Evening with Vladimir Solovyov (№ 407870)

I will return to the thoughts of S. E. Kurginyan. I'll clarify my understanding. S. E. said that there are two Wests. I believe that there are not two Wests, but two Europes. There is Western Europe, and there is Eurasian Europe. Since I agree with this line of Eurasians - Trubetskoy, Gumilev.
The Russian Empire has always been on the defensive. And that was the point. I believe there were two types of empire. Some were created as defense empires, i.e., to repel external threats. Such were in Europe, for example, Austria-Hungary. It was created to defend itself from the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire, too, in turn, was created from defense. At one time, it was a Muslim population that accepted the Ottomans as an opportunity to resist the Crusaders. Then it degenerated into an aggressive empire, occupied part of the Balkans. And there are empires purely colonial. They were created for the purpose of enrichment, and I agree with S. E. Kurginyan, it came from the traditions of Rome. These are the British Empire, the Dutch Empire, the Spanish Empire, the French Empire. The meaning of these empires was expansion. And empires from defense, like Byzantium, like Russia, created a kind of state. Therefore, for Russia, the meaning is in defense. In the defense of the Eurasian space that it occupied.