members of the Byzantine

“Civilization” in Russian-mediatized public sphere  95 Club state the case that “Russia is the civilizational successor to the Roman (Byzantine) Orthodox Empire” (Evraziiskoe dvizhenie Rossiiskoi federatsii 2016). With this understanding of Russian civilization, members of the Byzantine Club emphasize the superiority of Eastern Christianity over that of the West. At the same time, their position is not fundamentally different from the views of those who emphasize the role of Russia as a defender of genuine European Christianity, whose values should be sought primarily in Byzantium. It is this viewpoint that is represented by the influential pro-state Institute of National Strategy in its analytical report “Conservatism as a soft power factor of Russia”: Russia in no way should position itself as part of Asia or a conditional “non-Europe.” Such a position will play on Russia’s separation not only from its potential allies in the Western world, but also from its own cultural roots. Russian culture is one of the standard European cultures, rooted in the common heritage of Christianity and antiquity. An important thesis is the connection of Russia with the Eastern Roman Empire—Byzantium. The very fact of this connection and historical continuity forbids Russia to be “thrown out” of the European field […] The Byzantine heritage […] is a very serious argument that allows Russia to position itself as an equal partner in the debate about European values. Of course, along with the luggage of Russian culture proper, this allows the conservative community in Russia to maintain a healthy dialogue with Europe—not as “students of the West” and not in confrontation with it, but from the position of one of the co-authors of European civilization. (Institute of National Strategy 2014, 114). A number of similar pronouncements are replicated simultaneously on various traditional and new media platforms, resulting in a powerful suggestive effect in mass communication.

The Russian state and civilization as a multicultural empire In the web-based communication environment, side-by-side with the mediagenerated idea of the Russian state and civilization as a global empire, there is a view of it as a multiethnic, multicultural, multi-faith imperial entity in a constant state of spatial expansion.33 At the root of this project is the idea of consolidating the Russian regions, each with its own local subcivilizational history, into a spatial and civilizational community made up of many components. The organizing principle of this community is the idea of a commonwealth of nations, each of which has, in the past, made a voluntary “civilizational choice” in favor of national unification under the leadership of the Russian people. This position is presented in concise form

96  Galina Zvereva in an article by one of the ideologues of present-day Russian conservatism, Mikhail Remizov:34 Russia was formed not as a civic nation but as a historical project of a specific union of peoples, with the Russian people at its core. This union is the real basis of the political nation of Russia. The Russian nation is a community made up of those with an interest in the building of the Russian nation and state. The Russian people are the organic nucleus of this community, and the indigenous peoples loyal to Russia are its rightful participants. (Remizov 2005) It should be pointed out that this imperial paradigm is far from original. It has been constantly articulated among the political elite both in the capital and in Russia’s regions from the middle of the 2000s. To accept this paradigm is, in a way, to express a consensus on Russia’s political landscape and the shape of relations between the central and regional powers. In the 1990s and the early 2000s, at the time when the new federal state was being built, political reformers from among the central authorities and the intellectual elite tried more than once, with the help of legislative programs, to change the alleged nature of the ethnic, national and interregional relations which had been formed within the previous “Russian” states, proposing instead a new conception of a Russian civic state (Pain 2003; Zvereva 2010). However, all these attempts encountered strong political resistance both in the center and in the regions (Tishkov 2007; Nemenskii 2012; Granin 2017). In other words, the imperial conceptual framework of Russia as a unique country and civilization—a multi ethnic state with a Russian core—has been persistently reiterated in the post-Soviet official political discourse and disseminated in the mass media and school education, remaining a key aspect of the activity of contemporary Russian social institutions. Statist political and social actors take an active role in the production and dissemination of the imperial-civilizational discourse within the media. An important event that served to amplify the expression of such ideas in society was the official commemoration of the Christening of Rus’ in 2015 that took place all over Russia under the slogan “The Civilizational Choice of Prince Vladimir.” Throughout that year, in all the Russian regions, various secular and religious events devoted to this subject were held. These included themed festivals, competitions, academic conferences, and public forums. Senior government and Kremlin officials and high-ranking clergy from the Russian Orthodox Church were participants at some of the larger gatherings. These events quickly acquired a media presence, as they were broadcast as news on all the TV and radio stations and as videos on social media. For instance, the progress and results of the Russia-wide school essay competition on the topic “The Legacy of Prince Vladimir” (part of the general theme of “The Relevance of the Civilizational Choice of Prince Vladimir

“Civilization” in Russian-mediatized public sphere  97 for the 21st Century”) received detailed coverage in electronic journals and periodicals and on social media platforms. Schoolchildren from 65 regions of Russia took part in this competition. On social media platforms, texts and video materials from the all-Russia research and training conference “The Civilizational Choice of Russia’s Peoples” at Kazan Federal University (Volga region) and the international research and training conference “Prince Vladimir. A Civilizational Choice” (impressive gatherings of regional elites, including Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church and high-ranking Kremlin officials) were widely disseminated. In the course of the media promotion of a “civilizational choice,” representatives of secular and religious authority focused public attention on the unifying value of the concept of civilization for all the peoples, confessions and cultures of various regions of Russia. A typical example of this is an address by Metropolitan Tikhon of Novosibirsk and Berdsk on the website of the Karasuk and Ordynsk eparchy. In his address to a mass audience, he declares: Russia, as a country and a civilization, has to its name an impressive array of achievements of worldwide significance: the repeated defeat of aggressors with claims to global domination; an artistic culture which is recognised throughout the world, an outstanding contribution to world science, pre-eminence in space exploration; the colonization of Siberia and the Far East; faith in Orthodox Christianity […] Today we are in the grip of yet another crisis, caused mainly by the weakening of our own identity and the powerful attraction of our geopolitical rivals. It is essential that we free ourselves from civilizational hypnosis. It is by the mobilization of the country’s forces, not by spiritual capitulation, that we will be able to overcome any civilizational crisis. (Metropolitan Tikhon of Novosibirsk and Berdsk 2015) There also exists, however, an effort to decenter the Russian empire by relocating its civilizational roots spatially from center to periphery in media actors’ cultural practices. This can be seen clearly in popular television programs presented by their creators as scholarly educational projects. An example of this is the program by the television journalist Igor Prokopenko, “Territoriia Zabluzhdenii” (“Territory of Misconceptions”), on the channel RenTV, and the television program “Tainstvennaia Rossiia” (“Mysterious Russia”) on the NTV channel, whose episodes are constantly posted on YouTube. “Sakhalin: a lost civilization,” “Western Saian, dwelling place of an alien civilization,” and many other similar videos from the “Mysterious Russia” series gather a huge number of user views. As well as disseminating mythological notions about famous historical and cultural artefacts in the Russian regions, the creators of these mass-interest products also promote the idea of civilizational uniqueness and exceptionality within the media environment.

98  Galina Zvereva In the array of videos available on YouTube, a prominent place is taken by media presentations on supremely ancient cultural artefacts from various Russian regions (Siberia, the Urals, Altai, and others). The creators of these media products unfailingly stress the fact that these material proofs of ancient local civilizations are superior to world-famous cultural monuments.35 For example, the authors of a video about the so-called Shigirsk idol say that the idol is older than the pyramids of Giza (YouTube 2014). A film about the Arkaim Observatory in the Urals,36 which attracted more than 300,000 views on YouTube, incorporates the idea that this monument is considerably more ancient than Stonehenge. These and other similar videos unfailingly express the notion that these relics of great, lost civilizations are part of the shared cultural heritage of the multiethnic state and civilization of greater Russia. In their comments on the video about Arkaim, users support this imperial idea: User 1: Excellent film. This is precisely the sort of film we need to show in school history lessons, so that the younger generation feel a sense of national pride and a responsibility to preserve the splendor of their ancestors and their native land. User 2: I am proud of my Slavic Aryan ancestors. And my ancestral memory tells me that there will be many more such discoveries! User 3: Thank you for a wonderfully shot film which is very necessary for us, the children of our long-lost ancestors. However, along with positive ratings of this film in the comments, one can also find diametrically opposed, critical remarks. For example, User 4, catching the apology for the Empire contained in the film, reacts to it as follows: The look on this clown Zadornov’s face says that he is a nationalist. He would have done better to read the epos of the Ural-Batyr and other epics of the Bashkirs, and perhaps then he would have cooled off from this “territory of Arkaim.” They came, colonized the Bashkir land, and developed this nonsense and some kind of theory. (YouTube 2013) The notion of the unique and ancient character of a Russian civilization made up of many components, and of a “civilizational dialogue between the peoples of Russia,” is disseminated in various media-based formats from the center to the regions and elaborated in local spatial configurations. These act as ideological “ties” which help substantiate the idea of the spiritual and material interconnectedness of the regions to a common root—the Russian nucleus of the Empire. At the same time, it should be noted that, in a mediatized public space, “civilization” as a discursive construction can serve different purposes: imperial, national-state, ethno-national, or regional. As

“Civilization” in Russian-mediatized public sphere  99 “civilizational” products circulate in social media, they can also acquire some elements from postcolonial or separatist discourses (Zvereva 2016). In other words, political and social actors instrumentalize “civilization” at various levels and on different scales, based on their own interests and motivations.

The dynamics of regional civilizational discourses Prominent regional politicians, academics and journalists make wide use of the notion of unique civilizations in their discursive practice. The idea of civilization is used as a key factor in determining spatial identification. Civilizational identification takes place on the level of cultural, geographical, ethno-cultural, and territorial administrative spaces. Over the first fifteen years of this century, the repertoire of regional civilizational discourses has changed noticeably, although the basic premise behind the formation of these discourses is similar in many cases. This is because of the desire of certain regions and subjects of the Russian Federation to increase their status within the Russian state and to acquire concessions or privileges from the central authorities, while still demonstrating adherence to the idea of the preeminent role of Russians as the imperial core. The ambivalence of this position gives rise to several trends in the Russian-mediatized public space. One such tendency appears on the surface as the attempt by a given region to gain autonomy. It manifests itself in an emphasis on a distinctive local civilization. In regional communities it is expressed by the articulation and promotion within the media of the concepts of various civilizations: Circumpolar, Pomor, Arctic, Chuvash-Bulgar, Siberian, Altai, and others. In essence, these concepts do not contradict the imperial idea of a multiethnic Russian state and civilization. In a number of regions in the Russian north and Siberia, attempts have been made by some extreme radical groups to incorporate slogans of dis-integration into civilizational discourse, but these have a marginal character (Shnirel’man 2007; Zvereva 2016). After the protests on Bolotnaia Square in 2011–2012, and particularly in connection with the annexation of the Crimea and the military developments in Ukraine in 2014–2015, the tendency toward cultural separatism in regional discourse began to die down and seemed to come to an end. Moreover, self-censorship within the regional media and social media increased, and the Russian imperialists became more active on the web. No matter what form they take, any ideas of separatism are harshly rebuffed in the media by die-hard conservative journalists (Larin 2012; Semushin 2012; Vishniakov 2014). At the same time, certain influential conservative actors involved in civilizational discourse in the media are attempting to intercept some of these local spatial constructs, treating them as cultural projects and giving them new geopolitical significance. This process of semantic reconfiguration is taking place, in particular, with regard to the constructs of a “Northern civilization” (Krupnov 2003) and

100  Galina Zvereva an “Arctic civilization” (Prokhanov 2016). Opening the Arctic branch of the Izborsk Club in the town of Nizhnevartovsk, Aleksandr Prokhanov declared, “Today the Arctic is the stepping-off point for a new Russian expansion”: The Russian world, in order to compensate for Russia’s withdrawal from more southerly latitudes, is creating a new Arctic civilization in the polar regions. A civilization of the Pole Star. Here, in the Arctic, oil and gas are extracted from the marine shelf. The Arctic is where our strategic submarine force is located. And what of the creation of the Arctic civilization on the ice edge, past which fleets of ships will shortly travel along the Northern Sea Route? Here we have a complex system of locations, habitable settlements, and research stations. (Prokhanov 2016) Another current tendency in the positioning of regions is the branding of regional territories with an emphasis on civilizational mythology. In connection with this, we can see how, in scholarly, as well as literary and cultural circles in the Siberian and Urals regions, concepts of “fur-producing,” “salt-producing,” “oil and gas producing,” and “mining” civilizations have appeared (Fedorov 2012). The last of these has been the most successful. The famous Ural writer Aleksei Ivanov, supported by the local authorities, the intellectual community, and media industry, has been actively promoting the concept of the “mining civilization” of the Urals in various formats (journalism, fiction, television serials, and so on). Explaining the subject matter of this project, Ivanov stresses how crucial the civilization factor is for the sense of regional identity and territorial branding. According to him, Russia consists of numerous cultural projects and civilizational phenomena. All these phenomena are linked to whatever is the most effective method to develop and exploit a territory: For instance, we have the phenomenon of mid-Russia—peasant Russia. The main values here relate to property and power, and people express themselves through these values. Then there is the phenomenon of southern Russia—Cossack Russia. Here the most important values are fairness and equality. Then you have the phenomena of hunting, fishing and other small industries in the Russian North and Siberia. Here, the most important values have to do with initiative and enterprise. There are national regions—Tatarstan, Bashkiria, Chechnya—where the most important values have to do with faith and tradition. Then you have the Ural phenomenon. The Urals became an industrial region because it could be most effectively exploited using mining and metallurgical factories. Here, it is work—physical labor—that is valued above all. (Ivanov 2013a)

“Civilization” in Russian-mediatized public sphere  101 Developing the theme of the Urals as a unique civilizational phenomenon, Aleksei Ivanov says that: here, industry was organized like an empire, and the result was a “state within a state,” consisting of metallurgical factories. On the basis of that mining state, there rose up a “mining civilization,” a set of distinct habits and cultural practices. (Ivanov 2013b). Ivanov’s position finds support among statist conservative circles. For instance, social commentator Egor Kholmogorov, who praises Ivanov’s conception on his LiveJournal page, clearly interprets it in imperialist terms: Russian expansion is a prize won in a bloody and hazardous struggle. There were many who had a claim on the Urals and Siberia, but as they say—“nothing ventured, nothing gained.” Russia’s prize consisted not only of fur, oil, gas, and semi-precious stones, but also of a new Russian sub-civilization, a mining civilization which in the 18th century made Russia—albeit for a short time—the most industrialized country in the world. The mining civilization revealed by Aleksei Ivanov is a fascinating phenomenon. But we should not forget that it is only one of a score of Russian civilizations that have existed throughout Russian history and that continue to exist—the civilization of Russian cenobite monasteries, the civilization of the Russian North […], that of Don Cossacks and other Cossack hosts or of the Siberian peasantry. There are many civilizations, embracing a multitude of peoples. And one extraordinary people [i.e. the Russians, GZ], which has given rise to a multitude of civilizations, collateral products of its own shared national civilization. (Kholmogorov 2016) This statement by Kholmogorov clearly shows an attempt to appropriate the local-civilizational conception of Alexei Ivanov and incorporate it into the semi-official discourse about a multicultural imperial integrity with the system-forming Russian core. Recently, in the statements of regional social actors positioning themselves as opinion leaders, there has been a growing tendency to incorporate ideas about the civilizational originality of the regions into the general historical narrative of the multicultural empire (including the experience of the USSR in organizing inter-ethnic relations). A typical example of this is provided by pronouncements about the particular character of Bashkir civilization and its place within Russian civilization, pronouncements made by Azat Berdin, the famous Bashkir sociologist and head of department of

102  Galina Zvereva the Centre for Social Anthropology and Culture Studies in the city of Ufa. In 2012, he declared that: The contractually determined entry of Bashkortostan into Russia served as a precedent which has, in many respects, determined the Eurasian character of Russian colonization, that is, a model that is essentially non-racist. Furthermore, he drew the attention of his audience to the fact that: The Bashkir culture is a product of a complex fusion of civilizational interactions between the Great Eurasian Steppe and the Islamic World, with the first of these components dominating, while at the same time the culture possesses a number of unique sub-civilizational features which distinguish it from nomadic civilizations […]. In the case of the Bashkirs, their semi-nomadic lifestyle can be seen not only as a stadial invariant of the “nomadic civilization” but as a sub-civilization or even a distinctive civilizational feature, which explains the unique character of the historical path they have taken within the Turkic and Russian worlds. (Berdin 2012) However, in 2016 in a public announcement broadcast on social media, Azat Berdin put more emphasis on the historical significance of the entry of Bashkortostan into the body of Russia and noted the crucial significance of the experience of international relations within the USSR for the Russian state today (Berdin 2016).

The perception of civilizational discourses by users of social media The active promotion of statist civilizational discourse in various media products opens up possibilities for its mass consumption. Actors of civilizational discourse gravitate toward the Internet, using public platforms (new media and social media platforms) to present their positions and philosophies. However, it is not clear to what extent these actors place importance on the activity of ordinary Internet users or value their participation in expanding the content of these online media products. An analysis of media resources posted by statist actors on YouTube, Facebook, Vkontakte, and LiveJournal blogs suggests that, while there is a desire to encourage mass consumption of their products, these products nevertheless fail to stimulate “live” responses from users. This is clear from the format of the material posted on various social media platforms. Addresses and public appearances on television shows or at conferences by famous conservative opinion leaders, prominent politicians, statesmen, and publicists or interviews and specially made videos with recorded announcements—all such events tend

“Civilization” in Russian-mediatized public sphere  103 to have a “finished” quality. They resemble educational propaganda materials, ready for consumption for political and social purposes. In cases where, for instance, the content of videos posted on YouTube might provoke negative responses from ordinary users, the option to leave comments is disabled by the channel’s administrator. In this connection, it is worth noting the ways in which ordinary users perceive neo-traditional and conservative media products disseminating the idea of a Russian civilization, empire, or state and its unique character, and so forth. It turns out that ordinary users participate in the production of civilizational discourse to varying degrees. Their level of participation can range from passive consumption of visual and verbal signs and images to an active refusal to accept educational messages “from above.” If we look at the media communications made by the producers and users of “civilizational” products, we can see an imbalance of “bids” and “offers” in civilizational rhetoric. The comments posted about civilizational and imperial films on YouTube are either sparse or do not, in their rhetoric and modality, correspond to the “bid” being made. Ordinary internet users react with varying levels of trust to the informational messages sent out by various channels, and they proceed primarily from their own social and personal experience. When discussing products that are offered to the mass consumer, users assume the role of arbiters, witnesses for the defense or the prosecution, or participants in real and imaginary events. Ordinary internet users have a noticeable sensitivity to “how” things are said and a hyper-critical attitude to both ideology and scholarship. For instance, in comments on the video “The Mission of Russian Civilization,” which features an address by professor Viktor Efimov (2014), users express diametrically opposing views: User 1: Hats off to you for all your work! User 2: Empty words. How does this help improve people’s lives? How long have you been peddling this idea, and for what? Has anything changed in the world? A similarly broad range can be seen in the user comments posted on one of the many videos featuring Andrei Fursov under the title “Aspects of Russian Civilization.” In this film, the author declares that Russia’s constant spatial expansion in the past was a natural and logical phenomenon; that it is for this reason that Russians have no borders today except natural borders; that Russian expansion took place for reasons of defense; and that the Russian authorities are, and should be, above the law (Fursov 2016). The responses, however, have a rather diverse character: User 1: Respect, Andrei Fursov! User 2: An interesting account but not complete. Something important is missing. The relationship to justice and the way justice is understood in Russian civilization.

104  Galina Zvereva User 3: In general, I agree, but not with the idea of the unique nature of autocratic power. Despotisms are always the same, whether in the East or in the West—the main thing is a lack of restrictions on the power of the ruler. User 4: Judging by the results, however great we may be, our lives are crap. The heritage, the terminology, ballets, spacecraft, poetry, painting—all that is fine. We live on the verge of destitution, in the richest of lands. User 5: It can all be explained. This land isn’t yours. That is why it has no value for you. You took the land from its true owners […]. You “Russified” even them, the owners of the land, made them so lazy and stupid that they don’t value what they have and have forgotten their ancestors. And what do you do with that land? You don’t know what to do with it. So you just drain it of all its minerals. User 6: OK, maybe, if you’re so clever, you can tell me who lived here before the Russians. Who did we kill with hunger, cold, disease, “fire water” and Colt revolvers? Perhaps it was the Apaches? This nonsense about the extermination of native peoples in Russia is brought to us by the descendants of those who exterminated the Native Americans. They judge us by their own standards. Civilizational and imperial ideas and images in the media that make use of a mythologized past and present arouse in users either half-hearted agreement or complete disregard for the civilizational rhetoric employed. The ideas that are most consistently appropriated are anti-Western and anti-American tendencies. Ideas about the need for Russia to oppose the hostility of the “soulless” West and the US desire for world hegemony are actively broadcast by the official media, and they resonate with the mass audience because they provide simple explanations, in terms of external factors, for the internal problems of the Russian state and society. Stereotypical arguments, banal statements of patriotism and pride in Russia, aspirations to a unique and special status for Russia, together with ideas of the importance of opposing the West, the Maidan, and globalism—all these correspond to the desire of ordinary users to rid themselves of the trauma connected with the fall of a “Great State” and to affirm Russia’s leading position within the present world. At the same time, during any online discussion, the emphasis tends to shift to local social and ethno-cultural problems. It is no coincidence that the videos with the most “lofty” civilizational rhetoric and without any specific theme receive the least number of views or are ignored altogether by ordinary users. In other words, the reactions of social media users to civilizational statements by actors close to power, or by actors who support those in power, consist mainly of the users’ own social and economic judgments and their own micro-histories. A majority of the users are most interested, and are at their most active, in discussing the problems of the present.

“Civilization” in Russian-mediatized public sphere  105 The results of surveys carried out regularly by the sociological research organization the Levada Center confirm this peculiar combination of political, social, and mundane concerns in the minds of ordinary users of social media.37 For instance, during a sociological survey on the topic “Great Power” Statehood and Russia’s “Special Path” which was carried out at the end of 2016, on the question “What sort of state would you like Russia to be in the future?” 16% of respondents said that it should be a “state with an entirely special structure and an entirely special path of development.” Another 3% replied that they would prefer an “empire” or a “monarchy.” But 33% answered that they felt the most important thing was “a state with a market economy, a democratic system, and respect for human rights as in Western countries, but with its own particular culture.” Likewise, 33% said that they did not care what sort of state Russia would be: “I only care about how well my family and I will live” (Levada Center 2016). And a poll conducted by the Levada Center in December 2017 on the topic “Pride in the country and the people” showed that 72% of respondents considered Russia a great and powerful country and that 67% felt proud of today’s Russia. At the same time, sociologists note a distancing of a significant part of the population from the state and state institutions, a realization of their inability to influence what is happening in the country or in their region, and an understanding that their own problems must be solved independently, without any help from social institutions. (Levada Center 2017).

In lieu of a conclusion The imaginary spatial areas of identification created and promoted in the new media by statist actors are marshalled by means of the discursive exploitation of the concept of “civilization.” The concept of “civilization” is an important tool for disseminating conservative values and guidelines within mediatized society, for shaping a state-led sense of national identity, and for formulating the basic principles of Russia’s current global geopolitical positioning. In the media products of neo-traditional and conservative authors, the idea that the Russian state and civilization has its own special path and mission within world history is combined with the notion of Russian civilization as a multiethnic Empire. The object of this authoritative discourse on civilization is to establish Russian society as a homogenous semantic entity, in which a declared national and confessional (i.e., Orthodox Christian) identity is aligned with an imaginary spatial imperial community. However, the very nature of social media, with its predominance of flexible horizontal social bonds and chaotic interactions among citizens as Internet users, makes it difficult for the state to control the production and distribution of the civilizational discourse on the Web. Ordinary users of social media are more likely to voice concerns about “bread and butter” social and economic problems than to show an interest in the “lofty” abstract themes of “civilization” and “empire.”

106  Galina Zvereva

Notes

“Civilization” in Russian-mediatized public sphere  107



























108  Galina Zvereva the post-Soviet space can be found in the works of Victor Shnirelman. See, for example, Shnirel’man (2004, 2009). 36 This film was scripted by the writer Sergei Alekseev and the well-known publicist and satirist Mikhail Zadornov back in 2008 and was presented in media as a “documentary.” Shown for the first time on the Ren-TV television channel, this film began to spread rapidly on the channels of YouTube; it received a huge number of views and comments from users. Currently, this video remains very popular on YouTube (2013). 37 “Most Russians believe in Russia’s special historical path, completely unaware of what it is […]. [It is] the consequence of Russians’ desire for isolation caused by propaganda. Now it is weakening at times, and at times - is likewise increasing […]. This is the reverse side of imperial superiority and belief in one’s own exclusivity: a mixture of arrogance and humiliation” (Gudkov 2015).

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“Civilization” in Russian-mediatized public sphere  113 Semushin, Dmitrii. 2012. “Tsirkumpoliarnaia lzhenauka—protiv Russkoi Arktiki” (“Circumpolar Pseudo-Science – Against the Russian Arctic”). Regnum. https:// regnum.ru/news/polit/1501301.html (accessed 10 June 2019). Shemiakina, Ol’ga. 2011. Tsivilizatsionnyi podkhod k istorii Rossii kak fakt istoriografii i metod poznaniia (The Civilizational Approach to Russian History as a Fact of Historiography and a Method of Cognition). Abstract of PhD thesis. http:// www.dissercat.com/content/tsivilizatsionnyi-podkhod-k-istorii-rossii-kak-faktistoriografii-i-metod-poznaniya#ixzz4fFKYt7e7 (accessed 10 June 2019). Shnirel’man, Viktor. 2004. Intellektual’nye labirinty: Ocherki ideologii v sovremennoi Rossii (Intellectual Labyrinths: Essays in Ideologies in Modern Russia). Moscow: Academia. Shnirel’man, Viktor. 2007. “Tsivilizatsionnyi podkhod kak natsional’naia ideia” (“The Civilizational Approach as a National Idea”). In Natsionalizm v mirovoi istorii (Nationalism in World History), edited by Valerii Tishkov and Viktor Shnirel’man, 82–114. Moscow: Nauka. Shnirel’man, Viktor. 2009. “Prezidenty i arkheologiia, ili chto ishchut politiki v drevnosti: Dalekoe proshloe i ego politicheskaia rol’ v SSSR i v postsovetskoe vremia” (“Presidents and Archeology, or What Do Politicians Seek in Antiquity: The Distant Past and Its Political Role in the USSR and in the Post-Soviet Period”). Ab Imperio 1: 279–323. Starikov, Nikolai. 2015. “Konflikt dvukh tsivilizatsii” (“The Conflict between Two Civilizations”). YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ym5BgOs2jA (accessed 10 June 2019). Timiriasov, Vitalii (ed.) 2012. Rossiiskaia tsivilizatsia (Russian Civilization). Kazan: Poznanie. Tishkov, Valerii. 2007. “Rossiiskaia natsiia i ee kritiki” (“The Russian Nation and Its Critics”). In Natsionalizm v mirovoi istorii (Nationalism in World History), edited by Valerii Tishkov and Viktor Shnirel’man, 558–601. Moscow: Nauka. Trofimov, Oleg. 2016. “Slovo Russkoi tsivilizatsii v sviashchennoi voine v Sirii” (“The Message of Russian Civilization in the Holy War in Syria”). Dvizhenie russkii soiuz. http://russouz.ru/slovo-russkoj-tsivilizatsii-v-svyashhennoj-vojnev-sirii/ (accessed 10 June 2019). Troitskii, Evgenii. 1994. O russkoi idee: Ocherk teorii vozrozhdeniia natsii (The Russian Idea: An Essay on the Theory of the Rebirth of a Nation). Moscow: AKIRN. Vakhitov, Rustem. 2006. “Gosudarstvo-natsiia ili gosudarstvo-tsivilizatsiia” (“The Nation-State or State-Civilization”). Istoki 10 (466): 3–10. Viktorov, Viacheslav. 2015. Rossiiskaia tsivilizatsiia: Tendentsiia razvitiia ot istokov k sovremennosti (Russian Civilization: Developmental Tendencies from Its Origin to the Present Day). Moscow: Vuzovskii uchebnik. Vishniakov, Aleksandr. 2014. “Stsenarii raspada Rossii: Proekt ‘pomory’ i bor’ba za resursy Arktiki” (“The Scenario of Russia’s Collapse: The ‘Pomory’ Project and the Struggle for the Resources of the Arctic”). Vsemirnyi russkii narodnyi sobor. http://vrns.ru/experts/2550#.WAIo7fmLTcs (accessed 10 June 2019). Waldstein, Maxim, and Sanna Turoma (eds.). 2013. Empire De/Centered: New Spatial Histories of Russia and the Soviet Union. Surrey: Ashgate. YouTube. 2013. “Arkaim. Stoiashchii u solntsa” (“Arkaim: Standing Beside the Sun”). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e_pfB0OlbE (accessed 10 June 2019).

114  Galina Zvereva YouTube. 2014. “Ural’skii Idol starshe egipetskih pyramid” (“Idol from Urals Older Than Egyptian Pyramids”). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ydw3kUC7K50 (accessed 10 June 2019). Zvereva, Galina. 2005. “Novaia rossiiskaia istoriosofiia: Ritoricheskie strategii i pragmatika” (“New Russian Historiosophy: Rhetorical Strategies and Pragmatics”). In Fenomen proshlogo (The Phenomenon of the Past), edited by Irina Saveleva and Andrei Poletaev, 293–315. Moscow: GU VSHE. Zvereva, Galina. 2010. “What Will ‘We’ Be Called Now? Formulas of Collective Self-Identification in Contemporary Russia.” Russian Politics and Law 48: 68–92. Zvereva, Galina. 2014. “Shaping New Russian Identity: Discourses of Inclusion/ Exclusion in Europe.” In The Meanings of Europe: Changes and Exchanges of a Contested Concept, edited by Claudia Wiesner and Meike Schmidt-Gleim, 221–235. London: Routledge. Zvereva, Galina. 2016. “Digital Storytelling on YouTube: The Geopolitical Factor in Russian Vernacular Regional Identities.” In Eurasia 2.0: Post-Soviet Geopolitics and New Media, edited by Mark Bassin and Mikhail Suslov, 41–59. Lanham, MD: Lexington Press.

5

“Clash of masculinities”? Gendering Russian-Western relations in popular geopolitics1 Tatiana Riabova

The starting point of this research was a Dutch painter Schot’s caricature “Never the twain shall meet” circulating online in the aftermath of the 2014 Eurovision song contest, won by the transvestite singer Conchita Wurst. Its title quotes Rudyard Kipling’s renowned lines “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,” and the subtitle “The clash of civilizations” refers to Samuel Huntington’s book by the same title. The picture itself refers to Robert Kagan’s slogan “Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus” (Kagan 2002) from Kagan’s essay “Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World order” (republished as “Power and Weakness” in the journal Policy Review). For Kagan, Americans were a warmongering nation and Europeans peace-loving people. Instead of the Americans, however, it is the Russians who are associated with Mars in the Dutch caricature. Russia is symbolized by the Russian president Vladimir Putin, who rides a terrifying Russian bear, while Europe is personified by Conchita, who serves as a symbol of a placid, contemporary Western masculinity. Therefore, the “clash of civilizations,” Russian and Western, is interpreted here as a “clash of masculinities.” Inspired by Schot’s caricature, I explore in this chapter the following questions: How is gender discourse utilized for juxtaposing Russia and the West and to what extent are the gendered interpretations used to facilitate a determinist understanding of Russia and the West presenting two separate civilizations? I will explore these questions from the viewpoint of popular geopolitics. In comparison with formal and practical geopolitics, which study or produce theories and official documents, popular geopolitics focuses on widely spread, common perceptions of different parts of the world and on the reproduction of these perceptions by means of popular culture (see Dittmer 2010; Suslov 2014; Saunders 2017; Szostek 2017). As a methodological frame of research, popular geopolitics, aligned with critical geopolitics, analyzes discourses and representations of international relations widely circulated in films, comics, mass media texts, popular Internet resources, or quoting Jason Dittmer, in “user-driven content of so-called Web 2.0” (Dittmer 2010, 21).

116  Tatiana Riabova First, I specify the methodological aspects of my research, clarifying the ways in which popular culture uses images of masculinity for the conceptualization of civilization. I then explore how gender discourse is utilized in Russian popular culture to represent the Russian-Western relations and how this engenders geopolitical meanings. Next, I examine the role of representations of Putin as a “real man” in Russian popular geopolitical perceptions. Finally, I trace the main tendencies in gendering the geopolitics of Russian-Western relations in Western popular culture. The main materials in this study are comprised of representations of Russian and Western masculinity in contemporary Russian online texts and visual materials. In addition, I discuss texts produced and circulated widely in the frame of practical geopolitics, such as Russian high-ranked officials’ speeches. I also use analogous Western materials in order to show how Russian representations of masculinity are produced in a constant dialogue with the West about the normative gender order.

