Imperial Modernization Model in the Context of Ensuring Russia’s National Security

Introduction. The socio-philosophical analysis of historical features of the Russian national-state community adaptation to modernization processes in the world is the only opportunity to substantiate Russia’s strategic response to the national security threats that meet the conditions for ensuring its sustainable development. Using the historical method in such an analysis, we must inevitably recognize the existence of several models of Russia’s modernization development. The first such model is the model which can be conventionally called “imperial” (late 17^th — early 20^th centuries). In connection with the purpose of our research, above all, it is necessary to reveal the essential characteristics of the first model of domestic modernization, to determine the specifics of its determination, the peculiarity of methods and forms of implementation, the reasons for elimination in the context of the impact on ensuring Russia’s national security. The relevance of the research topic is due to the need to create mechanisms for ensuring national security that are relevant to the global modernization trend.

Materials and methods. The following research methods were used: dialectical method interpreting domestic modernization as a developing phenomenon associated with the phenomenon of national security; historical method which makes it possible to trace the historical evolution of these phenomena; comparativist method which makes it possible to identify features of the domestic model of modernization; axiological method that reveals value-oriented aspects of national security. Historical, scientific and philosophical texts were used as research materials to interpret and comprehend the impact of imperial modernization processes on national security.

Results. Russian modernization of the imperial period is undoubtedly a catching-up or secondary type of modernization. This means the following. Firstly, the modernization of Russia took place after the primary, Western European modernization. Secondly, it was focused on the implementation of its samples. Thirdly, it was “unnatural”, “inorganic”, that is, it provided for the assimilation of cultural and civilizational patterns alien to society. Fourthly, as a consequence, it was carried out mainly by the state, and not by the society unprepared for it, not oriented towards it, indifferent or hostile to it; the main actor, the subject of modernization was the state interested in its strengthening which in those conditions could only be provided by westernization. This strengthening was expressed in the desire to turn Russia into a power — a state with which interests other states are forced to take into account.

This had its positive and negative consequences. The sovereign status of Russia can be attributed to the positive. The latter made it possible to realize its basic geopolitical needs, thereby ensuring the interests of national security. Russia was able to: get accesses to the Baltic and Black Seas; reunite the lost lands of the Old Russian state which inhabitants recognized their identity with the population of Russia; ensure the security of the southern borders by annexing the North Caucasus and Central Asia; create a strong army and navy.

Negative consequences on ensuring national security include:

Firstly, modernization enshrined, as an attribute, the relationship between power and society as the relationship of the subject and object of modernization transformations. This led to the fact that the authorities did not enter into dialogue with society. It preferred to use methods such as command, non-equivalent exchange, violence that reaches terror in certain periods. The population was perceived only as a passive principle, a natural material that needs to be cultivated, ennobled, and by no means as a carrier of progressive intentions. Peter compared the population with children who resist parents in the process of authoritarian education, using violence and coercion, which, however, is beneficent for them [1, p. 20].

Secondly, as a result of the impossibility and unwillingness to introduce the masses to Western European values and institutions, catching-up modernization gave rise to a cultural and civilizational split in Russian society. V.O. Klyuchevsky defined this split as a division into “soil” (using the corresponding modern category “unmodernized”) and (“modernized”) “civilization”. These colossally unequal strata had directly opposite cultural orientations. The overwhelming majority of the population belonged to the “soil” — the peasantry, almost the entire emerging working class, part of the merchants and the gradually developing bourgeoisie, ministers of the church. The “civilization” included the nobility and bureaucracy, the top of the merchants and the bourgeoisie, entwined with the state economic mechanism, the intelligentsia, as well as generally the owners of private property and carriers of secular culture. “Soil” remained within the framework of traditional society mentally and value-based.

The third negative feature of the Russian version of catching-up modernization is its non-systemic, non-complex, limited nature. If two spheres of society, economic and spiritual met at least formal modernization indicators — the development of the capitalist order in the economy, the emergence of science and secular, vocational education, then political and social were developing in directly opposite directions of westernization. The political evolution was not to free society and the individual from state control, but to strengthen it. The social evolution was not to gradually weaken class inequality, but, on the contrary, to form a rigid class division, the meaning of which was that the authorities entrusted the different classes with the responsibility of implementing various aspects of modernization.

