Among the various ideological products that emerged in modern Russia it is hard to find a more “imperial” doctrine than the teaching of the Eurasianists.^[1] Born in the aftermath of the imperial dissolution and the “gathering of peoples” by the Bolsheviks, Eurasianism attempted to reinvent the Russian Empire as a cultural, political, and geographic unity, and to reconcile a particular, illiberal vision of modernity with ethnic and cultural diversity of a multinational state. Although Eurasianism pulled into its orbit a number of important figures in scholarship, arts and literature, it always remained the brainchild of three intellectuals: Petr Nikolaevich Savitsky, Petr Petrovich Suvchinsky, and Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetskoi.^[2] In this article, I am going to explore the life of Savitsky and to investigate how his biography, his teachings, and his politics were linked in a web of imperial dreams and projects, as well as how his vision of the physical unity of Eurasia influenced 20th century intellectual developments, in particular the emergence of a structuralist program for renovation of humanities and social sciences in interwar Europe.
Intellectual history studies ideas, which are generated by individuals in the course of their lives, and hence combines influences of intellectual lineages and biographical contexts. In that sense, the present work seeks to explore biography anthropologically, and to use it as a key to our understanding of ideas about Russian imperial space. I rely upon a perspective, or, to be more precise, perspectives on Russian imperial history that are offered by the new imperial history of the post-Soviet space.^[3] One of the lines of research suggested by this approach focuses upon different languages for describing imperial unity and diversity, while another proposes to see imperial experiences, transfers of ideas, and cultural and social encounters within the multiethnic space of the Russian empire as crucial to our understanding of Russian imperial history and its actors and agents. Savitsky’s life was one shaped by imperial encounters; his ideas focused on a vision, the central concern of which was the establishment of a spatial unity for the Russian empire.
Petr Nikolaevich Savitsky’s active scholarly and political life stretched over half a century, from 1914 to 1968, a half-century that had witnessed two world wars, several revolutions, a complete redrawing of the European map, the rise and fall of Nazism and the development of Stalinism, and none of these developments and events passed by Savitsky. He was born in 1895 in Chernigov (nowadays Ukraine), where his father, a member of the local gentry, was chairman of the zemstvo administration. As we revisit Savitsky’s scholarly interests later on, we shall recall that statistics, demography and political economy were all applied practically in the zemstvo administration. For young Savitsky, though, intellectual life began with an encounter with the Russian version of Heimatkunde, kraevedenie. His family was part of the milieu of “Little Russian gentry” of Central and Eastern Ukraine, where “Little Russian identity” combined Russian language and loyalty to “Greater Russia” with intense interest in the local past and the glory of Cossackdom. Savitsky published several articles that dealt with the history of Ukrainian architecture and folk art, and he remained interested in the subject for the rest of his life (he kept Ukrainian songs and poetry in his archive). Among those who influenced young Savitsky were several Ukrainian historians-kraevedy, such as A. M. Lazarevsky (1834-1902, the author of a well-known work on the history of serfdom in Ukraine) and the writer, statistician and populist (narodnik) M. M. Kotsiubinsky (1864-1913), who received a job at the statistics department of Chernigov zemstvo with Savitsky-senior’s assistance.^[4] P. N. Savitsky retained until the end of his life a fascination with the “people” and the notion that the enlightenment of the masses depends on the educated class.^[5] Perhaps Savitsky’s closest friend and teacher in Chernigov was Vadim L’vovich Modzalevsky (1882-1921), the author of the genealogical codex of Little Russian noble families. Also a member of the Little Russian gentry, Modzalevsky took charge of the local archives and museum in Chernigov in 1911. Together with Modzalevsky Savitsky published a book on the history of Chernigov, the whole run of which was, however, destroyed in a 1919 fire at the print shop.^[6]
