Patriotism in Russia: how to put your spiritual world in order

— Patriotism? she chuckled. – Do not make me laugh. What it is?

I heard similar notes of doubt and irony more than once in the statements of various smart people. As if this is some obsolete archaic or artificial category, imposed on modern society, which has long been living in a completely different coordinate system.

I conducted my personal express survey and found out that many people cannot formulate anything more about patriotism than commonplaces, standard official formulas that have a long-standing flavor of schematic clichés.

I thought a lot about this, about the fact that many of the categories used today, in fact, need to be rethought, in a new reading and interpretation, that, even being pronounced, they remain in the wake of the old traditions, called connotations in science, that is, the past contexts. We badly need renovation – reconstruction, new readings of important, fundamental concepts coming from the past, we need to re-name and explain our current life and our mentality.

In my thoughts about patriotism, I came to the conclusion that patriotism is a natural, primary human quality, innate, like unconditional love, and ensures the moral stability of a person. In fact, it is a marker of mental health. Isn’t this what Dmitry Sergeevich Likhachev wrote about: “The city on the high bank of the river is in perpetual motion. He “floats” past the river. And this is … the feeling of native expanses inherent in Rus’. The country is the unity of the people, nature and culture.

And then, later, he thought: “If nature is necessary for a person for his biological life, then the cultural environment is just as necessary for his spiritual, moral life, for his “spiritual settled way of life” …” So this is what patriotism is! An amazing formula is spiritual settledness.

It’s no secret that the concept of patriotism has gone through some strange, painful times in our life. For a long time at the end of the twentieth century, the word “patriot” was a dirty word. This trend did not appear out of the blue, its roots came from the 1970s. Then the spiritual space of the USSR became polarized, opposite camps formed: the camp of progressive democrats and the camp of conservatives called patriots. Democrats were associated with mindsets consonant with the creative, free, pro-dissident, and patriots with pro-party attitudes, this was the mark of conservative, inert people. That is, “patriot” sounded like a backward, narrow-minded, obedient. These shades, connotations were preserved in the concept of patriotism until recent times.

In the 90s, at the time of our complete moral surrender, the concept of patriotism completely disappeared. Has been cancelled. Like it was over. In its place came other landmarks: personal prosperity, success, enrichment, personal egoism became above all.

In the negative palette of shades of the concept of patriotism, Soviet ideology played its role; in its context, the phrase “Russian patriotism” was negative, referring to monarchism. It was replaced by the concept of “Soviet patriotism”, which was linked to party membership, the Soviet system of ideas equated patriotic feelings with loyalty to the party line. And so, along with Sovietism and party spirit, patriotism was also discarded.

However, another paradox happened: in the 1990s, those who recently shone with their reliability rushed in hundreds to rob and appropriate the people’s property. And many of those who were punished with unreliability, who were critics, who were squeezed out of the country, declared themselves patriots. Among them, the brightest name, perhaps, is Alexander Alexandrovich Zinoviev. Philosopher, writer, professional nonconformist, he took the position of an ardent defender of Russia in the new dramatic times. He, a critic of “super-society”, “human life” and “Westernism”, was passionately looking for new ways for the flourishing of his country, where he returned after many years of emigration. Eduard Limonov said: “Life abroad made me a patriot”… Some of the former dissidents went into Russophobia, and some became bright fighters for the preservation of the idea of ​​​​the Fatherland.

One of my interlocutors recently reflected bitterly: “How to combine loyalty with competence. So far, it often turns out like this: where there are higher competencies, there is lower loyalty, and where there is loyalty, there, alas, with competencies.

