Both theories emphasize Russia's fundamentally European character, and neither discusses the country's peripheral position. Russia's relative subalternity to Europe seems inevitable simply because she has never generated her own vision of modernity, but Whatsapp Mobile Number List instead adopted a European vision. From this arose a persistent dilemma that Russian intellectuals – the so-called intelligentsia – have suffered for the last 200 years. According to the American historian Alan Pollard , “the elements that constituted their consciousness were mostly Western products. So precisely those qualities of the intelligentsiathat gave them the ability to understand – that is, what constitutes their essence – distanced this group from the reality of life in the country, which precisely they had to portray»two.
Furthermore, acknowledging that Russia's Whatsapp Mobile Number List modern intellectual tradition is an imitation and that the country is culturally dependent on Europe runs smack into the idea of ​​Russian greatness. In the imagination of the Whatsapp Mobile Number List 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 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 Whatsapp Mobile Number List nation and international positioning throughout the nineteenth 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. .