Traditionalism as a Reaction to the Revolution: The Origins of the Modern Ideology of “Traditional Values” and Eurasianism of the 1920s

Abstract

The article is devoted to the problem of traditional values, their connections and contradictions with values generated by social, political and cultural revolutions. The author believes that traditional values are values characteristic of a certain stable stage of society’s development, they are linked to the traditions existing in this society and each epoch has its own, being a kind of synthesis of elements of the worldview of a traditional type of society and a modernist society. They are being established in society as a reaction to the revolution in politics and culture that preceded them. Modern Russian traditional values, which have become mainstream in our ideology in the 2020s, are a reaction to the nihilism of the 1990s. But a similar era of nihilism, only in relation to imperial Russia and its traditional values, was in the 1920s. And the reaction to that nihilism was the ideology of Eurasianism, which arose in emigration. The author examines in detail the relationship between the Bolshevik worldview and the worldview of Eurasianism. In conclusion, it is concluded that the reaction never returns to the previous state of things, the new traditional values are both similar to the old ones and different from them.