well as with the reformist-revolutionary impulse encouraged byrnmany army officers’ contacts with the West in the Napoleonicrnwars, fused in a liberal-radical mindset that proclaimed thatrnRussia had been left outside “history,” that Russia was a barbaricrncountry inhabited by a primitive people who were psychologicallyrnand culturally unable to join Europe (all non-Europeanrncountries and peoples were viewed as outside “history”), andrnthat only dramatic reforms—or radical revolution—could reconnectrnRussia with Europe (the Great Schism had cut offrnRussia from the source of her potential development). Oncernreformed, Russia could join in the dialectic of progress. Thern”end of history” might be constitutional government, as manyrnof the patriotic “right” Hegelian persuasion contended, butrnothers, unsatisfied with the notion of liberalism as the teleologicalrnaim of historical development, turned to a “philosophy ofrnaction” and materialism as the justification for revolutionaryrnanarchism, terrorism, and the eventual adoption of Marxism asrnthe creed of the radical intelligentsia. “Negation,” particularlyrnthe negation and hatred of one’s own country or people, becamernthe watchword of the atheistic nihilists.rnFor the radicals, Russia was a nation of slaves, of superstitiousrn(Orthodoxy was judged a particularly primitive form of “religiousrncult”), drunken, envious peasants who worshiped crueltyrnand hated everything foreign or that even smacked of advancedrnculture. Russia was the home of despotism (it is important tornnote here that, Ivan the Terrible notwithstanding, Peter borrowedrnthe absolutist model from the West; Marxism was notrnthe only Western import that attacked traditional society) andrnwas a danger to the rest of the world, a roadblock on the pathrnmarked “progress.” The only solution was the destruction ofrnRussia and the transformation of the half-human Russians intorn”New Soviet Men.” To that end, the Bolshevik leadership, afterrnseizing power in 1917, attacked Russia with a vengeance.rnChurch property was confiscated and religious instruction inrnthe schools terminated, priests executed, churches and otherrnhistorically significant buildings defaced, history rewritten, andrnRussian cultural traditions denigrated. The destruction of thernpeasant village and the rape of the land by the Soviets is wellrnknown, and the mass murder of millions by the regime is todayrnan acknowledged historical truth.rnSuch an acknowledgment was not always forthcoming inrncertain radical and Marxist quarters in the West, a fact thatrnreturns us to an examination of the sources of Russia’s homegrownrnepidemic of “Russophobia,” a term popularized by thernmathematician Igor Shafarevich in the I980’s. The feeling ofrninferiority among the Russian intelligentsia engendered by thernencounter with the technologically and materially superiorrnWest—a West, we must recognize, that was already movingrnaway from the “enlightened despotism” more or less copied byrnPeter toward liberalism, something that made comparisons ofrn”Russian” despotism with Western liberty all the more gratingrn—were strengthened by their reading of P]uropean philosophers’rnopinions of Russia. The French traditionalist De Bonald,rnfor instance, who influenced the development of Chaadaev’srnviews, once wrote that Russia, geographically situated betweenrnEast and West, was neither, but rather an undeveloped societyrnwithout deep roots, a nation of Scythian-like nomads.rnIndeed, with some exceptions, the view of Russia as a primitivernor “undeveloped” society (read “inferior”) with little to offerrnthe wodd—or even as representing a threat to the advancedrnnations of Europe, like the hordes of Attila or Genghis Khan,rnrather than as a bulwark of Christian civilization, as the Russiansrnoften viewed themselves—was and is a view widely heldrnon both the right and the left of the Western political spectrum.rnTrue, the far left may have learned Russian in the saladrndays of the Soviet “experiment,” when the Russian demon wasrnjudged to have been exorcised or transformed by the stern butrnenlightened hand of Lenin or the Great Leader of the Peoplesrnhimself, Stalin, and the right might have lauded the anti-Sovietrnworks of Solzhenitsyn during the Cold War (while largely ignoringrnhis doubts about Western consumerism), or shedrncrocodile tears for a traditional Russia they knew nothingrnabout, but the majority view on Russia was evident even then.rnThe Russophobic consensus of today’s West is, however, neitherrnthe far left’s Marxist-Leninist hatred of old-regime Russiarnnor the Nazis’ racist view of Russians as Untermenschen, butrnrather something more akin to that of the Cold War anticommunistrncoalition as it emerged in the 1960’s and 70’s, and mutatedrninto a sort of middling neoliberal/neoconservativernconglomerate in the 1980’s. Who, after all, on the “left” couldrnobject to the globalist propaganda for a new internationalist orderrndedicated to the “democratic revolution,” the global hegemonyrnof “democratic capitalism,” i.e., mass democracy combinedrnwith welfare-state consumerism, of today’s mainstreamrnright? This is the very same system that the neoconservatives’rnmentor, Ronald Reagan, thought the most revolutionary in humanrnhistory, a force that fuses the radical egalitarianism of thern”left” with the consumerist ideology of the “right.” In a word,rnwe are back to the Hegelian question of “history,” and thernprospect of its end.rnFrancis Fukuyama, the prophet of a universal “democraticrncapitalism” that embraces the economism of the conventionalrnright and the democratism of the mainstream left, has writtenrnthat the modernization of non-Western countries in the pastrnfew centuries has put the world on a path of global evolutionrnthat will make possible the writing of a “universal history.” Asrnnon-Western countries modernized themselves by employingrnWestern techniques and technologies, goes the argument, theyrnbought into a mode of development whose logical endpoint isrnuniversalism and homogenization. In Mr. Fukuyama’s estimation,rnall countries that “modernize,” i.e., that follow the pathrntaken by “democratic capitalist” societies, pass through two developmentalrnstages, first a stage that roughly corresponds to thernprocess developmental theorists have called “nation building,”rnand then, at a later time, a stage the First World appears to bernin now, the stage of globalization. In the latter stage, the nation-rnstate “unbuilds” itself and becomes tied to the emergingrnglobal system. In the end, no country will be—indeed, norncountry can be—left “outside history.” The emerging globalrnmonoculture demands, in typical “democratic capitalist” style,rnthat the particular peoples and the unique cultures they generaternmust be dissolved in the universal stew, a stew whose onlyrnspice is the variety of goods and services available to the atomizedrnmass of consumers that will remain.rnSir James Goldsmith, in his book The Trap, dissected thern”democratic capitalist” tendency to view any rejection of thernglobal monoculture as “a sign of either dementia or evil.” Thernglobalists, including, one might add, the Russian radicals andrnnihilists of an earlier time as well as some of their epigones (byrntemperament much milder, to be sure) still active in Russianrnpublic life today, “[are] convinced that. . . [they] have discoveredrnthe only model of society which benefits humanity, andrn[that they] have a moral duty to ensure that the whole worldrnJANUARY 1997/23rnrnrn