Russian Messianism: A Roundtable Discussion

"Could it be that in the West today, it is we who hate Russia for having its own distinctive roots, its own history and attachments?"

“Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow" by Adolph Northen

Several weeks ago, Landmarks published Paul Grenier’s essay on American Messianism. In the following, we present a conversation on the topic of Russian messianism that transpired, remotely, over the course of several weeks.  

About the participants:  Gordon Hahn is a political scientist who has written numerous articles and five books on Russia and international affairs.  His most recent essay for Landmarks was Berdyaev and the Ukraine War.  Victor Taki is a historian interested in imperial Russia’s Balkan entanglements and Russian intellectual history of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries.  His most recent essay in Landmarks was on the topic of containment.  Paul Robinson is a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. His published works include, most recently, books on Russian conservatism and Russian liberalism. Paul Grenier is the editor of Landmarks and a founder of the Simone Weil Center.  His interests include political philosophy and Russian intellectual history.  – The Editors

GRENIER: Sober consideration of the topic of Russian messianism is quite difficult today.  The public, that is to say the public in the West, has been primed for more than a century to take it on faith that Russia has insatiable ambitions. First it was Czarist Russia that wanted to conquer all of Europe and large chunks of Eurasia. Then it was the USSR that wanted to conquer the world. As Victor Taki recently pointed out here in Landmarks, though the early Bolsheviks did indeed have such unrealistic ambitions, and even though most Westerners have assumed that those same ambitions persisted right up until Perestroika, in reality the USSR returned to Russia’s centuries-old tradition of great-power balancing already by the mid-1930s. 

Today, in the wake of Russia’s post-Feb 24, 2022, invasion of Ukraine, it has been easy to evoke once again the image of a ravenous Russia intent on devouring its neighbors. As Joe Biden put it just this past June 8 in Paris, “Putin is not going to stop at Ukraine. All of Europe will be threatened.”  With such persistent messaging over such a long time, it is difficult to counter the perception that Russia is just naturally bent on global domination.

The exaggerations and falseness of this picture have, of course, been regularly critiqued on these pages.  And yet it would be equally false to fall into the opposite extreme and to pretend that Russia has no ambitions at all even in its near-abroad, or to claim that Russia has no messianic thinking.  

At the risk of falling into pop-psychology, it also seems to me that the Russian mindset tends toward dogmatic certainty, and this brings with it a certain proclivity toward messianic thinking.  What I mean to say is that it does not come naturally to Russians to say: ‘Well, such and such is what I happen to think – but it’s just my personal opinion.’  No. What they think is true, is true as such and for everyone.  This ‘typically Russian temperament’ has both strengths and weaknesses. In the best case it makes Russians philosophers.  In the worst case it makes them tyrannical.  Robinson, in his book on Russian liberalism, underlines a similar point when he notes what I have also often marveled at: Russian-style liberals would cheerfully rule their fellow ‘stupid Russians’ with an iron fist and cram liberalism down their throats whether they like it or not.  

And yet this same Russian temperament does not necessarily lead to the ‘crusading’ messianic mindset.  It may do so.   And yet, as was just recently illustrated in Gordon Hahn’s Landmarks article on the celebrated Russian philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev (1874 – 1948), a Russian philosopher’s certainty about the truth of his own vision may still be very distinct from messianic crusaderism of the sort condemned by Hans Morgenthau. Morgenthau, of course, was one of the founders of the American school of realism in international affairs. 

In that same essay, Hahn points out that Berdyaev considered that the Christian faith, being true, is therefore of universal importance. Berdyaev also held that Russia, Ukraine and Byelorussia belong to a single cultural-political space. No doubt by today’s standards, that already suffices to constitute a dangerous kind of messianism. But does it?  

As Hahn pointed out (and this accords with my own reading of Berdyaev), Berdyaev was a thinker of the type who, despite (or rather, because of) his ‘metaphysical commitments,’ realized perfectly well that what may be ultimately and universally true does not coincide with what is contingently necessary and appropriate in particular places and times.  He knew full well that different peoples have their own histories and values that cannot be simply ignored. To the extent, then, that one applies the word ‘messianic’ to Berdyaev, or indeed to many other important Russian thinkers, it should be with the caveat that theirs is not a ‘crusading’ kind of messianism, but something more subtle and complex.   

I will take it as a given, then, unless anyone objects, that it is important to disaggregate the different varieties of messianism that may exist in Russia.  

