Studying and analyzing political philosophy in Russia is not a simple task. It is, to an extent, an exercise in Comparative Political Philosophy, but only to an extent, or “half”, as Russian philosophy obviously has largely the same roots as its West-European counterpart: Ancient Greek Philosophy, Christianity, Enlightenment, German Idealism, and, not to forget, Marxism. The Russian and the West-European philosophical traditions are, in many respects, each other’s inside constitutive other, so are we dealing with a comparison between philosophical cultures or within a shared European one? Moreover, and more importantly, we should address the question of political philosophy “as such”: if all forms of human society have a political dimension, we may want to look for a common basis of all manifestations of political philosophy, wherever and in whichever form they occur. From this angle, the very title of a book called Russian Political Philosophy can be contested by asking if it should not rather be called Political Philosophy in Russia. Even book titles have a political (as well as a commercial) dimension.

Against the background of these questions, I will address three further notions that seem to set the stakes of the discussion: anarchy, authority, autocracy. This “triple A” suggests a specificity (rather than a uniqueness) of political-philosophical thought in Russia and in Russian (with the additional, far from obvious question: where to find it? partly in odd places…). The latter part of this sentence, however, raised new questions, that have become, arguably, more pressing than they ever were as a result of the current military conflict in Ukraine that some will describe as “Russia’s War” while others persist in calling it “Special Military Operation” - turning contemporary Russian society into a “special operation” in the process. Is a neutral, distanced approach possible in this case? While we always should seek nuance and perspective, we cannot, nor should we abstain from judging, nor can we avoid the question how to assess the current conflict, which can be described, alternatively but not mutually exclusively, as a clash between civilizations, as a geopolitical conflict between two of several large blocks -Schmittian Großräume [large spaces]- in a multipolar world, or as part of the yet-not-processed Russian as well as Soviet past – the total absence of Vergangenheitsbewältigung [coming to terms with the past], which not accidentally is a German word.

Presupposing, despite all differences, continuity rather than rupture when it comes to the Tsarist Russian Empire, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the present-day Russian Federation, we need to address the question if and how the current situation is nourished and / or legitimized by important strands and concepts in the tradition of political-philosophical thinking in Russia / Soviet Union. While, again, simplification must be avoided, we can identity, I will suggest, a specific dynamics of, on the one hand, an imperial and, by implication, Russo-Centric logic that comes in two variants, a belligerent and a benevolent (and paternalistic) one, and, on the other hand, an anti-colonial and, by implication, plural logic than emphasizes national identity and, politically, sovereignty and self-determination. This dynamics can then, finally, be tied back to the concepts of “empire” and “nation-state” as the two main alternative models of political modernity, both standing in opposition to alternatives that challenge the very notion of “statehood”. The specificity, albeit not uniqueness, of the Russian case would then be the historical fact of an expanding empire that incorporates, by whatever means, its blizhnеe zarubezh’e rather than establishing a colonial empire with overseas colonies.

One of the very few good things about the current military conflict in Ukraine is that it forces us to readdress, reassess and reinvestigate the anyway complicated reality of Russian political philosophy.

Antoine Arjakovsky, Docteur en Histoire, Directeur de recherche au Collège des Bernardins

Nous savons que le non jugement des crimes du passé communiste conduit à leur justification puis à leur répétition. Le kholodomor, le génocide par le froid pratiqué par la Russie contre l’Ukraine au cours de l’hiver 2022-2023, une population de plus de 40 millions d’habitants, est la répétition tragique du Kholodomor, le génocide par la faim auquel s’est livré, sur ordre de Staline, l’Union soviétique pour écraser l’Ukraine indépendante, un crime contre l’humanité qui fit plus de 5 millions de morts. De même alors qu’au début du XXIe siècle on croyait la Chine respectait le droit international, en 2013, le président Xi Jinping appela à « méthodiquement mener le travail de propagande externe » et à « mieux raconter l’histoire de la Chine et faire entendre la voix de la Chine ». Dix ans plus tard, le 21 novembre 2023, Lu Shaye, ambassadeur de Chine en France, nia sur LCI la souveraineté des pays issus de l'Union soviétique. Les pays de l'ex-URSS "n'ont pas le statut effectif dans le droit international parce qu'il n'y a pas d'accord international pour concrétiser leur statut de pays souverain", a-t-il notamment déclaré. L’ambassadeur chinois a également questionné l'appartenance de la Crimée à l'Ukraine, un territoire que la Russie occupe depuis 2014. "Cela dépend de comment on perçoit ce problème", a-t-il indiqué. "Il y a l'Histoire. La Crimée était, tout au début, à la Russie. C'est Khrouchtchev qui a offert la Crimée à l'Ukraine dans l'époque de l'Union soviétique." Pour le diplomate chinois, il faut arrêter de "chicaner" sur la question des frontières post-soviétiques.

Pour sortir de l’amnésie d’un côté, et de la propagande de l’autre, il convient de réhabiliter l’histoire authentique, fondée en métaphysique, capable de montrer la vérité, de faire émerger un récit thérapeutique, capable de guérir en profondeur les mémoires blessées, les ressentiments et les volontés de vengeance. On se propose au cours de cette brève intervention premièrement de mettre à jour la réalité du conflit mémoriel à la base de la guerre actuelle entre la Russie et l’Ukraine. Puis on rappellera certaines tentatives de jugement des crimes du communisme, notamment celle de Vladimir Boukovski, et on présentera brièvement la proposition de l’historien russe Nikolai Epplee de démocratisation du travail de justice historique. Enfin on insistera sur le fait que, comme l’avait déjà remarqué Nicolas Berdiaev qui comparait la 3^e internationale communiste à la Troisième Rome impériale, la mythologie communiste est elle-même liée à la mythologie impérialiste sur un plan historique mais aussi à un niveau métaphysique. Ce n’est qu’en procédant à la purification de la théologie politique impériale qu’on parviendra à se libérer des démons qui hantent la conscience russe et, au-delà, la conscience européenne.

Many influential policy and security experts and politicians have voiced fundamentally different judgments about whether Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine should be called ‘rational’ or ‘irrational’, without clarifying their assumptions, however. Using this case, I discuss general conditions for determining such rationality assessments. The question is more complex than common debates assume, due to the fragmentation of the concept of rationality. After careful analysis of the major views of rationality in philosophy and the social sciences - including the impact of rationalization, of biases, and of competing normative standards of rationality - I show that there are clear and defensible assumptions to be made. As I argue, Putin’s decision was subjectively instrumentally rational, including many aspects of calculation and reasoning. At the same time, it was not objectively instrumentally rational:  right from the start, he had numerous mistaken beliefs and desires and used flawed collective deliberation procedures. Such rationality assessments can be made without the benefit of hindsight, and without questionable mind-reading from a distance; most of them also do not require considering whether Putin’s decisions and actions are morally rational. This type of rationality analysis should be useful for decision-makers in politics and for negotiations, in this case as well as in others. I will also discuss how this analysis relates to discussions over „realism" versus „liberalism“ in international relations and political science.