INTRODUCTION

Russia’s Westernization during the 18th century had utopian elements that grew out of centuries of European cultural development. Christianity had long encouraged the faithful to look forward to Christ’s Second Coming, while the absolutist rulers of the baroque era and the Freemasons of the 18th century held that an all-powerful monarch or the secret wisdom of Masonic orders held the keys to the creation of a better world. In each case – Christian, absolutist, Masonic – there was a common belief that the world could become better in some vague yet truly life-transforming way if only history followed the correct path. In Russia, beginning with the reign of Peter the Great – which came at the end of a 17th century scarred by devastating civil strife and unprecedented religious violence – the official ideology of the imperial regime linked such utopian dreams with the empire’s Westernization. Anxious to remove any doubts about the radical character of the changes he was seeking, Peter ordered the nobles to abandon beards and styles of clothing and architecture that were hallowed by centuries of tradition; he ordered the adoption of the Julian calendar to coincide with the symbolic dawn of a new century (January 1, 1700) and called himself Peter the First (not, as his forebears would have, Peter Alekseevich [“son of Aleksei”]) to suggest that his reign marked the beginning of a new era; and he called his deliberately foreign-looking new capital city of St. Petersburg, at that time still a muddy frontier outpost in the northern marshes, his “paradise,” a term with unmistakable religious overtones. Beyond copying specific features of Western Europe, his aim was for Russia to blend its own national genius with the best of Western societies to create a superior new civilization.^[1]
Like the totalitarian states of modern Europe, Peter’s regime believed that this program offered breathtaking vistas of future greatness, and had little patience for those who did not share his vision or who objected to the methods employed in its pursuit.^[2] This enforced Westernization created a profound split in Russian society. The vast, largely powerless majority remained outside the Westernization process, their attitude ranging from reserved skepticism to outright hostility, and their culture growing ghettoized and ossified as the Westernized elite continually skimmed off the wealthiest and most educated individuals.^[3] However, the tiny 18th century ruling minority embraced the transformation and acknowledged the monarch’s exclusive power to guide it; aside from the succession crisis of 1730, neither churchmen, intellectuals, property owners, the judiciary, nor ancient aristocratic families – usually the most politically assertive groups of early modern society – seriously questioned the monarch’s supremacy.^[4]
Faced with the glaring discrepancy between its grandiose ambitions and limited resources for achieving them, the regime often had to settle for merely rhetorical or symbolic gestures; the Christian way of thinking, which placed high value on publicly proclaiming one’s faith, thus lived on in secularized form.^[5] One consequence was that the regime founded institutions and announced policies that dramatically advertised its commitment to Westernization but were out of touch with Russian realities. For example, it created a magnificent, imitation-European capital, St. Petersburg, when most Russian cities and towns were still small settlements of log cabins; it founded an academy of sciences (in 1724) before it had universities to train scientists to staff it; it established its first university (in 1755) before it had the necessary schools to train potential applicants; and it attempted (in 1767) to create a law code based on Enlightenment notions of individual rights, at a time when half the population were serfs with hardly any rights than at all. Much like the Russian communists of the 20th century, who began by proclaiming the existence of a “proletarian dictatorship” and only later tried to industrialize the country and actually create the industrial proletariat whose representatives they claimed to be, Peter and his heirs hoped that once Russia had the visible symbols of an advanced European society, the social realities that elsewhere gave rise to these symbols in the first place would appear as well.
Similarly, the high culture of Russia’s educated elite was, to a large extent, driven by the belief that if Russians imported the styles and artifacts of European culture, the social underpinnings of that culture would also arise. For example, literary salons – social gatherings of writers and their readers, frequently hosted by ladies of the aristocracy, where ideas could be exchanged freely and informally – were important features of European upper-class life in the early 18th century; writers often carried on their salon conversations in their published poetry or fiction, such as the French author Paul Tallement’s 1663 novel Le voyage de l’Isle d’amour,^[6] that were filled with oblique references to salon discussions and acquaintances. The Russian writer Vasilii Kirillovich Trediakovskii hoped to popularize salons in Russia, where they did not exist, to help foster a public opinion that would be independent of the imperial court. So, in 1730, he published a Russian translation of Tallement’s novel, hoping that Russians who read the book would be inspired to establish salons. In this case, as the Russian scholar Iurii Mikhailovich Lotman put it, in France “the salon (a literary milieu) had given rise to the novel, whereas in Russia the novel was expected to give rise to a particular cultural milieu. There [in France], reality created the text; here [in Russia], the text was supposed to create reality.”^[7]
This changed in the late 18th-early 19th century, when the regime was increasingly able to influence society’s everyday existence – thanks to its expanding administrative apparatus, education system, judiciary, and so on – even while a growing minority of non-noble Russians became receptive to the Westernized culture of the nobility. As a result, the gap between the regime’s utopian Westernizing rhetoric and the anti-Western traditionalism of the population gradually narrowed; in its place, there emerged, among the educated classes, a sense of Russian national identity that drew on pre-Petrine traditions as well as Western influences and that has been central to Russian thinking ever since. The remainder of this essay will explore the emergence and significance of this sense of “Russianness” in three contexts: the creation of the modern Russian literary language; changing conceptions of the social order; and Russians’ thinking about their place in Europe.

