CRIMEA: THE FIRST EAST-WEST CONFRONTATION

Crimean War

Deep-Rooted Reasons for Hostility

Глубоко засевшие причины враждебности

Profonde ragioni di ostilità

Des raisons d'hostilité profondement enracinées.

Tiefgreifende Feindlichkeitsgruende.

The cultural confrontation among Slavophiles and Westerners, can be utilized as a background scenario of Russia’s cultural and political life up to the Soviet Revolution. The reformist “Russian Thinking” around Černyševskij and Herzen, comes out of a Westerner background, whereby the reforms are seen as a partial imitation of Western Europe or of America. On the contrary, most of the literary, and/or musical, and/or pictorial productions (such as Dostojevsk’s, Tolstoj’s, Ciaikowsky’s, Serov’s, Nestorov’s, Rerih’s, Malevič’s, Strawinsky’s) are deeply rooted in the Slavonic tradition.

The strengthening of the hold of the Russian Empire on its Asiatic territories (Caucasus, but also Central Asia and the Artic Regions) had increased the interest of Russian intellectuals for the Asiatic Roots of Russia (the Scythians, the Tatars, the Finns, the Persians, the Turks), but also their sympathies for the subjected peoples, whose origins, histories, traditions, languages, were investigated at that time.

Russia was defined more and more as a “Eurasiatic” reality. “Asiatic” subjects enter into the repertory of artists, such as Shagané, Hadij Murat, the Fire Bird, Shahrazade, the Finnish folklore of the North.This attention is not much different from the praise of Mohicans by Fenimore Cooper, or the one of "strong men" of East and west by Kipling, and, fimnally, the participation of Ann Besant both to the induistic revival and to the independence struggle of India.

But also the idea of a community of destinies between Russia and Europe remained at that times strong, albeit Russia felt not be  well understood , and even to be rejected, by Europeans.

Many made an effort to become more European, for being better accepted, as in the case of the Occidentalist, or of social reformers like Caadajen. Others, like Ivanov-Razumnik (who converted to Catholicism as suggested by De Maistre), stressed that Europe needed Russia. He launched the idea of “Europe’s two lungs”, an idea which will achieve so large a resound after having been adopted by John Paul II himself.

The conflict between “Slavophiles” and “Occidentalists” will be synthesized, finally, after the October Revolution, by Blok, who, in his Panmongolizm, will submit, to Europeans, a dramatic alternative: either to accept, brotherly, the Russian as a part of the European family of people, or to find them hostiles, allied with “the Mongolic World” (now, we could think of China and of Islam).

During the XIX Century, Russia did not abandon the “Greek Project” (i Megàli Idèa”), albeit the independence of Greece was not achieved thanks to Russia (or, at least, not thanks to Russia alone); the newly independent Greece became open, besides Russian influences, also German and English connections.

The peak of anti-Russian feelings was reached between the 1848 Revolution and the Crimea War. Russia had intervened, upon request of the Austrian Emperor, in Hungary, for stopping the liberal and nationalistic unrests.Moreover, the Croatian Ban Jelacic, the Ruthenian  peasants and the Bohemian Pan-Slavists    had all supported the Emperor against the revolutionary, so causing all together the suppression of the revolts in the Austrian Empire. From this fact, Marx and Engels draw the pretext for a violent attack against the "peoples without history", responsible, first of all, to have supported the Russian and Austrian Emperors against the revolutionary movements. In 1853, there were not only the left-wing extremists, but also the bourgeois liberals governments of France and of England to be worried of the momentum gained by Imperial Russia by its presence in the Balkans  (including the occupation of Wallachia and Moldavia) and its support to Balkanic nationhoods.

The "Crimean War" consisted, in reality, in a vast encirclement of Russia by British, Franch, Austrians Turks and Sardinians, which took place along the Danube, in Ucraine, Crimea, Caucasus, the Baltic, the White Sea and the Pacific Ocean. The adhesion of the Kingdom of Sardinia was unequivocally motivated by the will of the liberal Cavour Government to join the liberal cohalition of Western constitutional monarchies, abandoning the traditional Russian friendship. The conservative opposition, led by Count Thaon de Ravel, refused to vote in favour of the war. The latter contributed heavily to the self-consciuosness of Russia, to the weakening of Austria, to the assertiveness of the Balkanic countries and to the strenthening of national feelings in Caucasian nationalities.

The Western alliance pretended from Russia the acceptance of some points, what Russia refused to do:

1. Russia was to give up its protectorate over the Danubian Principalities;
2. It was to abandon any claim granting it the right to interfere in Ottoman affairs on behalf of Orthodox Christians;
3. The Straits Convention of 1841 was to be revised;
4. All nations were to be granted access to the River Danube.

At the end of the war, these points were accepted by Russia only partially, and never fully complied with.