Savitsky might have been drawn to the Ukrainian national project, as was the case with Kotsiubinsky, for example, but his life took a different turn. Arguably, the crucial moment was Savitsky’s arrival in St. Petersburg, where he enrolled at the Polytechnic Institute. His most important teacher there was Petr Berngardovich Struve, Russia’s most articulate liberal nationalist.^[7] Under Struve’s influence, Savitsky became interested in debates on the future of Russian nationhood and the relationship between the imperial state and the emerging modern nations. Struve, no doubt, stimulated Savitsky’s interest in statistics, political economy, and economic geography, given the fact that Savitsky began writing for the journal Russkaia Mysl’, edited by his teacher. It is worth noting that his articles contained ideas that would later become part of the Eurasianist mainstream, yet they still revealed Savitsky’s local, Ukrainian interests: in one article Savitsky analyzed the economic component of Russian imperial expansion, arguing that Russia, as a contiguous land empire, had always been different from the colonial empires of Western Europe.^[8] In another piece, he developed what he later described to Vernadsky as a “dialectical concept of the ‘proto-nation’. For instance, the Ukrainian people is simultaneously an independent nation and part of a larger national whole”.^[9]
In 1916 Savitsky graduated from the Polytechnic Institute and entered the ranks of Russian imperial diplomacy. He became a commercial secretary for the Russian trade mission in Christiana, Norway. Interestingly, he worked under Konstantin Nikolaevich Gul’kevich (1865?-1935), a prominent Russian diplomat of Ukrainian origin, who remained a friend and adviser of Savitsky throughout the 1920s. Savitsky’s service as a diplomat was to be brief, since he served as a representative of a disintegrating empire. As he left for Chernigov in mid-1917, his wanderings in revolutionary Russia began.
In a letter to Gul’kevich written from Istanbul, where Savitsky was briefly employed by émigré relief organizations in the winter of 1919-1920, he described his recent experiences, which combined the shock of wounded national pride, disillusionment with the White cause, and an awareness of the empire’s fragility:

“I saw the regime of the Central Rada; during three months by the force of word and the force of arms together with my officer friends I had been defending my Chernigov estate from the Bolshevik gangs; I was liberated from this siege by the Germans and was witness to their seven months’ long regime; as a subaltern I fought in the ranks of the Russian Corps, which defended Kiev from Petliura and I lived through the fall of the city; together with my father I fled – or left, who can tell? – the city of Kiev; I saw and contacted with the French in Odessa and waited long enough to see the “glorious” end of l’оccupation française. From March 1919 to August I was in Ekaterinodar; from August to November I was floundering in the whirlwinds of the Russian “White Sovdepia”,^[10] the Russian South, which was just liberated from the Bolsheviks. I spent several weeks at the frontline and I lived in the cities and villages of Kharkov and Poltava. Then I moved to Rostov…”^[11]

It is significant that Savitsky shared these catastrophic experiences with his Eurasianist colleagues: Trubetskoi, for example, spent the year of 1918 wandering in the war-torn Caucasus (and briefly sojourned in Rostov, where he might have met Savitsky), while Suvchinsky fled Petrograd for Kiev (where he stayed throughout most of 1918) in an attempt to escape revolutionary destruction.^[12] These experiences, no doubt, made the founders of Eurasianism aware of the importance of national borderlands in Russia’s future. Paradoxically, these wanderings in a war-torn country also imbued them with a belief in the resurrection of Russia on new foundations, a theme recurrent in Eurasianist writings throughout the 1920s. These experiences made them associate Russia with the colonial world because the country’s “falling out of European life” seemed so complete during these tumultuous years.