Gendering civilizational identity in popular geopolitics According to Jason Dittmer, geopolitics is about assigning value to places. Geopolitical imagination constructs hierarchies of peoples and places; some places are considered geopolitically more important than others; some matter, some do not (Dittmer 2010, xviii). Such cultural hierarchies contribute to creating actual inequalities between cultures, peoples, countries, and civilizations. As Dittmer also notes, the key to geopolitics is the concept of identity. In David Campbell’s postulation, identity is constituted in relation to differences, while differences are constituted in relation to identity (Campbell 1998, 9). Forming collective identity implies producing representations not only of “us,” but also of “them”—as well as a symbolic boundary between the two. A similar mechanism applies to the way civilizational identity is imagined and constructed. It can be defined as a sense of belonging to an imagined community understood as a “civilization,” such as, for instance, European, Islamic, or Russian. For Benjamin Nelson, “symbolic frontiers, not iron curtains” form and shape civilizational identities (cf. Hall and Jackson 2007, 3; O’Hagan 2007, 15). There are many analytical perspectives on civilization identity, but in Jacinta O’Hagan’s view, the most important is to analyze how discourses of civilizational identity theorize the contours of order; predict and prescribe political interaction; define and justify a particular form of community; and evaluate the particular institutions, values, and practices of societies at global and regional levels (O’Hagan 2007, 21). Fredrik Barth has shown that the social boundaries between communities are created with the help of markers, or diacritics, by which he means the elements of culture selected by the members of a group in order to distinguish themselves from others (for example, clothing, language, or lifestyle) (Barth 1969, 14). Building on these ideas, Nira Yuval-Davis has suggested

“Clash of masculinities”?  117 that gender symbols should be interpreted as “symbolic border guards” that, alongside other markers, identify people as members or non-members of a given community (Yuval-Davis 1997, 23). Images of men and women, as well as depictions of the gender order of communities, function very effectively as markers of inclusion/exclusion. I suggest that these ideas may also be applied for civilizational identity, which uses gendered imagery as “symbolic border guards.” Another important factor of gendering civilizational identity is the inclusion of gender discourse in power relations: Gender markers also produce a system of evaluations and preferences. In the first place, this concerns social relations between men and women characterized by the privileged status of men. However, the hierarchical relations between the sexes are used as a matrix, which legitimates other forms of social inequality. The androcentrism of culture, that is, the presence of a value hierarchy of masculinity and femininity marginalizing the latter, also influences the hierarchy of social subjects, the marking of which as feminine or masculine involves attributing to them some particular qualities and an appropriate position in the social hierarchy. Thus, the use of gender metaphors serves as an effective mechanism for the production of power hierarchies. Interpreting the feminine as something second-rate and subordinate determines the main form of exploitation of gender metaphors: “us” are represented as being masculine and “them” as feminine, something of which active use is made in political infighting (Verdery 1994, 228; Eriksen 2002, 52–65). Due to the role which gender discourse plays in producing social borders and hierarchies, it is widely used in popular geopolitics (both in mass media and public opinion). As Carol Cohn notices, global conflict is portrayed in terms of competition among men (Cohn 1993, 239–241). There is a tradition of personifying states as their key statesmen, which results in international relations appearing as relationships between men. Sometimes representations of world politics are reminiscent of the soap operas with their set of “good guys” and “bad guys” (Hooper 2001, 88). R.W. Connell has proposed considering masculinity as a system of discourses which compete in order to define which masculinities should be hegemonic and which should be subordinated (Connell 2002, 54, 10–12). Representatives of hegemonic masculinity (i.e., masculinity dominating the determination of what, in particular, should be seen as the norm of gender relations) wield power over representatives of subordinate masculinities and derive more privileges from gender inequality than the latter (Connell 1995, 76–77). In the context of globalization such competition of masculinities is carried out internationally. The international relations discourse analysis shows that gender-differentiated images are frequently employed in foreign policy with the aim of legitimating or discrediting particular positions (Tickner 2001, 53). It works for various types of politics of identity, including the civilizational one.

118  Tatiana Riabova

Gendering Russian-Western relations in Russian popular geopolitics In recent years, civilizational identity in Russia has undergone a palpable change. As a rule, Russians have ceased to think of Russia as part of Europe, or of themselves as Europeans. In 2011, according to a research conducted by the Sociological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, just 13% of Russians considered themselves Europeans. A mere 7% of respondents supported the idea of Russia “coming back into the common European home” (a decade ago this figure was twice as high). Over a third of respondents shared the view that Russia is a unique Eurasian civilization (Russkii obozrevatel’ 2012). In 2015, the results of a Levada center survey demonstrated the same tendency (Vzgliad 2016). And according to a 2016 poll organized by the Körber Foundation in Germany, 44% of Russian respondents support the view that Russia is not part of Europe (Shatalin 2017). Positioning Russia as a separate civilization has become a visible trend of the state’s identity building conducted by high officials in the last few years. In the 2012 Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly, Putin called Russia “a civilization-state bonded by the Russian people, Russian language and Russian culture native for us, uniting us and preventing us from dissolving in this diverse world” (Putin 2012). It should be taken into account that attempts to represent Russia as a separate civilization have essentially anti-European connotations by definition. In 2014 the Ministry of Culture published a draft for an overall concept of the state’s cultural policy, in which it flatly stated that Russia is not Europe. This, however, did not find its way to the final text of the decree (ukaz) for the state’s cultural policy signed by the President. Instead, the decree emphasizes Russia’s civilizational uniqueness and presents Russia as “uniting the East and West” (Putin 2014). Gendered images, symbols, and metaphors are often incorporated in proving the essential differences between Russia and Europe. There is nothing especially original about Russian invective on the sexual deviancy of the West, and Europe, in particular. The concept of the “decadent West,” which can be traced back to the works of the Slavophiles, includes claims about the superiority of the Russian cultural understanding of family and of Russian gender norms (Riabov 2007). Criticism of the bourgeois gender order that featured in Soviet propaganda during the Cold War acts as another ideological source for the rejection of the contemporary West (Riabov 2017). Today, the gender dimension has become one of the most important aspects of allegations leveled against the West. Since Putin’s return to presidency in 2012, the hegemonic discourse in the Russian media presents the EU as “Gayropa,” as a degenerate civilization, and the changes in the gender order (the legalization of same-sex marriage, the destruction of traditional roles of men and women, the growing influence of feminism, and the crisis of the traditional family unit) are represented as a clear evidence of this (Riabov and Riabova 2014).

“Clash of masculinities”?  119 Some Russian commentators claim that these processes are bound to lead to a very real decline of European civilization, primarily because they pervert human nature itself and destroy the foundations of human communities. By the same token, as this reasoning goes, the new type of masculinity that is created under the influence of feminism in the EU prohibits manifesting such masculine characteristics as strength, integrity, courage, as well as the desire to defend women. It will inevitably, the argument goes, result in migrants’ conquest of a de-masculinized Europe (see, for instance, Narochnitskaia 2013; Znamenskii 2013). Russian media’s coverage on the cases of sexual assaults of migrant men against women during the 2016 New Year’s Eve celebrations in Cologne represented the events as an example of what is perceived as de-masculinizing processes. The “Night of the Long Arms,” as the Russian media called the Cologne events, and subsequent similar cases in other EU cities received detailed coverage in such major media outlets as Rossiiskaia gazeta (January 11, January 23, 2016) and Komsomolskaia Pravda (March 21, 2016) (see Riabova and Riabov 2019). Much attention was paid to issues of gender order in Western European societies, as well as to the behavior of German men. Generally, the incident was considered as clear evidence of how European masculinity is in the process of degenerating. German men were accused of weakness, cowardice, indecision, a complete lack of male qualities, such as the desire and ability to act as defenders of women (see, for instance, Aslamova 2016). In this regard, comments by a number of Russian officials and parliamentarians on the Cologne events published by the information agency Regions.ru: Federal News on February 8, 2016 are particularly indicative. They appeared with the eloquent title “European weaklings more concerned about the color of their thongs than the protection of women.” For instance, the Russian Federation’s Commissioner for Human Rights Tat’iana Mosal’kova notes: Well, what we can say about the Cologne men in this situation? Weaklings! I cannot choose another word […] One can see real men, strong and brave, ready to do anything to protect their women and children nowhere in the West, but only in Western thrillers. We could only feel sorry for Western women, who have to rely only on themselves. (Mosal’kova 2016) The media coverage of the “Rape of Europe” is designed to convince the audience that the values and norms of the EU (tolerance, multiculturalism, democracy, political correctness, and gender equality) inevitably lead to the emasculation of European men. This coverage functions also as a tool of political mobilization: If Russia follows the Western way then in the long term the country is to expect the same problems associated with the threat to the honor and health of Russian women. Representations of the “Rape of Europe” contribute to maintaining the legitimacy of power as well as supporting the current political system. One can see the similar tendencies

120  Tatiana Riabova in juxtaposing Russia’s and the USA’s gender orders that serve as an essential part of politics of civilizational identity and Russian Anti-Americanism. Though to a lesser degree, America is also seen as demasculinized, and Americans’ masculinity is ridiculed (Riabov and Riabova 2014, 29). It is necessary to take into consideration that the demasculinizing of “Others” forms part of a process of remasculinizing Russia—that is to say it is an aspect of national identity building that also marked Russian society in the 2000s. This politics has two dimensions: the creation of an image of Russia with masculine connotations (strength, independence, rationality) and of attractive models of national masculinity (Riabov and Riabova 2014). In analyzing the gender order of Russian society, one should note the popularity of the image of the muzhik as a sort of exemplary Russian masculinity. Olga Shaburova first noted the warm approval of muzhik as a male ideal among the majority of the Russian audience (Shaburova 2002). During the last two decades Russian authorities not just exploit the canonical representations of muzhik, but also take part in producing and promoting it and in incorporating it into their political practice and thought (Riabova and Riabov 2011, 63–65). It is important to keep in mind that this canon is juxtaposed with representations of Western masculinity: unlike the imagined man of the presentday West, the muzhik is sturdy, tough and strong; he must defend women and children; he doesn’t speak too much, but makes his deeds speak for him. Neither does the muzhik share the liberal values of political correctness; negative attitudes toward gay culture are the essential trait of the muzhik ethos. At the same time this model differs from macho model in its traditional sense (though scholars, especially Western ones, sometimes equate these two models): muzhik implies more emotions, modesty, humility, comradeship, and love for the Motherland. It is noteworthy that an image of Western masculinity implying egoism, arrogance, hubris and sometimes a lack of genuine manhood and fortitude behind the gloss, has a long history in Russian culture.2 Therefore, by putting a label on European civilization, the concept of Gayropa helps to support the collective identity of Russians and contributes to drawing a symbolic boundary between Russia and Europe, and to positioning Russia as a powerful and attractive country. At the same time the politics of civilizational identity in Russia is twofold. To consider the country as a separate civilization, juxtaposing it to Europe, is the main trend of the state’s politics of national identity. However, apart from this mainstream discourse, there is a different way of answering the question on Russia’s belonging to the European civilization, which refers back to the notion of “two Europes” postulated by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. This notion promotes the opposition of “true Europe” vs. “false Europe” and associates Russia with the former. This idea was employed in many different contexts in the course of Russian history (see Khellmann 1989; Neumann 1996; Lazari and Riabov 2007; Morozov 2015). Today it sees Russia as the successor to the real, authentic Europe; the country defends the values of national identity, national sovereignty, Christian religion, and the traditional family, allegedly essential for European civilization, which are bypassed by EU officials.

“Clash of masculinities”?  121 This idea is actively employed by high-ranked officials and experts (though it is not widespread among Russia’s population). In 2013, Putin in his speech at the Valdai Discussion Club (Putin 2013) accused Euro-Atlantic countries of rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilization. In 2017, the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, declared that the values which the West aimed to implement in Russia—including permissiveness and the universality of liberal approaches to the life of the individual—are radically and fundamentally at odds with the values passed down from generation to generation for centuries in Russia, which Russians would like to cherish and hand down to children and grandchildren. Moreover, these are not the values the grandfathers of today’s Europeans espoused. The head of the Foreign Ministry called these values “post-Christian” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation 2017).3 Sergei Karaganov, the influential political expert, expressed the disappointment of a large part of Russian society in the following terms: Russians were eager to join the Europe of nation states, Christianity and traditional values, from which they had been separated for seventy years, the Europe of Churchill and De Gaulle, Adenauer, knights, and great persons and ideas. Russian people were arduously regaining religious values and faith that had been eradicated for decades. But Europe had changed. Most importantly, since the 1980s–1990s it had taken one more giant leap from old to new values and imposed them stubbornly. (Karaganov 2016) In such a context the idea of Russia as the true Europe seems quite logical. In 2014 Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinskii said: “I’m afraid that in the modern world, we are becoming more European traditionalists in a spiritual and cultural way than the citizens of the European Union themselves” (Iarotskii 2014). The report “Vladimir Putin: Presidency and leadership” issued by a pro-Kremlin analytical center to mark Putin’s 65th birthday stressed that “Russia became the only country which defends the traditional values of European culture” (Tsentr politicheskogo analiza 2017, 24). This discourse considers the changing gender relations as one of the most visible manifestations of Europe rejecting Christian, i.e., authentic European values. The Russian representations of Putin as a muzhik, a “real Russian guy,” play an important role in this gendered way of presenting Russian civilization identity vis-a-vis Europe.4

Vladimir Putin as a “real man” in Russian popular geopolitics It is difficult to pinpoint the moment the Kremlin image-makers determined to exploit the image of Vladimir Putin as a “real man.” At the beginning of Putin’s first term his image was constructed as an alternative to that of the ill and aging Boris Yeltsin. Initially Putin’s image-making was rather in accordance with the canonical perception of masculinity in the West. He was presented

122  Tatiana Riabova as a rational, practical, and cool manager. His first presidential campaign saw a certain “German” slant to his image: The emphasis was on his stint of service in East Germany and his good command of German, his military past, his military department, his indifference to alcohol, and his affection not for Moscow but for St. Petersburg. An eloquent illustration of a “German” slant on Putin was a book by Germany’s Russia expert, Alexander Rahr, that was entitled “Vladimir Putin: A German in the Kremlin” (Rahr 2000). However, following the changes in Russia’s foreign policy, the president’s image has been modified, corresponding more and more to the image of a muzhik. This image was aimed largely for “domestic consumption” and featured first of all as a means of legitimating his power in Russia (Riabova and Riabov 2011; Sperling 2014; Wood 2016). It is noteworthy that according to a Levada survey done in October 2017, on the question what do you like about Putin, 19% of respondents said what attracted them to the president was that he is “a real man” (nastoiashchii muzhik), and that he is resolute, brave, firm, strong-willed, strong, calm, bold, confident and “clear” (Aktual’nye kommentarii 2017). As the relations between Russia and the West deteriorate, representations of Putin as a “real man” and a “Russian muzhik” have come to serve as a tool for criticizing Western masculinity. Getting back to the caricature “Never the twain shall meet,” mentioned in the beginning of the chapter, it should be noted that juxtaposing the images of Putin and Conchita as a symbol of “Gayropa” is widespread in Russian demotivators.5 Putin is not only contrasted to Conchita, but even more important is the way he is contrasted to Western political leaders and heads of the states, above all, to the American president Barack Obama in his second term in office. As outlined above, representations of relations between male leaders of states have a specific role in popular geopolitics. The undermining of Obama’s masculinity was a significant part of Russian Anti-Americanism as represented in politically motivated popular culture in the 2010s during Putin’s third term. Among the most remarkable cases of exploiting the “Putin vs. Obama” opposition in Russian media was the coverage of the exhibition of political posters “Without filters” which had been organized in 2014 by the “Young Guard,” which is the youth wing of the “United Russia” party. The confrontation between the two politicians was represented as a duel, and the authors repeatedly used the image of Putin as a judo hero.6 One of the posters presented Obama’s personal dislike of Putin as the reason for the worsening of USA-Russia relations, and hinted at the US leader’s envy of the “real man” Putin. It is indicative, however, that, according to Putin’s supporters, the matter was not only a matter of force, it was also one of intellect: One of the posters showed Putin as a more skilled chess player than his opponent. Attributing masculine characteristics to Putin and demasculinizing Obama were frequently used by Russian officials, journalists, bloggers, and Internet commenters during this period. For instance, in 2014, Dmitrii Rogozin, the Deputy Prime minister, tweeted an image in which Putin was pictured with a leopard while Obama

“Clash of masculinities”?  123 was shown with a puppy (Figure 5.1). The caption, “We have different values and allies,” was intended to highlight the difference between the two presidents. The image was immediately retweeted more than 1,000 times, and the top US and European newspapers wrote articles about it (for more details, see Riabova 2014).

Figure 5.1 Dmitrii Rogozin, “We have different values and allies,” 2014.

Figure 5.2 “Our response to American sanctions” (T-shirt).

124  Tatiana Riabova These representations were based on widely shared public opinion. In an interview survey conducted by the author in 2014,7 the interviewees were asked to compare Putin’s and Obama’s masculinities. The typical answers were as follows: “Putin is a muzhik, Obama takes selfies at funerals and behaves like a dummy” (Anastasiia, 24 y.o.). “It seems to me that Putin is more responsible, his actions are very rational, well-considered, calculated” (Tatiana, 21 y.o.); “Obama… is too feminine and hysterical” (Valentina, 60 y.o.).8 Moreover, many interviewees considered Obama’s masculinity to be typical of the de-masculinized contemporary America associated with weakness, narcissism, and softness. Juxtaposing Putin to Obama, one third of interviewees emphasized the specifics of the Russian president’s masculinity, drawing attention to his muzhik image for comparison: “Putin is a real muzhik,” “Russian men are muzhiks, American men are little men (muzhchinki)” (Olga, 42 y.o.). Thus, the opposition of two types of masculinity was placed in the context of the relations between two civilizations, Russia and the West. However, as noted above, today’s representations of civilizational identity in Russia are twofold, and Vladimir Putin is often portrayed as an embodiment of both Russian masculinity and masculinity considered traditional for European/Western civilization. Not only does he embody a normative European masculinity but he also protects it by defending traditional family values against same-sex marriages. Since 2013, Pro-Kremlin experts and journalists have been pointing to international surveys according to which the popularity of the Russian leader is growing around the world because “he defends fundamental European and Christian values” (Vzgliad 2013). In 2013, the Russian Center for Strategic Communications issued the paper “Putin—the new world conservative leader” (Plotnikov 2013). Medinskii portrays Putin as a “Russian European,” a true defender of traditional European values (Iarotskii 2014). The journalist Petr Akopov in an article titled “Putin is conquering the West” (2016) emphasizes that the Russian president is openly saying “no” to globalization and “yes” to classic sovereignty; he indeed is becoming the symbol of resistance of nation-states against the globalist project (Akopov 2016). The idea of Russia as the true Europe is not common among general Russian audiences; rather, it is mostly present in high-brow discussions. However, a certain Westernization of Putin’s image in popular geopolitics deserves special attention. Putin appears on T-shirts, demotivators, mugs, pictures, and statuettes not only as an Old Russian bogatyr, i.e., a hero of folklore narratives (Figure 5.3), but also as James Bond, a hero of Western popular films, thereby using images of Western culture. Also, the exhibition “SuperPutin,” which was opened in the Ultra Modern Art Museum in Moscow in December 2017, presented several dozens of pictures, mosaics, and sculptures, trying to show with a noticeable shade of irony how Russians view their president: in the Westernized image of a Roman emperor, a European king, a character in comics, and so on (Daily Storm 2017).

“Clash of masculinities”?  125

Figure 5.3 Souvenir mug.

The pro-Kremlin mass media claims that the request to restore traditional masculinity, embodied by Vladimir Putin, is a worldwide phenomenon. Journalist Vladimir Mamontov discerns two types of masculinity in international politics, the “Nerds” and the “Hooligans” (Mamontov 2016). According to the author, the former is considered progressive in the hegemonic discourse of the contemporary West, as those that holds the future; it presupposes the negation of traditional masculine values, which form the basis of the masculinity of the “Hooligans.” Russian masculinity is that of the “Hooligans,” and Putin is one of the embodiments of traditional masculinity. The “Nerds” have claimed that the masculinity of “Hooligans” is backward and has already celebrated victory over them. However, the world is currently going through events which cast a doubt over this triumph. Trump is a “Hooligan,” and his popularity among American voters demonstrates that the balance between the “nerds” and the “hooligans” is changing (Mamontov 2016). It is well known that many Russians enthusiastically welcomed presidentelect Donald Trump, one reason being that he was considered to be able to improve relations between the two countries. Gender discourse played an important role in this respect. According to the opinion of Valerii Solovei, a professor at the Moscow Institute of International Relations, Putin and Trump may have good relations because they are very similar in that they both make use of an overtly masculine or macho image. Obama, by contrast, is the complete opposite of Putin; it is well known that Putin and Obama

126  Tatiana Riabova disliked each other even on the personal level (see Luk’ianov 2016). The subsequent response to this in mass culture was to place images of Trump and Putin on T-shirts; it is not difficult to imagine them as co-ruling the world (Figure 5.4). It is interesting that the Russian Internet commenters often characterize Trump as a real muzhik, because he has not been afraid to challenge the political establishment and is seen to have remained true to himself and to the promises he made to American voters. Muzhik has been employed in the mainstream mass media to characterize Trump. Commenting on Trump’s decision to remove LGBT rights from the White House web-site, Dmitrii Kiselev, one of the most famous pro-Kremlin news anchors, called him a muzhik and made the assumption that this was one of the reasons for the American people electing him (Newsland 2017). Another journalist also called Trump a “real muzhik” and pinpointed this quality as the reason why Trump’s opponents from the liberal camp reject his personality (Usachev 2017). The masculine characteristics of the American leader are also projected on the discourse of civilizational identity. Commenting on Trump’s refusal to negotiate with Putin at the APEC summit in November 2017, a Russian journalist contrasted the American and European diplomatic traditions, presenting the USA as a young state that has introduced a hefty element of barbaric fervor, and even rudeness as diplomatic tools. The author notes that this civilizational specificity is multiplied by Trump’s personal qualities as

Figure 5.4 “We love Russia” (T-shirt).

“Clash of masculinities”?  127 well, as a “roughneck, macho and redneck,” “buoyant and cheerful American Pithecanthropus.”9 European diplomacy, by contrast, is characterized by courtesy, restraint and even some coldness. Therefore, the author concluded, it is Putin who is the best at demonstrating these characteristics at various foreign policy venues (Babitskii 2017). In other words, and somewhat paradoxically, markers of Russia’s Europeanness help to substantiate its supremacy over barbarian America in contemporary anti-Americanism. Russian society is certainly not homogeneous, and there is strong criticism of the traditional masculinity cult especially among the liberal opposition, which sees this critique in the context of resistance to the Kremlin. The adherents of the opposition aspire to represent the authorities and their supporters as backward, disconnected from the progressive development of humanity, and alienated from the spirit of the European civilization, which is founded on human rights and freedoms. They defend European gender norms and values, argue that the “patriarchal tradition” and “homophobia” lie at the heart of the current political system, and stress that the authorities manipulate gendered imagery for the legitimation of power (Riabov and Riabova 2014). The images of Putin as a “real man” and the canon of Russian muzhik are objects of derision. In a 2010 interview entitled “I believe that the ‘real Russian muzhik’ must become extinct,” Artemii Troitskii, a prominent critic of Russian authorities, expressed a wish that instead of being muzhiks, the next generation of Russian men would prove to be neat, intelligent, romantic, and respectful to women (Troitskii 2010). During the 2011–2013 Russian protests, also referred to as the Snow Revolution, the political criticism of the discourse on muzhik acquired overtones which sometimes labeled the masculinity of those associated with the social base of the political regime as uneducated and uncultured (Riabov and Riabova 2014; Turoma 2016).

Gendering Russian-Western relations in Western popular geopolitics The Russian views about the gender aspects of Russian-Western relations are developed in a continuous dialogue with Western attitudes and discourses. The representation of the Russian president as an embodiment of traditional masculinity was noticed in the West as well, in particular, in the USA. Thus, starting in 2012, American right-wing online media published selections of photographs and collages in which Putin and Obama were opposed while working, resting, and doing sports. The Russian president was represented as manly, resolute, and strong, whereas Obama was depicted as weak and inferior to Putin in all respects. Putin’s masculinity is a popular topic on English-language websites, where he is presented as strong, decisive, tough, and brave, as, for example, in the song “Go Hard Like Vladimir Putin” by American rapper AMG (2014). Putin’s image as an icon of traditional masculinity was initially part of pop culture (Goscilo 2014), but subsequently it was utilized in the political debate. It was adopted

128  Tatiana Riabova by conservative thinkers and politicians to criticize Obama’s policies: from excessive liberalization of domestic gender legislation to the weakening of USA’s position in international politics. For instance, the TV channel Fox News regularly criticized Obama’s masculinity, comparing it with Putin’s, as in a broadcast on September 4, 2014: “Putin is about deeds, not about words, Obama is about words, not about deeds.” There are several reasons why Putin’s image became relevant in the gendered representations of Russian-Western relations. First, a part of the Western public sees the changes in the gender order of the West (including family and marriage) as a departure from Christian values, which are considered the basis of Western civilization. Putin is perceived as the only major state leader who openly defends the values of Christianity, such as traditional family relations. This perception emerged as a response to the new law banning the propaganda of “non-traditional” sexual relations among minors, Putin’s annual address to the Federal Assembly in 2012 (Putin 2012), and his speech at the Valdai Forum (Putin 2013). In 2014, a prominent US church leader, Bryan Fischer, named Putin “the lion of Christianity” (YouTube 2014), referring to his alleged role as a defender of Christian values. Others have labeled him a “crusader” (Pevzner 2013; Buchanan 2014). Paleoconservatives—the representatives of the US traditionalist conservative political philosophy—consider Putin an exemplary leader, able to stand up for national sovereignty, support Christianity, and defend traditional values, above all family values. In their opinion, the contemporary West has become “post-Christian,” and only Russia is the “great conservative power” that embodies “forgotten traditional values” (Larison 2007; Hitchens 2012). A prominent paleoconservative (and famous Cold War warrior), Patrick Buchanan, acknowledged the Russian president’s perceptiveness: “Putin has read the new century better than his rivals” (Buchanan 2017). In the article “Is Putin one of us?” he suggested that Putin’s Russia defends the same values which were defended by the USA during the years of Cold War confrontation. Buchanan considers Putin to be an ally of the former, Christian America, which in recent decades was de-Christianized, over the vehement objections of a huge majority of the country. This America, which Putin sees as pagan, is the antagonist of contemporary Russia (Buchanan 2013). The second reason for Putin’s appeal in Western conservative circles is that changes in gender order are seen as the demasculinization of Western society that leads to its weakening in many aspects, such as the military one. Scholars identify a number of hegemonic masculinity types in Western history (Hooper 2001, 64). The current type is the new Western masculinity that gained popularity at the end of the twentieth century. Among the conditions of its emergence are globalization, the crisis of the nation-state, a changing demographic situation, escalating migration, increasing economic and social autonomy for women, and a weakening of traditional family structures. The replacement of one type of hegemonic masculinity with another means a modification not only of men’s physical, psychological, and moral characteristics but also of their values and ideologies. As for the new

“Clash of masculinities”?  129 masculinity, its pattern contains the values of tolerance, gender equality, and liberalism. Its supporters see the new masculinity as progressive and a pertinent response to the postmodern times and the changing gender order in Western societies. This new masculinity, however, is welcomed by far from everybody. In 2014, journalist Christian Kachel in an article for The Washington Times pointed out that America had witnessed a war on masculinity over the past three decades. The author wrote: “The scourge of political correctness has seeped into every facet of American life and threatens to silence dissent, cower our leaders and weaken our military.” In the author’s opinion, the most pernicious cause was a directed strategy by the Democratic Party to produce as many voters dependent on the federal government as possible. Democrats had realized that traditionally masculine traits stood in contrast to a culture of dependency and entitlement. By encouraging and fostering gender-warfare at all levels of society, the Democratic Party has been successful in stifling masculine thought and ensuring voters who espouse traditional beliefs of masculinity are marginalized and branded “cavemen,” “anti-women,” or worse. (Kachel 2014) It is noteworthy that the article was preceded by the aforementioned picture tweeted by Rogozin—although the article itself did not say a word about Putin. Indeed, insofar as strength and power are usually perceived as attributes of traditional masculinity, the question arises whether the current difficult international situation corresponds to the new Western masculinity. According to an article from the right-wing National Review, Putin reminds of us of our own limitations. He ends up existing to warn us in the West of what we are not, and to demonstrate that in a strange sort of way our loud principles without toughness are not much better than his toughness without principles. In that regard, he gives us a valuable look into ourselves—we the hollow men, the stuffed men of dry voices and whispers. (Hanson 2014) Apparently, one of the most visible expressions of the disappointment over this new gender order was Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential campaign in the USA 2016. Certainly, he was supported by voters for a variety of reasons, but one of them was formulated by Fox News as follows: “The left has tried to culturally feminize this country in a way that is disgusting. And you see blue collar voters—men—this is like their last vestige, their last hope is Trump to get their masculinity back” (Brayton 2015). Mention should also be made of famous actor Clint Eastwood, who hailed Trump as a foe of political correctness and lamented what he called “the kiss-ass generation.” “[Trump]’s onto something, because secretly everybody’s getting tired of political correctness,

130  Tatiana Riabova kissing up […]. That’s the kiss-ass generation we’re in right now. […] Everybody’s walking on eggshells” (Mazza 2016). This campaign provided the new impetus for employing the opposition “Putin vs. Obama.” Significantly, Trump organized his campaign on, among other things, criticizing Obama and emphasizing his inability to provide the US leadership under the circumstances when other countries were led by strong leaders such as the Russian president. Thus, discussions of the masculinity canon occupied an important place in the agenda of the US struggle, while projecting itself onto foreign policy rhetoric. Supporters of the Democratic Party defended the canon of new masculinity and criticized Trump, often representing Obama as its highest embodiment on the political Olympus. Obama himself made a significant contribution to this polemic by publishing an essay titled “This Is What a Feminist Looks Like” in the journal Glamour (Obama 2016). In this essay he named himself a feminist and declared that every man must be a feminist today and in this way contributed to shaping the canon of the new masculinity. It is fundamentally important that he concluded the essay by calling people to vote for the Democratic Party candidate Hilary Clinton as the first female candidate. Accordingly, the criticism of Trump’s masculinity (Clinton later labeled it “toxic masculinity”) became an essential part of Clinton’s presidential campaign. Its delegitimization of traditional masculinity became even more significant since it was connected with Putin. Furthermore, it accused its representatives of denying gender equality. Shortly before the election, an article was published in Newsweek which stated that the reason for Clinton’s distrust of Russia was the gendered perspective on foreign policy of the country’s decision-makers: The Russians maintain that women have no place in such discussions, and there are very few women in the upper echelons of the Russian foreign and security policy apparatus. Russia’s policy stance, as presented by its often-shirtless president, seems the epitome of a macho foreign policy. (Shapiro 2016) The attacks on Putin and Trump became even more serious in Hillary Clinton’s book What Happened, published in September 2017, in which she set out to explain her electoral defeat. She labels Putin “former KGB spy with a taste for over-the-top macho theatrics and baroque violence” (Clinton 2017, 327), and characterized her more successful opponent’s attitude to Putin in this way: And Trump appears to have fallen hard for Putin’s macho “barechested autocrat act.” He doesn't just like Putin—he seems to want to be like Putin, a white authoritarian leader who could put down dissenters, repress minorities, disenfranchise voters, weaken the press and amass untold billions for himself. (Clinton 2017, 334)

“Clash of masculinities”?  131 Another example of how the presidential campaign for Clinton used the image of Russia as a bulwark of traditional masculinity, based on sexism and gender inequality, was the #DraftOurDaughters hashtag. Less than a month before the election, images with the #DraftOurDaughters hashtag appeared online, allegedly in support of Clinton’s campaign. These pictures assumed that in the event of victory, Clinton would make military service mandatory for women in the name of ensuring gender equality, and also because she expects a war with Russia. It was fake news disseminated possibly by the alt-right movement to discredit Clinton, who was accused of excessively negative attitudes toward Russia that could provoke a nuclear war (We Hunted the Mammoth 2016). In relation to the topic discussed here, it is important to note that the young women depicted in this pseudo-advertisement expressed their determination to fight the Russians in the name of gender equality, whose enemy was Putin’s Russia. Captions for the pictures speak for themselves. “Hey, Putin. We don’t just vote. We kill Russians, too”; “I’m ready to show Putin: American women stronger than Russian men”; “Show Russia the strength of our diversity!”; “Join Hillary to fight Russia with our greatest asset: diversity”; “He wants you in the kitchen—She wants you on the battlefield to stop him. Will you join the first woman president to end this oppression?”; “Hillary will crush Putin’s patriarchy. I’ll fight for her”; “Teach the motherland what real mothers can do”; “The fight against Russia is a fight for equality”; “Take aim against Russian inequality” (Figure 5.5).

Figure 5.5 #DraftOurDaughters #StandWithHer (meme).

132  Tatiana Riabova Obviously, if these pictures did not reflect the mood of Clinton’s supporters at all, they would not make sense.10 They treat Putin’s masculinity as a demonstration of Russia’s civilizational backwardness, which would be overcome only in a distant future, or would remain an irremovable product of Russian civilization. It is noteworthy that this criticism of Russian masculinity as archaic, barbaric, and non-European has a long tradition in the Western discourse about Russia, which is also noticeable in the post-Soviet period (Riabov 2007). In an article titled “A Beast within a Sissy” (Fosvinkel 2007), a German journalist described the “massive and unpredictable bear” as the symbol of the Russian man. A “muzhik”, as Russians call a macho, displays his masculinity, as a rule, with the help of a short military haircut on top of a bull neck, a broad bear-like walk, and military pants. He is a rude guy, without any intellectual pretensions, who listens to broadcasts of “Russian radio”, where women are treated as objects and sex is referred to as a kind of competitive sport. (Fosvinkel 2007) Liberation and Figaro have likewise written about “primitive Russian men” and “infantile macho-alcoholics” (de Chikoff 2006; Millot 2006). Michael Gove, a British MP, ironically commented on the 2007 pictures of the barechested Russian president as follows: Vlad is showing us all that he’s a remarkably fit man for his age and that, unlike in the decadent West, Russia’s leaders remain the physical embodiment of their nation’s vigour […]. His bare-chested peacockery is, in that respect, in line with the broader cult of Putin as his nation’s silverback—the leader of the band. (Gove 2007) In full accordance with the Orientalist narrative, the Russian presence, imagined as backward, is seen as the past of the progressive West. At the same time, the future of the West is under threat. George Mosse has noted that the masculine stereotype was strengthened by the existence of a negative stereotype of men who not only failed to measure up to the ideal but who in body and soul were its foil, projecting the exact opposite of true masculinity (Mosse 1996, 6). In this sense, the image of Putin as an anti-ideal of masculinity serves as an instrument in disciplinary practices and practices of normalization in accordance with certain canons and acts as a way of legitimizing the gender order in Western societies. Moreover, “Putin” became the symbol of everything Democrats were against. In particular, the criticism of Trump for sexism, nationalism, racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and xenophobia is accompanied by criticism for his support of Putin and criticism

“Clash of masculinities”?  133 of Putin himself. Hilary Clinton labeled the Russian president “the grand godfather of this global brand of extreme nationalism” (Team Fix, Ohlheiser, and Dewey 2016), while a journalist named him “the Che Guevara of the Right” (Pomerantsev 2016). Finally, another way of delegitimizing traditional masculinity is by accusing its representatives of cultivating violence and brute force, which in today’s world is dangerous. “No more tough guys”—this was the title of an article, published in The New Yorker in 2014. Its author, Adam Gopnik, commented there on negative evaluations of Obama’s masculinity, largely made by Republicans: Barack Obama is not a tough guy. Everybody rolls him. He’s a wimp, a weak sister; he won’t stand up for himself or his country. Vladimir Putin, a true tough guy, blows planes out of the air, won’t apologize, walks around half-naked. […] He’s scared of Vladimir Putin […] Barack Obama is the first female president, and so on. Rejecting these evaluations, Gopnik asserted that Obama-like masculinity fits precisely the contemporary stage of world development. He was strongly skeptical of Putin’s masculinity, pointing out instead that “We don’t need tough guys. We need wise guys. We’ve tried tough guys, and it always ends in tears” (Gopnik 2014). Even the former US President entered into these polemics (though he never supports Putin’s views of matters). In one of his speeches Obama declared that Putin’s belief that Russia was in a stronger position after using military forces in Ukraine and Syria was “to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of power in foreign affairs or in the world generally.” He emphasized: “Real power means you can get what you want without having to exert violence” (Rutland and Kazantsev 2016). Predictably enough this discourse of might is right became even more popular after Trump’s victory. So, after a missile attack on a Syrian government airbase, which Trump authorized, a Bloomberg journalist wrote: “Russia and the U.S. now are in greater danger of a direct military clash than at any time since the end of the Cold War. Their leaders are driven by domestic political considerations and macho instincts—a dangerous combination” (Bershidsky 2017).11 Thus, the opponents of traditional masculinity in international relations use different ways of delegitimizing it: It is marked as archaic and alien to the West; unfair in terms of gender equality; fraught with military conflicts and the danger of potentially starting a nuclear war. It should be added, however, that sometimes they resort to less refined methods, including those that actually exploit homophobia. Much have been said about the Putin-Trump bromance (e.g., Clinton 2017, 334), including articles in well-known Western newspapers, often accompanied with the picture of the presidents’ kissing (Figure 5.6; see also Remnick 2016).

