이행의 관점에서 바라본 시공간 진화체로서 17세기 러시아

The Russian Society of the 17th Century as an Evolutium of Time and Space as Seen through the Prism of Transition

It can be said that the reason the 17th century was made possible was the rule of Ivan IV. It was when most powerful absolute monarchy became the starting point that detonated its own antithesis – the period of transition. Though it remained an unstable political regime with weak rulers, but Ivan IV was able to gradually build an 16-th century European absolute empire while facing collective resistance of the nobility towards him, and through covering up, conciliating with and suppressing rebelling peasants. This for m of imperial policy in the making, though it paradoxically produced perpetual reactio and as such was plagued with resistance from the below to the rule of the stabilizing upper classes, can be seen as the biggest side of in the history of Russian 17th century. The name “the century of revolts” (Бунташный век) was made for a reason. The important thing is the idea that the Russia society was slowly progressing through this forest of radical conflicts and struggle. In fact, conflicts and hostility is a rare element in societies that lack progress. Of course, these movements and that time, look as Janian movements, or, as someone ruled out, it is like “rushing forward while facing backward”. However, we can retroactively say that such movement itself, in the end, took form of the westernization reforms launched by Peter the Great. These reforms, let alone the argument against their axiological features as well as their positive/negative influence, truly became an obvious turning point for the Russia society. However, it is believed not to be a Copernican Revolution, as it is usually seen. It was not that a caprice of one absolute monarch created a city on a desolate coast of the Baltic sea the swamps of the Gulf of Finland and this city became the capital of the empire that would decide the fate of the Russian society. It was a tentative result first brought by the dialectical synthesis in the course of the historical consistency. In other words, it was one of the ways to enter the outside world. The 17th century is neither an appendix of the dying middle – ages nor the cumber some dawning of the bright modernity. It truly was a chapter in struggle of theses, the turning point and driving force that brought in the western is a nation and modernization by Peter the Great after the 18th century. In the process of transition from the middle ages (Древняя Русь) to the modernity (Новое время), the “17th century Russia” did not make a sudden teleport from one separate side to the other, it rather experienced an interpolation of the movement from the middle ages t modern times. When understanding Russia of the 17th century as a combination of two axes of time and space and as a type of evolutium, the transition from the middle ages to modernity, as a process inside a process, did not separate Russian history in two pieces with 1703 as the watershed. The author believes that it should be perceived though the trajectory of a truly coordinated development based on historical dialectics.