Ed. Note: Very interesting dive into Russia’s struggle to define its “manifest destiny,” which in the end resorts to mysticism and delusional religious fantasies. On that score, the struggle to define the Russian Idea gives a strong impression of why Russia cannot become the World’s Leader under such an ideology. Going back to Orthodox Christianity, Russia’s model — like Israel’s, like Islam’s model – cannot become a universalist ideology, cannot overcome the secular West. They are parochial, small-minded, clannish, rear-guard defense mechanisms for limited use by their communities under assault by the West.

On the other side of this global confrontation is the secular, the “practical realist” Anglo-Saxon mindset. When John Locke, in 17th-century England, took a look at the “idols of mind” and proclaimed the need for a “tabula rasa” in order to found our knowledge afresh on the basis of “perceptions and facts” – that revolutionary ideology set humanity on the path of the Industrial Revolution and that pursuit remains the only road to the title of the world’s leader.

The Soviet Idea did, indeed, resonate all over the world; it overcame class and ethnic divisions. But the Russian Idea? No way.

Russia can hope to keep the West in check and maintain a front of resistance, waiting for a new generation of Western leaders that can replace the “zero-sum” approach (derived from its own success) with a “win-win” approach — and thus reconsider Russia’s own realignment and eventual convergence into the secular Globalist world.

That would be the best to wish for.

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by Gordon Hahn via Gordon Hahn

In our age of crisis and chaos, it will be natural for great powers to rely on ideology and idealism rather than practical realism. Today’s international conflicts are increasingly becoming infused with ideological content, replete with universalist and messianic visions. Although the West first entered onto this path in the post-Cold War era and Russia seemed to eschew universalistic schemes and messianic dreams in the wake of the Soviet collapse, pre-revolutionary, traditional Russian transcendentalism, universalism, and messianism have become the default pillars upon which the conservative wing of the Russian elite and intelligentsia have increasingly relied. This raises the specter of a war or new Cold War of messianisms; one that can persist even if the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War ends in some minimal modus vivendi.

American Messianism and the New Cold War

In America and the larger West, ‘The End of History and the Last Man,’ as envisioned in the universalistic dreams of Francis Fukuyama and the American elite, is increasingly turning out to be a global nightmare. Theory’s waves of democratization have become a reality of authoritarianization globally, not least of all in America itself. The theory of ‘democratic peace’ was replaced by the harsh real-world consequences of pursuing American hegemonism: a world split apart and the risk of global conflagration sparked in Ukraine. This represents an unfortunate and seemingly ironic twist on Fukuyama’s title—as Fukuyama’s particular eschatology has not come to pass, as all universalistic absolutisms and ambitions ultimately do not.

The very same American and European actors who dream utopian dreams of universal republicanism [democracies do not exist outside perhaps the Swiss cantons] have cavorted with Islamist jihadists and Ukrainian neofascists alike. As Simone Weil described in her play “Venice Saved,” “(m)en of action and enterprise are dreamers.” Such Western men of action and enterprise can resemble Weil’s fictional depiction of pro-Spanish coup-plotters seeking to overthrow the classic Venetian republic on behalf of the Spanish Empire in 1618 or any others who pursue messianic dreams of universal systems and conquest. However, unlike Weil’s men of action, enterprise, and dreams, who fought their battles with their own hands and blood, today’s Western dreamers of a ‘democratic end of history’ and a ‘democratic peace’ wear clean, freshly pressed designer suits ensconced in the air-conditioned offices of Washington and Brussels. These ‘men of action and enterprise’ are quite daring in using others to achieve their democratic “Empire of the World.”

The American dream was from the beginning somewhat schizophrenic, with revolutionary dreams sitting uncomfortably next to practicality and humility. Accompanying American messianism is an American ‘revolutionism.’ As leading American historian Gordon S. Wood argues, revolution created our American political and strategic cultures: “Not only did the Revolution legally create the United States, but it infused into our culture all of our highest aspirations and most noble values. Our beliefs in liberty, equality, constitutionalism, and the well-being of ordinary people came out of the Revolutionary era. So too did our idea that we Americans are a special people with a special destiny to lead the world toward liberty and democracy”[[1]].

Missing from this description is messianic democracy’s faith in revolutions. Revolutionary republican messianism certainly would become a value or a near-value of our political and strategic culture if it was not part and parcel of them from the start. On the other hand, America’s first president, George Washington, famously warned against “foreign entanglements” and “enmities.” On the other hand, Thomas Jefferson, according to a dinner partner, was “a vigorous stickler of revolutions” and, “like his friend, T. Paine, cannot live but in a revolution.” Jefferson thought the French revolution’s fate would determine that of America’s own and hoped the former would spread the revolutionary flame across Europe. Although he deplored the French carnage of tens of thousands guillotined, he thought it necessary. In January 1793 he said: “The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest and…rather than it should have failed. I would have seen half the earth desolated.” If the French Revolution succeeded, he thought, “it would spread sooner or later all over Europe.” Jefferson would not live to see half of Europe so desolated by the French. Jefferson added: “Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than it is now”[[2]]. But America’s elite was quite divided over Napoleonic power; the Federalist Party countered the views of Jefferson, later James Madison, and the Democratic Republican Party during the Napoleonic Wars and supported Russia in its epic contest with post-revolutionary France’s own revolutionary republican messianism embodied in Bonaparte’s pan-European Grande Army[[3]].

In the 19th century, American idealism developed its own messianic ideology: Manifest Destiny. This idea held out a special American mission: the expansion of the American revolution and democracy to the continent’s hinterlands. Historian William Earl Weeks noted the religiously rooted precepts of this new messianic ideology: the existence of an exceptional American moral virtue; a special American mission to save the world through the spread of American republicanism and general way of life; and a belief in this American mission having been ordained by Providence[[4]].

America’s fifth president, James Monroe, declared a new foreign policy doctrine with global implications. The Monroe Doctrine held all the Americas, the entire western hemisphere, to be American republicanism’s exclusive sphere of influence. Any intervention by autocratic colonialism there was off limits. This opened the way for broad American intervention in South America. This policy holds today and is eerily reminiscent of Russia’s policy against great power encroachments along its border. Still, Abraham Lincoln, America’s sixteenth president, held the fort against foreign adventures. His political biographer concludes he was a master of “shrewd restraint” regarding foreign involvements. Although Lincoln was a committed “exceptionalist” regarding the American experiment’s potential for transforming government across the world, “he wasn’t a crusader. He remained a lifelong skeptic of grand foreign exploits—resisting imprudent calls for military action abroad and preventing diplomatic donnybrooks from morphing into war”[[5]].

