In a recent meeting with a colleague teaching Chinese history I mentioned “Eurasian” history as my subject, much to the genuine surprise of my interlocutor, to whose generation the term referred to descent from mixed marriages between Europeans and native peoples of South-East Asia, mainly Indochina and Indonesia. It took quite some time to explain to the curious Sinologist the way in which “Eurasia” has emerged as a contender to become the new geo-cultural concept embracing all or parts of the former “Soviet space,” floated along with notions of “East European and North Asian,” “post-Soviet,” “post-Mongol,” “post-Socialist,” “former USSR,” etc. space. My interlocutor’s confusion aside, problems with “Eurasia” as a designation for the former “Slavic field” are manifold.^[1]
While residents and scholars of Turkic or Muslim countries and regions might welcome it or at least consider it to be neutral, it is very doubtful whether Ukrainians, let alone Balts and Finns, will ever agree to be called “Eurasians.” On the one hand, the notion of Eurasia is firmly associated with Russian imperialism; on the other, Western attempts to lump together groups each of which highly values its own connections to “Europe,” appear at the very least arrogant and tactless, if not outright orientalist. As Stefan Wiederkehr perceptively noted in the work discussed below, the proliferation of studies of Eurasianism in countries of Eastern Europe underscores the importance of Eurasia as a new boundary-making tool in the former Soviet world. At the same time, one cannot but notice certain parallels between the use of “Eurasia” and other “Euros,” such as “Eurafrica” (a term with some history behind it), or the openly racist “Eurabia” of the extreme European right.^[2]
“Eurasia” is, indeed, geographical nonsense (not that the continent of “Europe” ever made sense as a geographical concept) and cannot be substantiated without recourse to a preconceived notion of a space defined by selectively chosen criteria, as critical studies of Savitskii’s geography discussed below demonstrate.^[3] But even its cultural and historical content is highly questionable. What should it include and what should be left out? And according to what principles? More importantly, what is the intellectual luggage associated with the term “Eurasia,” and what are its chances of satisfying the critical need of area studies to rethink old boundaries and conventions?
For one, the borders of imperial formations before and after 1917 did not coincide. If we take the legacy of the multiethnic Russian Imperium as a defining feature of “Eurasia,” we will have to include Finland and Manchuria but exclude parts of Western Ukraine, and, to the chagrin of those who cherish Chingis’ legacy, Mongolia. Much of the former socialist countries beyond the USSR will be left out. If we consider the 20th century experiences of Soviet style Communism, “Eurasia” will rapidly expand to include much of Central and Eastern Europe, absolving historians of the “Slavic” problem, and extend all the way to China, Mongolia, Cuba, and Vietnam (see Tuong Vu’s article in this issue of Ab Imperio) but Afghanistan will not qualify, neither will Finland.
The problem of historical trajectories in Eurasia is no simpler than that of historical geography. While Byzantine Christianity left a rich cultural and political legacy to Kievan Rus’ and Muscovy, the extent of the transformation of the Russian Orthodox Church under the Petrine bureaucratic state calls into question significant continuities. However much contemporary scholars are fascinated by the Mongol world empire and its influence across the Old World, few would seriously argue that the descendants of Chingis Khan had any visible impact on the modern Russian Empire beyond Kliuchevskii’s labeling the genealogical books of the Muscovite Boyars of the 16th century “a catalogue of a Russian ethnographic museum” because they contained “Russian, German, Greek, Lithuanian, and even Tatar and Finnish elements.”^[4] Although Martin Malia termed Stalin “the Red Khan,”^[5] such a designation did justice neither to the Mongols, nor to Soviet style Communism. Rather, not unlike the famous “Eastern mode of production,” it was a sign of a familiar orientalization of an unfamiliar, unpleasant, or outright scary social phenomenon. The Habsburgs, Hohenzollerns, Ottomans or Qing all influenced the outlying regions of Eurasia in different ways. Yet, the only two imperial formations, whose impact everywhere appears to remain real, measurable, and sizeable, were the former Russian Empire and the not less former USSR. Superimposing one or another upon the map of Eurasia will produce different result (see above).
