After having participated in the army that defeated Napoleon, Pyotr Chaadáyev spent a long time in Europe. Returning to the Russian Empire, and shocked by what he had experienced on the continent, he wrote eight Philosophical Letters which were Whatsapp Mobile Number List circulated in the literary salons of Moscow. In the first of them he wondered, not without some anguish, about the features that defined Russia and about the place it seemed to occupy in the world.5. His answer was final: his country was backward and he had not made any contribution to civilization.
Such a sentence earned him the accusation of "insane" by Tsarism, Whatsapp Mobile Number List but it gave rise to the famous debate between Slavophiles and Westerners around the 1840s regarding the national destiny, which would be Whatsapp Mobile Number List the gaze of the future. That intellectual dispute would be recycled several times over almost two centuries each time Russia faced an identity crisis. The dissolution of the USSR in 1991 seemed to revive those anxieties and concerns, in a society that was left without its country and in a country that lost its place as world superpower in a matter of days.
The responses rehearsed by Boris Yeltsin, the first president of post-Soviet Russia, were erratic and in tune with the implementation of the shock doctrine and "wild" neoliberalism6. While the new capitalist government made up of the old communists privatized state assets at ridiculous prices, deregulated the economy and opened up to international Whatsapp Mobile Number List aimed at disqualifying everything that referred to a centralized economy and state intervention. While millions of people became poorer, the economy de-industrialized and the country lost its status as a power, the contribution of the new Russian elite to refound a national identity that would replace the Soviet one only added confusion and disenchantment, if not an ambiguous revaluation of the past. imperial.