ABSTRACT
The Russian and Soviet historical understanding thus requires an adaptive self-conception, a new myth, a utopian reconsolidation of the past. The incomplete incorporation of the Russians’ historical experience did not allow them a Nietzschean escape from the dead weight of a useless legacy, but rather left them with only partial solutions to enormously complex problems. Alexander Herzen’s creative contribution to Russian social thought was to meld the Western, Enlightenment-based ideal of socialism with the Russian folk “socialism” of the commune. The Russian Marxists, of course, worked for the final eradication of the Russian pasts, both “feudal” and “bourgeois,” and the anarchists—representatives of one of the most important currents within Russian social and political thought—repudiated almost all historically developed political structures and practices. The society emerging from the ashes of the Russian empire was not capable of supporting a democratic political order.