To be sure, one can still use “Eurasia” in a vague sense, presupposing the profound impossibility of drawing precise borders and privileging connections and entanglements between many multiethnic imperial formations of Central and Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Far East, as well as recognizing the heavy influence (or toll) exerted by the decades of Soviet-style Communism on so many parts of the world. Indeed, recognizing such entanglements can enrich our understanding of how people, ideas, artifacts and practices traveled in the space between the Atlantic and the Pacific across the Old World, along what Humboldt called “Verkehrstrasse” of Eurasia. It is in that sense that historians of China, for example, have taken up “Eurasia” to demonstrate not only Qing’s expansion into nomadic, Turkic and Mongol speaking Inner Asia but also ways in which the Islamic civilization influenced China itself.^[6]
In many ways, it is exactly this quality of “Eurasia” understood as a means to de-center Euro-centric and Russo-centric narratives of the past and present while offering a possibility to maintain some intellectual framework of reference that attracted many historians of the former Russian Empire and USSR to this term. This perspective, no doubt, was also present in classic Eurasianism of the 1920s, which suggested the concept of “world history” and promoted Eurasia as a means to pursue new historical visions,^[7] albeit with an outcome that supported blatant Russian nationalism. Back in 1933, Petr Savitskii reported to George Vernadsky his impressions from the VII World Congress of Historical Sciences in Warsaw (where he took part in a section on what might be called today “historical regions”) suggesting that the Congress demonstrated the deep provincialism of contemporary European history due to the fact that all histories were “national, not social,” and that the Orient did not occupy historians’ attention.^[8] Today, the importance of “Eurasia” for world history is being revisited, and some of the legacy of Eurasianism in formulating the concept of world history remains interesting and significant.^[9]
In the former Slavic studies field, though, Eurasia remains of a vague term. While some have suggested Eurasia as an “anti-paradigm” for formerly Russian/Soviet studies, other scholars saw some kind of Eurasian manifestation in a range of historical and cultural phenomena, taking “Eurasia” as a term for Russia’s engagement with the “East,” or as a symptom of uneasiness and ruptures in discourses on its multifaceted identity.^[10] For Harsha Ram, for instance, “Eurasian” qualities of Velimir Khlebnikov’s poetry revealed an attempt to engage the cultural space of the “Eurasian world.”^[11] Boris Gasparov described some common features in the understanding of language between the Polish linguist Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and the Russian missionary and pedagogue Nikolai Il’minskii as a reflection of their Eurasian encounters.^[12] Michael Smith suggested a “Eurasian imperative” in Soviet linguistic policies of the 1920s and in the creation of national identities, languages and alphabets across the former Russian empire.^[13] Eurasia is now used beyond the Slavic field, too. Specialists in South and East Asian history (pace my Sinologist) begin to see it as a means to cross conventional borders between “civilizations” and disciplines in much the same way as they explore parallels in historical development across the Old World.^[14]
Indeed, “Eurasia” appears to be relevant to many key problems that excite today’s specialists on the former Russian Empire/USSR. The emergence of an entire field of study devoted to the Eastern borderlands of the former Russian Empire, Muslim or otherwise, certainly invokes questions pertaining to the interaction between different cultural milieus, and, hence, presents the problem of the overall framework within which these questions could be described or addressed.^[15] Much to the credit of specialists in this field, they have in general remained skeptical about “Eurasia” and recognized its profound intellectual limits by largely avoiding the term altogether.^[16]
Often the debate on the applicability of the postcolonial paradigm in general and concepts derived from Edward Said in particular to the case of the Russian Empire bump into a kind of “Eurasianist” argument pointing either to the serious problems with identifying the subject of imperial orientalization, or to the fact of “internal” orientalization of the Russian peasantry by the educated classes.^[17]
Moreover, given that the Eurasianists of the 1920s and the Russian/Soviet scholars of the “Orient” early in the 20th century did elaborate in an abstract form a criticism of European cultural colonialism not unlike that of Said (albeit from the position of extreme right rather than moderate left in the case of the Eurasianists), and that Russia, as one of the first developing countries does present an interesting case study in terms of turning Saidian rhetoric into an object of research rather than analytical language, it remains to be seen whether scholars will mine that possibility for further insights.^[18] Certainly, scholars of postcolonial literatures took notice of the “Eurasian dimension” of Russian studies.^[19] Undoubtedly, “Eurasianism,” with its combination of a critique of Eurocentric worldviews employed in the pursuit of imperial power with a radical anti-modernism and, paradoxically, a defense of the empire’s integrity, sheds much needed light on the often unique position of Saidian legacy as something that cannot be objectified and looked at as an ideology in itself. If we cannot explore the “political ontology” (Bourdieu’s term) of Saidian work, we probably can unravel such ontology in another case of anti-Orientalism with Trubetskoi and company, hopefully with interesting results.
