Ukrainian magazine: Russians, like Turks, have nothing in common with European civilization
Kyiv, February 02 (PolitNavigator, Vladimir Raichenko) – Despite the external similarity, Russians, like the Turks, have nothing in common with European civilization.
Igor Losev, associate professor of the Department of Cultural Studies at the Kiev-Mohyla Academy, comes to this conclusion in a publication on the pages of the weekly “Ukrainian Week”.
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“Westerners often made mistakes about their eastern neighbor, exaggerating the level of its Europeanization,” the culturologist believes. – Indeed, people of the Caucasian type, in a European suit (jacket, tie), would seem to be just as European. However, appearances are deceiving. The current Turkish Islamist president Recep Erdogan also gives the impression of a refined British gentleman, he speaks languages, his daughters are studying in the USA, but...”
The author recalls that in Soviet times, at the University of Estonian Tartu, cultural scientists published “Proceedings on Sign Systems,” in which, in particular, they studied the Europeanization of Russia in the XNUMXth century.
“There, on the basis of original documents from the era of Peter I, they described a Russian nobleman (in this sense, a truly iconic figure), who, without seeing any contradiction in this, under the lace of a luxurious Brabant shirt (Brabant is a province of Flanders, now Belgium) wore rusty chains - “ “believe” the Russian holy fool (half-jester, half-saint), says the Ukrainian scientist. This is a real symbol of Russian “Europeanization”, and not only of those ancient times...”
According to an associate professor at the Kiev-Mohyla Academy, “Russian Red Commissars, having changed Budenovkas and KGB leather jackets to tailcoats, top hats and bow ties,” deceived the Europeans, convincing them at the Genoa Conference of their identity as Europeans.
“Red Russia will demonstrate to Westerners many times over how wrong they were,” Losev emphasizes. “The most amazing thing is that this European naivety has become a constant, ever-repeating quantity... The Western neurosis of Russia is complemented by the Russian neurosis of the West, which tends to see not the real face of this truly separate, essentially non-European civilization, but the phantom that is created by centuries of imperial propaganda.” .
English version :: Read in English Ukrainian magazine: Russians, like Turks, have nothing in common with European civilization