Russia and Europe
Russia and Europe is Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk’s extended study of Russian civilization, known in Czech as Rusko a Evropa, in German as Russland und Europa, and in English under the title The Spirit of Russia. It is a work of historical and philosophical interpretation rather than a narrative chronicle. Its subject is the inner development of Russia—its religious traditions, its philosophical and political ideas, its literature, and its revolutionary movements—and its guiding question is whether Russia belongs to Europe or constitutes a separate civilization with its own character and destiny.
Masaryk’s fundamental conviction is that ideas, and above all religious beliefs, are decisive historical forces. He therefore approaches Russian history through the ideas that have animated it, treating the intelligentsia’s debates, the Church’s claims, and the various revolutionary programs as expressions of deeper spiritual and philosophical commitments. The work is organized around what he presents as a long struggle between two principles. On one side stands theocracy: the Orthodox autocracy, the ideal of “Holy Russia,” the doctrine of Moscow as the Third Rome, and the later alliance of throne and altar defended by the theorists of official nationality. On the other side stands democracy: the conviction, expressed in different forms by Westernizers, radicals, socialists, and religious reformers, that Russia must be reorganized on the basis of individual freedom, reason, and social justice. Much of the book is an elaboration and testing of this contrast.
The historical narrative
The historical portion of the work traces Russian development from the formation of the state and the religious-political ideas that sustained it. Masaryk examines the growth of the idea of “Holy Russia” and of Moscow as a third Rome; Peter the Great’s reforms and the forcible linking of Russia with Europe; and the theocratic reaction that followed the French Revolution, which he sees as preparing the ground for the political and philosophical revolution that opened in the nineteenth century. He follows the sequence of reform and reaction through the emancipation of the peasantry in 1861 and the administrative reforms that followed, the brief liberal interlude, and the renewal of a repressive, Nicolaitan regime. The growth of a terrorist guerrilla revolution, the assassination of Alexander II, the accentuation of theocratic reaction and counter-terrorism, and the defeat in the war against Japan are all treated as stages in a deepening crisis. The book reaches the first general revolutionary movement among the masses, the beginnings of constitutional government, and the counter-revolution that followed.
Throughout this survey, Masaryk is less interested in military and diplomatic detail than in the relation between political institutions and the religious and moral consciousness of the people. He stresses the gulf between the educated minority and the peasant masses, the subjection of the Church to the state, and the way in which official Orthodoxy failed to satisfy the spiritual needs of a society undergoing modernization. These conditions, in his account, explain both the intensity of Russian revolutionary sentiment and its chronic incapacity for constructive political action.
The Russian thinkers
The second and larger part of the work consists of a series of studies of individual thinkers and movements, intended to display the Russian philosophy of history and of religion in its concrete forms. Masaryk begins with P. J. Chaadaev, whose critique of Orthodox theocracy and sympathy for Catholic universalism he treats as the opening of Russian philosophical self-consciousness. He then examines Slavophilism, with its messianic claims for Orthodox theocracy and its relation to Pan-Slavism, followed by Westernism as represented by V. G. Belinsky. Apollon Grigoriev appears as an attempted synthesis of Westernism and Slavophilism, while Alexander Herzen is presented as the representative of philosophical and political radicalism, and M. A. Bakunin as the theorist of revolutionary anarchism.
The later studies move through the realist and nihilist writers—Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov, and Pisarev—and the so-called sociological subjectivists, Lavrov and Mikhailovsky. Masaryk then turns to the theorists of official theocracy, Pobedonostsev and Leontiev, and to Vladimir Solovyov, whose religious thought he characterizes as a form of mysticism. A substantial section is devoted to modern socialism: Marxism and Russian social democracy, the relation between Marxism and Narodnichestvo, the crisis within the Marxist movement, the religious problem as it appeared to the socialists, and the Social Revolutionaries. Modern anarchism, represented by Kropotkin, and the relation between anarchism and socialism are also examined. The book closes its survey with a discussion of the crisis in revolutionism and the religious question that increasingly preoccupied the Russian intelligentsia.
Method and themes
Masaryk’s method is comparative and critical. He measures Russian thinkers against European philosophy and against one another, and he is persistently concerned with two questions. The first is epistemological: whether Russian thought developed a distinctive theory of knowledge, and whether its characteristic intuitions could withstand philosophical scrutiny. The second is religious: whether the Russian search for faith could issue in a coherent worldview capable of sustaining moral and political life. He examines the Russian intelligentsia’s various attempts to replace Orthodox theology with secular creeds—positivism, materialism, utilitarianism, Marxism, anarchism—and judges them partly by their philosophical coherence and partly by their moral and religious adequacy.
The book concludes with a summary statement opposing democracy to theocracy and analyzing the problem of revolution. Masaryk does not treat revolution as a purely political event; he sees it as the outcome of a moral and spiritual crisis, and he is concerned with the question of whether political change can be effected without a deeper transformation of society’s religious and ethical life. His account of the Russian revolutionary tradition is therefore both sympathetic to its grievances and skeptical of its methods, and the work as a whole is an argument that Russia’s future depends on the development of a democratic culture grounded in moral responsibility rather than on the violent overthrow of one autocracy by another.
Intelligentsia and literature
Masaryk’s account of Russian thought is also an account of the intelligentsia as a moral and social formation. He presents it as Westernized in its vocabulary but isolated from the people, inclined toward abstract schemes, and prone to making politics into a substitute for religion. This helps explain why the successive creeds he examines—positivism, materialism, utilitarianism, Marxism, anarchism—so often take on an absolute, quasi-religious authority, and why radical politics can coexist with a weak sense of individual moral responsibility. His literary analyses, especially of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, are integrated into this diagnosis: Dostoevsky’s messianic nationalism and Tolstoy’s rationalized Christianity appear as powerful but finally inadequate attempts to answer the religious question that Orthodox theocracy had left unresolved.
Official theocracy as a system
Masaryk treats official theocracy not merely as a set of doctrines but as a system that compromises religion by subordinating the church to the autocratic state. Pobedonostsev and Leontiev represent the intellectual defense of this system, while the revolutionaries represent its reactive negation. The book’s argument is that this opposition—between a state church that has lost spiritual authority and a radical intelligentsia that rejects all authority—leaves Russian society without a stable moral center. The religious question is therefore not an appendix to politics but the point at which Russian thought reveals its deepest unresolved conflict.
Critical significance
The work’s significance lies in its combination of literary-philosophical analysis with a critique of secular messianism. It interprets Russian literature and philosophy as evidence of a broader struggle over the sources of authority, and it reads revolutionary creeds as secularized versions of the messianism they oppose. Masaryk’s aim is not a neutral catalogue of schools but a diagnosis of why Russian radicalism so often reproduces the absolutism it attacks. In this respect the book is both an intellectual history and a moral argument about the limits of political salvation.
