How Russia Forced Europeans to Define Themselves as “Western”

Hello, everyone, and welcome to A Single Tree Does Not Make a Forest. This episode looks back one hundred episodes, revisiting Episode 234, “What Kind of Ruler Was Peter the Great, Who Made Russia a World Power?” What follows is a sequel to that discussion.

In the earlier episode, I argued that before Peter the Great, Russia was not a polity in the true sense of the word; it could not even be considered a civilization. Russia was simply a group of illiterate serfs scattered across an immensely vast expanse of land. After taking power at the age of seventeen, Peter brutally suppressed the imperial guards, cut off beards and changed styles of dress, minted coins, reformed legislation, and reshaped Russia’s upper classes according to European standards.

At the heart of Peter’s reforms was a comprehensive embrace of European civilization. Those reforms directly produced the enduring divide between Russia’s upper-class society and its peasant culture. Peter personally visited the Netherlands, England, Germany, and Italy. Traveling under the identity “Peter the Carpenter,” he studied shipbuilding abroad and experienced firsthand the scientific, financial, and technological achievements of England and the Netherlands.

He also conspired with Augustus, the king of Poland, to join forces against Sweden. In 1700, he declared war on Sweden and launched the twenty-one-year Great Northern War, which enabled Russia to join the ranks of the world’s great powers, or at least the great powers of Europe.

Peter’s reforms did more than change the Russian polity. They also laid the foundations for Russian literature, culture, and national self-definition. His relationship with Europe was one of profound symbiosis and integration, not simple imitation or rejection. We have to understand how the Russia of Peter’s era shaped its own civilization with Europe’s help before we can make sense of the tension between East and West that runs throughout the nineteenth-century Russian literature we love.

This history also allows us to understand the fundamental difference between modern Russian and Chinese civilization. Russia’s modern spirit is rooted in its study of the European powers. In this respect, China’s experience of modernization is not comparable.

The second point is that the Russian spirit carried an expansionist aggressiveness from the very beginning. On that basis, I want to discuss how Russia forced Europeans to begin defining themselves as Westerners.

From Europeanization to enlightened despotism

Peter the Great reigned from 1682 to 1725, and his central project was to drag Russia forcibly from the margins of civilization into the European system. I discussed the key measures in the earlier episode. He established a new capital, St. Petersburg, symbolizing the imperative to look westward. He compelled the Russian nobility to Europeanize completely in clothing, etiquette, and language. He established a modern army and navy, carrying out military reform, and built a bureaucratic state.

Peter’s reforms opened the door to Europe for Russia. That was the seventeenth century. Now let us look at eighteenth-century Europe.

The eighteenth century was the Age of Enlightenment. Under Empress Catherine II, Russia actively embraced European Enlightenment thought and culture in the name of the Enlightenment. At the same time, in practical politics and its social structure, Russia further consolidated autocratic rule and serfdom. The Russian elite was extremely Frenchified in cultural terms, but institutionally the country remained bound to a vast population living under a premodern order.

Catherine II ruled from 1762 to 1796, and her rule is generally regarded as a classic example of enlightened despotism. “Enlightened despotism” was a specialized term in the Age of Enlightenment, one frequently encountered in the writings of Voltaire and Rousseau. What they were talking about was Russia.

Catherine consciously sought to fashion herself as an enlightened monarch, an enlightened despot, and actively established contact with Europe’s most famous Enlightenment thinkers. She maintained a long correspondence with Voltaire and accepted his praise of her rule. She also communicated directly with Diderot. When Diderot was in financial difficulty, she even purchased his library and hired him as an adviser to her court. This form of interaction at least meant that Russia was part of the European intellectual community.

Catherine’s acceptance of Enlightenment thought was, of course, selective. She admired and praised the technical dimensions of reason, order, and state governance, but rejected any political principle that might threaten the rights of an autocratic monarch, including ideas such as popular sovereignty.

