Русский Феникс. Между советским прошлым и евразийским будущим

The East is geopolitically identical with Russia, which is Eurasian, as its project of regional integration and even globalization for a part of the post-Soviet area (mostly the Eastern one). On the other hand, Russia’s geopolitical vector is oriented towards the West having as its ultimate goal the Big Europe — from Lisbon to Vladivostok. The same area could also be called ‘Big Eurasia’ but it has been preserved as ‘Big Europe’ in the post-Soviet geopolitical lexis because the Russian cultural identity is European. In this context, the concept of ‘European identity’ is important because since 1991 there has been a trend of suggesting that the ‘Eastern European identity’ is second-rate compared to the ‘Central European’ or the ‘Western European’ ones.

The concept of ‘Eastern Europe’ is only geopolitical and is related to the Soviet sphere of influence in the Eastern Bloc in the period from WWII to 1991. The concept of ‘Central Europe’ is not less political. It is often relayed in order to isolate the Belarusians and the Ukrainians from the ‘East’ (or Russia). However, for the time being, it remains artificial with the former and painful with the latter. The culture is either European or not and any other addition — Western, Eastern, Central, etc. — is geopolitical. For Russia, the East has been present in the Russian culture only after its Europeanization (in this respect, the East is an endless source of enrichment of the Russia and, through it, of the European culture).

East is a conservative component of the Russian national identity, which is religious (Eastern Orthodox spirituality in harmonic co-habitation with all traditional religions in Russia) and which is traditional (as a model of the family) and even largely patriarchal as a behaviour.

The East is within the Eurasian statehood of Russia (strong centralization, which is inevitable due to the huge territory) and, therefore, the political system involves educational authoritarianism combined with Eurasian democracy and oligarchic capitalism; the sacralization of the state is an important part of the Russian identity. The state should invoke pride — otherwise the Russians could themselves destroy it. The Russian history of the 19^th and the 20

^th centuries has shown that noone could conquer or destroy Russia from the outside (1812,1941–1945) but Russia can destroy itself, if it wishes (1917, 1991). It should not be forgotten, however, that, while Russia has not been defeated by the West, the East has destroyed it once (Ancient Rus by the Tatar-Mongols).

Paradoxically, Europe of the time of the Enlightenment is more likely to be preserved by Russia and Belarus through the Eurasian Union than by Brussels, for the time being oriented towards open de-Chris-tianization and de-Europeanization of the Old Continent under the pressure of trans-national corporations. The latter seek not only destroying the states — the elimination of state control — but also turning the nations into atomized planctoon of elfs of a third gender. The Russian culture is European and, along with the Belarusian and Ukrainian (Malorussian), may prevent the danger of having one day only the name left out of Europe, like Atlantida.

Only a balance between the East and the West in post-Soviet Russia may prevent the consecutive autoimmune crisis due to lack of national identity though a policy of dualism (Russian-Russiyan), having combined the imperial and the national — the two faces of the Russian post-Soviet eagle, of the phoenix-empir.