Socio-cultural
and historical analogies between different periods far removed from each other
in time acquire here a special significance: the Time of Troubles at the turn of
the XVI-XVII centuries, the period of the two revolutions of 1917 and the Civil
War which followed them, the recent dramatic disintegration of the USSR; the
despotic regimes of Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Nicolai I, Lenin and
Stalin; the liberal reforms of Catherine II, Alexander I, Alexander II, Stolypin,
Khrushchev, and so on. Socio-cultural correspondences between such distant
epochs are fully understandable in light of the unity of mind-set of Russian
civilization. With the aid of such cultural-historical analogies, it is easy to
be convinced of the continuity of different cultural and historical periods and
of the rhythmic nature of periodic, semantic coincidences observed between
different phases of the historical process. Finally, it is easy to be
convinced, practically speaking, of the unchanging (meta-historical) nature of
the mind-set of Russian culture and civilization, taken as a whole – that is,
when viewed in terms of its uninterrupted historical continuity.