#slavophiles

The Slavophiles

'Some, who became known as "Slavophiles," reacted by declaring that Chaadaev was mistaken, that Russia did have its own distinctive culture and its own valuable contribution to make to mankind's progress. … The leading Slavophile thinkers came from landowning families, and their milieu was still the salon rather than the kruzhok. Ivan Kireevskii, after studying the Greek church fathers, rebutted Chaadaev by asserting that Russia had its own rich cultural heritage, derived from Byzantium and transmitted by the Orthodox Church. Russia had actually preserved the integrity of the Christian faith, which the West had lost, thanks to the popes' greed for secular power and to the countervailing but equally sterile individualism and rationalism of the Protestants. What gave Russian institutions, especially the village community, their peculiar value, was sobornost, conciliarity or congregationalism, the capacity to take decisions in common, by consensus, and for the greater good of the collective rather than of the individual. Aleksei Khomiakov, the major theorist of sobornost, defined it as "unity in multiplicity," the principle by which the individual finds his strength and his true purpose in common reflection and action with others. Only thus could the individual fulfil himself as a person,"not in the impotence of spiritual solitude, but in the might of his sincere spiritual union with his brothers, with his Savior." In the "West," by contrast, human beings were spiritually impoverished, caught in the toils of a heartless laissez-faire economy, and consumed by individualism, rationalism, and atheism. Renewal for European civilization could come only from Russia, where the people, ignorant and poverty-stricken though they often were, nevertheless were still illuminated by the full light of Christianity. Conservatives though they were, the Slavophiles did not accept the autocracy in its current form. They considered that Peter the Great, inspired himself by Western principles, had undermined the inherited unity of monarch and people by interposing between them a Germanized bureaucracy. … To rectify this state of affairs the Slavophiles proposed that the tsar should reconvene the zemskii sobor as a regular institution representing the estates of Russian society. They rejected Western parliamentarism and did not consider that the tsar should be bound by constitutional guarantees, but they believed that he did need the regular contact with his loyal subjects which a zemskii sobor would provide. They also wanted to restore sobornost to the church by reinstating the pomestnyi sobor as its supreme governing body, and at the lowest level by reinstating the parish council as an autonomous body empowered to choose its own pastor, run its own finances, and look after the material affairs of the congregation.'

The Westerners

'The "Westerners" were a much less homogeneous camp than the Slavophiles. It would be difficult to single out common elements in their thinking, except for the generally held assumption that Russia was fundamentally like other European countries, only delayed in its evolution by geographical and historical circumstances. The crucial difference between Slavophiles and Westerners was over the question whether, in borrowing from European culture, Russia was denying its own nature, as the Slavophiles believed, or on the contrary taking vital steps for its own renewal and development.'