134  Tatiana Riabova

Figure 5.6 Putin-Trump Kiss, street mural, Vilnius.

Conclusions Civilizations are imagined in relations with Others, and gender discourse plays an important role in drawing, legitimating, and correcting their symbolic boundaries. Gender discourse is widely employed in the conceptualization of Russian-Western relations and in shaping a civilizational identity both in Russia and the West. In Russian popular culture and its representations of geopolitics, the civilizational identity of the country is twofold: Russia is both a separate civilization, juxtaposed to Europe and the only descendant of authentic European values. The hegemonic discourse in Russian media presents the EU as “Gayropa,” as a degenerate civilization, and the changes in the gender order are represented as clear evidence of this. On the one hand, Russian patterns of male and female behavior are declared to be different from the European ones; on the other, contemporary Russian society is considered a descendent of true European family values and gender relations. A key role here is played by Vladimir Putin’s image: The president is represented as a muzhik, the embodiment of Russian masculinity, and at the same time as an example of gender normality in regard to European tradition. In a Russian survey, one fifth of respondents considered that the most important positive trait of Putin is that he was an exemplary Russian muzhik (Aktual’nye kommentarii 2017). Meanwhile one can note a tendency of representing Putin’s masculinity as a Roman emperor, a hero of Hollywood movie, or a character in Western comics, in numerous artifacts of massculture—that is by means of the forms of Western popular culture.

“Clash of masculinities”?  135 The image of Putin as an embodiment of traditional masculinity is widespread in Western popular geopolitics as well—both among his supporters and his opponents. The former consider Putin’s Russia to be a natural ally of the West in the struggle to save a Christian civilizational identity not only against radical Islamic fundamentalism, but also against the post-modernist dechristianized West. The latter believe that Russia calls for restoring the traditional role of men in society and they criticize the new Western masculinity that, even in the view of Putin’s opponents, leads to the demasculinization of the West, threatening thereby Western civilization. Thus, the demand for a restoration of traditional masculinity on the political Olympus is a noticeable trait of today’s geopolitical rhetoric not only in Russia but also in other parts of the world, including the USA and the EU. This has been particularly evident during the US presidential campaign of 2016. Trump’s focus in his campaign was to emphasize Obama’s inability to provide the USA with leadership whereas other countries were led by such strong leaders as the Russian president. Trump’s opponents, on the contrary, depicted the new Western masculinity as progressive, as most fitting the postmodern society, and treated Obama as an example of this form of masculinity among political leaders. They criticized traditional masculinity as sexist, dangerous (leading to war) as well as backward, archaic, and sometimes alien with respect to the Western civilizational identity. Criticism of Putin became a weapon in the domestic political struggle against the conservative part of American society. For them, Putin’s image served as an anti-ideal of masculinity, embodying sexism, homophobia, the cult of violence, intolerance, nationalism, and a lack of political correctness. In a sense, any of Putin’s success in domestic or foreign politics—regardless of the degree of his confrontation with the West—challenges the current mainstream gender ideology. Thus, regardless of the real differences between the gender orders in Russian and Western societies, popular geopolitics sees the current RussianWestern confrontation, or the “Clash of civilizations,” as a “Clash of masculinities.”

Notes

136  Tatiana Riabova

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6

Re-imagining antiquity The conservative discourse of “Russia as the true Europe” and the Kremlin’s new cultural policy Maria Engström

Introduction: the aesthetics of the “conservative turn” Post-Crimean Russian cultural policy differs not only in its stricter control over cultural activities but also in its much more distinct ideological line, which presents Russia as the main protector of “European” Christian civilization. In this ideological construct, the terms Europe and the West are split: “the West” is defined as liberal multiculturalism, in which Europe’s Christian foundations are suppressed. In the search for a national identity, priority is accorded to anything portraying Russia as a guardian of the classical European tradition and as the “true” Europe, a European Christian civilization rooted in Greek and Roman culture. The construction of this new image of Russia lies behind the new surge of interest in so-called “Soviet antiquity” and the post-imperial melancholic idea of the Soviet Union as a sunken Atlantis or a fallen Rome, as depicted succinctly by Eduard Limonov (2014) in the title of his poetry anthology The USSR is our Ancient Rome. On the one hand, such a strategy for national image-building strives to depoliticize and mythologize the Soviet legacy. On the other hand, however, it creates a picture of Russia that is not a “Eurasian civilization” or a civilization with a “special path,” but rather a defender/katechon (Engström 2014) of the classical European tradition, which protects it from barbarian fundamentalists, who have lost their “civilizational memory”—be they Western liberals or radical Islamists. Up until the events in Ukraine and Syria, such messianic ideas were limited to neoconservative subcultures, mainly within neo-Eurasian and right-wing circles (Engström 2016), but in recent years they have been actively present in the political and cultural mainstream (Laruelle 2016). The katechon discourse allows the regime to criticize the nominally “liberal” and mostly Protestant West and to simultaneously assert its role in the international community as the final shield capable of defending the traditional values of old European culture.1 For example, Russia’s actions in Syria are presented as upholding true European values. The open-air concert by the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra, conducted by Valery Gergiev in Palmyra on May 5, 2016, was a symbolic act designed to demonstrate the

Re-imagining antiquity  143 triumph of Russia’s civilizing force over the new barbarism of the Islamic State. Pieces by Bach, Prokofiev, and Shchedrin were played at the concert, an event titled “Pray for Palmyra. Music Revives Ancient Ruins.” All of a sudden, the antiquity embodied in the second-century Monumental Arch of Palmyra—well-known to millions of Russians from their (Soviet) fifthgrade textbooks on ancient history—became animate and tangible, and (according to the official version) Russia had acted as its main and only defender and protector.2 This ideological project is one of many that the authorities are “testing,” but it seems this version of national identity is workable both at home and abroad, since it is capable of winning Russia allies in Europe and reopening splits inside the EU along the old confessional divides of a Catholic South, a Protestant North, and an Orthodox East. Little surprise, therefore, that it is currently receiving major support from the Russian state. This new European trajectory is present and visible in cultural consumption and is reflected above all in the exhibition and lecture practices of museums and galleries, the organization of recreational and leisure environments, the construction and reconstruction of cultural objects, and in long-term urbanistic projects. Although changes in cultural consumption are of considerable political significance, since they directly influence public opinion by satisfying the cultural needs of broad sectors of the population,3 they often lie outside the focus of the media or researchers. The Russian and Western mass media give priority to isolated but high-profile cultural scandals that shape the generally accepted view of the repressive and “unEuropean” developmental vector of contemporary Russian culture (bans on the films Matilda and The Death of Stalin, the Kirill Serebrennikov case, the prosecution of Pussy Riot and Petr Pavlenskii, etc.). Without denying the importance of studying cultural scandals and the repressive aspects of contemporary Russian politics, what I will concentrate on in the present article is post-Crimean cultural production, especially exhibition, restoration, and urbanistic practices. I will analyze the role of the state in these practices as well as the role of an artistic theory and program, which was articulated on the advent of the Soviet disintegration and shaped the views and subject positions of several artists and professionals influential in Russia today. This chapter is divided into two parts. The first will analyze a series of events in cultural life that show the active work of the authorities on the new project of “Russo-European civilization” and the changes in official cultural policy of recent years that are directly connected with shaping the image of Russia as the “guardian and defender” of European Christian civilization. The second part will address the artist and art theorist Timur Novikov’s ideological program of “the new Russian classicism.” It is in his manifestos and writings of the 1990s and in the activity of the New Academy of Fine Arts organized by him in 1989 that the concept of Russia as the guardian and final bulwark of European culture is formulated and visualized. The New Academy circle also includes such

144  Maria Engström prominent figures of contemporary cultural life as the curator Arkadii Ippolitov, the screenwriter and director Avdot’ia Smirnova, the artists Aleksei Beliaev-Gintovt and Ol’ga Tobreluts, the sculptors Aidan Salakhova and Aleksei Morozov, and the photographer Mikhail Rozanov. Without asserting any direct connection between the utopia of Novikov’s aesthetic state and the official cultural policy of recent years, I will nevertheless attempt to trace the trajectory of a number of conceptions and ideas that were popular in the Neo-academic circles of St. Petersburg and Moscow in the 1990s and early 2000s and the influence of this intellectual and artistic trend on the cultural policy of the post-Crimean period.

Part 1. The European turn in Russian cultural policy The new exhibition policy The most obvious evidence of the “turn towards Europe” is the new exhibition policy of the country’s main art museums—the Hermitage, the Russian Museum, the Tretyakov Art Gallery, and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. Russia has now begun to position itself more actively as a country that knows and cherishes the European heritage and Western Christian culture. The political predicament and deteriorating relations with the EU due to the Crimean crisis is compensated for by activating cultural diplomacy. The period 2014–2017 witnessed an unprecedented increase in the number of international exhibitions, including displays of Western art in Russia and Russian art in Europe and itinerant exhibitions appealing to the broad European and Russian public. Recruited for the organization of a great many exhibitions stressing the cultural kinship of Russia and Europe were Western curators, art experts, and scholars specializing in the cultural ties between Russia and Europe, particularly Italy. One such major exhibition was Russia Palladiana. Dal barocco al modernismo, which took place between September 27, and November 10, 2014 at the Museo Correr in Venice. Intended to demonstrate the influence of antiquity and neoclassicism on Russian culture and identity, it was a project of the Russian Federation Ministry of Culture and became a very important event in the cross-cultural year of tourism between Russia and Italy. The curators of the exhibition were Arkadii Ippolitov and Vasilii Uspenskii. Ippolitov is a well-known art historian from St. Petersburg, curator of the Italian prints at the Hermitage, and the author of a book on Piranesi (Ippolitov 2013) as well as bestsellers about Lombardy and Venice in the series Images of Italy XXI. Uspenskii is the curator of the Hermitage Prints Division. The organizers were the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia and the State Museum and Exhibition Center ROSIZO in collaboration with the Shchusev State Research Museum of Architecture. In 2015 an expanded version of the exhibition was shown in Moscow, where the curators divided the exposition into two chronological halves: “From Baroque to Modernism”

Re-imagining antiquity  145 and “The Twentieth Century.” The first part, devoted to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian Palladianism,4 was exhibited at the Tsaritsyno Museum-Reserve. The Russian viewer saw architectural drawings of St. Petersburg and prints and paintings showing the Palladian palaces and estates of Russian artists from various periods: Borovikovskii, Levitskii, Grabar’, Benois, and Kandinsky. Besides imperial Palladianism, the exhibition also featured the so-called provincial Palladianism of Nikolai L’vov, the first follower of Andrea Palladio in Russia and the first Russian translator of his Four Books on Architecture. Stalinist Palladianism as a synthesis of neoclassicism and the avant-garde (the projects and drawings of Ivan Fomin, Ivan Zholtovskii and Andrei Shchusev) was displayed at the Shchusev Museum of Architecture. The curators presented Palladianism as a very important component of Russian European identity. Antiquity and neoclassicism are positioned as the ideological and aesthetic foundation capable of consolidating a fragmented and divided Russian society, because it refers in equal measure to the European and the Russian imperial traditions; that is, it is a project that is simultaneously global and local. Yet another important ideological aspect of the exhibition is its revision of Soviet art, since the exposition demonstrates how Soviet Palladianism is embedded in the European neoclassical tradition. A similar conception informs the Pushkin Museum’s exhibition Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Before and After. Italy-Russia, Eighteenth-Twenty-First Centuries (September 20, 2016–November 13, 2016), which demonstrated the influence of Piranesi on Catherine II’s architects Giacomo Quarenghi and Charles Cameron and on the appearance of Russian cities and Russian art of various periods, from the avant-garde (Iakov Chernikhov, Ivan Leonidov, Konstantin Mel’nikov) to the present day (Valerii Koshliakov). Piranesi as a visionary and master of architectural utopia is currently the most popular of the neoclassicists. He is regularly exhibited in Russia: in the St. Petersburg City Museum (2010), the Hermitage (2011), Ekaterinburg (2012–2013), Astrakhan (2015), and a number of other cities. In 2014 an exhibition of his works was included in the Manifesta10 Biennial of Contemporary Art at the Hermitage.5 Another type of exhibitions are the blockbusters, which feature the absolute masterpieces of European Christian art. One that enjoyed enormous success among Russian viewers was Raphael. The Poetry of Image. Artworks from the Uffizi Galleries and Other Italian Collections, which was held in the fall of 2016 at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow (September 13, 2016–December 11, 2016). The main event, however, was undoubtedly Roma Aeterna. Masterpieces of the Vatican Pinacoteca. Bellini, Raphael, Caravaggio, which took place from November 25, 2016 to February 19, 2017 at the Tretyakov Gallery.6 Although “Eternal Rome” in the title is a reference to antiquity, what the exhibition presented was Italian religious art from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries. The negotiations were conducted at the highest level. Vladimir Putin and Pope Francis agreed to exchange Russian

146  Maria Engström and Italian exhibitions of Christian art during a meeting in 2013, and the arrangement was confirmed at a personal meeting between Patriarch Kirill and the Pope in Havana on February 12, 2016. The curator of the exhibition was Arkadii Ippolitov, who described his concept of it as follows: The curatorial idea is reflected in the title [...], which includes the Latin expression “Roma Aeterna”—“Eternal Rome”—which in Russian has become as widely used as “Anno Domini” or “Vox populi.” Implicit in “Roma Aeterna” is the enormous cultural unity that Rome has come to represent in human history—a city both ancient and modern that has brought together into a single whole entirely different periods: antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Baroque. Rome is the center of the empire, the center of religion and the center of the arts. The concept of Roma Aeterna can be said to be one of the most important ideas in human culture. It is this idea to which the exhibition is dedicated. (Kabanova 2016) In an interview for the state-owned newspaper Rossiiskaia gazeta, the Tretyakov Gallery’s director, Zel’fira Tregulova, emphasized the uniqueness of the Roma Aeterna exhibition and its ideological component: Never before has the Vatican Pinacoteca collection sent forty-two such high-level masterpieces at once. This is of course an unprecedented gesture that attests to the trust that has developed between Russia and the Vatican and between the Vatican museums and the Tretyakov Gallery at a very difficult moment for the entire world. (Tregulova quoted in Vasil’eva 2016) In November 2018–February 2019, the Vatican hosted in turn an exhibition from Russia: The Russian Pilgrimage: From Dionysius to Malevich/ Pellegrinaggio della pittura russa. Da Dionisij a Malevič/Russkii put. Ot Dionisiia do Malevicha, as part of the “Russian seasons” program in Italy. This exhibition, curated at the Russian end by Arkadii Ippolitov, was hosted by the Braccio di Carlo Magno gallery in Saint Peter’s Square and revealed to the European spectators the 500-year-old spiritual way of Russian art from icon painting to the avant-garde. The aim of the exhibition was to demonstrate the canonized visual tradition of Russia’s “cultural code” set in the Catholic context. The curators had selected 56 canonical works, or “major paintings” in Ippolitiov’s words, including paintings by Ivanov, Repin, Kramskoi, Levitan, Vrubel, Filonov, Kandinsky, Malevich, and Petrov-Vodkin: Major paintings are reproduced in textbooks. They are known, or should be known by each school pupil. They are imprinted in consciousnesslike matrix of national identity and will follow you, whether you want

Re-imagining antiquity  147 it or not, throughout your lifetime in numerous copies, in slogans, advertisements and cartoons. This is the kind of an exhibition, bringing together icon painting with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that we have compiled. (Ippolitov quoted in Kabanova 2018) The main article for the exhibition’s catalogue was written by a poet Ol’ga Sedakova, who at present is the primary mediator between the Russian Orthodox and the Catholic traditions in Russian literature. In 1998 the Vatican awarded her the literary prize “The Christian Roots of Europe” (in honor of Vladimir Solov’ev). These meetings and exhibitions could be viewed as an important diplomatic step, the start of a new dialogue between Orthodoxy and Catholicism— not a conversation confined to the impasse of ecumenical discourse, but a new cultural and political cooperation (Chapnin 2018).7 However, this unexpected turn by the state and the church toward dialogue with Catholic Europe has come under fire from both Orthodox fundamentalists and the liberal intelligentsia. The latter see it as an attempt by the authorities to form an alliance with the most conservative segment of the European Union. The Roma Aeterna exhibition has revived the topic of the Three Romes. Articles with related titles have started to appear in the media; for example, “From our Rome to your Rome,” “From the First Rome to the Third,” etc. However, the discourse regarding the Third Rome has acquired a new connotation. Unlike, for example, the radical imperialist projects in conservative circles, official rhetoric does not underscore Russia’s messianic exclusiveness as the last Rome, but rather the dialogue with the cultures of the First and Second Romes. We may again quote Tregulova, who expresses the Kremlin’s official position: It is no accident that the exhibition begins with religious paintings from the twelfth-century Roman school of icon painting, in which the Byzantine tradition is clearly present. At the same time, however, we are not accentuating the peculiarities of the iconography or interpretation of specific religious subjects in the European masters’ paintings because, in my opinion, such projects are not about what divides us, but about what unites us. (Tregulova quoted in Vasil’eva 2016) The same issue of dialogue, as well as the succession and close ties between Russia and Catholic Europe, are promoted in the 2016 TV series Sofia based on the life of the Byzantine princess Zoe (Sophia) Paleologue. Raised in Rome, she married Ivan III, the Grand Duke of Moscow, who laid the foundations of Russia’s imperial statehood. The series is funded by the Russian Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Defense. Despite the vital ideological component of Sofia’s commitment to Orthodoxy (not Catholicism),

148  Maria Engström which she adopted in Rome, the emphasis is on Muscovy’s participation in the political life of fifteenth-century Europe. Previously, for example, in Tikhon Shevkunov’s famous 2008 film Fall of an Empire: The Lesson of Byzantium, Europeans were depicted as negative caricatures. Yet Sofia shows the Vatican and the Italian Renaissance culture that the Byzantine princess brought to Moscow from Rome in a positive light. Soviet antiquity Building up Russia’s image as a “European civilization” is not limited to a penchant for Roman and Byzantine antiquity; there is also renewed interest in so-called “Soviet antiquity.”8 This can be illustrated by numerous recent urban renovation and exhibition projects. A visualization of Russia as a country with an eminent European culture was presented at the opening ceremony of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. However, the main symbol of this new European Russia was meant to be the Italian-style Gorky Gorod ski resort in Sochi. It was designed by architect Mikhail Filippov (b. 1954), a “new Zholtovskii,” one of the renowned “paper architects” of the late Soviet period and the leading neoclassicist in post-Soviet Russia. Filippov comments as follows on the peculiarities of the Gorky Gorod project, in which the principal aim was to create the illusion of an ancient city: The main technique was to build houses not just in a classical style, but like a city, to create the illusion of a city built around the ruins of a Roman amphitheater. Italian and Spanish seaside towns are built this way, as is the Piazza della Repubblica in Rome. (Filippov quoted in Kopylova 2014) On the other hand, he describes Stalinist neoclassicism as the main style in the area: International environmental certificates take into account whether an architectural style is consistent with local tradition. Sochi’s local tradition (vernacular) is 1930–1950s neoclassicism. I followed that tradition. (Kopylova 2014) Before this project, Filippov built the Roman House, the Italian Quarter and the Marshal residential complex in Moscow, totaling 750,000 square meters of neoclassical buildings. The “restoration of utopia”—large-scale projects to renovate Stalin-era architectural monuments—has become a hallmark of recent years. One of the first controversial examples was the refurbishment of the KurskaiaKoltsevaia metro station in Moscow in 2009, where the last lines of one

Re-imagining antiquity  149 edition of the USSR national anthem appeared on the walls of the entrance halls: “Be true to the people, thus Stalin has reared us, Inspired us to labour and valorous deed.” Responding to criticism, the renovators explained that they had restored the station’s appearance to the way it looked on the day it opened—January 1, 1950. Since then, interest in renovating monuments of Soviet antiquity is on the increase. The Moscow renewal project was developed by KB Strelka with the active participation of Grigorii Revzin—a professor at the Graduate School of Urban Studies of the Higher School of Economics—whose influence on the renovation program for Moscow’s neoclassical-style public areas was substantial. At the start of the 2000s, Revzin was in charge of the “Classics” project, in which much attention was paid to analyzing the history of Stalinist neoclassicism, and he is also the author of the famous monograph Neoclassicism in Russian Architecture of the Early Twentieth Century (Revzin 1992). The largest restoration projects in recent years have been the reconstruction of Gorky Park and VDNKh, the renovation of the Kotelnicheskaia Embankment Building, the remodeling of Tverskaia Street (façade renovation, widening pavements, planting trees) and, of course, the demolition of the trade pavilions in Moscow’s historical center in 2016—a crucial symbolic act which marked the end of spontaneous post-Soviet capitalism (so-called “kiosk civilization”) and the victory of a state which mostly associates itself with the Stalinist imperial style.9 The most significant project in the new cultural policy is the extensive reconstruction of the Exhibition of the Achievements of the National Economy (VDNKh). Following a national referendum in 2014, this architectural complex regained its historical name.10 Rejection of the name All-Russian Exhibition Center (VVTs) introduced in the 1990s had to do with the fact that it was associated with a flea market in the ruins of the Soviet Union, while the return of the familiar acronym VDNKh symbolized not only an acceptance of the Soviet past, but also the present-day relevance of the concept of “achievement,” i.e., a demonstration to the country and the world of the successes and grandeur of Russia’s resurgence under Putin. The large-scale VDNKh reconstruction project includes the repair of communications, landscaping, the restoration of fountains, and the restoration and replication of architectural features of the pavilions and interior decors. On the other hand, we also observe how Stalinist architectural complexes are being appropriated by urbanists who are eliminating the ideological component and transforming them into neutral urban recreational and educational spaces. The official VDNKh website notes that one of the basic aims of the reconstruction is to boost the number of visitors. One ongoing project to attract tourists is the Museum City, a museum-educational cluster consisting of the Cosmonautics and Aviation Centre in the legendary Cosmos Pavilion, the State Central Film Museum, the Beekeeping

150  Maria Engström Museum, etc. Another major museum center will be the pavilion of the state company Rosatom, dedicated to the development of the nuclear sector in Russia. The renovation of VDNKh has recruited leading European architects, designers, and construction companies. The nucleus of the future Park of Knowledge cluster will be the City of Heroes children’s educational center. Participating in the development of the architectural conception of the Park of Knowledge is the British architect Nicholas Champkins, the creator of the master plan of the Olympic Park in London. A project has been approved for a year-round theme park. Among those developing the conception of this park are Andrei Boltenko and George Tsypin, the artistic directors and production designers of the opening ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. The park will be constructed by the Italian firm Pizzaroti, which built Disneyland in Paris. Speaking about collaboration with Pizzarotti, Boltenko emphasizes the stability of the Italian component in Russian history: Italians have extensive experience of building in Russia: They built the Kremlin and a significant portion of St. Petersburg—that’s how things were historically. In addition, we know that the Italians are famous for their splendid taste, which has been confirmed time and time again in the most diverse areas of art. (VDNKh 2017) The new urban utopia the Moscow authorities are building on the site of the Soviet utopia is being integrated into the European context: Spreading out before you here will be the city of the future that the designers of the Exhibition dreamed about back in the Soviet period. Besides riding on traditional carousels, you will be able to fly above Moscow on giant butterflies or take a trip on the Metro of Time and ride a roller coaster to the city of the future. The park will have the highest observation wheel in Europe, which at 140 meters is five meters higher than the famous London Eye in Great Britain. (Mos.ru N.d.) According to the predictions of the experts, when the reconstruction is finished the number of visitors to VDNKh will increase from 25 to 40 million a year, and the revenue from the theme park alone will comprise 2.3 billion rubles annually. Thus the interest of the authorities in reconstructing architectural ensembles of the Stalinist period has to do not so much with imperial ideology as it does with neoliberal economics. As the research of Aleksandr Bikbov (2016) and Ilya Budraitskis (2017) shows, however, neoconservatism and neoliberalism are not in opposition in Russia, but constitute a new ideological hybrid. Bikbov and Budraitskis argue that the

Re-imagining antiquity  151 success of new urban projects among broad sectors of the population of the Russian Federation illustrates how the neoliberal turn and the accompanying fascination with the classics has capitalized on the Soviet cultural model. In the USSR classical art was not elitist (as in the West) but was a mass phenomenon. As Ekaterina Degot’ (2016) reminds us: In the USSR classical art belonged to the zone of the universal and came to the viewer in copies. The principal system of existence of art there was replication based on the original act of copying from nature which every new participant reproduces. This copying involves simultaneously copying the West and the artistic gesture of inclusion into Western culture. Thus, revitalization of things Soviet signifies not a weakening but a reinforcement of the European discourse in cultural policy, since what is being reconstituted today is the aspect of Soviet culture (architectural monuments of Stalinist neoclassicism, elements of European culture in the Soviet literary and artistic canon, etc.) which underscored the global rather than the local character of the Soviet modernization project. The reassessment of socialist realism One important component of the neoliberal appropriation of the Soviet heritage (Bikbov 2016; Budraitskis 2017) and the concept of “Russo-European civilization” is an ideological and aesthetic reassessment of Soviet culture, particularly the process of revising the art and architecture of Socialist Realism. Urbanistic projects for the reconstruction of Stalinist Moscow are being accompanied by the museification of the Soviet painterly heritage and its evaluation as a part of European modernism. A very important event in the context of this reappraisal of the Soviet legacy is the two-part exhibition Modernism without a Manifesto, consisting of works from Roman Babishev’s famous collection of Soviet art (Part 1: September 27–November 19, 2017; Part 2: November 28, 2017–January 14, 2018) at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. It is revealing that the term “totalitarian style” popular in the 1990s is now being replaced by “Stalinist neoclassicism,” “post-avantgarde,” and “Soviet art-deco” which, apart from their more positive connotations, add some global (especially American and European) context to Soviet neoclassicism. At the same time, there is a return of interest in realism and traditional visuality. In December 2011 the prominent collector of Soviet art Aleksei Anan’ev opened the private museum-exhibition complex, the Institute of Russian Realist Art (IRRA). One of the IRRA’s most successful projects was the international itinerant exhibition Russia on the Road, 1920–1990, which was supported by the Russian Ministry of Culture, the Italian Ministry of Culture, Moscow State University, La Sapienza University in Rome

152  Maria Engström and other institutions, and organized jointly with the Tretyakov Gallery, the Russian Museum, the Russian Academy of Arts, the National Gallery of Armenia, and a number of regional museums. The exhibition premiered at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome (October 16–December 15, 2015). In 2016 (January 28–May 22) this same exhibition, its title slightly altered to Russia on the Road: Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, 1920–1990, took place at IRRA in Moscow. The Italian ambassador to the Russian Federation, Cesare Maria Ragaglini, underscored the significance of this exhibition of works from the Soviet period for the reinforcement of traditional cultural ties between Italy and Russia: I am particularly glad that an exhibition on a level such as this was organized with the participation of authoritative Italian partners. It has received very high evaluations from art experts and has been included in the cultural program of the Universal Exhibition Expo 2015 and has been reviewed very positively in the Italian press. It was displayed at one of the best exhibition spaces in Rome, the Palazzo delle Esposizioni. And now this same Russia on the Road: Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, 1920–1990 is being presented to the general public in Moscow. In this I see the passing of the cultural baton that confirms the profound cultural ties between our nations. Throughout recent years they have expanded and strengthened, based on a long and traditionally broad spectrum of interrelationships spanning architecture, music, painting, cinema, ballet, literature, and many other forms in which our shared worldview is expressed. (IRRA 2016, 10) The importance of the Soviet visual heritage for building and visualizing a new Russo-European national identity is best illustrated by the Russian Pavilion at the Fifteenth Venice Architecture Biennale (May 28–November 27, 2016), where Russia presented a multimedia exhibition dedicated to the past and future of the VDNKh complex (Figure 6.1). In the first room, a video presentation set to music by Shostakovich informed spectators about key historical facts and figures. It showed three scenarios for the possible fates that such architectural ensembles have met worldwide: destruction (Palmyra), museification (the Roman Forum; Versailles), or revitalization (VDNKh). The curator of the exposition was Chief Architect of Moscow Sergei Kuznetsov, with VDNKh General Director Ekaterina Pronicheva as co-curator. Radical images of the VDNKh of the future were provided by students from the Higher School of Urbanism in Moscow and the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia in Barcelona. Also engaged in developing the exhibition were the young student artists from the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts Aleksei Rezvykh and Marina Piskunova, who presented their visionary projects depicting Moscow and its main park VDNKh in the twenty-first century.

Re-imagining antiquity  153

Figure 6.1 The Russian Pavilion at the Fifteenth Venice Architecture Biennale, 2016.

Figure 6.2 Aleksei  Gintovt, Surfacing, 2005.

154  Maria Engström It is telling that among the artists who were not invited to participate in this prestigious project were such well-known neoclassicists as Mikhail Rozanov and Aleksei Beliaev-Gintovt, who for the past twenty years have been successively developing the themes of Soviet antiquity and European identity and have for many years worked specifically on images of VDNKh (see, for example, Figure 6.2), but do not belong to the artistic mainstream or to the institutions involved with implementing the new urbanistic utopia.

Part II. The new Russian renaissance: Timur Novikov’s “ecology of culture” project The new academy of fine arts It is important that any study of the new Russian cultural policy and practice examine the mechanism by which ideas are transmitted from autonomous communities and subcultures—in the present case, both intellectual and artistic neoconservative milieus—into the political and cultural mainstream. Long before the conservative turn of the Kremlin and the neoliberal urbanistic projects, the ideological construction of Russia as the guardian of traditional European values and the heir and defender of great European culture had been articulated and visualized by the artist and theoretician of culture, Timur Novikov (1958–2002), who in the early 1990s founded the movement known as Neoacademism, or the “new Russian classicism.” It was in December 1989 that the Leningrad avant-gardist, provocateur, and informal member of the Kino rock group Novikov officially announced the founding of the New Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA). One of the first (even before the actual collapse of the USSR) to sense the future longing of the new Russia for its imperial grandeur, he was the first to propose a way to realize the future nostalgia in a new avant-garde project: a “new classicism.” According to Novikov, in order for the general public to enjoy the classics, people must be “brought closer,” by which he means that the mission of contemporary art is to wrench “beauty” from the fetters of the museums and return it to life. He posed this question explicitly in his first manifesto in 1991: Today the Venuses and Apollos exhumed and revived by the Renaissance are sound asleep in the crystal coffins of the museums. They should be opened once again, but how? (Novikov 1998, 11) At the center of the activities of the New Academy is the search for techniques through which the classics can be “resurrected.” In his reconstruction of classical images, Novikov adheres to Andy Warhol’s economic theories of image recycling and the literary formalist Viktor Shklovskii’s concept of defamiliarization. The theory of recomposition that Novikov had formulated

Re-imagining antiquity  155 by 1982 was applied in the 1990s to update the historical heritage (Novikov 1996). Despite its pointedly conservative and restorationist rhetoric, the New Academy utilizes the latest technologies. Ol’ga Tobreluts’s works from the 1990s, for example, synthesize photography, video, and digital technology. The New Academy is an ideological as well as an aesthetic project. The Neoacademists maintain that the future of Russia and the world lies with order and Apollonian civilization (Figure 6.3), which they contrast with the Dionysian chaos of the 1990s. They operate with archetypes of antique and European culture (Arcadia, the golden mean, Apollo) as well as Soviet culture, in which they single out Apollonian elements (the big style, sports, aviation, outer space). Artists employ the device of the “shift,” which liberates the viewer from automatism in the perception of the classics: The figure of Lenin is replaced by Apollo, Gagarin becomes Hermes, and Fedelino, the little boy extracting a thorn from his foot, is transformed into a girl pioneer (Figure 6.4). This combination of Sovietism and classical heritage, the underscoring of the antique and European component of the Soviet project in the 1990s, i.e., during a period of massive criticism of everything Soviet as totalitarian, was controversial. The Neoacademic play with the classical European and Soviet heritage, which the general public can understand even without explanation, is conceptualized by Novikov through the metaphor of the “Renaissance.” This term turns up both in the titles of Neoacademic exhibitions (Renaissance

Figure 6.3 Aleksei  Gintovt, Apollo 1, 2017.