As for the war in Ukraine, in my own view, its causes are almost the opposite of how they are portrayed in mainstream sources such as Foreign Affairs magazine or U.S. State Department briefings.  Or, even if one were to accept, for the sake of argument, that Russia has always aimed at violently reconquering Ukraine (and Byelorussia), and that the prospect of NATO naval bases opening up in Crimea had nothing at all to do with Putin’s decisions, even in that case it seems to me that the case of Ukraine is sui generis, and has no obvious implications for Russian messianism as such. Therefore, I propose bracketing, for the sake of our present discussion, the Ukraine war, and focussing instead on Russian messianism in more general terms. 

HAHN: I think you are right about the typical assumptions held in the West not just about Russia, but more broadly about ‘regimes like Russia;’ they indeed get in the way of a sober analysis of non-Western ideological realities.

Democratic Peace Theory — an outgrowth of utopian republican messianism — turns out to be a curiously convenient hypothesis. Since democratic regimes supposedly never go to war against each other, it can and should be inferred that authoritarianism is the cause of all wars. In this way, wars between ostensible or self-declared democracies and authoritarian regimes are always the result of actions by the authoritarian regimes’, inasmuch as they are inevitable deviations from the eschatological (i.e., the ‘correct’ ‘end of history’) line. Thus, authoritarian regimes are always to blame for the existence of war, and it is they who force democracies to fight ‘to defend themselves’ and ‘make the world safe for democracy.’ If a Western coup designed to ‘expand the community of democracies’ leads to civil war in a country that Westerners neither understand nor particularly care to understand, and in response an authoritarian regime intervenes, it is the authoritarian regime and only the authoritarian regime that bears responsibility.  The authoritarian country’s military action was not provoked by Western policies and their consequences but rather by the backward culture of the authoritarians, who are inherently and permanently hell-bent on destroying democracy. In this same vein, we often hear that ‘Putin’s Russia’, or ‘Xi’s China’ hate us for our ‘democratic way of life’ and so want to destroy it.  Therefore, supposedly, after Ukraine, Russia will march into the Baltics, China into Taiwan, etc. 

But could it be that in the West today, it is we who hate Russia for having its own distinctive roots, its own history and attachments? Undoubtedly, many in the West today do hate Russia for having a home and honoring its own traditions. Attachment to religious tradition is viewed as a sacrilege in the West, a grave sin against secularity. 

I think it is quite possible that this dynamic, fueled by the West’s non-acceptance of Russian difference (its non-liberalism, and etc.), could spark a Russian overreaction and give rise to a new Russian messianism that goes well beyond the original religious-cultural idea of Russia as the Third Rome.  This might be sparked by the NATO-Russia-Ukrainian war, or perhaps by some even greater cataclysm.

Will Russia become more like its enemy, the way the West — US, Europe, Israel — are becoming more like their enemies, real and imagined? Will a Russian reaction to its recent secular past and the present secular threat from the West counter with its own, aggressive and ‘crusading’ form of religious messianism? I think that there is good reason to think that it very well might. Putting aside the risk of nuclear war, it is not beyond imagining that Russia and the West could fall into a long conflict of two incompatible messianisms.

GRENIER: What ideas, and which writers do you see as possible sources of a ‘crusading’ Russian messianism of this more dangerous sort?  Can one classify Russian messianisms into benevolent, malevolent, and intermediate (or ambiguous) categories?

HAHN:  I am not sure one can neatly classify ideologies as falling, as you suggest, neatly into one or another of those categories. After all, what may seem ‘benevolent’ in theory may become malevolent in practice.  But there are clearly some rather wacky ideas – currently of little real importance inside Russia, to be sure – that could become important in the aftermath of a cataclysm.  

An example of what I have in mind are such anti-Western and messianic tendencies that have been around in Russia already for a long time, as illustrated by Mikhail Yuriev’s 2006 futuristic novel Tret’ya Imperiya (The Third Empire). Yuriev (1959 – 2019), a molecular biologist by training, was also a successful businessman and a member of the Russian State Duma.  In his novel, a revived Russian Orthodox, quasi-tsarist Russia defeats the West in a nuclear war and comes to rule the world.  Yuriev reflects here a Russian resentment against the West and desire for revenge. 

This is an extreme example, and recent trends are less aggressive and more subtle, but one aspect of Russia’s new direction at any rate is clear: Russia is moving out of its localized world into a wider regional or even global (‘universal’) framework.  