This is very clear in the Nakaz, the Instruction whose compilation Catherine oversaw. In this text, which she wrote herself, she drew extensively on the ideas of the Enlightenment philosophers Montesquieu and Beccaria. She emphasized the rule of law, the need for law to be rational, and the reform of criminal law. Fundamentally, however, she continued to insist on the legitimacy of autocratic monarchy.

In eighteenth-century Russia, then, the Enlightenment did not mean political emancipation. It was merely an instrument for strengthening the state’s capacity to govern. Enlightened autocracy formed the intellectual foundation of eighteenth-century Russian state-building and of Russia’s connection with Europe.

Corresponding to this posture toward Enlightenment thought was Russia’s rapid geopolitical expansion. By the second half of the eighteenth century, Russia had greatly expanded its territory southwestward and southward through a series of wars. Through its wars against the Ottoman Empire, Russia acquired access to the Black Sea and gradually gained control over Crimea. Through the three partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793, and 1795, Russia, Prussia, and Austria jointly destroyed the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, a traditional polity.

These expansions significantly strengthened Russia’s military and strategic position and embedded it more deeply in the European political system. By the end of the eighteenth century, Russia was no longer a peripheral country. It had become a direct participant in European affairs.

Now consider the European polities developing in parallel. Under the influence of Enlightenment thought, the countries of Western Europe gradually moved during the eighteenth century toward limiting royal power, developing the rule of law, and slowly dismantling feudal relationships of dependency. Russia, by contrast, further strengthened serfdom during the same period. Especially under Catherine, the state continually expanded the nobility’s control over the serfs in exchange for the nobility’s support for the regime. The serfs were not only firmly bound to the land but also subjected to even stricter legal and economic domination.

The Russian upper classes of the eighteenth century were reading French philosophy and communicating in French. They were funding French Enlightenment thinkers and hosting salons, but their society remained rooted in a highly unfree, premodern feudal structure. What eighteenth-century Russia displayed was a civilizational duality: the country was becoming increasingly socialized into Europe at the diplomatic and cultural levels, while reinforcing traditional patterns in its social organization and relations of production.

Against this background, we arrive at the major historical event of the early nineteenth century: the Napoleonic Wars.

The Napoleonic Wars became the key opportunity for Russia to complete the transformation of its international status. In 1812, Napoleon led a great army into Russia, only to suffer a catastrophic defeat through the combined effects of the Russian army’s strategic retreat and the bitterly cold winter. This war had both military and symbolic significance. Russia defeated what was then Europe’s most powerful modern army in a manner almost resembling a force of nature.

The outcome directly affected the reconstruction of the postwar European order. At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Russia participated as one of the victorious powers in formulating the new European international system. Tsar Alexander I not only played an important role at the congress but also proposed the Holy Alliance, through which he attempted to preserve Europe’s monarchical system on the basis of Christian morality.

Over the following decades, Russia repeatedly intervened against revolutionary movements in Europe and suppressed liberal and nationalist uprisings. It was therefore called the “gendarme of Europe.”

By this stage, Russia had completed the historical transformation that began in the era of Peter the Great. It had gone from something fundamentally uncivilized and barbaric, not a state, and barely even describable as a polity, to a core defender of the European order.

But there was a crucial tension. On the one hand, Russia had become an important force in modern international politics. On the other, it was a crucial force opposing political modernization within Europe.

Before Europe became “the West”

With that context in mind, let us shift our perspective to the European countries and see how they responded to this newly emerging Russia.

During the first few decades from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century, Europeans did not imagine themselves as Westerners. The eighteenth century was a European century. The concept of “the West” was not used by the classic figures whom we now honor as representatives of the Western tradition. Plato, Cicero, Locke, and Mill do not use the word “West” in their works.