But the next century saw America dragged into Europe’s Great War. The tide would turn sharply in favor of missionary dreams and democratic messianism. The twenty-eighth American president, Woodrow Wilson, was already championing making the world “safe for democracy,” the “self-determination of nations,” and America’s leading role in the League of Nations. Wilson had moved far beyond any realist formulation of America’s foreign policy foundation, no less that of Washington’s highly restrained realism or Lincoln’s realism of restraint. This shift was ideological, and it would take a second great war to establish the dominant position of this orientation. Thus, in the 1930s, according to David McCullough, the U.S. army was ranked 26th in the world, lagging behind Argentina and Switzerland[[6]].

Wilson was willing to send Americans to die in Europe for an esoteric American dream and ideal. Six years before the first great war, he told New Jersey Democratic Convention delegates: “America is not distinguished so much by its wealth and material power as by the fact that it was born with an ideal, a purpose to serve mankind. … When I look at the American flag before me, I think sometimes it is made of parchment and blood. The white in it stands for parchment, the red in it signifies blood—and blood that was spilled to make those rights real”[[7]]. Wilson’s friend and biographer, Raymond Stannard Baker, said Wilson saw his League of Nations as a project that would “save the world”[[8]].

American messianism would consolidate and intensify throughout the 20th century. America’s revolutionary messianic orientation was invigorated during the Second World War and Cold War. The defeat of fascism brought a ‘twilight struggle’ against communism and the USSR. That struggle required of the U.S. the formation of massive domestic and international structures: NATO, the Defense Department, CIA, DIA, NSA, National Security Council, among very many others. The original U.S. government of several hundred officials has burgeoned into a massive bureaucratic labyrinth of millions with their corporate interests tied to mammoth business, media, academic, and think tank enterprises and revolving doors between them all.

During the first Cold War’s wake, these structures did not disappear or even shrink but rather grew in size and power. Moreover, the sense grew that the U.S. foreign interest lay in repeating the fall of communism in new form, defeating all non-republican governments across the globe. A pseudo-science of democratic transition or ‘transitology’ provided the intellectual and practical know-how for how the inevitable coming of universal republicanism could be accelerated in line with U.S. and Western immediate interests. The decision to adopt ‘democracy’ was a rational choice, and those who made the wrong choice were deemed to have insufficient cultures, to be backward or backsliding. ‘Regime change’ methodologies — democracy-promotion (DP) and its attendant practices of network-building, party-building, coups, bribery, and the like — should be applied to all less-than-democratic states, regardless of their importance to American interests and security. DP was a ‘dual-use technology’ that could be used to forward democratic reforms or foment more uncontrollable revolutions that risked and often turned violent and could bring in the bargain less-than-democratic elements to the fore, as in Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine. Tens of billions of dollars have been and are being spent on education, propaganda, and intelligence efforts towards DP, with the added advantages now of the social net and artificial intelligence.

America’s global dreams eventually have impinged on the national and local levels to the detriment of the very republicanism Washington and Brussels have been selling; hence the growth of the state structures leading the military-industrial-congressional-media-academic meta-complex. Unity on the global level under the Empire necessitates tighter unity at home. Consequently, the original American dream of a ‘city on a hill’ for others to emulate, if they so wished, is becoming a city of arrogance, avarice, hubris, hypocrisy, corruption, and sin. America’s original political culture was anchored in virtue for the sake of republicanism—initially, for the most part, America’s republic. Contemporary American political culture is anchored in self-aggrandizement in the service of American national, nationalist, and globalist power—sheer power and nothing more than power—whether in the domestic or international arena. American republicanism is dying in its modern-era cradle—USA—murdered by Washington’s men of action, enterprise, and dreams that live on ‘eternal enmities’ of the kind the national capitol’s namesake warned against.

Under today’s curious form of messianic republicanism, its adepts comfortably cavort with ultranationalists and neofascists from Ukraine, Libya, or Syria—including self-righteous adepts such as Fukuyama and his transitology sidekick Michael McFaul[[9]]. It is no accident that the university they thrive within is championing the destruction of free speech and inspiring witch hunts for any who deviate from the Washington-Brussels uni-party line on Ukraine or the Democrat Party-state on any and all issues[[10]]. The end is the global dream; the means can be any, both at home as abroad.

The priority given to ends over means among Western elites pursuing ‘democratization’ casts doubt on their ‘good intentions.’ These Westerners, as Paul Grenier notes, are like the ‘Men with Thistledown Hair,’ who pave the road to hell deaf to the views of others: “This faerie uses his power to ensnare and trap victims within his own world, a world which the man with thistle down hair considers utterly delightful. This faerie takes a fancy to certain characters in the novel and sets about, with perfect sincerity, to ‘help’ them. He demonstrates, like a good Kantian, a will dedicated to doing good, with the only problem being that the goods that he bestows are only those that he himself defines. It is not that he hears, but is indifferent to, the protests of his victims, who do not want any of these ‘gifts.’ What we have in the faerie is a degree of egotistic solipsism that has reached an infinite degree, such that he is simply incapable of noticing anything outside of his own interpretation of the world”[[11]].

Thus, Democratic Peace Theory—an outgrowth of utopian republican messianism—is a curiously convenient hypothesis. Since democratic regimes supposedly never go to war against each other, it can and should be inferred that authoritarianism is the cause of all wars. In this way, wars between ostensible or self-declared democracies and authoritarian regimes are always the result of authoritarian regimes’ actions, which are inevitable deviations from the eschatological line. Thus, authoritarian regimes are to blame for the existence of war and force democracies to fight ‘to defend themselves’ and ‘make the world safe for democracy.’ If a Western coup designed to ‘expand the community of democracies’ leads to civil war in a country Westerners neither understand nor particularly care to understand, and forces an authoritarian regime to intervene, it is the authoritarian regime and only the authoritarian regime that bears responsibility. Its military action was not provoked by Western policies and their consequences but rather by the backward culture of the authoritarians, who inherently are bursting at the seams to destroy democracy. Thus, we often hear that AQ, ISIS, ‘Putin’s Russia,’ or Xi’s China hate us for our ‘democratic way of life’ and so want to destroy it. So after Ukraine, Russia will march into the Baltics, China into Taiwan, etc., etc., etc. But could it be that in the West today, it is we who hate Russia for having a home and roots and which, like Venice, is the target of a self-righteous imperial mission conjured up by restless, ambitious men of action, enterprise, dreams, and messianic, utopian, and incidentally profitable schemes. Many in the West do hate Russia for having a home and honoring its traditional roots—now a secular sacrilege in the West. Russian rootedness and tradition are affronts to the West’s ‘sophisticated’ world of anything-goes plurality and its domestic wars against family, religion, national culture, and humility.

