Igor Rostislavovich Shafarevich: Defender of the Russian People and Its Traditionsy

Abstract

The article is devoted to the biography and views of the famous mathematician and Russophile dissident Igor Shafarevich. Since the beginning of the 1970s, he has been a fellow-thinker and associate of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The article analyzes the main events of Shafarevich’s life, his social and political activity, and the ideas his most fundamental works base upon. It is noted that despite the importance of his ideas and his works, neither monographs nor signifi cant studies on his activity have yet appeared. The article tells about Shafarevich’s life journey, biography, his social and political activity, and his place in the dissident movement. It also pays attention to his friendship and ideological kinship with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Next, it analyzes the main ideas of Shafarevich’s article “Socialism” for the “From Under the Boulders” collection and his book “Socialism as a Phenomenon in the World History”. Shafarevich took socialism as a manifestation of the human race’s desire for self-destruction, for Nothing, as a kind of the biological death instinct. According to Shafarevich, socialism is hostile to individuality. It lowers a person down to the level of a government machine component and seeks to destroy the forces that support and strengthen the human personality: religion, culture, family, individual property, nationality. Developing his concept of socialism in later works, he appeared there as a critic of socialism, even more radical than Solzhenitsyn, and probably the most radical than anyone else among the Russian thinkers. The article pays special attention to Shafarevich’s famous work “Russophobia” and the controversy it aroused. It is noted that the core of Shafarevich’s social and political views was not formed by him in any separate program. However, it can be quite clearly identifi ed in a number of his key statements. It appears that it was connected with his vision of Orthodoxy, monarchy and Russian civilizational sovereignty, which presupposed getting rid of dependence on the West.