After the collapse of the Soviet Union many observers both within the newly created Russian Federation and abroad were contemplating if any new ideology would take Marxism’s place and, if so, which ideology that might be. There is quite some evidence that one of the most prominent contenders in this competition has become Eurasianism.^[1] As an ideology Eurasianism was invented in the early 1920s by a few young Russian intellectuals, who had left the disintegrating Russian Empire in the wake of Revolution and Civil War and found refuge in Central and Western Europe. The Eurasianists claimed that Russia was neither Europe nor Asia but “Eurasia,” a unique geographical, historical and cultural world of its own, different from both Europe and Asia, and, at the same time, combining and synthesizing the best qualities of both. After 1991 Eurasianism found numerous propagandists and adherents in post-communist Russia. The most prominent “neo-Eurasianists” were the orientalist and ethnographer Lev Gumilev,^[2] and the nationalist intellectual Aleksandr Dugin.^[3]
No doubt, the surprising popularity of neo-Eurasianism in Russia since the early 1990s was one of the factors stimulating Western scholars to more intensively examine the legacy of the “classical” Eurasianist movement of the inter-war period and its potential relevance for today. As a result we now have several monographs in various European languages that attempt to reconstruct the original Eurasianist teachings as a more or less coherent ideology, as a unified body of philosophical, economic, historical, political and other ideas.^[4]
Milan Subotić’s fine study provides the first detailed account of classical Eurasianism in the Serbian language. Methodologically Subotić sees himself as a historian of Russian political ideas; his approach is based on a traditional close reading, comparison and analysis of the movement’s published key texts. The result is a sober, comprehensive, well-written and well-argued examination of classical Eurasianism that provides an informative and reliable introduction to one of the most fascinating phenomena of Russian intellectual history.
The book is divided into four parts: the first part gives a brief account of the movement’s organization from its foundation in 1921 until it ceased to exist in the late 1930s; part two describes the concept of “Eurasia” as a philosophical and scientific construction; part three examines the political and social doctrines of Eurasianism; the concluding part situates the movement within the Russian intellectual tradition and assesses the legitimacy of today’s neo-Eurasianists to claim the legacy of the “classical” interwar movement for their own political interests. The text is supplemented by a valuable and comprehensive bibliography as well as brief biographical sketches of the original Eurasianist movement’s main protagonists.
In comparison to the study’s other parts Subotić’s account of the organizational history of Eurasianism in the 1920s and 1930s is rather sketchy. Unfortunately, Subotić was unable to consult archival documents and thus his account of the movement’s history reflects the two main focal points of the available secondary literature: the founding of the group in 1921 by the economist P. N. Savitskii, the linguist N. S. Trubetskoi, the musicologist P. P. Suvchinskii and the theologian G. V. Florovskii; and the “schism” of early 1929, the movement’s breakup into a pro-Marxist and anti-Marxist wings, a result of the movement’s gradual politization throughout the 1920s and possible infiltration by the GPU. We do not get to know much about other less-known events and the many less-prominent rank-and-file Eurasianists, who in large numbers attended the movement’s lectures, participated in Eurasianist seminars and contributed many articles to the movement’s various publications. Geographically, Subotić focuses on the well-known Eurasianist groups in Prague and Paris, where the movement’s publishing house was located. It would have been very interesting in this respect to hear something about the local Serbian and Yugoslavian context. After all, since the mid-1920s Belgrade was one of the centers of the movement. The Belgrade émigré weekly Russkii voennyi vestnik was subsidized by the Eurasianists and became one of their semi-official organs. In November 1927, the movement’s main ideologist Savitskii lectured in Belgrade in front of an audience of more than one thousand.^[5]
The impact of the Soviet secret police’s infiltration of the movement cannot be underestimated and Subotić is right to ascribe the movement’s politization to a large degree to the influence of the GPU. Yet, contrary to Subotić’s account, this politization began years before the “schism,” when in 1924 the Eurasianists voluntarily affiliated themselves with the so-called “Trest,” a bogus Monarchist “counter-revolutionary” group within the Soviet Union, created and maintained by the GPU. As a result of this affiliation the GPU was able to considerably “direct” the Eurasianists’ activities, and even place several of their own articles in Eurasianist publications.