From the eighteenth century through the first few decades of the nineteenth, almost every use of the word “West” in a work or book referred to the west in a purely geographical sense. It was merely a historical usage, employed at most to describe the successor states located within the geographical area of the Western Roman Empire. “The West” was not a term for a political and cultural community in the sense in which we understand it today. Whether in the English expression “the West,” the German Abendland, or the French L’Occident, that meaning did not exist.

The word occasionally appeared in the eighteenth century, but even then, “West” never referred specifically to a political community. It was more often a historical or geographical term of orientation.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, “the West” gradually began to replace “Europe” as the name of a newly self-defined community. That is the subject I want to discuss here.

As Russia’s military, diplomatic, and political weight continued to increase, the designation “Europe” became problematic for a growing number of Europeans. Why? Because from Peter the Great through the end of the eighteenth century, Russia had successfully inserted itself into Europe.

Beginning with Peter, Russia had been incorporated into the European system of international politics through military reform, institutional development, and cultural imitation. By the time of Alexander I and the Congress of Vienna, this process had reached its zenith. After the Napoleonic Wars, Russia was not merely a member of Europe. It had become one of the architects of Europe’s institutions.

The Congress of Vienna confirmed this. After Napoleon’s failed invasion of Russia in 1812, Russia wore down and defeated the main French forces during the Napoleonic Wars, becoming the decisive great power that saved the European order. It also gained a voice at the negotiating table equal to those of Britain, Austria, and Prussia.

The Congress of Vienna established what you may have learned about in history class as the “Concert of Europe,” a mechanism for consultation among the great powers. Russia now had a seat at the table and became one of the system’s co-authors. Tsar Alexander I participated in redrawing the map of Europe and led the establishment of the Holy Alliance, directly embedding Russia in the political ideology of Europe’s future.

Europe’s post-Napoleonic military system required several great powers to balance one another. With its vast territory, population, and military resources, Russia became an indispensable pivot in any military design. Whether the objective was to contain France, stabilize Central Europe, or deal with the Ottoman Empire and the Eastern Question, which we will discuss shortly, Russia’s will had to be taken into account.

After the Congress of Vienna, the operation of the European order began to presuppose Russia. That was where the problem arose.

Once Russia had successfully become a European country, Europe’s original self-understanding faced a crisis. Europe had been a hybrid geographical and cultural concept that could vaguely accommodate certain differences. But when an enormous empire that was institutionally highly autocratic and culturally regarded as semi-Oriental squeezed its way in, forced itself to the table, and became part of the core of European power, did the concept of Europe retain any power to distinguish?

Who am I? Who are we? If Russia was also Europe, what did being European still mean?

At this juncture, in the 1810s and 1820s, a very reasonable fear also emerged. Russia possessed vast territory, centralized political power, and unity of action. Western Europe, confronted with that Russia, was divided into multiple competing states.

Before the Congress of Vienna, Europe had long relied on an older, internalized cognitive framework: the distinction between north and south. If we set Russia aside for the moment, the south was generally regarded in the eighteenth century as the birthplace of civilization, while the north was seen as the land of later barbarians.

This is also why, when I discussed Mozart in that podcast series, people often found it confusing that Mozart, who came from the German-speaking regions, had to go south to prove himself. Europe at the time still operated within the context of a north–south distinction. The north was always barbarian territory, while the south was always the birthplace of civilization. Southern peoples were further ahead. By the time Southern Europe had reached civilizational maturity, northerners were still wandering around in forests.

We can trace this north–south distinction all the way back to classical antiquity. The Mediterranean world represented by ancient Greece and Rome was regarded as the source of reason, politics, art, and law. The expansion of the Roman Empire spread this civilization to other parts of Europe, but its core always remained in the south.

Beginning in the Middle Ages, the structure continued in new forms. Italy remained the center of culture and religion, while regions such as southern France and Spain carried forward the continuity of classical civilization and the Christian tradition. By comparison, just look at those northern bumpkins: the German lands, the British Isles, and Scandinavia farther away. In European tradition, these places were long regarded as uncivilized, crude, peripheral regions.

