Between East and West: Hegel and the Origins of the Russian Dilemma

Abstract

Nikolai Berdiaev, the eminent twentieth-century Russian philosopher, wrote that the "problem of East and West" was an "eternal" one for Russia. 1 Attempting to make sense of the violent upheavals that shook Russia in 1917, Berdiaev believed that the source of Russian troubles lay in the "inconsistency of the Russian spirit" due to the "conflict of the Eastern and Western elements in her." 2 Russia, he argued, always contained within its wide territory an invisible and shifting border between two continents, and thus Russian society was forever torn between two cultures. Berdiaev insisted that Russia could not discover its true calling or its place in the world until it resolved its internal conflict between East and West. 3