LANGUAGE

The new sense of national identity was inconceivable without a proper national literary language. Pre-Petrine Russia had experienced a situation known as diglossia, i.e., the simultaneous use of several distinct languages that were employed for different purposes and perceived as mutually complementary. The everyday spoken language was Russian, but lexicographers and grammarians had not fully developed the distinctions between formal and informal or between standard and substandard speech, or the specialized vocabularies of legal and political theorists, scientists, philosophers, and so on. The basis for the written language, on the other hand, was Old Church Slavonic, used in the Russian Bible and liturgy (like Latin in the medieval West) and generally associated with the church and religion. Officials and others writing on non-religious themes – a comparatively rare occurrence before 1700 – used a hybrid of the two languages.^[8] The Russian-Old Church Slavonic diglossia faithfully mirrored pre-Petrine Russia’s self-perception as a Slavic nation rooted in the Byzantine Orthodox tradition.
This diglossia was transformed in the 18th century, when the rapid expansion of non-religious publishing reflected the shift away from pre-Petrine cultural traditions, while the primacy of Old Church Slavonic was challenged by the languages of the Protestant and Catholic countries that now served as models for Russia’s Westernization; the effect of these developments, as the Russian statesman and scholar Pavel Nikolaevich Miliukov noted, “was to deprive the language used by the educated Russians of any firmly established foundation.”^[9] Foreign words and phrases were imported pell-mell into Russian. Thus, terms associated with new institutions of government were often taken from the German: for instance, the titles Polizeimeister (“police master”) and Oberhofmarschall (“chief court marshal”) were Russianized as politseimeister and obergofmarshal, even though to Russian ears these were meaningless strings of awkward syllables. Russians also translated, and sometimes mistranslated, foreign idiomatic expressions. For example, the French ne pas être dans son assiette means “not be in one’s proper position,” that is, feel awkward or out of kilter. Assiette here means “proper position,” but in other contexts it can mean “plate” or “bowl,” so Russians adopted the garbled translation byt’ ne v svoei tarelke – “not to be in one’s bowl.” However, many genuinely valuable words and phrases – “development,” “concentrate,” “theory,” “fashion,” “actor,” “soldier,” “university,” and countless others – entered the language as well, enriching its storehouse of concepts and enhancing its expressive powers. At the same time, writers began using Old Church Slavonic vocabulary as a stylistic device for evoking a religious or patriotic mood, while folk expressions were used to add an earthy flavor to one’s writing. Russian thus became a sophisticated literary language, capable of expressing a vast range of feelings and ideas in a variety of literary styles and levels of speech. However, in an era that regarded the language as the core of a nation’s identity, the heterogeneity of Russian’s linguistic roots – both (Orthodox) Old Church Slavonic and (Catholic or Protestant) West European, both aristocratic and peasant – made it unavoidable that discussions about language would become ideologically charged.
Russia’s literary elite (poets, prose writers, playwrights, journalists, literary and theater critics) was a tiny minority within the already small nobility, but its members – who, in addition to their literary work, were generally government officials, military officers, landowners, or members of the aristocracy of St. Petersburg and Moscow – were fully integrated into the mainstream of noble society. This allowed them both to observe and to influence the values and everyday conduct of their upper-class readers, whose style of living and thinking was, in turn, the model for the ever-expanding population of Russians who obtained an education and aspired to a genteel way of life over the course of the next century. The literary elite thus had a long-term impact that was entirely out of proportion to its small numbers.