156  Maria Engström

Figure 6.4 Doping-Pong, Girl pioneer pulling out a splinter, 2018.

and Resistance, State Russian Museum, 1994) and in manifestos such as Novikov’s The Force of Beauty (1998): We can boldly call the 1990s “The New Renaissance.” Ignoring their colleagues’ bewilderment, in different parts of Europe true artists are returning to tradition. Postmodernism is now regarded as a transitional period. Indeed, not so long ago, an artist who painted in the spirit of classical art had to bow to the critic and make excuses—“It’s a joke, irony, pretending”—and hope for forgiveness. Today, he can at last forget about the art critic, who is boring, uninteresting, and above all uninterested in beauty. Here we have a Renaissance, which means that we can show our pictures and sculptures to athletes and models, workers and collective farmers. They will understand us. (Novikov 1998, 51–52) The “ecology of culture” Novikov speaks of the New Academy as an “ecological project” aimed at saving the world from disembodiment and dehumanization and restoring beauty to it: The classical art of which Europe was so proud no longer exists! For those who are not indifferent to beauty this is no less important than,

Re-imagining antiquity  157 say, the loss of polar bears or pollution of the environment. From being aesthetic, the problem becomes ecological. This is why I speak of ecological activities. (Novikov 1998, 106) The concept of the “ecology of culture” was associated in the USSR/Russia of the 1970s–1990s with especially Arkadii Rostislavoch Nebol’sin (Arcadi Nebolsine) and medievalist and literary historian Dmitrii Sergeevich Likhachev (1980). Nebolsine (b. 1932) is a well-known American culturologist and religious philosopher of Russian descent who participated in the founding and activities of the Italian Art and Landscape Foundation. On the model of this organization, in 1998 Novikov founded the European Society for the Preservation of Classical Aesthetics, with Nebolsine as its chairman, and wrote his famous incantatory manifesto emphasizing Russia’s European identity and calling for united efforts to save traditional European culture. There is only one “we” in the manifesto, with no division into “Russians” and “Europeans.” According to Novikov, the classical heritage is a common legacy, and resurrecting it is also a common task: Fellow Europeans! Not long ago we had a great European culture. Not long ago our artists could paint beautiful canvases, our sculptors could carve beautiful sculptures, our architects could erect beautiful palaces, our poets could write beautiful verses, our composers could create beautiful music. Now almost all of this culture has been lost. The beauty that has abandoned art lives on in the hearts of the people. Fellow Europeans! Let us turn our eyes away from what is foisted upon us instead of culture! Isn’t it time for all of us together to rebuild lost traditions that can be worthy successors to our ancestors? We must learn how to paint beautiful canvases, we must learn how to carve beautiful sculptures, we must learn how to erect beautiful palaces, we must learn how to write beautiful verses, we must learn how to create beautiful music. And then we will deserve to be called Europeans in the next millennium as well! (Novikov 2007) In addition to manifestos, Novikov elaborated his conception of the turn in Russian art toward conservatism and “Apollonism for the masses” in a series of interviews, speeches, and articles (Novikov 1998). In 1999 he founded The Great Artistic Will, a journal dedicated to the ecology of culture, the

158  Maria Engström preservation of classical aesthetics, and realism and figurative painting. In this project he strove for a synthesis of academic scholarship and contemporary art to demonstrate the timeless relevance of the classical tradition. Contributors to the journal included Arcadi Nebolsine, Dmitrii Prigov (1940–2007), the prominent philologist and classical scholar Professor Aleksandr Zaitsev (1926–2000) of St. Petersburg University, the art experts Ekaterina Andreeva, Andrei Khlobystin, and many others. The Orthodox tradition, which by the late 1990s had become an important component of the Neo-Academic project, is also interpreted by Novikov (following Likachev) as an exclusively European heritage: Preserving the classics is especially important to us Russians. After all, following the collapse of the Byzantine Empire it was Rus’ that preserved the values of Byzantine civilization, and today, when throughout the century-long “modernization” of European culture Russia alone has not yet undergone a humanitarian catastrophe, we once again must take upon ourselves the function of guardians of the classical European culture to which our country turned three centuries ago. (Novikov 2003, 161) Anticipating present-day urbanistic and museum projects, Novikov proposes the notion of “aesthetic populism” and writes about the recreational function of culture and the museum, contrasting it with both the Soviet didactic and sociocritical functions and their counterparts in Western leftist art. Although in recent years we have witnessed a return of the didactic function of exhibitions (the most illustrative example being Tikhon Shevkunov’s itinerant Russia—My History exhibition), what contemporary urbanism accentuates is the recreational aspect (i.e., the organization of the environment and leisure time) of institutes involved with sociocultural memory. Because a very important goal of the Neoacademic ecology of culture has been the preservation in everyday life of representational, visual images of classical art, Novikov declares the photographing and drawing of classical sculpture and architecture to be the foremost task of Neoacademism. Favorite Neoacademic remixes and remakes include the sculpture and architectural ensembles of the Imperial and Stalinist periods—VDNKh, Peterhof, St. Petersburg’s square and palaces (Figure 6.5). In his 1994 manifesto “St. Petersburg” Novikov views the city as “a bedrock of classical culture” and the foundation of Russian European identity: Existence without a foundation is impossible for a Petersburger. St. Petersburg is a city built on a swamp, everything is unstable here; Petersburgers need support, pillars on which they can feel secure. This is why the city is called the city of stone, even though there was no stone here and it had to be brought from elsewhere. This stone of classical culture laid down by Peter I and reinforced by all generations of

Re-imagining antiquity  159

Figure 6.5 Natalia Zhernovskaya, Parade, 2006.

St. Petersburgers is in our day the indestructible bastion of the classics towering above the sea of contemporary art splashing around it. (Novikov 2015, 17).

Conclusion Beginning as a provocation among members of the Leningrad bohemia, by the early 2000s Novikov’s neoclassicism had become a serious ideological program, many of whose points are being implemented today in official Russian cultural policy and practice: the “re-composition” of things Soviet as “antique,” an increase in the share of the classical in the cultural everyday, an orientation toward the “unsophisticated mass audience,” urbanistic projects foregrounding the recreational function of the museum and art itself, and so on. Novikov and his associates at the New Academy have not only established the theory of classical aesthetics as the aesthetics of the future conservative turn toward the European and Soviet heritage, but have also created an enormous number of artworks in the aesthetics of this “New Renaissance” (Engström 2016). Recent years have witnessed a steady increase in exhibitions by conservative avant-gardists and advocates of classical aesthetics in contemporary art. Here may be mentioned the exhibition of the leading neoclassicists Mikhail Rozanov and Aleksei Gintovt Order (September 20–October 28, 2017 at the RuArts Gallery in Moscow), Aleksei Beliaev-Gintovt’s retrospective exhibition X (November 8–December 3, 2017 at MMOMA), the sculptor Aleksei Morozov’s PONTIFEX_MAXIMVST/

160  Maria Engström LE STANZE (February 9–April 2, 2017 at MMOMA), the personal exhibition of the neoclassicist architect Stepan Liphart The Seventeenth Utopia: Architectural Projects, 2007–2017 (August 18–September 10, 2017 at the On Shabolovka Gallery in Moscow), Mikhail Rozanov’s personal exhibition Clarity of Purpose dedicated to the architecture of VDNKh (January 23– March 1, 2015 at the Moscow Museum), and others. Despite their energetic exhibition activity and perhaps due to the radical nature of their projects, the artists who belonged to the Neo-Academic community in the 1990s are today seldom enlisted by the authorities to propagandize the image of Russia as a European civilization. The construction and dissemination of the image of Russo-European culture is being implemented above all by the bureaucratic apparatus of the Ministry of Culture and neoliberal institutions such as the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design. The official rethinking of the cultural heritage of the Soviet period is developing not within a utopian aesthetic state such as Novikov’s, but in the context of the neoliberal economics of services and financial censorship. The turn to conservative aesthetics and aesthetic populism has as much to do with economic considerations as it does with ideology, since European and Russian and Soviet art is comprehensible and familiar to the general public both in Russia and elsewhere. The present-day “revitalization” of objects of the architectural heritage (VDNKh, Gorky Park, Zariadye Park) follows worldwide tendencies and seeks to increase visitorship, create profitable recreational and educational zones, enhance the prestige of the city, increase tourism, and so on. Yet we must not overlook the important role played in the new exhibition policy by curators and art historians close to the New Academy, such as Ol’ga Sviblova (Multimedia Art Museum), Aleksandr Borovskii (The State Russian Museum), Arkadii Ippolitov (The State Hermitage Museum), Olesia Turkina (The State Russian Museum), and Ekaterina Andreeva (The State Russian Museum). In the domestic policy context, we can assume that this new universalist Russo-European civilizational project aims to oppose separatist ethnonationalistic movements inside Russia itself. In terms of foreign policy (as in the military operations in Syria and Ukraine), it contrasts Ukraine’s nationalistic nation-building and Western discourse about Russia’s “barbarism” and provinciality. The global horizon of the country’s cultural policy is currently being emphasized in every possible way, for according to President Putin (RT 2016), Russia not only lacks geographical borders, but also has no historical limits.

Notes

Re-imagining antiquity  161

3

4 5

6 7

8

9

10

military conflicts, was displayed in Trafalgar Square in London. Carved in Italy, the arch was built using 3-D images produced from photographs of various sites. In 2016–2017 it was also displayed in New York, Dubai, Arona and Florence. Commenting on changes in the evaluation of work in the cultural sphere over the past few years, General Director of the All-Russian Center for Public Opinion Research Valerii Fedorov notes: “in 2014 19% of Russian citizens viewed the state of affairs in the cultural sphere as positive, while in 2017 the figure was 30%, even though the economy had experienced a serious crisis in this period. Thus the vector of change in the situation is obvious” (Fedorov 2018). Russian Palladianism refers to the idea of Russia’s identification with European imperial culture, exhibited in neoclassical architecture heavily influenced by the Italian architect Andrea Palladio (1508–1580). Piranesi has been exhibited extensively in many European cities in recent years. The interest in Piranesi in the European context owes primarily to his aesthetics of ruins and urban wastelands (Phillips 2016). In Russia, the emphasis is placed on the historical context and on the significance of Piranesi as a visionary for Russian neo-classicism and avant-garde. One of the latest Russian exhibitions, which by addressing the creative heritage of Piranesi aimed at visualizing the future, was an architectural and urban planning exhibition “Petersburg-2103” (June 20, 2018–July 15, 2018). In the “Visions” section, an architect Sergei Choban presented his project “Impression of the Future,” in which the intervention of modern architecture into the historical parts of St. Petersburg, was visualized in engravings created by using Piranesi’s technique. The exhibition was supported financially by the Alisher Usmanov Art, Science and Sport Foundation. A new phase of relationships and collaboration between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Vatican began with the historic Havana meeting between the Pope and Patriarch Kirill in 2016. According to Thomas Bremer, however, the Russian Orthodox and the Roman Catholic Church have over the last decade formed a “strategic alliance” and “common front” in response to the allegedly “rotten West,” in order to defend “the Christian faith” (Bremer 2014, 90–91). The term “Soviet Antiquity” is ambiguous and primarily used by Russian critics and academics, who since the 1990s have insisted on the educational and enlightening aspects of Soviet heritage rather than on its repressive side. They emphasize those aspects of Soviet visual culture of the 1930s–1950s (architecture, urban planning, monumental and graphic art), which to a greater extent linked Soviet modernism with the European heritage, in particular, with Antiquity and the Renaissance. This term implicitly contains a positive evaluation of the Soviet period, which is frequently described as “Soviet civilization.” Art experts and curators have recently started using the term without necessarily referring to the above-mentioned significations. For instance, in 2018 the Moscow “At Shabolovka” gallery successfully hosted “The Soviet Antiquity” exhibition (curators Alexandra Selivanova and Nadezhda Plungian). The term is also used by Boris Groys in his analysis of Grigorii Bruskin’s creative works (Groys 2010). The main argument in defense of demolishing the kiosks (lar’ki) was that they had been built illegally and threatened the preservation of architectural monuments at the entrance to the metro stations built in the 1930s–1950s. Since Muscovites were used to seeing the kiosks on the site since the collapse of the USSR, it was understandable that many associate the new “kioskless” Moscow with Soviet Moscow. The choice of the acronym VDNKh was favored by 90% of Muscovites voting in the “Active Citizen” project (Mos.ru 2017).

162  Maria Engström

References Bikbov, Aleksandr. 2016. “Iz entsiklopedii muzei prevrashchaetsya v prezentatsionnuyu ploshchadku.” Colta, March 23. http://www.colta.ru/articles/ raznoglasiya/10484 (accessed 14 June 2019). Bremer, Thomas. 2014. “Between Admiration and Refusal: Roman Catholic Perceptions of Orthodoxy.” In Eastern Orthodox Encounters of Identity and Otherness: Values, Self-Reflection, Dialogue, edited by Andrii Krawchuk and Thomas Bremer, 81–94. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Budraitskis, Ilya. 2017. “Contradictions in Russian Cultural Politics: Conservatism as an Instrument of Neoliberalism.” Lefteast, September 12. http://www. criticatac.ro/lefteast/russian-contradiction/ (accessed 14 June 2019). Chapnin, Sergei. 2018. “Dva goda posle vstrechi v Gavane: Kak razvivaetsia dialog RPTs i Vatikana.” Moskovskii tsentr Karnegi, February 13. https://carnegie.ru/ commentary/75517 (accessed 14 June 2019). Degot’, Ekaterina. 2016. “Kak smotret’ na poslevoennoe sovetskoe iskusstvo bez nenavisti.” Theory&Practice, October 21. https://theoryandpractice.ru/ posts/14856-ekaterina-degot-kak-smotret-na-poslevoennoe-sovetskoe-iskusstvobez-nenavisti (accessed 14 June 2019). Engström, Maria. 2014. “Contemporary Russian Messianism and New Russian Foreign Policy.” Contemporary Security Policy 35 (3): 356–79. Engström, Maria. 2016. “Apollo against Black Square: Conservative Futurism in Contemporary Russia.” In International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 6, edited by Günter Berghaus, 328–53. Berlin: De Gruyter. Fedorov, Valerii. 2018. “Primetoi 2017 goda stal fenomen ‘kul’turnykh ocheredei’.” Gazeta.ru, January 18. https://www.gazeta.ru/culture/2018/01/18/a_11616770. shtml (accessed 14 June 2019). Groys, Boris. 2010. “Sovetskie drevnosti.” Lekhaim 4 (216). https://lechaim.ru/ ARHIV/216/groys.htm (accessed 14 June 2019). Ippolitov, Arkadii. 2013. “Tiur’my” i vlast’: Mif Dzhovanni Batista Piranezi. St. Petersburg: Arka. IRRA. 2016. Russia on the Road, 1920–1990. Moscow: Institute of Russian Realist Art. Kabanova, Ol’ga. 2016. “Arkadii Ippolitov, kurator vystavki Roma Aeterna, rasskazal, chto privezut osen’iu v Tret’iakovku.” Vedomosti. March 1. https:// www.vedomosti.ru/lifestyle/characters/2016/03/02/632116-arkadii-ippolitovkurator-vistavki-roma-aeterna-rasskazal-vedomostyam-chto-privezut-osenyutretyakovku (accessed 14 June 2019). Kabanova, Ol’ga. 2018. “Arkadii Ippoitov: ‘Kreshchenie—Peterburg—avantgard’.” The Art Newspaper Russia. http://www.theartnewspaper.ru/posts/5796/ (accessed 14 June 2019). Khlobystin, Andrei. 1994. “Interv’ju s Timurom Novikovym.” Khudozhestvennaia volia. https://timurnovikov.ru/storage/docs/articles/1994_interview_hlobistina. pdf (accessed 14 June 2019). Kopylova, Lara. 2014. “Zolotaia medal’ za arkhitekturu.” EKA.ru, February 23. https://archi.ru/press/world/53360/gorki-gorod (accessed 14 June 2019). Laruelle, Marlène. 2016. “Russia as an Anti-Liberal European Civilization.” In The New Russian Nationalism: Imperialism, Ethnicity and Authoritarianism, 2000– 2015, edited by Pål Kolstø and Helge Blakkisrud, 275–97. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Re-imagining antiquity  163 Likhachev, Dmitrii. 1980. “Ekologiia kul’tury.” Pamiatniki Otechestva 2. Limonov, Eduard. 2014. SSSR—nash drevnii Rim. Moscow: Ad Marginem. Mos.ru. 2017. “Vozrozhdenie VDNKh: Kakoi stanet glavnaia vystavka strany.” October 2. https://www.mos.ru/news/item/29768073/ (accessed 14 June 2019). Mos.ru. N.d. “Moia ulitsa.” https://www.mos.ru/city/projects/mystreet/ (accessed 14 June 2019). Novikov, Timur. 1996. “Teoriia perekompozitsii.” Kabinet 11: 85–101. Novikov, Timur. 1998. Novyi russkii klassitsizm. St Petersburg: Palace Editions. Novikov, Timur. 2003. Lektsii. St Petersburg: Novaia akademiia iziashchnykh iskusstv. Novikov, Timur. 2007. “Manifest neoakademizma.” Iia-Khkha: Kino, muzika, tuzovka, July 17. https://www.yahha.com/article.php?sid=123 (accessed 25 July 2019). Novikov, Timur. 2015. “Peterburg.” In Neoakademizm v Sankt-Peterburge, 16–17. Ekaterinburg and Budapest: UVG art gallery. Phillips, Daniel. 2016. “Piranesi, Pasolini, and Punk Rock: Reflections on the Meanings and Potentials of Urban Wastelands in the Eternal City (and Beyond).” Commonstudio, November 26. http://www.thecommonstudio.com/blog/2016/11/26/ piranesi-pasolini-and-punk-rockreflections-on-the-meanings-and-potentials-ofurban-wastelands-in-the-eternal-city-and-beyond (accessed 14 June 2019). Revzin, Grigorii. 1992. Neoklassitsizm v russkoi arkhitekture nachala XX veka. Moscow: VNIITAG. RT. 2016. “Putin: Granitsa Rossii nigde ne zakanchivaetsia.” RT na russkom, November 24. https://russian.rt.com/russia/news/335286-putin-granica-rossii (accessed 14 June 2019). Vasil’eva, Zhanna. 2016. “Rim i mir.” Rossijskaia gazeta, November 23. https:// rg.ru/2016/11/23/v-tretiakovskoj-galeree-projdet-vystavka-roma-aeterna.html (accessed 14 June 2019). VDNKh. 2017. “Ital’ianskaia kompaniia Pizzarotti zaimetsia stroitel’stvom Parka attraktsionov na VDNKh.” April 4. https://vdnh.ru/news/italyanskayakompaniya-pizzarotti-zaymetsya-stroitelstvom-parka-attraktsionov-na-vdnkh/ (accessed 14 June 2019).

7

Civilizational discourses in doctoral dissertations in postSoviet Russia Mikhail Suslov and Irina Kotkina

In post-Soviet Russia, in the context of methodological disorientation and lowering research standards, an academic degree has become easily available for those wishing to add the title of “doctor” to their names. At the same time, the PhD title has retained an air of prestige and become a much-coveted perk for many people who are not directly related to the world of science. In 2013, there were more than 22,000 defended dissertations in Russia annually. This figure dropped to 13,000 in 2015 (VAK 2016), mostly thanks to the activities of “Dissernet,” the Russian association of volunteers who search for plagiarism in dissertations.1 The number of conferred PhD degrees in Russia is very high. Between 1994 and 2015, as many as 560,000 dissertations were defended, which makes for an average of 25,000 per year (Science-Expert 2016). Germany has a comparable number of PhD defenses per year, but if we consider the number of patents per country per year, Germany has about 22,000, while Russia has only 300.2 According to the estimation of Andrei Rostovtsev, the head of Dissernet, 90% of Russian academia is a “hollow bubble” (dutyi puzyr’) (Semenets 2019). Spurious dissertations are part of this “bubble.” For example, during 2014–2017, Dissernet experts identified 7251 false dissertations whose authors practiced plagiarism or whose data were fabricated (Dissernet 2018). It has been repeatedly reported that many such dissertations have been defended by members of the Russian political elite.3 The head of Dissernet maintains that Russia today is governed by “swindlers with falsified dissertations” (Rostovtsev 2018). For example, according to the Minchenko Consulting report (Indicator 2017), out of the 26 closest associates of Vladimir Putin, 16 have academic degrees. Also, in the State Duma of 2011–2016, 205 of the 450 Duma members had a PhD. This level is unprecedented. In Canada there were 14 holders of PhDs among 338 elected members of parliament in 2015 (Samson 2015); in 2016 20 doctors sat in the UK House of Commons (consisting of 650 members altogether) and 10 in the US Congress (535 members) (The Virtual Stoa 2016). According to Dissernet, only 43 of these 205 dissertations written by the State Duma deputies were completely free of traces of plagiarism (Girin and Zaiakin 2016).

Civilizational discourses in post-Soviet Russia  165 Although the majority of falsified dissertations are in economics, a significant number of them deal with social and cultural studies and with social philosophy. In many of them, the concept of Russia as a civilization is the theoretical staple. This chapter provides an analysis of the civilizational discourse in dissertations defended after the collapse of the Soviet Union and argues that “civilization” is the concept that connects Russian academia to the political elite. The present chapter sees civilizational rhetoric as a constitutive part of the crystallizing conservative ideology (Bluhm and Varga 2018; Suslov and Uzlaner 2019).4 This rhetoric bridges the gap between “red-brown” (communist and ultra-conservative) radicals that emerged in the 1990s (Ingram 1999) and present-day versions of right-wing populism, supported by the Kremlin. The buzzword “civilization” likewise brings together loyal scholars across politicized humanities, people from military and security circles, pro-Kremlin party functionaries and opinion journalists, and also the grass roots, those who celebrate Russia’s international assertiveness. We do not claim that all the dissertations under scrutiny are falsified or spurious, but we do mean that the uncritical acceptance of “civilization” as an analytical concept in social studies devalues the scholarly potential of these works. Neither does this chapter venture into a critical analysis of the civilizational approach itself, although here we fully side with those who find it heuristically questionable (Alaev 2008; Shnirel’man 2009) and to some extent responsible for the decline of social studies, the humanities, and philosophy in post-Soviet Russia. The assumption that Russia is a “civilization” is not conducive to critical academic investigation; instead, it pushes these dissertations toward the camp of political ideology on a par with the dogmatic Marxism of the Soviet period. At the same time, we believe that authors of these dissertations (with some salient exceptions of plagiarism) spent a few years researching their topic, collecting materials, and thinking and writing about that subject. Hitherto, our understanding of the civilizational rhetoric was grounded on scattered remarks by state functionaries and public figures. By contrast, the dissertations examined in this chapter represent substantial “nodes” of systematic conceptualization. They help us better understand current civilizational thinking.

The language of power: civilizations in the service of the political elite A simple keyword search in the dissertation database of the Russian State Library retrieves more than one thousand hits for the words “civilization” and “civilizational” in titles.5 Usually these dissertations find their theoretical inspiration in the “civilizational approach” to history—the alternative to the “formative approach” taken by dogmatic Marxism. The “civilizational approach” enabled post-Soviet Russia to reconnect with pre-revolutionary and émigré Russian philosophy. Quite often the “civilizational approach” in

166  Mikhail Suslov and Irina Kotkina dissertations feeds ruminations about the “Russian idea,” “Russian destiny,” the “Russian spirit” and “Russian uniqueness.” In these dissertations, civilizational discourses are made up from a number of related concepts, including “civilization” proper, but also “civilizational system,” “state- civilization,” “proto-civilization,” “civilizational super-ethnos,” and so forth. For the purpose of this chapter our research has concentrated on 19 dissertations. In most cases the choice was random, based on the keyword search in the Russian State Library dissertation catalogue. We used such keywords as “civilization” and “civilizational” (tsivilizatsiia, tsivilizatsionnyi) and picked the top hits by relevance. Additionally, we considered dissertations written by prominent political figures (Sergei Baburin, Vladimir Medinskii, and Dmitrii Rogozin). In our sample, the 19 dissertations are quite evenly distributed chronologically through the period from 1998 to 2017; 8 are Doktor nauk and 11 are Kandidat nauk dissertations.6 The majority of them (13) are dissertations in philosophy, with an additional 3 in history, 1 in law, 1 in cultural studies and 1 in political studies. They issue from a great variety of academic institutions: 2 from Moscow State University, 2 from the Academy of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), 3 from other military-profile institutions (the Military University, the Air Force Academy, and “Voenmekh”), and 5 from various regional state universities, while the rest were defended at other academies and institutes. In terms of the current professional affiliation of their authors, 8 remain in academia, and the rest (11) work in the public sphere as politicians and state functionaries, experts in various think-tanks and foundations, opinion journalists and businesspeople. We did not perform plagiarism checks on these dissertations, but one of them—by Al’bert Ianakov—has attracted the attention of Dissernet activists, according to whom only 10 out of 198 pages were free from plagiarism (Dissernet N.d.b). The civilizational approach prevails in the dissertations written by the state functionaries and pro-Kremlin public figures both at the regional and federal levels. Most often, these dissertations do not use civilizational discourse as a self-reflexive theoretical frame of research but, rather, draw on it as the common jargon of the Russian political elite. Many of such dissertations open with political statements by Vladimir Putin and Patriarch Kirill in a fashion similar to the way they would have started in the Soviet era with quotations from Lenin or Marx.7 We can assume that many of the authors of dissertations did not consider an academic career as a coveted life option (cf. Table 7.1). For them, writing dissertations about Russian civilization was a way to impart greater trustworthiness to their patriotic musings about Russia’s destiny by means of academic language, and probably to give a boost to their life plans outside of academia. We do not argue that there is a causal link between the rhetoric of civilizations in dissertations and cooptation to the political elite in Putin’s Russia. However, in this section we maintain that there is a certain selective affinity: The language of

Civilizational discourses in post-Soviet Russia  167 Table 7.1 Russian doctoral dissertations Year

Author, title

Subject area

1998

Rogozin, Dmitrii: Problemy natsional’noi bezopasnosti Rossii na rubezhe XXI veka Baburin, Sergei: Territoriia gosudarstva: Teoretiko-pravovye problemy Nikitova, Svetlana: Kharakter rossiiskoi tsivilizatsii: sotsial’nofilosofskii analiz Khodakovskii, Evgenii: Tsivilizatsionnaia bezopasnost’ i ee spetsifika v usloviiakh Rossiiskogo gosudarstva Kan’shin, Aleksandr: Dukhovnye osnovy sotsial’nogo upravleniia

Doktor nauk in Moscow State U philosophy

1998 1999 2000

2000 2002

2003

2004

2005 2005 2005

2011

2011

Iaretskii, Iurii: Rossiiskoe obshchestvo i razvitie tsivilizatsii: Sotsial’nye sostavliaiushchie istoricheskogo protsessa Butenko, Nadezhda: Russkii etnos i rossiiskaia tsivilizatsiia: Sotsial’no-filosofskoe issledovanie samosoznaniia Ianakov, Al’bert: Dukhovnyi potentsial rossiiskoi tsivilizatsii kak faktor voennoi bezopasnosti gosudarstva Feofanov, Konstantin: Bezopasnost’ tsivilizatsionnogo razvitiia Rossii v usloviiakh globalizatsii Kalashnikova, Larisa: Geopolitika v sisteme faktorov tsivilizatsionnogo stanovleniia obshchestva Svistunov, Mikhail: Rossiiskaia tsivilizatsiia i pravoslavie: Dialektika ikh vzaimootnoshenii i perspektivy razvitiia Galkina, Oksana: Rossiiskaia tsivilizatsiia v kontekste sovremennogo globalizatsionnogo protsessa Medinskii, Vladimir: Problemy ob”ektivnosti v osveshchenii rossiiskoi istorii vtoroi poloviny XV–XVII vv.

Place of completion

Professional trajectory Political figure

Doktor nauk in Russian Academy Political figure law of State Service Kandidat nauk in philosophy Kandidat nauk in philosophy

Moscow State Technical U

Academic

Academy of FSB

Public figure and academic

Kandidat Military nauk in University philosophy Doktor nauk in Russian State history Social U (Moscow)

Political figure Academic

Kandidat nauk in philosophy

Surgut State U

Academic

Kandidat nauk in philosophy

Air Force Academy

Public figure and businessman

Doktor nauk Academy of FSB Academic and in political writer science Kandidat Saratov U State employee nauk in philosophy Doctor nauk in Moscow U for the Academic philosophy Humanities Kandidat nauk in philosophy

Armavir N/a OrthodoxSocial Institute

Doktor nauk in Russian State history Social U (Moscow)

Political figure

(Continued)

168  Mikhail Suslov and Irina Kotkina Year

Author, title

Subject area

2014

Morozov, Nikolai: Kontseptualizatsiia istoricheskogo znaniia o rossiiskoi tsivilizatsii na rubezhe XX–XXI vv. v otechestvennoi istoriografii Mustafaev, Farid: Mezhnatsional’noe obshchenie v kontekste obespecheniia tsivilizatsionnoi bezopasnosti Rossii Shuklin, Andrei: Perspektivy rossiiskoi tsivilizatsii i globalizatsiia Lepekhin, Vladimir: Antropologicheskii podkhod v issledovanii problemy sushchnostnykh priznakov rossiiskoi tsivilizatsii Milovzorova, Mariia: Aksiologicheskie osnovaniia russkoi tsivilizatsii kak dialekticheskogo otritsaniia globalizma Il’ina, Aleksandra: Territoriia kak resurs preodoleniia tsivilizatsionnykh krizisov

Doktor nauk in Siberian branch history of the Russian Academy of Science

Academic

Doktor nauk in South Federal philosophy University (Rostov-onDon)

Academic

2014

2014 2015

2016

2017

Kandidat nauk in philosophy Kandidat nauk in philosophy

Place of completion

Tiumen’ State U Moscow State U

Doktor nauk in Baltic State philosophy Technical U (“Voenmekh”) Kandidat nauk in cultural studies

Federal U of the Far East (Vladivostok)

Professional trajectory

Public/ political work Public and political figure Academic

Academic

civilizations became the “default” language for descriptions of Russia by pro-Kremlin ideologists. To a large extent, this language was baked into the dissertation “production line” in the Russian research institution. In 1998 two high-ranking political figures defended their doctoral dissertations: Dmitrii Rogozin and Sergei Baburin. Their defenses signaled a decisive step toward the coalescence of the nationalist-traditionalist opinion journalism of the 1990s, the political establishment, and Russian academic institutions. In 1998 Baburin was the deputy speaker of the State Duma and a renowned politician of nationalistic persuasions. In 2018 he ran for the presidency (receiving 0.65% of votes). Today he chairs the International Slavic Committee. In his dissertation Baburin accentuates aspects of the historical continuity and cultural heterogeneity of the “unique Russian civilization” (to be noted: He uses the ethnically colored term russkaia, not the civic rossiiskaia, cf. Baburin, 267). These ideas repeat the statements he made in his earlier patriotic op-eds from 1995, in which he argued that the “regeneration of Russia [as a state, MS&IK] can take place only when you think about it as a form of the Russian (russkaia) civilization” (Baburin 2012, 34, 84).

Civilizational discourses in post-Soviet Russia  169 When Dmitrii Rogozin defended his dissertation in the same year, 1998, he was a State Duma deputy with a steep career trajectory ahead of him. In 2004 he became the chair of the oppositional nationalistic party Rodina (“Motherland”)8; in 2008, Russia’s representative in NATO; and in 2011, the deputy prime minister of the Russian government working on the issues of military production, space, and the nuclear industry. Today he is the Chief Executive Officer of the state monopoly Roskosmos, in charge of Russia’s space programs. In the 1990s, as a leader of nationalistic organizations such as the Union of the Regeneration of Russia (Soiuz Vozrozhdeniia Rossii) and the Congress of the Russian Communities (Kongress Russkikh Obshchin), Rogozin was not among the very first to make active use of the idea of civilization. In the “Manifesto of Russian Regeneration” (1996), for example, he did not use “Russian civilization,” preferring instead the “Russian nation” (russkaia natsiia), while reserving the term “civilization” for the Orthodox nations in general (Rogozin 1996a, 1996b). In his dissertation, Rogozin also avoids calling Russia a civilization, but he argues that Russia is a “super-ethnos” inside the larger Slavic civilization, which has always been fighting against attempts at Westernization (Rogozin, 90, 225). The dissertation of Vladimir Medinskii, the current Minister of Culture of the Russian Federation, attracted much public interest. It was heavily criticized for plagiarism and the lack of a scholarly approach.9 Activists of Dissernet initiated the procedure for revoking his Doktor nauk title in history, but they ultimately failed (Meduza 2017). In his dissertation, Medinskii analyzes travel notes and accounts about Russia by foreigners, aiming to prove that these accounts were not objective.10 Medinskii borrowed his ideas about civilization from the discussions of the late 1980s and early 1990s, specifically from Mikhail Barg (1991), who critically assessed the heuristic trade-off of the concept and found it unsatisfactory. Medinskii, however, never questions the analytical soundness of the concept of “Russian civilization.” He uses the concept of civilization to denote a specifically Russian way of life, or a “Russian mentality.” By Russian civilization he means, then, the whole aggregate of Russian specificity or difference from Western civilization, which has always been at “media war” with Russia (Medinskii, 14). Vladimir Lepekhin made his career as a high-ranking bureaucrat and political adviser11 as well as television producer. He was a Deputy of the State Duma, and at present he is the head of the Institute of Eurasian Economic Cooperation and one of the experts of the Universal Russian People’s Council (Vsemirnyi Russkii Narodnyi Sobor).12 The supervisor of Lepekhin’s candidate dissertation was Vitalii Bel’skii, Honorary Member of the Ministry of the Interior of Russia, Doktor nauk in philosophy, professor, and a colonel in the police force. Bel’skii’s academic interests revolve around the idea of Russia’s “civilizational security” (VRNS 2018). In an article published in 2018, Lepekhin maps out the intellectual contours of the “Russian civilizational school” in scholarship, starting from classic Slavophiles and religious

170  Mikhail Suslov and Irina Kotkina philosophers and continuing to Patriarch Kirill and his own works. Today, he claims, this “school” could be called the “greatest achievement of Russian philosophy” (Lepekhin 2018). Similar ideas are encountered in the writings of Evgenii Khodakovskii. He works as an expert at the Foundation for National and International Security. Little is known about this foundation. It was long presided over by General-Major Leonid Shershnev, one of the key functionaries in the department of ideology and propaganda of the Soviet Army. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Shershnev became one of the key activists for nationalism and a consultant of the State Duma on security issues. In his reflections on the Ukrainian crisis of 2014, Khodakovskii claimed that the global West has been pressing Russia so hard that Russia will soon be compelled to start the “Third Patriotic War” for its “civilizational unity” (Khodakovskii 2014). These examples show the coalescence of the (pseudo) academic studies on Russia’s civilizational nature in dissertations with the political rhetoric of the authors of these dissertations. In the next section, we will look at how the concept of civilization developed in Russia. This will help us to contextualize a more focused examination of the civilizational logic and the morphology of this concept in dissertations.

