THE RUSSIAN NATIONAL IDEA

1. Toward The National Idea Debate.
The concept of the National Idea is probably the most important one in political and social studies, yet it is terribly undeveloped, all too ambiguous, and consistently misleading. If one Googles “national idea” on the Internet, my criticism of the state of the national idea studies will become understandable, but the essence of this concept and the need for its proper elaboration still need to be addressed.
It has been noted that for some time the interest in this concept has been the most discussed in Russia, and Mr. Putin is on record, expressing a particular interest in this concept, in its relevance to Russia. Although Mr. Putin has not elaborated on its substance, I am quite certain that he knows exactly what this substance is, even though he has allowed a certain ambiguity to continue.
With regard to the said ambiguity, we find ample examples of it, to the point of sheer silliness, among those commentators who have been attempting to elaborate on it. To start with, they are all speaking of a number of Russian “national ideas” throughout the centuries and historical stages, as if unaware of and indifferent to the simple fact that in order to rise to the level of the national idea (or “nation-idea,” as I have called it for maximum clarity), there has to be just one (!), transcending the peripeties of the nation’s historical fortunes. Otherwise, it will be no better than those accidental slogans and ideas du jour, so many of which have gone by the wayside.
To give examples of what I have in mind with regard to Russia, it’s been suggested that the Russian national idea since the time of Tsar Nicholas I until the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, used to be the slogan “For Faith, Tsar, and Fatherland!” sitting on the three whales of Russian religious Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and National Spirit. The slogan was, understandably, altered in Soviet times to “For Our Soviet Motherland,” and some of the “scholarly” minds were trying to generalize it further, in terms of the three whales mentioned above.
In modern times, the twisted minds of the “national idea special force” were trying to formulate the Yeltsin-era Russian national idea as “anti-Sovietism,” changed since President Putin came to power to the absurdity of “Russia is Back!” I think I have said enough already on this nonsense, and might well wind up this part of my discussion with the following comment on the more subtle principle of the three whales, which deserves more attention than just laughing it off.
First of all, the national idea of any great nation has to be unique, and the idea of “Religion-Leader-Nation” is not unique, even when it appears in such a distinctive religion-free form as the Nazi German “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer” (one could not possibly unite the Third Reich by appealing to religion, which had been a divisive factor in Germany ever since the Reformation).
So what is unique in such a triad per se? Any nation, big or small, significant or less significant, possesses a cultural tradition, which includes the idea of fatherland-motherland-homeland, the idea of sovereign-ruler-leader and the idea of a national belief in God, at least to the extent of being able to affirm that “God is with us!” These are admittedly the three basics, although, once we get into detail on them, things are never quite so simple.
The appeal to Fatherland is extremely ambiguous in countries which do not have a well-delineated national boundary, or whose citizens are immigrants with multiple allegiances to their old and new countries (often to several of them, like it is the case in the United States). The appeal to sovereign has lost most of its value in modern times, even in Western monarchies which still retain a constitutional sovereign. To put it broadly, free societies have little, if any, respect for their national leaders. Most of them prefer to worship a substitute sovereign, such as “freedom” or “democracy.” And lastly, the question of faith is even more confusing. In multicultural societies it is often more advisable to downplay faith than to exacerbate religious differences by emphasizing it. On the other hand, in single-faith societies, particularly in Catholic countries, such as in Poland, an appeal to the faith of Roman Catholicism is not contiguous with the physical national boundaries, reaching well outside the national borders, and thus is not conducive per se to the development of a national idea. (The big exception is Russia, to which point we shall be coming momentarily.)
To sum it up, the national idea is essentially an idea of national exclusivity, which makes the nation unique, rather than one among many. By its definition, the national idea has a global dimension to it: being unique means that a global comparison of “us” against “all others” has been made, producing a definitive outcome. Therefore, the term “national idea,” or “nation-idea,” as I have insisted on calling it, can be best expressed by the familiar American phrase “manifest destiny,” and only when these two phrases are conjoined can we get a better comprehension of our term’s elusive substance.