With the political consolidation, commercial development, and Reformation of the late Middle Ages, the north gradually rose. In the early modern period, England, the Netherlands, and later Prussia rose as powers, allowing the north to catch up with and even surpass the south economically, militarily, and institutionally. By the eighteenth century, this change had gradually begun to be absorbed into Europe’s self-understanding. Those undeveloped and barbaric northern regions were beginning to progress and catch up with the south.

By the end of the eighteenth century, Europe’s civilizational center had in fact begun to move northward. It shifted to places such as London, Paris, and Amsterdam, which replaced Rome and the Mediterranean as the center.

Before the nineteenth century, then, the principal distinction in Europeans’ self-understanding was between north and south, not east and west. They did not imagine themselves as Westerners.

So who was the big fellow, or rather, the great hero, who forcibly wrenched Europeans away from a north–south distinction and made it an east–west distinction?

It was Russia.

From stages of progress to types of civilization

In the early nineteenth century, the north–south framework gradually began to appear inadequate. Once Russia entered the center of European power as a mighty empire, the old question of whether the south or the north was more advanced became less important. What truly mattered was who belonged to the same civilization.

Russia could be classified as a great northern power, yet its political structure, religious tradition, and social form were profoundly different from those of Western Europe. The north–south framework could no longer adequately express this difference, because it assumed that all participants belonged to the same historical process and merely occupied different stages within it.

Russia’s inclusion therefore caused a new division gradually to replace Europe’s old structure of self-understanding: the distinction between east and west.

Unlike the north–south distinction, the east–west distinction was no longer about different rates of progress along a temporal dimension. It became a difference between types of civilization, an opposition between liberty and autocracy, reason and tradition, the individual and the collective.

Within this new framework, Russia was no longer the north that had not yet caught up with us. It was redefined as a typical Eastern empire. At the same time, the framework allowed the Western European countries, despite their immense internal differences, to be reintegrated into a new whole. That whole was called “the West.”

In the north–south model that existed before the nineteenth century, the south, represented by ancient Greece, Rome, and the Mediterranean world, was understood as the birthplace of civilization. The countries of Northern Europe were later participants in this civilizational process. Initially, the north was seen as crude or backward.

We find this everywhere in Montaigne’s Essays. In an earlier episode of Footnotes to Dionysus about Montaigne, I discussed in detail how Germans, in Montaigne’s writing, were bumpkins and barbarians who did not even know how to drink. Southerners knew how to drink.

Northern countries, however, could gradually catch up with and even surpass southern countries through imitation, assimilation, and institutional development. Europe’s earlier internal north–south differences were merely differences of stage. They presupposed a single civilizational track along which every European region was moving, merely occupying different positions.

This mode of thought allowed for historical shifts. Civilization could shift from south to north, but that shift did not deny the unity of civilization as a whole. The north–south distinction was a narrative about who came first and who came later, who was mature and who was still developing. It was founded on a civilizational continuum.

Beginning in the nineteenth century, by contrast, Russia’s rise gradually transformed the distinction between east and west into a structure of political and civilizational opposition. It no longer explained differences in terms of time and stages of development. Instead, it divided the world according to type and essence.

Within this framework, the West and the East were assigned completely different attributes: liberty and autocracy, reason and tradition, and so on. These were no longer understood as temporary differences of stage that development could bridge. They were presented as irreconcilable oppositions. The relationship between east and west was not one of sequence but one of boundaries, a logical opposition between two different civilizations.

This division was inherently political because it served both alliance and exclusion. By assigning particular countries, Russia, for example, to the East, Europeans could conceptually push them out of the Western community, thereby establishing a defensive political identity.