Civilizational discourses in Russian politics: from the idea of multipolarity to the concept of a “state-civilization” The remote roots of the civilizational logic can be found in the work of Nikolai Danilevsky, the nineteenth-century neo-Slavophile thinker who has become an unquestionable authority for today’s Russian conservatives. Danilevsky emphatically stressed the multiplicity of civilizations in the world, none of which has a monopoly on the ultimate truth. He argued that there is no common yardstick to measure civilizations and assume which are better and which are worse; they are simply incommensurable (MacMaster 1967, 203). The idea of the radical incommensurability of civilizations found a new home in post-Soviet Russia, where two intellectual streams met: left-wing multiculturalism with its attention to identity politics and cultural differences, and right-wing anti-globalism. In this context, Danilevsky was successfully exhumed and galvanized by the injection of Samuel Huntington’s interpretation of the clash of civilizations. The resulting product was warmly received in both left and right camps, i.e., among the post-Soviet “red-brown” opposition to the liberal and reformist course of President Boris Yeltsin. For example, post-Soviet nationalistic neo-Slavophiles such as Oleg Platonov and Evgenii Troitskii (Mjør 2016a, 101) developed the language of civilizations in the first half of the 1990s, but in this period they had to fight with the most respectable academic circles, which supported the “classic” (Rousseau vs. Voltaire) definition of civilization as either refinement of culture or degeneration of morals (Goggi 1997, Kissel 2006).

Civilizational discourses in post-Soviet Russia  171 Nevertheless, gradually the identitarian13 reading of civilizations, which buttresses anti-Western identity politics, gathered momentum. In 1997 the committee on geopolitics at the Russian State Duma hosted a conference entitled “Russian-Slavic Civilization: Historical Roots and Contemporary Geopolitical Problems,” which followed the tracks of Danilevsky but focused mostly on the idea of Slavic unity rather than Russian civilizational uniqueness (Troitskii 1998, 478). In the same year, the publishing house Entsiklopediia russkoi tsivilizatsii was launched in Moscow by Oleg Platonov. In 2003 Platonov’s publishing house became an “Institute,” whose advisory board includes some of the most intransigent anti-liberals, such as Iurii Begunov, a conspirologist who actively propagates The Book of Veles, a well-known literary forgery,14 and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion; Jürgen Graf, a well-known Holocaust denier; Vladimir Osipov, an underground right-wing dissident; Anatolii Stepanov, the editor of the fundamentalist online news agency Russkaia Narodnaia Liniia; and Igor Shafarevich, a famous conservative publicist.15 In the 1990s the term “Russian civilization” became contested among the nationalist opposition. For example, Aleksandr Panarin, the main proponent of the idea of an “Orthodox civilization” in the 1990s, was cautious to apply this term to Russia. He saw a possibility for a civilizational reading of Russian culture, but for him the “Russian civilization” was not the reality, but rather a project for future development, pledged by the possibility to align Orthodox culture and Eurasian geopolitics with the present Russian state (Panarin 1999, 14–15, 221–222). In political terms, the living standards of the masses of Russians deteriorated in the period of the 1990s, while Russia’s importance in global affairs markedly diminished. This development instigated widespread ressentiment and disenchantment in terms of anti-Westernism. In this context, visions of Russia’s cultural uniqueness became amalgamated with another newcomer to the academic and pseudo-academic world: the “discipline” of geopolitics, which surged shortly after 1996, when Dugin published his first manual, Foundations of Geopolitics (Dugin 1997; Suslov 2013). Thus, during President Yeltsin’s second term in power, 1996–1999, all the intellectual ingredients were already in the bowl: geographic determinism, Russian integral nationalism, and the logic of antagonism between Russia and the West. The concept of “Russian civilization” successfully glued together explanatory principles of culture, nation, and territory. Civilizational rhetoric thrived in the context of the discipline of kul’turologiia (culturology). This field of studies replaced Marxism-Leninism in the Russian university curricula, and soon thereafter this new discipline was introduced to secondary schools as well. The economy-centrism of the official Soviet ideology gave way to a kind of “culture-centrism,” seen as a universal explanatory method in social sciences. In parallel, the academic infrastructure for studying “culture” emerged; the Institute of Culture, for example, was renamed as the Russian Institute for Culturology (Rossiiskii

172  Mikhail Suslov and Irina Kotkina Institut Kul’turologii) in 1992; similar departments emerged at the Russian State University for the Humanities and Moscow State University, as well as in provincial cities (e.g., the State Institute of Arts and Culture was established in Perm in 1991). By extension, the teachers of official Marxism, which was compulsory in all institutions of higher education in the Soviet Union, found new inspiration and employment in or around culturology, the Russian version of “cultural studies.” The ideological essence of this discipline consisted in essentialist ideas of Russia’s cultural uniqueness, fed by the massive republication of the philosophers of the Silver Age and emigration (Bazhanov 1999; Scherrer 2003; Laruelle 2004; Turoma, Ratilainen, and Trubina 2018). This rhetoric of Russia’s civilizational uniqueness gradually made its way into official documents during Vladimir Putin’s second term as the President of Russia. For example, leaders of the United Russia party began to toy with the concept in 2004–2007. For the first time, the leader of this party, Boris Gryzlov (2005a), drew on the idea of “Russia’s civilizational choice” in an article dedicated to the Victory Day celebration in 2005, and then again at the end of the year. This time he voiced the invective against the “unipolar world.” He spoke in support of a “multipolar world” instead, a phrase which became the hallmark of Russian official rhetoric after Putin’s renowned “Munich speech” in 2007. In this multipolar world, according to Gryzlov, Russia would assume the role of “one of the centers of civilizational development” (2006). In 2005, Gryzlov “firmly and consistently” asserted that Russia is a “unique and great civilization” (2005b). By the time of the approach to the presidential elections in 2012, it was clear that the civilizational rhetoric had entered the intellectual, academic and political mainstream, seconded by the “conservative turn” in the official ideology and a growing alienation from the West in the aftermath of the Russo-Georgian war of 2008.16 One of Vladimir Putin’s articles, deployed in the electoral campaign of 2011/2012, maintains that the “Russian people and Russian culture are the linchpin, the glue that binds together this unique civilization.” Further on, he repeats the idea that the mission of the Russian people has always been to “bind together a civilization” (Putin 2012; see also Mjør 2012; Linde 2016). As we can observe in the official documents, the language of civilization had evolved from the idea of multipolarity in international relations to the concept of securitization of Russia’s unique civilization from the hegemonic West in the most recent documents, such as the Foreign Policy Concept of 2013 and the Bases of Russia’s Cultural Policy of 2014 (Turoma and Aitamurto 2016). The civilizational discourse as articulated in Russian official documents is an adaptation of Samuel Huntington’s notorious post-Cold War vision, according to which, Global politics is being reconfigured along cultural lines. Peoples and countries with similar cultures are coming together. Peoples and

Civilizational discourses in post-Soviet Russia  173 countries with different cultures are coming apart. Alignments defined by ideology and superpower relations are giving way to alignments defined by culture and civilization. Political boundaries increasingly are redrawn to coincide with cultural ones: ethnic, religious, and civilizational. Cultural communities are replacing Cold War blocs, and the fault lines between civilizations are becoming the central lines of conflict in global politics. (Huntington 1996a, 125) According to Huntington, a civilization is the “highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity.” Civilizations have different and often incommensurable value-systems, and thus they differently approach the most fundamental questions of human life such as the relations of the people to the groups, to the state, to the transcendental, to partners, and so on. These differences are “far more fundamental than differences among political ideologies and political regimes” (Huntington 1996b, 4). The Concept of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation of 2013 offers an almost verbatim restatement of Huntington’s argument: for the first time in modern history, global competition acquires a civilizational dimension, and it is manifested in competition of various value reference points [tsennostnye orientiry] and models of development […] The cultural and civilizational multiplicity of the contemporary world is becoming more obvious. (Kontseptsiia 2013; see also Linde 2016, 612) The Concept warns that, in this context, any attempt to impose a hegemonic normative order will exacerbate already conflictual international relations. The most recent Concept, adopted in 2016, rewords the same principles, but it also evokes Spenglerian ideas about a “decline of the West,” arguing that, against the backdrop of ascendance of non-European great powers, the West’s role in global politics and economy is now shrinking (MID 2016). Both Concepts add a tinge of messianic universalism to this big picture of radical relativism and cultural incommensurability. Hinting at Eurasianism, they insist that Russia has always played the role of the balancer in this world of disparate and conflictual interests. Thinking about Russia as a unique civilization has naturally developed into a consensual idea of Russia as a state-civilization (Tsygankov 2016), reinforced by the isolationist and irredentist reinterpretation of the “Russian world” project after 2014 (Suslov 2017, 2018). The vision of Russia as a state-civilization stabilizes Russia’s territoriality, but since Russia’s territoriality is imagined as intentionally vague, it also welcomes revanchist interpretations. For example, as Hegumen Filipp Riabykh suggested in 2010, “Russian civilization transcends the borders of our country” (Riabykh 2010).

174  Mikhail Suslov and Irina Kotkina On the other hand, Patriarch Kirill recently stressed that the “question of Russian civilizational identity is […] first and foremost the question of the unity of our civilizational space (edinstvo nashego tsivilizatsionnogo prostranstva)” (Kirill 2018, 38). Thus, the use of the concept of “state-civilization” could be considered a post-factum legitimization of Russia’s annexationist policy in relation to Ukraine. Indeed, as Patriarch Kirill expressed it, the idea of Russian civilization and the notorious “Russian world” are synonyms (Kirill 2014).

The logic of fragility and security in civilizational discourses Official rhetoric of civilizations does not exist in isolation from opinion journalism and academia. In the rest of the chapter we will examine what the idea of Russia as a civilization is made up of, by focusing on Russian doctoral dissertations and their use of organicist concepts. This organicist argument harks back to Friedrich Ratzel’s concept of Lebensraum and, above all, to Lev Gumilev’s theory of “ethnogenesis,” which parallels the life cycle of large ethnic communities (“super-ethnoses” in his parlance) with the life cycle of an organism. In one dissertation, for example, a civilization is explicitly defined as a “social and cultural organism,” whose unity was forged during centuries of shared history on the grounds of commonly understood basic values (Svistunov, 22–23). The organic interpretation of civilization is directly related to conservatism, understood as an ideological predilection for organic change. Thus, conceptual corollaries of the organic understanding of civilizations are central to the present-day ideological climate in Russia. Here, specifically, we will discuss three such corollaries: the idea of historical continuity, the idea of the fragility of Russia (and hence, the necessity of a “strong hand” in politics), and the idea of regeneration, fraught with dangers of expansionism. The idea of the historical continuity of Russian civilization is strategically allied with “civilizational nationalism” (Verkhovskii and Pain 2013). Nadezhda Butenko, for example, draws on the canonical Huntingtonian geopolitical interpretation of civilizations as subjects of the modern-day international conflicts, and she tries to revamp this interpretation by connecting it with ethno-national visions, inherited mostly from Lev Gumilev. Butenko’s thesis insists that the “naturalness” of Russian civilization is conditioned not only by the geographically and climatically common development in Eurasia (mestorazvitie, in Savitstky’s terms),17 but also by the organic processes of “ethnogenesis,” which forged a civilization from the complementary (i.e., again in Gumilev’s terms, mutually compatible, non-antagonistic) Slavic, Turkic, and Finno-Ugric nations (Butenko, 35). Being critical of the geopolitical argumentation, Butenko puts forward an exclusive, nationalist, and civilizational approach. Evgenii Khodakovskii follows the same organic model, arguing that civilizations emerge because of “changes in the noosphere,”18 which lead to the consolidation of the

Civilizational discourses in post-Soviet Russia  175 group of people who adhere to a shared set of ideas and values (Khodakovskii, 39). Following these lines, Kan’shin’s thesis purports to connect the concept of civilization with the idea of the continuity of generations. In his view, the persistence of the unique “Russian civilization” is inscribed in the generational ladder from time immemorial. It is worth noting that Kan’shin believes in the pre-historical civilization of the Slavs, extensively quotes from The Book of Veles, and traces the roots of Russian civilization back to the 2nd millennium BC.19 Andrei Shuklin, similarly, elaborates on the continuity between the “civilization of tsarist Russia,” Soviet civilization, and contemporary Russian civilization (Shuklin, 51). According to this dissertation, the principle of “civilizational continuity” proves that today’s Russia is the “result (porozhdenie) of Soviet civilization.” Mikhail Svistunov insists that the civilizational logic should overcome the perception of Russian history in terms of breaks and gaps: We deem it scientifically wrong to argue that in 1917 Russian civilization ceased to exist and disappeared, and a new, Soviet civilization came in its place. Similarly, [we disagree that] in 1992 Russian civilization emerged from thin air and replaced Soviet civilization. A  more scientifically grounded position […] leans on the dialectic of continuity, succession […] (Svistunov, 34) This kind of interpretation lies at the bottom of the official line toward reconciliation with the Soviet past and the reconceptualization of all periods of Russian history as indelible and necessary links in the same historical chain (Malinova 2018; Mjør and Lunde 2018; Laruelle 2019). Another corollary from the organic reading of civilizations is the vocal bio-political tendency toward securitizing the civilizational “body.” Such a “body” was born at some point in time, it will die sometime in the future, and now it is coming through an ordeal of potentially deadly crises or is under an internal or external threat (Svistunov, 285). Sometimes, dissertations elaborate on the ongoing or forthcoming crisis of the global human civilization (Il’ina, 12). Oksana Galkina’s dissertation, for example, dwells on the idea of a “deep civilizational crisis” and the “crisis of civilizational identity” in which contemporary Russia has been entrapped. The fragility and vulnerability of Russian civilization is conditioned by the encroachments of the powerful Western nemesis, but also by internal weakness. Following Huntington’s assessment of Russia as a civilizationally “torn country,” on a par with Turkey and Mexico, many Russian dissertations elaborate on Russia’s “civilizational status” as unclear, contested, undetermined, or liminal and not fully fledged. Unlike other civilizations, Russian civilization’s full autonomy and self-sufficiency is not something already given, but it is rather a project for the future (Nikitova, 21, 24; Iaretskii,

176  Mikhail Suslov and Irina Kotkina 372). Galkina identifies the task of her dissertation as an investigation of the “reasons for the civilizational crisis” (Galkina, 10). She argues that Russian civilization “has not been shaped” yet (nedooformlennaia) and that Russia’s “civilizational status is chronically undetermined” and “amorphous” (Galkina, 11, 29–30). Specifically, it is the “geopolitical catastrophe [i.e. the fall of the Soviet Union] which dimmed Russia’s self-awareness as a civilization, so that the sense of civilizational self-sufficiency has been lost,” and Russia entered into a period of “civilizational anxiety” (Galkina, 49, 31). The idea of the fragility and immaturity of Russian civilization provides multiple opportunities for securitization, while at the same time it imparts a teleological vision to the history of Russia. It explains why the concept of civilizational uniqueness is seamlessly connected with the concept of “statecivilization”: a weak, underdeveloped “body” of civilization requires a powerful protective shell of the state. For example, Svetlana Nikitova’s dissertation qualifies Russia as “a dependent civilization” (nesamostoiatel’naia tsivilizatsiia) and dwells on the necessity to have a strong state in order to counter the West, which “feels the need to sieze Russia’s properties, resources and territories” (Nikitova, 24, 50). Al’bert Ianakov would probably disagree with the qualification of Russia as a “dependent civilization,” but he still makes two similar points. The first of these is the uncritically accepted assumption that Russian civilization is “in crisis,” while the second is the argument about its “intermediate” (promezhutochnyi) character (Ianakov, 204, 372). Ianakov then goes on, likewise, to call for state protection (Ianakov, 372). Mikhail Svistunov points at the democratic reforms of the 1990s, which, as he argues, made “civilizational processes more difficult” (tsivilizationnye protsessy […] byli otiagoshcheny), while the “scientific and intellectual potential of Russian civilization was considerably undermined” (Svistunov, 3, 15). He identifies the West as a political subject which consciously spoiled Russian civilization in the 1990s by means of pouring into Russia the most immoral and corrupt products of Western civilization. Following this logic, Svistunov concludes that only a strong state can “guard Russia from all intrigues and attacks (proiski i naskoki) of its external and internal enemies” (Svistunov, 267). Mourning various threats which beset Russian civilization, Mariia Milovzorova entices her readers to “recover and shudder” (ochnut’sia i sodrognut’sia) deep inside their souls (Milovzorova, 33). Nadezhda Butenko also connects the fact that Russian civilization has been “disbalanced” (rasbalansirovanie) because of the West’s interference and because of Russia’s own pro-Western course in the 1990s (Butenko, 92). Likewise, Vladimir Lepekhin interprets the period of the 1990s as “de- civilizationment” (rastsivilizovyvanie) of the post-Soviet space (Lepekhin, 13, 26). Andrei Shuklin adds one more layer to this idea, claiming that, due to the heterogeneity of Russian civilization, only strong centralized state power is capable of keeping together its disparate parts, which will otherwise gravitate toward other civilizations: Islamic, Buddhist, West-European, etc. To do him justice, he later stipulates that strong power should be combined

Civilizational discourses in post-Soviet Russia  177 with dialogue, a statement that we find to be oxymoronic (Shuklin, 120). Here, the idea of Russian civilization as “power-centric” comes from the same assumption that this civilization is incomplete, torn asunder by more accomplished civilizational centers. When discussing what can help Russian civilization to “preserve itself” (sokhranit’sia) in the future (Shuklin, 6, 129), Shuklin’s choice of words instigates a moral panic that Russia is facing a real threat of not being able to preserve itself. The same word is used by Butenko. For her, the state priority should become the politics of “preservation” of Russia’s civilizational space; otherwise, Russia as a civilization “may stop existing” (Butenko, 95). Securitization of Russian civilization provided a stimulus for the whole subfield of studies and opinion journalism dubbed “civilizational security” (tsivilizatsionnaia bezopasnost’). Eleven of our dissertations deal directly with civilizational security. One of them is the Doktor nauk dissertation in political science (2005) written by Konstantin Feofanov, professor at the Diplomatic Academy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In this work, saturated with esoteric language and general words about Russia’s role in the world, Feofanov introduces the concept of “the security of civilizational development.” This concept condenses the whole gamut of the civilizational imaginary: The vision of civilizations as organisms whose natural development could be effectively stemmed not only by direct “mechanical” intervention, but also in more subtle ways. For example, a civilization could be exposed to hostile information impact, or, as he puts it, the lack of “necessary domestic and international conditions” (Feofanov, 37, 89, 112). Logically, in order to securitize the “civilizational development,” a “civilizational policy” should be developed (Feofanov, 60, 279). Larisa Kalashnikova, who now works as a school director in Saratov, expressed her concerns about civilizational security in her Kandidat nauk dissertation in philosophy in a similar manner. Here she claims that the “clash of civilizations takes place not only on the level of military confrontation or economic expansion, but mostly on the level of […] suppression (podavleniia) of spiritual components […] in local civilizations” (Kalashnikova, 3). In a more recent Doktor nauk dissertation in philosophy by Farid Mustafaev (2014), the idea of civilizational (in)security is expressed by the concept of “civilizational risks” (Mustafaev, 4). The vision of Russia’s civilization as being in deep crisis is usually accompanied by hopes for future regeneration (Iaretskii, 379). Nadezhda Butenko infers that the organic vision of civilizations implies that civilizations have an intrinsic capability to regenerate (sposobnost’ k regeneratsii, Butenko, 34). Obviously, the idea of civilization as an organism does not fully obliterate the cyclic vision of history, omnipresent in today’s Russia (Mjør 2016b, 2018), but superimposes itself on that vision, producing a picture of an organism which goes through a series of ups and downs, but whose magisterial trajectory is nevertheless from birth to maturity to eventual death. Some authors of dissertations emphasize that Russia is a “young civilization” (Butenko, 35),

178  Mikhail Suslov and Irina Kotkina implying that the development of Russian civilization is a teleological thrust toward civilizational maturity, impeded by powerful external and internal negative factors and enemies. The overcoming of civilizational crisis would lead to civilizational self-consciousness (Butenko, 95–97) and geopolitical competitiveness (Kan’shin, 6, 86). For example, Butenko and Lepekhin suggest that the best remedy is to become aware of Russia’s “civilizational status” and “civilizational uniqueness” (Butenko, 97; Lepekhin, 116). In some dissertations, geopolitical success presupposes Russia’s territorial expansion, incorporation, and assimilation of parts of the neighboring civilizations, because this is seen as a natural property of a viable, energetic civilization to expand its Lebensraum (Shuklin, 132–133). Galkina also mentions that such a regeneration should be accompanied by the “restoration of Russia’s civilizational area” (Galkina, 154). Here we can see that the clog of ideas—organic civilization, fragility of civilization, and regeneration of civilization—is tightly connected with a revisionist agenda in international relations. Another logical inference from the idea of organic civilizations deals with the principle of insurmountable cultural difference in global politics. Samuel Huntington’s words—“For people seeking identity and reinventing ethnicity, enemies are essential, and the potentially most dangerous enmities occur across the fault lines between the world’s major civilizations” (Huntington 1996a, 20)—are taken as an unquestionable canon by the vast majority of dissertations. The idea of civilizational difference embraces differences between values, styles of thinking, and even anthropologies and human natures. The logic of difference pushes civilizational discourses toward an increasingly essentialist reading of the difference rooted in natural, racial, psychological, and anthropological qualities of the community. Victor Shnirelman has demonstrated the racist traits in civilizational discourses (Shnirel’man 2009, 66). Thus, the left-wing multiculturalist agenda lying behind the idea of multiple civilizations is being hijacked by conservative communitarianism and primordialism. According to this interpretation, our cultural background is more primary and formative for collective identities than our rational decision-making. Thus, someone born in “Russian civilization” has a degree of indelible difference from all other people born in other civilizations. The idea of civilizational difference has been the motivation for, for example, the doctoral dissertation in philosophy by Al’bert Ianakov. With a reference to Pitirim Sorokin, he argues that Russian civilization has produced a “specific type of human being […] distinctive from the Western and Oriental types” (Ianakov, 46). Likewise, Svetlana Nikitova’s thesis in philosophy, titled The Character of Russian Civilization: Sociological-Philosophical Analysis, purports to formulate the “rule of mutual non-transferability” of local civilizations by rephrasing Kipling: “East is East, West is West, and Russia is Eurasia […] and never shall they meet” (Nikitova, 102). The most glaring example of such thinking is the dissertation by Vladimir Lepekhin. He goes so far as to claim that “modern conflicts are the result of

Civilizational discourses in post-Soviet Russia  179 the clashes of not simply civilizations, but anthropological systems” (antroposistemy). Here we can witness an interesting case of introducing a quasiscientific term into philosophical academic discourse. “Anthropological system”—or, to parallel the one-word Russian term, “anthroposystem”—is a term which was first introduced in 1974 by the Soviet zoologist Nikolai Reimers. Anthroposystem in zoology means man as a biological species, his material and spiritual culture, productive forces, and society. In the process of the adaptation of anthroposystems to the natural environment, urban industrial structures and infrastructures arise. The combination of the features of anthroposystems, natural systems, and urban industrial structures constitutes the environment. As can be seen, Lepekhin makes very bold statements about the relevance of anthroposystems to an analysis beyond ecology (Lepekhin, 4). The totality of difference, understood in this way, prods him to conclude that Russian “civilization” is not simply “unique” or “different” from that of the “West”—instead, the Russian “anthropological system […] is the anti-thesis of the Western civilization” (Lepekhin, 23). In his dissertation Lepekhin conjured up the word “civilizationality” (tsivilizatsionnost’), which he juxtaposes to the term “civility” (tsivilizovannost’), meaning the refinement of culture, and to civilization, meaning a geopolitical body. By contrast, “civilizationality” (tsivilizatsionnost’) means the pure difference from the hegemonic Western standard.

Conclusion The civilizational frame of conceptualizing history and culture has spilled over from post-Soviet academia into opinion journalism and the political rhetoric of patriotism and has become an indispensable element of the official conservative doctrine. Today, the dynamic is not unidirectional: It is not merely the flow of civilization-related ideas from scholars’ writing desks to the corridors in the Kremlin and the State Duma. In Russia, rather, there is a stable, multidirectional channel, connecting the academic literature about civilizations and the political discourses that capitalize on the civilizational problematic. Dissertations have become a useful testing ground for ideas associated with the concept of civilization, ideas which could eagerly be recycled in the political context. But it is also true that post-graduate students are likely to draw on the concept of civilization as a politically “hot topic” in Putin’s Russia. Pragmatically speaking, civilizational discourse is a useful medium for both academics and politicians, enabling them to speak out loud their concerns about Russia’s place in the world and Russia’s uniqueness and difference from the West, as well as their skepticism about values and principles of the Enlightenment. The chapter has shown the connections between civilizational thinking and the “conservative turn” in official ideology and politics. The vision of the global world order as a system of variegated civilizations with irreducible cultural differences does not automatically rubber-stamp an ideologist

180  Mikhail Suslov and Irina Kotkina as a conservative. This vision can likewise be characteristic of the left-wing criticism of capitalist globalization, or of the left-liberal concerns about having a non-exclusive society of equal rights. What colors this vision in conservative hues is the idea of civilizations as organic entities. This “organicist” reading of civilizations is supported by five key pillars of present-day Russian conservatism, namely, (1) the idea of Russia’s historical continuity throughout centuries, (2) the idea of the ongoing crisis and fragility of this body, (3) the idea of the state as a protector of the vulnerable Russian civilizational “body,” (4) the idea of civilizational regeneration, which bodes danger to the territorial integrity of Russia’s neighbors, and finally, (5) the idea of irreconcilable difference between various civilizations, such as Russia and the West. To be sure, the concept of Russia as a civilization does not exhaust the meanings of contemporary Russian conservatism. Rather, it co-exists in symbiosis and alliance with the concept of Russia as a sovereign “large space” (Grossraum), as manifested in the concept of the “Russian world” and in neo-Eurasianist thinking. While the “Russia-Grossraum” thinking highlights Russia’s independence from the West, “Russia-civilization” thinking emphasizes Russia’s difference from the West, and it is also well attuned to amplify moral panics about Russia’s weakness vis-à-vis powerful external enemies. These two concepts also have a different intellectual provenience: “Grossraum” comes from geographic and geopolitical thought, whereas “civilization” stems from the post-Soviet infatuation with “culturology.” Both concepts help the supporters of conservatism ward off proponents of democratic reforms by referring to Russia’s civilizational uniqueness, which effectively blocks any meaningful discussion of the country’s sores and provides argumentation for framing liberal-democratic reforms of the 1990s as foreign to the Russian soil and detrimental to its geopolitical autonomy.

Notes

Civilizational discourses in post-Soviet Russia  181

7

8 9

10 11 12 13

14

15 16 17 18 19

page, e.g. “Butenko, 15.” In Russian academia, there are two academic degrees, a Kandidat nauk (Candidate of Science), which roughly corresponds to a PhD, and Doktor nauk (Doctor of Science), which is considered the second and highest degree, analogous to the German Dr. Habil. degree. One of the clearest examples is Medinskii’s dissertation. It opens with a citation from Dmitry Medvedev’s speech: “Speaking about the huge role of historical consciousness in the contemporary development of the Russian state and society, the President of the Russian Federation D.A. Medvedev said: ‘The society is able to set and solve large-scale national tasks only when it has a common system of moral guidelines’.” Cited from http://www.dissercat.com/content/ problemy- obektivnosti-v-osveshchenii-rossiiskoi-istorii-vtoroi-poloviny-xvxvii-vv#ixzz5Hebm0O6Y (accessed 6 June 2018). “Rodina” adopted the rhetoric of the “unique Russian (rossiiskaia) civilization” in its program of 2012 (Rodina 2012). Both Medinskii’s dissertation and his books are in the genre of “popular history” and are marked by a clear political bias, obvious mistakes, and the total lack of reflexive theoretical apparatus (Dissernet 2016). Medinskii’s previous, kandidat nauk dissertation in political science was nearly 90% plagiarized (Dissernet 2014). One example is the famous account of Siegmund (Sigismund) Freiherr von Herberstein (1486–1566), a Carniolan diplomat, writer, historian, and member of the Holy Roman Empire’s Imperial Council. According to the presidential decree of 2013, this civilian rank is equivalent to a military general or navy admiral. The Institute of Eurasian Economic Cooperation, http://i-eeu.ru/institute/ (accessed 12 March 2017). The term “identitarian” is connected with the “identitarian movement” (e.g. Virchow 2015), but here we use it more broadly, as a concept embracing all kinds of right-wing concerns with the preservation of the community’s identity against a liberal agenda. The Book of Veles is a literary counterfeit claiming to be a text of ancient Slavic religion and history supposedly written on wooden planks. The content is meant to prove the historical supremacy of the Slavs, the antiquity of their race and the vastness of their territories. On the Institute for Russian Civilization, see Mjør (2016, republished in English translation in this volume). In 2009 United Russia adopted conservatism as its ideology (Edinaia Rossiia 2009). One of the key Eurasianist concepts developed by Petr Savitskii. He implied that geopolitical and geographical circumstances pre-determine the historical development of society. “Noosphere” (noosfera) is a popular concept in Russian journalism and academic works, originating in works by Vladimir Vernadskii. It means a specific spatial region where nature and human reason coalesce. Cf. “The Russian civilization that emerged has taken its form and attained perfection as a self-sufficient ethnic and social entity over a period of four thousand years” (Kan’shin, 86).

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8

An eternal Russia Oleg Platonov, the Institute for Russian Civilization and the nationalization of Russian thought1 Kåre Johan Mjør

If you enter a Russian bookstore nowadays, physically or on the Internet, in order to purchase an edition of some canonized Russian philosopher, you might end up buying a book published by the Institute for Russian Civilization. Hardbound and relatively inexpensive, their editions currently occupy a prominent place in the philosophy sections in Russian bookstores, and this institute has, since the early 2000s, published numerous classics of Russian thought from the Middle Ages up to the present. What kind of “institute” is this? The English Wikipedia describes it as a “think tank” (Wikipedia n.d.), i.e., as an organization responsible for meetings, publishing activities, and the production of policy papers. However, there are few traces of such civil activity on the institute’s website (Institut russkoi tsivilizatsii n.d. a). This institute is first and foremost a publishing house. It concentrates its efforts on editing and publishing books,2 as well as advertising them by means of short films on its website. In general, there are seemingly few other Internet projects this institute seeks to affiliate with. It is apparently not very active in social media. Compared to the otherwise chaotic and cacophonic Internet environment, this institute, as it appears on its website, tends to lead an isolated life. The full name of the institute is The Metropolitan of St. Petersburg and Ladoga Ioann Institute for Russian Civilization. This name is explained on the page “About the Institute”: “The Institute for Russian Civilization was established in 2003 in order to commemorate the great devotee (podvizhnik) of Orthodox Russia Ioann, Metropolitan of St. Petersburg and Ladoga, and to realize his ideas” (Institut russkoi tsivilizatsii n.d. b). In addition to the name of Metropolitan Ioann, the online visitor encounters Il’ia Glazunov’s famous painting “Eternal Russia,” a collage of past Russian saints, rulers, artists, and conservative thinkers. The combination of Glazunov and Metropolitan Ioann is an illustrative indicator of the ideological orientation of this project. Glazunov was a representative of the new Russian nationalism that emerged in the Soviet Union in the 1960s during Brezhnev. Filled with motifs from Russian history, his paintings are often marked by anti-Western attitudes and even traces of anti-Semitism (Brudny

An eternal Russia  187 1998, 107–108). Ioann (Ivan Snychev), meanwhile, took over as Metropolitan of Leningrad and Ladoga when Aleksei II became Patriarch in 1990, but he died as early as 1995. During the intervening period he became infamous for disseminating a series of anti-Western and anti-Semitic conspiracies about Russia being continually under attack by external and internal enemies. He emerged as a leader for the most conservative, or rather reactionary, wing of the Russian Orthodox Church, and in the early 1990s he gained a prominent flock of followers. After his death, the Church has never really figured out how it should relate to Ioann and his legacy, and Ioann has thus become a polarizing figure within the church. Several supporters have lobbied for his canonization (Slater 2000; Knox 2005, 150–154). One person outside the church who shares Ioann’s worldview is the founder of the Institute for Russian Civilization, Oleg Platonov. In addition to naming the institute after Ioann, Platonov often mentions him as his “spiritual teacher” (Zavtra 2010; Russkii vestnik 2014). Platonov’s own books likewise indulge in speculation about various Western/Jewish conspiracies against Russia in the past and present. Indeed, conspiracies, anti-Semitic included, have been widespread in post-Soviet Russia and appear to be further fueled by political conflicts at home and, not least, in neighboring countries such as Georgia and Ukraine (Laruelle 2012; Ortmann and Heathershaw 2012; Sakwa 2012). However, Platonov’s conspiracies, to which I will return, are so extreme that it is tempting to categorize him as belonging to the “marginal factions” of the varied field of contemporary Russian nationalism (cf. Laruelle 2009c, 31–33): We are apparently dealing here with a paranoid nationalistic anti-Semite belonging to the periphery of the Russian public sphere. He primarily addresses hard-liners, insisting on permanent Jewish plots against Russia, and even more so in recent times when anti-Semitism in Russia generally has faded somewhat, while xenophobia against other groups has increased (Shlapentokh and Arutunyan 2013, 59). This chapter argues that it is not sufficient to approach Platonov as exclusively marginal, although his position in Russian society may have been such in the 1990s. The point is not that the extreme Platonov is an important or widely read thinker, with direct influence on the Russian public and on Russian politics. Rather, I suggest that his activities, that is, the publication of his own texts and above all the texts of others, contribute to the dissemination of a specific idea of Russia as a secluded, self-contained world that nevertheless needs to be protected against both the West and Russia’s own fifth columnists.3 The key term that Platonov uses in this context is civilization, and this inscribes him in a broader tendency of “civilizational nationalism” in post-Soviet Russia (Shnirel’man 2007; Verkhovskii and Pain 2010). His publishing activities present Russian intellectual history (philosophy, ideas, science) as fully independent, closed, and uncontaminated by the outside. By analyzing this activity in detail, this chapter argues that Platonov makes up a special case that nevertheless illustrates a general tendency in contemporary Russian nationalism: That it has become possible to include

188  Kåre Johan Mjør the marginal and at times extreme in the hegemonic discourse, which, on the one hand, is oriented toward consensus by including radical views alongside the more moderate ones (Laruelle 2009b) and, on the other hand, constructs a Manichean worldview through its isolationist stance and categorical rejection of the West (Shnirel’man 2007, 247).

