The Unvisited Debates: Russia as a Civilisation and America as a European Country! Part 2

The old continent is now being told who it is by two outsiders, one that does not mind leaving, and another that never lived there. Europe’s voters might wonder when they will be asked? And that is one major factor of why they’re angry at their rulers.

Part 2: The Address Russia Keeps Changing

For three hundred years Moscow and St Petersburg argued about whether they lived in Europe, beside it, or somewhere that only resembled it on the map. In March 2023, the argument was settled by decree. Russia’s Foreign Policy Concept described the country as “an original state-civilization,” a Eurasian and Euro-Pacific power. As we shall see, the declaration was newer than it sounds and older than its critics admit.

A European State by Imperial Order

Start with the empress who wrote the opening line of the debate. In 1767 Catherine II’s Instruction to her law commission opened with the flat statement that “Russia is a European State,” credited to the reforms of Peter the Great. The same document declared the sovereign absolute. That pairing is the first clue to the whole story: Europe, in Russia, arrived by order from the throne. Peter’s Europeanisation was a state project, and so was the identity attached to it. Catherine’s Enlightenment vocabulary decorated an autocracy; the subordinates saw little of the decoration.

Within decades the throne changed its mind. In 1833 Education Minister Sergei Uvarov coined the formula Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality. Historians describe it as a state-defined national idea.

The debate went public in 1836, when the journal Telescope printed Pyotr Chaadaev’s first “Philosophical Letter.” He had written it in French, which he considered the language of Europe. It argued that Russia’s break with the Western Christian tradition left it adrift. Alexander Herzen called it “a shot that rang out in the dark night.” The authorities declared the author insane and exiled the editor. Britannica summarises the letter’s core as the claim that Russia belonged neither to Europe nor to Asia.

Pushkin, who wrote to Chaadaev in French, replied with a worried question: would some future historian put Russia outside Europe? That was the fear in 1836. In the 1840s it had become a fixed programme. The Slavophiles maintained that Russia should follow a separate course, one based on Orthodoxy and........

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