Let us look at how this process unfolded in intellectual history. Princeton University Press has arranged for me to interview next week one of the authors of its new books, George Varoufakis, a professor of the history of political thought at Queen Mary University of London. He recently wrote a book called The West: The History of an Idea. In its second chapter, he traces how European thinkers during the first half of the nineteenth century gradually abandoned the north–south distinction as an internal hierarchy and began constructing a political and civilizational community centered on the West. They established its identity by setting the West against the East.

The decisive driving force behind this transformation was Russia’s rise. The documents from intellectual history that I cite here all come from the second chapter of that book.

Consider the writings of Madame de Staël, an important thinker of the late French Enlightenment and early Romanticism. She explicitly pointed out that Russians were less closely related to the peoples of the north than to those of the south, or even the East. Russia’s supposed Europeanness amounted to nothing more than court etiquette; Russia’s true nature was Eastern.

The north–south distinction therefore had to be abandoned. The south that had belonged to the original north–south framework was transformed into the East in a new east–west framework. Russia was redefined from a northern great power into an Eastern civilization. It was no longer a society at a backward stage but an Other, an alien Other.

This step laid the foundations for the emergence of the concept of “the West.”

After Russian civilization had been Orientalized step by step, European intellectual circles began trying to describe themselves in a new language. At this stage, “the West,” or Occident, remained an unstable term. At least during the nineteenth century, it was often used interchangeably with “Europe.”

In the historical and political writings of the period, historians frequently began using “Westerners” and “Europeans” as equivalents while still including Russia among the European powers. At this point, “the West” had not yet developed an exclusionary boundary. It was merely a rhetorical substitute. In the tradition of the early socialist Saint-Simon, the terms “Europe,” “Western Europe,” and “the West” coexisted and were even used interchangeably.

The true turning point came in the 1830s. After the July Revolution of 1830, Britain and France developed similar constitutional-liberal political systems. This led them to begin imagining a shared political camp, a “Western alliance,” opposed to the autocratic powers of the East.

In this context, “the West” was no longer merely a cultural term. It became an explicit political identity whose core function was opposition to Russia.

An important text appeared in this setting. In 1843, Astolphe de Custine published Russia in 1839. The book is extremely important because it consolidated the crucial east–west distinction through which Europeans understood themselves as the West and Russia as the East. It was a landmark work.

Custine had visited Russia in 1839 and recorded what he saw and heard in the form of a travelogue. Russia in 1839 portrayed Russian society under Tsar Nicholas I while criticizing autocracy and the blind worship of authority. Custine was a relatively famous Enlightenment thinker, and his book provoked a powerful reaction among Western European readers. It is an important text for understanding both nineteenth-century Russian society and Western European liberal thought.

Through the form of travel notes, Custine revealed how an autocratic system oppressed both individuals and society. The book is often mentioned in the same breath as Tocqueville’s book from the 1830s, Democracy in America. Over the past few years, many people have told me that I ought to read Russia in 1839. I have not read it yet. So many people have told me that the response it elicited in Europe at the time was as enormous as the impact of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.

Custine not only frequently used terms such as “the West” and “Western civilization” but also explicitly warned that Russia would conquer Western Europe. This discourse closely bound the West to the threat of a rising Russia, turning the West into a strongly defensive identity.

Europe gradually developed a common cognitive framework. Russia was an internal outsider: it was within the European system, yet it was treated as a different civilization, separate from “us.” What kind of civilization was Russia? It was an Eastern civilization. Therefore, we were a Western civilization.

The publication of Russia in 1839 translated Europe’s unease about Russia, which had existed since the Congress of Vienna, into a concrete and perceptible social picture. It portrayed the hypocrisy of the Russian court, the terror of the Russian bureaucracy, and the people’s submission to authority.

Presented in the form of a traveler’s observations, this criticism transformed abstract political concerns into a culturally and emotionally powerful narrative, greatly expanding the range of its dissemination. Through a mirror-like mechanism of comparison, the book reinforced the West’s self-identification.

