SUMMARY:

As Butterfield warned years ago, the attempt to find the origins of the present in a distant pivotal moment is a very dangerous pursuit, for it leads almost inevitably to the “discovery” of analogies that lead the mind further and further back in time and deeper and deeper into anachronistic error. The history of the idea “Moscow, the Third Rome” clearly illustrates the pitfalls of origins-seeking in the sphere of national histories. Since the mid-nineteenth century a variety of scholars, philosophers and publicists have “discovered” in the writings of Filofei the “roots” of what they believed to be a fundamental characteristic of the “Russian idea”: Lamanskii located the origins of Panslavism; Solov'ev found the roots of Christian universalism; Berdiaev uncovered the lineages of Bolshevism; Chaev traced the beginnings of Russian nationalism; and numerous Cold-Warriors identified the bedrock of Soviet “expansionism.” Yet a sober assessment of the early history of the doctrine suggests that none of these things was ever dreamt of by Filofei. “Third Rome,” then, is the result of the projection of a modern idea – notably, the “Russian mission” – onto a superficially analogous early modern concept. Ironically, it is only in this sense that “Third Rome” can be seen as having any significant impact on Russian history – as an anachronistic artifact that reinforced a pre-existing modern belief that Russians are imbued with some kind of messianic impulse. One could reasonably guess that careful investigations of other pivotal moments in other national histories might lead to similar conclusions.