Platonov and civilizational nationalism Despite a seeming lack of interest in making use of available technology for sharing and networking, the Institute for Russian Civilization’s website ranks high on search engines such as Google, Yandex and Rambler in terms of hits for the phrase russkaia tsivilizatsiia. In most cases, it comes second only to the entry for russkaia tsivilizatsiia on Russian Wikipedia. By implication, an internet search for “Russian civilization,” which has become a key concept in Russian identity discourses, will soon lead one to this webpage. It is therefore an important website in the Russian public sphere, in spite of its seemingly low profile. Instead of discussions and other kinds of virtual noise, however, it presents the searcher with a rich selection of texts and studies that partly claims to be partly about “Russian civilization” and partly an expression of Russian civilization. To disseminate the perspective on Russia as a civilization of its own is thus a key agenda of this institute, and the means for achieving this goal is to publish what others have written about Russia—regardless of whether these authors have used the concept of civilization or not. In this context, Platonov is not just one of many who has recently begun riding a wave of conceptual popularity: He himself plays a central role in the history of this concept in post-Soviet Russia. According to the article about Platonov on the institute’s own website, which is part of the Great Encyclopedia of the Russian People (a project for which Platonov himself is responsible), he was “the first in Russian science (otechestvennaia nauka) to make use of the concept of ‘Russian civilization’, extensively exploring the inner content of this civilization” (Institut russkoi tsivilizatsii, n.d. d). In fact, Platonov might be correct on this point (cf. Shnirel’man 2007, 229)—as long as we ignore the term “science.” As long ago as 1992, he published the book The Russian Civilization, which has been reissued several times since then. For Platonov, “Russian civilization” means, in short, “Holy Russia”: Orthodox spirituality, anti-materialism, collectivism. In definitions like these, Russia is contrasted throughout with Western individualism and materialism. Thus, Platonov may be characterized as a post-Soviet neo-Slavophile, since Slavophile topoi such as anti-individualism and anti-materialism play a central role in his definition of Russia. From time to time he also refers to another commonplace in Russian nineteenth-century thought: the peaceful incorporation and protection by the Russian state and people of other “small neighboring peoples” (Platonov 1995, 36–37). Predominantly, however, Russian civilization for Platonov means the Russian Orthodox people and not so much the state or the empire.

An eternal Russia  189 In today’s civilizational discourse in Russia, the notions of state and empire play a greater role than they did in Platonov’s neo-Slavophile ideas of the 1990s. True, Platonov appears to have noticed this shift: In a 2014 interview entitled “Russia will be an empire” (a book of his with the same title appeared in 2015), Platonov renders, almost verbatim, the central ideas of Putin’s article on the “National Question” (2012): “The Russian people has created a unique civilization, a civilization that has included numerous other peoples. […] Russia is a unique state, a unique civilization” (Russkii vestnik 2014). He admits also that he “earlier saw things differently.” Previously, he regarded the Russian people as more isolated from the other peoples of the empire. Nevertheless, the neo-Slavophile understanding of civilization still dominates Platonov’s writings. He returns time and again to “spirituality” as the country’s most important “value” and “weapon.” Although this Slavophile interpretation of civilization has recently been overshadowed by a state-centered one, with the latter also being used now to legitimize the project of integrating the post-Soviet domain into a Eurasian economic union (cf. Putin 2012), there are several publicists who, like Platonov, still define Russia by means of Slavophile topoi as a spiritual opposition to Western individualism and materialism. One example is the Soviet apologist Sergei Kara-Murza, who characterizes Russia as a traditionalist non-Western Christian civilization founded on collectivism. The Russian worldview has produced an anti-capitalistic civilization, which is time and time again threatened by Western assaults (Kara-Murza 2011). Like Gennadii Ziuganov, the leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Kara-Murza illustrates that the left/right divide is not a relevant analytical tool for Russian nationalism. Platonov sees himself as belonging to the “right” (Zavtra 2010), but both sides share fundamentally similar ideas about the Russian people and Russia as a civilization (Malakhov 2007, 30).

Platonov’s conspiracies Above, I characterized Platonov as a neo-Slavophile. On the basis of Vladimir Malakhov’s typology of contemporary Russian nationalism, he may also be described as a “traditionalist and pochvennik,” a description that means more or less the same as neo-Slavophile (Malakhov 2007, 31–34). Anastasiia Mitrofanova categorizes him as an “Orthodox fundamentalist,” thereby grouping him together with Metropolitan Ioann. However, she points out that Russianness appears to be more important to this group than Orthodoxy as such (Mitrofanova 2005, 43, 215). Platonov is an economist by education and has published several books within that field, in particular about the Russian economy and Russian work as specific, unique practices. These writings are nevertheless overshadowed by his numerous books on conspiracies against Russia. His comprehensive series Russia’s Crown of Thorns (1995–2001) includes vast volumes such as The Conspiracy of the Tsar Murderers (1996) and The Secrecy of

190  Kåre Johan Mjør Lawlessness: Judaism and Freemasonry Against Christian Civilization (1998). These works describe all kinds of plots against Russian civilization by Jews and Freemasons. According to his (own) biography on the institute’s website, Platonov “demonstrates that Western civilization is ideologically founded on the values of the Jewish Talmud, in firm opposition to Christian civilization” (Institut russkoi tsivilizatsii n.d. d). In 1999, having visited the USA, he published the book Why America is Dying: The Secret World Government. His paranoid and deeply anti-Semitic books have been characterized as penetrated by “anti-Americanism, preposterous conspiracies, apocalyptic visions of the future and fanatic statements about an imminent rebirth of the Russian nation” (Umland 2006, 3). For Platonov, the 1917 Revolution was deeply anti-Russian, being directed against Russian civilization and the Russian people. The February Revolution was mainly the work of the Freemasons, while the October Revolution, including the killing of the tsar and his family, was carried out by the West and the Jews. The latter’s main antagonists were the Russian peasants. What Platonov regularly describes as the Jewish-led genocide of the Russian people continued up to the Great Terror. Only at this point did Stalin manage to release Russia from “Jewish captivity,” and the enemies of the Russian people received the punishment they deserved (Billington 2004, 86–87; King 2006, 216–219, 222). The infamous anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy that was most likely produced in Russia at the turn of the twentieth century, is for Platonov, as it was for Ioann, a truthful document that has been confirmed by history, and Platonov himself has been an active disseminator of this text in post-Soviet Russia (Hagemeister 2006, 247). Platonov’s anti-Semitism is not limited to alleged conspiracies against Russia, however. He is even a Holocaust denier. His denials, more specifically, consist in reducing the number of Jewish victims of the Second World War (down to half a million), while claiming that Russians were the main victims of Nazism (Rock 2001). In 1996 he published a Russian edition of the Swiss Holocaust denier Jürgen Graf’s The Myth of Holocaust, and he has collaborated with Graf on several conferences in both Russia and the West since then. Meanwhile, Graf, who has been living in Moscow since the early 2000s, when he escaped a sentence in Switzerland (Atkins 2009, 125), is a member of the “scientific board” of the Institute for Russian Civilization. Platonov himself, accordingly, is a member of the editorial board of the revisionist Journal of Historical Review.4 A more local anti-Semitic topic can be found in Platonov’s writings on the Kingdom of Khazaria, which existed on the northern coast of the Black Sea in the period 400–900 and whose elite converted to Judaism at a late stage in their history. In the twentieth century, a myth was created that this state represented a threat to Russia from the ninth century onwards and was the first example of “Jewish dominance” over Russia. This myth of a “Khazar Yoke” may be found in the writings of several Soviet academicians—not

An eternal Russia  191 only controversial figures such as Lev Gumilev but also more commonly respected scholars such as Mikhail Tikhomirov and Mikhail Artamanov. Since then, the myth has been actively spread by nationalistic writers such as Ioann and Platonov. Viktor Shnirel’man (2012) has argued that “Khazars” in this myth represent a euphemism for Jews, whereby the Khazar Kingdom constitutes an early Jewish conspiracy against Russia. Platonov has also published the book Myth and Truth about the Pogroms, according to which the pogroms in Imperial Russia were “in reality” Russian self-defense against “Jewish terror.” In sum, these contributions make Platonov a representative of not only the 10% of the Russian population openly and consistently anti-Semitic over time, according to earlier surveys, but also the 1% who are (potential) anti-Semitic activists (Gudkov 2004, 214–218).5 Although this makes him marginal, his anti-Semitism is at the same time an expression of anti-Westernism, which makes it part of a broader network of beliefs, including official statements about Western interference in Russian affairs (Ortmann and Heathershaw 2012, 560). Platonov has been active in several fields. In 2013 he took over as the editor of the nationalist newspaper Russkii vestnik, which was started by Aleksei Senin in 1991. More important, though, with regard to societal outreach, is his membership in the Izborsk Club. This club was founded in Izborsk in Western Russia in September 2012 and has received extensive attention from commentators—which has most likely been one of its goals. The Izborsk Club is a venue that that aims to consolidate Russian public intellectuals of the patriotic camp across factions and disagreements. One such dividing line among Russian patriots that this club aims to overcome separates imperialism and nationalism (Laruelle 2016, 58)—though it must be granted that the imperialists are dominant in the club, while the new wave of Russian ethnonationalism (Kolstø 2014) is absent. The club is led by the neo-imperialist Aleksandr Prokhanov, and its members include the ubiquitous Aleksandr Dugin, the historian Nataliia Narochnitskaia, the politicians Sergei Glaz’ev and Mikhkail Deliagin, and several other public intellectuals, often with a connection to academic institutions. By being included in this environment, Platonov has now emerged from the more marginal position he held in the 1990s. The Izborsk Club, and its leader Prokhanov, in particular, became especially active in the wake of the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbass. The club has widely celebrated the seizure of Crimea, subsequently attempting to persuade the Russian government to intervene (even) more actively in the Donbass region. Platonov’s contribution in connection with the conflicts in Ukraine was the text “How Russians Were Made Ukrainians.” Platonov’s explanation for this transformation, not surprisingly for those familiar with his ideas, was related to the “Polish-Jewish occupation” of the West-Russian land (Platonov 2014). Another Platonov text published on the Izborsk Club’s website, “The Unique Features of Russian Civilization” (Platonov 2010), maintains his

192  Kåre Johan Mjør main world outlook since the early 1990s, that Russian Civilization is a “closed (zamknutaia) spiritual community” which came into being 1000 years before our era. It is distinguished by Orthodox ethics, the absence of private ownership (nestiazhatel’stvo), love for the good (dobrotoliubie) and collectivism, for instance in economy and work. To be sure, Platonov is profoundly self-contradictory here, since the civilization, according to this definition, came into being 2000 years before Orthodoxy was even introduced. Platonov’s answer is that Orthodoxy was chosen by the Russian people because it was in harmony with an already established Russian worldview, i.e., a specific collectivist ethics (Mitrofanova 2005, 43; Zavtra 2010). Two premises for Platonov’s writings are, first, that there exist absolute borders between civilizations and, second, that there is no alternative to being either a patriot or a fifth columnist. The paradox that emerges from his texts, however, is that this unique, closed Russian civilization has apparently never existed as such, since it is always under attack from the outside. Civilizations are continually in conflict with one another, and the main conflict in the world, according to Platonov, is between the “Christian Orthodox Russian civilization” and the Western one. The latter is no longer Christian since it has been influenced by the Talmud, which led to the rise of capitalism during the Renaissance. This conflict continually takes on new forms— the Cold War was in reality a conflict between civilizations. And Russian civilization is at present the main impediment to Western dominance and hegemony. Thus, according to Platonov, it is impossible to study Russian civilization without focusing on its enemies (Platonov 2010). Intentionally or not, Platonov has remained consistently faithful to this interpretation: He hardly ever speaks about Russia without speaking about the West. His imaginary Russia is therefore far from “closed,” but rather an inverted projection of an imaginary Jewish West. The more he insists on Russian sovereignty and Western colonialism, the more he reveals that he is dependent on the West. As Viatcheslav Morozov (2015) has shown, such dependency is characteristic of Russia’s “postcolonial” identity in general.

Platonov as editor A central project for Platonov in the 1990s was the work Holy Russia: An Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Russian People, which appeared in 2000. As Simon Franklin points out, this is a work that already, in its title and physical appearance, gives the impression of being serious research, “basing itself in the solid, reassuring genre of reference book” (Franklin 2004, 113). True, Franklin notes, the title itself is ambiguous, since “encyclopedic dictionary” connotes scholarship, rationality, and objectivity, while “Holy Russia” points in a different direction. Nevertheless, we are presented with a solidly bound book, whose 1000 pages include more than 5000 articles, seemingly filled with fact-based information. In addition, there are plates, maps, and tables, as well as references. Its signals are academic.

An eternal Russia  193 Several of the entries devoted to figures and places in ancient Russian history are likewise apparently unproblematic until the reader comes across, in the midst of medieval history, the entry for Aleksei Senin, whom we encountered above. Not only is it surprising to find a contemporary figure in this work on Holy Russia (Senin was born in 1945), but Senin is also described as “editor-in-chief of the patriotic newspaper The Russian Messenger, which defends the national interests of the Russian people, opposed to the Judaeo-Masonic ideology of the West” (quoted in Franklin 2004, 114). Thus, the first impression is revealed to be a mere illusion. Behind a serious surface, it becomes suddenly clear that this is not serious research at all, but nationalism and anti-Semitism disseminated by way of a dictionary. The title Holy Russia now also makes more sense: The entry for “Orthodoxy” defines it as the “true” form of Christianity, in opposition to Catholicism. And the true bearer of Orthodoxy is Russia. Franklin’s observation points to what has been a recurrent feature of Platonov’s activity for a long time, namely, to create an immediate illusion of seriousness and research. His agenda is not completely disguised (that would have been counterproductive), but it is not immediately observable, either. One might use his dictionary for retrieving basic facts about medieval Russia without being (too) exposed to nationalism and anti-Semitism. This combination of serious appearance and ideological campaign makes it possible for Platonov to disseminate his perspectives to a wider public sphere than the traditional audience of such hardcore conspiracies, without making his main views too pushy. The question is now whether Platonov’s conspiracies affect his republication of texts that have no relation to his ideology and, if they do, what that effect is. Such publishing activities have been a central feature of the Institute for Russian Civilization since its beginning. Through his institute, Platonov continues to produce books that give a serious impression. Hardbound and often more than 1000 pages long, they are no doubt expensive to produce, though no information is provided, either in the books themselves or on the institute’s website, as to financial sources.6 Moreover, its books create trustworthiness for an additional reason: The institute repeatedly claims that it makes accessible texts that have not been republished since they were written (meaning, most often, since the nineteenth century)—a claim that is often true. It provides access to sources that are not only of public interest but also of interest for scholars. Furthermore, the institute has sometimes collaborated with, or at least borrowed the names of, well-respected Russian researchers. The Domostroi edition, a sixteenth-century book of everyday-life instructions, was prepared by Vladimir Kolesov of St. Petersburg State University, who published this edition for the first time in 1990. The collection of texts by the monk Nil Sorskii (fifteenth century) stems from another prominent Russian philologist—Gelian Prokhorov. For this edition, Platonov is not even listed as the “editor-in-chief.” The presence of well-respected academicians within its ranks no doubt increases the credibility of the Institute for Russian Civilization as a publisher of classical Russian thought.7

194  Kåre Johan Mjør Given Platonov’s active production of conspiracy theories since the early 1990s, it is noteworthy how little discussion there has been in the Russian public about the activity of the Institute for Russian Civilization.8 Traditionally the chief Russian organ of literature and literary criticism, the newspaper Literaturnaia Gazeta regularly publishes quite neutral notifications about the institute’s latest books, mostly with mild praise. It should be added here that this newspaper, which was a liberal organ in the 1990s, experienced a conservative turn after 2000 under its new editor-in-chief, Iurii Poliakov (Marsh 2007, 82)—who is also a member of the Izborsk Club. The newspaper has, for instance, presented Platonov and his institute as paving the way for “a more thorough knowledge of Slavophilism” (Literaturnaia gazeta 2008).9 Positive reviews can also be found on the website Orthodoxy, which in 2011 announced that “for the first time since the nineteenth century we are provided with complete editions of Slavophile thinkers” (Pravoslavie 2011). The editor of the website Orthodoxy is Archimandrite Tikhon, also a member of the Izborsk Club and thus a representative of the Russian Orthodox Church there. The activities of the institute have also been given positive attention on the website Theologian, without any questioning of the institute’s ideological basis (Bogoslov 2011). The Institute for Russian Civilization is responsible for several series of publications in which contemporary ideologists figure side by side with past thinkers. One example is the series “Russian Resistance,” where we find the early twentieth-century White émigré Ivan Il’in together with Aleksandr Prokhanov—as well as with Platonov himself. Yet the series that I will discuss in the following—since it is especially illustrative of the strategy of the institute—is simply called “Russian Civilization.” This is where, for the most part, the classics of Russian thought are published, and it avoids the more obscure contemporary authors. And yet here, too, we encounter some surprises similar to those that Franklin was exposed to. The series “Russian Civilization” began in 2007 and was at first dominated by nineteenth-century Slavophilism: Ivan Kireevskii, Aleksei Khomiakov, Ivan and Konstantin Aksakov, Nikolai Danilevsky, Iurii Samarin. Danilevsky and Khomiakov have even been printed twice. Equally comprehensive editions have since then been devoted to less-known Slavophiles (including Pan-Slavists and pochvenniki), such as the literary critic Apollon Grigor’ev, the journalist Mikhail Katkov, the chronicler Aleksandr Koshelev, the geographer Vladimir Lamanskii, the economist Sergei Sharapov, the philologists Orest Miller and Aleksandr Gil’ferding, and the monarchists Lev Tikhomirov and Dmitrii Khomaiakov. Finally, the series contains what I would call forgotten nineteenth-century Slavophiles, such as the economist Ivan Beliaev, the Pan-Slavist Anton Budilovich and the jurist Vasilii Leshkov—each of whom has been given a separate comprehensive collection of texts. However, this series contains more than what is usually labelled “Slavophilism.” Another group is made up of Silver Age philosophers such as

An eternal Russia  195 Vladimir Solov’ev, Sergei Bulgakov, Nikolai Berdiaev, Evgenii Trubetskoi, and Georgii Florovskii—all of them thinkers who, for various reasons, as I will argue below, do not suit Platonov’s agenda. Orthodox writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are also widely represented. So are Soviet and post-Soviet writers, whether of fiction (Vasilii Belov, Valentin Rasputin) or non-fiction (Vadim Kozhinov, Igor Shafarevich, Mikhail Lobanov), who were representatives of the new Russian nationalism that emerged in the late Soviet period (Brudny 1998). Furthermore, the series contains medieval texts from the Nestor Chronicle to Ivan the Terrible, as well as modern canonized literature—Lomonosov, Pushkin, Gogol, Tiutchev, and Dostoevsky. These writers figure together with conservative nineteenth-century statesmen and bureaucrats such as Admiral Shishkov, Mikhail Magnitskii, Rostislav Fadeev, Sergei Uvarov, and Konstantin Pobedonostsev. Finally, we also encounter explicitly anti-Semitic texts, such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Sergei Nilus). An even more remarkable appearance in the series is the collection of texts by early twentieth-century Orthodox thinkers who were also members of the radical right-wing organization known as the “Black Hundreds.” The most famous among these was Ioann Kronstadt. Since these figures have later been canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church, the book bears the title Black-Hundred Saints: The Holy Union of the Russian People. Yet, against this background, the presence of the mid-nineteenth-century liberal Konstantin Kavelin, who is mostly considered a Westernizer, becomes the most surprising addition to this series, which claims to present theories about Russian civilization. However, readers do not necessarily pay attention to a series as a whole. More important is the question of to what extent Platonov’s ideology and world outlook have influenced his individual editions. In fact, he does not, as a rule, edit the texts. True, his edition of Vasilii Zen’kovskii’s History of Russian Philosophy is a selection of chapters, and according to the short presentation on the colophon page (Russian books always include a short description of the book here), this edition publishes only those parts of Zen’kovskii’s work that are “devoted to Christian philosophy,” while “consciously omitting accounts of philosophical systems that are imitations (epigonstvo) of Western ideas and have nothing to do with truly Russian Christian philosophy.”10 In fact, these phrases appear to describe an impossible project, since Zen’kovskii held that the most original Russian philosophy represented a synthesis of Russia and the West in the form of a reflection on Orthodoxy by means of Western systems à la Hegel (Mjør 2011, 276–296). Even so, the chapters on those whom Zen’kovskii himself considered to be the greatest Russian constructors of philosophical systems have been included. Moreover, these editions, as a rule, contain no commentary apparatus that seeks to direct the reading in specific directions, while the forewords are often written by external, trustworthy experts. Berdiaev, Bulgakov, Grigor’ev, Kireevskii, Khomiakov, Trubetskoi, and Solov’ev are all introduced by the authoritative historian of Russian philosophy discussed above,

196  Kåre Johan Mjør Zen’kovskii.11 Likewise, the Gogol edition has an introduction written by an academician (Vladimir Voropaev, Moscow State University). More astonishing, however, is the introduction to Pushkin. It was written by Boris Brazol’, a Russian White émigré, literary critic and founder of the American Pushkin Society who also was an ardent anti-Semite and even responsible for the first US edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Marks 2003, 172–174). His foreword emphasizes Pushkin’s alleged struggle against “secret societies,” that is, freemasons. Although Pushkin himself had been a member of a lodge until their prohibition in Russia in 1822, Brazol concludes that Pushkin eventually became a victim of a complot by the freemasons. Thus, Brazol’s conspiracist foreword belongs to the same category as those written by Platonov himself (for instance, on Ivan Il’in) and by Metropolitan Ioann (on Ilarion of Kiev and Ivan the Terrible). Some forewords are anonymous. By implication, the forewords waver between those that are serious and scholarly and others that are deeply ideologized and conspiracist, but in general the large number of serious texts prevents the editions from excluding a broader range of readers. In particular, the books devoted to Silver Age philosophy are mostly free from ideologized forewords.

The rhetoric of the colophon text What remains, then, is the short text on the colophon page, which was briefly mentioned in connection with Zen’kovskii. It turns out that it is on the colophon text that Platonov presents his perspectives on the texts, in particular, and on the world in general. The colophon texts are also published separately on the institute’s website, so that no one needs to download the books in order to read their colophon texts. Here, they function as independent encyclopedia-like entries on Russian thinkers, and they do indeed present us with remarkable presentations and contextualizations. A recurrent theme in the presentation of Slavophile thinkers is that they were defenders of Russian civilization. Ivan Aksakov “defended” national traditions and ideals, as did the far more unknown Anton Budilovich. Another concept that is often met here is “imitation” (epigonstvo), against which the Slavophiles also struggled. Leshkov “struggled” against the “slavish borrowing” of Western ideas in law, while Nikolai Strakhov “combatted” the “borrowing” of Western ideas more generally, be they related to democracy or liberalism. Ivan Kireevskii “was correct” in claiming that Western materialism leads to loss of faith, while Aleksei Khomiakov “demonstrated” that Russia’s task in the world was to save humankind from Western influence. Although the emphasis on imitation is quite one-sided, and although these presentations are clearly sympathetic, this is not necessarily a false rendering of Slavophilism. Decisively more distorted are the presentations of Silver Age philosophers. Vladimir Solov’ev is contextualized in a historical sequence from the Slavophiles, a line that he “developed.” Central to Solov’ev, we read, was liberation from individualism in favor of “integral

An eternal Russia  197 knowledge” (tsel’noe znanie)—a Slavophile theme that does play a key role in Solov’ev’s early works, but not in his work that is actually published by the Institute for Russian Civilization: The Justification of the Good, a late treatise on ethics that is a dialogue with Kant, in which Slavophilism plays no role at all. Interestingly, the colophon text also gives a warning: Solov’ev’s “theurgy,” that is, his belief in human participation in creation, led him into “blind alleys” such as the utopian project of bringing Orthodoxy and Catholicism together. This transgression of firm civilizational borders is explicitly rejected here. Similar criticism is encountered in the description of Berdiaev: In Berdiaev, there are many things that are “unacceptable” for those living in accordance with the ideals of Holy Russia, we read. Nevertheless, his writings do contain “deep thoughts,” whose foundation is the “national Russian philosophy—from [the eleventh-century] Metropolitan Ilarion to Slavophilism,” the context into which Berdiaev is inscribed. What is particularly emphasized in Berdiaev is his exposure of the “Jewish roots” of socialism, and his “prophetic word” about freemasonry as a devastating force based on Judaism. Freemasonry is “antinational,” we are reminded: According to the Institute for Russian Civilization, “what Berdiaev wrote about in 1918 has become reality in today’s European Union.” In this presentation, Platonov and his colleagues have chosen one of numerous themes in Berdiaev’s writings and construed it as his main message to the world. In The Meaning of History, which is included in the edition published by the institute, Berdiaev did postulate a correspondence between Jewish messianism and modern socialism. As a Christian philosopher, Berdiaev also, on several occasions, criticized certain elements in what he saw as traditional Jewish thought (national exclusiveness, the rejection of Christ). Berdiaev’s contemporary Mikhail Gershenzon, himself a non-practicing Jew, thus felt that Berdiaev’s ideas had a potential for justifying the persecution of Jews. In general, Berdiaev’s texts contain both criticism of Judaism and criticism of anti-Semitism (Horowitz 1994, 506, 512). This colophon text, however, goes far in suggesting that socialism (and thus the Russian Revolution) was a Jewish plot against Russia, an idea that is a caricature of Berdiaev. As for freemasonry, this is a topic that is touched upon twice in the material published here, where Berdiaev describes it as a transnational movement from which he distances himself. Like Solov’ev, Bulgakov and other contemporary religious thinkers in Russia, Berdiaev was critical of both “nationalism” and “cosmopolitanism,” and he saw “nationality” as a sound alternative to both. In any case, his texts do not contain the conspiracies that the Institute for Russian Civilization claims to be the main message of his antirevolutionary works The Philosophy of Inequality and The Meaning of History, both written in the early 1920s. A focus on the “Jewish question”—as it has traditionally been called in Russia—turns out to be a recurrent feature of the colophon texts in Platonov’s editions, however marginal the topic is in the actual material, and this

198  Kåre Johan Mjør shades them with an anti-Semitic character. Iosif Volotskii, for instance, is described as first and foremost struggling against the “Judaizers” of fifteenth-century Novgorod, while Dostoevsky’s A Writer’s Diary is seen to be above all a foreboding of the Revolution as the work of the devil—with the full assistance of the Jews. While it is well-known that Dostoevsky’s late journalism contains several anti-Semitic statements, here we are told that socialism and capitalism as the expression of the “Jewish-Satanic ideal” is Dostoevsky’s main message. The remaining part of the colophon text consists of a long, anti-Jewish quotation from A Writer’s Diary. It is thus not surprising that Jews are also in focus in the description of the philosopher Vasilii Rozanov. Although Rozanov had a positive opinion of Judaism’s attitude to sexuality and family, he would also formulate anti-Semitic ideas. However, these were not about “Zionism” as an “anti-Christian force,” as the institute maintains, but were concerned with an alleged Jewish fascination with blood and ritual murder, ideas that Rozanov presented in the book Jews’ Attitude to and Feeling for the Smell of Blood (1914). Curiously, this text is not included in this edition. The “Jewish question” is again at the center in the presentation of Ilarion, the eleventh-century Metropolitan of Kiev, and his “Discourse on Law and Grace.” The central motif in this text is the contrast between Old Testament law and New Testament grace. It thus may be said to contain anti-Jewish theological polemics. For the Institute for Russian Civilization, however, this is first and foremost a text about the “central political problem” for Ilarion and his contemporaries, namely the struggle against the “Khazar yoke”—which was “no less dangerous than the Mongol yoke.” This claim is made despite the fact that the Khazars are not mentioned in Ilarion’s text at all. What Christianity actually conquers in Ilarion’s text is heathendom, not Judaism (Franklin 1992, xxxvii–xxxviii). The parallel drawn to the Mongol yoke refers implicitly to a debate that took place in the journal Voprosy literatury in 1988–1989, where Vadim Kozhinov (1988, 1989) maintained that the alleged conflict with the Khazars was crucial in understanding Ilarion’s juxtaposition of law and grace.12 Although the Khazar kingdom had disappeared long before Ilarion wrote his text, Kozhinov claimed that, in the middle of the eleventh century, one could still find Khazar successors in Kiev in terms of political opponents professing Jewish faith. For support, Kozhinov referred to works by Soviet scholars on the Khazars; these scholars had claimed that an “active Khazar Judaism” was still present in Ilarion’s time (Kozhinov 1988, 142; 1989, 241). Meanwhile, the edition by the Institute for Russian Civilization contains a short foreword by Metropolitan Ioann and a longer introduction by the Slavist Viktor Deriagin (1937–1994), who published an Ilarion edition in 1994. Even Deriagin’s commentaries bring up the Khazar motif on several occasions. The claim that Pushkin “exposed the evil and lies of Freemasonry” is wishful thinking by the editors. An outright falsehood is the claim that

An eternal Russia  199 General Rostislav Fadeev, who served in the Northern Caucasus in the mid-nineteenth century, managed to “create a peace that lasted until 1917.” False, likewise, is the idea that Georgii Florovskii’s Ways of Russian Theology of 1937 “examines the religious life of the Russian people,” since “the people” plays no role whatsoever in this work. It is therefore also misleading to describe Florovskii’s critical analysis as a “guide” to Russian spirituality, since there is very little in this book that can be called “Russian spirituality”— according to Florovskii, such a thing has hardly ever existed. According to a standard formulation about the Institute for Russian Civilization on its own website and in its publications, it “studies the history and ideology of the Russian people” (Institut russkoi tsivilizatsii n.d. b). The institute thus lets various more or less nationalist ideas, including its own, speak on behalf of the people as its true ideology, something that may be characterized as a post-Soviet form of “internal colonization” (Etkind 2011). At the same time, this Russian people emerges as “subaltern”: it is spoken for, but does not itself speak (Morozov 2015). By means of this framework, Slavophilism is construed as the people’s own struggle against the West and “false” Western ideas and doctrines: liberalism, democracy, Zionism. On the one hand, this is a struggle against fifth columnists. Ivan the Terrible was, according to the colophon introduction to the collection The Ruler, not only the “creator of the ideology of Russian monarchy.” He also had to fight against an elite that sought to subject Russia to the Catholic Church. “Relatively little blood” was spilled in this struggle as compared to “similar circumstances” in the West. And the consequences of the Time of Troubles (1598–1613) would have been far worse if Tsar Ivan had not succeeded in weakening the Westerners (zapadniki), who thus failed to persuade Russian society to “abandon the ideals of Russian civilization.” On the other hand, Russian civilization leads a continuous struggle against external enemies, above all the USA, which, with support from its “WestEuropean satellites,” stood behind the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. This threat is emphasized in the presentation of the nineteenth-century thinkers Nikolai Danilevsky and Lev Tikhomirov, who are thus seen as thinkers enabling a true understanding of today’s globalization. The same is the case with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a “topical” work that allows us to understand the “orange revolutionary technology.” On the colophon page, the Protocols are characterized as “probably the greatest work created by Russians in the twentieth century.” It is hereby actually admitted that it was not “the elders of Zion” but “Russians” who were behind this forgery. It is nevertheless presented as serious research, which “with support from secret archives exposes the program of the secret Jewish government for world domination.” But, although the conflicts are fierce and the borders between civilizations are absolute, it is possible to find one’s way back from one’s own earlier deceptions. The chief example here is Konstantin Kavelin, who is depicted as having gradually abandoned his initial liberal, West-oriented position

200  Kåre Johan Mjør and moving closer to the Slavophiles by becoming more concerned with the state and the peasant commune (obshchina). He eventually supported autocracy and became an opponent of private property, we are told. The Kavelin edition is thus called The State and the Peasant Commune. Its editors thereby ignore that the individual human being would remain crucial to the late Kavelin as well. A more appropriate title would have been The State, the Peasant Commune and the Personality, not least since this wide selection of texts gives prominent place to his early liberal writings. Even the introduction, a serious text written by a young researcher on Kavelin, Valeriia Trofimova, makes it clear that Kavelin saw Russia as belonging to Europe.

