"Idea of ​​Nation" as the foundation of the "idea of ​​Empire"

In December 2004, the APN-Nizhny Novgorod website published Yegor Kholmogorov's article "What kind of empire do Russians need?", which could well compete with Mikhail Yuryev's concept , published a month earlier in Komsomolskaya Pravda.

Yegor Kholmogorov believes that the "idea of ​​the Nation" is not an alternative to the "idea of ​​the Empire", but a necessary component of it. "The empire is most often defined as a large state, with the help of military force and integrating civilizational mechanisms, uniting several peoples into a single political whole" . Meanwhile, this is a conceptual mistake, because, according to the author, "in the classical empire, a multi-ethnic society has a clear hierarchical structure, at the top of which there is only one empire-forming people - Persians, Romans-Italics, Russians, Englishmen, Ottoman Turks, etc. It is in the hands of this ethnos that power, the indivisible imperium, which, according to the Roman tradition, came into full force only outside the "pomerium", that is, the borders of the city, the civil community, to which, until the late period of Roman history, was attributed supreme sovereignty over all Roman possessions, is in the hands of this ethnos. ..A necessary condition for the emergence of an empire is the existence of a privileged and fairly extensive community (not an elite, but a community) - an ethnic group, a confession, a civil community, in whose hands is the "imperium", that is, power" (cf. with the theses of M. Yuryev ).

The author is convinced that "imperium", imperial power (and not "burden") is an important component of the Russian national identity, one of its defining features... Russians need an empire not because they owe something to someone in part enlightenment, civilization, "the burden of the whites", but because they owe themselves for their full self-realization .

At the same time, he rejects the imperial idea in the form of a dream of restoring the USSR, because. considers the Soviet period a time of loss of self-identification by the "Russian Nation" , which is now just beginning to recover.

* "The true path of imperial restoration is just the slowly but steadily continuing process of fundamentalization and nationalization in Russia. The Russian nation must acquire a number of characteristic features and properties that sharply distinguish it from the foreign environment and from the inhabitants of the former republics of the USSR. Russians must become different in relation to other Soviet peoples.

The ancient historical nation, the Russians, is now entering a new stage of its existence, a period of conscious formation of itself as a nation, and not just as a cultural, religious or political community. And she is free to choose significant features for herself and emphasize her differences. Even if these features seem rather uncomfortable to the neighbors.

At the same time, we should ( not neglecting, by the way, in relation to clearly hostile nations and the practice of regression, that is, the conscious cultural and economic "lowering" of certain territories and nations [emphasis added by us - ed. ]) to encourage a rather peculiar development of other post-Soviet peoples. Of which at least two - Belarusian and Turkmen - have already developed very specific political and cultural regimes, sufficient to create imperial tension.

Only by strengthening the subject of imperial expansion, the Russian Nation, which turned out to be a nation with a changed national identity for a long time, only by defining the expansion space (which, by the way, can be much wider than the post-Soviet space), can one begin to implement the imperial expansionist program. A program that cannot have anything in common with rosy dreams of a "restoration of the USSR"*.

Sources

• Kholmogorov Egor. What kind of empire do the Russians need? // APN-NN. 2004. December.