| Date | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Wednesday, March 30, 2022 | 3:00PM - 4:30PM | Online Event, Online Event |
Today many Russians believe that Russia is waging war not against Ukraine but against the West, which threatens Russia by using Ukraine. In their imagination, Russia is playing a messianic role, freeing not only Ukraine from the ‘Nazis’ and ‘foreign rule,’ but also the whole world from Western, especially American, domination. This combination of messianism with anti-Westernism has long roots. Nikolai Berdyaev’s books The Origin of Russian Communism (1937) and The Russian Idea (1947) offer one of the most influential historiosophical explanations of Russian messianism. Some assessments of the Russian philosopher coincide with the ideas of another thinker, who was almost the opposite of Berdyaev in his views – the ideologue of Ukrainian integral nationalism Dmytro Dontsov. However, Dontsov, much more than Berdyaev, linked Russian messianism to anti-Westernism and hostility to Ukraine. Today we can assess the correctness of their predictions about the further development of Russian messianism and Russia’s attitudes to the West and to Ukraine.
Oleksandr Zaitsev is a professor at the Department of History, Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv. His studies deal mainly with the political history of interwar Western Ukraine and the intellectual history of Ukrainian integral nationalism. He is the author of Ukrainian Integral Nationalism of the 1920s and 1930s: Essays in Intellectual History (2013), Nationalist in the Fascist Epoch: Dmytro Dontsov’s Lviv Period, 1922-1939. Towards an Intellectual Biography (2019), co-author and editor of Nationalism and Religion: the Greek-Catholic Church and Ukrainian Nationalist Movement in Galicia, 1920s – 1930s (2011), editor of Fascism and Right Radicalism on the East of Europe (special issue of the journal Ukraina Moderna, 2013), and co-editor of Ukrainian Radical Right in Past and Present: Studies in Ideology, Memory and Politics (special issue of the journal Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 2015).
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