At the Dawn of the Cold War: F.M. Dostoevsky VS H. Arendt in the Question about the World Value of the Slavic Idea

In order to pose the problem of identifying features of the design of the frame "totalitarianism", the article analyzes one of these cases, namely, how the authoritative philosopher Hannah Arendt used Dostoevsky's statements about the universality of the Slavic idea and views on the purpose of Russia in the changing world to prove Pan-Slavism as the source of totalitarianism in its Russian version, just like she called Pan-Germanism a source of Hitlerism. The present article compares the ideological techniques of Arendt and Karl Popper, since their works became the scientific rationale for fight against totalitarianism and, as a consequence, as a frame, against Russia. The analysis of this frame was conducted based on the comparison of the texts of Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism and Dostoevsky's essay "Pushkin". In his text, Dostoevsky uses the concept vsechelovek ("all-man") and gradually builds it out of the universality (universal significance) of Pushkin's poetry, the European history of Russia beginning with the reforms of Peter the Great, and finally destinations of Russia and the Slavic world in Europe. In her book, Arendt puts forward an artificial division into "historical" (England, France) and "non-historical" (Slavic) peoples, which actually proclaims the moral superiority of the former (Great French Revolution) as the desire for the liberation of humanity and love for it and gives a negative assessment of exactly the same trends in the pan-Slavic movement of the latter. The article reveals the causes for it, both political, i.e. making conditions fit an answer (Soviet totalitarianism is a product of Pan-Slavism), and technical, i.e. ignorance of the original text of the work and taking the phrase "all-man" from a secondary source. The authors made a conclusion about the typicality of the political and ideological conditionality of works of this kind based on a comparison of Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism and Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies, which were used as one of the reliable, i.e. science-based, argument for dissolution of the USSR and one of the most important elements of the modern anti-Russian frame. Agreeing with D.V. Grishin's research work on The Diary of a Writer, the authors show that Dostoevsky's almost thirty-year-long struggle for Russia's place in the family of European nations is still relevant today. A return to the archetypes of first- and second-rank peoples in both the past and the present raises serious concerns due to the stability of the frame and the historical "experience" of using political recommendations built based on constructing theories.

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