Savitsky certainly had enough experience with the anti-Bolshevik forces to be as disillusioned with the White cause as were all Eurasianists. For a brief period in the winter and early spring of 1920 he served as an assistant to the representative of the Zemskii Soiuz in Constantinople, providing help to refugees and evacuees.^[13] At the same time, Struve invited Savitsky to work in the Department of External Relations of the Crimean Government of General Wrangel. Savitsky prepared statistical reports on the Crimean economy and participated in an attempt by Struve to secure international help for General Wrangel in the summer of 1920, traveling between Paris, Constantinople and Crimea. It was during one such trip to Paris, in July 1920, that he wrote a letter to his parents, in which we first encounter the term “Eurasianism”:

“Despite the charming climate and the Parisians’ elegance I begin to long for the Orient. I desire to see you, my dear all, and I am feeling as well that my heart knows its homeland only in Eurasia, among the fields of Chernigov, the steppes of Kuban, under the palm trees of Batum and in the commotion of Constantinople! I industriously propagate “Eurasianism”. But in Paris you would not find Lieven^[14]… and virtuous Europeans listen to my heretical predictions with horror…”^[15]

Savitsky must have had little faith in the ability of Wrangel even to retain Crimea, for he managed to rent an estate in Turkey for his family three months prior to the Crimean exodus of the White Army.^[16] The estate was located in Narli, close to Constantinople (as Savitsky liked to stress, “on the Asian bank of the Bosphorus”). After the evacuation of November 1920 it was on this estate that Savitsky, his parents and his brother established some kind of émigré agricultural cooperative.^[17] Savitsky’s parents and brother remained in Narli until 1922 and then had to flee (again) before the advance of the Kemalist forces. In the first days after the evacuation from Crimea Savitsky stayed at Narli. There he received a letter from Prince Andrei Lieven, who informed him that in Sofia a “Eurasianist” publishing enterprise was being planned and that Prince Nikolai Trubetskoi was charged with editing a Eurasianist collection of articles. Lieven invited Savitsky to participate and inquired about the addresses of other possible participants, such as P. B. Struve and A. V. Kartashev. We may safely assume that by that time discussions about “Eurasianism” had taken place between Savitsky, Lieven, Trubetskoi and Suvchinsky, possibly in Istanbul. In his reply to Lieven Savitsky wrote: “I received your letter (on the “Eurasianist publishing house”) and was very happy. May God help you, dear Prince, you and your comrades. I cannot express sufficiently how sympathetic I am to your initiative. On my side I can promise a “view and something else” on “Russia’s destiny” and an outline of the economic nature of Eurasia…”.^[18]
At the beginning of 1921 Savitsky himself departed for Sofia, where he became an editor of the journal Russkaia Mysl, re-launched by Struve in emigration. Savitsky was to represent the permanently absent Struve at the Russian-Bulgarian Publishing House, which was given the task of printing the journal.^[19] After years of intellectual solitude and minute bureaucratic work in Crimea Savitsky was impressed by the intensity of the émigré Russian intellectual life in Sofia and by his meetings with publishers and scholars. In the course of 1921 he took an active part in the initial elaboration of Eurasianist doctrine and wrote several articles for the first Eurasianist collection, Exodus to the East. At the end of 1921 Savitsky grew very bitter because of his personal and ideological conflict with Struve (who strongly criticized Eurasianists, and Savitsky in particular, for “populism”) and left Sofia for Prague, where he assumed a teaching position at the Russian Law School in the Czechoslovak capital, benefiting from the unprecedented action by the Czechoslovak government to support Russian refugees.^[20]
For the next 20 years, Savitsky feverishly wrote on Eurasianist topics, while his organizational work was no less important for the Eurasianist movement. Quite ascetic in private life and an extraordinarily hard working person, Savitsky dedicated himself completely to the cause. He published and edited an incredible number of books, articles and book reviews, not to mention his voluminous correspondence. His Eurasianist archive boasts more than 6,000 documents, including never-published manuscripts and meticulously penned minutiae of meetings. If we are to trust Nikolai Trubetskoi’s judgement, Savitsky had a difficult character, suspicious, irritable and at times unpleasant, which Trubetskoi tended to explain by Savitsky’s erratic lifestyle. His ties with members of the Eurasianist movement were often strained due to personal clashes; it was only with Trubetskoi that Savitsky got on very well and it was only with Trubetskoi that he established a lasting personal relationship (at least, among his equals in the movement).^[21] At the same time, Savitsky’s was an integral character; he completely internalized the Eurasianist doctrine and never doubted its logic and truth. The Eurasia he constructed became a reality (sometimes tragic) for Savitsky and he was loyal to this vision despite imprisonment and exile, to which he was subjected by his “ideocratic” Homeland.

