The Road of Slaves. Four Milestones

Compendium on the book
“V.K. Petrosyan (Vadimir). The Road of Slaves: Four Milestones of the Spiritual Degradation of the Russian People and the Colonization of Russia by the West”

The book “The Road of Slaves: Four Milestones of the Spiritual Degradation of the Russian People and the Colonization of Russia by the West” is not merely a polemical reinterpretation of Russian history, nor simply another publicistic argument about the country’s past. It proposes a unified model of a thousand-year national drama. According to this model, Russian history, in its decisive turning points, was not the history of gradual liberation and organic ascent, but the history of a repeated stripping away of spiritual sovereignty. Each time Russia was offered a new “higher” form of faith, culture, ideology, or freedom, it was simultaneously offered a new form of subordination. This recurring pattern is what the author calls “The Road of Slaves.”

The central thesis of the book is that the spiritual degradation of Russia was not a chain of accidental crises, not simply the result of wrong decisions by particular rulers, and not reducible to external pressure alone. On the contrary, the author sees it as an internally coherent and historically reproduced process. For more than a thousand years, in his interpretation, the Russian people were repeatedly torn away from their own spiritual foundation and inserted into alien systems of meaning. Every new milestone was justified in the name of necessity, progress, modernization, freedom, or salvation, yet in reality it deepened dependence, destroyed continuity, and prepared the next stage of subordination. This is the tragedy at the heart of the book: the people did not merely suffer wars, disasters, and crises; they gradually lost the right to remain the subject of their own spiritual destiny.

To unfold this logic, the author identifies four major milestones. These are presented not as isolated historical episodes but as a single cascade of reconfigurations of Russian consciousness. Each subsequent milestone does not cancel the previous one; it builds upon it, intensifies its consequences, and translates dependence into a new form. Thus the reader is not given four separate stories, but one long process in which symbols, institutions, and ideological banners changed, while the same structure remained intact: an external center of meaning tells Russia what to believe, how to think, what its future ought to be, and in what direction it must develop.

The first milestone is the baptism of Rus’. In conventional historical consciousness, this act is usually portrayed as a great step toward state unity, cultural elevation, and entry into a broader civilizational world. The book, however, offers the opposite perspective. Here the baptism of Rus’ is treated as the original act of spiritual rupture, bound up with the displacement of the indigenous pagan tradition, the destruction of the people’s organic connection with nature, ancestors, and their own sacred forms of life. Before conversion, according to the author, Rus’ possessed not a chaotic collection of local superstitions but a complex system of spiritual representations, rituals, communal practices, and worldview structures deeply rooted in the life of the people. The volkhvy, popular traditions, the cult of ancestors, natural symbolism, and local forms of the sacred all composed the inner spiritual fabric of society.

In the logic of the book, the adoption of Christianity tore this fabric apart. It meant not simply a change from one religion to another, but the replacement of an indigenous world of meaning by an external spiritual content. Instead of independent development, an alien religious code was accepted, and with it came dependence on an external spiritual center. Most important for the author is that this was accomplished not through organic conviction, but through violence, suppression, destruction of older sanctuaries, and coercion into a new faith. Thus emerged the first and deepest model of mental enslavement: the people were deprived of the right to independent spiritual choice, while power acquired the right to impose an alien form of truth from above.

The book stresses that the consequences of this first milestone reached far beyond religion as such. The baptism of Rus’ established the very precedent of submission to an external spiritual authority. It cultivated the historical habit of seeing the foreign as higher, the native as replaceable, and the forcible implantation of the new as a legitimate tool of historical development. In this way the matrix of all later transformations was laid down. If one can destroy one’s own spiritual foundation in the name of an externally recognized “higher truth,” then one can later destroy one’s own cultural, social, and ideological forms in the name of yet another historical ideal.

The second milestone is the reign of Peter the Great and the forced westernization of Russia. If the first milestone meant submission to an external spiritual center, the second, in the author’s view, meant submission to an external civilizational model. Peter sought to modernize Russia, to transform it into a great power, and to integrate it into the circle of strong states. Yet, as the book argues, this was attempted through a radical and often violent imitation of Western norms, institutions, modes of behavior, and ways of life. Under assault were not only outward customs, dress, appearance, and ecclesiastical autonomy, but the very structure of national self-consciousness.

