About Classical Conservatism and Soviet Conservatism: Similarities and Differences. (Essays on the Conservative Thought in the USSR)

Abstract

In the paper, an attempt is made to define the conservatism as is. The integral conservatism involves monarchy, class stratification of the society, domination of religion, idealistic platonic philosophy, mostly agrarian economy, and focus on ancient patterns, classics and classicism in art. Conservatism emerged on the cusp of the 18th and 19th centuries as a reaction to the bourgeois revolutions (first of all, the French Revolution), which destroyed the traditional Western societies and paved the way to a modernist civilization. Conservatives differ from traditionalists and “conservative revolutionaries” in that they do not call for a “revolution against the modern world”. Instead, they seek to preserve the existing traditional structures. At first glance, the Soviet society, with its cult of progress and anti-traditional worldview, left no room for the conservatism. Yet, firstly, authoritarian traits were present in Bolshevism itself. Secondly, Russian peasants and national Bolshevik specialists brought the elements of traditional Russian culture to the Soviet project. Thanks to this, not only latent integral conservatism (A. F. Losev) became possible in the USSR, but also the partial one (M. A. Lifshitz and L. N. Gumilev).