The Russian political philosophers Aleksandr Panarin (1940 – 2003) and Aleksandr Dugin have been the most prominent examples of the contemporary semi-universalism of neo-Eurasianism. Panarin proposed a global Russian-Eurasian vision and ambitious Eurasian integration projects. For Panarin, the main creative success of Russian (rossiiskaya, i.e., Russian in the broader, non-ethnic sense) civilization is its capacity to form large interethnic syntheses, a capacity that was encouraged by its mastering of the vast expanses of the steppes. There is a hint here of Alexander Pushkin’s ‘Russian otzyvchivost’ so famously praised by Dostoevsky during his speech in praise of Russia’s national poet.  The word ‘otzyvchivost’ refers here to the ability to enter sympathetically into the spirit of foreign cultures, to understand them from within and on their own terms. It is not of special concern for Panarin that the West “not only did not accept (Russia) into the ‘European home’ but tried to block and isolate her within the post-Soviet space using anti-Russian sentiments.”  

Many Russians, including, it would appear, President Vladimir Putin, have been influenced by much of the program proposed by Panarin in his 1998 volume, History’s Revenge (Revansh Istorii).  According to Panarin, Russia’s ‘messianic’ role is to “propose to the peoples of Eurasia a new, powerful, super-energetic synthesis” based on “people’s conservatism” and “civilizational diversity.”  The fundamental tenet of the Russian-Eurasian “mission of people’s conservatism” is “socio-cultural conservatism,” the goal of which is to preserve Eurasia’s and the world’s traditional cultures, religious mysticisms, and ethnic and “civilizational diversity and pluralism” from Western-framed globalization, cultural homogenization, and the left-liberal intelligentsia’s attraction to mass, urban, “semi-bohemianism” (polubogema) and “consumer hedonism.” Panarin believes that Orthodox Eurasia will give birth to a “new historical paradigm of humankind.”  Despite its economic weakness relative to both the West and to Eurasia’s China, Russia can lead Eurasia and the world into a new post-industrial, eco-cultural, multi-civilizational world that rejects the anti-cultural ‘technologism,’ consumerism, and homogeneity of the ‘soulless’ American worldview which threatens nature and national cultures.  To those familiar with the earlier Panarin, it is apparent that the recent writings of Dugin on ‘multipolarism’ are largely derivative. 

GRENIER:  For the sake of non-Russian speakers, I think it needs to be noted, Gordon, that the point of view expressed in the novel Tret’ya Imperiya, at least at present, has no following in Russia. The only reviews I could find on Yandex.ru – in other words, reviews written by Russians in Russia -- held the novel by Yuriev up to ridicule.¹  But your point remains for all that valid.  Thinking along roughly similar lines might, as you say, become important in the aftermath of a cataclysm …  

Victor Taki, what are your thoughts?

TAKI: They say that no matter what Russians begin to build they always end up producing a tank. Similarly, no matter how much I try to reflect on politics or philosophy, I always end up writing about history. 

I understand by messianism a belief about a special mission of one’s country to save the world, or parts thereof; it is a belief that strongly influences, even if it doesn’t completely determine, a nation’s international conduct. Related to messianism is exceptionalism, or a belief in the spiritual superiority of one’s nation, a belief which is often religious in origin. To the extent that exceptionalism asserts a particular community’s special relation to God, it does not necessarily imply messianism, which is about one’s special mission with respect to others or the world. At the same time, I cannot think of a historical example of messianism that would not be based on a form of exceptionalism. 

Any attempt to discuss the Russian dimension of exceptionalism and messianism cannot avoid the proverbial theory of “Moscow the Third Rome,” expressed most clearly by the monk Philotheus in an address to the Grand Duke Vasilii III in the early sixteenth century. It is important to recognize, however, that this concept asserted Moscow’s status as the only existing “City of God,” and did not imply a mission to liberate or restore the previous two Romes that had fallen. Just as the concept of Moscow as the new Jerusalem promoted a century and a half later by Patriarch Nikon, the notion of “Moscow the Third Rome” did not come with a geopolitical program attached. It should thus be seen as an example of religiously based national exceptionalism, but not messianism. 