Custine not only described Russia’s autocratic structure but repeatedly emphasized that system’s potential to expand, warning of the threat it might pose to Western Europe. In this comparison, the West, as Russia’s opposite, became a political space that needed to protect itself. Russia was the East, so we were the West.

The concept of “the West” became closely bound to Russia’s rise.

The Crimean War and the Eastern Question

Russia in 1839 did not merely portray Russia as an Eastern autocratic empire. It was published in the 1840s. Then, in the 1850s, came the Crimean War.

The Crimean War was an international conflict fought from 1853 to 1856, pitting the Russian Empire against Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire. The war further intensified the so-called Eastern Question.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire had clearly declined, and its control over the Balkans and the Black Sea region was increasingly weakening. The European powers engaged in a prolonged struggle over who would inherit the Ottoman Empire’s legacy. Russia, as a land power, had consistently sought to expand southward, gain access to the Black Sea, and penetrate farther into the Mediterranean. The Ottoman Empire’s decline presented Russia with an opportunity.

At the same time, the balance of power under the Vienna system had begun to change. Since the Congress of Vienna, Europe had maintained a military structure based on consultation among the great powers, and Russia occupied an important position within that system. But as Russian national power grew and its expansionist intentions became apparent, Britain and France increasingly regarded Russia as a potential threat.

Britain was particularly worried that Russia’s southward advance would threaten the maritime route to India. France, meanwhile, was trying to reestablish its influence in Europe after Napoleon. Containing Russia therefore became a common interest of Britain and France, providing the strategic conditions for the outbreak of war.

Structurally, the war took the form of an alliance of Western countries opposing a great Eastern power.

Religion also helped these European countries imagine themselves as a Western community, something different from the East. France presented itself as the protector of Catholicism, while Russia claimed to be the protector of Orthodox Christians within the Ottoman Empire.

The dispute that led to the Crimean War originated in the question of religious rights of protection in the holy places of Jerusalem. Disputes over church keys and the right to carry out repairs at the holy sites gradually escalated into a diplomatic conflict. Russia pressured the Ottoman Empire to grant it more extensive rights of protection, which in practice amounted to directly challenging Ottoman sovereignty.

When negotiations collapsed, Russia sent troops to occupy the Danubian Principalities, and the war broke out. Under the combined influence of all these factors, the situation rapidly escalated. In 1853, the Ottoman Empire declared war on Russia. Britain and France joined the war in 1854.

Although the Ottoman Empire had grown weak, it had become an important buffer for preserving Europe’s military balance. Britain and France therefore chose to support this “sick man of Europe” in order to prevent Russian expansion.

The principal theater of the war was the Crimean Peninsula. After three years of war, Russia was ultimately defeated. Under the Treaty of Paris in 1856, it was forced to accept provisions restricting its military presence in the Black Sea.

How Russia answered its own Orientalization

Now let us turn our perspective back toward Russia. As Western Europeans increasingly Orientalized Russia and thereby defined themselves as Western, how did the people being Orientalized respond? Did they accept that they belonged to the East? And if they did, what kind of East did they belong to?

The Persian East, the Slavic East, and the Chinese East were profoundly different from one another.

The rise of Westerners’ conception of themselves as Westerners laid the foundations for the most important nineteenth-century debate among Russians: the debate between the Westernizers and the Slavophiles.

This question first erupted in an extreme form in the work of the Russian thinker Chaadayev. In 1836, Chaadayev published his first Philosophical Letter, shocking Russian society. He believed that by choosing Eastern Orthodoxy, Russia had cut itself off from the unified Christian world represented by Catholicism. It had therefore missed its historical opportunity to participate in modern Europe’s development.

Chaadayev’s judgment was that Russians had never advanced together with other peoples. They did not belong to any of humanity’s great families. Russia belonged neither to the West nor to the East. It was as if Russia had been placed outside time and left untouched by humanity’s universal education.