By about 1800, this literary world had become divided into two camps. Both agreed that Russians’ ability to think creatively and take their place among the great cultures of Europe depended on the subtlety and expressiveness of their language. Furthermore, they took for granted – as did most educated Europeans of their time – that each nation had a distinctive personality that needed to be expressed in its own language; under this theory, a nation that relied on another’s language was condemned to produce sterile imitations of that other nation’s thought patterns. (Not coincidentally, it was in this same period that Noah Webster worked to codify an American form of English, in the hope of thereby cementing culturally the American people’s independence from Great Britain.) Authors writing in Russian, it was agreed, needed to achieve European levels of intellectual and aesthetic sophistication while preserving distinctly Russian ways of thinking and feeling.
The linguistic debate of the early 1800s, while fundamentally about national identity, concretely took the form of a dispute about vocabulary, grammar, literary and rhetorical style, and everyday behavior. On one side were the advocates of the “New Style,” so called because they sought Russia’s integration into the mainstream of Enlightenment Europe. They were open to borrowings from Western languages and regarded the spoken Russian of educated nobles as the proper model for the written language. Like the ideal noblewoman, the Russian language and the corresponding sentimentalist style of literature – exemplified in the highly popular writings of Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin – were supposed to be “delicate,” “pleasant,” sensitive, consciously aristocratic, cosmopolitan in outlook, and not pompous, pedantic, servile, or overly religious; the writers associated with this style cultivated a refined sense of irony, informality in their personal relationships, and a critically-minded individualism. This vision of the world was rejected by the champions of the “Old Style,” which was actually quite new but whose advocates saw themselves as the upholders of Russia’s Slavic, Orthodox, and monarchical tradition. In contrast to the “feminine” literary sentimentalism of the New Style, the Old Style, whose chief exponent was Admiral Aleksandr Semenovich Shishkov, favored the more “masculine” literary style of classicism and stressed such qualities as “gravity,” hierarchy, decorum, and stoicism. Whereas the New Style borrowed from European languages, the Old drew its vocabulary and style from Old Church Slavonic and Russian folk sources. The New Style was accused of ignoring Russia’s heritage, fawning over Europe, and favoring “feminine” private emotions rather than “masculine” public ones (e.g., patriotism); the Old Style, on the other hand, was accused of being dull and rejecting the beneficent influence of Europe while idealizing Russia’s medieval past. Reflecting these philosophical differences, the pro-Old Style “Symposium of Lovers of the Russian Word” was a large organization that held decorous public readings and was hierarchically structured under the leadership of older writers and statesmen, while the pro-New Style “Arzamas Society of Obscure People” was an intimate gathering of young writers who, as their group’s very name indicated,^[10] delighted in irony and satire, such as delivering mock eulogies for Old Style writers whom they deemed intellectually “dead.”
Both the Old and New Style embraced Russia’s 18th century Westernization. Within that framework, however, the Old Style wanted to strengthen the elite’s frayed ties to the Orthodox, pre-Petrine, and folk traditions, and keep out what it considered the frivolous, caustic French Enlightenment spirit that challenged all inherited beliefs and ultimately corroded decency and the bonds of society. The New Style, by contrast, hoped to lead Russian society toward “enlightenment” by combating superstition, tyranny, servility, ignorance, and the general coarseness of manners; this meant looking to Enlightenment Europe (including France) as a role model and adopting a critical distance toward many national traditions. Against the background of the Napoleonic Wars and Alexander I’s intermittent reform efforts, the debate had political overtones – the advocates of the Old Style were accused of being authoritarian enemies of “enlightenment,” while the supporters of the New Style were charged with being unpatriotic and serving the interests of Napoleonic France, Russia’s enemy.^[11]
By the 1820s-30s, the two currents merged. The end of the Napoleonic Wars and of Alexander I’s reform efforts had removed the principal earlier sources of domestic political discord, but more broadly, Russian writers had achieved a greater consensus on what “Russianness” meant. The premier writer of the New Style, Karamzin, spent the years after the traumatic 1812 war against Napoleon writing a patriotic and immensely popular history of medieval Russia; this reflected his entire generation’s deepening sense that Russia’s past, long extolled by the Old Style, was indeed central to the national identity. The Old Style’s openness to Church Slavonicisms and folk expressions likewise found acceptance as ways to express the national character. On the other hand, the crusade against linguistic borrowing conducted by the Old Style’s main champion, Shishkov, came to be seen as quixotic and unproductive, while the Old Style’s orientation toward classicism produced a literature that seemed anachronistic, wooden, and uninspired. More generally, the European-wide fashion of romanticism – which encouraged a cosmopolitan outlook, individual introspection, and attention to the uniqueness of each nation’s history and folk culture – was conducive to a synthesis of the two styles.