An unmistakable Byzantine influence transpires in both of these variants of early Russian exceptionalism, formulated, respectively, soon after the end of the Mongol dominance and in the wake of the Time of Troubles (1598–1613). In both cases, the confirmation of the country’s special relation to God was founded not so much on its worldly greatness, as on the magnitude of its travails and suffering (as was the case with Job and all those whom God specially loves). The echoes of this “exceptionalism of suffering” would later be heard in Russian literature and historiography long after the Muscovite political theology was overtaken by the Petrine reforms and the Westernization that they entailed. 

The history of the transformation of Russia carried out by Peter the Great, who reigned from 1682 – 1725, serves as a useful reminder of how early this religiously-based national exceptionalism was challenged, if not displaced altogether, by a very different elite mentality. The self-centeredness of Muscovy gave way to a thirst for European fashions and meanings. If Russia remained exceptional in the minds of the Westernized elites of the post-Petrine period, it did so by virtue of the exceptionality of Peter the Great, and the scale and success of “the learning from Europe” that he had initiated. Nicholas Riasanovsky’s history of “the Petrine myth” in Russian culture provides some striking illustrations thereof (I am thinking, in particular, of the 19^th century Russian historian and journalist Mikhail Pogodin’s half joking proposal to rename Russia “Petroviia”). Without denying the existence of Russian exceptionalism, one therefore has to recognize its limitations and discontinuities.

Similar limitations and discontinuities characterize the history of Russian messianism, whose first historical manifestation can be seen in Muscovy’s relations with the “Orthodox East.” Russia’s ties to the co-religionist elites of South-Eastern Europe constituted perhaps the most important form of its “soft power” before 1917. “Protection,” or even “liberation” of Russia’s Orthodox co-religionists provided, at first glance, the main motive behind the long series of wars that Russia waged on the Ottoman Empire between the late XVII and the late XIX century.

A closer examination, however, makes it necessary to add multiple qualifiers to that statement. First, the mission to liberate the co-religionists was clearly suggested to the Russian tsars by the Christian elites of Southeastern Europe themselves. Its earliest iterations actually came from the advocates of Union with Rome, whose Renaissance and post-Renaissance Popes repeatedly attempted to draw Muscovy into the Holy League. Second, the tsars were remarkably slow to assume this mission and abandon the generally peaceful relations with Ottomans that had been the norm during the early modern period. Third, considerable westernization of the Russian elites over the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century explains why the tsarist military and diplomats initially conceived of “the Eastern policy” in secular terms -- that is, as a mission to extract the Balkan peoples from Oriental “barbarism” and to bring them into European “civilization.” 

Only when Russia’s “Eastern policy” stumbled over the rising Balkan nationalisms and a European coalition (at the time of the Crimean war) did the Russian elites reinterpret their historical mission in specifically anti-Western, Pan-Orthodox or Pan-Slavic terms (one thinks here about Feodor Tiutchev, Mikhail Pogodin, Nikolai Danilevsky, Rostislav Fadeev, and Ivan Aksakov, among other leading lights of the Slavic cause in the 19^th century). However, as soon as it happened, the tension, and even irreconcilability, between the Pan-Slavic and Pan-Orthodox variants of this mission were brought to the fore by the philosopher Konstantin Leontiev (1831-1891), whose religious reflections were otherwise more closely connected to questions of foreign policy than was the case with any other representative of Russian religious thought. All these considerations suggest that, although tangible, Russian pre-revolutionary messianism was subject to as many qualifiers as was Russian exceptionalism. One therefore should not overestimate its place in the mentality of the Russian rulers and elites, let alone its role in shaping Imperial Russia’s actual foreign political conduct.

As far as the post-1917 period is concerned, the revolutionary messianism of the early Soviet years is equally undeniable. Yuri Slezkine’s recent book The House of Government draws some important parallels between the mentality of the “Old Bolsheviks” and that of the radical Protestants of the early days of the Reformation, such as Thomas Muntzer or Jan of Leiden. One wonders, however, how specifically “Russian” this early Soviet messianism actually was, and how long it actually lasted. In the domain of foreign policy, Stalin’s “Thermidor” of the mid-1930s consisted in the effort to essentially revive the Entente by way of “collective security” agreements and negotiations with a reluctant France, and with the even more reluctant Britain. Stalin’s (in)famous non-aggression pact in a sense amounted to an attempt to follow the 1914 advice of Peter Durnovo to Nicholas II.² However different, both policies strike one as an example of realpolitik (even if a failed one) rather than of revolutionary messianism.

