Bolshevism in Oswald Spengler's cultural and historical concept

The paper considers the views of the prominent German history philosopher and culturologist Oswald Spengler on the emergence, genesis and essence of Russian Bolshevism in the context of his cultural and historical concept. The author aims to analyze the evolution of Spengler's perception of Bolshevism as a phenomenon of the Russian and world history. The paper is based on Spengler's works, where he repeatedly referred to the Russian history and Bolshevism. The author notes that the ideologists of the German "Conservative Revolution" showed considerable interest in the Bolshevism experiment in Russia, Spengler's views being the most comprehensive. His principle ideas about Russian Bolshevism are expressed in his works of the late 1910s - early 1920s: The Decline of the West and Prussianism and Socialism. The issue of Russian Bolshevism was interesting for Spengler in two ways: firstly, in the context of the history of Russia, to which Spengler attributed an important place in the world history. Secondly, as the most prominent ideologist of "Prussian socialism", Spengler repudiated Marxist socialism, to which he attributed Russian Bolshevism. Speaking of Bolshevism as a phenomenon of the Russian and world history, Spengler claimed that it emerged from Russian culture, which was initially alien to the Faustian culture of the West and rejected the very essence of the Western rationality type. Spengler argued that along with Peter I's reforms Bolshevism became the second attempt of "Westernization of the Russian history". Yet, according to Spengler, despite having emerged from the western influence on Russian culture, Russian Bolshevism showed all the generic features of the latter: the religious struggle of the Russian soul, the Tatar despotism, and the unbridgeable gap between the upper layer of the society and the people (the peasants). Despite the influence of the Marxist ideology on the Russian Bolsheviks, for practical reasons they started transforming it according to the traditions of Russian culture. Spengler also made a paradoxical conclusion about the economic structure of Soviet Russia. Bolshevism tended to imitate and copy the western forms of economy, but implemented them according to the Russian-Asian traditions of the despotic state. In Spengler's works of the early 1930s he called Russia the "Mistress" of Asia. Thus, Spengler understood Bolshevism in a new way, as a component of the struggle of "Asia" against "Europe". The author of the paper concludes that Spengler's original understanding of the essence of Russian Bolshevism lay in acknowledging its dual character, which was expressed in the synthesis of the ideas of the Western Faustian culture and the Russian-Asian worldview.

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