Will this Western dream, through the NATO-Russia Ukrainian war or some greater cataclysm, spark in the end a Russian overreaction, a new Russian messianism politicized beyond the original religious-cultural idea of the Third Rome? Indeed, once, under Soviet power, this notion was transformed into new universalist and messianic political and imperial goals in more secular, materialist guise. Will Russia become more like its enemy, the way the West—US, Europe, Israel—are becoming more like their enemies, real and imagined? Will a Russian reaction to its recent secular past and the present secular threat from the West counter with its own religious messianism? There is good reason to think that it very well might. After all, both Jews and Muslims have their messianisms, and they undoubtedly help drive the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So do Russia’s ancient antagonists, the Poles. Putting aside the risk of nuclear war, cannot Russia and the West fall into a long conflict of two incompatible messianisms?

Russian Religious-based Messianism and Russian Tselostnost’

History demonstrates that Russia or many Russians are not immune to messianic dreams. NATO’s ‘new cold war’ turned hot could very well be regenerating—limited albeit in breadth as yet—a Russian religious-based messianism as an antidote to the anti-religious, secularist Western messianism. Just as Russia’s 19th-century Slavophiles politicized the 16th-century Third Rome idea, so too today there is the potential for, if not the beginning of, the politicization of this and similar messianic Russian dreams conjured from aspects of Russian Orthodox Christianity. Russian transcendentalism and universalism suggest that Russian culture may be more susceptible to such messianism. Residual materialism from Russian communism, only recently relegated to the dustbin of history, may be temporarily holding back the return of Russian messianism. Russian tselostnost’ and transcendentalism tend to seek absolutism and a mission. Since much of Russian tselostnost’ and transcendentalism are rooted in Orthodoxy, we can expect that any new Russian absolutism or messianic dreams and absolutisms will propose some universal, perhaps wholly or partially Orthodox, dream.

If some rise of Russian messianism is occurring, is it a response to Fukuyama’s ‘democratic messianism’? Is there a messianic version of democratization’s or color revolutions’ supposed ‘demonstration effect’? Is Russian messianism a deliberate mimicking of Western messianism—if they can, so can we—as we have seen in Ukraine (color revolution in Crimea and Donbas as in Kiev, Russian ignoring the international law’s principle of state sovereignty and territorial integrity, and Russian military intervention in Ukraine and NATO military intervention in Yugoslavia, Serbia, Kosovo)? If Washington has a global mission and can write the rules of the international order, why cannot Russia (and China) do the same? Will the flowering of any new Russian messianism result in its institutionalization as state policy or ideology?

Within the post-Soviet return of Orthodoxy and even tselostnost’ in its various forms, we can see the melding of a new form of Russian messianism with roots in the late Imperial Era Religious Renaissance and Silver Age. At the center of this revival is the late 19th-early 20th century Religious Renaissance and related Silver Age. Since I have addressed this in Russian Tselostnost’ and in a short monograph-length article “Russian Historical Tselostnost’,” I will only mention the ubiquity of monism, universalism, communalism (social, group unity), solidarism (national unity of various kinds), and historical wholeness. Examples of these in Russian discourse are endless: Vladimir Solovev and the other God-Seekers, Nikolai Berdyaev and the Vekhi thinkers, the idealist or intuitivist philosophers (Nikolai Losskii, Semyon Frank, and others), Russian literature (Fedora Dostoevskii, Lev Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol’ and many others), the symbolist movement in philosophy and the arts (Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Andrei Bely, Velimir Khlebnikov, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Vasilli Rozanov, Aleksandr Scriabin, and others), and even the socialist and revolutionary movements (e.g., Anatolii Lunacharskii, Aleksandr Bogdanov, Vladimir Mayakovskii, Andrei Platonov, and others) [[12]].

Russian messianism is not only closely related to a certain Russian exceptionalism. It is closely related to two of the five tselostnosts I perceive in Russian culture, thought, and discourse: monism and universalism. The source of tselostnost’ appears to be Orthodox monism (the ultimate integrality of Heaven and Earth, God and Man, spirit and matter) and perhaps secondarily attendant Orthodox universalism (Christian or Orthodox unity in Christ). These helped engender the materialist monism of Man and Machine in the USSR and proletarian internationalism, utopianism, and messianism. Russian ideas surrounding the wholeness of the world and Russian history and theurgical teleologies related to Christian eschatology are another source of the Russian tendency—always present but not always dominant—towards some historical mission mandated by God and/or Humankind. They help the Russian inclination towards the transcendental over the everyday, reflected in monism and universalism to maintain a presence in Russian culture and discourse. The revival of these modes of thinking has intensified and penetrated new works more broadly as disenchantment with the West mounted beginning in the late 1990s, leading to an abandonment of Western signposts for creating a new Russian identity and culture and a return of pre-revolutionary religious, philosophical, and artistic culture and discourses.

In addition to the post-Soviet revival of the pre-Soviet Russian Religious Renaissance and Silver Age cultures, there are a plethora of new original works and trends in Russian culture, thought, and discourse that reflect and refract the intellectual return of the imperial twilight with new nuances defined by contemporary developments. Some are more religious-, Orthodox-based and provide monist support for messianism. Others are more secular and driven by geopolitical thought and concerns and lend support to a new universalist or semi-universalist mission. Some combine elements of both these tendencies. The trend to a new anti-Western messianism and universalism was signaled decades ago. For example, in literature, Mikhail Yurev’s 2006 futuristic novel Tret’ya Imperiya (The Third Empire) reflected an urge for revenge against the West for its spurning of Russia. In Yurev’s novel, a revived Russian Orthodox, quasi-tsarist Russia defeats the West in a nuclear war and comes to rule the world. Recent trends are less aggressive and more subtle, but the direction is clear: Russia is moving from the local and regional to the universal and some elements wait in the wings to abandon Putin’s practicality in favor of a more transcendental, messianic project.