Other participants in this discussion are much better prepared to comment on the messianism of Berdyaev and the Eurasianists. I will just note that their visions of Russia’s role in world history or its mission with respect to the peoples of Eurasia were formulated largely outside of Russia and had precious little impact on Moscow’s domestic policies or its international conduct prior to 1991. The latter period was much more influenced by the logic of bipolarity and the rhetoric of competition between and/or the coexistence of the two systems. As to the post – 1991 period, it revealed, in my opinion, not only a considerable interest towards the Eurasianist ideas within Russia, but also their limited ability to play the role of a common language between Russia and the countries of the “global south.” The latter must necessarily take a dim view of the Eurasianist metaphysics as they continue to speak the quasi-Marxist language of anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism once heard from Moscow. 

In these conditions, the discourse of multipolarity might well play the role of a common denominator between these disparate tendencies. Within this approach, Russia’s mission could be defined as promoting on a global scale the old European notion of international politics as a balance between sovereign entities. In fact, Russia’s continued existence as a such an entity very much depends on the success of this mission.

PAUL ROBINSON:

Victor Taki makes an important point about the relationship between exceptionalism and messianism. The former does not necessarily lead to the other but is perhaps a necessary prerequisite for it. In order to understand Russian messianism, one needs first therefore to analyze the nature of Russian exceptionalism. This is often misunderstood, as people tend to imagine it as being the same as Western, or perhaps more narrowly American, exceptionalism. But the two are significantly different, meaning that the resultant Russian messianism is different too.

One may view exceptionalism as having two components: a sense of difference; and a sense of excellence. Like all forms of identity, this rests on comparison with some ‘other.’ For the West, the other is everybody else. The West views itself both as different from and superior to the rest of the world. Its messianism is thus universalistic. It sees its role as spreading its own excellence to everybody else.

By contrast, Russia’s point of comparison is more limited. It is the West. Russian exceptionalism involves emphasizing what differentiates Russia from the West and in what ways Russia might be said to embody some excellence that the West lacks.

This means that Russian exceptionalism and thus Russian messianism are not inherently universalistic in the manner of their Western counterparts. They are more concerned with separating Russia from the West than with converting everybody else to Russian ways. Communism, to my mind, was something of an aberration in this regard, and unlike Berdyaev, who viewed communism as a manifestation of Russian messianism, I would tend to regard it instead as a form of Western universalism artificially and forcibly imposed on Russia.

All that, though, raises the question of what it is that differentiates Russia from the West. Generally speaking, Russians’ answers to this question have emphasized spirituality. Very few have ever claimed that Russia’s political, economic, or even cultural institutions are superior. Russian exceptionalists have admitted that in these areas, Russia lags behind and has much to learn from the West. Russia, though, is supposedly a land in which people have retained a spiritual frame of mind, an ‘all-unity’ (vseedinstvo), a ‘wholeness of spirit’, that the individualistic, materialistic, and increasingly atheistic West has lost.

Russia’s mission derives from this sense of exceptionalism. It has historically not been a political or economic mission (communism again I regard as an aberration, more Western than Russian). Rather it has been a spiritual mission – first, to preserve Russia’s spiritual excellence by resisting the pressures of Westernization, and second, once it has been preserved, to export it to the West, thereby saving the latter from itself. The first part, though, is key. Before the second part can be carried out, Russia must first defend its own independence.

The Western tendency to view Russia as hell bent on global political domination is therefore perhaps more a projection of the West’s own tendencies than it is a realistic description of Russian desires. That said, a global political mission can emerge from this worldview. For if those who hold the view that Russia is the repository of the values and beliefs that the West once held but has now lost come to the conclusion that the West has set itself the task of destroying those values and beliefs everywhere they still exist (including in Russia), they may come to the conclusion that a forceful political response is required, which will give Russia a role leading the fight against the encroachments of godless Westernism.

And this is indeed what has gradually come to pass. Hahn mentions Panarin. His philosophy once had few adherents. Now, it is more or less openly advocated by high Russian officials, albeit largely stripped of its Eurasianist trappings. This is not a Western-style messianism that demands that all states adopt a single mode of life. Rather, as Hahn notes, it is one that demands that all be allowed to decide for themselves how to live. Russia’s role is to be the promoter of a new multipolar order, founded on a multiplicity of distinct civilizations. By fighting the West, it claims, it is helping to free the world from the shackles of Western liberal neocolonialism.

