Religion, War, and Revolution: E. N. Trubetskoi's Liberal Construction of Russian National Identity, 1912-20

Rarely has religion been as closely associated with national identity as in the case of Russia, at least at the level of conscious representation. Religion, the very essence of "Holy Russia," is central to most versions of the "Russian Idea."¹ The religious element has been most conspicuous in conservative thought (e.g., Slavophilism), but radical representations of Russia were also often religious in form if not (consciously) in content, as in the undeniable eschatological and millenarian features of Bolshevism. The Russian religious-philosophical renaissance at the beginning of the 20th century was especially rich in diverse ideas about Russian national identity. These are more difficult to classify, in large part because they tended to reflect the complex, ambiguous legacy of Vladimir Solov´ev (1853–1900), Russia's greatest religious philosopher. Solov´ev condemned nationalism but assigned Russia a messianic role in his grand utopian project of "free theocracy," which would unify Eastern and Western Christianity under the spiritual authority of the pope and the imperial authority of the tsar. This brief overview suggests that the prominent religious component in Russian national identity has been, in general, an illiberal one. Against this history, the work of Evgenii Nikolaevich Trubetskoi (1863–1920), one of Russia's major religious philosophers, merits consideration.

Prince Trubetskoi came from one of Russia's most distinguished aristocratic families. One of his brothers, Sergei (1862–1905), was also a famous idealist philosopher, disciple of Vladimir Solov´ev, and Moscow University professor; another brother, Grigorii (1873–1930), was an influential diplomat. After graduating from the Faculty of Law at Moscow University in 1885, Evgenii began his academic career at the Demidov Juridical Lycée in Iaroslavl´, where he taught philosophy of law. His magister and doctoral dissertations were critical studies in the intellectual history of theocracy in medieval Europe.² His university appointments were in the history and philosophy of law, first at St. Vladimir University in Kiev (1892–1905) and then at Moscow University (1906–18), where he in effect succeeded his brother Sergei. He had a prominent role in Russia's first and most important philosophical society, the Moscow Psychological Society (1885–1922), as well as in the Vladimir Solov´ev Religious-Philosophical Society in Moscow (1905–18). He was deeply influenced by Solov´ev, whom he met during the winter of 1886–87. From their first meeting, Trubetskoi later wrote, "all my intellectual life was connected with Solov´ev. My whole philosophic and religious Weltanschauung was full of Solov´evian content and expressed in formulations very close to Solov´ev."³ His two-volume study, Mirosozertsanie Vl. S. Solov´eva (Vl. S. Solov´ev's Weltanschauung [1913]), is the classic work on the philosopher. Taking Solov´ev as his point of departure, he advanced a powerful synthesis of religious philosophy (a metaphysics of vseedinstvo or the "unity of all"), Kantian transcendental idealism, and philosophical liberalism.⁴

In politics, Trubetskoi was a member of the Beseda circle of zemstvo opposition, the Union of Zemstvo Constitutionalists, and the Union of Liberation; through these organizations he was active in the Russian Liberation Movement that culminated in the Revolution of 1905. He was one of the founders of the Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party but resigned from it in January 1906 (he rejoined the party in 1917). He served on the State Council from February 1907 to August 1908 (and again in 1915–17). Later in 1906, he joined the Party of Peaceful Renewal, which shared with the right Kadets and left Octobrists a political program of moderate liberalism. This program was advanced in the newspaper that Trubetskoi and his younger brother Grigorii published from March 1906 to August 1910, Moskovskii ezhenedel´nik. After the newspaper's...