RE-INVENTING EMPIRE: EURASIANIST DOCTRINE AND MOVEMENT

Savitsky was, perhaps, the most dedicated Eurasianist. His life and work were inseparable from the history of that remarkable doctrine and movement that combined quasi-fascist politics, an apology for empire, and fascination with the scholarly and artistic avant-garde. The Eurasianist movement emerged in 1920-1921 in Sofia, when a group of young Russian émigrés took up the Russian intelligentsia tradition of forming “kruzhki,” or intellectual circles, to explore the roots of the Revolution and the recent collapse of the Russian empire. These young intellectuals were Prince Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetskoi, eventually a famous linguist and the founder of structuralist phonology, Petr Petrovich Suvchinsky, a brilliant essayist, who on the eve of the Revolution published Russia’s leading musical journal and was a life-long friend of Stravinsky and Prokofiev, Georgii Vasil’evich Florovsky, an Orthodox thinker and Church historian,^[22] and Petr Nikolaevich Savitsky. Eurasianism, as the movement came to call itself, was founded on a number of dogmas of historical, ethnographical, geographical and political nature. Building upon the tradition of cultural and historical types, the Eurasianists argued that Russia was a world of its own, separate from both Europe and Asia, while Russians, unlike Poles or Czechs, had experienced the intense impact of “Turanians” (the nomadic peoples of the steppes of Asia, the Finno-Ugric and the Turkic peoples). These peoples played an essential role in bringing about the Russian state and culture. The Russian state, in its pre-Petrine form, was heir to the great nomadic empires, and a natural protector of the specific non-European culture that emerged in Eurasia. The Europeanizing reforms, the Eurasianists believed, violated the organic correspondence between that state and the underlying culture, and created a cleavage between Russia’s Europeanized elite and its Eurasian masses. The result was the militaristic rule of the Tsarist regime and the terror of the bureaucracy, which collapsed during the Revolution. The latter was thus viewed as not just a social turmoil, but also as an uprising of colonized Eurasians against the alien Europeanized regime.
Remarkably for its time, Eurasianism was not simply anti-Western, deploring European civilization as the climax of a standardizing modernity, which was a common theme among European conservatives. Rather, the Eurasianists drew a sharp border between Europe and Russia-Eurasia and declared the latter to be part (indeed, the potential leader of) the world of colonized peoples. The anti-colonialist rhetoric of the Eurasianists has a distinctly modern sound and in some ways it preceded the post-structuralist critique of colonialism in the second half of the 20th century: Trubetskoi, for example, proclaimed that all European sciences were in fact a tool of colonial domination and suggested that anthropology, ethnography and other disciplines be purged from judgments about superior and inferior cultures.^[23]
Distancing themselves from those Russian writers who subscribed to a common European “orientalization” of Asian peoples, the Eurasianists insisted on the wholeness of Eurasian civilization, thus salvaging the unity of the Russian Empire from modern nationalism. In order to prove the indivisible nature of Eurasia, they utilized arguments that ranged in disciplinary terms from theology to modern (and, in fact, advanced) linguistics. Eurasia was a whole as a union of languages (Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetskoi elaborated the concept of the Sprachbund), as an ethnographic mixture of peoples, as a common civilization and as a federation of peoples. Such a federation was re-created by the “state instinct” of the Bolsheviks, whom the Eurasianists welcomed as saviors of the Russian state tradition, attentive to the Asian component of the country, but whom they despised as representatives of European atheist and materialist culture.
