In his book "The Russian Anti-World", the Russian émigré philosopher Mikhail Epstein - a professor at Emory University in Atlanta - analyzes Russia's failed historical destiny; a path that has prompted the country to imitate the West, while harboring an increasingly aggressive desire for revenge against it. Epstein's book draws on cultural and political history, as well as literature and psychology, to explore the deep-rooted, mysterious mechanisms that prompted Putin to start a war in Ukraine.
In an interview with the newspaper Le Figaro on the occasion of the book's release in France, the author claims that the paradox of Russia lies in the fact that it has historically been defined as a destructive force - an "anti-world", whose nihilism and "ideology of the end" today threaten humanity with a nuclear apocalypse.
LE FIGARO: In your book "The Russian Anti-World" you note that the metaphysical reasons for Putin's war remain a mystery. Your thesis is that the historical process is pushing Russia towards self-destruction - and perhaps dragging us towards the apocalypse. Please explain this to us.
MIKHAIL EPSTEIN: The concept of "anti-world" refers to the central concept of contemporary Russian politics: the "Russian World" and its expansion. Initially, this idea - which arose in the 1990s in the circle of the philosopher Georgy Shchedrovitsky - was aimed at cultural expansion. But Vladislav Surkov turned it into a propaganda weapon, expressing Russia's desire to expand again. What is striking here is the complete lack of content in this concept. The idea of the "Third Rome", the Pan-Slavic project centered on Russia, and later communism - all of them had a certain content. In Putin's version, however, we are faced with a tautology: "The Russian world" must expand simply because it is "Russian world".
LE FIGARO: For you, this "Russian world" is a dangerous anti-world. And above all - anti-West.
MIKHAIL EPSTEIN: Russia has always defined the rest of the world as something opposite to itself (as "anti"), proceeding from the idea that it is "surrounded by enemies": non-Christians, Catholics, Protestants, the bourgeoisie, capitalists, imperialists, anti-Sovietists, Russophobes... The image of a besieged fortress dominates contemporary propaganda. However, this reveals that Russia itself is "anti" in relation to the world. When I define it as anti-Western in essence, I refer to Oswald Spengler's famous book "The Decline of the West", in which he notes that Russian civilization emerged as a "pseudomorphosis": under Peter the Great it embarked on a Western historical path, without being fully prepared for it. It assimilated everything Western - and turned it against the West itself! This "pseudomorphosis" becomes "antimorphosis". Imagine this complex, this bitterness that turns the very model we imitate into the source of our strongest hatred. Mimesis - imitation - gives birth to nemesis: the thirst for retribution. This has been the decisive factor in all Russian politics since the time of Peter the Great, whatever form it took - be it the Russian Empire with its aspiration to unite the Slavic lands against the Romance and Germanic ones, or Marxism borrowed from the West but turned against it with the aim of destroying it. Russia has always borrowed from the West theories that could serve to destroy it: Marxism, anarchism or - in our days - the teachings of Guénon, Evola and other prophets of the "right international" and Eurasianism. Putin is no accident. He has touched the sore spot of Russian civilization.
LE FIGARO: Putin claims that Russia is a "state-civilization" that follows its own, unique path
MIKHAIL EPSTEIN: He is deeply mistaken, although the appeal of this slogan is understandable. Unlike China or India, Russia is not autonomous or distinctive enough to constitute an independent civilization - but it is large enough to claim such a status! Russia resembles the "underground man" described by Dostoevsky: incapable of creating anything of his own, yet reflective and insightful enough to mock, destroy, and do evil to others as well as to himself. Under Putin, Russia behaves exactly like this "underground man".
LE FIGARO: Did Dostoevsky predict the future revolutionary of 1917? Is this the real rupture?
MIKHAIL EPSTEIN: The Tsarist Empire also represented a kind of "anti-world", constantly opposed to the West: Orthodoxy was juxtaposed with Catholicism and Protestantism, and the progressive intelligentsia of the 19th century - with bourgeois rationality. And yet this "predator" was relatively peaceful; it was gradually losing its teeth and was ready to transform itself into a European-type state, to establish a Duma... After the revolution, the opposition became fiercer and bloodier, although Soviet ideology retained elements of the Enlightenment and rationalism. However, Putinism is even more aggressive. It is dominated by fanaticism, characterized by hateful rhetoric and dehumanization of the enemy.
LE FIGARO: And yet, in 1989, there was hope that Russia would join the West.