The embodiment of that synthesis was Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin. His prose remains to this day the gold standard of “good” Russian, monuments to his memory adorn streets and squares across the country, and Russians memorize his verse and speak of him with quasi-religious reverence. Equally important, his turns of phrase, the moods created by his poetry, and the characters who populate his stories, have powerfully contributed to shaping Russians’ sense of what it means to be “Russian,” while Pushkin’s own life – he is remembered as a romantic lover who died tragically in a duel, an ardent advocate of liberty, prickly individualist, and proud yet melancholy aristocrat and patriot – remains a touchstone for Russian national ideals.
The conception of the national character popularized by Pushkin, Nikolai Vasil’evich Gogol’, Sergei Timofeevich Aksakov, and other writers of the first half of the 19th century, became accepted by educated people and has played an important role ever since in shaping how Russians see themselves and are seen by others. Fundamental to this conception is the idea that “Russianness,” like the character traits popularly attributed to American regions and ethnicities (such as Southerners or Italian Americans), is a quintessentially personal attribute that manifests itself in how an individual thinks, feels, and interacts with other individuals. (It is therefore quite different from the conception of American national identity that sees Americans as being “diverse” individuals who reveal their “Americanness” mainly by adhering to certain values, such as respect for the rights of others, when they interact with society at large.) By contrast with stereotyped notions about the frivolous French, the pedantic Germans, or the treacherous Poles, ideal Russians were supposed to be easygoing, tolerant, warmhearted, communal, spiritual, sincere, and loyal; the shortcomings attributed to them by Russian writers – superstitiousness, drunkenness, corruption, laziness, disregard for rules – were deemed logical, even endearing corollaries to these favorable qualities. While earlier stereotypes had focused on differences between social groups, such as peasants and nobles, the national stereotype applied to both sexes and all classes of society.^[12]

THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL ORDER

This conception of the Russian national character crystallized in tandem with evolving ideas about the social and political order. Eighteenth-century upper-class Russians generally took their rigidly hierarchical social order for granted as a natural fact of life that was justified by the superiority of the “enlightened” nobles over the “benighted” peasants and by the nobles’ duty to serve the monarch. Reading the autobiographies of such thoughtful nobles as Ekaterina Romanovna Dashkova, Anna Evdokimovna Labzina, Gavriil Romanovich Derzhavin, Aleksandr Semenovich Shishkov, Ivan Vladimirovich Lopukhin, and others, one rarely senses any unease with the social or political order.^[13] At the same time, as Richard Wortman and others have pointed out, the 18th century monarchs’ “scenarios of power” – i.e., the ideological constructs that justified their rule – typically argued that the current monarch represented a break with his or her predecessor’s policies and that the goal of his or her reign was to implement changes that would make Russia more similar to Europe.^[14] The idea of regime-sponsored Westernizing change, starting at the top of society and gradually spreading downward – along with an attitude of fear and contempt toward the peasant masses – lay at the core of the regime’s ideology for most of the 18th century.
These ideas changed around the turn of the century. In part, educated Russians underwent the same influences as their counterparts elsewhere: the Enlightenment and romanticism made folk culture appear as a virtuous repository of national tradition, not brutish primitiveness;^[15] the French Revolution caused many to lose faith in the ability of traditional social and political structures anywhere to maintain order; and the participation of lower-class soldiers in the wars against Napoleon inspired many nobles with a new respect for the peasants’ bravery and patriotism. As a consequence, post-Napoleonic elites across Europe made greater efforts than had their predecessors to create an emotional bond between themselves and the common people.