The first post-Soviet geopolitical trend to counter the pro-Western majority of the early 1990s, neo-Eurasianism, was semi-universalist in scope but hinted at a more universalist orientation in the future. Largely geopolitical and secularist, it initially was merely tinted with Orthodoxy but more as a civilizational rather than religious force. Aleksandr Panarin and Aleksandr Dugin, discussed below, have been the most prominent examples of the contemporary semi-universalism of neo-Eurasianism. Panarin proposed a global Russian-Eurasian vision and ambitious Eurasian integration projects. Like Gumilev, for Panarin “the main creative success of Russian (rossiiskaya) civilization is the capacity to form large interethnic syntheses; this was its response to the challenge of the steppe plains’ expanse.” There is a hint of Pushkin’s Russian obzyvchyvost’. It is not of special concern that the West “not only did not accept (Russia) into the ‘European home’ but tried to block and isolate her within the post-Soviet space using anti-Russian sentiments.”

Not surprisingly then, many Russians, including President Vladimir Putin, have adopted much of the program proposed by Panarin in his 1998 Revansh Istorii. According to Panarin, Russia’s messianic role is to “propose to the peoples of Eurasia a new, powerful, superenergetic synthesis” based on “people’s conservatism” and “civilizational diversity.” The fundamental tenet of the Russian-Eurasian “mission of people’s conservatism” is “socio-cultural conservatism,” the goal of which is to preserve Eurasia’s and the world’s traditional cultures, religious mysticisms, and ethnic and “civilizational diversity and pluralism” from Western-framed globalization, cultural homogenization, and the left-liberal intelligentsia’s attraction to mass, urban, “semi-bohemianism” (polubogema) and “consumer hedonism.” Thus, Orthodox Eurasia will give birth to a “new historical paradigm of humankind.” Despite its economic weakness relative to the West and Eurasia’s China, Russia can lead Eurasia and the world into a new post-industrial, eco-cultural, multi-civilizational world that rejects the anti-cultural ‘technologism’, consumerism, and homogeneity of the ‘soulless’ American worldview which threatens nature and national cultures.

For his part, Dugin in 2014 offered a Panarinian assertion of neo-Eurasianist universalism and messianism: “Only Russia in the future can become the main pole and haven for the planetary resistance and rallying point of all the world’s forces insisting on their own special path.” This semi-universalist messianism has echoes of many past Russian thinkers’ universalist messianic pronouncements. Thus, for Fedor Dostoevskii, the “Russian national idea” is in the end “nothing other than worldwide universal unity.” Indeed, “universality is the main character trait and destiny of the Russian.” Dostoevskii came to see the second half of the 19th century as a regrettable “era of universal differentiation, which only Russia could overcome and bring unity.”

The Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) has become a prominent proponent of what might be called Orthodox geopolitical thinking. The ROC’s Worldwide Russian People’s Assembly (Vsemirnyi Russkii Narodniy Sobor or VRNS) seeks to unite all Rus Orthodox around the world in support of ROC’s ecclesiastical goals and to a certain extent Russian government policies. VRNS Deputy Chairman, Prof. Aleksandr Shipkov, argues that Russia must become the core of a “North-South Center,” a “meaningful core of Christian civilization,” not an economic center but a “value center that can win world authority.” We can see elements of this approach in Russia’s intensified global foreign policy, expanding beyond BRICS to court all non-western countries and counter them against the antagonistic, anti-traditional West. With this new universalism comes another semi-universalism with concerns beyond Greater Eurasia: Russia also must re-integrate European consciousness and the false opposition between tradition and modernity extant there. The ROC’s and Orthodox thought’s active involvement in Russian foreign policy’s soft power and public diplomacy reflects a larger trend of greater religious influence on Russian political thought. Thus, a new religious-philosophical renaissance is producing new strains of thought. One of the new trends, Orthodox Eurasianism, has rapidly expanded its views beyond Eurasia to the global scale.

Nikolai Vasetskii, Moscow State University Professor of international sociology and one-time co-author with nationalist-populist leader of the misnamed Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, Vladimir Zhirinovskii, and his 2019 A Sociology of the History of Russia: Basic Meanings and Values (Notes of Sociologist) are good examples of religious influence on neo-Eurasianist thought. Vasetskii argues convincingly that Patriarch Kirill is an Orthodox Eurasianist, who frequently uses the term “Eastern-Christian Orthodox civilization” when interacting with political figures, and proposes the aforementioned VRNS as a key institution for developing and implementing such a strategy. Citing thought leaders of the pre-Soviet Russian Religious Renaissance copiously, Vasetskii offers a pro-VRNS pan-Orthodox/neo-Eurasianist project uniting all Russian Orthodox communities everywhere behind ROC and Kremlin projects. He regards Kievan Rus’s first Metropolitan, Illarion (Hilarion), and his ‘Slovo’ not merely as the earliest artifact of “Russian sociopolitical thought and culture,” but the document that “determined the basic meaning and values of Ancient Russian civilization.” It set the “worldview of the Russian superethnos for a thousand years forward.” Vasetskii sees Illarion’s views as implicit legitimization of Russia’s present-day foreign policy principle of the “multipolarity of the world and civilizations.” The epistle “Slova o Zakone i Blagodati” (“A Word on Law and Grace”) written in the years 1037-1050 by Kievan priest Illarion (Hilarion), is a panegyric to the unification of mankind with God in and through Christ. Illarion Kievskii’s significance for Russian religiosity and literature is difficult to overstate. He is “unanimously” regarded as the foremost theologian and preacher of both Kievan and Muscovite Rus’ and “stands at the very springs of original Russian literature.” His prayers and teachings continue to influence Russian Orthodoxy today. Illarion’s ‘Slovo’ was, in Russian religious historian George Fedotov’s words, “a theological hymn to salvation” on the “national theme interspersed with the great universal-historical picture of God’s redemptive Providence,” vividly expressing the “Russian national spirit.” Thus, the Russian national spirit is rooted in God’s Providence, which is God’s interaction with human history. Illarion’s effort was rewarded by Prince Yaroslav the Wise with his appointment as Kiev’s first metropolitan, the first Russian to hold this post (previous Kievan metropolitans were Greek) and appointed by Kiev and not the Constantinople patriarch. Kiev’s emerging conflict with Constantinople came as Rus’ reached the apex of its power, and the ‘national party’ in Kiev was led by Illarion himself.