The author does not deny that Peter’s reforms gave Russia a powerful technical, administrative, and military impulse. New forms of state organization emerged, the army and navy were strengthened, industry developed, and foreign policy influence expanded. Yet the book insists that beneath this visible brilliance there was a deep spiritual cost. Peter’s reforms created a durable rupture between the elite and the people. The upper strata increasingly lived according to foreign models, adopting Western languages, manners, and concepts of prestige and correctness. The people, by contrast, continued to live within a traditional value system and understood their own elite less and less. Thus one of the most destructive divisions of Russian history was born: a westernized ruling stratum and an increasingly alienated historical Russia beneath it.

Special importance is given to the formation of a national inferiority complex before Europe. It is precisely in the Petrine era, according to the author, that the idea becomes entrenched that Russia must not create from itself, but catch up with what is alien; not think from its own center, but endlessly measure itself against an external standard. The European came to be seen as the measure of development, beauty, reason, and progress, while the Russian came to be viewed as secondary, heavy, backward, and in need of correction. This psychological deformation would prove remarkably durable. It would survive the imperial era, the revolution, the Soviet period, and reappear in new forms in later liberal westernism.

The third milestone is the implantation of communist ideology into the consciousness of the Russian people. In the interpretation of the book, communism is not an internal and organic product of Russian spiritual history. On the contrary, it is treated as yet another external ideological matrix, imported from Western philosophy and imposed upon Russian crisis conditions. This time subordination takes its harshest and most all-encompassing form. If previously external influence had destroyed tradition or replaced one cultural orientation with another, now the ideological machine seeks to restructure the human mind itself.

The book shows that the communist project carried out a radical negation of religion, traditional values, historical memory, and cultural continuity. The Church was subjected to repression, clergy were destroyed, the intelligentsia was persecuted, and education and culture were placed under ideological control. All this was accompanied by systematic propaganda, censorship, the formation of one-sided thought, and the persecution of any dissent. In this construction, the communist era becomes the peak of “The Road of Slaves,” because here the state no longer merely dictates norms of behavior, but effectively monopolizes the right to truth, the interpretation of history, the shaping of memory, and even the definition of reality itself.

The most terrible consequence of this third milestone, in the author’s view, is total control over the inner world of the individual. Communist ideology, in his reading, replaced not only religion, but the very possibility of free spiritual search. A person had to do more than obey external authority; he had to think, feel, speak, and judge within the boundaries of an imposed ideological system. This is, for the book, the culmination of spiritual enslavement: the transformation of the person into a carrier of an imposed truth and the suppression of the very capacity for inner independence.

The fourth milestone is connected with post-Soviet liberalization, democratization, and the introduction of Western models in what the author calls a “colonial design.” This part of the book is especially important because it challenges the familiar myth that after the collapse of communism Russia finally entered the path of freedom. In the author’s interpretation, something quite different occurred. The destruction of Soviet ideology created a vast ideological vacuum, but this vacuum was not filled by an organic and sovereign Russian idea of the future. Instead, the country received an imported package of liberal-market prescriptions, introduced without proper adaptation to Russian historical, cultural, and social realities.

The consequences of this turn are evaluated in the book in extremely harsh terms. Shock therapy, privatization, deindustrialization, growing inequality, the erosion of social guarantees, cultural disorientation, moral relativism, and mass disillusionment are all interpreted as the completion of the cycle of spiritual enslavement. Communist unfreedom was replaced not by an ascending freedom of creation, but by formal freedom amid a collapse of meaning. The individual acquired the right to choose, but increasingly no longer understood between what choices or for what purpose he was choosing. Society became more open, yet also more fragmented. The state became constitutionally de-ideologized, yet in practice fell under powerful external economic, political, and cultural templates.

At this point the book makes one of its strongest conclusions. The final milestone completes not merely another reformist wave, but the entire thousand-year cycle of “The Road of Slaves.” If the baptism of Rus’ initiated spiritual dependence, Peter intensified cultural and civilizational secondariness, and communism carried subordination to total control over consciousness, then the liberal post-Soviet stage, in the author’s view, finished this trajectory by dissolving the remaining points of orientation, fragmenting society, and bringing the country dangerously close to the loss of sovereignty, identity, and even territorial integrity.