All these implications of Eurasia, quite fascinating in their own right, are often overshadowed and complicated by the fact that the term “Eurasia” in application to the former Russian or Soviet world is inextricably linked to the legacy of a remarkable group of thinkers, émigrés from revolutionary Russia, who elaborated a multifaceted and complex response to the disintegration of Russia as an empire and as a Europeanization project, and to its unlikely emergence as the first country in the world undertaking practical measures to build a utopia along the lines of 19th century socialist teachings. This response was in the form of self-proclaimed “Eurasianism” (evraziistvo); it was an intellectual product of above all three people: Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetskoi (better known as one of the 20th century most prominent linguists), Petr Petrovich Suvchinskii (a connoisseur of music on the Petersburg scene before 1917 and in Paris in the 1930s – 1960s), and Petr Nikolaevich Savitskii (an economist and geographer and tireless propagator of Eurasia and Eurasianism). As an organized movement, it owed its existence to these three plus Petr Nikolaevich Arapov (otherwise an obscure White émigré officer with ties to Soviet secret services) and, to a much lesser degree, Petr Nikolaevich Malevskii-Malevich, an émigré White officer and a son of the Russian imperial ambassador to Japan. A multitude of other individuals were involved in the 1920s and 1930s in the orbit of the remarkable Eurasianist group but the movement (and ideas) really were engineered by the above mentioned five.
Of those who became involved with Eurasianism but never formally joined it, perhaps, the most fascinating case is presented by Roman Osipovich Jakobson. Though he shared in many intellectual pursuits of the Eurasianist group, and even wrote a well-known treatise on the Eurasian language union (Sprachbund), Jakobson remained politically very distant from the Eurasianist movement and was consciously kept at a distance by the latter. George Florovsky (one of the original founders who increasingly severed his ties to Eurasianism after 1922), Lev Karsavin (whose participation was imposed upon the rest by Suvchinskii), Dmitry Sviatopolk-Mirskii, Anton Kartashev, Petr Bitsilli, Vasilii Nikitin, Konstantin Chkheidze, George Vernadsky, Vladimir Il’in, Semen Frank, Nikolai Alekseev, Sergei Pushkarev, Pavel Chelishchev, Artur Lur’e, Marina Tsvetaeva, Sergei Efron, Emilia Litauer, the Malevskii-Maleviches and the Klepinins (to name but a few most well known figures) were all connected to the Eurasianist venture, especially in its later, more confused and problematic stage, but really exerted little influence on the movement’s direction and especially on the ideas elaborated by the core group of organizers. They were just fellow travelers, invitees, dragged into the orbit of the movement mostly by the charms and charisma of Petr Suvchinskii (or, less frequently, by the scholarly passions of Trubetskoi and Savitskii) and asked to present texts that would fit in with the Eurasianist “system.” Each of these individuals, undoubtedly, imbued his or her interpretation of Eurasianism with one’s own content, not always to the leaders’ satisfaction. Thus, for Florovsky, early Eurasianism was a product of a “league of Russian culture,” a spiritual search for new religious grounds after the catastrophe of 1917; for Sviatopolk-Mirskii, Eurasianism was a perfect venue for a range of escapades (against the bourgeois milieu of English scholarship on Russia, against contemporary émigré circles, etc.), for George Vernadsky the movement presented an intellectual milieu to explore new kinds of historical conceptions of the history of Russia as a multiethnic space (unsuccessful and problematic, it should be noted).
The Eurasianist “system” itself involved a geographical component (“Eurasia” as a “continent” defined not so much by the oceans as by certain regularities of climate and landscape); a historical one (“Eurasia” as an outcome of the Mongol “unification” of the “continent” that prior to the Mongol conquests had been ruled by state formations based on river systems); a national one (Russia-Eurasia as a space of the realization of the Russian national destiny inextricably linked with the Orthodox religion); an imperial one (“Eurasia” as a space of brotherly co-existence of the Slavs, Finn-Ugrians, Turks, etc); a literary one (“Eurasia” as a potential space of new creativity that combined religious foundations with modernist experimentation); an anti-Western, anti-European, and anti-colonialist one (“Eurasia” as a potential leader of the rebellion of the colonized peoples of the world against European imperialist domination); a conservative one (“Eurasia” as an antidote to the universalizing and standardizing impact of European modernity); and an epistemological one (“Eurasia” as the symbol and the locus of the development of a specifically Russian science with its focus on wholeness and structure rather than on “atomistic fact-gathering” of its Western counterparts). The “system” also involved a quasi-theory of politics rejecting procedural democracy in favor of a totalizing regime based on the rule of a powerful idea. Most of the political thinking of Eurasianism was borrowed from the practice of the Soviet regime and contemporary corporatist ideas; the Eurasianist also found theoretical writings of contemporary German and Austrian conservatives, Othmar Spann’s theory of “Staendestaat” in particular, to resonate with their own views. Combining a modernist search for the rejuvenation and renewal of society on Romantic totalizing foundations, religious or ideological, with a taste for decisive and organic politics brought the Eurasianists very close to generic fascism.
