A conviction lingered in the expansive, brooding “Russian soul” (as Russian thinkers would come to call it) that someday all of Russia’s vast exertions and contradictions would come to fruition: its journey would be vindicated; its achievements would be lauded, and the disdain of the West would transform into awe and admiration; Russia would combine the power and vastness of the East with the refinements of the West and the moral force of true religion; and Moscow, the “Third Rome” inheriting fallen Byzantium’s mantle, with its Czar “the successor of the caesars of Eastern Rome, of the
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