The paper examines the views of the ethnologist, historian and philosopher Lev Nikolayevich Gumilev (1912–1992), the creator of the theory of ethnogenesis and the theory of passionarity. The scientist’s dramatic life journey, his political opinions and scientific concepts are discussed here. The paper also reconstructs Lev Gumilev’s political views based on biographers’ studies, memoirs about Lev Gumilev and his poems that were unpublished during his life. This entire process shows that from his very youth to the last days the scientist was a secret anti-Soviet, anti-communist, monarchist and Orthodox Christian, anti-Westerner and antidemocrat. The paper reveals how these views of his are connected with the theories of ethnogenesis and passionarity. The perception of the history of mankind as the development of ethnic groups excludes progressism and liberalism, since under this concept the history of mankind would cease to be perceived as a universal process involving traditional and modernist stages. At the same time, the doctrine of “fostering landscapes” created by Lev Gumilev suggests that every nation has its own system of values and standards of behavior, and their mechanical borrowing is impossible. It was from this point that Lev Gumilev drew his conclusions of anti-Western and Slavophile/Eurasian nature: Russia should not imitate Europe. It  should follow its own way. However, the doctrine of the Slavic-Turkic symbiosis as the foundation of Russian civilization turned out to be a distinction between him and the Slavophiles. In addition, the liberal democracy of the Western type was seen by Lev Gumilev not as a universal value, but as a set of behavioral patterns and stereotypes in views typical only of the peoples of Western civilization. Finally, the scientist repeatedly emphasized the most important role of Orthodoxy in forming the Russian ethnicity. So, Lev Gumilev was a conservative thinker. His conservatism, however, was a kind of naturalistic, cosmic conservatism, akin to the teachings of Plato, Konstantin Leontiev and Oswald Spengler.

The article examines Leonid Borodin’s historiosophical ideas stated in his autobiographical narrative “Without a choice”. It is shown that according to Leonid Borodin, the comprehension of the Russian history and the world history meaning was an existential effort rather than an abstract thought. Leonid Borodin’s historiosophical thought was hard won through his personal spiritual searches and coming to Orthodoxy. Therefore, it continued the tradition of the great Russian philosophers by becoming congenial to them and having risen up to their level. The spiritual logic of history, which requires spiritual and philosophical culture for its fundamental understanding, was discovered by Leonid Borodin thanks to the restoration of connection with the Russian philosophy of the Silver Age. The catastrophic lapse of a large portion of the people into the “satanic abyss” in the twentieth century can be explained precisely by the fact that it was basically caused by a religious deception and temptation rather than by a naive belief in the bright future. Namely, this is the obsession with pride, which does its best to “rebuild the world”. The internal spiritual and existential foundations of the philosophical understanding of the history by Leonid Borodin are also featured here. These are: 1) the thinking — free and seeking — and at the same time strict and heroic; 2) it is based on the highest spiritual comprehension of the truth, always associated with the mystical penetration into the flesh of history rather than on rational constructions of the mind (they are set up later as a result). Leonid Borodin had to resist this type of “dissidents” — Russophobes — even more fundamentally than the Soviet regime itself, since they became enemies of the Soviet regime not because of love for Russia, but, on the contrary, because of hatred for the country rather than for the regime. Leonid Borodin’s, just like Konstantin Leontiev’s, historical thinking was based not on some predefined schemes, but, first of all, on the aesthetic, full-blooded penetration into this meaning, “letting it pass through yourself”, experiencing it internally as a personal tragedy and personal fate, through which both the fate of the people in the twentieth century and the Christian meaning of the Russian history in general became clear.