Marginal or mainstream? In several interviews Platonov has suggested that his project is a task that was bestowed upon him by Metropolitan Ioann: to publish “all Russian national thinkers.” Self-confidently, he compares his own efforts with the Great Monthly Readings (Velikie minei-cheti) of the mid-sixteenth century, which collected everything in the near and distant past that was meant to make up true Orthodoxy. By the same token, Platonov’s own goal is to bring together the classics of “Russian national thought” (Literaturnaia gazeta 2008; Zavtra 2010). At present, Platonov has come impressively far, although it is easy to see that the project cannot be pursued without crude simplifications and misreadings. For Platonov and his institute, “Russian civilization” is an eternally existing space besieged by internal and external enemies: Westernizers, Orange Revolutionaries, Jews, Freemasons. Thus, it is not accidental that the main illustration on the institute’s website is Glazunov’s “Eternal Russia.” Each epoch has its editions. During perestroika and the early post-Soviet period, the most important series for previously suppressed philosophy was “From the Past of Our Philosophical Thought,” also known as “Attachments to Voprosy filosofii.” These were editions that made nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Russian philosophy available to the public, providing scholarly commentaries of high quality. “Russian civilization” is a different kind of series and reflects a different period. The goal is to gather “Russian thought” from the earliest times up to the present as expressing “Russian civilization,” “the ideology of the Russian people” and its struggle against the West. Between these two series, Russia has seen numerous editions and reissues of Russian thinkers, but mostly of a simpler kind, and for several Russian thinkers we still await thorough, scholarly, comprehensive editions. This lack has made it easier for Platonov to find his own niche in the Russian book market. As observed at the beginning of this chapter, Platonov is not a prominent figure in the Russian public sphere. Compared to other representatives of the Izborsk Club, such as Dugin and Prokhanov, he is rather

An eternal Russia  201 unknown. And since the issue of whether the well-known Dugin has any influence on Russian politics is a recurrent theme (Shekhovtsov 2014; Espedal and Lindholm 2015), we may too easily conclude that Platonov has no such influence. However, such an answer is not sufficient. Platonov has been responsible for editions of classic Russian thought with a potentially broad range of readers, and by means of this project he has found an alternative way of spreading his Manichean worldview, which complements his own far more explicit conspiracies. By publishing the canonized classics of Russian philosophy, he reaches beyond what is seemingly a marginal position, and he may even, as we have seen, be regarded as respectable in the eyes of many. To what extent readers are also influenced by his worldview lies beyond the scope of this chapter to estimate, but the combination of conspiracy and alternative history, as encountered here on the colophon pages and in other presentations, has been a central means of spreading nationalist ideas in post-Soviet Russia (Laruelle 2012, 566). When Platonov began to publish in the early 1990s, his radical nationalism was marginal—he was seemingly a representative of “the losers” (Laruelle 2009b, 200). Since then, the marginal and extreme have become mainstream in Russia in the sense that they have been gradually allowed into an increasing number of arenas. And while Platonov is not as prominent as Dugin, his Institute for Russian Civilization has enabled him to find a new outlet for disseminating his vision of Russia as a unique civilization of its own. Moreover, his view of Russian thought as “national” and “self-sufficient” corresponds to a broader isolationist tendency in today’s Russia, disseminated by means of notions such as “sovereignty,” “autonomy,” and “nationalization” (Morozov 2015, 141). By implication, his project resonates with the hegemonic discourses outside his own eternal Russia in the way that it is maintained on the website of the Institute for Russian Civilization.

Notes 1 This chapter is a revised translation from Norwegian by the author of the article “Eit evig Russland: Oleg Platonov, Institutt for russisk sivilisation og nasjonaliseringa av russisk tenking,” Nordisk Østforum 30(2), 2016: 98–117. Translated and republished with permission from Nordisk Østforum. 2 All of the institute’s publications are made freely available on its website as pdf files, which means that one does not even need to visit a bookstore in order to obtain them. 3 According to a survey published by the Levada Center in April 2015, 55% of the respondents supported the view that Russia should “follow its own special path,” while 19% held that the country should follow the “European civilization” (Levada Center 2015). 4 Graf is the only non-Russian member of the institute’s scientific board. Apart from Aleksei Senin (see below), Igor Shafarevich, Evgenii Troitskii and Platonov himself, the members of this board are rather unknown figures, though they are

202  Kåre Johan Mjør

5

6

7

8

9

10

11 12

all listed with their university degrees/titles, unless they are “writers.” Otherwise, we are told that there exist a governing board, an auditing commission, and a group dealing with outreach, but not who their members are (Institut russkoi tsivilizatsii n.d. b). In addition to the 10% who are “open and consistent anti-Semites,” Gudkov operates with a group holding less ideologized anti-Semitic attitudes (15–18%), as well as with those evincing more latent anti-Semitism (25–30%), which often corresponds to other kinds of xenophobia (Gudkov 2004, 218–221). Gudkov’s numbers stem from surveys made in the 1990s. A report published in late 2015 on the site DeloRus—one of the few websites that are linked up with that of the Institute for Russian Civilization—reveals that the institute’s activities in 2015 encountered “serious difficulties” in terms of lacking financial resources, whether for paying salaries to its own staff or for printing services. This led to a retardation of several projects and even to the temporary closing of some of them (DeloRus 2015). However, even the DeloRus website does not reveal the financial sources from which the institute has benefited so far. Instead, we are presented with a long list of planned publications in the near future—from the eighteenth-century poet Gavrila Derzhavin to The Russian Ideology of the Izborsk Club. 2015 ended with the publication of Russian Doctrine: State Ideology in the Age of Putin, a manifesto initially published in 2007 and written by a collective consisting of Vitalii Averianov and other members of the Institute for Dynamic Conservatism, a forerunner of the Izborsk Club (Laruelle 2009a). It is never mentioned whether such editions have been published earlier and whether the editors have given their consent to their republication—apart from an inserted ©, followed by a date (the same year as the edition) and the editor’s name. My claim is based on queries in the database Integrum in June 2015, where I searched for discussions about Platonov as an editor, and the results were minimal. Those that I found were limited to descriptions as referred to below. In general, Platonov is not an active discussant in the Russian public sphere, as compared to other members of the Izborsk Club; he figures mainly in his own forums, such as Russkii vestnik. Literaturnaia gazeta even reviews Platonov’s own books in a positive way. When Stalin’s Epoch (2013) came out, Platonov was described as a “conservator, an enemy of revolutions.” The most critical comment made in relation to this book was that Platonov’s description of Stalin as a “conqueror of revolutionary chaos supported by the people” was, “admittedly, not mainstream” (Literaturnaia gazeta 2013b). In connection with another Platonov book from 2013, The Russian People: Its History, Soul, Victories, Platonov was portrayed as having his “entire life studied Russian civilization, examined his Fatherland.” The newspaper even situated him in a long and respectable tradition of Russian folklorists and ethnographers (Literaturnaia gazeta 2013a). In order to avoid a long and complex bibliography, I have not inserted references to each edition in the following. All of them are accessible in the section “Russian civilization” on the institute’s website (Institut russkoi tsivilizatsii n.d. c). Unless noted, the main source of the analysis below is this website, and the reader can easily identify here the origin of the quotations. These introductions are usually taken from his History of Philosophy, although not all of them have been possible to identify, for instance the introduction to the Rozanov edition. Kozhinov’s opponents in this debate were the Slavists Mikhail Robinson and Lidiia Sazonova, whose contributions are printed in the same issues as those of Kozhinov.

An eternal Russia  203

References Atkins, Stephen. 2009. Holocaust Denial as an International Movement. Westport, CT: Praeger. Billington, James H. 2004. Russia in Search of Itself. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press. Bogoslov. 2011. “Knizhnaia palitra.” September 8. www.bogoslov.ru/text/1938927. html (accessed 10 March 2016). Brudny, Yitzhak. 1998. Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953–1991. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. DeloRus. 2015. “Glavnye itogi raboty Instituta Russkoi tsivilizatsii v 2015 godu.” December 29. www.delorus.com/news/news_detail.php?ID=8681 (accessed 10 June 2019). Espedal, Tore Engelsen, and Audun Lindholm. 2015. “Mellom Kali Yuga og Kreml.” Vagant 1: 63–69. Etkind, Alexander. 2011. Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience. Cambridge: Polity Press. Franklin, Simon (ed.). 1992. Sermons and Rhetoric of Kievan Rus. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Franklin, Simon. 2004. “Russia in Time.” In National Identity in Russian Culture: An Introduction, edited by Simon Franklin and Emma Widdis, 11–29. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gudkov, Lev. 2004. Negativnaia identichnost’: Stati 1997–2002. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. Hagemeister, Michael. 2006. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Myth of a Jewish Conspiracy in Post-Soviet Russia.” In Nationalist Myths and the Modern Media: Cultural Identity in the Age of Globalisation, edited by Jan Herman Brinks, Stella Rock and Edward Timms, 243–54. London: Tauris Academic Studies. Horowitz, Brian. 1994. “A Jewish-Christian Rift in Twentieth-Century Russian Philosophy: N.A. Berdiaev and M.O. Gershenzon.” Russian Review 53 (4): 497–514. Institut russkoi tsivilizatsii. N.d. a. “Glavnaia.” www.rusinst.ru (accessed 10 March 2016). Institut russkoi tsivilizatsii. N.d. b. “Ob institute.” http://rusinst.ru/ob-institute. html (accessed 10 June 2019). Institut russkoi tsivilizatsii. N.d. c. “Trudy instituta: Russkaia tsivilizatsiia.” http:// rusinst.ru/trudy-instituta.html (accessed 10 June 2019). Institut russkoi tsivilizatsii. N.d. d. “Bolshaia entsiklopediia russkogo naroda: Russkoe mirovozzrenie: Platonov, Oleg Anatolevich (r. 11.01.1950), issledovatel’ russkoi i zapadnoi tsivilizatsii.” www.rusinst.ru/articletext.asp?rzd=1&id=840&tm=10 (accessed 10 March 2016). Kara-Murza, Sergei. 2011. Rossiia i zapad: Paradigmy tsivilizatsii. Moscow: Akademicheskii proekt. King, Francis. 2006. “Making Virtual (Non)Sense of the Past: Russian Nationalist Interpretations of Twentieth-Century History on the Internet.” In Nationalist Myths and the Modern Media: Cultural Identity in the Age of Globalisation, edited by Jan Herman Brinks, Stella Rock and Edward Timms, 215–28. London: Tauris Academic Studies. Knox, Zoe. 2005. Russian Society and the Orthodox Church. London: Routledge. Kolstø, Pål. 2014. “Russia’s Nationalists Flirt with Democracy.” Journal of Democracy 25 (3): 120–34.

204  Kåre Johan Mjør Kozhinov, Vadim. 1988. “Tvorchestvo Ilariona i istoricheskaia real’nost’ ego epokhi.” Voprosy literatury 12: 130–50. Kozhinov, Vadim. 1989. “Nesostoiatelnye ssylki.” Voprosy literatury 9: 236–42. Laruelle, Marlène. 2009a. Inside and Around the Kremlin’s Black Box: The New Nationalist Think Tanks in Russia. Stockholm: Institute for Security and Development Policy. Laruelle, Marlène. 2009b. In the Name of the Nation: Nationalism and Politics in Contemporary Russia. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Laruelle, Marlène. 2009c. “Rethinking Russian Nationalism: Historical Continuity, Political Diversity, and Doctrinal Fragmentation.” In Russian Nationalism and the National Reassertion of Russia, edited by Marlène Laruelle, 13–48. London: Routledge. Laruelle, Marlène. 2012. “Conspiracy and Alternate History in Russia: A Nationalist Equation for Success?” Russian Review 71 (4): 565–80. Laruelle, Marlène. 2016. “The Three Colors of Novorossiya, or the Russian Nationalist Mythmaking of the Ukrainian Crisis.” Post-Soviet Affairs 32 (1): 55–74. Levada Center. 2015. “Bol’shinstvo rossiian khotiat, chtoby Rossiia shla po sobstvennomu puti.” Levada-tsentr, 21 April. www.levada.ru/21-04-2015/ bolshinstvorossiyan-khotyat-chtoby-rossiya-shla-po-sobstvennomu-puti (accessed 10 March 2016). Literaturnaia gazeta. 2008. “Nam neobkhodim dukhovnyi fundament: Shest’ voprosov izdateliu.” July 30. Literaturnaia gazeta. 2013a. “Pamiat’ o velikikh russkikh liudiakh.” October 23. Literaturnaia gazeta. 2013b. “Russkoe slovo—sverkhderzhava.” November 6. Malakhov, Vladimir. 2007. Ponaekhali tut …: Ocherki o natsionalizme, rasizme i kul’turnom pliuralizme. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. Marks, Steven G. 2003. How Russia Shaped the Modern World: From Art to AntiSemitism, Ballet to Bolshevism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Marsh, Rosalind. 2007. Literature, History and Identity in Post-Soviet Russia. Oxford: Peter Lang. Mitrofanova, Anastasia. 2005. The Politicization of Russian Orthodoxy: Actors and Ideas. Stuttgart: Ibidem. Mjør, Kåre Johan. 2011. Reformulating Russia: The Cultural and Intellectual Historiography of Russian First-Wave Émigré Writers. Boston, MA and Leiden: Brill. Morozov, Viatcheslav. 2015. Russia’s Postcolonial Identity: A Subaltern Empire in a Eurocentric World. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ortmann, Stefanie, and John Heathershaw. 2012. “Conspiracy Theories in the Post-Soviet Space.” Russian Review 71 (4): 551–64. Platonov, Oleg. 1995. Russkaia tsivilizatsiia: Uchebnoe posobie dlia formirovaniia russkogo natsionalnogo soznaniia. Moscow: Roman-Gazeta. Platonov, Oleg. 2010. “Nepovtorimye cherty russkoi tsivilizatsii.” www.izborsk-club. ru/content/articles/428/ (accessed 10 June 2019). Platonov, Oleg. 2014. “Kak russkikh delali ukraintsami.” www.izborsk-club.ru/ content/articles/3030/ (accessed 10 June 2019). Pravoslavie. 2011. “Vpervye c xix veka polnost’iu izdaiutsia trudy mysliteleislavianofilov.” 18. mars. www.pravoslavie.ru/news/45389.htm (accessed 10 June 2019).

An eternal Russia  205 Putin, Vladimir. 2012. “Rossiia: Natsional’nyi vopros.” Nezavisimaia gazeta, January 23. Rock, Stella. 2001. “Russian Revisionism: Holocaust Denial and the New Nationalist Historiography.” Patterns of Prejudice 35 (4): 64–76. Russkii Vestnik. 2014. “Rossiia budet imperiei: Interv’iu Olega Platonova pravoslavnoi studii ‘Rus TV’.” January 9. Sakwa, Richard. 2012. “Conspiracy Narratives as a Mode of Engagement in International Politics: The Case of the 2008 Russo-Georgian War.” Russian Review 71 (4): 581–609. Shekhovtsov, Anton. 2014. “Putin’s Brain?” New Eastern Europe 8–9: 72–79. Shlapentokh, Vladimir, and Anna Arutunyan. 2013. Freedom, Repression, and Private Property in Russia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shnirel’man, Viktor. 2007. “Tsivilizatsionnyi podkhod kak natsional’naia ideia.” In Sovremennye interpretatsii russkogo natsionalizma, edited by Marlène Laruelle, 217–248. Stuttgart: Ibidem. Shnirel’man, Viktor. 2012. Khazarskii mif: Ideologiia politicheskogo radikalizma v Rossii i ee istoki. Moscow: Mosti kul’tury and Gesharim. Slater, Wendy. 2000. “A Modern-Day Saint? Metropolitan Ioann and the Postsoviet Russian Orthodox Church.” Religion State and Society 28 (4): 313–325. Umland, Andreas. 2006. “Alexander Dugin, die Faschismusfrage und der russische politische Diskurs.” Russlandanalysen 105: 2–5. Verkhovskii, Aleksandr, and Emil’ Pain. 2010. “Tsivilizatsionnyi natsionalizm: Rossiiskaia versiia ‘osobogo puti’.” In Ideologiia «osobogo puti» v Rossii i Germanii: Istoki, soderzhanie, posledstviia, edited by Emil Pain, 171–210. Moscow: Tri kvadrata. Wikipedia. N.d. “Oleg Platonov.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleg_Platonov (accessed 10 June 2019). Zavtra. 2010. “Russkaia tsivilizatsiia.” December 8.

9

Contemporary civilizational analysis and Russian sociology1 Mikhail Maslovskiy

The paradigm of civilizational analysis has been described as one of the most promising theoretical perspectives in contemporary sociology (Smith 2017). It has been argued that within the last two decades largely under the influence of Shmuel Eisenstadt’s and Johann Arnason’s revival of civilizational analysis, historical-comparative sociology became “a major contributor to a critical diagnosis of the present” (Dlamini, Mota, and Wagner 2016, 7). This perspective differs in many respects from other recent civilizational approaches such as Samuel Huntington’s theory. Sociological civilizational analysis has already influenced attempts to move beyond Huntington in the field of international relations (Katzenstein 2010). The interest in the paradigm of civilizational analysis among Russian scholars has grown since the beginning of the 2010s. While it would hardly be possible to speak of a civilizational turn in Russian sociology there is a need to discuss its new engagement with civilizational theories. In the first part of the chapter, I discuss contemporary civilizational analysis as a sociological paradigm. In the second part, I analyze the relationships between civilizational approaches and sociology in post-Soviet Russia. Finally, I offer a review of recent discussions in Russian sociology with a particular focus on the reception and re-interpretation of the paradigm of civilizational analysis.

Civilizational analysis as a sociological paradigm In a recent account of civilizational theories, a distinction has been made between earlier perspectives and “contemporary civilizational analysis” as a new sociological paradigm (Smith 2017, 5). The earlier civilizational perspectives were elaborated mostly by philosophers and historians such as Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee. At the same time, in classical sociology the concept of civilization was discussed by Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss. Max Weber’s sociology of world religions contributed to a comparative study of civilizations, although Weber avoided using that concept (Arnason 2003, 86–105). According to Jeremy Smith, contemporary civilizational analysis includes the “processual,” “integrationist,” and “relational” approaches represented by Norbert Elias, Shmuel Eisenstadt, and Johann Arnason (Smith 2017, 28–29).

Civilizational analysis and Russian sociology  207 The ideas of Norbert Elias played an important role in the legitimization of civilizational discourse in sociology. Elias discussed the civilizing process already in the 1930s, although his ideas became influential in historical sociology much later, particularly since the 1970s and 1980s. He focused on changes in forms of everyday behavior in European history (Elias 2000). For Elias, the most important characteristic of the civilizing process was a gradual strengthening of self-control in individual behavior. But, as he argued, changes in the structure of personality could only be understood on the basis of an analysis of changes in social relations. Elias considered the process of consolidation of state power in Western Europe in the course of the formation of absolute monarchies. At the same time, he discussed a broader process of growth of social differentiation which was accompanied by the widening of interaction between individuals and social groups. Overall, he believed that the growth of complexity of a social structure facilitated the development of the self-control and self-regulation of individual behavior. But, as Smith (2017, 37–38) notes, Elias focused on “the intra-societal dynamics of state formation” but did not take into account the interaction of civilizations. Despite the “unique appeal” of his ideas to present-day historical sociologists “the absence of the international arena from Elias’s analysis is a stark omission and, in this respect, his results are context-bound and thus tacitly Eurocentric” (Smith 2017, 38). Shmuel Eisenstadt was a “seminal figure” for historical sociology since he “spearheaded major research enterprises defining the agenda for contemporary civilizational analysis” (Smith 2017, 29). Eisenstadt originally followed the functionalist paradigm, although he was influenced by Max Weber’s ideas. The impact of the Weberian tradition in historical sociology was evident in his works, which focused on a comparative analysis of civilizations. Eisenstadt discussed the Axial Age civilizations that emerged in India, China, Greece, and Palestine in the period from 800 to 200 BC. The concept of Axial Age was introduced by the German philosopher Karl Jaspers, who believed that this period was a time of spiritual transformations resulting in the creation of religious and philosophical traditions that determined the course of history of different civilizations (Jaspers 1953). As Arnason (2015, 149) points out, “Eisenstadt replaced this highly speculative account with a new model of interrelations among cultural and social forces.” According to Eisenstadt, the Axial Age was characterized by the emergence of new visions of the world which emphasized the difference between transcendental and mundane reality. This led to “double-edged” consequences: “the reference to a higher reality could serve to legitimise rulers and power elites as well as to justify protest and resistance. Different constellations of this kind characterise the Eurasian traditions that go back to axial origins” (Arnason 2015, 149). For Eisenstadt, the emergence of Axial Age civilizations and the transition to modernity represented two most important processes of social and cultural change in world history (Eisenstadt 2000, 19). Eisenstadt regards modernity as a cultural project that was formed under the influence of the

208  Mikhail Maslovskiy Enlightenment. He devotes particular attention to the impact of revolutions upon the formation of modern societies. As he argues, while modernity originally emerged in Western Europe, modern ideologies and social institutions were later transferred to the American continent and other parts of the world (Eisenstadt 2001). According to Eisenstadt, the first non-European versions of modernity were formed in North America and Latin America where the influence of Protestantism and Catholic Counter-Reformation respectively shaped different versions of modern society (Eisenstadt 2002). In some of his writings he considers the impact of civilizational legacies on the political sphere and analyzes the role of cultural factors for the peculiarities of political institutions in non-Western states. Elias and Eisenstadt developed their theories around the concept of civilization. For both of them, “the civilizational turn was linked to a reformulation of basic sociological concepts, a reassessment (not always explicit) of the classical sociological legacy, and a sustained effort to combine sociological and historical inquiry” (Arnason 2015, 150). But there were significant differences between their perspectives. While Elias used the concept of civilization in the singular, focusing on Western Europe, Eisenstadt discussed civilizations in the plural and employed comparative analysis. However, common points can be found between these two approaches. As Arnason (2015, 165) argues, a closer reading of Elias’s works “opens up historical perspectives of the kind most congenial to Eisenstadt’s civilizational analysis.” Although there are some “dissonances” between the two authors, a “comparative framework, drawing on Eisenstadt’s ideas while revising some of his arguments” should “enable us to make progress with integrating their insights” (Arnason 2015, 175). Johann Arnason’s civilizational perspective partly draws on Eisenstadt’s theory and employs elements of Elias’s approach to state-formation, but there are also other theoretical sources that he uses, particularly Cornelius Castoriadis’s theory of “social imaginaries.” In his works, Arnason focuses on social creativity and considers both cultural and political aspects of civilizational dynamics. He has offered a theoretical model of civilizational analysis that includes various components which range from cultural premises to geographical contexts of civilizational patterns (Arnason 2001). It has been pointed out that Arnason’s work represents “one of the most elaborate contributions to the contemporary revival of civilizational theory, methodology and analysis” (Spohn 2011, 24). What is characteristic of Arnason’s theory is the focus on “intercivilizational encounters.” As he claims, this concept is more appropriate for sociological study than the notion of the “clash of civilizations.” Arnason believes that some encounters lead to unilateral assimilation while others are conducive to innovations but “comparative inquiry should also take note of the encounters that throw light on distances and dissonances between divergent cultural worlds” (Arnason 2006, 46). Arnason characterizes the relations of the West with other civilizations as the interaction of local traditions,

Civilizational analysis and Russian sociology  209 Western traditions, interpretations of modernity and its alternative versions. From the viewpoint of his theory, “modernity is not self-grounding but is rather grounded in relation to—and encounters with—a variety of ‘others’, including classical antiquity, intercultural others, inter-civilisational others, and intra-cultural constellations” (Adams et al. 2015, 40). As Arnason notes, civilizational analysis is not simply a new label for religious studies, since there is only a partial overlap between these two fields. On the one hand, the civilizational focus on religions “foregrounds their role as ‘meta-institutions’ in the Durkheimian sense, i.e., as frameworks for the formation of other institutions” (Arnason 2012, 23). On the other hand, civilizational analysis “takes note of changes due to other modes of articulation—philosophical reflection or scientific inquiry, to mention the most pronounced cases—intervening in the domain previously claimed by religion” (Arnason 2012, 23). In addition, according to Arnason, civilizational analysis also focuses on the problematic of “secular religions” when other socio-cultural spheres displace religion but at the same time acquire sacral characteristics. In his works Arnason discusses the Russian cultural and political tradition which combined, in his view, a peripheral position within the Western world with some traits of a separate civilization. Thus, he evaluates the Byzantine civilizational influence on the growth of the Muscovite state. Arnason rejects the idea of direct continuity between Byzantium and Russia on the level of cultural patterns. He agrees that the encounter with the Byzantine civilization led to a large-scale cultural transformation. Nevertheless, the reception of the Byzantine legacy was “selective and inconclusive” (Arnason 1993, 45) as a result of interaction between imperial and civilizational patterns in the process of state-building. After reforms of Peter the Great in the first quarter of the eighteenth century the role of the Orthodox Church “became so subaltern that one can hardly call it a civilizational nucleus” (Arnason 2000, 61). However, Arnason concentrates not so much on pre-revolutionary Russian history but on the origins and trajectories of the specific model of modernity that emerged in the Soviet period. From his viewpoint, the civilizational identity of the Soviet system was formed by Marxism-Leninism as a kind of political religion, although there was only “a partial functional equivalence between Marxism-Leninism and traditional theological systems” (Arnason 1993, 116). Arnason believes that one can speak of the Soviet model of modernity that possessed only some civilizational characteristics. In particular, he focuses on the process of re-traditionalization during the Brezhnev period. In his view, this trend was evident in attempts to present the “Soviet way of life” as a specific tradition (Arnason 1993, 213). But, as he claims, the trend toward re-traditionalization did not lead to a sustainable civilizational pattern. Overall, the perspective of civilizational analysis proposed by Eisenstadt and elaborated by Arnason “begins with the recognition of the pluralistic

210  Mikhail Maslovskiy nature of civilizations without any presupposition of a single model or the superiority of European civilization, which is seen as one of many” (Delanty 2016, 24). In comparison with Eisenstadt, Arnason places a stronger emphasis on the interaction of civilizational patterns. For Arnason, civilizations should not be seen as “self-contained or self-generating” but are shaped by their interactions with other civilizations (Delanty 2016, 24–25). Thus, Arnason can be regarded as the main representative of the “relational” perspective within contemporary civilizational analysis (Smith 2017, 29). It will be demonstrated in the last part of the chapter that Arnason’s approach proved to be particularly relevant for the engagement with civilizational analysis in recent Russian sociology.

The concept of civilization and post-Soviet Russian sociology In post-Soviet Russia Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis (Huntington 1996) proved to be the most widely discussed civilizational approach. This thesis has been debated in Russian social sciences and was even referred to by some members of the political elite. As Andrei Tsygankov (2003) demonstrates, the perception of Huntington’s ideas depended on the position of Russian scholars and politicians in the ideological spectrum. Thus, representatives of the liberal camp appreciated Huntington’s interest in cultural aspects of world politics, but most of them were dissatisfied with the way he defined civilizations and interpreted their interactions (Tsygankov 2003, 63). From this viewpoint, Huntington overlooked the processes of globalization and overemphasized civilizational conflicts. At the same time, proponents of conservative ideological positions mostly accepted Huntington’s view that civilizations were the key units in world politics fighting for power and prestige. However, it was argued that Huntington’s actual goal was “to counterpose the West against all other non-Western civilizations rather than to warn about the clash of various civilizations with each other” (Tsygankov 2003, 65). Unlike Huntington, Russian conservative intellectuals tended to stress not so much the Orthodox as the Eurasian identity of the “Russian civilization.” Nevertheless, civilizational analysis as a sociological paradigm was hardly ever mentioned in Russian debates over Huntington’s thesis. It should be noted that representatives of sociological civilizational analysis criticized Huntington’s approach as one-sided, ideologically motivated and lacking a solid theoretical foundation. It has been argued that in today’s world “there are no intact civilizations of the kind presupposed by those who prophecy a clash between them” (Arnason 2006, 52). The main flaws of Huntington’s view of civilizations were regarded as the following: an assumption that the world religions have some unchangeable core essence; considering civilizations as territorially bounded geopolitical units; the assertion of Western hegemony that can turn the prediction of the clash of civilizations into a self-fulfilling prophecy (Casanova 2011, 259). At the same

Civilizational analysis and Russian sociology  211 time, a new wave of interest in civilizational approaches that has begun recently within the discipline of international relations goes beyond Huntington’s theory. Thus Peter Katzenstein (2010) has proposed an original perspective on civilizational aspects of world politics drawing on the works of historical sociologists such as Shmuel Eisenstadt, Randall Collins, and Norbert Elias. It is characteristic that new approaches in international relations tend to focus on civilizations as discursive or ideological phenomena but not as real socio-historical structures. From this viewpoint civilizations can be seen as a specific form of “imagined communities” (Bettiza 2014). In the 1990s and 2000s Russian sociologists mostly did not participate in the discussion of Huntington’s thesis. On the one hand, there was a widespread perception that Huntington’s ideas were relevant for the discipline of international relations but not for sociology. On the other hand, the ideological component of the debate over the “clash of civilizations” thesis also distracted sociologists from engaging in that discussion. Paradoxically, Huntington’s thesis proved to be to a certain extent an obstacle to reception of the civilizational perspective in Russian sociology. In addition, in post-Soviet Russia civilizational approaches were often associated with ideological currents like neo-Eurasianism, which represented the project of isolationism and claimed “to build a special sociology for a special country” (Kurakin 2017, 400). The term “civilization” has become largely discredited in the eyes of many Russian sociologists due to its use by notorious figures belonging to the “neo-Eurasian” camp. In order to evaluate the context in which the reception of contemporary civilizational analysis began in Russian sociology we need to take into account the development of historical sociology in the country in the post-Soviet years. First of all, it should be noted that historical sociology practically disappeared during the Soviet period. While there were discussions of the relationship between historical materialism and sociology, the leading role of Marxism-Leninism could not be questioned (Batygin 1998, 32–36). Although ideological restrictions were gradually abolished during the perestroika period, the process of institutionalization of Russian historical sociology proved to be rather slow. Thus, a section on historical sociology appeared in the leading Russian sociological journal Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia only in 1998 (Romanovskii 2009, 123). It was mainly empirically oriented social history rather than theoretically oriented historical sociology that developed in Russia in the 1990s. The concept of civilization was not considered relevant by most representatives of Russian historical sociology during that period. Nevertheless, the relevance of civilizational theory for the studies of Russian society was discussed by some sociologists in the 2000s. Thus, Ovsei Shkaratan (2004, 2007, 2010) has offered a sociological analysis of “path dependence” in Russian history drawing on sociological research as well as philosophical and historical perspectives on “Eurasian civilization.” He refers to various approaches to the concept of civilization and to the

212  Mikhail Maslovskiy idea of “institutional matrixes” that were applied to Russian society by several sociologist and economists (Kirdina 2000; Nureev 2009). In particular, Shkaratan draws on the ideas of the Russian scholar Leonid Vasil’ev, who specialized in Oriental history and largely followed the Marxist concept of the “Asiatic mode of production.” In his writings, Vasil’ev (1998) described power-property relations in Asiatic societies where the state was the only owner of land. Shkaratan’s analysis of the transformations of “etacratism”—the order where the state owns the means of production and possesses a monopoly control of social and political life—also focuses on the merging of power and property as a defining characteristic of Russian society at different stages of its evolution. For Shkaratan, the multiplicity of societal trajectories is ultimately defined by the difference between two main types of civilization which he regards as “European” and “Asiatic” ones. The former is characterized by the existence of private property, balanced relationships between civil society and state institutions and the priority of individualist values. The latter is connected with the predominance of state property, the omnipotence of state structures and the absence of civil society as well as the priority of communal values (Shkaratan 2010, 26). Overall, Shkaratan follows a strong version of the “path dependence thesis,” which is applied mostly to the economic and political, whereas Eisenstadt emphasized the role of cultural legacies of a certain civilization. At the same time, Shkaratan takes into consideration that since the end of the 1990s there was a growth of interest in world sociology toward the “multi-linear” trajectories of societal dynamics. Thus, he refers to some representatives of the multiple modernities perspective in historical sociology, such as Mouzelis (1999) and Wittrock (2000). Shkaratan makes an overall conclusion that various types of economy in the modern world as well as different types of social and political organization depend greatly on the civilization factor. From that perspective he compares Russia with the post-communist states of Central Eastern Europe. As he argues, Russia formed the “core” of the system of “etacratism” while the Western “periphery” of the Soviet block partly preserved European institutions and values during the communist period (Shkaratan 2010, 31). He believes that in both cases civilizational legacies have exerted a decisive influence on the course and outcomes of post-communist transformations. Thus, the countries of Central Eastern Europe were able to overcome the legacies of “etacratism” but in post-communist Russia that social order was only partly transformed and there was no decisive turn toward private property, civil society, and democratic political institutions. Shkaratan has formed a research network around the Laboratory for Comparative Analysis of Post-Socialist Development at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. This network includes not only sociologists but also economists and historians and has strong connections with the journal Mir Rossii. It should be noted, however, that Shkaratan’s approach has been criticized by several Russian researchers. Thus, Vladimir Kozlovskii (2017, 11) claims

Civilizational analysis and Russian sociology  213 that this approach focuses on searching for relicts of the past in the radically changed socio-economic, political, and cultural context of contemporary Russian society. According to Kozlovskii, the theory of “etacratism” does not take into account the cultural potential of different social groups and their ability to create new formal and informal institutions. As Vladimir Il’in (2017, 42) argues, the historical analogies used by Shkaratan do not explain how the social structure of “etacratic” society could persist for centuries in varying social conditions. For Il’in, the legacies of Soviet economic structures proved to be more important in defining the course of post-Soviet transformations in Russia than the more ancient legacies of the estate-type social structure and Orthodox religion. Overall, the issue of historical legacies remains controversial in studies of post-communist societies (Kotkin and Beissinger 2014). One of the most recent trends in these studies is defined by a renewed interest in long-term legacies and cultural contexts. According to Grzegorz Ekiert, the new “historicist” approach focuses not on nation-states but rather “on sub-national units, cross-border regions and wider “civilizational” identities on the macro-level” (Ekiert 2015, 335). In addition, this new perspective “strives to re- conceptualize long-run continuities as multiple, interacting threads of continuity of various duration, each interacting with one or more critical periods that produce fundamental transformations, clusters or innovations, and new institutional and cultural configurations” (Ekiert 2015, 335). Apparently, this description has much in common with the paradigm of civilizational analysis in historical sociology.