In Russia, this development exhibited several peculiarities. The notion of “folk” (narod) society was interpreted in light of Russia’s 18th century history of Westernization, the weakening influence of the Orthodox Church, the expansion of serfdom, and the absence of significant urbanization: the “folk” hence was defined as a monarchical, communal, Orthodox world of non-Western peasant villagers, whose heyday was situated between the Time of Troubles and the reforms of Peter the Great. (The “folk” tradition was defined variously in different countries: for example, Germans often associated it with the semifeudal communalism of late medieval towns, while Americans identified it with the individualistic, democratic farmers of the early Republic.)^[16] This vision of the folk appears repeatedly in the Russian high culture of the early 19th century, in such disparate sources as Shishkov’s polemical Treatise on the Old and New Styles of the Russian Language (1803), Sergei Nikolaevich Glinka’s nationalistic journal The Russian Messenger (1808-25), Aleksei Gavrilovich Venetsianov’s 1820s paintings of rural life, or Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka’s opera A Life for the Tsar (1836).
Ideas about Russian national identity, which took shape gradually during the 18th century, affected Russian politics in a variety of sometimes contradictory ways. On the one hand, the reigns of Peter III (1761-62) and Paul I (1796-1801) were discredited among the nobility, and cut short by coups, in part because their oppressive, militaristic authoritarianism was perceived as too “German.”^[17] On the other hand, when Alexander I and his advisers mooted liberal reforms in 1801-12, both Karamzin and Derzhavin (leading exponents of, respectively, the New and the Old Style) roundly denounced these efforts as driven by an un-Russian – in this case, French and Polish – spirit of liberalism, while the nationalist writer and statesman Fedor Vasil’evich Rostopchin argued that Russian serfdom was uniquely benign because it reflected the essential benevolence of the national character.^[18]
During the reign of Alexander I’s brother and successor, Nicholas I (1825-55), the highly influential minister of education Count Sergei Semenovich Uvarov defined the regime’s ideology as “Orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality” – in other words, the Orthodox faith (favored over other religions mainly because it was historically Russian, not for theological reasons), the absolute monarchy, and the spirit of the folk.^[19] The absolutist implications of this doctrine were not universally accepted by educated Russians, but the underlying premises were widely shared. Not only did the Slavophiles of the 1840s broadly hold this view^[20] – even the early socialist Aleksandr Ivanovich Herzen (a Westernizer and vehement critic of the Slavophiles), who denounced Nicholas I’s regime as a form of German bureaucratic authoritarianism imposed on the Russian people, nonetheless agreed with the basic assumption that bourgeois capitalism and liberal politics were alien to Russia, that the Russian peasantry lacked the capitalistic impulses of its Western counterparts, and that radical changes were possible in Russia that would be unthinkable elsewhere in Europe.^[21] Even though Uvarov was a conservative monarchist, and Herzen, a revolutionary socialist, the emerging consensus on what constituted “Russianness” profoundly influenced both of them. This sense of Russia’s greatness, its irrationalism, and its vast yet mysterious potential was captured by one of its best-known poets, Fedor Ivanovich Tiutchev, who wrote in 1866 that “The mind cannot grasp Russia/Nor can the common yardstick measure her/She has a stature all her own/All you can do is believe in Russia.”
The emerging conception of a Russian identity fostered the belief in a great national destiny and the existence of shared values and behaviors that made all Russians fundamentally alike and different from foreigners. During the second quarter of the 19th century, this strengthened educated Russians’ sense of kinship with the peasantry and thereby undermined their support for serfdom; while Aleksandr Nikolaevich Radishchev’s searing 1790 indictment of serfdom (A Journey From St. Petersburg to Moscow) still appealed to nobles to empathize with the serfs on the grounds of their shared humanity, Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev’s 1840s Hunter’s Sketches went a significant step farther and emphasized the enserfed peasants’ inherent Russianness. The significance of this shift is apparent when we consider the experience of the United States, which also had a large servile population but where the educated classes developed no comparable sense that their slaves were members of the same American nation and therefore had claims on the respect and solidarity of their fellow Americans.^[22] However, the deepening sense of national distinctiveness also encouraged educated Russians after mid-century to think that Russia could dispense with the liberal industrial capitalism that increasingly dominated Western societies, and it made them generally intolerant of the aspirations of their empire’s minority nationalities. Thus, key features of post-1850s Russian history – the educated classes’ reaching out to the peasantry, the failure of Western-type liberalism to make inroads in Russian public opinion, and the empire’s worsening ethnic tensions – were all related to the concept of “Russianness” that had taken shape by the mid-19th century.