This paper examines the question of whether the Russian thinker Alexander Alexandrovich Zinoviev can be reckoned among nationalist conservatives, and provides a reasoned negative answer. One of the reasons for this is Alexander Zinoviev’s sharply negative and even nihilistic attitude towards the Russian Orthodox Church and historical, pre-revolutionary Russia, which was unthinkable for any real Russian conservative. Therefore, his views could be conditionally labeled as Soviet conservatism. But even here there are nuances that complicate matters greatly, which are discussed in this paper. It is also noted that despite the great hype around the name of Alexander Zinoviev, his creative heritage is still very poorly studied at the moment. The paper briefly considers his creative evolution, his propensity for positivism starting from his dissertation. The pros and cons of his concept of communism as the core of all Alexander Zinoviev’s ideas are analyzed in more detail. The poverty of its basic ideological scheme and its weak prognostic abilities are noted. At the end of the paper, three points are highlighted stating why Alexander Zinoviev cannot be considered a real conservative. Firstly, this is his sharply negative attitude towards historical Russia and Orthodoxy. Secondly, this is the ahistoricism of his project on logical sociology and the positivism associated with it. Thirdly, Alexander Zinoviev became an apologist of the Soviet social system only after it left the stage of history, that is post factum. During the active period of the Soviet social system, Alexander Zinoviev always criticized and satirised it sharply.

The article highlights the stages in the evolution of Vladimir Karpets' socio-political views. It also reveals the conditions of the formation of Vladimir Karpets as a thinker, basically at the early stage of his creative work from 1975 to 1995. Poems, historical and literary essays, publishing projects, and a dissertation by Vladimir Karpets are used as sources here. The ways in which the thinker promoted Orthodox and monarchical views against the background of the Soviet censorship are also shown. The article mentions the classics and contemporaries who influenced the formation of Vladimir Karpets' identity: his father Igor Karpets, Pyotr Palamarchuk, Tatyana Glushkova, Anatoly Ivanov, monarchists of the Perestroika era, Grigory Kremnev, Vladimir Mikushevich, Oleg Fomin, Alexander Dugin. All the poetry collections by Vladimir Karpets and the themes of his poems are considered. Attention is paid to his activity as a researcher and lecturer in law, his historical and legal studies of Russia and Spain. The article considers in detail the study by Vladimir Karpets of life and work of Admiral Alexander Shishkov and poet Fyodor Glinka, and traces the influence of their literary and religious views on the formation of Vladimir Karpets as a poet and thinker. The article states the features of monarchism according to Vladimir Karpets, his emphasis on the royal family natural succession, his interpretation of the Soviet period of history as a secret continuation of Russia's mission as Katechon Withholding. In this context, the published films and unpublished scripts by Vladimir Karpets for 1989–1992 are considered: “For Your Friends”, “The Third Rome”, “Name”, “Angel of Harvest”, “Khovanshchina”, “Morok” (“The Story of the Story”). The evolution of the thinker's views in the 1990s is discussed, including his reassessment of the Russian Church schism (dissent) in the 17th century. The article also tells about the translation activity of Vladimir Karpets, and represents a brief description of the subsequent evolution of Vladimir Karpets' thought during 1995–2016.

The paper uses journalistic works (op-ed pieces for the media, speeches, press conferences, interviews, etc.) by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to reveal the formation and development of religious and moral issues in the writer's worldview. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn continued the historical line of Russian political and social thought, which had always been characterized by polyphony, ambiguity, and variability. The writer himself had repeatedly drawn attention to how important it is to understand the dependence of philosophical attitudes of a thinker on their life experience and age. In the mature period of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's career, the main aspects of his religious idea can be highlighted. Firstly, the opposition to the ideological legacy of the rationalist philosophy of the modern age and the criticism of the idea of constant progress as an example of “delusional philosophy”, the desire to legitimize the sacred in the political discourse, the postulation of the need to abandon the political language in reflections on social problems and return to the language of spiritual and moral writings can be mentioned here. Secondly, this is the recognition of the organic connection of religious consciousness with the national cultural type, the critical attitude to globalism and unification, the desire to preserve the national identity as a guarantee of the spiritual development of mankind, since a nation emerges around a religious idea and preserves it. The paper also examines Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's understanding of the phenomenon of the nation and the intelligentsia, as well as the reasons for the writer's skeptical attitude to the prospects of cultural convergence between East and West. According to the writer, both competing models of sociopolitical development — bourgeois democratic capitalism and the communist utopia of economic equality — are based on the same spiritual foundations: rationalism and naive Rousseaism in understanding human nature, cosmopolitanism and recognition of the issue of the distribution of wealth as the key issue of human existence. The convergence of social systems suffering from the same vices in their slightly different forms would lead to nothing but the multiplication of these vices.

