Furthermore, acknowledging that Russia's modern intellectual tradition is an imitation and that the country is culturally dependent on Europe Whatsapp Mobile Number List runs smack into the idea of Russian greatness. In the imagination of the country's ruling elites, throughout its history, Russia has primarily formed an alternative center of power pursuing a global and universal 'project', like the orthodox empire of the Romanovs or the Soviet empire. Seeing Russia in a student role made the country appear as a junior partner in the concert of European power.
From the Pan-Slavic view of Russia as an original "cultural-historical type" to the Whatsapp Mobile Number List reinvention of the country as an autonomous world within classical Eurasianism, it is the struggle with this double dilemma that has always shaped the Russian intelligentsia's discourses on the nation and international positioning Whatsapp Mobile Number List and twentieth centuries. Behind these exercises in symbolic geography was an aspiration shared by generations of nationalist thinkers: to challenge the dominant Eurocentric perspective and insist on Russia's status as an autonomous civilization, fully sovereign and at least on a par with any other major European power. .
Current ideologues close to the Kremlin draw from this reservoir of metaphors, meanings, images, and tropes. Yet those who oppose Europe today ignore the fact that their 19th-century predecessors, while amassing ample evidence of the imminent demise of the West, thereby positioned themselves in a lively debate within Europe. Indeed, his intellectual Whatsapp Mobile Number List constructs were largely products of the European spirit. In his cultural-historical study The Icon and the Ax , James Billington pointed to a "significant phenomenon" that has perennially marked Russian intellectual history: the figure of the "Western prophet who looks to Russia with his eyes searching for the realization of ideas that in the West itself they do not get the attention they deserve»3.