Perhaps one of the most seminal pieces of late-Tsarist, proto-Soviet literature, whose influence is still playing in the hearts and minds of Russian culture today, the seven-essay work known as 'Vekhi' (Landmarks) argued that the Intelligentsia (non-noble intellectual "class" although they would dispute the title) were harming, not helping the Russian people, achieve true liberation. Instead of helping the late-Tsarist people find their voice through an appeal to ethical and calculated pedagogy, the Intelligentsia were instead inviting beastial proclivities and destructive urges to rule the people, leading to nothing but to the complete social cacophony and upheaval of order, morals, and the abolition of personal agency for the "greater good" of class warfare. In effect, the Vekhi authors were targeting the identical "group think" predicament that has seemingly taken a hold in the Western world. To be an individual, to lead by calculated proceduralism which finds its root not in cheap materiality but universal spiritualism, is now a radical thought. The Vekhi authors had hoped otherwise.
In Marc Raeff's forward for the 1994 publication of Vekhi, he remarked that true social and political change would not come from the annihiliation of social and political order, as the Bolsheviks erroneously considered (and which the Mensheviks sheepishly observed). Rather, by strengthening within each person their ability to aptly and cogently respond to the duties inherent with civil freedom, "educating the populace to the responsibilities of citizenship," true political (and by extension social) change would occur. However, as our current world so accurately portrays, we have become accustomed to reactionary politics and no longer convene with the impact of our choices but rather, their momentary influence. Vekhi was a product of the Silver Age (1890-1917), and by extension Russian symbolism and "Belle Époque" (optimism/excitement) and "Fin-de-Siecle" (cynicism/nihilism). This period in Russian culture was where the barriers of realism, spirituality, rationalism, optimism, modesty, and morals were broken, allowing everything to be questioned, interrogated, and opinions eschewed for explorations of the soul, worldviews, lifestyles, our relationship with nature and the supernatural, our minds, knowledge, and what we know to be true. A great example would be the spiritual-religious belief of Sophiology, defined as the recognition of a unity of all things material and immaterial, a part of theosophical ideology.
As Raeff notes, the Vekhi authors were aware of such modernist trends, and while in-step with the need for spiritual rediscovery, they gravitated towards the "German philosophy and social science" version (think German Idealism and Neo-Kantianism). But instead of drably restating their philosophy, there's a point that I think is important to bear in mind and which forms the point of this post. While arguing against the Intelligentsia's excessive positivism, where anything outside "crude rationalism" like universal morals, ethical advancement, civic stability, and unmediated personal agency, the Vekhi authors stressed that it was cultural creativity where society could find itself. As Raeff writes, "to reduce cultural creativity to a mere reflection of economic and social forces...was to deprive society of an essential instrument of self-consciousness." Incredibly accurate, and such nefarious reductionism is being seen in the ways we think about classical music and traditionally "high-brow" art in Musicological discourse today. The reduction of art to "class" is a polemic of the soul, where the human element is eschewed for its hierarchical placement instead of allowing it to be a embodiment of the human experience, no matter the medium.
Yet, it was their Slavophilic views that I find most reassuring, "Russia needed a firm cultural structure, based on her own national traditions" and if we are seeing one thing today, it is the need for Russia to reignite the 19th century search for a nationally "Russian School" of expression, not a Western-qua-Russian mimesis. Perhaps Russian Hip-Hop is the greatest embodiment, as despite its non-domestic roots, it has grown to become a staple of contemporary Russian life whose very aesthetic and thematic self rejects its Western upbringing and instead looks inwards, and towards itself for its own development. What greater progress for nation can be made then this? To reject the foreign, helpful as it may be, for the domestic, rudimentary as it may be, is and should be the natural cycle of any nation when they begin to introspect and engage with themselves to build themselves. This is all to say, the Vekhi author's rejection of the Intelligentsia's rejection of "absolutes," moral, ethical, cultural, philosophical, spiritual, or otherwise, and their belief that only by endorsing a "suprahuman order" could real change be enacted, echoes concerns many have over the era of "post post-modernism" and immodest relativism that has befallen our global society.
By seeing everything as empty constructs to be weaponized and destroyed, aesthetics and cultural expressions as subjective experiences which hold no right or wrong, and narratives which have no 'true' formation, along with the belief that to be morally and ethically "free" is to be actually "free," we have regressed to the decadence of the 20th century. For Russia, while there is much to condemn, the only hope for the country is to look inwards. By losing the endorsement of the West, they have gained the opportune chance to negotiate their own history and cultural development once again. Yet, whether the lessons of the past will be used to negotiate their future is unknown but there must be a prioritization of identifying and bolstering cultural uniqueness in order to disincline hegemony from forming. We are already bearing witness how Western powers have shown themselves to be neo-colonialist, and are amply fortified and ready to devour nations for whom capitulation is guaranteed.
Thus, in many respects the Russian world is unique in their direct opposition to the Western hegemon, and their unwillingness to nonsensically endorse the slavery-of-the-soul model which has befallen the Western world (led by the USA and its "democratic" liberalism). This is not to say Russia (i.e., Putin) is guileless, far from it. But one must comprehend what he is doing, not what we wish to think he is doing. Why must Russia adopt the so-called liberal views of the West, and kow tow like a prodigal son to the Western world? What right does the Western world have in dictating, read demanding, that Russia operate as they do, by the same beliefs, customs, traditions, ideologies, as they? Do we not live on a globe, are the days of Pangea still afoot, and am I mistaken to think that in different countries societies and nations have developed in idiosyncratic ways? Like Vekhi note, there are absolutes ethical and moral truths to respect, but then there are unobfuscatable national dissimilarities which must be recognized, and to casually ignore them is to be ignorant to human existence itself.
In short, Russia is not our enemy. Homogenization, reactionism, and relativism is the true enemy, and we'll all be a victim if we don't begin to quickly recognize this unassailable truth.
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