In this seemingly ambiguous attitude toward the Bolsheviks the Eurasianists were, in fact, quite consistent. The Eurasianists’ own conception of history argued that revolutions were nothing more than the replacement of the “ruling layer [of the population],” an idea put forward by Lev Platonovich Karsavin, a philosopher who joined the movement in 1925.^[24] The Bolsheviks, by emancipating Russia from its old elite, cleared the way for this new ruling class. It was this class that was predestined to create a true “ideocratic” state. The conception of the “ideocratic state”, ruled by a single ideology, was elaborated by Nikolai Trubetskoi under the direct influence of Othmar Spann’s theory of Ständestaat: Trubetskoi met Spann in Vienna and discussed Eurasianist ideas with him.^[25] Such a state would preserve the Soviet demotic nature, yet it would get rid of Marxist theory and replace it with Eurasianism. The Eurasianists’ vision of the ideocratic state and their search for the “third way” between socialism and capitalism demonstrates their sensitivity to the intellectual climate of interwar Europe, with its predominance of proto-fascist ideologies. The ideology of the third way found a remarkable parallel in the aesthetics of the movement. The author of the Eurasianist aesthetic was Petr Suvchinsky, who corresponded actively not only with representatives of the Russian modernist milieu but also, among others, with Giuseppe Ungaretti. Suvchinsky argued in favor of combining the artistic avant-garde and its formalist experiment with religious, Orthodox foundations and tried to steer the Eurasianist vision of art and creativity onto a path between Russian formalism and Soviet Marxism.^[26]
The Eurasianists attempted to translate their ideas about the “ideocratic state” into political practice. The four founders of the Eurasianist movement (Trubetskoi, Suvchinsky, Florovsky and Savitsky) were joined in 1922 by a group of young émigré monarchist officers, among whom Petr Semenovich Arapov and Baron Aleksandr Vladimirovich Meller-Zakomelsky were prominent. This injection stimulated the proto-Fascist inclinations of the Eurasianists and the movement quickly developed from a purely ideological venture into a clandestine political organization, whose aim was to convert as many people as possible, both in the emigration and in the USSR, to Eurasianism. The Eurasianists believed that the converted members of the Soviet leadership would help transform the USSR into a true “ideocratic state” based on the principles of Eurasianism. To that end, in late 1923 the Eurasianists established contacts with the underground monarchist organization “Trest,” set up by the Soviet secret services to infiltrate the émigré community.^[27] Agents of Trest crept into the movement and totally controlled the smuggling of Eurasianist literature and visits by the Eurasianists to the USSR until spring 1927, when the real nature of the Trest became widely known among émigrés. Even at that point the Eurasianists continued to maintain that their teaching had the potential to win converts among the Soviet leadership and refused to give up attempts to propagate their ideas in the USSR. Moreover, the Eurasianist leaders conducted negotiations with representatives of the Soviet Union abroad (such negotiations were conducted, for instance, with G. L. Piatakov, who was the USSR trade representative in Paris in 1927) and cherished hopes of turning their movement into a “laboratory of thought” at the service of the Soviet opposition.^[28]
There is no doubt that Savitsky (as well as other intellectual leaders of Eurasianism) was involved in clandestine politics. By 1925 there was an internal dispute going on among the members of the movement. Trubetskoi protested against the “excessive” involvement with “some kind of conspirators” (in general, Trubetskoi tended to mistrust representatives of Trest) and appealed to his friends to follow his own motto “to keep as far from politics as possible”. In this discussion Savitsky firmly associated himself with Petr Suvchinsky and Petr Arapov, who insisted on an “activist policy”, which in fact meant more cooperation with Trest.^[29] Savitsky and Suvchinsky succeeded in convincing Trubetskoi that their line of behavior was more appropriate. Savitsky secretly traveled to the USSR at least twice in order to establish personal contact with the Trest. He stated in the Eurasianist program of 1927 that it had been written in Moscow and he preserved a note in his archive which confirmed that he had composed the program during a trip which had obviously been staged by the Soviet secret services.
