Island Russia? A Conversation with Boris Mezhuev on the Possibilities for a Settlement with the West

On a recent broadcast of his nightly show on Fox News, Tucker Carlson stated that the reading list provided to Russian senior military officers includes a book by Alexander Dugin. Carlson described Dugin as a “Russian nationalist” whose book, Foundations of Geopolitics, “envisions a Eurasian empire with Russia at the center of it.”

Carlson’s mention of Dugin as a pre-eminent Russian geo-strategician is by no means anomalous. Indeed, from a casual reading of the U.S. press (to the extent, I mean, that it ever treats of such matters), it would be easy to get the impression that Dugin is the only Russian geo-politician, period. It would be easy to get the impression that he is the mastermind behind everything Russia does abroad, because there simply is no-one else thinking about such things in Russia, and never has been.

This, of course, is very far from being the case. Though Dugin is indeed the leading theoretician behind the Eurasianist school of thought in Russia, there are, after all, other schools. There are liberals who have their own concept of Russia’s place in the world. The 19th century philosopher Vladimir Solovyov remains relevant today among Russian liberals, at least to the extent that Solovyov viewed Russia as a European culture and a European nation.

Another school, that of Vadim Tsymburski (1957 – 2009), can, at the risk of oversimplification, be termed neo-isolationist. At any rate, Tsymburski’s vision differs markedly from that of both Dugin and Solovyov. If Dugin wishes to return, in a certain respect, to the norm that endured from the reign of Peter I until 1991 (namely, that of an empire within Eurasia), and Solovyov wanted to reunify the Roman and Byzantine halves of Christendom, Tsymburski’s vision, as outlined in a volume called Island Russia, describes as its ideal a Russia within the far narrower borders that preceded Peter I, and that, as it happens, closely match Russia’s present-day outlines. Such an ‘Island Russia’, in the ideal case, will continue to be protected on the north and east by oceans, and on the west and south by ‘shoreline’ areas of militarily neutral zones or states. Marlene Laruelle and Paul Robinson have noted the influence of Tsymburski on an important school of Russian political thought, a school variously termed by them Democratic Conservatism (Robinson) and The Young Conservatives (Laruelle). Both reference Mezhuev as among this school’s founders and leaders.

Boris Mezhuev is author of The Political Critique of Vadim Tsymburski, a professor of the history of Russian philosophy at MGU (Moscow State University), and managing editor of the magazine Russkaya Idea. He is also a long-time friend and colleague of the Simone Weil Center. Our conversation follows, below. — Paul Grenier

GRENIER: Boris, according to my reading of your work on geo-politics, and this would include everything from your book on Vadim Tsymburski to your English-language essays on civilizational realism, testifies to the political centrality of civilizational centers of gravity.

In your analysis of the Ukraine conflict, for example, you see an example of a larger category of states, those that are divided in their allegiances between two different civilizations. In such cases, stability is structurally impossible if one ignores this foundational fact and attempts to cram the whole country into one civilization or the other. Hence, Ukraine, for example, should not be pulled wholly into the Russian orbit, nor wholly into the EU, and still less into NATO. Its status in geo-political terms should be neutral – this will be the optimal result precisely for the people living in the country itself. Am I getting your thinking right so far?

MEZHUEV: I apologize for responding in Russian, which obliges you to translate for the English reader, but unfortunately my written English is not quite what it should be. Regarding your question, I completely agree with how you have formulated my position; what is more, I am happy to say that this same position has, in effect, been voiced by the Russian president. To be precise, in his recent article for the German magazine Die Zeit, he defined his position in just such terms. He wrote that the West had forced Ukraine into making a fatal, either-or choice -- either Russia or the Euro-Atlantic world; and it was this coerced choice that brought about the territorial division of the country. Mutatis mutandi, the same can be said of Georgia or Moldova. In each of these cases, it was precisely a competition between civilizations that led to the breaking up of a formerly unified state. To be sure, the efforts of one or another national government to keep within its orbit of influence some parts of post-Soviet states also played a role. Nevertheless, one should not discount the role of the Soviet legacy in the political-cultural self-determination of, say, Transnistria; or the role of Russian cultural identity when Crimea and Sevastopol made their choice for self-determination in 2014. On the whole, it would be far better, both for Europe and for Russia, if the limitrophe (i.e., boundary) zone dividing our civilizational blocs remained neutral. This is the idea that underlies my concept of "civilizational realism," which, I am pleased to note, is currently being adopted by the Russian authorities. If it were accepted by European leaders as well, I think it would help resolve this whole geopolitical dilemma associated with the collapse of the USSR and the advance of Euro-Atlantic structures to the east.

