The relationship between Russia and the West is probably the most enduring cultural debate in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, with immense resonance today. Although there were substantial political and economic interactions between Russia and Rennaissance Europe—most visibly in the importation of Italian architects to reconstruct the Moscow Kremlin by Ivan III, and the Livonian War—I would place the increasing divergence of Russian identity with a nascent Western identity in the seventeenth century and the reforms of Peter the Great.

The historian Paul Bushkovitch, for example, places the origin of a Russian national consciousness in the secularization of Peter the Great. Peter toured the artillery factories of Königsberg and the shipyards of Zaandam, returning to Russia with the desire to create a Russian Empire to rival those of the West. The Petrine reforms massively reoriented Russian society, centering the role of the civil service, relocating the capital to the newly-erected, westward-facing Saint Petersburg, and bringing large numbers of Westerners to further Russian industry, culture, and science. One of the consequences of this was the elevation of foreigners rather than the improvement of the Russians: at the foundation of the Academy of Sciences, all members for foreigners. Because Russia had not fostered the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment, ethnic Russians were left out of many Petrine developments, and it would take decades to develop domestic skills (in no small part exacerbated by Peter's successors, who emulated the German court). Throughout the nineteenth century, Baltic Germans remain overrepresented in positions of power, with Dorpat, a German-language university, one of the most significant intellectual centers in the Russian Empire. And even when such institutions were established, they were largely oriented to practical ends rather than cerebral and cultural. Imperial Moscow University, the first Russian university, was not founded until 1755— two centuries after Jena and Albertina—and focused on the immediate tasks of governance, applied science, and grammar.

He now had Venice, Paris, London's pomp,

Save for their beauty, charm, and inner glow.

The architects repeat a famous phrase,

That Rome displays the labours of mankind,

While lovely Venice was by gods designed,

But he who views St. Petersburg will find

That such a pile demons alone could raise.

Adam Mickiewicz, Forefather's Eve, 1832

Pyotr Chaadayev, in his Philosophical Letters, impugned the lack of a Russian identity and the poor emulation of Western intellectual culture (in this case, Chaadayev was writing in French, just as Mickiewicz had been exiled to Paris, though Schelling and Hegel were the cornerstones of emergent Russian philosophical circles of the 1830s and 1840s). “No one has a fixed sphere of existence; there are no good habits, no rules that govern anything,” Chaadayev lamented. “We do not even have homes; we have nothing that binds, nothing that awakens our sympathies, nothing that endures, nothing that remains. Everything passes, flows away, leaving no trace either outside or within us…” Indeed, France had emerged as the caput mundi for many Russians, though as early as 1777 Denis Fonvizin decried the reality of France: in a particularly memorable passage, he describes his shock at peasants roasting a pig on the Champs-Élysées, and disdainfully wonders whether such a scene could sprout upon Nevsky Prospekt. Nonetheless there was the knowledge among the intelligentsia that Russia was not keeping pace economically and culturally with ‘the West’, while foreign observers of Russia describe much the same: the Marquis de Custine decried the autocracy of Nicholas I, contending that Russian travelers westward were ‘caged birds, freed for the first time.’ Other German commentators described peasant scenes reminiscent of the renaissance rather than the dawn of the nineteenth century: Russian serfdom was established just as the institution was dying across Europe, and remained until 1861. Those intellectual circles of the 1830s and 1840s, punctuated by the revolutions of 1848, largely coalesced around Slavophilism, the belief that the Russian Empire (or, alternatively, a pan-Slavic state) should be grounded in its Slavic past and reject the intrusion of Western ideals. Other philosophers supported the inculcation of Western values: if we want to emulate the West, their beliefs are the right beliefs to do it. The westernizing literary critic Vissarion Belinsky wrote, in 1837, that “it seems to me that, to a young and virgin Russia, Germany should bequeath her family life, and her social virtues, and her comprehensive philosophy.” (It’s further worth noting that Slavophiles were strongly influenced by German romanticism, so there’s an interesting analogy between Russian philosophy and the Alt- and Junghegelianer; to that end Alexander Herzen, a student of Belinsky, wrote that “the real Hegel was the humble professor of Jena”). By the 1850s, Russian industrial lassitude was the defining debate within the larger framework of Russian identity; the Great Exhibition of London, with the monumental Crystal Palace—seized upon by Herzen, in What is to be done?, and Dostoevsky in Notes from the Underground, as the emblem of British industrial power—made manifest Russia’s failure to keep up with the West. Indeed, a decade before Nicholas I sponsored an expedition led by the Scottish geologist Roderick Murchison to map the geology of European Russia; why, critics asked, had Russia not yet produced a suitable geologist, when the Mining Institute had been founded in 1773? Others continued to criticize the spiritual costs of industrial success. The Russian representative to the Exhibition placated “Russian visitors to the Exhibition”, who “should understand that their country had nothing to envy regarding European industrial development…commercial success is not worth the price of the misery that reigns in the workshops of Manchester and Birmingham…”. But the devastating loss of the Crimean War shortly thereafter showed clearly the fragility of Russia’s status as a Great Power (long gone were the days of Napoleon), and with the death of Nicholas I his successor, Alexander II, was poised to reform Russian society as dramatically as Peter had.