Vasetskii extrapolates from the usually general propositions and strategies in Russia’s Orthodox and Eurasianist discourses and designs detailed international strategies for Russian public diplomacy. Building on the ‘Russian world’ (Russkii mir) proposed by Patriarch Kirill and political scientists such as Vyacheslav Nikonov (grandson of Stalin era Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov), he proposes an Orthodox-Eurasianist policy he calls in Nikonovian terms “the Russian world as a symphony of ethnoses” for maximizing Russia’s cultural leverage and other forms of soft power and influence. The strategy is to build a worldwide network of Orthodox Christian and Russian-oriented states, sub-state regions, and communities. Such entities with significant Orthodox Christian populations are to provide the leverage for maximizing Russian influence and power. Clusters of such states, regions, and populations, in Vasetskii’s analysis, are spread out across the globe. The core of this Russian world is Eurasia plus Slavdom: the Slavic core (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Transdnistria), East Europe and the Balkans, and Eurasia. Further afield are African and Near East enclaves, the emigration (diasporas) in America, Europe, Australia, Africa, “and others.” This Orthodox community, though perhaps centered in Russia and then Eurasia, is to partner with other traditional civilizations opposed to the new Western decadence. Thus, Orthodox neo-Eurasianism is centered on traditional religions, especially Russian Orthodox civilization’s unique affinity with the mysticism of Eurasia’s other major religions – Islam, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Hinduism — as Panarin proposed.

Thinkers like Dugin soon adopted a kind of theo-ideology, expanding their vision beyond Eurasia to the entire globe and deploying monist and universalist assertions drawn directly from Russian Orthodoxy as they interpret it. This is part and parcel of the new religious-philosophical renaissance. Dugin’s recent The Fourth Theory offers an esoteric philosophical alternative of Beingism or Daseinism as the next ideology confounding The End of History in Fukuyama’s sense. In Dugin’s conception, Russia is the Last Man and will lead a “sophiological revolution” that will bring in the Apocalypse, Second Coming, and merging of Heaven and Earth, God and Man, spirit and matter. Dugin’s imaginative, mystical, sometimes irrational side envisions the Atlanticist-Eurasianist tectonic in “realms lying well beyond the reach of empirical investigation,” including mysticism, myth, and apocalypticism. The ‘sophiological revolution’ he envisions in The Fourth Way: Introduction to the Fourth Political Theory is expected to be global and to bring in the last stage of human history. In a monist-universalist flight of fancy, Dugin sees a new transmogrified global society:

“(T)he reincarnation of a reorganized spiritual society as a holistic whole along a vertical of the heavenly flame; a Radical Subject and superman.”

By using the term ‘sophiological,’ Dugin is invoking a more or less esoteric idea popular among some Orthodox thinkers, especially during the Russian Religious Renaissance and Silver Age, that there is a feminine principle or spirit of Divine Wisdom — Holy Sophia — that, depending on the thinker, helps to maintain the unity of all existence or that of the Holy Trinity and is variously described as mankind’s guardian angel, the Eternal Bride of ‘Logos’ (the Word of God), the primordial nature of creation, the creative Love of God. In the thinking of perhaps Russia’s greatest philosopher, Vladimir Solovev, his central idea of the unity of everything with everything or ‘all-unity’ (vseedinstvo), which was widely popular in Russian intellectual circles before the Imperial crash, was closely tied to Holy Sophia. She symbolizes ‘perfected Femininity,’ ‘Eternal Femininity’ – as the spiritual energy linking and permeating the Holy Trinity, God’s Kingdom, and all Creation. Like Christ, Divine Sophia enables vseedinstvo to manifest itself. Solovev’s religious philosophy stipulated two kinds of tselostnost’ of the divine: “the acting or producing unity of the divine creativity of the Word (Logos) and the unity produced and realized.” Christ – and therefore God – and Divine Sophia are connected not just through their places in these two constituent types of divine tselostnost’ but also by virtue of Sophia’s being perfected mankind, which is contained in Christ the God-Man:

“If in the divine being – in Christ the first or producing unity is actually the Divine – God is the active force or Logos, and if, therefore, in this first unity we have Christ as our own divine being, then the second, produced unity, to which we gave the mystical name Sophia, is the beginning of humanity and the ideal or normal person. And Christ, tied to the human principle in this unity, is a man or, in the words of Holy Scripture, the second Adam. And so, Sophia is the ideal, perfected mankind, eternally contained in the integral divine being, or Christ.”

In sum, Dugin believes in the emergence of a neo-traditional spirituality that communes with nature and God and, in Hegelian terms, will be the antithesis to the Western techno-globalization thesis, producing a new type and level of universal civilization, in which Russia can play an important, even leading role in founding.

Aleksandr Prokhanov’s novels always have a global setting. While this might not be so surprising for a writer who during the Soviet era was nicknamed the Red Army’s ‘nightingale,’ what perhaps is surprising is his recent novels’ nod to the religious. His popular novel “Mr. Hexogen” involves an eternal struggle fought across all history. Agent Belotseltsev receives and fights on the side of “God’s design.” Wherever he goes he is being tracked in a ubiquitous web of enemy agents or technical means. This small unity is embedded in an infinitely larger one, a monist-universalist vision that literary critic Oksana Timofeeva calls “an eschatological project.” Prokhanov writes:

“And you see God’s design is something else. (It is) to end the separation of the Churches, with the separation of the peoples, with multi-theism, with multi-linguality, with the constant strife and antagonism over living space, over pastures, over caravan paths, over locations with uranium and kimberlite loadstocks. (It is) to create a united mankind, and in it is reflected the united image of the one, universal God.”

Belosel’tsev receives the truth from on high (in one scene from a holy fool) and “experiences grace” (blazhenstvo) from God and “God’s Providence.” In Prokhanov’s novel “The Political Scientist,” the hero Styzhailo is a devious, ‘khitryi’ Westernizer but has a conversion moment and is “just as blessed [by God] as Belosel’tsev” and finds himself in a “Russian paradise.” Prokhanov is also an adherent to one of the traditional forms of Russian universalism. He articulated the Dostoevskian view of Russian universal receptivity in a June 2021 radio interview, noting: “The Russian consciousness is open to all civilizations and all cultural codes. Dostoevskii spoke about this. The Russian code speaks about this – the soul of the world.”