Another consequence of modernization was the preservation of the belittled position of the objects of modernization impacts and the privileged one — its subjects. Socially, the latter can undoubtedly include employees of the state apparatus and those estates that made up its direct social support, on whose interests it was mainly guided — nobles, representatives of the bourgeoisie closely associated with the treasury, the church. It is not surprising that the actors of modernization have arrogated to themselves the monopoly right to reap its benefits. The overwhelming majority of the population got only the hardships of the colossal stress of all their resources during the modernization.

Finally, the modernization processes needed to be “mastered” by the overwhelming majority of society. Therefore, periods of “modernization breakthrough” were replaced by periods of “modernization recession”. The need for society to master modernization principles required extreme moderation and caution in carrying out transformations. Not only gradualism was required, but also their continuity, which was not easy to achieve in the conditions of acute confrontation of interests in the divided Russian society and elite.

It should be noted that the main threat during this period was aggression from the outside. The fundamental nature of such a threat as external expansion is beyond doubt, since... “in Russia security was formed on the basis of historically established and purposefully formed stable values, attitudes, beliefs, perceptions, behavior patterns manifested in the activities of security entities and ensuring the formation and implementation of conditions and factors, necessary for the protection of state order and public peace, the realization of the development path chosen by peoples, achieving the intended purposes, realizing national interests, excluding aggression and minimizing types of expansion based on an acceptable measure of violence and active non-violence” [2, p. 13].

Modern analysts of the problem are proving that “geopolitical foundations of the national-territorial security of the Russian state are primarily associated with the spatial expansion of its borders and the Eurasian civilization building” [3, p. 118]. The main threat to national security was other empires, and not, for example, separatism on the outskirts. The ways to eliminate this threat in the past were quite definite. A.G. Arbatov in one of his works identified four domestic factors that ensured the national-territorial security of imperial Russia. The scientist attributed to them an undemocratic political regime (totalitarian or authoritarian), a nationalized economy, military power and legitimate power consolidating society [2, p. 34]. In other words, negative features of imperial modernization were the main guarantors and factors of ensuring national security.

However, it should be noted that according to modern ideas, national security is the coordination of the interests of personality, society and state. Interests are fundamental, basic needs. Due to these characteristics, they, firstly, represent civilizational-peculiar axiological imperatives, and, secondly, such imperatives that have always existed throughout the entire period of civilization.

Therefore, it is necessary to pay attention to the value-based aspects of Russia’s modernization development. The value-based essence, the axiological core of civilization is formed by certain value-based constants that are transhistorical, extra-temporal in nature and, therefore, which are the spiritual essence, the spiritual substance of civilization that in modern socio-political thought (for example, in D. North) is declared the social basis of institutions, that is, “informal stimuli” and “cultural attitudes” [5, p. 388]. From our point of view, these constants appeared during the genesis of Russia. As a result, they became its value-based attributes. While maintaining their axiological content, they only imitated, adapted to the changing conditions of being in the process of historical (including modernization) development of Russia, presenting it in a historically specific form.

These value-based markers undoubtedly include the civilizational originality of Russia. Russia, perceiving, in this regard, the orientation of “the Second Rome”, does not belong to either of the two main civilizational types, representing not only a state-civilization, but a special civilization, a civilization which mental and value-based markers differ sharply from the western ones formed by the western version of Christianity and the eastern ones based mainly on the dogmas of Islam. In this regard, the messianism characteristic of this civilization cannot be ignored. The salvation of the world by introducing it to true values was associated with the emergence of the Russian state as the only “Orthodox Kingdom”, that is, the only church-political community intended for salvation. As a result, it saw the meaning of its existence in introducing the rest of the “universe” to this salvation. Undoubtedly, they also include the ideocracy characteristic of Russia throughout its history. In essence, it was a syncretism of the interests of personality, society and state. Its origins lie in the victory of “the Josephites” over “the Nonpossessors”.