Monarchist officers who had ties to the aristocratic emigration in Great Britain were recruited for the movement and succeeded in soliciting financial contributions to the Eurasianist cause from Henry Norman Spalding, a British theologian and student of Christianity, who mistakenly believed Eurasianism provided a way to prevent the spread of Marxism among the elites of colonized peoples.^[30] Coming in late 1924, Spalding’s generous donations made Eurasianism into a flourishing enterprise, with its own publishing house, annual almanacs, a chronicle and a spectacular yearly output of up to ten book titles. Yet, even this financial support did not prevent the movement from splitting apart in 1928. The inherent contradiction between approval of the Soviet state and the movement’s anti-Communist convictions led to a debate within the Eurasianist inner circle between Petr Suvchinsky (joined, among others, by the well known critic Prince Dmitry Sviatopolk-Mirsky), defending the pro-Soviet line, and Nikolai Trubetskoi and Petr Savitsky, supporting the orthodox Eurasianist standpoint. This debate burst into public view in 1928, when Suvchinsky successfully turned the newspaper “Evrazia”, which was published in Paris, into a tool of pro-Soviet propaganda. As a result, Trubetskoi left organized Eurasianism, while Savitsky successfully appropriated the name of the movement and excluded Suvchinsky’s group from the ranks of the Eurasianists.
The collapse of Eurasianism in 1928 - 1929 was at least in equal degree due to ideological differences among leading Eurasianists as to Savitsky’s and Suvchinsky’s personal clashes. Savitsky accused Suvchinsky of cynicism and pro-Marxist inclinations, while Suvchinsky deplored Savitsky’s “conservatism,” “White-guardism” and exalted style. When Trubetskoi left the movement in late 1928, Savitsky denounced the Parisian group and made Henry Norman Spalding, the British benefactor of Eurasianism, cut their funding. He also formed a new leadership in Prague, which consisted of himself, N. N. Alekseev, N. A. Klepinin and K. A. Chkheidze. P. N. Malevsky-Malevich, the Eurasianist treasurer, joined the new group after initial hesitation. Of these new leaders, only Savitsky himself and Alekseev had some intellectual authority. The Eurasianist congress, which Savitsky sponsored in 1931 in Brussels, failed to give the movement a new impetus. The new Eurasianist publications lacked the provocative stance championed by Suvchinsky and the intellectual breadth provided by Trubetskoi. Despite some interesting and promising recruits, such as the poet Zinaida Shakhovskaia and her husband, Sviatoslav Malevskii-Malevich, the movement suffered one blow after another. Funding was insufficient, even if Spalding occasionally sent donations to Savitsky’s group. Moreover, accusations of espionage and scandals followed one after the other: in 1932-34 there were persistent rumors that the Belgian group of Eurasianists was thoroughly infiltrated by Soviet agents and in 1934 the group had to be dissolved altogether.^[31] Other revelations came when Sergei Efron, a member of the movement and Marina Tsvetaeva’s husband, fled to the USSR in 1937 after the murder of the Soviet defector Reiss. It appeared that not only Efron but also the Klepinin family, active Eurasianists, worked for the Soviet secret services.
The movement continued to function throughout the 1930s under Savitsky’s leadership. Yet, deprived of the steady flow of Trubetskoi’s daring works and Suvchinsky’s modernist aura, Eurasianism in the 1930s was a bleak continuation of the original movement, even if in 1929 – 1931 the cooperation between Savitsky and Roman Jakobson was at its peak. The darkening political climate of Europe in the second half of the 1930s added to the movement’s demise. Some Eurasianists returned to the USSR and perished in Stalin’s camps. After 1929 Trubetskoi turned to his linguistic studies, only occasionally contributing to Eurasianist editions sponsored by Savitsky. In 1938 Trubetskoi died, after he had been arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo in Vienna. Roman Jakobson had to flee Czechoslovakia and went to the United States via Scandinavia; his exile proved crucial to the strengthening and spread of a structuralist paradigm elaborated under the impact of Eurasianism (a connection that I will discuss below). Suvchinsky, who was centrally involved in the scandals surrounding the split-up of the Eurasianist ranks in 1928, dedicated himself completely to music and became an important figure in the Parisian artistic scene; he lived until 1985 and influenced the work of such composers as Henri Boulez and Gérard Masson, whom Suvchinsky introduced to Stravinsky. Suvchinsky presided over the Domaine Musicale and inspired the Encyclopédie de la Musique (Fasquelle, Paris, 1958-1961).^[32] Only Savitsky, throughout the following years, remained a dedicated Eurasianist.