In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 RUSSIA AND THE WEST Russian history is marked by the drama of trying to catch up with the West and then falling back. . . . Humiliated by some military defeat or provoked by some travel experience , leader after leader in what was once Russia and subsequently the Soviet Union determined that his or her mission in life was to transform that backward country into a modernized society equal to those in the West. — . , What Went Wrong with Perestroika For most of its history Russia has been isolated from other major centers of world civilization.Vast distances separated it from Western Europe, the Middle East, and China. In an age when transportation was primitive and hazardous, a trip by horse-drawn coach from Moscow to Western Europe could take three months or more. At the end of the seventeenth century, for example, before roads were improved, a Russian named Pyotr Tolstoi departed Moscow on January  and arrived in Venice on May  after several major stopovers. When ordered to return to Moscow, he left Venice on November  and arrived in Moscow on January , a mere three-month journey because travel in winter over snow and ice was much faster.1 Russia’s isolation from the West, however, was also self-imposed. Its temporal leaders saw the West as hostile; and after Mongol rule of Muscovy ended in the fifteenth century, Russia was indeed invaded many times from the West—from Sweden and Poland in the seventeenth century, France in the nineteenth, and Germany twice in the twentieth. Russia’s religious leaders, moreover, saw the Catholic and Protestant West as threats to their Orthodox Christian beliefs and traditions. Pravoslaviye, the Russian translation of Orthodoxy, literally means “right praising” and implies that other forms of worship are wrong. Russia’s communist leaders demonstrated the same deportment toward any departure from their “party line.” Indeed, the Russian word for dissidents, inakomysliashchi, literally means “people who think differently.” A big question for Russia over the centuries has been whether it could borrow and learn from the more advanced West and still preserve Russia’s samobytnost’  . For the details of Tolstoi’s travel, I am indebted to Max Okenfuss of Washington University, St. Louis. (distinctiveness). Differences over the answer to this question has given rise to two rival schools of thought—Westernizers and Slavophiles—a division that has persisted in Russian history from the time of Tsar Peter the Great to the present. Westernizers, recognizing Russia’s backwardness, have sought to borrow from the West in order to modernize. They have regarded Russia as a political entity that would benefit from Western enlightenment, rationalism, rule of law, technology , and manufacturing and the growth of a Western-style middle class. Among the Westernizers have been political reformers, liberals, and socialists. Slavophiles have also sought to borrow from the West but have been determined to protect and preserve Russia’s unique cultural values and traditions. They have rejected individualism, and regarded the Orthodox Church, rather than the state, as Russia’s leading historical and moral force. As admirers of agricultural life, they were critical of urban development and industrialization. Slavophiles, moreover, sought to preserve the mir, the traditional Russian agricultural commune , in order to prevent the growth of a Russian proletariat. They preferred Russian mysticism to Western rationalism. Among the Slavophiles have been philosophical conservatives, nationalists, and the Church. The controversy between Westernizers and Slavophiles has surfaced many times in Russian history. As Hugh Seton-Watson has pointed out, it split Russian socialism between Marxists and Populists, Russian Marxism between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, and Bolsheviks between opponents and followers of Stalin.2 The controversy, which continues in Russia today, has been between those who believe in Europe and those who believe in Russia.3 For an early Russian Westernizer we turn to Tsar Peter the Great. Peter the Modernizer In Russian history, modernization has been achieved—notably by Peter the Great— through the process of copying selected features of more advanced Western countries while keeping other spheres of social life unchanged. —̌ ̌, Can Gorbachev Change the Soviet Union? Russia’s cultural exchanges with the West began in the late sixteenth century when Tsar Boris Godunov sent thirty Russians to study in Western Europe at places like Paris, London, Oxford, Cambridge, Eton, and Winchester. But as historians like to point out, only two returned; the others became Russia’s first defectors to the        . Hugh Seton-Watson, The Decline of Imperial Russia, – (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, ), . . These paragraphs on Westernizers and Slavophiles...

Share