Research Paper on "Effects of Slavophilic Russian Ideas vs. The Modern World Globalization"

Research Paper 10 pages (4190 words) Sources: 6

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Slavophilic Russian Ideas vs. The Modern World/Globalization

The effects of Slavophilic Russian Ideas vs. The Modern World/Globalizatio

An Overview of Russia

Geography

According to Russia Travel Guide, Russia is the largest country in the world by far; spanning nine time zones, its territory covers nearly twice as much of the earth as that of the next largest country, Canada. Besides, the U.S. Department of State claims that the official name of Russia is the Russia Federation. It has an area of 17 million sq. km. (6.5 million sq. mi.); about 1.8 times the size of the United States. Its capital city Moscow has a population of approximately10.4 million people while other cities like St. Petersburg has 4.6 million, Novosibirsk has 1.4 million, and Nizhniy Novgorod has1.3 million. Russia has a broad plain terrain with low hills west of Urals; vast coniferous forest and tundra in Siberia; uplands and mountains (Caucasus range) along southern borders. Besides, its climate is of Northern continental. Russia Travel Guide notes that Russia also administers the exclave of Kaliningrad Oblast on the Baltic coast located in between Poland and Lithania.

People

The U.S. Department of State alleges that the nationality of the people of Russia is known as the Russian(s). It further argues that their population, as at January 2009, was approximately 141.9 million, whiles their annual population growth rate, estimated to be declining at the rate of -0.467%. The ethnic groups in Russia comprise of 79.8% Russian, 3.8% Tatar, 2% Ukrainian, and 14.4% others. Their religion comprises of Russian Orthodox, Islam, Judaism, Roman Catholicism, Protestant, Buddhist, other. There are more than 140 other languages and dialects in Russia; however Russian is the official language. The total population's literacy level is estimated at 99.4%. In the year 2007, the life expectancy of Russians people was averagely at 67.5 years, while that of men and women were averagely at 61.4 and 73.9 years, respectively. Its workforce comprises of approximately 90.152 million individuals (as at 2007) whereby 84% of the population represents production and economic services sector while 16% represent the government

Economy

Despite Russia's massive size, Russia Travel Guide declares that much of the country lacks proper soils and climates (either too cold or too dry) for agriculture. Instead it has huge reserves of some of the world's most important resources such as oil, gas, coal, platinum, gold, chrome, and asbestos. In 2008, U.S. Department of State asserts that Russia had a GDP of U.S.$1.67 trillion and a growth rate of 5.6%. Its natural resources comprise of the petroleum, natural gas, timber, furs, precious and nonferrous metals. In the agriculture sector, Russia produces grain, sugar beets, sunflower seeds, meat, and the dairy products. Its industry sector types includes a complete range of manufactures such as automobiles, trucks, trains, agricultural equipment, advanced aircraft, aerospace, machine and equipment products; mining and extractive industry; medical and scientific instruments; and construction equipment. Accordingly, in 2008, Russia's trade on Exports of petroleum and petroleum products; natural gas; woods and wood products; metals; and chemical was estimated at U.S.$368 billion whereby, its major markets were EU, CIS, China, and Japan. Its imports on machinery and equipment; chemicals; consumer goods; medicines; meat; sugar; and semi-finished metal products was estimated at U.S.$256 billion.

An Overview of Slavophilic Russian Ideas

Duffy acknowledges that Russia was an autocracy, ruled by Nicholas I who, mindful of the Decembrist revolt, was fearful of Western revolutionary ideas taking hold in Russia. He therefore deliberately held back his country's progression. However, Duffy suspects that the Russian intelligentsia of the 1840s either longed for Western progress or idealized the peasantry. According to Duffy, the opposing idealists were known as Westerners and Slavophiles. Complexity and innovation characterized the Western Europe in the nineteenth century and the rise of a new middle class ensured a ferment of ideas, a burst of technologies progress. This was not so in Russia where the Slavophiles embodied the painful ideological struggle of contradictory ideals.

