ABSTRACT
This chapter starts with the main themes and symbols informing Russian historical culture, and shows how these key insights has been appropriated in Soviet and post-Soviet Russian history. It shows that Russian communism has been nourished by communalism, nativism, and anti-Westernism—a set of beliefs and practices that elevate the species' life over individuality and sacrifice individual freedom to collective imperatives. The historical culture in prerevolutionary Russia was informed by the ongoing debate about Russia's relation to the West. Many dissidents saw religion as a natural bulwark against godless communism and actively sought to establish ties with the Russian Orthodox Church. In place of the concrete historical individual, neo-Slavophiles put the "people", a collective national body endowed with natural wisdom and superhuman capacity to discern the unvarnished truth. Lev Gumilyov and his prodigious writings form a vital link between the original Eurasianism and the renascent Eurasianist movement in post-Soviet Russia.