Wallachia and Moldavia, formerly under a strong Russian influence, united under the name of Romania, into a new state, where French and Italian influences are decisive, up to the point that the same Rumanian language is “purified” from many of the preceding Slavonic influences, so that the heritage of the Romans is put in the forefront.

Russia interests concentrated on the Slavonic peoples of the Balkans, such as Bulgarians and Serbians, which Russia helped in their efforts to become independent from the Turkish Empire. These efforts, which were at the origin of the “Balkanic Wars”, contributed to creating the background for World War I. 

Of course, not just Russia, but the whole system of powers of the Europe of that time, are equally responsible for the Balkan Wars and for the subsequent World War II. It has to be remarked that the Russian Tsars were active in the diplomatic scene, for fostering a movement for Peace and Disarmament (the Hague Congress for Peace was promoted by Tsar Nicolas II).

The policy of the Russian Empire in that period is rather contradictory. In fact, it had to manage too many contradictory tendencies. From one side, Russia was a very powerful, cultivated, and even rich, country, whose rates of growths were higher than the ones of Western Europe. From another point of view, riches was very unequally distributed, and this created strong social contrasts. The land reforms carried out at the end of the XIX Century, whilst fostering industrialization,also as a consequence of the Crimean War, had not solved the problem of a sound farming class.

The Tsar swinged between the tough defense of traditional autocracy and timid tentatives of reforms in the direction of a parliamentary monarchy, from avant-garde initiatives in the field of internationalism, such as the Hague  Congress, to military escalations, such as the ones in the Balkans.

The policy of Russia-bashing from the side of western goverments and intellectuasls went on. The fact that, contrary to what happened in France, Italy and Austria, liberal reforms had not been implemented during the largest part of the XIX Century were explained, as always, by the innate autocratic spirit of Russians. However, as always, many of the faults identified by polemists in Russia were, or false, a shared with many other European countries.

As an example, the myth, according to which the Russian Empire had to be considered as the main enemy of nationalities in Eastern Europe is not correct. It is true that a strong conflict arose since the beginning with Poles, who did not accept the partial autonomy role of the Kingdom of Poland. It is also true that the Empire forbade the Ukrainian language and the transliteration, into Latin characters, of Baltic languages. However, also Prussia and Austria had annexed large parts of Poland, where they had suppressed any form of autonomy, whilst Russia had been even helpful with Belorussian and Lithuanians, for asserting their own nationhood, after long centuries of dominance of the Polish language, aristocracy and clergy.Not to speak of the violent repression, by England, of Irish autonomy.

SLAVOPHILY; OCCIDENTALISM AND GERMAN ROMANTISM

Schelling

Russian Grand Culture: an integral part of European Romantism

Русская  великая культура:

неотделнмя часть европейского романтизма

La grande cultura russa: parte integrante del romanticismo europeo

La grande culture russe: partie intégrante du romantisme européen

Die grosse russische Literatur. ein unteilbares Bestandteil der europaeischen Romantik.

 

The Nineteenth Century constitutes, probably, the Golden Age of Russian Culture. The transformations introduced by Peter 1^st and Catherine 2^nd with the help of European intellectuals had succeeded in transforming, at least superficially, Russia into a “modern nation”, a “nation policée”, with its centralized government, its glamorous court, its stable Army and administration.

The Napoleonic Wars had raised, also in the Russian People, the sense of belonging to a sole nation, beyond class boundaries; Romanticism had stimulated the innate sense of the Russian People for emotions, religion, fabulous, communitarism and music; the influence of German philosophers (especially Shelling and Hegel) was open and formal. The circle of the “Lovers of Knowing” was devoted precisely to the study of those authors.

The great authors and musicians of the Russian culture, such as Puškin, Gogol’, Cechov, Dostojevskij and Tol'stoj, as well as Chaikowskij, Rachmaninoff and Rimskij-Korsakoff belong in the Nineteenth Century. Their production constitutes an integral part of the contemporary production of European Pre-Romanticism, Romantism, Verism and Decadentism. Finally, the “classical” historical and social Russian painting set down the bases, from one side, of the iconography of all fine arts devoted to the presentation of Russian history (such as theatre, cinema and “Socialist Realism” in general), and, from another side, constituted a precedent also for the historical painting style of other Slavonic Peoples, such as the Czechs.

As concerns culture’s history, the Nineteenth Century in Russia is characterized by the debate amongst “Slavophiles” and “Westerners”, which implies a profound debate about the identities of Russia and Europe. A debate which has no parallel, for its intensity, in other European culture, and which has not lost its actuality even today.

Consistently with the autocratic and aristocratic power structure of Tsarist Russia, neither Slavophiles, nor Occidentalists, were bourgeois, nor democratic.