GRENIER: From this simple starting point, I am now going to suddenly skip ahead to something more complex in your vision, as I understand it. The structure of your argument, I propose, has a ‘on the one hand x, but on the other hand y’ structure to it, with x and y standing in a paradoxical and contradictory relationship. I will start with the x, which is the circumstance, proposed by Tsymburski (who is himself in a tradition that extends at least as far back as N. Danilevsky), that Russia forms a separate civilizational identity, and that its survival requires not so much isolationism – that would be a great over-simplification – as much as a fairly classical process of balancing that does not allow Russia to get absorbed by anything outside of itself, including China, but certainly not the modern West nor modern Europe, which are decidedly other. There is a nuance to this, though, in so far as Tsymburski viewed hyper liberal Europe as engaged in a process of slow suicide from renunciation, on liberal moralistic but profoundly unrealistic grounds, of the idea of boundaries. But I don’t want to get side-tracked by that matter, maybe we can return to it.

And now for the ‘on the other hand,’ the ‘y.’ Here is your position, as I understand it, that asserts that, contra Tsymburski, Russia’s self-concept is in no way self-sufficient, nor is it self-confident. It is constantly looking over its shoulder to see what the outside is saying and doing – perhaps particularly at America.

This creates, to my mind, a potentially unresolvable tension, or dialectic, which means that Russia, to survive, needs at once to not be absorbed into any civilization other than itself, and yet, at the same time, it is always compelled to compare itself with civilizations wholly unlike itself. Because, to my mind at least, liberal America is wholly unlike Russian civilization as a type. Is this apparently somewhat schizophrenic character of Russian culture true to your own perceptions? Have I terribly distorted your understanding of Russia’s mentality? Please give a better and fuller account!

MEZHUEV: I do see what you are getting at here, and it seems to me that you have raised a very important question, one that discloses an important distinction between my own approach and that of Vadim Tsymburski. Vadim Leonidovich, besides being an admirer of Spengler, was also – and this despite all the amateurism of his approach to sociology -- an adherent of the structural-functional method of [American sociologist] Talcott Parsons. This meant that, for him, culture is a function of the social system. Culture is inseparable from the social system, and exists in a kind of instrumental dependency upon it. For that reason it was easy for him to make the leap from Parsons to Spengler and declare that any turn toward European culture within Russian culture represents a ‘pseudomorphosis’ -- in other words, a kind of perversion of the norm. For Spengler himself, it was a ‘perversion’ of the same sort for the German soul of the Faustian type to turn toward ancient Greek culture, with its Apollonian soul. Both the one and the other are nothing more than ‘perversions’ -- perhaps sublime, perhaps aesthetically attractive, and yet in civilizational terms useless. I, of course, view the matter differently. It seems to me that every culture is in this sense a ‘perversion’ – unless of course we are talking about the culture of a very local community that has no interest in outside cultures. From my perspective, culture in the true sense of the word begins precisely from the moment that such ‘perversions’ occur, and especially so in the Russian case. In culture there is something that transcends the purely functional, something connected with man’s need to not be bound by any limited society, even if that society is civilizational.

And, of course, no Russian culture can even exist without reference to the Other. In the Russian case, the relevant ‘Other’ is most often the European, or, in today’s terms, the Euro-Atlantic civilization, even if it is unacceptable to us in political and civilizational terms. Philosophy of culture in this sense cannot be the servant of theory of civilization. And yet, people cannot and do not live their lives only in terms of their knowledge of the Other and of what is Different; nor solely within a framework of dialogue with the Other. Within a given society people are obliged to make one or another choice. Sometimes individually, but more often together with their community, they choose, for example, to settle on a particular family policy: whether to legalize or, to the contrary, to restrain sexual deviancy; whether to have an official state religion or to the contrary to separate religion from society. All this is often determined not so much by the rationally defined positions that people consciously hold as it is by their belief in the legitimacy of one or another civilizational path. In this respect, civilization is higher than culture. Civilizational self-determination ends up being on a higher level than the space of cultural dialogue. Nevertheless, in order to depart from dialogue with this or that existential decision, one must first have entered into dialogue. To put the matter in Spengler-Tsymburski terms, you first need to go through the stage of "perversion," or, as I would prefer to put it, the stage of dialogue with the Other, the stage of discovery of the Other in oneself. You simply need to understand that the discovery of the Other is not the last and main discovery; after that, you still face the task of discovering yourself, and this is always very difficult to do, because it involves an inevitable reduction of Self, a reduction of the space of [abstract] possibility to the realm of the concretely actual, to use the language of David C. Schindler.

