ABSTRACT
One of the most striking features of Russian social and political thought is the persistence with which the concept of civilisation occurs in the literature. Although it may be different things to different people, it often adopts either an interpretative or an explanatory function in theoretical writings in Russia. While it is used as a polemical weapon in political debates, it possesses sufficient flexibility to demonstrate both alleged points of departure of Russia with the West and underlying similarities. The pedigree of the civilisational theme is varied and complex. It stretches back to notions of Russian uniqueness and particularity as formulated in Aksakov’s ‘Petition to the Tsar’ (1855) and recurs in the Eurasian movement around the 1930s and 1940s. What seems noteworthy is that it never managed to cast off its ultimately polemical character and to congeal into a cogent historiographical interpretative paradigm. Neither did it become a viable model of socio-political analysis. In other words, despite its tendency to dominate political and historical debate there is nowadays little confidence in its heuristic use. One of the reasons may be that the concept of civilisation is rarely consistently defined and described and it is this vacuity of the idea that makes it susceptible to often contradictory purposes and intentions in political debate.
