CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN EUROPEANISM AS A "MARGINAL" POLITICAL TRADITION AND A HISTORIOGRAPHIC GRAND NARRATIVE

Abstract

The author analyses the development features of Europeanism as an invented political tradition and historiographic grand narrative in Russian intellectual history. It is assumed that modern Russian Europeanism is related to the cultural traditions of Russian Westernisation genetically, as well as the reforms of the 1990s, when the political elites of Russia had pro-Western sympathies. The author perceives Europeanism as a number of heterogeneous intellectual phenomena. The author believes that historical and literary academic studies became the main form of the history and functioning of Russian Europeanism in the 2000s and 2010s. It is assumed that the Russian intellectual communities of historians, philologists and literary critics exist in a state of institutionalised dependence on the Western European model of humanitarian knowledge. The article shows that Russian Europeanism has two forms: firstly, the desire of Russian intellectuals to write the history of Russia in the European system of coordinates, “imagining” and “inventing” it as a European one; secondly, the refusal of some of them to analyse Russian problems as ideologically and politically motivated a priori. The author analyses attempts to Europeanise the Russian historical process as invented traditions in contexts of alternative historiographic interpretations. It is assumed that the European perception of the historical process became one of the historiographic grand narratives. The author believes that Russian Europeanism had significant cultural and intellectual potential, but it was unable to actualize its adaptive potential in competition with alternative ideological trends, including various versions of the left (communist) and right (nationalist) ideologies. Therefore, contemporary Russian Europeanism is not institutionalised and does not have a formal organisational structure. The author believes that the national intellectual communities, unlike the Russian ones, have not lost interest in the European idea yet, which guarantee the further development of Europeanism in Russia, but in substantially different forms.