“Civilization” and civilizational Evolution of Russia

Abstract

The report analyzes the problem of the civilizational evolution of Russia on the basis of the use of a set of ideas of F.A. Tolstoy. Brodel, P. Sorokin, S. Eisenstadt, K. Jaspers, and other specialists. The content of the term “civilization” is discussed. “Civilization” is interpreted by the author as a socio-philosophical category to denote the diversity of cultural and his­torical types of development of economically and politically connected large communities of people and/or their aggregates (communities), subjectively and symbolically integrated into a relatively unified whole through historical and social imagination, cultural mean­ings, values and norms that serve as the cause, purpose and basis for the organization and functioning of these communities. This definition is concretized by revealing the dialectics of the relationship of social, cultural, cognitive and institutional components of “civiliza­tion” using the example of Russia in the historical range from Kievan Rus to the modern Russian Federation. The most important institutional factors in the formation and develop­ment of civilizations, their interaction and expansion over long distances were “universal States” – “kingdoms” and “empires”. Studying the formation and development of the Grand Duchy of Moscow, the Russian Empire and the USSR, the author comes to the conclusion that historically these political forms had several civilizational embodiments: the “Orthodox civilization” of the Moscow Kingdom (XVI–XVII centuries), the “civiliza­tional pseudo-morphosis” of the Romanov Empire in the XVIII and mid-XIX century, the “hybrid modern civilization” of Russia on the eve of the First World War, and the “Soviet civilization”, which represented an alternative type of modern (industrial and value-seman­tic) development to the West. Modern Russia, of course, inherits it. But it doesnʼt have a meta-ideology that unites peoples, and it doesnʼt have claims, like the United States, to global dominance. Rather, it is a civilizational hybrid, fancifully combining elements of the archaic, Soviet past and Western modernity.