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IMAGE: Portrait of Aleksandr Herzen (1848)
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Since the reign of Peter the Great, there have existed a number of continuities and discontinuities in the Russian perception of Europe. Even at any single given time, there was usually disagreement over how European society was to be interpreted, and whether the qualities it was thought to possess should or even could be emulated by Russia. Often there was even a consensus about what characterized the West, but opinions were split when it came to the desirability of Europeanization. As time passed, the set of terms used to discuss Europe changed slightly, and the positions of the various thinkers and schools of thought shifted as well. Nevertheless, they nearly all agreed that there had been a fundamental difference between the development of Russian and mainstream (Western, Romano-German) European society. And despite the changing nature of the Russian discourse on Europe, several categories remained fairly constant throughout and were continuously revisited by its participants. So while the specific configuration of these categories was bound to be different in each age, a few common threads can be established between them.
In explaining the separate path of Western European development, a few factors were consistently identified by Russian intellectuals as accounting for this difference. Most agreed that the religious establishment of Roman Catholicism had exerted a powerful influence on the subsequent social, political, and intellectual growth of Europe. This was contrasted with Russia’s inheritance of Greek Christianity from Byzantium, which soon thereafter became estranged from the Western Church. Many other Russians pointed to the residual impact of the Roman legal code on the political and juridical development of the West. Some believed that the different geographical conditions of Russia and Western Europe had been a decisive determinant in their respective histories. The precise relationship of these factors to one another and the particular emphasis given to each point shifted from thinker to thinker, but they were still the most common themes in the Russian discourse on European history.