Nikolai Berdiaev and the Origin of Russian Messianism

During much of the twentieth century, when it was commonplace to expound upon the "character" or "national essence" of peoples and states, "messianism" was considered an essential aspect of Russia's national character. Russian Orthodox Christianity, with its mystical and otherworldly perspective, was believed to have imbued Russian politics with a grand image of Russia's spiritual destiny to guide mankind. From its origins in a "Third Rome" ideology born in Muscovy to its culmination in Soviet internationalism, messianism was said to be a stable factor in Russian political and intellectual life. In the twentieth century, historians and other observers of Russia used Russian messianism to explain a wide variety of phenomena in Russian history: the stability of autocracy, the imperial expansionist drive, and the transformation of Marxism into a peculiarly eschatological Bolshevism. Even in modern historical and political works on Russia, the existence of Russian messianism has achieved the status of a truism. Scholars often assert, without particular justification, that Russian culture is saturated with messianic ideas and that, throughout history, Russian writers, intellectuals, tsars, revolutionaries, and Soviet bureaucrats were influenced by this belief in Russia's spiritual destiny. Here, Siljak looks at the question of Russian messianism from a new perspective--tracing the history of the concept as an explanatory framework used by observers to understand Russian history, politics, and culture in a very particular way.