The old continent is now being told who it is by two outsiders, one that does not mind leaving, and another that never lived there. Europe’s voters might wonder when they will be asked? And that is one major factor of why they’re angry at their rulers.
Part 2: The Address Russia Keeps Changing
For three hundred years Moscow and St Petersburg argued about whether they lived in Europe, beside it, or somewhere that only resembled it on the map. In March 2023, the argument was settled by decree. Russia’s Foreign Policy Concept described the country as “an original state-civilization,” a Eurasian and Euro-Pacific power. As we shall see, the declaration was newer than it sounds and older than its critics admit.
A European State by Imperial Order
Start with the empress who wrote the opening line of the debate. In 1767 Catherine II’s Instruction to her law commission opened with the flat statement that “Russia is a European State,” credited to the reforms of Peter the Great. The same document declared the sovereign absolute. That pairing is the first clue to the whole story: Europe, in Russia, arrived by order from the throne. Peter’s Europeanisation was a state project, and so was the identity attached to it. Catherine’s Enlightenment vocabulary decorated an autocracy; the subordinates saw little of the decoration.
Within decades the throne changed its mind. In 1833 Education Minister Sergei Uvarov coined the formula Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality. Historians describe it as a state-defined national idea.
Chaadaev’s Shot
The debate went public in 1836, when the journal Telescope printed Pyotr Chaadaev’s first “Philosophical Letter.” He had written it in French, which he considered the language of Europe. It argued that Russia’s break with the Western Christian tradition left it adrift. Alexander Herzen called it “a shot that rang out in the dark night.” The authorities declared the author insane and exiled the editor. Britannica summarises the letter’s core as the claim that Russia belonged neither to Europe nor to Asia.
Pushkin, who wrote to Chaadaev in French, replied with a worried question: would some future historian put Russia outside Europe? That was the fear in 1836. In the 1840s it had become a fixed programme. The Slavophiles maintained that Russia should follow a separate course, one based on Orthodoxy and the peasant commune, while the Westernizers held that Russia was only falling behind.
In 1869 Nikolai Danilevsky’s Russia and Europe turned the mood into a theory of rival cultural-historical types, predicting a new Slavic civilisation once Constantinople fell.
Dostoevsky: Prophet or Mirror?
Dostoevsky is the writer every side of the argument loves to recruit. At the 1880 Pushkin Monument ceremony in Moscow, he praised the poet as the embodiment of Russia’s ideals, and some observers note that the speech was really about Russia, and about Dostoevsky. The universalist message was that Russians could embrace all humanity.
His last Diary of a Writer piece, on the Geok-Tepe campaign in 1881, is the passage Moscow’s diplomats now quote. In it he declared that “the Russian is not only a European, but also an Asiatic,” and argued that Russia’s future lay at least as much in Asia as in the West, where Russians had been treated as hangers-on.
The Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov often cites Dostoevsky. The honest reading is neither “Dostoevsky declared a separate civilisation” nor “Dostoevsky was an enthusiastic European.” He was a man who craved Europe’s respect and resented the way it was withheld. That is not a doctrine. It is a mood, and moods get quoted selectively.
The Soviet Detour
Then came 1917, and the paradox deepens. Historians consider the Soviet era a maximal departure from European system. The Eurasianists of the 1920s and 30s imagined Eurasia as an imperial space ruled by an ideologically driven elite. The old question reappeared as the quarrel between “socialism in one country” and internationalism, with Pokrovsky and Trotsky, curiously, swapping the roles history assigned them. Officially, though, the Soviet Union saw itself as the vanguard of a universal civilisation, not a regional one. Hence, It claimed the future, not a heritage. Isn’t that the core reason why this phase of Russian history was so consequential?
The Brief Return to Europe
When the USSR collapsed, Moscow tried the opposite. Gorbachev spoke of a common European home. Yeltsin talked of rejoining European civilisation. Richard Pipes wrote in 2001 that after communism Russia had one option left: to turn West.
President Putin’s 2005 state-of-the-nation address described Russia as a major European power that had developed alongside other European nations for three centuries. Putin himself later recalled that Richard Nixon told a Moscow audience in 1991 that Russia was part of Western civilisation.
