The American Constitution would not have come into existence f they had for a moment assumed that spiritual freedom must precede a political one. Even discussion of this topic, which has already absorbed advocates of the Russian Idea for centuries, would have seemed to them a pointless waste of time. Not a single democracy would exist in the world today — and consequently the present-day proponents of the Russian Idea would have nowhere to take refuge from the despotism of their native land — if Western leaders had once upon a time followed the advice of Slavophile spiritual forebears and considered parliamentarism a global ev ,1.
I would not presume to set myself up as a judge m the dispute between the philosophies of Calvin and Hobbes on the one hand and of the fathers of the Russian Orthodox church on the other. Perhaps the latter were incomparably more pious and 'spiritual' than the former. However, the followers of Calvin and Hobbes kept their promise to provide their countries with freedom whi'e the followers of the fathers of the Russian Orthodox church failed to keep theirs. The idea of neutralizing vice with vice has turned out to be the more practical politically, whereas the idea of a renaissance of virtue neutralizing vice has turned out to be a fruitless dream capable only of
perpetuat: ig despotism.
With all due respect for the spiritual quest of the Russian Ide, s founding fathers, it must be pointed out that the; г primordial contempt for politics and hatred of parliamentarism punished them with political bankruptcy. It is precisely parliamentarism, the th'ng from which they intended to save Europe, that in reality did save Europe. It has proved to be the single method known to man for preventing despotism. The Russian Idea, as history has shown, was not an alternative to parliamentarism it was merely an impractical and, as we shall see later, dangerous Utopia
For the moment»let us imagine two neighbours, each of whom has managed his business according to n different prnc'ple: the one, parliamentarism, the other, the Russian Idea. The first, for better or worse, has survived the crises that have shaken his enterprise and moved forward, while the other has gone broke. What 1 ight, one might ask- do the bankrupt's heirs have to denounce their neighbour's business as 'decaying', 'ready to collapse at any nnnute' and 'spiritual slavery'?
Of course, they may object — as they often do — that today Russia would be the focal point of world civilization f it hadn t been conquered by Western communism in 1917, if Orthodoxy had been given the chance to travel the course God had charted for it, and if the proponents ot the Russian Idea had not had their hands tied. In fact, their political forebears had from the 1830s to the turn of the century and beyond, when Russia was the leader of world ant;-communism. Orthodoxy was Its state religion and when, consequently, their hands were not tied, to try out their historical experiment and indeed attempted to do so How did it end? In such a way that today then heirs are forced to mimic the same unworkable formulas, bankrupt rallying cries and tailed prognoses.
We shall return to these issues later. First, let us summarize the fundamentals of Slavophilism s initial catechism, developed by the founding fathers of the Russian Idea and today repeated by their heirs.
Ruuie's mission
The Russian Idea proceeded, as we already know, from the belief that the contemporary world was suffering from a global spiiitual crisis 'carrying humankind headlong toward catastrophe'20 (in the words of a present-day prophet). It pointed to the inability of the secularized, materialistic and cosmopolitan West to come to gups with this cnsis, whose historical source lay in the secular Enlightenment- in the West's rejection of religion as the spiritual basis of politics and in its inahihty to realise that not the individual but the nation is the foundation of the world order conceived hy God; that 'humankind is quantified by nations'.2*
The Russian Idea pointed to the providential role of Orthodoxy, as uniquely capahle of pulling back the world from the brink of the abyss, and to Russia as the instrument oF this great mission. While the Russian Idea rejected the "government's interference in the moral life of the people' (the police state), it also denounced the 'people's interference in state power' (democracy). To both of these it opposed the 'principle of AUTHORITARIAN powers The state» it taught, must be unlimited because 'only under unlimited monarchical power ^an the people separate the government front themselves and free chemselves to concentrate on moral-social liFe [hYuVstveHnd-obskck&sit* vennaia zhizn], on the drive for spiritual freedom.
The Russian Idea did not acknowledge Ihe central postulate of Western political thought concerning the separation of powers (as the institutional embodiment of the neutralization of vice by vice). Instead, it advocated the principle of sepamtion of functions between temporal and spiritual powtrs: the state guards the country against external foes and the Orthodox church settles the nation's internal conflicts. In place of Hobbes's misanthropic philosophy it offered a naive, but pure, faith in relations of love and goodness throughout the whole hierarchy of human collectives which make up society — the family, the peasant commune (ob$kchina)> the monastery, the church ahd the nation. It cherished the ideal of the nation cum family, requiting neither parliaments, political parties, nor separation of powers. Like the family, the nation would have no need of legal guarantees or institutional limitations on state's power and its focus should not be the rights, but rather the obligations of its members. The nation's conflicts, according to the Russian Idea, must be reconciled by spiritual, rather than constitutional, authority.
The ideal of the nation as family presupposed the need fnr salvation from the sinful influences of the 'street' (tne West) and, consequently, for a spiritual rebirth and a moral revolution, in the course of this Russia would return 'home' to its pure rural roots, to the tsarist (pre-Petersburg in the old version; pre-Communist in the new), a land supposedly free from despotism, police terror, and official state lies.
Slavophilism
Such was the basis of the Russian Idea, which took many by surprise when it was resurrected, completely unaltered, in Communist Russia, more than a century after its birth. Whatever one may think of it, the nobility of its scheme and the purity of its intentions cannot be denied Essentially, Slavophilism was an opposition movement.
Although its first advocates were themselves nationalists, they hated official nationalism, the ideology of Nicholas I's dictatorship ' hev passionately opposed human oppression m all its forms, whether serfdom, censorship or official lies. They called upon people not to live by lies. Moreover, although they claimed Russia's spiritual, cultural and potential political superiority over the West, this superiority was not to be used to harm the West The Slavophiles wished merely to open the West's eyes to the ultimate truth, and in a spirit of generosity со extend a helping hand.
It is true that Slavophilism was a 'retrospective Utopia as Petr Chaadaev called it. It was also both reactionary and reactive, that is, it was at one and the same time a Romantic reaction to the bankruptcy ol eighteenth-century European Rationalism and a political reaction to the new decline of the Russian empire begun in 1830 — 50. In the event, it was incapable of fulfilling any of its solemn promises, either to save Russia from the calamity that was ndeed approaching (which, it must not be forgotten, Slavophilism was the first to sense and reflect in its impassioned writings), or — fortunately — to save Europe from parliamentarism. But, in all fatness, it should not be forgotten that the starting point of the Slavophiles political quest was freedom, even if only spintual and not political.