K.N. LEONTIEV IN THE RUSSIAN NATIONAL DISCOURSE OF THE SECOND HALF OF THE 19TH CENTURY

Leontiev tried to build a mechanism of action of European society liberalization that accompanied the national movement in the 19th century in the implementation of national projects. He argued that liberal egalitarianism destroyed the individuality of the person eliminating all existing differences in society: class, religious, corporate. Byzantinism as an ideological doctrine was based on the unconditional subordination of all elements of society, the people and the church, to the state. Therefore, Leontiev saw the Slavophile idea of equivalence of the nationality and Orthodoxy to autocracy as a dangerous idea bearing an element of liberalism, because it was a threat to the absolute power of the state. The idea of the nation as an autonomous subject of historical activity was categorically rejected for the same reason. He saw the national liberation movement inseparable from liberal revolutions because liberalism fought for the elimination of a rigid hierarchical social system, that is Byzantinism, for the autonomy of the individual, the nation. The right of a nation to self-determination implied acceptance of the existence of a public power alternative to the state, an autonomous public institution. Leontiev opposed cultural and political Slavophilism, not speaking against the idea of unification of the Slavs under the auspices of Russia, but against the beginning of the process in the triumph of liberalism. He disagreed with Pan-Slavists in assessing Russia's ability to influence the Slavic countries. Pan-Slavists believed that Russia would be able to provide not only political unity but also universality of social and political systems of the Slavic countries based on Russian models, protecting the countries from the expansion of the European liberal model. Leontiev, on the contrary, believed that Russia's intervention in the Balkan processes and the destruction of the existing system of interstate relations here would lead to destabilization in Russia itself. Slavic intelligentsia representatives infected by liberalism would be conductors of these ideas in Russia. Leontiev made a conclusion about the inseparability of the contemporary national processes with liberal modernization. He considered it possible to support government policy relying on ethnicity as an element of social consciousness which has a cultural and religious, not ethnic, basis definitely subordinate to the public interest rather than relying on the nation as a real community with its own interests. Leontiev was forced to admit that the penetration of hostile liberal and socialist ideas had the most detrimental impact on the Russian people who lost traditional values that used to be the support of the state. Therefore, to preserve the empire in opposition to liberal nationalism it was necessary to focus on peoples that preserved religiosity and monarchism, because the choice was not between the Orthodox Church and other faiths, but between faith and atheism. The question was not in the preservation of the Russian national character of the monarchy, but in the preservation of monarchy as such.