Discussions of representatives of the main ideological trends in the Russian empire of the first half of the XIX century

A characteristic feature of the socio-political development of Russia during the reign of Nicholas I was, as is known, an absolutist political regime associated with serfdom. In such conditions, rather strict censorship restrictions were in effect, the systemic legal regulation of which began in the time of Catherine the Great. Nevertheless, in the Russian public space, judgments began to appear that to a certain extent can be regarded as dissent, and, and this is important to emphasize, with the tacit consent of the authorities (unlike the same Decembrists, Petrashevites, Herzen, etc.). This concerns, first of all, the discussions that were held between the "Slavophiles" and the "Westerners" - representatives of the two main ideological trends of the first half of the 19th century. The article highlights the content of the discussions and characterizes their participants. At the same time, the discussions themselves were the result of a response to the bourgeois-revolutionary events that took place in Western European countries at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries; these events did not change the form of government of the Russian Empire, but in some way liberalized public sentiment, which affected primarily fiction and journalism.