You might say, perhaps, that the idea of the mir or the village commune has a certain originality, but the Poles claim even that.

This is a startling statement, but I know of no exception to it. The proposition is this: it appears to me that in the region of social and political ideas, and in general outside the range of natural sciences or exact ideas, the Russian people have generated no original ideas at all of any kind. I should like to begin with a paradox which I have stated before, and if anyone thinks that it is false or exaggerated I should be grateful if somebody will take this up with me during the question period.

But I have to admit to you that, even if it were irrelevant, I should still be talking about this subject. To this extent it is not altogether irrelevant to the general subject of these lectures. It seems to me that this is one of the motifs which runs through Russian history, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (about which I intend to talk), and is therefore relevant to the atmosphere in which the ideas out of which the Revolution sprang were bred. The subject on which I wish to speak, ‘The Russian Preoccupation with Historicism’, 1 was deliberately chosen: the Russian preoccupation not with history, but with historicism – that is to say, with theories of history, with the philosophy of history, with the laws of history, with the patterns of history. 'The history of a nation is not only a succession of events, but also a chain of ideas.'

Isaiah berlin tolstoy