Chaadayev was not saying that Russia was backward, nor was he saying that Russia was Eastern. He said that Russia had no genuine Eastern tradition and no Western tradition either. Its problem was a kind of historical isolation.

Russians lived in a constricted present, with neither past nor future. Like illegitimate children, they had no inheritance and no bonds connecting them to the world that had come before. This was an intensely painful historical diagnosis. Chaadayev’s Russia was not the opposite of the West; it was an exception detached from the universal historical process.

In Chaadayev’s view, the West had become the West not merely because it possessed technology, institutions, and wealth, but because it possessed certain ideas formed throughout history. These ideas included justice, power, order, and duty. They were not abstract concepts but components of European social organization, the very physiology of Europeans themselves.

Russia, by contrast, could only imitate other peoples blindly, superficially, and clumsily. It was incapable of connecting its own thought to a continuously developing sequence of ideas.

Chaadayev ultimately reached a devastating conclusion about his own Russian nation. Russia had contributed nothing to the world and taught the world nothing. Even the things Russia had borrowed from human progress had been distorted by Russia.

The first Philosophical Letter of 1836 is extremely important because it initiated the debate between Westernizers and Slavophiles in Russian intellectual history. The Westernizers accepted the Chaadayevian formulation of the problem. Throughout the nineteenth century, they criticized Russia’s autocracy and backwardness and advocated modernization and liberalization.

The Slavophiles, by contrast, believed that Russia’s problems stemmed precisely from its mistaken imitation of the West. Although the West had achieved material progress and success, they argued, it had sacrificed the spiritual dimension of life. Russia’s path should not be to copy the West but to return to the true Christian orthodoxy represented by Eastern Orthodoxy.

Within Russia itself, understandings of the East divided. For Russia’s Westernizers, the East meant backwardness, autocracy, and isolation. For Russia’s Slavophiles, the East meant a Christian tradition more complete and more spiritual than that of the West.

To borrow the formulation of the Slavophile thinker Khomyakov, the East contained two parts. One was the East of Xerxes, the great Persian emperor. The other was the East of Christ.

Russia was unwilling to be assigned to the East of Xerxes, that pagan, autocratic East in the mold of the Persian Empire. It wanted to understand itself as the Christian East. In this sense, although Russia was not Western, it still shared the Christian tradition with the West.

The nineteenth-century East was not a single concept. It was being contested in both Russian and European contexts. Western European liberals and many French and German authors called Russia “Eastern,” generally in order to push it out of European civilization. Russia’s Slavophiles attempted to accept the designation “Eastern” while changing the value attached to the East. The East was not barbarism but spirit. It was not the Xerxean autocratic empire of Persia but the Christian tradition.

Let me take another step back. Many of us have probably heard about the two major camps into which Russian intellectual circles gradually divided after 1830: the Westernizers and the Slavophiles. But how did those positions emerge?

They were deeply shaped by their particular era. They revolved around the concept of east and west that Europeans invented in the early nineteenth century in order to reject Russia and push it out. Russia then absorbed this concept and, in turn, used it to understand itself.

Russia’s Westernizers accepted Chaadayev’s diagnosis. They regarded the Orientalization of Russia that Europe had been carrying out since the nineteenth century as a judgment grounded in historical reality. They believed Russia was regarded as Eastern because its institutions and historical development were backward. Autocratic politics, serfdom, and the absence of the rule of law and civil society all prevented Russia from occupying the same civilizational level as the countries of Western Europe.

Russia therefore had to transform itself into part of the West through reform. For the Russian Westernizers, this meant introducing constitutional government and the rule of law in politics, gradually abolishing serfdom in society, and absorbing European ideas and institutions in culture.

I want to continue emphasizing this point: Russia’s Westernizers understood the east–west distinction as a temporal difference. They believed Russia was Eastern because it was relatively underdeveloped, and that reform could allow it to enter the West.

