Dadabayeva, Gulnara, juhendajaRowe, Oliver, juhendajaFennell, HarryTartu Ülikool. Sotsiaalteaduste valdkondTartu Ülikool. Johan Skytte poliitikauuringute instituut2025-10-282025-10-282025https://hdl.handle.net/10062/117171This thesis explores the religious aspect of liberal ideas of national identity in the late Romanov Empire, focusing on how Orthodoxy shaped the work of key Russian liberal thinkers. While liberalism is often portrayed as a secular and Western ideology, this study argues that a distinctive Russian liberalism emerged through a innovative engagement with Orthodox theology, specifically concepts such as Sobornost, and Godmanhood. In doing so, it challenges dominant narratives of liberalism and postcolonial scholarship, in particular the notion of Russia’s ideological subalternity. Methodologically, the thesis employs Reinhart Koselleck’s approach to conceptual history to trace the evolution and semantic layering of concepts such as liberalism, national identity, and Orthodoxy. It focuses on three major philosophical and political symposia from the early twentieth century: Problems of Idealism, Landmarks, and Out of the Depths. In doing so, it analyses how Russian thinkers such as Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov, and Pyotr Struve synthesised European idealism with Orthodoxy. The thesis demonstrates that these thinkers articulated a vision of national identity rooted not solely in ethnic chauvinism or secular nationalism, but in a theological ideal of personalism and cultural renewal. Their critique of positivism, materialism, and Western historicism led them to propose an alternative temporality; one shaped by a dialectic of loss and recovery, informed by both European and Orthodox intellectual traditions. By recovering this neglected current of religious liberalism, the thesis contributes to the broader rethinking of Russian nationalism, and identity. It ultimately challenges the binaries of East and West, secular and religious, and progress and reaction, offering a more nuanced approach for understanding Russian political thought.enAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Estoniahttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ee/magistritöödThesis