Konstantin Malofeev (1974-present), Yurii Mamleev (1931-2015), Mikhail Nazarov (1948-present), and others put forward an Orthodox monarchism with a theurgical Orthodox mission. For example, Malofeev’s “Imperiya XXI Veka” (2022), the last book in a trilogy, puts forward Malofeev’s standard monarchist line with a healthy dose of Orthodox messianism: “the main thing for the future emperor is an awareness of his high mission as tsar of the Third Rome, holding back the world from evil.” Russia is Katechon – the biblical force that restrains Satan and evil. “The mission of Katechon should be codified in the constitution.” The new Russian empire will be eternal, dying at the end of the world, he says, and then quotes Putin: “Why do we need a world in which there is no Russia?” (Malofeev, p. 480). Malofeev knows Katechon poorly because, according to Scripture, Katechon is not a force for good, since the revelation of the Anti-Christ’s identity is necessary for the War of all against all, the apocalypse, and Christ’s second coming, ending human time and history. If Malofeev is a Christian, then he should regard the End as inevitable, and so giving Russia the role of Katechon is neither here nor there.

Aleksandr Bokhanov’s 2023 “The Russian Idea” gives us a “cosmological approach” and “Christ-centric perspective” in his message of Russian Orthodox messianism [Aleksandr Bokhanov, “Russkaya ideaya” (Moscow: Prospekt, 2023), pp. 7-8 and 12-13]. Again we meet the Third Rome idea, with Russia succeeding Constantinople as the carrier of the Orthodox Empire, similarly ordained from above as in Malofeev’s vision. “Several centuries filled with heavy tribulations and national cataclysms were necessary for the idea of ‘the land’ to be transformed into the ideal of the world mission ‘land-kingdom’ in the Russian consciousness.” ‘Land-kingdom’ in Russian easily connotes ‘Earth-Heaven.’ For Bokhanov, the Western icon of freedom, New York’s Statue of Liberty, is “an ugly cyclops of a structure,” an artificial image of freedom which pales in the face of the Russian idea of freedom “in the image of Christ, imparting the highest spiritual content to the earthly existence of mankind.” In discussing the prophets of doom in Russia’s 20th century, Bokhanov concludes his book as follows:

“Father Serafim (Sarovskii) also knew something else: in the end, the Lord ‘will forgive Russia and lead her by the path of suffering to great glory.’ Other holy ascetics also foretold this. That is why the Russian idea is alive because the Light of Christ is eternal.
“She that is gifted not only by Orthodoxy, and in no way only because of it, but by it first of all. From this (comes) its universal significance and universal destiny. As a contemporary philosopher wrote: ‘The Russian idea is urgent as never before, you see humankind (and not just Russia) has approached the edge of the abyss.’
“At the beginning of the 21st century, the experience of allegiance to Christ has turned out to be broadly and badly needed in Russia, and so broadly as never in other parts of the world. Precisely this Christian breakthrough once more underscores that the Russian idea never disappeared and could never have. Its historical realization is in no way at all comparable to an attempt to establish God’s Kingdom on earth. Russian Christian thought never even thought about anything like it. It is a search on the road to Heavenly Jerusalem and the Eternal World and to find that which will help grace, the testament of the Savior, and the storehouse of the Holy Spirit’s legacy.”

In a world where post-modernism, artificial intelligence, and humankind-technological singularity are on the march, Orthodox eschatology and messianism are mixing with a new cosmism or immortalism, melding not just Man and Machine, like the Bolsheviks and Rev’ry God-builders (Lunacharskkii, Bogdanov), but bringing God back in. This is facilitated by the revived popularity of Russia’s original immortalist and cosmist, Nikolai Fyodorov (1829-1903). He proposed that mankind could unite with God only by conquering nature and death and proposed grand projects to tame the former and defeat the latter. Today, Dmitrii Itskov, founder of the transhumanist ‘Russia 2045’ initiative, takes the same approach. He founded a transhumanist political party ‘Evolution 2045’ to inspire “a spiritual revolution” under which technology would eliminate aging, disease, death, crime, conflict, and even the “possibility of war.” He proposes a “spiritual-bodily strategy” towards the creation of “neo-mankind” and “a new model for society’s existence – spiritual, human, ethical, and high-technological.” Mankind and technology, neo-mankind, must begin the “process of mankind’s integration into a united collective super-reason (sverkhrazum) and superbeing (sverkhsushchestvo)” in order to “take under control” both the negative and positive attributes of humankind and “reveal the creative consciousness of the genius-creator.” The ultimate goal is cosmologically millennial and utopian: “Neo-mankind…will open a principally new epoch—a cosmic civilization of people of the future.” Chief traits of neo-mankind, according to Itskov, are “the ability to unite into a collective giant mind – the noosphere – a complex self-organized free society of progress, evolution and synergy” and “synergy between technological and spiritual development, superintelligence, immortality, multi-corporeality, cosmic creativity, and technologies aimed at improving the physical carrier of a person.”

Itskov envisages a transition period lasting throughout the 21st century, during which the following goals and tasks must be accomplished: project “Avatar,” producing technologies for “transferring individual human consciousness to a non-biological… artificial body” (replacement of the human body by a robot or cyborg); establishment of conditions for merging science and spirituality; “transhumanistic medicine based on avatar technologies of cybernetic artificial organs and systems; and the education of a spiritual, humane, future-oriented, creative people who believe in their divine potential.” Goals and objectives for the 22nd and 23rd centuries include immortalist and cosmist targets: the attainment of “unlimited immortality” for all neo-humankind by its transfer to a non-biological carrier; free unlimited movement in space; universal access to “multi-corporeality and consciousness distributed on many carriers, the free life of one consciousness in several immortal bodies and control over them”; and the ability to live simultaneously and move freely in several realities. From the 23rd to the 30th centuries, goals and objectives include: “ending the need to live only on planet Earth (‘Earth is the cradle of mankind, but you can’t live in the cradle all your life.’ K. E. Tsiolkovsky)”; resettlement of humankind to near and deep space; unlimited movement across the universe; “complete control of reality by the power of thought and will”, the ability to self-organize, order and complicate space, and “create new worlds”; creation “for each neo-human a personal, mind-controlled Universe”; and “the management of the course of personal history by the power of thought until the completion of all historical processes at the point of singularity (end of history, collapse of time).”