Two things went wrong. First came status: Russia could not comfortably be a pupil. The Norwegian scholar Iver Neumann put it memorably: “Great Powers do not go to school.” Second, Europe itself had become an institution. As the European Union and NATO moved east, Russia was set apart not by culture but by membership. The chain of Part 1 matters here: Kennan’s warnings, the 1999 Kosovo war, and the broken sense of an agreed European home all pushed Moscow towards the idea that the architecture had no place for it. The Ukraine War sharpened the contradiction.
Renewal: From Valdai to the 2023 Concept
In September at Valdai, Putin stated that “the Euro-Atlantic countries are, in fact, rejecting their roots” and gave the philosopher Konstantin Leontyev to describe Russia as a state-civilisation shaped by the Russian language, culture, Orthodoxy and other traditional religions. By 2021 he was presenting the lines separating him from the West as being conceptual and civilisational.
After February 2022, the idea moved from speeches into doctrine. In the 2023 Concept, the vocabulary of the Russian world and a Eurasian and Euro-Pacific power replaced the 2016 language of constructive cooperation with Washington.
Dmitri Trenin, among Russia’s best-known foreign-policy analysts, has argued that the centuries-old strategy of Europeanising Russia is now exhausted. In practice the counter-measures catalogued in Part 1 are the civilisational doctrine’s material side: energy sold east, trade settled in rubles and yuan, finance rebuilt away from Western custody.
Putin’s 2023 Valdai speech distilled the doctrinal claim: Russian civilisation, he said, has no frontiers, but exists because the Russian state does.
The Unfinished Debate Inside Russia
Today’s state-civilisation language borrows freely from the imperial vocabulary of Uvarov’s days, and from a thousand-year narrative. Ukraine is where the contradiction becomes lethal, and this “mood” is what the West unwisely picks on as Russia’s neo-expansionist “Soviet dream”. Does Western propaganda falsehoods and intentional obfuscation even need to be clarified?
Putin acknowledged in 2013 that Ukraine is an independent state, then added that Russian statehood has its roots on the Dnieper, in the Baptism of Rus’. Critics hear a civilisation stretching to cover a neighbour. Supporters hear history.
The Mirror in Washington
Now the plot twist. As Moscow was leaving the European family, Washington moved in with a civilisational vocabulary of its own. In Munich, Rubio said, “We are part of one civilization / Western civilization,” and the 2025 strategy warns of Europe’s civilisational erasure. Putin’s 2013 diagnosis, that developed nations are failing to reproduce themselves and abandoning their Christian roots, is oddly close to the American text. So, could one say that both capitals use “civilisation” to make the same argument: sovereignty from liberal “rules” while disagreeing only on who counts as family? I’ll leave the answer to the reader.
The word has become a political passport. In Washington, it supplies a reason to stay in Europe and remake it. In Moscow, it supplies a reason to leave Europe. So, let us ask the question: Is “civilisation” used to describe borders of loyalty, more than borders of culture? Or should we simply remind ourselves here of the term “spheres of influence”.
Looking Back, Moving East
Russia – here we are precisely talking about the Russian Federation – did not abandon the European address by itself, or in an “unprovoked” tantrum. It left after NATO enlargement, after Kosovo, after sanctions, and after the freezing of its reserves, and for each step there is, indubitably, a Western signature.
The honest conclusion is the uncomfortable one: Russia is both a European country that was slowly told it was not, and a civilisation that discovered, rather late, that it would not mind the shedding of that label if its strategical interests are at stake.
Russia seems to be reenacting Fyodor Dostoevsky’s own psychological journey: beginning with an ecstatic, universalist desire to brother and reconcile all of Europe, only to pivot toward the East once that Europe denied that embrace.
America, meanwhile, claims to be Europe’s child while rewriting the family rules. The old continent is now being told who it is by two outsiders, one that does not mind leaving, and another that never lived there.
Europe’s own voters might reasonably wonder when they will be asked? And that is one major factor of why they’re angry at their rulers, whether they get it or not.
So, I’ll end with one final question: I wonder when will they get it?
Tamer Mansour, Egyptian Independent Writer & Researcher
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