There are actually only three nations today, that I know of, which meet the said requirement. (The question of whether China may have a nation-idea of her own is beyond the competence and comprehension of any foreigner, as I am explaining in my entry Ten Thousand Hieroglyphs, and I am certainly not going to make a fool out of myself by pretending that I know anything substantial about this subject, despite the fact that I spent two years in China and have always been intrigued by that country.)
Thus, there are only three great nations, that I know of, which have developed a clear and distinct nation-idea with a sweeping internationalist dimension to it. A nation-idea is a statement of nationalist self-expression, inwardly directed for the purpose of developing an all-encompassing sense of national purpose, affecting national consciousness at its roots, and it is the outwardly directed sense of a global mission, which turns a great nation into a great global power.

2. Three Manifest Destinies.
This is the subject I first raised in this direct form in my lecture at the December 2006 meeting of the Global Security Seminar (GSS) held at the UCLA in Los Angeles, California.
In the course of human history, three great Nation-Ideas have been formulated, to my knowledge, providing the respective nations with a sense of historical mission and a lasting purpose, unlike any others. They are, starting with the most recent, the Nation-Idea of “A City Upon A Hill,” (“the eyes of all people upon us”), originally expressed by John Winthrop, and subsequently developed (albeit hardly improved on) by John L. O’Sullivan in these words: “…The nation of many nations is destined to manifest to mankind the excellence of divine principles; to establish on earth the noblest temple ever dedicated to the worship of the Most High ---the Sacred and the True.” (The concept of the American “Nation-Idea” is sufficiently self-explanatory to require further elaboration.)
Next comes the Jewish Nation-Idea of Tikkun Olam, mystically represented by Isaac Luria (1534-1572), and later developed by the scholars of Kaballah as a metaphor explaining and rationalizing the Great Dispersion of the Jews, and giving the scattered nation a potent raison d’être. (See the Legend Of Tikkun Olam, among my entries. But here, in order to let the reader know what I am talking about, here is my very brief summary and its interpretation: For the purpose of Creation, God contracted a part of Himself into several vessels of light, which were shattered in the course of Creation, and small light-containing fragments of these vessels scattered all over the world. In order to repair the vessels and with this to repair the world, God dispersed His chosen people so that they would seek these light-bearing fragments everywhere and then put them all together, thus accomplishing the mission of repairing the world.)
And lastly, the earliest, and perhaps the most vibrant of them all, as it self-realizes throughout history, akin to Hegel’s Geist, comes the monumental Great-Russian Nation-Idea of The Third Rome, prominently featured in a number of places in this book, and making a special center-stage appearance in my next entry.
It must be noted that the “Third Rome” national idea has been noted as such by the majority of scholars on this subject, but it has been treated with a marked unappreciation, suffering from the terrible humiliation of being relegated to the rank of “pre-historic” national ideas, formulated some time ago, in the hoary past, but superseded since then by a host of others, more in tune with the Zeitgeists of the later epochs. In fact, it had never been found obsolete, but had subsisted in suspended animation during the times when religion and the Russian Church suffered utter disrespect, prior to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. It was exactly to make it respectable again that the powerful forces inside Russia whom I have called “the keepers of the faith” made the Bolshevik Revolution possible, inviting its hellfire to re-baptize Russian Orthodoxy, and thus allow it to be “born again”… (Otherwise, without such powerful help, how could a little bunch of desperados, led by a brilliant lunatic, but exponentially outnumbered, have suddenly taken power in Russia, against all odds, and defeating pure reason itself?!) I am convinced that today this Third Rome nation-idea, revitalized and empowered by the natural partnership of the Church and the State, has returned as the spiritual foundation of the Russian nation, and that Mr. Putin has it in mind, when he is talking about the Russian national idea.