As a result, the ideological concept triumphed, according to which the state is obliged to realize religious ideals, while relying on the Orthodox Church and society and personality controlled by it. Ideocracy was due to the enormous role that the state played in the birth of the nation by overthrowing the yoke of the Horde, as well as the inability to gain religious salvation outside the Orthodox state. Conciliarity has always been extremely significant for Russians. It consisted in recognizing that the search for and achievement of the truth can only be general, that the truth as the cognitive basis of the meaning of life is available only to the nation as a whole, and not to its intellectual, economic or political elite. At all times, it was considered obvious that the acquisition by a person of the true meaning of their being is unreal without the axiological unity of personality, society and power. Spirituality is also a value-based marker for Russians. This is a desire for spiritual transformation in the direction of ideals dictated by higher sacred meanings. The “exemplary” personality of the Russian has always been aimed, so to speak, not forward, but upward, focusing on abstinence in the name of achieving the traditionally approved ideal.

Nevertheless, the most significant value-based guideline for Russians is justice. Its stability is most clearly proved by the thousand-year existence of the community as a social organism that regulates the value-based imperatives of the majority of the population of Rus and Russia. However, justice must be interpreted more broadly than social equalization. It is the integrative base of the Russian civilization. First of all, due to the fact that throughout Russian history there has been a colossal contradiction between the tasks facing the nation which are enormous in scale, in fact, unrealistic and very insignificant resources for their implementation. Therefore, (using Aristotle’s terminology) equalizing justice dominated distributive justice, and this value itself dominated the imperatives of life, liberty, and well-being. Moreover, not in the form of power domination over society and man, since the state, which formed existential meanings and the very possibility of survival of the nation, was “considered by everyone as the main national achievement and property” [6, p. 116], but in the form of syncretism of the deep needs of personality, society and state. The contractual matrix of relations between personality, society and state was not typical for Russia. Here, the realization of the impossibility of separate realization of the axiological phenomena of life, freedom, happiness and finding the meaning of one’s being in time prevailed.

In the West the situation was different. The thesis of the analyst of the problem that “in the context of the historical and cultural life of the Russian civilization, justice is not a value subordinate to freedom and happiness of the individual seems legitimate. It occupies the top of the hierarchy of values” [7, p. 52]. That is why “such an aspect of understanding and implementing the liberal doctrine is most relevant for Russia from the point of view of universal axiological constants of its development and the peculiarities of the mentality of its population, and, therefore, the most adequate requirements for ensuring national security” [8, p. 242].

In this regard, the threat to national security was from the fact that in favor of the modernizing values of freedom and well-being of the nobility and the modernizing elite as a subject of modernization, the value of justice, which the overwhelming majority focused on, being a passive object of modernization, whose axiological orientations were not taken into account, was sacrificed to this subject. The beginning of this process was laid by the gradual liberation of the nobility from service to the state, begun already in the era of “palace coups” by the successors of Peter the Great, finally carried out by Peter III in 1762, legally formalized and guaranteed by Catherine II by the “Letter to the nobility” in 1785. The nobility ceased compulsory service to the state. The peasantry, the bulk of the population, continued to be the actual slaves of the nobility. The meaning of such servitude to the nobility, which no longer necessarily serves the needs of the state, was lost in the eyes of the overwhelming majority of the population. Equalizing justice, expressed in religious form by the slogan “land of God”, suggesting that the source of its possession is labor (either agricultural, military, or judicialadministrative, primarily for the benefit of the state), provoked numerous disturbances of the peasants, the most intense expression of which was the uprising led by Yemelyan Pugachev (1773–1775).

The huge range, the relatively high degree of organization of the rebels and the clarity of their demands, directed against the nobility, finally, the massive support of the rebellious Cossacks by the population of the Volga landowners’ estates during the period when, according to the great poet, “Pugachev fled, but his flight seemed like an invasion” — all this speaks of the unprecedented intensity of the value-based confrontation between “soil” and “civilization”. Not accidentally, it was the gradual increase in the number of peasant riots (although they did not reach such proportions as the peasant war) that served as one of the main reasons for the abolition of serfdom in Russia by Alexander II.