RUSSIA’S ROLE IN EUROPE

A third area where the notion of “Russianness” played a role is Russia’s relationship with other European powers. Of course, international relations are always influenced by pragmatic considerations – as Great Britain’s Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston famously declared in 1848, “We have no eternal allies and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”^[23] The Russian Empire in the 18th century likewise had “eternal and perpetual” interests: hence its abiding rivalry with its neighbors Sweden, Poland, and Turkey, its lasting alliance with their enemy, Austria, and its enmity toward their patron, France. However, ideology helps shape international relations by suggesting ways to interpret one’s own and others’ long-term interests and strategies. For example, the belief among mid 19th century German nationalists that Germans could protect themselves against French aggression only by creating their own nation-state, was a sweeping ideological vision undergirded by complex beliefs about the two nations’ character and destiny, not merely a response to self-evident facts. As public opinion became increasingly influential in politics in the mid-late 18th century, as an ideological split opened up between liberal and conservative states after the Napoleonic Wars, and as states became increasingly identified with their dominant nationality’s culture and ethnic identity, the importance of the ideological component in foreign policy steadily increased.
As in so many things, it was Catherine II, ironically a French-speaking, German-born usurper on the Russian throne, who recognized and fostered the deepening sense of Russianness among the elite. She played a crucial role in creating a nationalist ideological framework for Russian foreign policy with her “Greek Project,” whose core was the ambition to revive the long-defunct Byzantine Empire, its capital once more in Constantinople, in what was presently the Balkan and Anatolian heartland of the Ottoman Empire. This Greek empire would be ruled by Catherine’s grandson (who was therefore given the name Constantine), and would serve as a junior ally of the Russian Empire. The Greek Project linked concepts that had not hitherto been connected in Russian ideology: Russia’s strategic interest in the Black Sea region; its supposed religious mission to liberate the Orthodox Balkan peoples and the city of Constantinople (Orthodoxy’s historic capital) from the Muslim Turks; and the novel claim that, as the successor to medieval Greco-Byzantine Christianity, Russia was somehow also the rightful heir to the pagan classical Greek culture that educated Europeans everywhere celebrated as the mother of Western civilization and that predated Byzantium by over six hundred years.^[24] (In the 19th century, the notion of Russia’s ethnic kinship with the Slavic Serbs and Bulgarians would be added to this mix.) In pursuing this plan, Catherine hoped to appeal to Russian public opinion, enhance Russian prestige in Europe, and win allies in the Balkans. While the Greek Project itself ultimately failed for military reasons, it helped to foster a Russian nationalist interest in the Balkans that continued when the Russians fought the Ottomans in 1828-29, 1853-56 (the Crimean War), and 1877-78 – thereby helping to secure the independence of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Montenegro – as well as when they entered World War I in defense of Serbia in 1914, and, most recently, vehemently opposed NATO’s war against Yugoslavia in 1999.
The second element of a self-consciously “Russian” view of European affairs that we see appearing in the late 18th century is hostility to Poland. To be sure, the strategic and religious hostility between Orthodox Russia and Catholic Poland had been a prominent feature of 16th and 17th century European politics, but the relationship had changed fundamentally by the early 18th century, when Russia’s religious antagonism toward the West dwindled and its power steadily increased while Poland entered a long-term decline. In this context, Poland and Russia were allies in the Great Northern War (1700-21), and the increasingly feeble Polish state posed no serious threat to Russian security for the remainder of the 18th century.
