French and German became the languages of the elite, and fluency in these foreign languages would remain necessary for bureaucrats and intellectuals into the nineteenth century. The sweeping reforms of Peter and his eventual successor, the equally “great” Tsarina Catherine II, included substantial changes in educational practices and norms. Petersburg in 1703 and subsequently (1712) made it the capital of his empire from this “Window on the West,” he and his subjects could observe the goings-on of their European neighbors more clearly than they could from remote Moscow. With respect to the first observation, we can safely say that the time during which Skovoroda lived was not markedly different from prior eras despite his arrival on the scene, philosophy in Russia would remain, in the words of James Edie, James Scanlan, and Mary-Barbara Zeldin “uniquely non-academic and non-institutional.” Regarding the second point, the shift from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century was a watershed moment: this marked the start of an ongoing period during which Russians became better acquainted with “Evropa.” Second, it highlights the gulf that separated Russian and West European cultures into the eighteenth century. First, this fact points to the comparatively late development of academic philosophy in Russia. That an entire millennium separated the trial and death of the better-known Athenian thinker and the birth of philosophy in Russia is noteworthy for two reasons. Remembered by his compatriots as the “Russian Socrates,” Grigory Skovoroda (1722-1794) merits distinction as the founder of Russia’s autochthonous philosophical tradition. This is part of a series on the Ukraine crisis.

A Road to Nowhere by Matthew W. Slaboch