It was clear that in the United States there was a development not of the best, but of the middle and worst sides of European civilization; the notorious general voting, the tendency to politics... all the same as in Europe. A new dawn is not to be seen on this side of the ocean.
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"I love only science, and my children, and my wife, and my work, and the motherland."
"Knowledge is a holy thing, and it is a sacred duty to transmit it to others."
"There is nothing in this world that I fear to say."
"The capital fact to note is that petroleum was born in the depths of the earth, and it is only there that we must seek its origin."
"The chemical elements are the children of the sun."
Observations during his visit to the United States, critique of American society and politics, published in his work 'To the Cognition of Russia'.
Date: 1906
PoliticalFound in 1 providers: gemini
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The speaker argues that America did not create something genuinely new but instead amplified the worst traits of Europe, such as populist voting and political obsession. Rather than being a fresh civilization, the United States merely recycles European flaws on a larger scale. The hoped-for dawn of a better society has not arrived across the Atlantic, and the speaker sees no sign that it will.
Mendeleev, famous for the periodic table, also traveled widely and wrote on economics, industry, and national development for Russia. He visited the United States in 1876 to study its oil industry and left disappointed. A Russian patriot who believed in strong state-guided progress, he distrusted mass democracy and saw Western populism as shallow. His critique reflects a scientist-nationalist comparing civilizations by their substance.
Writing in the late 1800s, Mendeleev lived during an age when Russian intellectuals debated whether their country should imitate the West or forge its own path. The United States was booming after the Civil War but plagued by Gilded Age corruption, machine politics, and rampant speculation. European liberals once saw America as a beacon; by the 1870s many observers felt its politics had decayed into vote-buying and partisanship, confirming Slavophile doubts.
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