This utopian and promethean project, like earlier Russian and Soviet predecessors, adds Russian messianism to its mix of monism, universalism, millennialism, prometheanism, utopianism, and transcendentalism. In Itskov’s vision, Russia is poised to be world transhumanism’s “leader” and “epicenter,” “driving the locomotive of history” to its monist ‘point of singularity,’ a new variation of the vseedinstvo theme. In sum, Itskov immortalizes humankind by downloading its minds and souls into a general server of humankind’s consciousness in order to meet or construct God, and God is a Russian! Broader support for this project could only come post-Putin, if ever; Putin and the Russian elite remain too down to earth and practical for such a wildly transcendentalist and messianic program.

Conclusion

None of the above is meant to suggest that the new Russian universalism and messianism are veering towards an aggressive imperialistic universalism. It is to say that Russia has rejected the often hypocritical teachings brought from other shores after the Soviet collapse and, having sailed into open waters, is now guided by pre-Soviet traditions of religious universalism and messianism of a more modest type. However, the Soviet experience of fervent faith and zealous struggle for a universalistic, messianic utopia, backed up by violent and military means, suggests the potential for such a bad turn. Although it is important to note that there is no firm movement in such a direction at this stage, war has a way of transforming societies and states, as the Russians learned a little more than a century ago.

Clearly, there is a coalescing intellectual trend mixing Russian Orthodox images of the meaning and end of history, the superiority and Providentially-ordained Russian traditions of universality, communalism, and spirituality versus the Western descent into social decay and individualistic assertion through decadence, and a geopolitical confrontation that reflects these two beliefs. For now, the Putin government remains far too practical to adopt projects like those offered by Dugin, Malofeev, Yurev, and Itskov. But ideas of more moderate and limited scale, such as those of Schipkov, Vasetskii, and Bokhanov, already are a good part of the Russian elite’s worldview and policy preferences.

For Russia to adopt one or more of the more moderate programs full-scale as the bases for a state ideology, not to mention such adoption of the more radical orientations, several conditions would need to prevail. First, there would have to be an end to Putin’s rule, which, ironically, the West requires in its quest to realize its own messianic vision. Second, there would need to be an absence of hope for a rapprochement with the West, which, again ironically, the West is doing everything it can to bring about. Third, Russia likely would have to undergo a defeat in the NATO-Russia Ukraine War or any war extending out from it; another end the West is hoping to arrange. On the other hand, a quasi-revolutionary ideological fever inspiring a fervent messianic Russian teleology, even eschatology, could be sparked by a resounding, glorious Russian victory over the West. Time or History will tell whether Russian messianism emerges as Moscow’s ideological countermove to Washington’s messianic dreams.

*The seminal work on Russian messianism is Manuel’ Sarkisyants, “Rossiya i messianizm: k ‘russkoi idee’ N. A. Berdyaeva,” (St. Petersburg: St. Petersburg State University, 2005) [translated from Manuel Sarkisyanz, “Russland und der messianismus des Orient: Sendungsbewusstsein und politischer Chiliasmus des Ostens” (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mahr, 1955)].

FOOTNOTES

[1] Simone Weil, Venice Saved (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), pp. 31 and 94.

[2] Gordon S. Wood, Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States (New York: Penguin Press, 2011), pp. 2-3.

[3] Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 180-1.

[4] I. I. Kurilla, “‘Ruskie prazdniki’ i amerikanskie spory o Rossii,” in Rossiya i SShA: poznavaya drug druga: sbornik pamyati akademika Aleksandra Aleksandrovich Fursenko (Saint Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriya, 2015), pp. 168-79.

[5] William Earl Weeks, John Quincy Adams and American Global Empire (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002), pp. 183–184.

[6] Kevin Peraino, Lincoln in the World: The Making of a Statesman and the Dawn of American Power, cited in www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304434104579382990902123538.

[7] David McCullough, The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017), p. 73.

[8] Arthur Herman, 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder (New York: Harper, 2017), p. 65

[9] Herman, 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder, p. 66.

[10] Alec Regimbal, “Author Francis Fukuyama, a Stanford fellow, backs far-right Azov group after school visit,” SF Gate, 12 July 2023, https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/fukuyama-senior-fellow-stanford-far-right-group-18193614.php; Lee Golinkin, “Why Did a Group of Stanford Students Host Azov Neo-Nazis, Forward.com, 3 July 2023, https://forward.com/opinion/552958/why-did-stanford-host-azov-neo-nazis/; Larry Cohler-Esses, “Does Ukraine Really Have a Neo-Nazi Problem?”, Forward.com, 28 July 2023, https://forward.com/news/555676/azov-brigade-ukraine-nazi-extremism-jewish-criticism/; and “Stanford is supporting Neo-Nazi ideology by welcoming Azov: Russia,” Al Mayadeen, 14 October 2022, https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/stanford-is-supporting-neo-nazi-ideology-by-welcoming-azov:.

[11] Ben Weingarten, “Stanford, Silicon Valley and the Rise of the Censorship Industrial Complex,” Real Clear Investigations, 31 May 2024, http://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2024/05/30/stanford_silicon_valley_and_the_rise_of_the_censorship_industrial_complex_1034440.html?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR25g-LjnVX0LdNvdH1Gmjw8lK58XajcwrZEyD-U4uvrGl9UPtBo1xSzl5s_aem_8V-dcm296x1ePC2Zv1rGSw.

[12] Paul Grenier, “American Messianism,” Landmarks, 12 June 2024, https://landmarksmag.substack.com/p/american-messianism?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share.

[13] Gordon M. Hahn, Russian Tselostnost’: Wholeness in Russian Culture, Thought, History, and Politics (London: Europe Books, 2021). On Russian historical tselostnost’, see Gordon M. Hahn, “Russian Historical Tselostnost’,” Russian and Eurasian Politics, 13 April 2023, https://gordonhahn.com/2023/04/13/working-paper-russian-historical-tselostnost-parts-1-3-conclusion/.

[14] A. S. Panarin, Revansh istorii: Rossiiskaya strategicheskaya initsiativa v XXI veke (Moscow: Logos, 1998), pp. 362 (from here on cited as Revansh istorii).

