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The Impact of the "Great Debate" |
Despite
their different visions of Russia’s past and future, and their
sometimes mutually incompatible views, representatives of the
three different trends within the intellectual opposition were,
in effect, pushing in the same direction. All of them were
unanimous that any reform had to start by resolving Russia’s two
cardinal issues.
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The abolition of serfdom and the reform of the autocratic system of
government were the chief twin objectives which the progressives of all
persuasion set out to achieve. The opposition’s activities were strictly
legal, but they were wide-ranging and diverse, and produced a much
greater impact on society than the conspiratorial Decembrist movement. |
Through the
medium of university lectures, journalistic and literary work, salon
debates, the opposition was gnawing away at the old foundations of
society, raising grave moral concerns about serfdom, instilling
wide-spread condemnation of the autocratic-serfdom system, and
mobilizing public opinion in support of reform. The results of this
‘quiet work’, to use Herzen’s phrase, would bear fruit in the next
reign. Through schools, clubs, salons and personal friendships
reformist ideas, aired and developed in the 1830s and 1840s, would
spread from educated society to reach these key decision-makers in
the government, who in the 1850s and 1860s were to spearhead
Alexander II’s reforms. The great liberal modernization of Alexander
II’s era had been intellectually prepared by the ‘Great Debate’.
It is
impossible to overestimate the impact of Westernizer-Slavophile
controversy on the future intellectual and political history of
Russia. Many of the later disputes and divisions between different
factions, schools of thought and political parties in Russia can be
analyzed in terms of those who saw Western orientation as a single
solution to Russian problems and those who professed their belief in
Russia’s own distinct path of development. Indeed, the debate about
the correlation between national and ‘adopted’ elements within
Russian civilization is still alive and readily detectable in the
intellectual discussions and political confrontations within Russia
in the last decade of the twentieth century.
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Tsarist Russia |
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