Is Russia more about the West or the East?
I am interested in your opinion on the ethnographic, cultural, and historical component of the issue.
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From all points of view, this is almost exclusively the West. Russia is a country of European culture and this is felt in everything. The language, literature, religion, political structure, art – and absolutely everything here is European. It is not for nothing that Russians go to Asia to see the exotic, and to Europe to feel at home, only more comfortable.
The very border between Asia and Europe in Russia is very conditional. As Zbigniew Brzezinski said, Vladivostok, located in Asia, is a much more European city than Kazan, located in Europe.
Russia is its own culture, the West, and the Middle East.
The influence of cultures was on both sides. In ancient times, there was more influence from the East (especially during the Yoke occupation), starting with Peter I-from the West. But our own culture still dominates.
For “Westerners”, we are “Easterners” both in terms of territorial location and perception. For “Easterners” – “Westerners”.
Neither fish nor meat.
In Russia, European culture and Asian mentality. In the pre-Mongol period, Russia was part of Europe, then for 300 years it was a vassal part of the Horde. Since the time of Peter I, it has “returned” to Europe as a great power, paying for it with a quarter of the population who died in wars and during the construction of the village.St. Petersburg. The RI aristocracy was part European, but most of the population continued to live in an Asian way. The reforms initiated by Alexander II during the tsarist period were not completed, and the peasants remained” half-servants ” according to Witte's definition. The Soviet period, from my point of view, is a rollback to Asia: the aristocracy with the highest culture was destroyed, and the Soviet educated people never reached this level. Stalin – an eastern despot born not far from the birthplace of Saddam Hussein, ruled the USSR for many years, revived the peasant community in the form of collective farms and GULAG slavery. Now, in terms of the structure of the economy, Russia is an oil caliphate, the main” friends ” from Asia: Iran, India, China, possibly Turkey in the future, the level of development pushes to “close in spirit”. So, historically and geographically, Russia is the edge of Europe, in terms of its level of development, and mentally-an Asian country.
Of course the West. We have a European people, religion and language. And if you studied other Slavs, primarily southern and eastern, you would notice a similar mentality. That is Russia is not radically different from Europe but simply belongs to the Slavic subgroup the only difference is imperial thinking and great Russian chauvinism. Only the Western Slavs, who are too germanized, fall out of the Slavic community. And what is considered Eastern despotism in Russia is more the influence of Byzantium, for example, unlike the East, the church was always separated from the authorities and was under the sovereign. A typical late Roman Dominant system. If you listened to Polish folk music or Bulgarian music, you would notice a lot of similarities. For example, in the West, they often speak not Russian, but Slavic slavs, that is, the kinship of all Slavs is obvious to them.
in ancient China they said —
it meant the border between China and India, of course ..
in this sense, Russia is certainly the West. like all European and Middle Eastern culture. we have Indian medicine, Indian astronomy, Indian mathematics .. and in general, the Indian mentality .. some would call it all ARYAN , and some would even call it” Vedic”…
other divisions into east and west are artificial, and are more determined by the desire to participate in some kind of exoticism. In fact, since the time of Macedon, the “Western world” has been sucking up Indian culture like a big vacuum cleaner, slightly transforming it along the way through the Middle East .. but in essence, we are Vedic arias.
well, in order to understand what Eastern culture is, we would have to change all our science, all our culture (painting, music), the system of weights and measures, and turn into Chinese. .. and all this is hardly available to us.
those crumbs of Eastern culture and mentality that we inherited from the Genghisites through Tartary-do not mean anything, and have long been dissolved in a much larger volume of Westernism.