Structurally, this position continued the eighteenth-century model of development that Europe had applied internally to north and south. It simply replaced the backwardness of the north with the backwardness of the East.

Do you understand the limitations of this perspective within Russia? The reason I have gone on for so long is that, for Europeans, the east–west distinction they created was not a temporal distinction at all. From the beginning, they created it because they were trying by every possible means to squeeze Russia out of European civilization.

Within the east–west framework proposed by Europeans, difference was understood as a difference between types of civilization, not as a difference between temporal stages of development. Russia’s Westernizers were therefore operating under a misunderstanding. They took a difference that Europeans had essentialized, framing it as a clash of civilizations, and placed it back inside a temporal framework. They believed Russia could become Western. We Russians do not have to belong forever and completely to the backward East.

The Slavophiles differed from the Westernizers. They did not deny the differences between Russia and Western Europe, but they refused to accept that those differences were negative. They recognized that Europe was excluding Russia by Orientalizing it. Their response was not to reject the label but to redefine it.

The Slavophile position can be summarized as follows: yes, we Russians really are different from the West, but this difference is not backwardness. It represents a more complete form of civilization.

The Slavophile critique of the West centered on several points. The West overemphasized reason and neglected spirit and faith. Western society was founded on individualism, leading to social atomization. The West’s material progress had been achieved at the cost of spiritual impoverishment.

Welcome to Dostoevsky.

Dostoevsky ultimately sided with the critique of Western civilization and the affirmation of Russia’s special mission. In his view, Western Europe’s development since the Enlightenment had been founded on rationalism, individualism, and utilitarianism. Although this brought institutional and technological progress, it simultaneously dismantled humanity’s religious foundations and moral unity.

In Notes from Underground, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky repeatedly criticized the model of human nature based on rational calculation. He believed that this model could not explain human freedom and salvation. He therefore rejected the Westernizers’ premise that the West represented the universal direction of human development.

Dostoevsky transformed this critique into an affirmative civilizational critique. Russia was not a backward version of the West; it was another possible form of civilization. He emphasized the qualities of community, humility, and love carried by the Orthodox tradition, arguing that these qualities could remedy the fragmentation and nihilism of the West.

He did not deny Russia’s backwardness. He believed, however, that this backwardness was precisely what had allowed Russia to avoid the West’s spiritual collapse, thereby preserving a spiritual depth that had not yet been thoroughly corrupted by modernity.

In A Writer’s Diary, from his later years, Dostoevsky explicitly proposed that Russia’s mission was not simply to imitate Europe but to offer Europe the possibility of salvation through its own spiritual tradition. He portrayed Russia as a nation capable of embracing all peoples, one possessing a universality that transcended narrow nationalism. This universal Russian mission was at the heart of Slavophile thought.

Within the Slavophiles’ critical framework, the West was not the endpoint of universal history but a civilization that had developed in a one-sided fashion. Russia was assigned a supplementary and even superior role.

From this perspective, the Westernizers and Slavophiles of nineteenth-century Russia were not two opposing extremes. They were two sides of the same question: once “the West” had become a synonym for modern civilization and Russia had been assigned to the East, how was Russia to understand itself?

The Russian Westernizers’ answer was to become Western through reform. The Russian Slavophiles’ answer was to reject the West by redefining the East.

Neither path could escape the east–west framework itself. And this framework had not always existed. It had historical origins. It appeared within a very specific historical, political, and cultural consciousness. Europeans created it out of the sense of crisis they experienced in the face of Russia’s rise, using it to redefine themselves.

The distinction between East and West first shaped Europe’s self-identification and then, in turn, shaped Russia’s understanding of itself. Throughout the nineteenth century, Russian thought unfolded within this conceptual framework, imposed from outside and continually rewritten from within.

The West is not a civilization that has existed since time immemorial. It is an identity invented through conflict. Otherwise, we would not find that the authors we now understand as classics of Western orthodoxy never once referred to themselves as “Westerners.”