Occidentalists thought that Russia, because of its geographical separateness, and/or because of the Tatar domination, had been cut out of the European Civilization (which they understood, according to the enlightenment and idealistic patterns, as well as to De Maistre’s influence, as the sole “true” civilization), so that Russia had not participated to the “true” history.In this sense, the idea that the Occidentalists had of Russia was similar to the one that Marx would have expressed later on about the small peoples of Central-Eastern Europe, “Peoples without history”.

On the contrary, the Slavophiles, who rejected the idea of the Western history as the only “true” history, stressed the riches of Russia variegated history (Vikings, Byzantines, Tatars, Orthodoxy, Enlightenment), and emphasized the role of Russia to preserve ancient values such as spiritualism, mysticism, sociality, discipline, a.s.o., in a Europe which, because of rationalism and enlightenment, was losing its souls. Because of its capability to preserve ancient values, it was called to a mission, the one to save Europe.

Paradoxically, the views of the Slavophiles, if considered attentively, were not at all alien, nor, surely, opposed, to the dominant romantic views in XIX Century’s Central Europe. The refusal, by Slavophiles, to rally with the mainstream rationalism and economicism was common to all kinds of romanticism, from Goethe to Mazzini; the search of a primeval “pure” nationhood was shared with “patriots” of all kinds, from Heine to Gioberti,from Mickiewicz to Herczeg; the reconstruction of a primitive and communitarian society can be found in the American Thoreau and in the German von Hexthausen.

In general, the struggle opposing in Russia “Slavophiles” and “Westerners” is just a more acute and blatant aspect of the Europe-wide conflict between “Modernists” and “anti-Modernists”: Condorcet and Rousseau; Hegel and Kierkegaard; Marx and Nietzsche, a.s.o..

This idea, which is, at the end, the one of the Napoleonic Wars (the first “Patriotic War”), and of De Maistre, will survive through different generation, in Dostojevski, in national mobilitation for the “Great Patriotical War” against Nazism, and, at the end, is still the greater motivation of the assertion, by Russia, of a “special” role. In fact, what has always been stressed by Russian authorities is that present-days Europe would not have arisen without the victory of the Soviet Army against the Armies of the Third Reich.The joint celebration, on the Red Square, of the “Victory Day” (“Den’ Pobiedy”) 2010, together with European Authorities, including Angela Merkel, Donald Tusk and Tayyep Erdogan, constitutes the logical conclusion of this Russian ideology.

The Svavophile Chomjakov worked out the concept of “Sobornost”, from “Sobor” (assembly, church, cathedral) - which may be translated as “communitarism”, or consistorialism” or “conviviality” - a special human attitude, which, according to Chomjakov, was specifical to Orthodoxy. “Sobornost” should have constituted the opposite of the rationalism, the economism, the individualism of the West. A “born-again Russia” could have brought “Sobornost” to the dying West. In reality, “Sobornost” echoed the ideas of the bewonderers of primitive religion and of nature, like a certain number of Protestant Sects, and the American Trascendentalists.

Also Occidentalists started from the ideas of German Idealism. Their main difference was that Occidentalists, instead of magnifying the superiority of the Russian spirit, they preached that Russia, remaining far from the progressive spirit of Western Europe, would not be able to take profit of its potential.

The Nineteenth Century constitutes, probably, the Golden Age of Russian Culture. The transformations introduced by Peter 1^st and Catherine 2^nd with the help of European intellectuals had succeeded in transforming, at least superficially, Russia into a “modern nation”, a “nation policée”, with its centralized government, its glamorous court, its stable Army and administration.

The Napoleonic Wars had raised, also in the Russian People, the sense of belonging to a sole nation, beyond class boundaries; Romanticism had stimulated the innate sense of the Russian People for emotions, religion, fabulous, communitarism and music; the influence of German philosophers (especially Shelling and Hegel) was open and formal. The circle of the “Lovers of Knowing” was devoted precisely to the study of those authors.

The great authors and musicians of the Russian culture, such as Puškin, Gogol’, Cechov, Dostojevskij and Tolstoj, as well as Ciaikowskij, Rachmaninoff and Rimskij-Korsakoff belong in the Nineteenth Century. Their production constitutes an integral part of the contemporary production of European Pre-Romanticism, Romanticism, Verism and Decadentism. Finally, the “classical” historical and social Russian painting set down the bases, from one side, of the iconography of all fine arts devoted to the presentation of Russian history (such as theatre, cinema and “Socialist Realism” in general), and, from another side, constituted a precedent also for the historical painting style of other Slavonic Peoples, such as the Czechs.

As concerns culture’s history, the Nineteenth Century in Russia is characterized by the debate amongst “Slavophiles” and “Westerners”, which implies a profound debate about the identities of Russia and Europe. A debate which has no parallel, for its intensity, in other European culture, and which has not lost its actuality even today.