Victor Taki suggests that this concept is unlikely to help Russia appeal to the global south, as it is too muddled up with ‘Eurasian metaphysics’ and ‘quasi-Marxist language of anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism.’ At this point, I would have to disagree. It seems to me that the Kremlin is resorting to civilizational language in large part because it provides a tool to win if not the support, then at least the neutrality, of that part of the world that does not belong to the collective West. The rhetoric of civilizationism increasingly occurs alongside references to the anti-colonial struggle, and it seems to resonate with non-Western audiences.

As a final point, I would note, however, that the talk of a multicivilizational world serves a decidedly instrumental purpose. Its true aim (at least, I suspect, for the Kremlin) is not to save the world from the West but to save Russia from the West. Hahn comments that Russian messianism may be viewed as a reaction to Western messianism. As such, its ultimate concern is Russia’s relationship with the West rather than the state of the world as a whole. This may explain why the West is so much more worried about it than anybody else.

GRENIER:   A consensus is emerging that modern Russian messianism has limited ambitions (though that could change).  Russian ‘messianism,’ it would appear, at least currently is mostly about protecting Russia, and it is with this same aim in mind that it seeks to ‘defend’ non-Western nations in the global South from Western messianism.  That such a posture will be interpreted by the West as aggression against the West goes without saying. I fully agree with Hahn on this point. 

Hahn also notes that democratic peace theory justifies the West’s permanent war against  its enemies.  Who are these enemies? They are places outside the West’s control and, typically, beyond its understanding and even interest.   Another point made by Hahn strikes me as of great interest, for reasons I will get into later: He states that Western hatred of traditional and/or non-liberal (termed ‘authoritarian’) societies is likely mixed with jealousy. 

Taki’s overview of Russian foreign policy history suggests that Russia’s default position of having limited aims stems from its tradition of realism. This realism is the fruit of the Russian state’s long contact with reality, and its leaders’ ability to draw intelligent conclusions from that contact.  It is illustrative, and I would add pedagogic for the Western reader, that Taki goes so deeply into the details of his home-country’s history.  Russia, as one of its leaders recently illustrated very publicly (in an interview with Tucker Carlson), is a country that lives within history … unlike certain other countries. 

Robinson, in a Hegelian turn, points out that all human identities depend on a comparison with some ‘other.’  He adds that, for the West, that ‘other’ is the rest of the world, whereas for Russia, it is only the West that is ‘the other.’  This helps explain the limited ambitions of Russia. Not only is the latter not concerned with the whole world, it is also not trying to convert the world into itself (with the exception, as noted, of Ukraine and Byelorussia, which it views as part of the same civilization – see on this topic Matthew Dal Santo’s article in First Things, The Theopolitics of Ukraine).  Like Taki, Robinson notes that exceptionalism in Russia does not really feed into the expected messianic or ‘crusading’ zeal.   The Russian tradition of exceptionalism is grounded in Russia’s self-perception as having greater spiritual substance than the West – at any rate, as compared with the modern, increasingly secular version of the West. 

In my earlier Landmarks essay on American messianism, I suggest that the outward orientation of the United States – its tendency to define itself by the ‘other’ that it hates and fears – stems from an inner vacuity, a lack of spiritual substance.  I also appealed there to the Hegelian notion of Sittlichkeit  (which I immediately related to Simone Weil’s ideal of the polity rooted ‘in certain treasures which must be passed on to the future’) as an example of what it means to have a politics oriented to actual substance.  Now, it seems to me that this same concept of Sittlichkeit – usually rendered in English as ‘ethical life’ – can deepen our understanding of the dialectic of self-identity-by-means-of-comparison which has brought Russia and the West into this fateful dead-end.

According to the liberal theory of society, jealousy and ambition are viewed not only as inevitable, but also as final.  Hegel accepts, with his characteristic realism, the inevitability of jealousy and ambition, but he does not concede their finality.  These potentially fatally divisive elements to human self-definition can be peacefully subsumed by society through the mediation of ‘ethical life.’ But this foundational grounding of the life of society is precisely not a morality or subjective idea, but a real ethical substance, something that has ontological weight.³ As D.C. Schindler has helpfully pointed out, ethical life, for Hegel, is not a mere intellectualized abstraction, nor is it a subjective moral feeling; it is, instead, a substantive (concrete) ideal whole inclusive of both self and other. Now, it was my argument in American Messianism that American society lacks this substantive and concrete reference point which, for Hegel, is also termed Spirit. 

