The Endless Imperiality of Russia. The Civilizational Dimension

Abstract

The article analyzes the problem of the imperial character of Russia and its future. In the course of the correspondence polemic, the content of the concepts of “civi­lization” and “empire”, the cultural and historical meaning of empires as political forms of the emergence and development of civilizations are analyzed. The idea is refuted that for centuries Russia has lived at the expense of “external receptions”, which supposedly predetermined the “imperial nature of the Russian state”. Both are wrong. Interpretation of the history of Russia from the perspective of large – scale cultural and technological receptions is a sociological simplification of the real interaction of the country with the surrounding world of states of various civilizational affiliation. It was a complex process of mutual influence of domestic political and socio-cultural traditions with samples of foreign forms of life, during which both changed, and quite significantly. Therefore, the history of tsarist, Soviet and present-day Russia cannot be reduced in any way to cultural and socio-politi­cal dependency. Modernity has never been unique and homogeneous. One can rea­son otherwise only from the standpoint of flat progressivism. Criticizing this theo­retical attitude, the author proves that Russia's “endless imperialism” does not lead the country into a “historical dead end”, but remains its geopolitical advantage.