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Russia and the West: A Comparison and Contrast

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Henry L. Roberts
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Extract

Comparisons of Russia with the “West” have been a staple of historians and of contemporary observers for a very long time, and no end is in sight. A recent appraisal of Soviet developments in the decade after the death of Stalin was devoted in part to a consideration of the prospects for “a gradual convergence of the social and/or political systems of the West and the Soviet Union.” The variety of the contributors’ responses—“ very likely,” “necessarily uncertain,” “unlikely any meaningful convergence,” “highly improbable,” “depends on what is meant by ‘gradual’ “—suggests an ample range of disagreement, both in expectations for the future and in the characterization of the contrasts underlying these expectations.

Type
Discussion
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , March 1964 , pp. 1 - 12
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1963

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References

1 Survey: A Journal of Soviet and East European Studies, No. 47 (Apr., 1963), pp. 37-42.

2 Berlin, Isaiah, “The Silence in Russian Culture,” in The Soviet Union, 1922-1962: A Foreign Affairs Reader, ed. Mosely, Philip E. (New York: Praeger, for the Council on Foreign Relations, 1963), p. 337.Google Scholar

3 “Russia,” of course, comprised numerous nationalities, and the term has occasioned much debate. In this piece, however, I shall not attempt to deal with this problem. By Russia I mean the Russian state or the culture and society of its Great Russian inhabitants only.

4 Pritsak, Omeljan and Reshetar, John S. Jr.,“The Ukraine and the Dialectics of Nation-Building,” Slavic Review, XXII, No. 2 (June, 1963), 224–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Mathewson, Rufus W. Jr., “Russian Literature and the West,” Slavic Review, XXI, No. 3 (Sept., 1962), 413 and 417.Google Scholar

6 Coulson, Jessie, Dostoevsky: A Self-Portrait (London: Oxford University Press, 1962, p. 163 Google Scholar.

7 Ibid., p. 165.

8 Keller, Werner, East Minus West = Zero: Russia's Debt to the Western World, 862- 1962, trans. Fitzgibbon, Constantine (New York: Putnam, 1962, p. 7.Google Scholar

9 Visoianu, Constantin, in the introduction to Captive Rumania, ed. Cretzianu, Alexandre (New York: Praeger, 1956), p. xvi.Google Scholar

10 Happily, the question of what the Russians are if they are not Western is beyond the scope of this paper. I am informed that a discussion of Russia and the East has been prepared for the preceding issue of this journal.

11 Backus, Oswald P. III, “The Problem of Feudalism in Lithuania, 1506-1548,” Slavic Review, XXI, No. 4 (Dec, 1962), 650.Google Scholar

12 For example, Preradovich, Nikolaus von, Die Fiihrungsschichten in Österreich und Preussen (1804-1918) (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1955 Google Scholar.

13 Rostow, W. W., The Stages of Economic Growth (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1960), p. 67 Google Scholar.

14 In his Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution.

15 Trotsky, Leon, The History of the Russian Revolution, trans. Eastman, Max (3 vols.; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), I, 464 Google Scholar.

16 See Riasanovsky, Nicholas V., Russia and the West in the Teaching of the Slavophiles (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952 CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

17 Raeff, Marc, “Home, School, and Service in the Life of the 18th-Century Russian Nobleman,” The Slavonic and East European Review, XL, No. 95 (June, 1962), 295–307.Google Scholar

18 See Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1933), pp. 537-49.

19 Planck, Max, The Philosophy of Physics, trans. Johnston, W. H. (New York: Norton, 1936), pp. 13 and 14.Google Scholar