Consistently with the autocratic and aristocratic power structure of Tsarist Russia, neither Slavophiles, nor Occidentalists, were bourgeois, nor democratic.

Occidentalists thought that Russia, because of its geographical separateness, and/or because of the Tatar domination, had been cut out of the European Civilization (which they understood, according to the enlightenment and idealistic patterns, as well as to De Maistre’s influence, as the sole “true” civilization), so that Russia had not participated to the “true” history.In this sense, the idea that the Occidentalists had of Russia was similar to the one that Marx would have expressed later on about the small peoples of Central-Eastern Europe, “Peoples without history”.

On the contrary, the Slavophiles, who rejected the idea of the Western history as the only “true” history, stressed the riches of Russia variegated history (Vikings, Byzantines, Tatars, Orthodoxy, Enlightenment), and emphasized the role of Russia to preserve ancient values such as spiritualism, mysticism, sociality, discipline, a.s.o., in a Europe which, because of rationalism and enlightenment, was losing its souls. Because of its capability to preserve ancient values, it was called to a mission, the one to save Europe.

Paradoxically, the views of the Slavophiles, if considered attentively, were not at all alien, nor, surely, opposed, to the dominant romantic views in XIX Century’s Central Europe. The refusal, by Slavophiles, to rally with the mainstream rationalism and economicism was common to all kinds of romanticism, from Goethe to Mazzini; the search of a primeval “pure” nationhood was shared with “patriots” of all kinds, from Heine to Gioberti, to Herczeg; the reconstruction of a primitive and communitarian society can be found in the American Thoreau and in the German von Hexthausen.

In general, the struggle opposing in Russia “Slavophiles” and “Westerners” is just a more acute and blatant aspect of the Europe-wide conflict between “Modernists” and “anti-Modernists”: Condorcet and Rousseau; Hegel and Kierkegaard; Marx and Nietzsche, a.s.o..

This idea, which is, at the end, the one of the Napoleonic Wars (the first “Patriotic War”), and of De Maistre, will survive through different generation, in Dostojevski, in national mobilitation for the “Great Patriotical War” against Nazism, and, at the end, is still the greater motivation of the assertion, by Russia, of a “special” role. In fact, what has always been stressed by Russian authorities is that present-days Europe would not have arisen without the victory of the Soviet Army against the Armies of the Third Reich.The joint celebration, on the Red Square, of the “Victory Day” (“Den’ Pobiedy”) 2010, together with European Authorities, including Angela Merkel, Donald Tusk and Tayyep Erdogan, constitutes the logical conclusion of this Russian ideology.

The Svavophile Chomjakov worked out the concept of “Sobornost”, from “Sobor” (assembly, church, cathedral) - which may be translated as “communitarism”, or consistorialism” or “conviviality” - a special human attitude, which, according to Chomjakov, was specifical to Orthodoxy. “Sobornost” should have constituted the opposite of the rationalism, the economism, the individualism of the West. A “born-again Russia” could have brought “Sobornost” to the dying West. In reality, “Sobornost” echoed the ideas of the bewonderers of primitive religion and of nature, like a certain number of Protestant Sects, and the American Trascendentalists.

Also Occidentalists started from the ideas of German Idealism. Their main difference was that Occidentalists, instead of magnifying the superiority of the Russian spirit, they preached that Russia, remaining far from the progressive spirit of Western Europe, would not be able to take profit of its potential.

At the end of their evolution, many occidentalists, such as Herzen, Bakunin and Čaadayev, arrived at a positive concept of the traditional Russian communities exalted by “Slavophiles” (“mir” and “obščina”) as the only solid basis for the renewal of Russia.

Idealism was the source of the view that, of cultural history, had both Slavophiles and Occidentalists, but positivism and, in particular, comparative economics, became the basis for political debate.

The “Occidentalist” Čenyševsky accepted to confer a special role to the Russian land community (“obščina”), but considered it with a relativistic approach, seeing, in it, a social institution common to other countries, like Germany. According to him, the origins of obščina were not traditional, but fiscal, depending on tax obligations of the XVI Century.

Herzen, which had studied at length the revolutionary experiences in America, arrived at the conclusion that the American society was an intolerant one, as already Tocqueville had foreseen. It is worth considering to what extent this conclusion is similar to the one of many other disillusioned European revolutionaries, such as Heine and Carlyle.

Like the idea of “Sobornost”, also the concept of “Obščina” had not been discovered by Russians, but, on the contrary, by Germans. Von Haxthausen, a German aristocrat specialized in agriculture, had studied the Russian rural communities, had discussed of them with Herzen and was arrived at the end at a positive conclusion, since it found them consistent with his Christian and monarchic ideas.