The second and third chapters of Subotić’s book provide a profound and coherent account of the Eurasianists’ attempts to re-define Russia historically, geographically and culturally as a world of its own (“Eurasia”), and to use these insights for the development of political strategies to transform the communist state and government into a genuinely “Eurasianist” one. Subotić competently discusses most of the Eurasianist key publications and skillfully combines the movement’s various writings on a wide variety of topics into a coherent and convincing synthesis.
Subotić begins his account of the movement’s ideas with a discussion of Trubetskoi’s anti-European pamphlet “Europe and Mankind.” Trubetskoi subjected European (“Romano-germanic”) universalism to a forceful critique, demanded cultural pluralism and de-Europeanization and passionately called all Russians to undergo a profound process of “self-cognition.” Russians, Trubetskoi argued, would have to acknowledge that in fact their culture and psychology had over the centuries been exposed to a strong impact of “Turanian” and other “Eastern” elements, and, as a result, were neither “European,” nor “Slavic,” but “Eurasian.”
Trubetskoi’s ethno-cultural definition of “Eurasia,” Subotić explains, was complemented by Savitskii’s discovery of the country’s unique and remarkable geographic structure: a combination of four horizontal flag-shaped soil and vegetation zones that exhibited amazing symmetries both in their latitudinal and longitudinal composition. Although Subotić does not discuss Savitskii’s many works on economic questions and considers the geographic definition of Eurasia “the essential trait of the Eurasianist teachings” (P. 80), he escapes the common temptation to reduce Savitskii’s geographic argument to mere “geopolitics.” Subotić’s perceptive comparison of Savitskii’s “Eurasia” with other interpretations of Russian geography, including those of V. I. Lamanskii, H. J. Mackinder and K. Haushofer allows him to correctly argue that geography had never become Eurasianism’s decisive argument. On the contrary, Russia’s unique geography could become meaningful for Eurasianism only in so far as it was paralleled by a corresponding historical development.
On the basis of the historian G. V. Vernadskii’s writings Subotić describes the Eurasian interpretation of Russian history as that of a permanent struggle of the “forest” and the “steppe,” of a rhythmical change of unity and disunity of the two that ultimately led to a unity of both within the borders of Tsarist Russia and the USSR. For both Vernadskii and Trubetskoi the Mongolian period in Russian history was the central aspect of Russian history. As Trubetskoi argued in his highly speculative pamphlet “The Legacy of Genghis-Khan,” Russia had inherited not only Byzantine Orthodox spirituality but also Mongolian great power statecraft. The permanent interaction between Slavic and non-Slavic inhabitants had left its mark even on the languages spoken in Eurasia. Although genetically unrelated, they acquired common features and “converged” into what the linguist R. Jakobson, briefly associated with the movement in the early 1930s, described as the “Eurasian language union.” Once the Eurasianists had collected sufficient evidence that “Eurasia” in fact constituted a particular “continent,” a “world of its own,” Subotić explains, they could apply their insights about the country’s special nature to answer the burning questions about Russia’s political future and develop a suitable strategy to overcome the communist regime.
At the example of L. P. Karsavin’s essential essay on the “Phenomenology of revolution” Subotić shows how the Eurasianists interpreted the revolution as a necessary and positive stage in Russian history. Going through a complex development of numerous stages, Karsavin argued, the revolution in Russia had been a protest against the Europeanization of Russia that finally led to the emergence of a new “ruling stratum” from the depths of the nation, which sooner or later would rid itself of the Bolshevik leaders, using them as nothing but a tool for their own purpose.