We can now return to the dialectic of Western messianism as unlimited expansion vs. the Russian messianism based on an exceptionalism of (alleged) spiritual substance.  It is clear from the above overview by Hahn, Taki and Robinson that both imitation and rejection figure into the dialectic of the Russia–United States relation.  What is even clearer is that there is nothing that transcends the process of comparison – there is no ‘mediating’ role of a greater whole, an ‘ethical life,’ to which both sides belong.  What one is left with is a relationship that is not about anything except for the jealousy, pride and hatred elicited by the other in relation to whom one is fated to be compared (recall here Hahn’s point in this same vein, above).  

Forgive me, at this point, for a somewhat abrupt transition to a different register.  Now, according to Robinson, Russia’s version of exceptionalism is grounded in its spirituality.  I will make no effort here to assess the health of Russia’s soul.  What I will do instead is draw on a Russian author, Dostoevsky, who, despite his being Russian, is not the property of Russia.  It is worth emphasizing in precisely the present context that Dostoevsky the theologian and philosopher ‘belongs’ to anyone who takes the trouble to read him.  

It nonetheless seems to me that Dostoevsky is systematically misunderstood in the West, perhaps more so today than formerly.  It is striking that even such an insightful Western reader of Dostoevsky as Rene Girard, who brilliantly notices the dialectic of imitation and jealousy that destroys so many of Dostoevsky’s characters, nonetheless fails to capture what is most essential about Dostoevsky’s works.  Dostoevsky’s greatest novels, to the dismay of many (including, notably, Alasdair MacIntyre) are overflowing with a great many repulsive characters charged with all-too-human passions.  Long before the Holocaust, real evil was already present in such novels as Demons and The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevskian characters are quite regularly precisely possessed by their hatreds and jealousies.  

Here is the key point.  What frees certain of these characters from their hatreds is not a psycho-sociological doctrine about Christ as the universal scapegoat (Girard), nor a sometimes overly abstract teaching about Spirit (Hegel). It is, instead, the entry into the world – realistically, convincingly and yet miraculously – of grace.  What is present on certain pages of Dostoevsky’s novels is not a theory about Christ, but Christ himself.  Here we have the ‘substance’ that overcomes the dialectic of comparison and hatred. There is no need to make a fuss about it or even to talk about it. There is nothing to prevent Americans from sitting alone in silence and reading these books and profiting from them spiritually.

1. Paul Robinson, in a separate communication, noted the following in reference to Yuriev: 

In regard to Yuriev, since he is mentioned here several times, it is worth pointing out that his The Third Empire is a novel, not a political manifesto. A year or two after Third Empire, Yuriev did produce a political manifesto in the form of his essay Fortress Russia. The policies it proposed constituted an extreme form of isolationism and are the opposite of messianism. For instance, in Fortress Russia, Yuriev wrote that: “In general, there is no need for any foreign policy … We will not support any countries in resisting the West, nor will we support the West in resisting them. We will not support international terrorism, nor will we support the struggle against international terrorism. We will not support breaches of human rights, nor will we support the struggle against such breaches. … We will start the process of quitting all multilateral organizations, both European and global, a process we shall complete by leaving the UN. … We can rely entirely on ourselves. … We must stop the endless anti-Western and especially anti-American rhetoric … Using the principle ‘You do as you want, and we will respond as we must,’ we need to avoid the mistakes of the Cold War.’ ”

2. Peter Durnovo was a very prominent Russian conservative statesman who, in the period from 1906 - 1915, served in the State Council of Czarist Russia.  The reference here is to the letter written by Durnovo directly to Czar Nicholas II on the eve of WWI.  His letter laid out in surprisingly accurate detail the catastrophic consequences that would necessarily follow for Russia if it stayed true to its commitments to England and went to war against Germany.  A translation of the letter can be found here: https://pages.uoregon.edu/kimball/durnovo.htm 

3. Cf. Paul Franco, Hegel’s Philosophy of Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 100 – 101.  As Franco notes, the perfection of what Hegel calls ‘ethical substance’ comes with our realization that it is not we ourselves, through our wills, that the ‘eternal law’ is created.  Law has its own ‘intrinsic being.’  For Hegel, reason becomes Spirit (Geist) when the human agent of reason comes to accept that the laws (here Hegel quotes Sophocles’ Antigone) “are not of yesterday or today, but everlasting; though where they come from, none of us can tell.”