Many regard Russia as backward, lagging behind the West. This is not so. Our shared civilization is changing, and because of our raw experience of the twentieth century, my country is in some respects ahead of the West. I have described the coming epoch as a new medievalism (“The New Middle Ages,” August/September 2016). But it is too early to outline this new epoch in detail. We can only dimly see its outlines, which are best expressed as a turn toward inner strengthening and social reconsolidation. I call this “concentration.”
Communist materialism determined the order of Russia for more than seventy years; the phase of market-based materialism was traversed in much more rapid fashion. Both materialisms attained extreme manifestations but ultimately left the stage, or at least the proscenium. The whole world had time to admire the communist phase of our development, while the market phase passed without much notice. It is possible that the grotesque and farcical forms of Russian capitalism ultimately prevented this phenomenon from becoming an ideologically dominant conception in my society.
Not since the eighteenth century, when Russian culture switched its orientation from Byzantium to Western Europe, have we seen such a radical shift toward the West as occurred after the end of the Soviet Union. It was just as disruptive as it had been in the eighteenth century, marked by the appearance of previously unknown words and ideologemes, the phrases and thought patterns that are building blocks of ideological systems. One of these ideologemes was expressed in a statement that arose at the time. It conveyed a new, obligatory individualism: “That’s your problem.” In the conditions of Soviet collectivism, such an expression would have been absolutely impossible, but in the Russia of perestroika, people pronounced it enthusiastically, whether in an appropriate context or not. Sometimes the reason to pronounce it was even invented. The phrase was admired; it seemed so “Western.”
The relationship between Russia and the West at this time could be compared to a love story. At the beginning of the post-Soviet period, Russia was like a girl without a dowry who stood ready to marry the rich West on any terms. Though some might say this romantic abandon was little more than a crude desire to sell herself, it was in fact true love. Genuine though it was, her love turned out to be unrequited, and the girl was unceremoniously shown the door. The plot then developed, just as it should in a good story, in the direction of a radical transformation of the protagonists.