ABSTRACT
The Russian debate about Europe in the period from the First to the Second World War was, like almost all other Russian debates and developments in this period, a rather messy affair. Its dynamism was not generated by the sheer number of positions and the lively interaction between them, as had been the case in the preceding period. To the contrary, the debate contained an ever-decreasing number of positions. Neither was the messiness due to great divisions where different frameworks and moral judgements were concerned. When, at the time of the Russo-Polish War, only the Bolshevik and the Romantic nationalist positions were left in the debate, these issues were all but laid to rest. Instead, the messiness of the debate stemmed from the plethora of views of how to delineate ‘Russia’ and ‘Europe’, ingroup and out-group. The First World War set the nationalist cat among the social democratic pigeons, inasmuch as the definition of their supranational in-group-‘true Europe’—came under immediate pressure. The question of the relative importance of national and class identities created immediate confusion as to who the social democratic ‘we’ actually referred to.
