Alexander Vladimirovich Pyzhikov
Alexander Vladimirovich Pyzhikov (1965–2019)
Historian, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor. From 2003 to 2004, Deputy Minister of Education of the Russian Federation.
In Pyzhikov's view, Russia can find its true path only through a global project of its own, one grounded in an understanding of Russian identity and the deep popular archetype.
Russia is a civilisation in search of justice. Its people are truth-seekers, who seem driven by an inner necessity to save or liberate someone.
This trait has shown itself more than once throughout history. As early as the mid-nineteenth century, A. I. Herzen saw the seed of socialism in the Russian peasant commune . He was pushed toward this idea by the defeat of the revolutions of 1848–1849 in Western Europe: disillusioned with the West, Herzen began to search for a separate path for Russia. Following him, N. G. Chernyshevsky, and later the Narodniks — P. N. Tkachev, N. K. Mikhailovsky, and others — believed that Russia could arrive at socialism while bypassing the capitalist stage altogether. Even Karl Marx seriously entertained this possibility: in his letter to Vera Zasulich (1881) and in the preface to the Russian edition of the “Communist Manifesto” (1882).
History, it would seem, disproved these hopes. After the abolition of serfdom, capitalism developed rapidly in Russia, the commune was eroding, and in 1899 V. I. Lenin, in his work “The Development of Capitalism in Russia”, argued that the country had already set out on the capitalist path. Yet, as Pyzhikov shows, the communal way of life did not disappear — it went underground. The events of 1917 relied in large part on precisely these communal strata, above all the Old Believer ones. The idea that the Narodniks had tied to the commune returned, but in an unexpected form.
This is where the key point lies: an archetype is only partly worn away by decades, even centuries, because it is decentralised. Soviet slogans, by contrast, were centralised: people believed in them at first, then stopped believing, and eventually forgot them altogether. The archetype, however, is present in everything — in fairy tales, films, jokes; it is literally dissolved into culture and everyday life.
That is why even deliberate attempts to rebuild or destroy it fail to achieve their aim. The archetype is passed down from generation to generation, and each time it gives fresh birth to answers to the questions of what is just, what is honourable, what is right in conscience. And these answers do not always coincide with what is “lawful”.
Alexander Pyzhikov's most significant books:
“The Facets of the Russian Schism”, “The Roots of Stalinist Bolshevism”, “Piter–Moscow: The Struggle for Russia”, “The Slavic Fracture”.
