Russia in the European Home? Convergence, Cosmopolitanism and Cosmism in Late Soviet Europeanisation

Abstract

The aim is to present a conceptual and historical reconstruction of Gorbachev's notion of a ‘European home’, its underlying philosophy of history as well as its relation to Russian cosmism. The concept is contextualised within the convergence debate of the post-war period, in which a rapprochement between communism and capitalism was posited. The essay concludes with reflections on what the conceptualisation can tell us about the fall of communism and what impact the concept has had on today's search for a common European identity. An argument is advanced that the notion contained paradoxes that contributed to the dislocation of post-Soviet Russia from Europe.

Notes

The article was written at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies at Södertörn University, and is a part of the research project ‘East of Cosmopolis: The World Citizen and the Paradox of the Undocumented’, financed by the Swedish Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies. Special thanks are due to Rebecka Lettevall and Charlotte Bydler. All translations are the author's.

¹ The Russian dom means both home and house. The common English translation of evropeiskii dom is ‘European home’. However, there is no doubt that dom in the Russian sources is used to refer not only to what is best characterised as a ‘home’ but also a ‘house’—the latter indicated by metaphors such as ‘roof’, ‘walls’ and ‘rooms’. In order to reflect this nuance I have used both ‘home’ and ‘house’, dependent on context. In some instances, I have maintained the distinction for purely analytical reasons.

² If some branches of conceptual history could be charged with having a metaphysical tendency towards making concepts absolute and transforming them into virtual agents of autonomous action (Petrov 2008, p. 181), effectual history could be seen as a corrective. Ideally, the latter neutralises the inclination to identify foundational concepts without taking into account one's own historicity of understanding. The former can thus help the historian ‘identify the horizon within which the selection of foundational concepts is to be made’, by asking the right reflexive questions (Scholtz 1998, p. 90; cf. Lettevall 2011).

³ Although convergence theories were condemned by the Soviet leadership, and thus could not be advocated in public, there was at least an opportunity to familiarise oneself with them indirectly, through ‘critical’ journal issues about decadent Western ideas (Bregel' 1968). The Soviet physicist and human rights activist Andrei Sakharov (1990, pp. 121–22, 281) praised in retrospect also his possession of a short-wave transistor radio, by which he was able in the 1960s to inform himself about currents in the outside world. He also acknowledged the intellectual importance of his mentor relationship with Igor Tamm (one of the USSR's great quantum physicists and a Nobel laureate in 1958). According to Sakharov it was Tamm who introduced the Western convergence concept to him, alongside other concepts such as world government.

⁴ Sakharov (1968, p. 38) wrote convergence within quotation marks, which is symptomatic of the concept's controversial status.

⁵ The alleged Russian translation from the 1960s to which Sorokin (1964, p. 78) refers has unfortunately escaped my investigations. However, there is no doubt that Sorokin's theory of the integral and peaceful global society really was known by parts of the Soviet educated public, not least through ‘critical’ symposia and articles (Ikonitskii 1967, p. 141).

⁶ The volte-face from class antagonism towards universal humanism was motivated during perestroika, not on Sakharov's ideas of internationalism and human rights, but by references to Lenin's concept of ‘peaceful cohabitation’ (mirnoe sozhitel'stvo) (Gorbachev 1987f, p. 437). Note that Gorbachev also did not legitimise peaceful co-existence (mirnoe sosushchestvovanie) with any reference to the still controversial Khrushchev, who actually had launched the co-existence policy at the 20th Party Congress in 1956.

⁷ Sakharov's ‘world government’ expressed a utopian belief he shared with several twentieth century Western intellectuals. Trust was put in a universalistic and scientistic government without religious or ideological considerations other than democracy, pluralism, tolerance, peace and ecology (Sakharov 1990, p. 282; cf. Popper 1966, p. 163).

⁸ Interestingly, Sakharov did not seem to identify a neutral or alternative subject beyond communism and capitalism. In contradistinction to more recent ideological attempts at redefining the middle way into a third way, the middle was, according to Sakharov, instead more of a converging point which was realised when the two hegemonic systems assimilated the best of each other's intrinsic qualities. Giddens (1998, pp. 26, 99) defines the third way as a transcending of the historical forms of laissez-faire capitalism, state socialism and even social democracy, and simultaneously creating one's own way, different and distinct—a new kind of mixed economy, brought about by the renewal of social democracy.

⁹ ‘Perestroika’ is a polysemic term. It denotes re-building, extending or completing a house, but also, metaphorically, a transformation of society's structures or an individual's mental ‘temperament’. Another meaning, peripheral in everyday language but evident in its technical context, is musical re-tuning or transposing (re-tempering) (Dal' 1903–1909, p. 217).

¹⁰ For Tinbergen convergence was a one-way movement. It went from a non-optimal economic order (extreme market or extreme command economy) to a system that was closer to the optimum, or the middle (a mixed economy). The musical meaning of perestroika here corresponds to Tinbergen's notion of an optimal state of general equilibrium.

¹¹ Gorbachev (2004) has subsequently often advocated an ‘integrated’ society in which solidarity and fairness are reconciled with freedom.

¹² It is symptomatic that the Council of Europe, by virtue of its expansive member policy and will to include ‘observers’ and ‘partners’ on foreign continents, can increasingly be described as a Western organisation for democracies/market economies not just in Europe but in the whole world.

¹³ A counter-concept is a concept that occurs as part of a pair with another concept, such as within a dichotomy like conservative/radical, and derives its polemical content from its conceptual twin. Both concepts can be used by different users or in front of different audiences in order to build different ‘we groups’.

¹⁴ Shlapentokh (1997, p. 284) has convincingly argued that from Stalin onwards, the French Revolution could no longer serve as a relevant model for the Soviet Union as it had done for the old Bolsheviks around 1917, partly since development increasingly corresponded to a ‘Eurasian’ or ‘Mongolian’ pattern rather than a European. For an example of an official reference to 1789—attributing to it a characteristically downplayed significance—among one of Gorbachev's immediate predecessors, see Brezhnev (1967, p. 39).

¹⁵ Although materialism was the cornerstone of official Soviet science ideology, there was space to integrate the noosphere concept in Soviet thought. Vernadsky's achievements could not be denied even by Stalin, and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's ideas were unquestionably instrumental for the space programme. In Marx and Engels, it was possible to find support for theses that ideas could change the world and that nature, through humanity, could reach self-consciousness. In 1989 a ‘Centre for Ecological Noosphere Studies’ was established in the Soviet Republic of Armenia (Samson & Pitt 1999a, pp. 4, 7).

¹⁶ Gorbachev is today the Founding President of Green Cross International. He had already proposed an idea to create an organisation with such an ethos in 1990 (Gorbachev 1990).