Two views on the dialectic of Russian culture and history: Eurasians of the 20s and M. A. Lifshits

The article is devoted to the concepts of the Eurasians of the 1920th (P. N. Savitsky, N. S. Trubetskoy, P. P. Suvchinsky, N. N. Alekseev) and the Soviet philosopher M. A. Lifshits, in which the relationship of Eastern and Western in Russian culture is considered as a dialectical unity. Special attention is paid to the relationship between the patriarchal religiosity of the people and the atheism and the materialism of the Russian Westernist intelligentsia. According to the concept of Eurasians, in the Russian culture one can distinguish the archaic faith of Russian peasants (faith without knowledge) and the faith of religious intelligentsia in the person of the Slavophiles and V. S. Solovev (unity of faith and knowledge). The opposite cultural world is a world of knowledge without faith in the face of liberals, and even Marxist “Mensheviks”, with their “lukewarm” attitude to ethical values and the recognition of the relativity of truth. Atheists and revolutionary materialists, in whom the cult of knowledge is controversially combined with a belief in absolute values, but in a non-religious form, occupy a special place. As a Marxist, Lifshits connects the highest organic synthesis of science and non-religious belief in absolute values with the line from Chernyshevsky to Lenin. Eurasians see in Leninism a perverse combination of faith and knowledge, as opposed to the organic unity of faith and knowledge, which means Eastern and Western in Russian culture, among Slavophiles and V. S. Solovev. This determines their assessment of the October Revolution and the further development of Russia, in which Eurasians assume another breakthrough - from “fideistic Marxism” to Orthodox-Eurasian ideology in Soviet Russia.