Nevertheless, Catherine II joined Prussia and Austria in partitioning Poland. The partitions created a huge practical problem – how to control the restive Poles and prevent them from supporting Napoleonic France against Russia – as well as the ideological challenge of justifying the complete destruction of a large, sovereign European state, an act that contradicted the most elementary notions of international law. The Russian elite’s response was twofold. On the one hand, the authors of poems, plays, novels, and operas depicted the Poles as a devious, pompous, anarchic, arrogant nation that served as a bridgehead for French revolutionary influences and continually sought to harm Russia; Poland’s intervention in 17th century Russia’s Time of Troubles was frequently recalled, as were intrigues by Polish aristocrats at the Russian court under Catherine II and Alexander I, and the participation of Polish troops in Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Russia.^[25] (In his 1870 novel The History of a Town, a mordant satire of Russian government set in an imaginary provincial backwater, Mikhail Evgrafovich Saltykov-Shchedrin describes an hilarious, week-long mini-civil war among female pretenders to local power that recalls both the Time of Troubles and 18th century Russian court politics; among the instigators of the mischief are, of course, “Polish conspirators.”) Russia itself, by contrast, was depicted as a magnanimous conqueror whose generosity the Poles continually repaid with treachery and rebellion, especially during their uprisings of 1830-31 and 1863-64. Once established, this antagonism toward the Poles – whom Russians pointedly excluded from the family of Slavic “brother nations” for which they exhibited such solicitude – remained in place at least until the Romanov monarchy collapsed in 1917.^[26]
Finally, a third important ideological current emerged in late 18th – early 19th century Russian thinking about international relations: a moralistic, frequently religious, and usually conservative impulse that was often associated with fantasies about a vast international plot against Russia; the villains of these conspiracy theories at various times included Western governments, Western radicals, Protestants, Jesuits, Jews, and Freemasons, among others. The roots of this way of thinking stretch back to Muscovite ideas about Moscow being the beleaguered Third Rome, but in its modern incarnation it originated in the late 18th century, when Russia’s aggressive expansion gave rise simultaneously to grandiose Russian ambitions (e.g., the Greek Project) and growing European fears of Russian power; Russians’ sense that envious Europeans were obstructing Russia’s imperial destiny fueled the suspicion that Russia was the target of an international conspiracy. These concerns were reinforced by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, which encouraged the belief that foreign enemies were in league with subversive elements within Russia;^[27] in various guises, such conspiracy theories continued to flourish throughout the tsarist and Soviet periods of Russian history and remain widespread even now.
The element of ideological conservatism first becomes prominent in Russian foreign-policy thinking during the brief reign of Paul I (1796-1801). Unlike his mother, Catherine II, who had treated the French Revolution and its international repercussions primarily as a foreign-policy issue, Paul regarded it as a threat to the survival of monarchical society as such. His response was to demand that Russians renounce any aspects of European culture that might encourage ideological sympathy for the revolutionaries, and he was outraged when his British and Austrian allies seemed to place national self-interest ahead of the anti-French crusade during their joint War of the Second Coalition against France in 1798-99. Paul’s son, Alexander I, pursued a more stable foreign policy than his mercurial father, yet he likewise saw his mission as going beyond the defense of specifically Russian interests to include the restoration of “order” in Europe as a whole. To that end, he pursued Napoleon’s armies from Moscow all the way to Paris in 1812-14; persuaded the other powers to join him in a “Holy Alliance” that committed European monarchs to uphold Christian principles in their conduct of domestic and foreign affairs; urged other European states to adopt constitutions after 1815; and considered sending Russian troops to suppress revolutions in Italy in 1820. His successor, Nicholas I, continued this role of “policeman of Europe,” though in a more explicitly conservative spirit: thus, he was prepared to send Russian troops in 1830 to prevent Belgium from seceding from the Netherlands, and in 1849 his armies came to the Habsburg Empire’s rescue by crushing the rebels in Hungary.
Many educated Russians disapproved of the foreign policies of Paul, Alexander, and Nicholas, whether because they saw no practical benefit to Russia or because they disagreed with their ideological orientation. However, these policies also reflected growing sentiment that Russian society had a unique moral character that ought to find expression in its foreign policy; though there was no consensus on just what policies should embody this “Russianness,” it seemed clear that it entailed maintaining Russia’s status as a great power and was neither capitalist nor liberal. In various guises – Nicholas I’s anti-revolutionary conservatism, the pan-Slavist leanings of his successors (and much of Russian public opinion) until 1917, the revolutionary socialism of the Soviets, and many post-communist Russians’ suspiciousness toward the West – this legacy has lived on from the late 18th century to the present.

CONCLUSION

For most of the 18th century, Westernizing ideas in Russia were bold and sweeping yet frequently touched only the surface of the everyday world in which most Russians lived, but by the early-mid 19th century, an emerging notion of “Russianness” increasingly formed the basis for institutions, practices, attitudes, and behaviors that gradually spread through society and remained stable for generations, in some cases down to the present. As “Russianness” crystallized into this particular form, it naturally failed to take other forms that would also have been imaginable from the vantage point of the 18th century, such as a stronger impetus toward liberal capitalism or a consensus that Russia was an integral part of Western civilization and should aspire to follow the same historical path. The notion of “Russianness” thus helped give stability and cohesiveness to society but discouraged Russians from pursuing what might otherwise have been promising paths of development for their country.