[15] Panarin, Revansh istorii, pp. 14-15.

[16] Panarin, Revansh istorii, pp. 13-15, 222-27, and 357.

[17] For Panarin’s words on these points, see Hahn, Russian Tselostnost’, pp. 517-19.

[18] Aleksandr Dugin, “Yevraziiskii put’ kak national’naya idea,” Yevravziiskoe obozrenie, No. 9, 31 May 2003, pp. 71-90, at p. 85.

[19] F. M. Dostoevskii, Dnevnik pisatelya (Saint Petersburg: Lenizdat, 2001), p. 403.

[20] Dostoevskii, Dnevnik pisatelya, p. 239.

[21] Dostoevskii, Dnevnik pisatelya, p. 174.

[22] A. V. Shipkov, Diskurs ortodoksii (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Moskovskoi Patriarkhii Russkoi Pravoslavnoi TseArkvy, 2021), p. 252.

[23] Shipkov, Diskurs ortodoksii, p. 252.

[24] Vasetskii, Sotsiologiya istorii Rossii: Bazovyie smysly i tsennosti (zapicka sotsiolog), pp. 128 and 180-93.

[25] N. A. Vasetskii, Sotsiologiya istorii Rossii: Bazoviye smysly i tsennosti (Zapiski sotsiolog) (Moscow: Akademicheskii proekt, 2019), pp. 36-7.

[26] In arguing the contemporary neo-Eurasianist and Putin era Russian policy position that U.S. and Western neo-liberal hegemony maintains an undemocratic international order and threatens civilizational diversity and traditionalist civilizations such as Russia’s own, Vasetskii asserts that Illarion’s “Word” introduced the idea of the equality of all nationalities, nullifying the idea of a “chosen people.” Vasetskii, Sotsiologiya istorii Rossii: Bazoviye smysly i tsennosti (Zapiski sotsiolog), pp. 38-9.

[27] Fedotov, Russkaya religioznost’- Chast’ 1: Khristianstvo Kievskoi Rusi, X-XIII vv., p. 86.

[28] Fedotov, Russkaya religioznost’- Chast’ 1: Khristianstvo Kievskoi Rusi, X-XIII vv., pp. 88 and 91.

[29] Despite his stature, Illarion soon disappeared from the historical chronicles, and the Russian Church neglected the memory of Illarion as a historical personality, despite his having been one of the first and “most remarkable archpastors.” Fedotov, Russkaya religioznost’- Chast’ 1: Khristianstvo Kievskoi Rusi, X-XIII vv., p. 86.

[30] Vasetskii’s East European/Balkan region encompasses Serbia, Greece, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbska, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Rumania, Moldovia, and Orthodox segments of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Albania. The Eurasian mega-region includes all of the Transcaucasus (including Abkhazia and South Ossetiya, excluding Azerbaijan) and Orthodox segments in the five former Soviet republics in Central Asia. The African and Near East enclaves include Ethiopia, Antioch and the Orthodox communities in Egypt, Palestine, and Israel, including the Orthodox center of Jerusalem. In addition to this list, Vasetskii notes that “no one has repealed Russian America in California,” and “Russian influences are appearing in China, on the Russian border, and in Mongolia. He also notes the emergence of Orthodox communities and priests among “ethnic Chinese and Japanese.” Vasetskii, Sotsiologiya istorii Rossii: Bazovyie smysly i tsennosti (zapicka sotsiolog), p. 131.

[31] Stephen D. Shenfield, Russian Fascism: Traditions, Tendencies, Movements (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2001), pp. 195-7. In his Misterii Yevrazii (Mysteries of Eurasia), Dugin asserts that there was once an island Arctic paradise ‘Hyperborea’ from which a pure Aryan race, the Russians’ ancestors, moved into Eurasia. Alexander Dugin, Misterii Yevrazii (Moscow: Arktogeia, 1996) cited in Sheffield, Russian Fascism: Traditions, Tendencies, Movements, pp. 196-7.

[32] Aleksandr Dugin, Chetvertyi put’: Vvedenie v chetvertuyu politicheskuyu teoriyu (Moscow: Akademicheskii proekt, 2014), p. 40.

[33] Dugin, Chetvertyi put’: Vvedienie v chetvertuyu politicheskuyu teoriyu, p. 65.

[34] Florenskii, Stolp i utverzhdenie Istiny, p. 329.

[35] Solovev, Chtenie o Bogochelovechestve in Solovev and Radlov, Sobranie sochinenii Vladimira Sergeevicha Solov’eva, Tom III, p. 121.

[36] Alexander Prokhanov, Mister Hexogen cited in Oksana Timofeeva, “Russkii rai, ili Rodina-Mat’,” in Marlen Laryuel’ (Marlene Laruelle), ed., Russkii natsionalizm: sotsial’nyi i kul’turnyi kontekst (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2008), pp. 339-68, pp, at p. 348.

[37] Prokhanov, Mister Hexogen cited in Timofeeva, “Russkii rai, ili Rodina-Mat’,” pp. 350-2.

[38] Timofeeva, “Russkii rai, ili Rodina-Mat’,” pp. 365-6.

[39] Interview with Alexander Prokhanov, “Koronovirus, Putin, stat’ya Lavrova,” Program ‘Osobie mnenie,’ Ekho Moskvy, https://echo.msk.ru/programs/personalno/2862332-echo/, last accessed on 5 July 2021.

[40] Aleksandr Bokhanov, Russkaya ideya: Istoriya i istoriosofiya gosudarstva Rossiiskogo (Moscow: Prospekt, 2023), p. 82.

[41] Bokhanov, Russkaya ideya: Istoriya i istoriosofiya gosudarstva Rossiiskogo, p. 103.

[42] Bokhanov, Russkaya ideya: Istoriya i istoriosofiya gosudarstva Rossiiskogo, p. 554.

[43] Dmitrii Itskov, “Put’ k neochelovechestvu kak osnova ideologii partii ‘Evolyutsiya 2045’,” 2045.ru, 9 November 2012, http://www.2045.ru/articles/30840.html, last accessed on 24 October 2020.

[44] Itskov, “Put’ k neochelovechestvu kak osnova ideologii partii ‘Evolyutsiya 2045’”.

[45] Itskov, “Put’ k neochelovechestvu kak osnova ideologii partii ‘Evolyutsiya 2045’”.