Paul
Goble
Staunton, June 9 – “Russia is part
of Europe but it never will be part of the West,” a psychological pattern that
has remained “unchanged” over the course of the last 500 to 600 years and one whose continuity leads to
the modification of any system it has adopted to fit the Russian mentality,
according to a St. Petersburg psychoanalyst.
While that sometimes has had less
than positive consequences, Mikhail Reshetnikov, rector of the East European
Institute for Psychoanalysis, says, it has also means that “rebirth has always
taken place” when this civilizational island is surrounded “approximately like
now” by the limitless ocean (regnum.ru/news/polit/1811641.html).
Speaking at a
press conference on “Russian Identity and the Crisis of Civilizations” at the conclusion
of the 7th St. Petersbur Summit of Psychologists last week, Reshetnikov
argued that “every people is the fruit of an evolved mentality and has its own
goals,” which he calls “the chosen goal of a specific people.”
The Russian variant of this involves
several things historically, the psychoanalyst says. “Above all, it [includes] Russian historical
pride,” the idea sometimes realized and sometimes not that Russia could play
the leading role in the world after the opening of the space provided by the
collapse of Byzantium in the 15th century.
When Russia was unable to realize
this role, he continues, it adopted as compensation “such myths” as “the
special Russian social,” “the special Russian character,” and “the indestructible
Russian spirit.” After 1917, these myths
were simply transferred by substituting the word “Soviet” for the word “Russian.”
Another “chosen goal” in the Russian
mentality is reflected in the fact that “the Russian state always expanded: to
the north, to the west, to the south and to the east.” That was combined with
the notion of “a certain messianic role for Russia with regard to all
neighboring nations and to people within the state.”
“In the Soviet period,” Reshetnikov
said, “this was transformed into the assertion that ‘we are bringing light to
the entire world.’” Throughout this messianism has been not based on a Russian
national idea but rather on “the super-national idea of the priority of Russian
culture over the others.”
“Everyone had to know Russian
writers,” he continued, because”except for Chingiz Aitmatov and a couple of
others, you can’t name writers from the borderlands of Russia.”
Another “distinctive aspect of the
Russian people,” he said, is that “unlike other countries”—and he said that he
says this with regret – Russians ‘are not colonizers. We occupy territory but
people continue to speak Uzbek, Armenian, Ukrainian and so on.” Wherever the
French went, they imposed French.
A third characteristic of the
Russian mentality is “a focus on the first person of the state,” an assumption
that he rather than the people will make the decisions and exercise power. That was true before under the tsars, under
the Soviets and now. “The democratic
freedom which people received after1991 was nonsense,” he said.
Russia became “a state of the free poor, and we are
reaping the results.” And this is complicated by the fact, Reshetnikov says,
that the Russian state was never about protecting the citizenry but only about
protecting the state. “This also is our
tradition.”
“All
western models which Russia took offer as a result have been transformed by the
force of our mentality,” he said. “Social democracy was transformed into
bolshevism,” and “borrowed democracy became democratism” and thus took on”a
negative shading.”
Russia’s
special situation reflects the fact that “we were never the Scandinavian north,
the Muslim south, the west or the east ... We always were an island of civilization,
and in this is an enormous hope or rebirth.”
Russia is in a position to do so now, and as it does, Russia as “a young
nation” doesn’t need aging Europe. Let it rot in peace.”
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