Slavophilia

• 1. Introduction

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  Some of the men who founded Slavophilia changed what they wore to make a point. They adopted pre-Petrine dress, the traditional robes of a Russia that had existed before Peter the Great remade the empire on Western lines. This was not personal whimsy.

  Slavophilia was the 19th-century intellectual movement that called on Russia to develop from its own early history, not from Western European models. The movement coalesced in Moscow in the 1830s. It was never a single coherent doctrine. It contained left-wing voices and right-wing voices, liberal reformers and autocratic champions. The philosopher Aleksey Khomyakov, born in 1804, stood at its center.

  The ideas that Khomyakov and his colleagues worked out would eventually shape the careers of composers, architects, poets, novelists, and lexicographers. Their doctrines would be adopted as official state ideology under two Russian emperors. Decades after the Russian Revolution, their influence would still be detectable in the thinking of prominent Cold War strategists.

• 2. The Moscow Roots

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  Aleksey Khomyakov drew on the works of Greek Church Fathers to build the philosophical foundation of Slavophile thought. He and his devoutly Orthodox colleagues argued that Russia had its own distinct path, one that should never imitate Western institutions. Their primary criticism targeted the modernizing legacies of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great.

  Medieval Novgorod appeared in left-wing Slavophile arguments as proof that progressive values were native to Russia, not imported from abroad. Its rough democracy was cited as evidence that liberal institutions had grown from Russian soil. Right-wing Slavophiles drew the opposite conclusion, pointing to the centuries-old tradition of the autocratic tsar as the truest expression of the Russian character.

  The Russian Orthodox Church mattered more to Slavophiles than the state did, regardless of which wing they occupied. Socialism was dismissed as a foreign intrusion. The movement praised rural life, opposed industrialization and urban development, and saw protection of the mir, the peasant commune, as essential to preventing the growth of a working class.

  Ivan Kireyevsky, born in 1806, worked alongside Khomyakov to give those convictions their most precise philosophical form.

• 3. The Doctrine of Sobornost

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  Sobornost was the concept Kireyevsky and Khomyakov together coined to name their vision of ideal human community. The word denotes organic unity and integration. Its purpose was to argue that opposing groups should focus on what they hold in common. Collective welfare was to take precedence over individual claims.

  Khomyakov applied this framework to compare the major branches of Christianity. The Orthodox Church, in his view, combined freedom and unity in the right measure. The Catholic Church delivered unity but sacrificed freedom. Protestantism offered freedom but lacked any unity to sustain it.

  In 19th-century Russia itself, the Slavophiles believed they could see sobornost already at work. The peasant obshchina, the communal village institution, recognized the primacy of collective life. At the same time, it guaranteed the welfare and integrity of each person within the collective.

  The composers known as The Five, active during the 1850s and 1860s, were among the artists most visibly shaped by Slavophile thought. The Russian Revival school of architecture drew on the same sensibilities. The novelist Nikolai Gogol, born in 1809, and the poet Fyodor Tyutchev, born in 1803, both reflected its concerns. Vladimir Dahl, the lexicographer born in 1801, shared the Slavophiles' preoccupation with the purity of the Russian language. That same concern appeared in the ascetic writing of Leo Tolstoy, born in 1828.

  Konstantin Aksakov, born in 1817, was among those who carried these doctrines into the sphere of practical politics, where a pan-Slavic agenda would put them to the test.

• 4. A Troubled Brotherhood

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  General Mikhail Skobelev, charismatic commander of Russian forces during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, became the human face of what the movement called militant Slavophilism. The war was fought to secure independence for Balkan Slavs from Ottoman rule, translating Slavophile doctrine directly into military action.

  Mikhail Katkov, born in 1818, argued that Ukrainians and Belarusians were simply parts of a single Great Russian nation. He was among the most prominent Slavophile voices developing this position. Belarusians were called White Russians; Ukrainians were called Little Russians or Malorussians. Katkov believed both peoples were essential to the Russian state and should be governed under Russian leadership.

  Katkov and his allies denied the distinct cultural identities of Ukrainian and Belarusian people entirely. National and linguistic aspirations among those groups were attributed to Polish intrigue, aimed at separating those peoples from Russia.

  Ivan Aksakov took a somewhat different position. He recognized the right of Ukrainians to use their own language, but regarded that right as unnecessary and harmful. He did find one practical use for the Malorussian language. In Aksakov's view, it could be deployed against what he called the Polish civilizational element in the western provinces.

  Poland itself posed a structural problem for the entire ideology. Poland had ceased to exist as a state in 1795, when three neighboring powers, including Russia, partitioned its territory. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 then extended Russian control over additional Polish-inhabited areas, including Warsaw. The Poles were Slavic in origin, which the movement's name implied should matter. But Poles were also deeply Roman Catholic, with the Catholic faith forming a core element of Polish national identity. Their culture was rooted in Western European values, the very things Slavophilia most opposed. Slavophile writers were particularly hostile to Poland, attacking it frequently in their publications.

  When the Polish uprising of 1863 began, Slavophiles used anti-Polish sentiment to foster Russian national unity. The vision of a cultural union of all Slavs was abandoned. After that confrontation failed to russify Poland, some Slavophiles came to concede that the annexation had been a mistake. The movement turned toward predicting a future conflict between the Teutonic race and the Slavs. Germanophobia replaced pan-Slavism as its chief preoccupation.

  The emancipation of serfs, which came in 1861, had the ardent support of most Slavophiles. Press censorship, serfdom, and capital punishment were all viewed as baneful imports from Western Europe. The movement's political ideal was a parliamentary monarchy, modeled on the medieval Zemsky Sobors.

  By the 1870s, scholars like Nikolay Danilevsky were remaking what Slavophilism stood for.

• 5. Pochvennichestvo and Its Long Reach

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  Nikolay Danilevsky argued that history moved in cycles, positioning Russia as the rising civilization in the next turn. He promoted autocracy and imperial expansion as expressions of the Russian national interest. Konstantin Leontiev, who emerged in the same 1870s-1880s generation, believed a police state was the only reliable barrier against European influence reaching Russia.

  Fyodor Dostoyevsky, along with Leontiev and Danilevsky, gave this harder conservative version of Slavophilism a name: Pochvennichestvo, from the Russian word for soil. The teaching was articulated by Konstantin Pobedonostsev, who served as Ober-Procurator of the Russian Orthodox Church. It became the official tsarist ideology during the reigns of Alexander III and Nicholas II.

  Even the Russian Revolution of 1917 did not end the tradition. Ivan Ilyin, born in 1883 and alive until 1954, was among the emigre religious philosophers who carried Pochvennichestvo forward into the 20th century.

  George F. Kennan was among the Cold War thinkers shaped by Slavophile ideas. The movement instilled in him a regard for the Russian Empire as distinct from the Soviet Union. That influence had direct policy consequences. Kennan believed the revival of the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate in 1943 could lead to reform or even the overthrow of Joseph Stalin's rule.

  Andrei Okara has argued that the original three-way 19th-century division of Russian thought still maps onto modern Russia. That division placed Westernizers, Slavophiles, and Conservatives in separate camps. Among those Okara names as present-day Slavophiles are the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Dmitry Rogozin, and Sergei Glazyev.