Yet the book does not remain trapped in diagnosis. Its aim is not only to describe Russia’s historical drama, but also to show the possibility of an exit. This is why the concluding section shifts the discussion from critique to project. The author introduces the motif of the “miracle of the first quarter of the twenty-first century,” by which he means the beginning of an awareness within part of the Russian elite of the need for an independent path, a rejection of full external dependence, and a search for Russia’s own historical course. Yet this turn is judged insufficient if it remains limited to geopolitical, military, or administrative measures. A genuine reversal requires a new spiritual and existential paradigm.

This paradigm is Demiurgism. It is presented not as a secondary theory, not as a supplementary doctrine, and not as an optional appendix to historical criticism, but as an alternative project of the future capable of leading Russia out of the thousand-year rut of subordination. Demiurgism, in the author’s system, is a new fundamental ideology that views history as a process of changing nooformations and transitions to higher levels of consciousness, collective thought, and being. Within it, Russia is conceived not as the periphery of an alien civilization and not as an object of geopolitical struggle, but as a possible center of a new historical synthesis.

Connected with this is the central positive metaphor of the book: “The Road of Gods.” If “The Road of Slaves” means movement along a trajectory governed by externally imposed meanings, then “The Road of Gods” means a path of historical independence, spiritual regeneration, technological and cultural self-development, and an ascending anthropological project. This is not merely a rhetorical symbol. In the structure of the book it plays the role of the decisive antithesis: to the past of subordination is opposed a future of creativity, to the past of dependence a future of sovereignty, to the past of spiritual compression a future of nooevolution and the expansion of human capacities.

Thus the whole book is constructed as a clash between two great historical scenarios. The first scenario is the continuation of life according to imposed models, in which Russia again and again seeks justification in an external example, an external truth, an external norm of development. The second scenario is historical maturation, in which the people and the country reclaim the right to be the source of their own order of meaning. This is the book’s deepest opposition: not simply East versus West, and not religion versus irreligion as such, but one’s own spiritual center versus perpetual life according to an alien center.

A special strength of the book lies in the way it links historiosophical analysis with a mobilizing pathos. The author not only reconstructs a chain of spiritual capitulations, but calls for a conscious break with this trajectory. For this reason the work is written not in the genre of cold historical expertise, but in the genre of warning, diagnosis, and summons. It tells the reader that Russia cannot endlessly exist in a mode of reaction, defense, and belated catch-up development. If it does not formulate its own large idea, its own ascending anthropology, and its own project of the future, it will once again remain merely the object of alien meanings, alien reforms, and alien geopolitical constructions.

In this sense, “The Road of Slaves” is not merely a critique of the past, but an attempt to name the deep cause of Russian historical weakness. That cause, according to the author, lies not only in mistakes of power, not only in external pressure, and not only in the imperfection of institutions. It lies in the chronic displacement of the center of meaning outward. The Russian people too often lived not from their own spiritual core, but from schemes imposed from outside: religious, cultural, ideological, political. Because of this they lost internal wholeness, and with it the capacity for stable, independent, and ascending development.

The principal conclusion of the book may be stated as follows: Russian history, in its decisive turning points, was a history of successive spiritual capitulations, each one framed as blessing, progress, liberation, or modernization, but in fact deepening dependence, cultural rupture, and existential weakening. Against this line the author advances Demiurgism as an alternative to historical collapse, and “The Road of Gods” as both the program and symbol of a new ascending future for Russia. Not the restoration of the past and not merely resistance to external influence, but the creation of a new, sovereign, elevated axis of historical being: this is the solution the book offers as the way out of a thousand-year tragedy.

For this reason, “The Road of Slaves” is a book not only about Russia’s past, but above all about its ultimate choice. Either the country remains within a trajectory of dependence, secondary meaning, and repeated historical subordination, merely changing the external forms of its servitude. Or it regains the right to spiritual independence, restores historical subjectivity, and enters “The Road of Gods” — the path of inner sovereignty, national self-restoration, and ascending development. This is how the book concludes its argument: the question of Russia is not only a question of borders, resources, or forms of power. It is прежде всего a question of whether it can once again become the author of its own historical world.