GRENIER:   What I am tempted to propose, in light of the above, is this. Perhaps there can be a constructive as opposed to a destructive dialectic/conversation between Russian and American civilizations based on those elements within each that, though grounded quite variously in terms of their pre-history, are formally complementary. I am thinking, in the first instance, of a point you make in your The Political Critique of Vadim Tsymburski. Toward the end, you point to Tsymburski’s wish that Russian politics develop in the direction of an internal modernization, emphasizing, in a very Keynesian spirit, internal finance of the domestic productive (industrial, technological) potential while at the same time reaching a values consensus between elites and the people, where the working people, or maybe better to just say ‘the citizenry,’ have a sort of moral authority over the elites. I’d like you to flesh out this vision in respect to its spiritual component, which I am not sure I fully understand.
Now, what is interesting to me here, is that, in neither today’s Russia nor in today’s United States is this kind of internal (‘domestic’) structure the order of the day. Which country is further from this stated ‘ideal’ we can discuss some other time.   What is interesting, though, is this: the ideal expressed by Tsymburski represents a nice synthesis of the ideals articulated by such sharp observers of the current political-economic and cultural crisis inside the United States as Patrick Deneen and Michael Lind. The former has called for ‘a change of the elites.’ The latter has called for the organization of the working classes so as to give them enough leverage to stop being steam-rolled by the present elites. But in both cases – here I think Deneen and Lind are in agreement – the desired end result is an America where working people are able to live stable, rooted lives in real communities, do dignified, meaningful work, and not have to be constantly made redundant by financial or technological whiz-kids who justify their constant destruction by appeals to the latest woke bullshit.

So here, at last, is my question: Is a ‘settlement’ between the United States and Russia dependent on the strengthening, in both countries, of such a political-economic and cultural paradigm?   Could the strengthening, in both ‘civilizations’ (and after their own patterns and traditions) of this type of developmental pattern resolve the destructive dialectic that seems to have become habitual in Russia? Also, I will repeat again my question two paragraphs ago, in reference to ‘the spiritual component,’ if any, of Tsymburski’s vision.   Is it in this dimension that, despite everything, the ultimate incompatibility of Russian and American civilizations will remain?

MEZHUEV: First of all, Tsymburski certainly did reflect deeply on these topics, and he reached similar conclusions to those of Lind and, perhaps, Deneen, though of course at a much earlier stage than either of them.[1] The central concept undergirding his vision for Russia was that of the small city or town, a formation that he sharply contrasted with the megalopolis. It is precisely the latter that gives rise to that allegedly progressive minority culture that hysterically denies any link with the past and which is so plainly hostile to the forms of the family. He had already intuited the coming controversy, the one that came to the fore so plainly during the pandemic, and which accentuated two different possibilities. One possibility was a new dispersal of the population to smaller cities, together with renewed efforts to gain a greater degree of local self-government, and create an ecologically safe environment, and, finally, renewed possibilities for living one’s life close to the family nest. This was the direction Tsymburski preferred. The other alternative was continued movement towards ever larger agglomerations, the gradual mixing of work and home spaces along with the absorption of the latter by the former. A return, in short, to the clash between ‘conservative democracy’ (the Tocqueville Option favored by Deneen) and ‘liberal authoritarianism’ with its dictatorship of an allegedly progressive megalopolis over the allegedly backwards small town and rural periphery.

But here two additional points arise. The first is this. In order to lift up the small town you need to develop domestic production, and you also need at least the partial rejection of the globalization strategy into which the megalopolis fits so well. This is precisely why Tsymburski wrote about the need for a Keynesian policy, something now already a commonplace in both Russia and the United States. Except that in Russia little is being done in this direction, at least so far; and, frankly speaking, it is unclear at this point what can be done. The second topic has to do with the dialogue between civilizations. Can we afford to wait until civilizations acquire a pleasant appearance, and only then work to achieve a normalization of relations between them? Should, say, Russia work to destroy the Euro-Atlantic civilization? Should the latter, for its part, work to destroy Russia? Tsymburski was dead set against any such thing. He believed that the forces born of such enormously destructive efforts would turn out to be still more terrible than current elites. In this sense, it was better to deal with the Euro-Atlantic that presently exists, all the more so as its strength is clearly already at its limits. This does not mean, of course, that people who take the position of “democratic conservativism" should give up on trying to find a common language with their peers so that the rapprochement of civilizations takes place on the basis of our platform, as opposed to the liberal platform. However -- and I am speaking here strictly for myself -- the era of Trumpism and, especially, of Brexit showed us in general what kinds of forces would surface if the Euro-Atlantic, like the USSR, fell apart under the influence of nationalistic sentiments. The main Brexit activist just recently almost started World War III and I fear that the Republican Party in the United States will lead the charge into direct conflict with Russia. We were fortunate to have Trump in power for four years in the sense that he was a politician not personally inclined towards military solutions. But right alongside him for a time was John Bolton, steadily pushing him into just such adventures. I am certain that in future, Republicans will be closer to Bolton, and further from Trump. The task today is therefore to gently get a hold of the ‘rapprochement of civilizations’ agenda in order to move from “civilizational realism” toward a real “engagement between conservatives.” While I do not think such a task will be impossible, neither will it be at all easy.

NOTES

[1] Vadim Tsymburski passed away from cancer in 2009 at the age of 53.

Paul GrenierJuly 8, 2021