The paper highlights the history of emergence and development of Christian motives in Soviet cinema, from the times of persecution against the Church in 1920–1930 up to the era of Perestroika. There is a difference in the perception of Christianity as the basis of traditional ethno-cultural identity and as the basis of universal moral values, which in both cases contributed to the gradual legitimization of Christian subjects in Soviet culture in spite of the multilevel system of ideological censorship. This paper analyzes the deep ideological trends in the evolution of Soviet culture, which allowed, on the one hand, the atheistic authorities themselves and, on the other hand, the experimenting filmmakers to address the topic of religion in general, Christianity in particular and specifically the Russian Orthodox Church in different ways in different periods of Soviet history. The illustrative examples of using various Christian symbols, Biblical quotations, events of religious history, the representation of the image of a Christian priest and a believer as such in Soviet films, as well as the increasingly noticeable appeal of Soviet filmmakers to Christian associations and allusions are also shown here. The author pays special attention to contradictory ideological trends during the three basic periods of Soviet history in the second half of the twentieth century: The Khrushchev Thaw, the Era of Stagnation and Perestroika. All three contributed to the legitimization of religious themes in Soviet cinema and determined the specifics of the attitude to religion in the late Soviet period. The films by such directors as Mikhail Romm, Marlen Khutsiev, Andrei Tarkovsky, Michael Kalik, Andrei Konchalovsky, Nikita Mikhalkov, Gleb Panfilov and others are considered in the paper as the most significant precedents. Hypotheses are put forward about further ideological strategies of the Soviet state regarding Orthodox Christianity, if the Communist Party had been able to retain its power.

The history and results of the famous Smenovekhovtsy movement, which started with the Change of Signposts (Smena Vekh) publication in 1921, are observed. The paper states that the Smenovekhovtsy movement dropped off the field of public attention in the post-Soviet period, but now it is time to return to this phenomenon. The author considers the Smenovekhovtsy movement as the first historical attempt to reconcile the Reds and the Whites after the Civil War. From this point of view, the positive and negative sides of this movement are evaluated, as well as what lessons can be drawn from those events for today. The papers highlights the relevance and nonrandom popularity of the the Smenovekhovtsy movement’s ideas at the time of their very emergence. However, quite quickly this movement became extremely corrupt (messed up and fake) due to its leading participants. That way, the custommade nature, which it acquired quite soon, became obvious to many people. The Bolsheviks were not ready to make any serious compromises, except for tactical reasons — that was the initial mistake of the Smenovekhovtsy. The tragic fate of the leader of this movement Nikolay Ustryalov, and many other prominent participants was conditioned by the fact that their view and analysis did not involve the philosophical and metaphysical plane, being limited mainly to sociopolitical and economic reality. Therefore, their hopes for an early evolution of the regime did not come true. In case of such an ideocratic state as the USSR, it was essential to take into account both the philosophy of Marxism and its metaphysics. The historical results, which would allow to evaluate the Smenovekhovtsy movement, turned out to be twisted and ambiguous. It is impossible not to recognize the restoration of the state and the army, the international prestige of the USSR, which became the world’s leading power in the XX century. On the other hand, the Soviet great power ended with the collapse. The Smenovekhovtsy overestimated the state potential of Bolshevism. A take on the Soviet period of history, its pros and cons through the prism of the Smenovekhovtsy movement is quite useful. It is no coincidence that the features of historical Russia suddenly bled through the red contours of the USSR. This was exactly what the Smenovekhovtsy movement highly appreciated. But to what extent they bled through — this remains a subject for discussion until today.