Rossiiskaja gosudarstvennost v sravnitelnoj perspective : russkaja tradicija i zapadnaja model gosudarstvennogo ustrojstva (La statualità russa imperiale in prospettiva comparata : la tradizione russa e il modello occidentale di struttura statuale)

For many centuries Russia has been viewed, by Russians and foreigner alike, as something basically different from the norms and standards of the West. Since the October Revolution it has become a widespread conviction that Russia is developing along lines fundamentally different from the broad State and societal patterns of what is usually called the Western world. The concept of the West has also come to represent a value system as well as certain political and social arrangements and assumptions, including individualism, the separation of the church and the state, protection of civil and human rights, rule of law, private property, democratic government brought to power by free and fair elections, free-market economy, spontaneous inter-individual cooperation and contracts, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and civil society. For many observers, Russia appeared to be a State and a society whose basic principles were totally alien to all Western concepts, and the only country of geographical Europe that owed virtually nothing to the common cultural and spiritual heritage of a “Western” system of State and social relationships. Certainly, Russia’s political and social institutions have evolved differently from those of the Western countries. Twenty years after the Soviet system collapsed it is still hard for Russia to put away its Soviet past and there are consistent and often substantial differences in values between Russians and the West. But there is a permanent risk of great oversimplification. In fact, Russia widely depended on the imported Western State model and nowadays the Country is even rediscovering his civil society, which already existed in late Imperial Russia. The Russian tradition is marked by a series of peculiarities, some of which continued into the Soviet period in new forms, and others which were sharply truncated in 1917 and are now being revived.