In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Paul Grenier about his article “Konstantin Krylov’s Ethical Theory and What It Reveals about the Propensity for Conflict between Russia and the West,” from Telos 201 (Winter 2022). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss Russian conservative thinkers, including Konstantin Krylov, Vadim Tsymburski, and Vladimir Solovyov, and their attitudes toward the West; how Krylov differentiates between different civilizational types as well as how he differentiates between liberalism and Russian civilization; how Krylov frames his critique of liberalism and of Russian civilization; how his view of liberalism compares with other definitions; how else we can interpret the weaknesses of liberalism, aside from Krylov’s view of a good and bad version; the relationship between liberalism and tradition; and what Krylov’s thought tells us about the development of Russian perspectives on its relationship to the West today. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 201 are available for purchase in our online store.
Konstantin Krylov’s Ethical Theory and What It Reveals about the Propensity for Conflict between Russia and the West
Paul Grenier
The Decline of Liberalism
From the perspective of the Russian political philosopher Konstantin Krylov, Russia’s civilizational order is not liberal—in most respects, it is the very opposite of liberal. At the same time, Russia has, over the course of centuries, failed to properly come into its own as its own civilizational type. From Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin, Russia has lingered in a stunted, oversimplified version of its own “Northern” national idea even as it has repeatedly taken up, like children playing at dress-up, the civilizational ideas of others. Like much of the rest of the world, Russia at present is playing at liberalism.[1] Writing in the late 1990s (the reader is urged to keep in mind that Krylov’s theory was formulated and put on paper not today but twenty-five years ago), Krylov predicted that Russia’s dalliance with liberalism would play itself out within a decade or so and that by about 2030 Russia would finally come into its own as a civilization of the “Northern” type. What Krylov means by this is something we will get to in due course.
Meanwhile, for Krylov, the developmental trajectory of the liberal West has moved, so to speak, in the opposite direction. Here we have the case of a mature civilization that has been in place, and globally dominant, for centuries, but which has now entered into a period of oversimplification and degradation. What had once been an authentically liberal civilization has decayed into a simplified, distorted version of its former self, and it is this deformation of liberalism that principally explains the militancy and intolerance that, according to Krylov, have become characteristic features of the liberal West.
I do not mean to offer, in what follows, an overview of the theoretical work of Konstantin Krylov. My goal, instead, is to use some of Krylov’s insights as a heuristic to reflect on several persistent political-philosophical questions. I came across these insights in Krylov’s book Behavior (Povedenie), which appeared in 2021.[2] In it, Krylov systematically lays out his system of ethics and his theory of the relation between ethical systems and civilizations. Krylov’s approach to these questions at minimum provides a valuable opportunity to reflect on a series of significant questions—questions that quite obviously come into particularly urgent focus during this time of crisis and war. For example: Is conflict between Russia and the West built into the very structure of what Russia and the West are? What is liberalism, and is liberalism as such a source of conflict? What is Russia, and why does it act as it does? Finally, are there versions of the liberal West and of civilizations of the Russian type that, while allowing each to still stay true to its own formative idea, can offer us hope for a future that no longer teeters on the edge of apocalyptic conflict? Krylov’s theory is of interest because in its mathematical concision, it allows us to insightfully review such large questions without losing the forest for the trees. And there is a further motivation for taking an interest in Krylov’s writings on this topic: he is an important representative of a school of Russian political thought that is currently in the ascendant—the school that holds that Russia defines its own civilization, that Russia is a civilization-state.
To be sure, this whole method of treating “civilizations” as something of primary political importance is controversial. International relations realists such as John Mearsheimer reject this approach. They insist that states, not civilizations, are the true locus of political loyalty and action. Other schools of thought also reject the centrality of separate civilizations. Liberals typically pay particular attention to the notion of universal rights. Such liberals will tend therefore to identify with globalized, or globalist, perspectives because they see rights as universal by their very nature. Others emphasize the universality of the market and see it as defining a single sociological space that ultimately transcends in importance states and civilizations. A systematic response to the arguments proffered by these schools of thought lies well beyond the scope of the present essay.
Krylov and the Russian Right
By all accounts Krylov was a Russian nationalist. He was also widely regarded as something of a genius—indeed, I have heard him described as such by some of his friends, a number of whom, incidentally, themselves number among the leading lights of Russian intellectual life. At the same time, as even Krylov’s conservative friends admit, he was in certain respects a flawed genius—someone who, for all his intelligence, was not always right.
Like other Young Conservative[3] thinkers who lived through the social, economic, and demographic tragedies that Russia experienced in the 1990s, Krylov was deeply familiar with the theory and practice of liberalism but ended by rejecting liberalism as a model for Russia.[4] Krylov nonetheless favored democracy in Russia and wanted to see more of it. He participated in the December 2011 Bolotny Square protests in Moscow, protests during which the Russian state was accused by some of having committed election fraud. A subsequent criminal charge against Krylov blocked him from directly participating in electoral politics or registering his own political party.[5] Despite his being disliked by the Kremlin, and having his career blocked, many in Russia, at least as of the year 2009, considered him among the leading political minds of his day.[6]
Like many other Russian conservatives, nationalists, and Slavophiles, Krylov considered Russia a unique civilization with a high spiritual calling. Unusually, however, for someone holding such views, Krylov was not a Russian Orthodox Christian. In his early twenties, after spending some years in contact with Persian intellectuals while he was living in Uzbekistan, he became a follower of the Zoroastrian faith. I make no claims to being a Krylov expert; all the same, it appears to me at least possible that there is some element of antisemitism in some of Krylov’s writings. If so, it is very much to be regretted.
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1. Here one clearly sees the influence of Oswald Spengler’s pseudomorphosis concept. Spengler is well known to Russian conservatives.
2. K. A. Krylov, Povedenie (Moscow: Al’kor Publishers, 2021). This was the first publication of Krylov’s manuscript. It appeared scarcely a year after the author’s untimely death, in 2020, from a stroke at the age of fifty-three. When, in the mid-1990s, Krylov wrote the manuscript, he was in his late twenties.
3. “Young Conservatives” refers to such Russian intellectuals as Boris Mezhuev, Mikhail Remizov, and Egor Kholmogorov, among others, who were socially in contact with one another over an extended period and engaged in polemics about Russian political and cultural life. The group is distinguished by its scholarly seriousness and knowledge of Western thought.
4. This would make him, according to the definition proposed by Marlene Laruelle, an “illiberal.”
5. In October 2011, Krylov was charged under Criminal Code article 282, which forbids “extremist political speech,” after giving a public lecture during which he spoke ill of the Chechen and nearby geographical districts in Russia, terming them parasitical on the wider Russian economy and contributing nothing of value. In this respect, at least, Krylov’s views appear to overlap to some extent with those of Alexei Navalny, who is also well known to have spoken dismissively about immigrants from Russia’s southern areas.
6. In a 2009 poll regarding which intellectual figures in Russia are the most widely respected, Krylov placed fifth. The poll was conducted in 2009 by OpenSpace.ru (now Colta.ru). The scientific nature of the sample is unclear (it was based on 60,000 “votes”). See “The Most Influential Intellectual in Russia: A Poll with All the Details” [Самый влиятельный интеллектуал России: Опрос в деталях], Colta.ru, December 21, 2009, http://os.colta.ru/society/russia/details/15155/. The Russian writer Victor Pelevin placed first in the poll; Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, placed sixth.
