Two civilizations collide like tectonic plates in Ukraine

At least, so does the Russian writer Victor Yerofeyev, author of “The Good Stalin,” in which he reviews his own privileged life as the son of a Soviet dictator and a translator for the Foreign Minister. Viacheslav Molotov.

Of Russian and French culture, Yerofeyev was the editor of the magazine Metropol dedicated to dissidents in his home country, and its publication destroyed the diplomatic career of his own father, a Stalinist hoping to be appointed foreign minister of the USSR.

In a recent interview with him on a philosophy program on Swiss television, Yerofeyev spoke of many of his compatriots as people for whom religion and the state have always been more important than individualism and humanistic values ​​imported from the West.

Indeed, it is enough to review the history of Russian culture and the intelligentsia and to see what kind of struggle has taken place in that country, at least since Peter the Great, between the so-called “Westerners” and “Slavists”.

Westernists, including great writers such as Alexander Herzen, Ivan Turgenev or Vissarion Belinski, have always viewed the Orthodox religion of the Russian people as a reactionary force supporting an autocratic state, and consequently advocated the adoption of the European rationalist model.

On the other hand, Slavists, influenced by German romantic philosophy, especially Herder, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and the author of “Gulag Archipelago” Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, have always valued ancient traditions and believed in the special role of a mystical Russia. a Europe considered materialist and atheist.

And Ukraine has the misfortune of being where these two opposing views collide, according to Yerofeyev.

However, there was a moment after the Cold War when a Russia that had officially ceased to be communist seemed to want to expand into Europe, of which it had always been a geographical part.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the USSR, then his successor at the head of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, and also at first Vladimir Putin, something that many today prefer to forget, tried each in his own way.

He even went so far as to mention the possibility of sitting at the NATO table one day, despite claiming, like others, that his country was receiving preferential treatment because he did not want to succumb to the humiliation of queuing in Brussels.

This idea was rejected by Washington, who saw the danger to its hegemony from a greater European dependence on Russia, as Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, warned at the time.

And today one wonders what would have happened if the United States had tried to facilitate a rival country’s rapprochement with the Atlantic Alliance, instead of ignoring Russia and humiliating Putin.

What we know today is that there are supporters of that “eternal Russia” hitherto alienated from the democratic values ​​of the West, with Russia’s complete isolation, both politically and economically, in response to their invasion of Ukraine by the alliance countries. there we once again gained strength. .

And the “westerners” will once again and rightly feel betrayed.