Russia has developed her effectively self-serving account of Three Romes upon the solid and philosophically convincing foundation of history, politics, and religion, merged into a single compelling entity, supporting the narrative with such objective facts which cannot be dismissed offhand even by her detractors. It must be understood, in the context of our previous discussion of most religions’ non-exclusivity, that in Russia’s unique case, her Christian Orthodoxy radiates from the inside, rather than reflects something on the outside, as is the case with all Catholic countries, including Italy. Let us now take a closer look at Russia’s Three Romes, which are the subject of my next entry.

3. Russia’s Three Romes.
In order not to keep the reader in unnecessary suspense, let us first name the “three Romes” in the title: they are, in chronological order, Rome, Constantinople, and Moscow.
In launching the story of the Three Romes, our first order of business, is to establish absolute clarity by answering this by no means trivial question: Why is Rome so important to Russia’s nation-idea? It must be understood that talking about the first of the three Romes, Rome proper, we are not merely talking about the Imperial Rome at the height of her glory, which is symbolically important to secular power. Russia’s Three Romes are also the history of Christianity that starts with Saint Paul’s sacred mission to Rome, highlighted in the Acts:
…After these things were ended, Paul purposed in the spirit, when he had passed through Macedonia and Achaia, to go to Jerusalem, saying, After I have been there, I must also see Rome (Acts 19:21).
And the night following the Lord stood by him, and said, Be of good cheer, Paul: for as thou hast testified of me in Jerusalem, so must thou bear witness also in Rome (Acts 23:11).
Observe that the Russians, naturally, do not make a claim to Jerusalem, the great city of the Jews. Russia’s destiny is a Gentile Christian destiny, and it is rooted in the history of Gentile Christianity, which starts in the Gentile Rome, where Saint Paul was sent by the Lord, where he preached, and where he was martyred, along with Saint Peter, who, according to the Christian tradition, also made his last stand in Rome. (As for the Catholic claim that Saint Peter was the first Roman Pope, the Russians have denounced this spurious, in their opinion, claim of Rome’s everlasting papal primacy, but, mind you, not the perfect legitimacy of every early Bishop of Rome (but not their “Papal Supremacy” as claimed by the Roman Catholic Church), nor the fact that the Gentile history of Christianity starts, indeed, with the First Rome.)
The official date of the end of the Western Roman Empire, with its center in the city of Rome, in 476 AD, is certainly one of the most spurious major dates in the textbook history of Western Civilization. The Russians honor this date only insofar as it provides a universal acknowledgment that the First Rome had really fallen. But in a more specific rationalization, the First Rome would fall more than three centuries later, when its Christianity was corrupted by the ungodly political alliance of Charlemagne and the heretical Bishop of Rome Leo III, in which the integrity of Rome’s religious tradition was sacrificed to political expediency.
Observe that the milestone date of 1054 AD, to which history ascribes the irreconcilable Great Schism that separated Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy is, for all intents and purposes, a meaningless date, just as the previous official date of 476 AD is equally meaningless in the context of Christian history. The year 1054 is identified as the date when the Western Church “excommunicated” the Eastern Church, but in the tradition of Eastern Orthodoxy no attention whatsoever has been paid to this action of a heretical enemy, and even from the Western perspective, this event has been seen as a relatively minor incident in the Church history.
Meanwhile, a Second Rome had been steadily rising all this time, centered in the city of Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire. Built by Constantine the Great on the site of a former city of Byzantium, it had been declared the capital of the reunited Roman Empire back in 330 AD, but, in terms of the Christian history, it coexisted with the First Rome, until the latter had lost its religious legitimacy. Apparently, it did not happen in the years of the so-called ‘early religious schisms’ between the eastern and western churches, in the early years. As long as there was an actual reconciliation, Christianity demanded a forgiveness, and in the eyes of the Church of the East, the Church of the West always restored her legitimacy through such reconciliations.
The reign of Justinian the Great brought even more clout to Constantinople, yet still without a simultaneous delegitimization of Rome, whose fall from grace, although preceding the official date of The Great Schism by two and a half centuries, was by the latter sanctioned as an unforgivable sin, after which the First Rome could never rise again.