Long before this event, serfdom was recognized as “a powder keg” under the state [2, p. 480] and “a tangible and obvious to everyone evil”. It should be noted that the “Letter of Merit to the Cities” of 1785 granted certain freedoms to the emerging urban bourgeoisie, allowing it to receive and spend profits at its discretion. As it is known, Catherine the Great had previously canceled the state order and monopolies. She also introduced courts independent of the administration, which laid the foundation for guaranteeing privacy of person and property, which was urgently needed by the entrepreneurial strata of the population. However, the merchants and manufactories freed from the direct state dues were perceived as “alien” strata of population by the peasantry and urban lower classes. In the conditions of their increasing consolidation not in the state, but in the private interests of the nobility and the bourgeoisie, they sharply negatively reacted to the restructuring of the traditional system of values in the interests of the “overwhelming minority” of Russian society. After the abolition of serfdom, the situation, of course, changed. However, the peasants materially, and as a result of the introduction of the posts of world mediators and, especially, zemsky district chiefs, and formally and legally, remained dependent on the local landowners-nobles. But the peasants did not recognize the right to attempt their freedom and well-being precisely because the nobles, from their point of view, violated the fundamental value of justice.

All other markers of Russian civilization were also undermined by modernization processes. The ideocratic nature of state power and the unconditional etatism based on it melted away as the messianic function of the empire lost the status of unconditional value in the eyes of the population. Orthodoxy took on the function of ideological justification of a modernization model of development alien to the population. Therefore, religious salvation within and through the Orthodox state, the need to spread true faith in order to save humanity, gradually ceased to be an excuse for absolute obedience to the state power. The relative safety of the population from external invasions within the empire in a dialectically contradictory form began to contribute to the loss of the population’s faith in the unconditional value of the state. The mobilization of the population resources (in the form of an order, non-equivalent exchange, violence) has lost its justification. The modernization project, which ensures Russia’s competitiveness and its sovereign status, tailored according to the patterns of the West, turned out to be alien to the “soil” and it ceased to support it, which, accordingly, imperiled national security.

Spirituality lost its role as a regulator of public life for the same reason. Orthodoxy, by virtue of merging with state power, was rapidly losing its authority. The function of landmarks of spiritual asceticism, “beacons” of spiritual endeavor, was assumed by various antistate and essentially “soil” social doctrines of a socialist kind (populism, Marxism, anarchosocialism, etc.). At first, they paradoxically remained alien to the masses, who perceived these teachings as another manifestation of antireligious and anti-Orthodox ideals alien to them. However, over time, under the influence of secular principles and rationalism, this new form of spirituality began to be accepted by the masses. But this did not strengthen national security, since it provoked a split between two types of spirituality — religious and atheistic.

Conciliarity was eliminated by the split of Russian society into “soil” and “civilization”. Civilizational contradictions between them became a time bomb for the Russian civilization, constantly provoking various conflicts. The value-based split was so serious that it literally tore apart the “axiological body” of Russia. The division of people into privileged, financially secure or working in high positions in government bodies people (“bars”) and all other citizens (“commoners by origin”, “beggars”, “worthless”) undermined the foundations of national security, which is based on the unity of interests of various social groups.

Over time, the coordination of these interests became more and more difficult. As a result of rapid differentiation of society, they inevitably activated in the process of modernization; the growth of the empire, catalyzing ethnic, cultural, confessional diversity, increasing intensification of the uneven development of various regions, social contradictions “superimposed on this main, deep split, were repeatedly complicated and aggravated” [9, p. 81].

Discussion and conclusion. Thus, the period of imperial modernization in terms of ensuring national security was characterized by the following features. Firstly, the catching-up model of modernization that took shape in Russia during this period contributed to the final formation of a national state in the status of a power, which meant the opportunity to successfully defend national interests in the international arena in a conflict confrontation with other powers. Secondly, on the other hand, such an opportunity turned into an axiological split within Russian civilization, forming two subcivilizations existing simultaneously and within the same geographical range — traditional (in the terminology of V.O. Klyuchevsky “soil”) and modernization (in the terminology of V.O. Klyuchevsky “civilization”).

This split created contradictions growing as the modernization processes deepened and expanded, which by the beginning of the 20^th century had become antagonistic, excluding, in fact, the formation of common national interests as such. After all, they presuppose the value-based unity of the national-state community, the achievement of a compromise on the interests of authorities, various public groups and individuals. The destruction during the imperial period of modernization of the unity of power and population in the orientation towards trans-historical axiological imperatives, which forms the spiritual core of the national-state community, formed at the beginning of its existence and representing the genetic code of the national-state community, made such coordination impossible. Accordingly, they made it impossible to form, and, therefore, to uphold, unified, indigenous, essential, substantial national needs. This led to the crisis of the national-state community. In 1917, this crisis actually led to the collapse of the national-state community.