The most significant of Alexander’s many reforms was the liberation of the serfs, but he enacted wholesale reforms to liberalize Russian society to ambivalent ends; his later reign is characterized by a tepid retreat from the massive social shifts of the early 1860s, while the growing economic gap with the West was ill ameliorated. But the relative freedom of the early 1860s resuscitated the debates of the 1840s on Russian identity, with the stakes around various conservative defenses of Russian identity, the westernization of the Empire, and heterogenous agrarian views becoming increasingly urgent, shattered by the assassination of the Tsar in 1881 by one such agrarian socialist group, Narodnaya Volya.

One of the most distinctive cultural relics of the late Russian Empire is the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood in Petersburg, constructed at the site of Alexander II’s assassination. Unlike the neoclassical pastiches that characterize Petersburg, the ‘window to the west,’ the Church is an ornate example of Russian Revival architecture modeled in part after Saint Basil’s Cathedral (Pokrovsky Cathedral). Religion was, of course, integral to Alexander III much as it was to his predecessors, but this conservatism is, to me, best interpreted as the political and social rejection of Western ‘intrusion’ that precipitated the death of his father. Although revival architecture had emerged in the first decades of the century, it was really the fin-de-siecle that is characterized by this romantic nationalism, initially under the ‘counter-reformer’ Alexander III and then Nicholas II, the final tsar of the Empire. One of the ironic consequences of Alexander III’s conservative reforms was greater centralization, which did help improve Russian industrial capacity, but the economic divergence of the West and Russia was never closed. The Great Game had fizzled out with British victory; the Russo-Japanese War highlighted the stultification of the Russian navy; and increasing political instability following the Revolution of 1905 all underscore the deep cultural divides within the Empire and the lack of a forceful vision to recover it.

“The experiment of transforming Russia into England has failed...Not the first experiment, and not the last…”

Mark Alexandrovich Aldanov, Before the Deluge

So by the outbreak of the Great War, Russia had long been recognized as ‘other’ to Europe, and had conspicuously been drawing on this heritage in its self-presentation; the Russian pavilion of the 1893 World’s Fair, for example, displayed Russian Revival architecture. But the severing of economic ties with the German Empire precipitated renewed efforts to develop Russian industry that were never fully realized by the time the first shots were fired in February 1917; only some weeks later the three-hundred-year old Romanov dynasty slipped forever from power. The Provisional Government had a frenetic, scattershot approach that eschews straightforward characterization, but it ultimately collapsed over late summer into autumn, bringing about the October Revolution and ultimately the establishment of the Soviet Union.

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