I think a lot about the unity and coherence of Russian culture, civilization and mentality. Today, Russian culture is being canceled in the world, and it comes to the point of absurdity – how can one cancel not only Tchaikovsky and Tolstoy, but also Stanislavsky, Mendeleev, Pirogov, Mechnikov, Popov, Zvorykin – those thanks to whom the modern Western man not only watches movies and TV , listens to the radio, but is treated, drinks yogurt in the morning and longevity. The trouble is that the current cancellation of our culture is not the first, but the third. The first – during the revolution and after it, the second – during the years of the collapse and destruction of the Soviet Union, and again they canceled and forgot not only the names, but the thoughts themselves, the true peaks of the thought of our civilizational continent! We ourselves, in great enthusiasm, canceled our culture and history twice!

So our culture has come down to us in fragments, in fragments, mosaic, patchwork. It subsided in the minds: patriotism is agreement with everything that happens, it is glorification and loyalty.

Meanwhile, the philosophy of patriotism is one of the most creative and winged ideas that excited the best minds of Russia. Here is a reflection of a unique person who made a spiritual breakthrough in the 18th century – Alexander Nikolayevich Radishchev “A Conversation about the Son of the Fatherland.” Written in 1789, it reveals archaic modern approaches. A person who loves his country is the son of the Fatherland, and this, according to Radishchev, is a true person. And what is the main thing in the son of the fatherland? You will be surprised, but this main property is freedom. Only a free man can be a patriot. A patriot is a man of honor, he is ambitious. It strengthens and grows along with the strengthening of its Fatherland. And the highest manifestation of patriotism is nobility. That is, patriotism is a manifestation of the ethical, constructive, original beginning in a person!

And another one of my interlocutors. A man of a creative profession, ironic, doubting, self-sufficient. “You know,” he tells me, “I had very wealthy great-grandfather and great-grandmother. After the revolution, everything was taken away from them, including the house. They lived, wandered around with friends – who will let them. And so they were called and driven onto a barge, they say – give everything that is left, otherwise we will drown the barge. And they have nothing more to take. They spent several days in that barge. Well, they’ve been released. And what do you think? They didn’t go anywhere, they stayed in the country. That’s patriotism!”

Strange story. How it is all intertwined in our history – joy and sorrow, tenderness and bitterness, love and sacrifice. But I understand this: patriotism is the ability to make a personal decision, it is one of the highest degrees of personal freedom, it is a person’s self-government, it is the highest level of self-development. Patriotism is not a loyal category, but a creative one. You can be a loyal, loyally willing person and at the same time turn out to be an inveterate pest of your homeland.

Patriotism is an active participation in the fate of one’s people. It is patriotism that builds factories, paves the streets, builds buildings, keeps the state. Patriotism gives meaning to human life, and significance to a person.

Patriotism is tightly merged with such a human quality as personal dignity. If there is no dignity, then there is not and cannot be patriotism. But if there is dignity, then there is also a feeling of patriotism. However, there is a difference between dignity and merit. Virtues are concrete, almost substantive characteristics of a person, these are statements. And the dignity of a person is a generalized, generalizing property of the human personality, this is the level of development, self-understanding, this is the general quality of a person.

The idea of ​​the philosopher E.N. Trubetskoy is very close to me: “The peculiarity of Russian patriotism lies in the fact that it is never inspired by the idea of ​​the motherland as such, by serving the Russian as such. In order to surrender to the feeling of love for the motherland, we need to know what it serves, what business it does. And we need to believe in the sanctity of this cause, we need to realize its rightness. We need a goal that would raise our people’s cause above national egoism.

Interestingly, the problem of patriotism in Russia has always been “sick” by poets, they were looking for its essence, they wrote about it. Patriotism for Russia is a poetic word, and its essence lies in the personal growth of a person, his semantic potential. This is a poetic experience. Patriotism is not passive acceptance of everything, it is the living poetry of life.

And patriotism opposes not cosmopolitanism – that is, love for all the wealth created by human genius – but selfishness, narrow-mindedness, passivity and, in general, indifference. Leo Tolstoy gave his formula: “the warmth of patriotism.” This is the inner warmth and connectedness of people.

Today we have a lot to do. Tidy up your country, land, cities and settlements. We need to get our relationship in order. And we need to put our soul world in order.