And so the era of the Second Rome: Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire had begun. Predictably it had to be over by the time the city fell to the Turks in 1453, but again this is a general historical date which has little relevance to the Russian Christian history of the Three Romes, although the general fact that the fall of Constantinople is universally recognized as a well-established historical fact, means that the Russians do not have to prove to anyone that the Second Rome had indeed fallen.
But if you ask the Russians about the precise time when Constantinople lost her religious legitimacy, they’ll point not to 1453, but to the earlier event of 1438-1445, that is to the Council of Ferrara-Florence convened by Rome, but attended by the highest secular and religious dignitaries of the Byzantine Empire, including its Emperor John VIII Paleolog and two Orthodox Patriarchs of Constantinople: Joseph II, who died in 1439 in Florence, and Metrophanes II, who succeeded him. They all came to Florence as beggars, asking for help from the self-serving Pope Eugenius IV, in thwarting the impending onslaught of the Ottoman Turks, but before they had received a single promise (none to be kept), they were forced to submit to the power of the Roman Catholic Church, to which effect the Decree of the Union was signed on July 6, 1439, creating what would be known as the Uniate Church, immediately condemned and repudiated by the Orthodox Christian majority at home.
Although most of the Orthodox clerics forced to sign the infamous capitulation at Florence had repented the deed the instant they returned home, this act of betrayal of the true Christian faith was to strip the Church of Constantinople of her Pastoral supremacy, and several independent Patriarchates were established, refusing their former allegiance to the apostate Greek Church. By far the foremost among them was the Patriarchate of Moscow and of All Russia. (It was eventually established in 1589, bringing to life the new leader of the faithful: the Russian Orthodox Church. But, without going into too many details, I need to clarify that the Russian Orthodox Church had become autocephalous as early as in 1441, yet her elevation to the status of Patriarchate was necessary to make her claim to Patriarchal legitimacy valid in the eyes of the Orthodox world, for which the consent of the Orthodox Patriarch Jeremias II of Constantinople was required, and obtained by Russia's Regent, and later Tsar, Boris Godunov. As an immediate result of it, Metropolitan Job of Moscow and All Russia became Patriarch Job of Moscow and All Russia on January 26, 1589.)
"Two Romes have fallen, but the third stands, and a fourth there shall not be." Such was the historic prophesy uttered in 1510 by the monk Philotheus of Pskov, and thus, the Russian nation-idea of the Third Rome was finally to acquire its concrete shape. But the great event preceding its formulation, the event that established the Russian Church-State duumvirate as the legitimate and only heir of the Second Rome, had taken place a half-century before, in 1472, to be precise, when Zoë/Sophia Paleolog, the niece of the last Emperor of the Byzantine Empire Constantine XI, having fled from the Ottoman Turks, and having spent several years as a ward of the Pope in Rome, moved on to Moscow, with the Pope’s blessing, to become the bride of Russia’s Ivan III the Great, grandfather of Ivan IV Grozny.
This momentous event in Russian history ranks among the most significant milestones in the development of Russian national consciousness, yet it is vaguely, if at all, appreciated even by the foremost Russia experts in the West. But, without an understanding of its immense importance in the rise of the Russian "Manifest Destiny," no proper understanding of Russia can be possible. No wonder that the level of ignorance, particularly here in America, about what makes the Russians tick, is truly mind-boggling...
As her dowry, Sophia brought to Moscow nothing less than the proud and world-famous Paleolog coat of arms: the double-headed eagle. The two heads, looking left and right, had represented the two parts of the divided Roman Empire, whose sole heir the Byzantine Empire had claimed to be. But now the Russian ruler was the legitimate inheritor of the glory of the Roman Empire! Her symbolic dowry explicitly meant that the Byzantine Empire, no longer capable of carrying the torch of pure Christianity, earlier passed from Rome to Constantinople during the “heretical” reign of Charlemagne, according to the traditional version, claimed by the Orthodox Church and subsequently by the rulers of Russia, was now passing this torch, or to be precise, the double-eagle coat of arms, representing East and West, but now coming to represent the whole world, to Moscow, Rome Number Three, and the Last!