DANILEVSKY, NIKOLAI YAKOVLEVICH

(1822–1885), social theorist and pan-Slavist.

Nikolai Danilevsky, a pan-Slavist, introduced into Russian social thought of the early and mid-nineteenth century the utopian-socialist ideas of the French thinker, Charles François Marie Fourier. Danilevsky's major writing was his book Russia and Europe: An Inquiry into the Cultural and Political Relations of the Slavs to the Germano-Latin World, published in 1869.

In his interpretation of socialism as applied to peasant Russia, Danilevsky developed the idea of the existing Russian peasant commune, or obshchina, as a unique, progressive, specifically Russian institution. It contained, he said, the seeds of cooperative socialism as found in Fourier's "phalanstery," or socialist cooperative.

Into his socialist worldview Danilevsky had added the Russian ingredient of Slavophilism and pan-Russism. This nationalistic concept that influenced some segments of the Russian intelligentsia by the early nineteenth century was derived from German thinkers of Germanophilic persuasion, such as Herder and Ruckert. In Danilevsky's construction, not Germany but Russia occupies a leading position in the world as the standard-bearer of socialism. At heart, his Slavophilism was not a religious conception but, in his view, a "scientific" one.

Danilevsky gave his cyclic theory of history a specifically Russian twist. In it he incorporated the historiography of Oswald Spengler as found in the latter's Decline of the West. For Danilevsky, the West and in particular Germany were in the throes of decadence and demise. Russia, by contrast, was the wave of the future. In his book, he insisted that "even today [in the Balkans] the Slavs prefer the heavy yoke of Islam to the civilized domination of Austria." Danilevsky came to the conclusion that Russia's interests ran parallel to those of Prussia, which needed Russian collaboration more than the other way around. Yet Russia alone, he insisted, could make the best synthesis of all types of civilization worldwide.

Danilevsky's views influenced such writers as Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881). Moreover, his Slavophilism and pan-Russism became a point of departure for rationalizing tsarist Russian foreign policy. This expansionist motivation allowed Slavs to become united as "brothers" around the Russian core. Polish Slavs, on the other hand, would be excluded in this brotherhood because Poland was said by some to be a collective "old traitor to Slavdom."

Because of his socialist views and his affinity to the revolutionist Petrashevsky Circle of socialists in St. Petersburg, Danilevsky ran afoul of the tsarist police. As the reputed leading Russian expert on Fourierism, he, too, was put on trial and imprisoned along with the other Petrashevtsy, including Dostoyevsky.

Although Bolshevik and Soviet propaganda disavowed Danilevskian Pan-Slavism as a tsarist dogma, Leninism-Stalinism nevertheless reflected, in essence, a good deal of this thought. Lenin had described the Great Russian proletariat as the "vanguard" of world revolution. Stalin, in turn, echoed this idea in his tributes to the Great Russians, placing them above all other peoples in the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in 1945. Moreover, in its domestic imperial policy, Moscow described the Russians as the elder brother of all nations and national groups composing the USSR.

See also: dostoyevsky, fyodor mikhailovich; obshchina; panslavism; petrashevtsy

bibliography

Kohn, Hans. (1953). Pan-Slavism: Its History and Ideology. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame.

Venturi, Franco. (1960). Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth-Century Russia. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Albert L. Weeks