The Sources of the Russian National Character

Abstract

Much has recently been said and written about the "Russian idea." In the last century, most such discussions represented a reaction to the ideology of German romanticism and nineteenth-century philosophy, as well as to the German current in Russian historical literature that had dominated the Russian Academy of Sciences since the eighteenth century. This system of values considered the state as the pinnacle, a kind of machine structured in a certain way, while peoples were divided into those capable or incapable of creating states, who were "historical" and "ahistorical" (Hegel, Fichte). The Slavs fell into the latter category, a circumstance that provoked either protest or the desire to discern a special destiny beneath this superficial characterization.