The reception of the paradigm of civilizational analysis in contemporary Russian sociology One of the most important trends of development in today’s Russian sociology is its growing internationalization. As Dmitrii Kurakin (2017) demonstrates, two main strategies of integration into world sociology have been used by Russian researchers in the sphere of sociology of culture. On the one hand, several research centers participate in large-scale Western empirical projects, such as the World Values Survey. On the other hand, a strategy of “popularization of Western cultural theories in the Russian academy” (Kurakin 2017, 409) has been adopted by some groups of researchers. In particular, the works of Pierre Bourdieu and Jeffrey Alexander became the basis for forming research groups which not only popularized their ideas but also used these ideas in their own studies. A recent example of the latter trend is the emergence of a research network focused on contemporary civilizational analysis. The interest in sociological civilizational analysis has been growing among Russian researchers since the beginning of the 2010s. An important step toward a wider reception of that paradigm was made at the conference “Civilizational Dynamics of Modern Societies” that took place at the

214  Mikhail Maslovskiy Sociological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg in 2011. Among the keynote speakers at the conference were two leading representatives of contemporary civilizational analysis, Johann Arnason and Björn Wittrock. One of the keynote speeches (Arnason 2012) and other proceedings of the conference were published in a special issue of Zhurnal sotsiologii i sotsial’noi antropologii. After the conference, a research network on contemporary civilizational analysis was formed. It was connected to the editorial board of Zhurnal sotsiologii i sotsial’noi antropologii and the newly founded Centre for Civilizational Analysis and Global History at the Sociological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The paradigm of civilizational analysis and the possibilities of its application to Russian society have been discussed in the papers that were published in several Russian journals (Maslovskii 2012; Braslavskii 2013; Braslavskii and Maslovskii 2014; Prozorova 2014). Ruslan Braslavskii and Mikhail Maslovskiy (2014) have considered the ideas of the main representatives of civilizational analysis in today’s historical sociology. While Arnason’s theory is particularly significant for these researchers, they also discuss other approaches within civilizational analysis and take into account recent interpretations of Arnason’s ideas (Knöbl 2011; Spohn 2011). First of all, they focus on the lines of convergence and divergence between mainstream contemporary sociology and civilizational analysis as a new paradigm. They point out that theories of modernization, on the one hand, and of local civilizations, on the other hand, offer opposite views on the social and cultural dynamics of modern societies. However, the sociological version of civilizational analysis can be considered an alternative to both of them. This theory emphasizes that social change should be seen neither as the result of invariable cultural programs nor as the expression of a universal logic of social evolution. The paradigm of civilizational analysis also rejects the more conventional view that civilizations form “closed, self-sufficient, homogenous socio-cultural entities” (Braslavskii and Maslovskii 2014, 47). The theory of multiple modernities that developed within the paradigm of civilizational analysis presupposes that the concept of modernization as a transition from tradition to modernity is not sufficient for understanding the social and cultural dynamics of contemporary societies. From that perspective “tradition” and “modernity” should not be regarded as mutually exclusive concepts. At the same time, the variety of cultural and institutional forms of today’s societies cannot be explained with reference only to traditions and institutional matrixes (Braslavskii and Maslovskii 2014, 48). On the one hand, traditions provide cultural resources that influence the working out and realization of different projects of modernity. On the other hand, traditions themselves are being transformed and can be invented in the conditions of modernity. Unlike the more conventional theoretical approaches, sociological civilizational analysis emphasizes the heterogeneous, ambivalent, and antinomian character of civilizational patterns.

Civilizational analysis and Russian sociology  215 The distinctive characteristic of this paradigm is a focus on civilizational transformations and intercivilizational encounters (Braslavskii and Maslovskii 2014, 49). Iuliia Prozorova (2014) largely draws on the concept of intercivilizational encounters elaborated by Benjamin Nelson (1981) and Arnason (2006) and on the analysis of the dynamics of openness and closure of modernity in Central Eastern Europe (Blokker 2009). As she argues, the post-Soviet “encounter” with Western modernity and the reception of Western cultural and institutional patterns can be seen as a crucial driving force for transformation processes in Russia. On the eve of the disintegration of the USSR and during the first post-Soviet years, the idea of the universality of the Western project of modernity became predominant in Russian political and academic discourse. The Westernizing civilizational discourse was particularly characteristic for the first half of the 1990s when Russian society demonstrated a high degree of openness toward Western patterns in the economic and political spheres (Prozorova 2014, 59–60). Prozorova also discusses the Russian political discourse of the last decade that involves reinterpretation and contestation of the cultural and institutional patterns of Western modernity. The conservative shift in the discourse of Russian authorities has been accompanied by an anti-Western rhetoric, an emphasis on Russia’s unique civilizational identity and a return to traditional national values. As a result, the character of the interaction with the West has become “more limited, ‘selective’ and revisionist” (Prozorova 2014, 66). Prozorova refers to the prediction made by Nelson (1981, 101–102) that the modern world was on the eve of “civil wars and revolutions in the sphere of structures of consciousness” largely directed against “Western rationalized consciousness.” As she notes, today’s Russian politics is oriented toward suppression of universalism through the weakening of secular ethics, formal law, and elements of rationalist Enlightenment culture (Prozorova 2014, 66). Apparently, sociological civilizational analysis can contribute to the studies of a recent “conservative shift” in Russian politics and attempts of Russian authorities to forge a new ideology that emphasizes “Russia’s status as the other Europe, the one that does not follow the Western path of development” (Laruelle 2016, 293). It is noteworthy that the case of post-Soviet Belarus has also been studied from the viewpoint of civilizational analysis. As Larisa Titarenko (2012) claims, Arnason’s theory offers a deep theoretical interpretation of the origins and development of the Soviet model of modernity. She argues that the specific form of disintegration of that model in the USSR was largely due to historical contingencies. As the example of contemporary China demonstrates, under other circumstances communist modernity could have survived longer in other places as well. Titarenko believes that today’s Belarus represents a version of the Soviet model that survived after the collapse of the USSR. In her view, there is a considerable degree of continuity between Soviet modernity and contemporary Belarus in the economic and political

216  Mikhail Maslovskiy spheres. At the same time, the ideology of Marxism-Leninism is no longer relevant in the case of Belarus. Instead the official propaganda presents a vision of a “conflict-free welfare state” (Titarenko 2012, 211). The importance of sociological civilizational analysis has been recognized in the comparative study of Russia and Latin America. Iakov Shemiakin has elaborated an approach to Russian and Latin American societies based on the concept of “borderland civilization.” As he argues, for such civilizations the influence of external factors is more significant than in the case of “classical civilizations.” From his viewpoint, borderline civilizations are more inclined to reinterpret and transform external influences. For Shemiakin, these civilizations are characterized by two opposite trends: openness toward the outside world and protection of their identity (Shemiakin 2016, 171). Drawing on the works of Eisenstadt and other representatives of sociological civilizational analysis, Shemiakin considers modernization in the context of intercivilizational encounters. In his view, this perspective is most fruitful for comparative studies of modernizing trajectories of non-Western societies (Shemiakin 2015). As Arnason points out, the countries of the BRICS group represent distinctive versions of modern societies and modernizing dynamics. However, the role and the relative weight of civilizational factors vary from case to case. For Arnason, they are more visible in the formation of Chinese modernity than in the Indian and Russian cases due to the colonial experience in India and the history of Westernization in Russia. At the same time “in the settler societies of Brazil and South Africa it is not easy at all to define civilizational aspects” (Arnason 2012, 25). Following Arnason’s approach we can add to the civilizational sources the impact of intercivilizational encounters upon the processes of social and political change. While civilizational legacies connected to the traditions of Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy as well as the “political religion” of Marxism-Leninism should be considered, the degree of openness toward Western liberal modernity also seems to be an important factor that influenced the trajectories of development in Russia and Latin America. But it should be remembered that the experience of communism as an alternative version of modernity formed a crucial difference between Russia and Latin American societies (Maslovskiy 2017, 158–161).

Conclusion The sociological paradigm of civilizational analysis can be seen as an alternative to the “clash of civilizations” thesis and civilizational approaches in Russian philosophical and political discourse. From the perspective of civilizational analysis in historical sociology one cannot speak of the existence of a Russian (Orthodox, Eurasian, etc.) civilization in today’s world. After the experience of the Soviet model of modernity, contemporary Russian society cannot simply return to some pre-modern cultural

Civilizational analysis and Russian sociology  217 patterns. Sociological civilizational analysis can form the foundation for critique of the ideological use of the notion of civilization. Arnason’s approach that emphasizes the role of social creativity and intercivilizational encounters seems particularly relevant for this purpose. However, the reception of contemporary civilizational approaches in post-Soviet Russian sociology proved to be a relatively slow and complicated process. A certain bias against civilizational theories was common among Russian sociologists in the 1990s and 2000s. More recently, two main research networks employing the concept of civilization have been created. The Moscow network headed by Ovsei Shkaratan is connected with the Higher School of Economics while the St. Petersburg network has been formed around the Sociological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The Moscow network is more interdisciplinary and draws largely on the works of Russian economists and historians while contemporary theories of sociological civilizational analysis are used rather as auxiliary analytical devices. Members of the St. Petersburg network follow the sociological paradigm of civilizational analysis more strictly and seek to employ theoretical models elaborated within that paradigm for the study of social transformations in the USSR and post-Soviet Russia.

Note 1 The study was funded by the RFBR research project no. 19-011-00950.

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Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. academia 10, 21n19, 164–166, 174, 179, 181n6 Aitamurto, K. 15 Akhmatova, A. 12 Akopov, P. 28, 124 Aleksei II, Patriarch of All Rus 187 Alexander, J. 213 Althusser, L. 7 alt-right 131 America 7, 20n7, 68, 76n7, 104, 116, 120, 122–129, 131, 135, 136n9, 151, 190, 196, 208; Latin 216 AMG (US rapper) 127 Anderson, B. 30–31 anti-Americanism 5, 104, 120, 122, 127, 190 anti-colonial see post-colonialism anti-European see anti-Westernism anti-globalization see globalization anti-liberalism see liberalism anti-Muslim see Muslims anti-Putinism see Putinism antiquity 95, 107n35, 143–146, 181n14, 209; Soviet 142, 148–149, 154, 161n8 anti-semitism 186–187, 190–191, 193, 195–198, 202n5 anti-universalism see universalism anti-Westernism 5, 15, 40, 42, 73, 104, 118, 171, 186–187, 191, 215 Arnason, J. 206–210, 214, 216–217 Artamonov, M. 191 Asia 13, 36, 37, 47, 61, 75, 95, 212; East 1; see also Central Asia Augustin (Anisimov), Bishop of Gorodetsk and Vetluzhsk 90 Austria 35 Averianov, V. 91

Averintsev, S. 12 Baburin, S. 166–168 Barg, M. 169 Barth, F. 116 Bassin, M. 12 Bashkiria 100; Bashkirs 15, 98, 101–102 Begunov, I. 171 Beliaev-Gintovt, A. 144, 154, 159 Belorus 62, 215, 216, 217 Berdiaev, N. 11–12, 195, 197 Berdin, A. 101–102 Bikbov, A. 150–151 Black Hundred Movement 33 Bolshevism 5, 37–38 Boltenko, A. 150 Bourdieu, P. 213 Brazol’, B. 196 Bremer, T. 161n7 Brezhnev, L. 186, 209 Brubaker, R. 1, 14 Buchanan, P. 128 Buckle, H.T. 1 Buddhism 15, 61, 176 Budraitskis, I. 150–151 Bulgakov, S. 195 Burtin, Iu. 55 Butenko, N. 167, 174, 176–177 Byzantium 14, 33, 69, 70, 72, 209; see also civilization(s), Byzantine Byzantism see Byzantium Calhoun, C. 31 Campbell, D. 116 Castoriadis, C. 208 Catholicism 143, 147, 161n7, 193, 197, 199, 208, 216

222 Index Central Asia 13, 15, 75; see also Asia Chaadaev, P. 9 Chaplin, V. 70 Chechenya 100; Chechens 15, 42 Chicherin, B. 34 China 75, 207, 215 Chomsky, N. 7, 20n7 Clinton, Hillary 130–133 Crimea 6, 15, 19n4, 28, 40, 65, 73, 99, 191; post-Crimean culture 142–144 Christianity 14, 15, 16, 56, 71, 70–72, 95, 97, 121, 128, 193, 198; Eastern 95; European 95; Orthodox 56, 60; see also Orthodoxy Civilization(s) 2–3, 7, 9, 10–12, 19, 27, 30, 32, 40, 87; Apollonian 155; American 136n9; Arctic 100; Asiatic 212; Axial Age 207; Bashkir 101–102; borderland 216; Byzantine 158, 209 (see also Byzantium); capitalist 55, 189; Christian 34, 65, 71–73, 75, 93–95, 135, 142, 143, 189; and Culture 3, 19n3, 49, 71; Eurasian 2, 13, 37, 62, 71, 118, 142, 211, 216; European 9, 13, 29, 34, 118–120, 124, 126, 142, 143, 210, 212; imperial 96; Judeo-Masonic 73; liberal 88, 106n4; mining 101; non-Western 210; Orthodox 2, 11, 14, 17, 34, 61, 66, 69–75, 171, 192; proto166; regional 17, 88, 99; Russia as European 34, 143, 160; Russian 2–4, 7, 9–11, 13–14, 17–19, 19n1, 21n15, 28–29, 34, 35, 41, 59, 62–65, 69, 74, 87, 93, 95, 103, 115, 132, 168–169, 171, 174–178, 188, 190, 216; Slavic 9, 169, 171; Soviet 161n8, 175; Soviet concept of 48–52, 54–55, 59; Western 2, 9, 13, 34–36, 55, 56, 65, 67, 69, 73, 93, 115, 121, 124, 128, 135, 169, 176, 179–180, 189, 190, 192, 195–196, 199–200 civilizational: analysis (in sociology) 206–217; approach 10–11, 17–18, 48, 56, 59–60, 165; discourse 2, 8, 10–11, 19, 28–29, 89–92, 102, 105, 166, 172, 178–179, 189; paradigm 10–11, 17, 59, 61, 69, 72, 74, 75, 91; politics 27, 61; rhetoric 3, 29, 165, 172; talk 27–28, 40; theory 3, 30–33, 48–55, 59, 208; turn 1, 10, 18, 27–29, 67, 207–208; uniqueness 171–172, 176, 189, 215 civilizationality 179

civilizationism 1–3, 7–9, 14; inter215–217; Russian 2–3, 6–9, 13, 17–18, 20n9; sociological 1, 215–217; transnational 1 Clover, C. 68 Cohn, C. 117 Collins, R. 211 colonialism 192, 216; see also post-colonialism colonialization 15, 21n17, 97, 102; internal 199 Conchita Wurst 115, 122 Conrad, S. 1, 8 Connell, R.W. 117 conservatism 5–7, 12, 15, 17–19, 20n9, 21n14, 29, 39, 41, 56, 60, 62, 63, 66, 147, 150, 154–155, 157, 165, 171, 174, 178, 179, 186–187, 210, 215; conservative turn 142–144, 154, 159–160, 172, 194–195, 215 conservative turn see conservatism conspiracy 171, 187, 189–194, 196–197, 201 cosmopolitanism 197 Cossacks 100 culture(s) 3–4, 8, 11, 12–14, 31, 32, 48, 50, 56, 60, 66, 67, 97, 105, 116, 117, 129, 146, 158, 170, 171; Byzantine 72; and civilization 3, 19n3, 49, 71; classical 158; “ecology of ” (see Novikov); European 143, 151, 155, 157, 158, 161n4; gay 120; global 2, 73; Greek 142; imperial 161n4; Institute of 171; Italian 148; Italian Ministry of 151; mass (see popular); Orthodox 17, 171; popular 115–116, 122, 134; Roman 142, 147; Russian 3–4, 17, 40, 48, 49, 56, 57n4, 61, 64, 70, 74, 118, 120, 126, 143, 144, 169, 171; Renaissance 148; Russian ministry of 3–4, 64, 91, 118, 144, 147, 151, 160; Soviet 151; traditional 73; Vatican 148; Western 124, 151 culturology 10–11, 14, 21n14, 59, 157, 171–172, 180 Danilevsky, N. 1, 9, 11, 13, 21n12, 33, 42n3, 59, 65, 71, 170–171, 194, 199 Degot’, E. 151 Deliagin, M. 191 Deriagin, V. 198 Dissernet 164–166 Dittmer, J. 115–116

Index  223 diversity: in America 131; civilizational 14, 88; cultural 65, 73; ethnic 64–65, 73; ideological 4; regional 88; religious 17, 60–61, 64–65, 70, 74–75 Dostoevsky, F. 120, 195, 198 Drobizheva, L. 66 Dugin, A. 13, 17, 18, 90, 171, 191, 200–201 Durkheim, É. 206 Eagleton, T. 6, 20n8 Eastwood, C. 129 Efimov, V. 93, 103 Eisenstadt, S. 1, 206–208, 210–211, 216 Ekiert, G. 213 Elias, N. 206–208, 211 empire 13, 17, 19, 30, 32, 33, 36, 69, 73, 75, 88, 89, 92, 95–99, 101, 103, 105, 107n33, 146, 148, 188 ; affirmative action 38; American; British ; Byzantine 94, 95, 158; Eurasian 14, 17; Habsburg 37; multicultural 95–99, multiethnic 16, 105; Orthodox 95; Ottoman 37; Roman 134; Romanov 37, 38; Russian 13, 15, 16, 34, 41, 60, 63, 91–94, 97, 189; Soviet 73 Engels, F. 6–7 Enlightenment 9, 20n10, 52, 179, 208, 215 ethnicity 37, 38, 39, 60–61, 63–66, 72, 74, 173, 178, 181n19; see also multiethnicity ethnonationalism see nationalism Eurasia 4, 13, 15, 37, 61–65, 74, 76n4, 88, 94, 102, 171, 174, 178, 207 Eurasian Economic Union 5, 39, 61–63, 65, 75, 189 Eurasian Youth Union 89–90 Eurasianism 8, 13–14, 37, 61, 76n9, 173, 181n17, 210; classical 13, 37; see also neo-Eurasanism Eurocentrism 9, 41, 207 Europe 1, 8, 11, 12, 14, 18, 20n12, 29, 30, 31, 33–41, 42n3, 67, 72, 75, 94–95, 115, 118–122, 142–161, 200, 207; Central 35, 212, 215; Eastern 35, 212, 215; Northern 1, 15; Western 1, 13, 15, 30, 31, 33–41, 208, 215 European Union 121, 147, 197 Europeanization 37, 61 Fadeev, R. 195, 199 far-right 89

Feofanov, K. 167, 177 Filippov, M. 148 Fisher, B. 128 Florovskii, G. 195, 199 formation: Soviet Marxist concept 47–57 Frank, S. 12 Franklin, S. 30, 192–194 Freeden, M. 2, 20n9, 180n4 Fukuyama, F. 55–56 Fursov, A: 90, 103 Gaaze, K. 68 Galeotti, M. 5 Galkina, O. 167, 175–176, 178 Gaman-Golovutina, O. 94 Geertz, G. 6–8 Gergiev, V. 142 gender 14, 15, 115–136 geopolitics 3, 10, 13, 16–17, 18, 19n4, 27, 37, 38, 54, 62, 88, 89, 97, 99, 105, 171, 174, 176, 178, 179, 180, 181n17, 210; popular 115–136 Georgia 10, 68, 172, 187 Gerzhenzon, M. 197 Gintovt see Beliaev-Gintovt Glaz’ev, S. 191 Glazunov, I. 186 globalism 104, 170 globalizatsiia see globalization globalization 3, 6, 13, 14, 18, 93, 117, 124, 128, 167, 168, 180, 199 Gogol, N. 195–196 Golubev, V. 64 Gopnik, A. 133 Gorbachev, M. 18, 51–53, 56 Gove, M. 132 Graf, J. 171, 190, 201n4 Great Britain 52, 150; see also UK Grossraum 180 Groys, B. 161n8 Gryzlov, B. 172 Gudkov, L. 202n5 Guizot, F. 1, 8–9, 20n12, Gumilev, L. 12–13, 59, 66, 174, 191 Gumilev, N. 12 Haug, W. 53–54 Hegel, G.W.F. 12, 195 Herberstein, S. F. von 181n10 Herder, J.G. 12 Herman, E. 7, 20n7 Herzen, A. 34 homophobia 133, 135

224 Index Huntington, Samuel 2, 7, 12, 16–17, 27, 32, 56, 59, 93, 115, 170, 172–173, 178, 210–211 Iakovlev, A. 54 Iakunin, V. 63 Ianakov, A. 166–167, 176, 178 Iaretskii, Iu. 167 Identitarian 181n13 Identity: Christian 105; civic 65–66; civilizational 3, 8, 11, 19n2, 30, 31, 38, 40–42, 63–64, 69–73, 116–118, 120–121, 124, 126, 134–135, 174–175, 209, 213, 215; cultural 1, 32, 61, 71, 144, 173; Eurasian 210; European 14, 36, 154; gender 15; geopolitical 2; imperial 2, 30; macro-political (see political); national 2, 10, 31, 33, 35, 36, 39, 40, 59, 60, 70, 71, 92, 120, 142, 146; Orthodox 105, 210; political 38, 39, 42; politics 15, 117, 170; postcolonial 192; regional 100, 105; Russian 4, 9, 10, 17, 18, 28–46, 69–73; Russian European 145, 157, 188; spiritual 40; state- 8, 88, 118 ideologeme 7, 19, 20n8, 20n9, 56 ideological: authenticity 6, 19n5; crisis 59; discourse 3–8; posture 29, 41, 42n1, state apparatus 7 ideology 17, 20n8, 20n9, 29, 38, 42n1, 67, 68, 87–89, 103, 128, 170, 195, 202n6, 208, 210–211, 215, 217; Church 76n15; civilizational 5; conservative 62, 91, 96, 165, 180n4, 181n16; as discourse 3–8; fascist 63; gender 135; imperial 13, 61; Judaeo-Masonic 193; Marxist 6, 10; Marxist-Leninist 53, 216; official 172, 179; perestroika 50–53, 56; political 173; pro-Kremlin 168; of the Russian people 199–200; Soviet 38, 171; state 4; statist 70; see also civilizationism Il’in, I. 194, 196 Il’in, Viktor 52 Il’in, Vladimir 213 Il’ina, A. 168 Ilarion, Metropolitan of Kiev 196, 198 Imperialism 17, 27, 37, 60, 62; Russian 75, 101 Interethnic 43n4, 70, 101; Council for Interethnic relations 64–66 Institute for National Strategy 89, 95, 106n8

Institute for Russian Civilization 16, 89, 106n11, 171, 187–202 Intolerance see tolerance Ioann Kronstadt 195 Ioann, Metropolitan of St. Petersburg and Ladoga 60, 73, 186–187, 196, 198, 200 Iosif Volotskii 198 Ippolitov, A. 144, 146 Islam 1, 14, 15–16, 21n18, 29, 60, 61, 94, 102, 116, 135, 142, 143, 176 Ivan the Terrible 195–196, 199 Ivanov, A. 100–101 Izborsk Club 63, 89–91, 100, 106n9, 191, 194, 200, 202n6 Jaspers, K. 207 Judaism 15, 16, 190, 197–198 Kachel, C. 129 Kagan, R. 115 Kalashnikova, L. 167, 177 Kan’shin, A. 167, 175 Kandinsky, V. 145–146 Kant, I. 53–54 Kapustin, B. 8, 18 Karaganov, S. 28, 121 Kara-Murza, S. 18, 56, 189 Katasonov, V. 90 Katzenstein, P. 211 Kavelin, K. 195, 199–200 Kazakhstan 13, 62; Kazakhs 15 Khodakovskii, E. 167, 170, 175 Kholmogorov, E. 92, 101 Khomiakov 194, 196 Khrushchev, N. 51 Kiev 34 Kireevskii, I. 194, 196 Kirill, Patriarch of All Rus 28, 60, 69–75, 97, 146, 161n7, 166, 174 Kiselev, D. 126 Kolesov, V. 193 Korovin, V. 89 Kozhinov, V. 195, 198 Kozlovskii, V. 213 Kruglov, A. 72 kul’turologiia see culturology Kurakin, D. 213 Kuznetsov, S. 152 L’vov, N. 145 Laclau, E. 2 Laruelle, M. 5, 29, 66

Index  225 Lavrov, S. 121 Lazarev, V. 12 Leite, N. 5 Leninism 5; see also Marxism-Leninism Leont’ev, K. 33, 65 Lepekhin, V. 168–169, 176, 178–179 LGBT 126 liberalism 5, 14, 15, 19, 20n9, 29, 55–56, 88, 106n4, 129, 171, 180, 181n13, 196, 199, 210, 216 Likhachev, D. 157 Limonov, E. 142 Linde, F. 28–29 Makarychev, A. 6 Malakhov, V. 189 Malinetskii, G. 90 Mamontov, V. 125 Mannheim, K. 18–19 Markov, S. 136n11 Martin, T. 38 Marx, K. 6–7, 12, 19n6, 47–48, 50 Marxism 5–7, 10–11, 12, 17–18; see also Marxism-Leninism Marxism-Leninism 4, 5, 10, 47, 48, 52–55, 59, 209, 211, 216 masculinity 115–136; European 119, 124; hegemonic 117, 128; national 120, 121; and Obama 122, 124–125, 127–128, 130, 133, 135, 136n6, 136n8; and Putin 116, 121–127, 128, 130–135, 136n8; Russian 120, 124, 125, 134; subordinate 116; toxic 130; traditional 125, 127, 129, 130, 131, 133, 135; and Trump 125–126, 129–130, 132–135, 136n11; Western 115, 116, 120, 122, 128, 129, 135 Mauss, M. 206 Mchedlov, M. 10, 48–50 Medinskii, V. 121, 166–167, 169, 181n7–9 Medvedev, D. 62 Meinicke, F. 11 Mel’gunov, N. 35 Mel’nikov, K. 145 Menshikov, M. 36 Merkel, A. 62 Mezhuev, B. 28 Mikhailov, V. 65–66 Miliukov, P. 36 Miller, C. 5, 8 Milovzorova, M. 168, 176

Mitrofanova, A. 10, 189 Morozov, A. 144, 159 Morozov, N. 168 Morozov, V. 41, 192 Mosal’kova, T. 119 Mosse, G. 132 multiculturalism 70, 76n12, 95, 101, 119, 142, 170, 178 multiethnicity 14, 16, 17, 28, 40–41, 61, 63, 64, 67, 70–71, 88, 95–96, 98–99, 105 multipolarity 70, 170–174 Muslims 13, 15 Mustafaev, F. 168, 177 muzhik 120–122, 124, 126–127, 132, 134 Narochnitskaia, N. 13–14, 191 Naryshkin, S. 64 nationalism 5, 14, 27, 31, 33, 36, 68, 72, 135, 191, 193; American 132–133; civilizational 28, 174, 188–189; ethno- (ethnic) 17, 19n4, 42, 64, 66, 67, 107n35, 191; German 9; imperial 17, 66; multi- 15; Russian 9, 29, 40, 62, 171, 186–187, 189, 191, 195 Nebol’sin, A. 157 Nelson, B. 116, 215 neoconservatism see conservatism neo-Eurasianism 13, 17, 142, 180, 211; see also Eurasianism neoimperialism see imperialism neoliberalism 41, 150–151, 154, 160 neo-Slavophilism see Slavophilism New Right 11, 17 Nikitova, S. 167, 176, 178 Nikodim (Rotov), Metropolitan 70 Nilus, S. see The Protocols of the Elders of Zion Norkin, A. 91 Novikov, T. 143, 154–159 Novikova, L. 50, 57n4 O’Hagan, J. 116 Obama, B. 122–125, 127–128, 130, 133, 135, 136n6, 136n8 Oittinen, V. 19n6 Osipov, V. 171 Orthodox Church (Russian) 41, 62, 69–73, 89–90, 93, 94, 96, 97, 161n7, 187, 195, 209; see also Ukrainian Orthodox Church

226 Index Orthodoxy 2, 9, 11, 13, 37, 60–61, 66, 74, 143, 147, 158, 192–194, 197, 200 osobyi put’ see special path Pain, E. 17, 28 Palmyra 142–143, 159–160n2 Panarin, A. 13–14, 55, 60, 171 Pasholok, M. 135n5 patriarchy 127, 131 patriotism 4, 5, 42, 56, 59, 62, 63, 70, 88, 89, 93, 104, 166, 168, 179, 191–193 Peremetin, G. 62 Platonov, O. 16, 60, 170–171, 186–201 Pobedonostsev, K. 195 Pogodin, M. 34 Poliakov, Iu. 194 Pope Francis 145–146, 161n7 populism 1, 5, 14, 15, 165; aesthetic 158, 160 post-colonialism 13, 27, 99, 192 Prigov, D. 158 Prokhanov, A. 62–63, 100, 191, 194, 200 Prokhorov, G. 193 Prokopenko, I. 97 Pronicheva, E. 152 Protestantism 143 The Protocols of the Elders of Zion 171, 190, 195–196, 199 Prozorova, Iu. 215 Pushkin, A. 195–196, 198–199 Putin, V. 1, 3–5, 8, 14–16, 18, 19n4, 60–69, 72–75, 115, 118, 121–136, 145, 164, 166, 172, 189 Putinism 5, 28, 40 racism 102, 132, 178 Radvanyi, J. 5 Rahr, A. 122 Ratzel, F. 174 Reimers, N. 179 Remizov, M. 18, 28, 96 Reshetnikov, L. 92 Revzin, G. 149 right wing (right-wing) 6, 36, 70, 88, 91, 129, 133, 142, 165, 170, 171, 181n13, 189, 195; see also alt-right; far-right; New Right Rogozin, D. 122–123, 166–169 Romanticism 9 Rostovtsev, A. see Dissernet Rousseau, J. 170 Rozanov, M. 144, 154, 159

Rozanov, V. 198 Rudakov, A. 69 Rus’ 69, 72, 93, 94, 96, 158 Russkiy Mir Foundation 89 Said, E. 7 Sakharov, A. 54 Salakhova, A. 144 Savitskii, P. 37, 174 Scherrer, J. 11 Schmitt, C. 11 Schot (painter) 115 Sedakova, O. 147 Semenko, V. 73 Senin, A. 191, 193, 201n3 separatism 75, 99, 160 Serebrennikov, K. 143 sexism 131, 132, 135 Shaburova, O. 120 Shershnev, L. 170 Shevardnadze, E. 53–54 Shkaratan, O. 211–212 Shnirelman, V. 29, 178, 191 Shuklin, A. 168, 175–177 Slavophilism 9, 11, 16, 34, 36, 118, 169, 170, 188, 189, 194, 196–197, 199–200 Smirnova, A. 144 Smith, J. 206–207 Solov’ev, V. 195–197 Sonderweg see special path Sorokin, P. 11 Soviet Union 11, 12, 15, 18, 42n2, 51, 52, 56, 87, 149, 165, 170, 172, 176, 186; see also USSR special path 87, 88, 91–95, 105, 108n37, 142, 146, 201n3 Spengler, O. 1, 8, 11–13, 21n14, 21n15, 27, 59, 206 spenglerism 8, 11–13 Stalin, J. 38 Stalinism 5, 145, 148–151, 158 Starikov, N. 93 state-civilization (civilization as state) 3, 14, 18, 28, 40–41, 63, 65, 75, 88, 118, 166, 173–174, 189 statism 5, 16, 29, 70, 75 Stepanov, A. 171 Stepun, F. 12 Struve, P. 33 Surkov, V. 28 Svistunov, M. 167, 175–176 Syria 93, 133, 142, 160

Index  227 Tatars 15, 42, 76n6, 100 Taylor, B. 5 Teper, Yu. 68 Thierry, A. 34 Thom, F. 68 Tikhomirov, L. 194, 199 Tikhomirov, M. 191 Tikhon (Emel’ianov), Metropolitan of Novosibirsk and Berdsk 97 Tikhon (Shevkunov), Bishop 69, 90, 148, 158, 194 Tishkov, V. 43n4, 66 Titarenko, L. 215 Tobreluts, O. 144, 155 tolerance 94, 119, 129, 135 Toynbee, A. 1, 11, 21n15, 27, 30, 59, 206 Tregulova, Z. 146 Trofimov, O. 93–94 Troitskii, A. 127 Troitskii, E. 16, 18, 170, 201n4 Trubetskoi, E. 195 Trubetskoi, N. 37, 75 Trump, D. 1, 68, 125–126, 129–130, 132–134, 136n11 Tsipko, A. 55, 92 tsivilizatsiia 3, 4, 9, 21n12, 87, 166, 168, 176, 188 tsivilizatsionnost’ 179 Tsygankov, A. 5, 29, 210 Tsymburskii, V. 32–33 Tsypin, G. 150 Turans 37 Turkey 175; Turkic (languages, people) 13, 76n6, 102, 174; Turks 15 UK 164; see also Great Britain Ukraine 5, 6, 19n4, 40, 65, 72, 74, 75, 93, 99, 133, 142, 160, 170, 174, 187, 191, 199 Ukrainian Orthodox Church 75 Umland, A. 68 United States 5, 11, 12, 14, 18, 52, 104, 123–124, 120, 122, 126, 128, 129, 135, 151, 164, 190, 199; see also America universalism 2, 8–11, 38, 41, 50, 173, 215

USA see United States Uspenskii, V. 144 USSR 38, 48, 51, 56n3, 63, 92, 102, 142, 149, 154, 157, 215; see also Soviet Union Uvarov, S. 195 Valdai Discussion Club 62, 65–66, 121, 128 values 8, 11, 16, 17, 42n1, 48, 50, 60, 70, 95, 100, 116, 119, 123, 129, 174, 175, 178, 121 ; Byzantine 158; Christian 65, 96, 121, 124, 128, 135n3; conservative 6, 75, 105; of Enlightenment 179; eternal 92; European 41, 94, 95, 121, 124, 143, 154; family 124, 128, 135n3; gender 127, 129; human 10, 49–53, 56; imperial 70, 76n15; Jewish 190; liberal 120, 129; masculine 125; national 215; right-wing 91; post-Christian 121; religious 121; right-wing 91; rivalry of 67; Russian 66; spiritual 69, 73, 74; system of 4–5, 6, 8; traditional 63, 65, 66, 71, 73, 94, 121, 125, 128, 143, 154; Western 121 Vasil’ev, L.eonid 212 Verkhovskii, A. 17, 28 Vernadskii, V. 181n18 Vladimir the Great, Prince 71–72 Volodin, V. 63 Voltaire 170 Voropaev, V. 196 Weber, M. 206–207 Widdis, E. 30 Wittrock, B. 214 Yeltsin, B. 4, 16, 121, 170–171 Yuval-Davis, N. 116–117 Zaitsev, A. 158 Zen’kovskii, V. 195 Zholtovskii, I. 145 Zionism 198, 199 Ziuganov, G. 16–18, 28, 189