On the 12th July 1996, following a closely fought election victory, Boris Yeltsin called his advisors to him. Boris said, 'In Russia's history in the 20th century…each epoch had its own ideology. [But] now we don't have one. And that's bad,' (969). According to Slade, the goal was set to have a unifying 'Russian idea' developed before the next election in 2000.

Slade claims that, in any state-building project, the state must project an image of itself as the legitimate representation of the people bounded within its territory. Slade continues to allege that for the state, this is an issue of ideology, understood as the creation of signifiers, determined by power relations, which bring disparate identities together through a process of suture, forming unity and homogeneity within the mass of relations designated by the term 'society.' As Bourdieu notes, 'every group is the site of struggle to impose a legitimate principle of group construction.'(130). For instance, Slade declares that 'Nation' and 'nationality' is an obvious example of such a principle that authorizes state power.

According to Slade, Vera Tolz has identified various principles of nationality group construction within 1990s Russia. Vera Tolz declares that the first of these is Eurasianism that was based on an emigre movement in the 1920s and 30s. It emphasizes Russia's unique place in civilization and its special geographic position; and demands a re-birth of some form of the Soviet Union, claiming that Russian identity is bound up with its expansionist history. Secondly, Vera Tolz further claims there are those schools of thought that emphasize Slavophilia. Invariably this either involves the reintegration of Ukraine and Belarus with Russia, or a unification of all Russian speakers ('rescuing' those 25 million in the Russian Diaspora), and/or a nation with the Orthodox religion as its organizing principle. A third conception according to Vera Tolz was imported from the West in the 1980s; and it is of a civic nation with solidarity based on citizenship. Slade comprehends that these competing visions had their political advocates as liberal reformers argued for the third option and the Communist and Nationalist opposition took up a mixture of the first two.

Sakwa notes that during the 1990s, the competition amongst political groupings with various quantities of symbolic capital, that is recognition and legitimacy perpetuated these fractious lines of diametrically opposed political visions and diverging ideals. This led to 'regime politics' (23) in which elections determined not simply the government but the entire political system. Elections were 'plebiscites on the nature of the system,' (23) and each system had its own principles for constructing the nation.

Batygin claim Russia needed to monopolize a conception of the nation because Yeltsin realized that a common political language was urgently in need. However, as Batygin puts it, the problem was that the historical changes and crises of legitimacy experienced by communist and post-communist regimes in Russia are linked to a positional conflict within the community of discourse; and Urban declare that 'collectively [this conflict] create[s] an intolerable situation and anticipate[s] some moment at which victors and vanquished in the struggle for state power will be declared along with the acceptance and/or imposition of a singe definition of the Russian nation'(969).

On the 29th of December 1999, Slade proclaim that it was declared by Vladimir Putin; when his Millennium Manifesto was initially placed on the Internet and published in the newspaper, a day later; that the economic well-being of the people was an ideological, spiritual and moral problem, and during that period he attempted to define the core values of Russians. More so, Slade declare that Putin, right before becoming interim president, staked out his position as the authorized representative and spokesperson of the Russian people by co-opting other positions and creating his own principles for defining Russian nationality.

Migdal appreciates Max Weber's definition of the state as being a monopoly of legitimate violence over a given territory. Migdal claim that Max Weber said the state is given legitimacy through the rational calculations of a society that requires an organizational principle for the distribution of collective goods, most basically protection on Weber's definition. For Russia in the 1990s, according to Migdal, this leaves a problem since there was (and there is) a failure to meet people's needs and this undermines the state's raison d'etre. Migdal's argument is that the state can fail to keep its monopoly on violence; and thus ineffectively distribute protection to its citizens and he declares that this is precisely what happened during Yeltsin's presidency, and continues to some extent today in Russia due to its Slavophilic ideas. Therefore, this aspect of the Yeltsin-Putin initiative is the one that inextricably linked to the question of Russian perspectives on that initiative which itself adds up to serious questions of the self-identity and self-perception of Russia.

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