KONDAKOV – VII

Page 60

Pagan, Christian, Byzantine and Mongol traditions not only replace each other but to a large extent contradict, challenge and nullify the preceding cultural experience. The cultural isolation and self-sufficiency of Muscovy was nullified by the policy of total Europeanization undertaken by post-Petrine Russia. The development of capitalism in Russia, begun belatedly and facing internal resistance from forces representing Russia's cultural heritage (both Russian conservatives and Russian socialists entertained high hopes that the Russian people, attached as they were to the concept of “sobornost’” [communal tradition] and the community, would either refuse to follow the path of bourgeois development or else would leap over this phase of European historical development), was then replaced by Russian communism. The latter at first sought to carry out revolution throughout the world but then redirected its energies to carrying out the socialist revolution in its own country. Finally, in the post-Soviet period, the egalitarian principle of “Russian socialism” was suddenly replaced by Russian neo-capitalism -- by the “wild and barbarous” free market -- just as in its own time, as a result of the Russian revolution of 1917, Stolypin’s bourgeois reforms were swept away by the communes, the expropriation of the kulaks and the establishment of the kolkhoz.

Practically each and every new cultural paradigm of Russian history was marked by processes which reviewed, rejected or halted the course of changes begun during the previous stage of history (within the framework of the old paradigm): the October Revolution of 1917 put an end to the liberal reforms and freedoms won by the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the February Revolution of 1917. Collectivization brought back serfdom to the Russian countryside. Stalin’s Union of Soviet Socialist Republics revived to a large extent the ideology and symbolism of the Russian Empire, which seemingly had been buried by Lenin and his Bolshevik comrades-in-arms once and for all.

In the socio-cultural history of Russia, the old never completely disappeared from the scene. Rather, it continued to exist in its most enduring forms as an undertow in parallel with the formation of the new. At the same time, the new never completely displaced the old even though it may have claimed to have done so. The old and new in Russian history did not so much replace each other as continue to exist parallel to each other, overlapping each other and making their coexistence especially paradoxical, internally contradictory, conflicting and dramatic (it is this socio-cultural mechanism that has served as the foundation for the socio-cultural stratification of Russian society).

This means that the contradictory nature, the disconnectedness, the "centaur-like" form of Russian history and culture do not represent a merely temporary though prolonged period of growth and development of the Russian mind-set, do not testify to an extended, drawn-out period of socio-cultural formlessness of the Russian spirit, tossing this way and that way in search of principles and limits unique to itself. Rather, it points to the inherent constitutive properties of the Russian mind-set: primordial boundlessness, breadth and sweep, capacity to contain within itself absolute, mutually exclusive extremes, a tendency to gravitate to extreme absolutes while rejecting everything having to do with the Golden Mean, with the reconciliation of competing principles or with the inconclusiveness of compromises, a mind-set prepared to move either in one direction or in a completely opposite one, without allowing for an interval of gradual development, -- spontaneously, wildly, suddenly. Hence also the famous unpredictability of Russian history and its no less noticeable repetitiveness, qualities that manifest themselves to an unprecedented extent in comparison with other countries and peoples.