MIKHAIL EPSTEIN: Yes, absolutely. When I returned to Russia in 2003 - for the first time since I left - I was amazed. Moscow, which was black and gray when I left, seemed almost as glamorous as the cities of the West. I returned almost every year; the last time was in 2014, when you could already feel how the essence of the country was changing... So, yes - I was hopeful! And I was not the only one: it was shared by more competent figures, such as Alexander Yanov - a prominent historian of Russian Westernization and Slavophilism, who died on the eve of February 24, 2022. Back in the 1980s, he introduced the concept of "Weimar Russia", predicting that the country could slide towards fascism after a period of partial disintegration. But the Russian metamorphosis had changed his views so radically that when a form of aggressive fascism emerged after the annexation of Crimea, he still said: "Putin - the new Hitler? Nonsense!
LE FIGARO: You offer an explanation for these traps: the enormous scale of the country - so vast that it is impossible to assume civil responsibility for it
MIKHAIL EPSTEIN: Just as there is the curse of abundant resources - which atrophies the ability to work - there is also an obvious territorial curse. Possession of a vast territory creates a feeling of emptiness and nomadism. Thus, Russia - although it has become a settled society - remains essentially a nomadic horde. Putin calls this "riotism, thirst for movement": "When everything is calm, orderly and stable, a person gets bored... and longs for something to happen". That says it all. He even goes so far as to ask: if the "special military operation" is over, what will we do then?
His strategy is to wage war, rather than take up the "boring" task of developing our vast land. What is called in Russian razdol - this almost untranslatable word that denotes vast, open spaces, suggesting both enormous scale and freedom to roam - is related to another difficult-to-translate word: toska - melancholy, a mixture of madness and a painful state. Pushkin perceived in this sincere cry "now wild euphoria, now the deepest melancholy". In Blok's poem "On the Field of Kulikovo" a melancholic horseman wanders on his white horse. The plain, uninterrupted by natural barriers, gives rise to a sense of loss and uncertainty about one's own role.
LE FIGARO: So Russia lives in a world of chimeras?
MIKHAIL EPSTEIN: The greatest Russian writers have said it, and Andrei Platonov better than anyone. On the one hand, there is the maniacal rapture of the rulers, the obsession with conquering the world; on the other, the fact that the more we expand the boundaries of this space, the emptier it becomes - and the more it, in turn, empties us from within. The alternation of depression and mania captures the key stages of Russian history better than traditional political science: short bursts of manic activity on the part of the rulers and long periods of depression among the oppressed people.
LE FIGARO: Your book examines the apocalyptic temptation that Putin expresses through nuclear threats. Is there a political fusion between the brutal world of the Chekists and Russian Orthodox eschatology?
MIKHAIL EPSTEIN: Paradoxically, it is in the Sarov Monastery, where one of the greatest Russian saints, Seraphim of Sarov, lived in asceticism, that the Federal Nuclear Center is located. Back in 2007, during the time of Patriarch Alexy, the Church took the center under its patronage; later, in 2023, Patriarch Kirill stated that nuclear weapons were conceived in the monastery "by the ineffable providence of God." It is as if an attempt is being made to connect this weapon of the apocalypse with sacred places. It is here that the theology and technology of the "end of history" intersect. Constantly expanding the boundaries of emptiness, the "Russian World" risks being left with no other horizon than the devastation of the entire planet.
LE FIGARO: Why?
MIKHAIL EPSTEIN: Let me repeat: Peter the Great launched Russia into Western history. But history is a process of patient creation and accumulation. The apocalypse, on the contrary, offers an escape from this historical labor. Everything ends in an instant: heaven or hell - here and now. The idea of the apocalypse has always been strong in Russia - especially among the Old Believers, whose eschatology I studied in the field in the 1980s. Berdyaev also, in his book "The Russian Idea", describes the Russian people as a people of apocalypse and nihilism. The idea that Russia entered history not because of success, but to end history, gradually imposed itself in parallel with the spread of nihilism. Ultimately, contempt for the world, for the law and for human freedoms gives rise to a desire for all this to end as soon as possible.
LE FIGARO: Is it possible that Putin will use nuclear weapons or does he cynically intend to force us to abandon Ukraine?
MIKHAIL EPSTEIN: Probably both. And yet, no one - not even the "underground man" sitting in the Kremlin - knows at what point this intention may become a reality. Or at what level - tactical or strategic. Some argue that there are too many intermediate links between the order and its execution. However, we are dealing with an irrational power that has lost all sense of historical reason and is increasingly betting on a deadly negative-sum game: if we cannot win, let everyone lose!
Source: news.bg