The Russian idea was born as an answer to a challenge. In 1836 Chaadaev wrote: Russia has dropped out of history, it has nothing to say to humankind. Kireyevsky and Khomyakov answered: no — Russia has a foundation of its own, deeper and more whole than Western rationalism. Dostoevsky gave that idea its passion. Solovyov gave it a warning. Berdyaev gave it a tragic reckoning. The argument is not over.
Kireyevsky was the first to give Slavophilism a philosophical foundation. He studied in Germany, read Schelling and Hegel, knew Western thought from the inside — and concluded that it leads into a dead end. The Western intellect breaks things up, divides, analyses — and loses the whole. The Orthodox tradition keeps something else: integral knowledge, in which mind and heart are not torn apart. Russia has not fallen behind Europe — it has preserved what Europe lost.
Khomyakov was the chief polemicist of Slavophilism. His central concept is sobornost — conciliarity: a living unity of people in love and freedom, without coercion and without Western atomism. For him Orthodoxy is not simply a religion but a way of being together, which the West destroyed back in the eleventh century, when Rome separated itself from the Church. Russia keeps that way. This is precisely its advantage over the West.
Dostoevsky was the chief prophet of the Russian idea. His Pushkin Speech of 1880: Russia possesses "a universal responsiveness" — the capacity to understand and take in any people whatever. This is its particular gift and its particular mission: to reconcile humankind. He believed it sincerely. And at the same time he was writing anti-Polish pamphlets and speaking out against the Jews. Universal responsiveness had its limits.
Solovyov — the foremost Russian philosopher of the nineteenth century — took up the challenge: to prove that Russia has a mission. His answer: the "Russian idea" is service. Not dominion, not isolation — but working together with the West and the East to build a free theocracy: the unity of peoples in God. He dreamed of the reunion of the Churches. And he gave warning: a great mission demands great humility.
Berdyaev wrote "The Russian Idea" in 1946 — in Paris, after the war, after the Gulag, after the Holocaust. His conclusion: Russia is a country of contradictions. Statehood and anarchy. Religiosity and atheist nihilism. Universality and savage nationalism. This is not an illness — this is its nature. The Russian idea is real — but it gives no right to dominion. It lays down an obligation towards humankind.
If Russia does have a special mission — does it consist in showing what must not be done? Or in something else?