Introduction van der Zweerde, Evert
Russian Political Philosophy,
06/2022
Book Chapter
I beg you in advance, please don't think that all the charlatans of the world are living in your country. They are everywhere! Forget, generally, about Russia's exclusivity.Aleksandr M. Piatigorskii, ...Chto takoe politicheskaia filosofiia: razmyshleniia i soobrazheniia (Piatigorskii 2007: 38)The topic of this book is political philosophy in Russia. The fact that, to date, there is no monograph on this topic, is suggestive, not of the absence of the phenomenon it seeks to address, but of its intrinsic sensitivity. Whenever philosophy becomes political, it is looked upon with suspicion by the authorities in place. Although Russia is not unique on this point, it certainly is extreme. For long periods of time, philosophy generally has been either forbidden or subordinated by the incumbent regime (tsarist or Soviet), while political philosophy as a separate academic discipline is almost non-existent. This implies that one has to look for political philosophy in unexpected places. Sources include diaries, letters and prison writings; authors include activists, novelists and a nun. At the same time, it means that one needs a flexible understanding of political philosophy.Many of the authors discussed in this book use concepts that may appeal to some while others abhor them. This applies both to the political–theological language of Orthodox-Christian thinkers and to the political-philosophical categories used by socialists and revolutionaries. The key categories of modern political theory, from sovereignty to bright communist future, are ‘secularised’ political–theological concepts (Schmitt). However, ‘secular’ is itself a religious category that makes full sense only within the Latin– Christian tradition, and, second, political theology is already an attempt to articulate the political dimension of human existence. If, therefore, Christian thinkers detect, at some point, the Antichrist, while Marxists point to a class enemy, they are employing different, yet functionally equivalent concepts. In both cases, they identify the opponent as an enemy that has to be defeated or even destroyed, rather than as an adversary who can be convinced in a debate.In order to present and analyse so widely diverse currents, authors and texts within a single framework, without burdening the book with elaborate arguments of my own, I apply a simplified, yet specific, conception of political philosophy.
Afterword van der Zweerde, Evert
Russian Political Philosophy,
06/2022
Book Chapter
Since this book was finished, a major episode started, the result of which remains unclear. The army of the Russian Federation invaded Ukraine, a ‘brother-nation’ with which it has a lot in common, ...including a shared origin in Kievan Rus’. On the Russian side, this ‘special military operation’ is presented as a legitimate intervention to defend its geopolitical interests and to protect its Russian compatriots on the other side of the border. At the same time, it fits a narrative on the restoration of the political and economic space that once was the USSR and, before that, the tsarist Russian empire. Also, it is accompanied by discourses about Russia's mission to protect true, Orthodox Christianity, of which the Moscow Patriarchate continues to understand itself as guardian. The question how ‘ordinary’ territorial and economic interests relate to ideas of a Great Russia is, as always, difficult to decide.Readers of this book will recognise motifs and patters connected to names like Dostoevsky, Il’in, Solzhenitsyn and Dugin. They will also notice the prominence of a ‘Russian idea’. Hopefully, however, they will not overlook the many critical elements in the currents and positions discussed in this book, connected to the names of Herzen, Skobtsova, Bibikhin and others; elements that can be easily transposed to the present situation. If that situation demonstrates one thing, it is that there never is a one-to-one correspondence between the actual domestic and foreign politics of a particular country and political philosophy as it exists in that country. In 2022, political opposition and protest in Russia are under even heavier pressure than they already were, and this also affects the academic world. Many people inside and outside Russia today feel as if three decades of intellectual effort have been lost and Russia returns to Soviet, or even Stalinist times. While this sentiment is understandable, it is also inaccurate: much of the yield of those 30 years has found a place in the minds of thousands of young Russians who have no experience with the long Soviet period.
