This November, two significant dates are celebrated: the 300th anniversary of the proclamation of Russia as an empire and the 200th anniversary of the genius of Russian classic literature Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Peter the Great accepted a new title of the Emperor on November 2 (October 22, old style), 1721. Russia became an empire that lasted until the February Revolution and the proclamation of the Republic in September 1917.
By the beginning of the 20th century, Russia stretched from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea and from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean. From a culturological point of view, imperial consciousness is essentially opposite to nationalism, because the empire is initially supranational, multi-ethnic and has a civilisational rather than cultural basis. Similar to the USSR, the Russian language in the Russian Empire did not only play a role of a carrier of Russian civilisation, it was also a vector for entering the global civilisational space.
Imperial consciousness should not be correlated with the modern political concept of “imperialism”. The word itself appeared only in 1902 in the book of the same name written by John Hobson, an English economist, who dubbed the new stage in the development of capitalism. Imperialism contributes to the erasure of national and territorial boundaries, affects the economies, politics, culture, lifestyle and, of course, ideology, forming a kind of basis for globalisation.
There was nothing like this in the Russian Empire. Based on this, we can say that in terms of civilisation, modern Russia is more likely to be the successor of the Russian Empire, rather than the over-ideologised Soviet Union.
Victor Loupan