Although the Bolsheviks were, to a certain degree, the legitimate rulers of Russia, the country’s future had nothing to do with Marxism, claimed the legal scholar N. N. Alekseev, whose writings serve Subotić as the main source on Eurasianism’s political views. In Alekseev’s opinion Marxism was a Western political concept with the ambition to be a universally valid social and political ideology, and thus was unsuitable for the unique conditions of Russia-Eurasia, a particular “world of its own.” The solution for Eurasia was neither capitalism nor its negation (communism), but the construction of a “Eurasianist state,” the “negation of the negation,” as Subotić calls it (P. 195). Internally this new state would be organized as an “ideocracy,” i.e., the government would be subordinated to the Eurasianist “idea.” The population would be organized as a “demoty,” i.e., a form of indirect government without the formal mechanisms of a democracy, through various corporative organs, where people could more effectively convey their needs to the ruling Eurasianist stratum. The vertical organization of the Eurasian state, in the opinion of both Alekseev and Trubetskoi, would be complemented by a similarly harmonious horizontal organization of the various nationalities into a “Eurasianist federation.” It would be legitimized by its own ideology – an “All-Eurasian nationalism,” entirely different from the Tsarist “All-Russian chauvinism” – it would be a true brotherhood of nationalities with the Russians being only the primus inter pares.
Subotić’s analysis of the Eurasianist political ideas gains much from his comparison to those of other “post-revolutionary” movements, such as the so-called “Changing Signpost” movement. Despite significant ideological differences they all accepted the revolution and the victory of Bolshevism in Russia as irreversible facts, and saw the only way to struggle with the new regime in a future transformation of its ideology and political system into a “third way” that would be neither liberal and democratic capitalism nor communism.
It is surprising that Subotić pays almost no attention to the writings and views of the prominent Eurasianist P. P. Suvchinskii, who after all was one of the movement’s founders and, besides Trubetskoi and Savitskii, one of the three members of the ideological “troika,” the group’s leading ideological circle. It appears as if Suvchinskii’s idiosyncratic writings, and in particular his difficult concept of “confession of every day life” (bytovoe ispovednichestvo), do not really fit into a systematic account of Eurasianism. Could it thus be that there were at least two different Eurasianisms, one scientific-systematic and one artistic-performative, as Trubetskoi presumed in November 1928?^[6] And could it be that conceptual as much as political differences ultimately caused the famous “schism” of the movement in early 1929? Whatever may be the answer, “classical” Eurasianism of the 1920s and 1930s appears as a much more complex phenomenon than post-Soviet attempts of actualization and transformation of its ideology into a ready-made political program might suggest. Subotić’s conclusion points in this direction. He approvingly quotes the famous assessment of G. V. Florovskii, one of Eurasianism’s founders, who became disillusioned and left the movement in 1923, that Eurasianism’s truth was the “truth of the questions and not of the answers, the truth of the problems and not of their solutions” (P. 245).
Subotić acknowledges Eurasianism’s many intellectual predecessors in the history of Russian thought, and skillfully compares the movement’s ideas to those of the Slavophiles, N. Ia. Danilevskii, K. N. Leont’ev, pointing out both similarities and differences. At the same time Subotić is very well aware that Eurasianism as a historical phenomenon cannot be adequately assessed by looking at the Russian intellectual tradition alone and stresses the movement’s European context as well. Strongly influenced by continental Europe’s ubiquitous catastrophic Zeitgeist after the devastating Great War, the Eurasianists were the contemporaries of O. Spengler’s “Decline of Europe” and the so-called “conservative revolutionaries” in Germany. Subotić’s statement that “Eurasianism is both a Russian and a European phenomenon – despite the Eurasianists’ self-understanding and their critics’ inclination for reductionism” (P. 261) forcefully makes this important point.
Finally, Subotić’s concluding comparison of “classical” Eurasianism with present-day “neo-Eurasianist” tendencies pleads to judge Eurasianism as a historical phenomenon sui generis. Whereas the classical Eurasianists were devoted to a scientific ethos, avoided politics if possible, and were concerned exclusively with Russia, today’s Eurasianists are highly politicized and see themselves in a universal mission against American-led globalization. Neo-Eurasianism, Subotić summarizes, is an eclectic collection of Eurasianist and non-Eurasianist ideas, an “ideological cocktail” (P. 267), where Eurasianism is only one and an unfortunately too often abused ingredient. Does, in Subotić’s opinion, Eurasianism have a political future in present-day Russia? Subotić is skeptical: “Eurasianism is an intellectual movement of the Russian emigration’s ‘first wave’ that despite attempts for re-actualization belongs to the past” (P. 243).
Although primarily written for the Serbian reader, Subotić’s elegant study provides one of the most comprehensive and systematic accounts of classical Eurasianism and certainly deserves attention beyond the limits of Serbian scholarship.