The Traps of "Westernism" and the Blind Alleys of "Nativism": The Political Culture of Post-Soviet Pseudodemocracy

Abstract

In the 1830s, when Russian educated society was enthralled by Hegel, someone invented a joke that was quite remarkable in its own way. An Englishman, a German, and a Russian were asked to write a treatise on the camel. The Englishman traveled to Egypt, settled in among the camels, ate their food, became familiar with their concerns, and came to feel quite at home among them. When he returned home, he wrote a detailed, empirical report on the life of camels. The German, on the contrary, withdrew to the solitude of his study and began to extract the pure idea of a camel from the depths of his own mind. He succeeded. He published. The Russian, however, waited for his German colleague to publish and then had the work translated into his native language—with a large number of mistakes.