ФИЛОСОФСКО-КУЛЬТУРОЛОГИЧЕСКАЯ ИНТЕРПРЕТАЦИЯ ЭКСТРЕМИСТСКИХ ПРАКТИК В РОССИЙСКОЙ ИМПЕРИИ

Purpose of the study. This article analyzes extremist practices in the Russian Empire of the 18th–19th centuries as forms of cultural and philosophical response to crises of measure, identity, and authority under the conditions of catch-up modernization. It is demonstrated that extremism is not an anomaly but a specific structure of the cultural chronotope, in which violence, sacrifice, and the refusal of compromise become instruments of historical action and symbolic expression. The study examines the 17th-century religious schism, Old Believer resistance, Peter I’s reformist absolutism, peasant and Cossack uprisings, as well as the revolutionary ideology of the radical intelligentsia. It concludes that extremism in Russian culture was not merely a political practice, but an expression of sacred anxiety and a metaphysical drive to restore authentic legitimacy through the destruction of the old world. The aim of the study is to reconstruct extremism as a philosophical and cultural mechanism that structures transitional states of Russian civilization in situations of temporal and ontological crisis. Research methodology. The study is based on a philosophical and cultural approach that interprets extremism not as a social deviation, but as a form of symbolic and ontological response to crises of measure, identity, and authority. The research employs methods of philosophical hermeneutics, event analysis, and categorical synthesis (measure, form, symbol, violence). The central methodological framework is event analysis, which treats extremist acts as turning points in cultural history — disrupting established norms and generating new layers of meaning. This is complemented by philosophical hermeneutics, which reveals the internal logic of radical action as an expression of sacred anxiety. The study also employs categorical analysis of the concepts of measure, gesture, sacrifice, violence, and imposture, allowing for the reconstruction of the deep structures of cultural memory. A key role is also played by the cultural-semiotic approach, which views extremism as a mode of meaning-making under conditions of normative collapse. The results of the study. The study produced theoretically and culturally significant findings that enable a new interpretation of extremism in the history of the Russian Empire as an ontologically meaningful and philosophically structured phenomenon. It was established that extremism in 18th–19th century Russia is not a marginal deviation but a structural element of the cultural chronotope that emerges during moments of civilizational rupture, when established norms and forms of legitimacy lose their stability. The 17th-century religious schism and the resistance of the Old Believers are interpreted as extremism of measure — a sacred protest against ontological intrusion into the liturgical and ritual order. These forms of violence are not political but metaphysical in nature. The emergence of state extremism under Peter I is analyzed as a model in which violence becomes not an exception but a rationalized tool of modernization embedded within state normativity. The study highlights the dual nature of power, which combines order with destruction. Further, the transformation of extremism in popular culture during the 18th–19th centuries is revealed in the form of peasant and Cossack uprisings, sectarian movements, and the cult of the impostor as an archetype of sacred resistance. Popular consciousness perceives violence as a means of restoring lost justice. The philosophy of the radical intelligentsia (from Belinsky to Lenin) is reconstructed as an ideological system in which violence acquires ethical and mythopoetic legitimacy. Terror becomes not only a political act but a form of cultural expression. The study introduces the concept of «pure extremism» as the final stage of radical action, in which the destruction of order becomes an end in itself and an act of eschatological rupture with historical time. Revolution is thus interpreted as a metaphysical limit of modernity, where measure as a cultural category vanishes. The prospects of studying. The findings of this study open up avenues for further investigation of extremism as a structural phenomenon of cultural history that transcends political or criminological interpretations. Promising directions for future research include: expanding the historical scope of analysis to include extremist practices of the Soviet and post-Soviet periods in order to trace the continuity between imperial and modernist forms of violence and radicalism; comparative cultural analysis, involving the juxtaposition of the Russian model of extremism with similar phenomena in Western European, Islamic, and East Asian cultural contexts, which would help identify both universal and culturally specific parameters of extremism as a form of limit-experience; deepening the conceptual framework through the development of key notions such as gesture, imposture, eschatological action, and symbolic sacrifice as core forms of expressing extremist experience within culture.