Russian westernizers and change in International Relations: the promised West

Extract

In the final part of his trilogy on Russian international thought, Andrei Tsygankov challenges Fyodor Tyutchev's claim that Russia defies rational understanding. At the core of Russian westernizers and change in International Relations, and of the trilogy as a whole, is the effort to emphasise the dialectic of othering and the co-constitution of Russia, situating it in a complex entanglement with its principal significant other: the West (see Tsygankov's Russian realism, Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2022; reviewed in International Affairs 99: 2, March 2023; and The ‘Russian Idea’ in International Relations, Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2023; reviewed in International Affairs 100: 4, July 2024). According to Tsygankov, this entanglement unfolds via Russia's pursuit of western-style modernization. In this process, the Russian westernizers face the challenge of preserving the country's sociocultural identity and power (pp. 2–3). The book explores the trajectory of western—primarily liberal—ideas and of their advocates, the so-called westernizers, in Russia's socio-historical context (p. 5). According to the author, the modernization cycles, or waves of westernization, often fail due to their incompatibility with the local conception of social and political domains (p. 29).