(1825-1855).
In general, the Slavophiles saw the Westward swing as a threat to the church, the peasant and village community, and other Russian institutions. Many classical Slavophiles were initially influenced by Nicholas I’s Official Nationality slogan: “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality.” The most important proponent of classical Slavophilism was Ivan Kir-eyevsky (1806-1856), who could read French and German, had traveled in Russia,. and understood the importance of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835). Kireyevsky rejected the main intellectual developments of the time (rationalism, secularism, the industrial revolution, liberalism) and argued that Russia, as a backward young nation, was not in a position to imitate a civilized Europe. He pointed, for example, to the differences in religion (Catholicism versus Orthodox Christianity) and to the fact that Russian society consisted of small peasant communes founded upon common land tenure. Like
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Kireyevsky, Alexei Khomiakov (1804-1860) also warned against blindly following the West and criticized the impending emancipation of the serfs (1861). He emphasized spiritual freedom (sobornost) and Russia’s unique historical mission. Whereas the West was built upon coercion and slavery, he said, Russia was founded and maintained by consent, freedom, and peace. Yuri A. Samarin (1819-1879) supported Khomiakov’s view, arguing that society, if left to its own devices, would be torn apart by division and conflict because individualism only promoted selfishness and isolation, and thus a strong centralized state and leader were needed to maintain order. This was a clear reference to the danger that Russia would see a rerun of the Revolutions of 1848. As he saw it, chaos would ensue if Russia followed the example of Western liberalism by introducing constitutionalism and a system of checks and balances. Other proponents included the Aksakov brothers, Ivan and Konstantin. Ivan, at the height of his influence in the late 1870s, favored the liberation of the Balkan Slavs, whereas Konstantin advocated the emancipation of the serfs and was a proponent of the village commune (mir). Both wanted to preserve Russian traditions and maintain the ties between the Slavic peoples. In Ivan Aksakov in particular, one sees clear evidence of the emergence of Panslavism, which advocated the political and cultural unity of the Slavic peoples.
MODERATE AND RADICAL SLAVOPHILISM
Classical Slavophilism eventually gave way to two other variants of the doctrine. The moderate wing of the Slavophile movement is associated with Mikhail P. Pogodin (1800-1875) and Fyodor I. Tyutchev (1808-1873). Pogodin, a historian and publisher whose conservative journal The Muscovite (1841-1856) defended the policies of Nicholas I, was professor of Russian history at Moscow University (1835-1844) and wrote a history of Russia (7 vols., 1846-1857) and a study of the origins of Russia (3 vols., 1871). Tyutchev was a lyric poet and essayist who spent most of his life (1822-1844) abroad in the diplomatic service and later wrote poetry of a nationalist and Panslavist orientation.
The radical wing of slavophilism was epitomized by Nikolai Y. Danilevsky (1828-1855). As outlined in his Russia and Europe (1869), Danilevsky’s aim was to unite all the countries and peoples who spoke Slavic languages on the grounds that they possessed common cultural, economic, and political goals. Whereas in the seventeenth century such
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aims only received limited government support, Panslavism became stronger than ever in the post-Napoleonic period and especially after Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War. From the mid-nineteenth century onward, as Prussia tried to assimilate the Slavs, the Slavophiles called for solidarity against foreign oppression, and with this goal in mind many advocated the establishment of a federation. This was necessary, in Danilevsky’s view, in order to protect all Slavs from European expansion in the east. The Russian government in the 1870s used these ideas to justify russification and an increasingly expansionist policy. All in all, with the advance of Russian liberalism and constitutionalism at the end of the nineteenth century, the Panslav-ists tried to distance themselves from the classical and moderate Slavophiles.
The demise of Slavophilism in the nineteenth century was primarily due to the widespread divisions between those favoring conservative reform and those advocating a more extremist Panslavism. Like the populists, many Slavophiles argued that Nicholas I was incapable of reform, as shown by his repressive reign, and thus a more nationalist stance was needed.
Between the Russian Revolution and the rise of Josef Stalin, this ideology was largely rejected by the Soviet regime, but following the rise of National Socialism in Germany, Panslavism was revived, and it became very prominent during World War II. In the late Soviet period and especially in the post-communist era, the Slavophile ideology was once again promoted by Vladimir Zhirinovsky and other nationalists who sought to put Russia first and to protect it against a hostile West. Many neo-Slavophiles wished to see the restoration of the USSR and the Soviet Empire, and a return to Orthodoxy. Thus the legacy of the Slavophiles remains important and influential in contemporary Russia. See also: MIR; NATIONALISM IN TSARIST EMPIRE; NATION AND NATIONALITY; PANSLAVISM; NICHOLAS I; PETER I; RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH; RUSSIFICATION; TABLE OF RANKS; WESTERNIZERS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Devlin, Judith. (1999). Slavophiles and Commissars: Enemies of Democracy in Modern Russia. London: Macmil-lan. Walicki, Andrei. (1975). The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth- Century
Russian Thought, tr. Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Williams, Christopher, and Hanson, Stephen E. (1999). “National Socialism, Left Patriotism or Superimpe-rialism? The Radical Right in Russia.” In The Radical Right in East-Central Europe, ed. Sabrina P. Ramet. University Park: Penn State University Press.
(1919-1986), Russian poet and memoirist.
Brought up in Kharkov, Boris Abramovich Slutsky moved to Moscow in 1937 to study law and soon began a simultaneous literature course. On the outbreak of World War II he volunteered and went into battle as an infantry officer. Soon wounded in action, he spent the remainder of the war as a political officer, joining the Party in 1943. He ended up as a highly decorated Guards major, having campaigned all the way to Austria.
In 1945 he returned to Moscow and after convalescence made a living writing radio scripts, but in 1948 he was deprived of this work because of his Jewish origin. Sponsored by Ilya Erenburg, he was accepted in the Union of Writers in 1957 and thereafter was a professional poet. He made a lasting reputation with unprecedentedly unheroic poems about the war, but he was soon upstaged by the more flamboyant younger poets of the Thaw under Nikita Khrushchev, poets more concerned with the future than with the past. Slutsky steadily continued publishing original poetry and also translations, until on the death of his wife in 1977 at which point he suffered a mental collapse, which was underlain by the lingering effects of his wounds. Thereafter he was silent. From the beginning of his career Slutsky acquiesced in the censoring of his work, never moving into dissidence; notoriously, in 1958 he spoke and voted for the expulsion of Pasternak from the Union of Writers, an action for which he privately never forgave himself.
After Slutsky’s death, it was found that well over half of his poetry had never been published. The appearance of this suppressed work in the decade after he died revealed that Slutsky had been by far the most important poet of his generation. In hundreds of short lyrics he had chronicled his life and times, paying attention to everything from high politics to the routines of everyday life and tracing the evoluENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY tion of his society from youthful idealism through terrible trials to decline and imminent fall. He created a distinctive poetic language, purged of conventional poetic ornament, that has been highly influential. His prose memoirs about his military service, equally plain and unconventional, were only published fifty years after the end of the war. See also: THAW, THE; UNION OF SOVIET WRITERS; WORLD WAR II
BIBLIOGRAPHY