Each of these elements relied on a specific intellectual tradition, recast in new terms in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and the disintegration of the Russian Empire along social and ethno-national lines. Thus, the geographical idea of Eurasia as a separate continent descended from a Russian re-working (for instance, by Lamanskii or Mendeleev) of the ideas of Humboldt and Ritter. While the term “Eurasia” as a designation of the “Russian world” apparently belongs to the Austrian geologist Eduard Suess, the notion of Russia’s Asian connections goes back to at least Karamzin and Herzen. The anti-European rhetoric built upon the long tradition of Russian conservative and diversitarian thought, including thinkers such as N. Ia. Danilevsky and K. N. Leontiev, etc.
Another important element in the history of Eurasianism was its involvement with the underground world of Soviet agents who penetrated the first emigration. From as early as 1923, the Eurasianists, together with General Kutepov’s organization, were linked in a web of secretive dealings under the umbrella of the “Trest,” a GPU sponsored fake monarchist organization supposedly in existence in the USSR.^[20] While there is little evidence that this involvement had significant impact on the general ideas of Eurasianism, it did underscore the Eurasinists’ readiness to engage in underground activities and their willingness to pursue practical work in order to achieve their political goals. Above all, this encounter was a sign of the psychological state of the Eurasianist milieu, and it did contribute to the impetus behind the movement’s consolidation and expansion.
Given the complexity of the Eurasianist “system” of ideas (and of its evolution and decay), a synthetic study of the movement and its place in Russian and European intellectual tradition, understandably, presents a tremendous challenge. Apart from the need to venture into fields as different as historiographies of late imperial Russia (religious revival, professions, neo-Kantian philosophy, intelligentsia, the Ukrainian question, Russian national historical narratives), structural linguistics, Russian conservatism, and German geosophical thought, the sources on the history of Eurasianism are scattered in archival collections in New York, Princeton, Moscow, Paris, Prague, and London. Some of these sources are known to scholars, while some (albeit not many by now) remain undiscovered. The first studies of Eurasianism relied largely on published materials and some correspondence made available in the West by Roman Jakobson. In the past decade or so, the study of Eurasianism began to change as more and more scholars began to work with archival collections and measure Eurasianist ideas against the background of the movement’s inner life.
One of the first monographs on Eurasianism published after the collapse of the USSR and the revival of interest in Eurasianism belonged to Marlene Laruelle. Her study, a doctoral dissertation defended under the direction of Catherine Poujol at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, explored Eurasianism as an ideology and a discursive construction. As the pioneering work in the study of Eurasianism, Laruelle’s work presents a good deal of mixture of achievements and weaknesses. Laruelle was the first scholar to look at Eurasianism in the context of contemporary theorizing of the production of knowledge and employed a sophisticated theoretical language to address Eurasianism’s many complexities. Laruelle’s book is divided into three parts (Philosophy of History and Nation in Russia, Eurasianism as a Geographical Ideology, and Historiography and Historiosophy of Eurasianism), with each part subdivided into two chapters.
In the first part, Laruelle charts the chronological development of the Eurasianist movement and explores Eurasianism as a Weltanschauung and ideology. The former is treated exclusively on the basis of published works and secondary sources and is the weakest part of the book. The lack of a solid archival base leads the scholar to some mistakes and misinterpretations. For example, her distinction between the “idealists” and the “pragmatics” in the movement does not hold up when new archival sources are revealed. All members of the Eurasianist leadership were equally committed to the practical and political activities aimed at spreading Eurasianist ideas both in emigration and in the USSR (albeit from time to time Trubetskoi would grumble about the political work, he nevertheless remained committed to it). Similarly, some individuals mentioned by Laruelle as Eurasianist “leaders” hardly had any influence on Eurasianist ideas or practice. While Laruelle’s excursion into the history of Russian nationalist thought is useful, the choice of authors and their relationship to Eurasianism is little substantiated.
Much more interesting and complex is Laruelle’s treatment of Eurasianist ideas on history, civilization, and science. Laruelle correctly points out the Hegelian roots of the Eurasianist understanding of history, which had been noted by Gasparov and Liberman,^[21] but misses the fact that this understanding was not directly borrowed from Hegel. Rather, it was mediated by the Russian Romantics, in particular by Herzen, whose influence on Eurasianism is still to be explored.^[22] While Laruelle relies heavily on the work of Patrick Sériot (see below) in her treatment of the organicist metaphor in Eurasianism and of the influence of neo-Platonic thought on the Eurasianist epistemology, she does not pursue some interesting suggestions by the Swiss scholar, in particular, the impact of the anti-Darwinist line of Russian thought on the thinking of Trubetskoi and Savitskii. Here, the role of Lev Semenovich Berg, a geographer and a follower of Danilevsky, is profoundly important. Berg’s work, which proposed a vision of evolution governed by a pre-designed set of regularities, was a subject of some discussion by the Eurasianists in their correspondence, and was extremely close to their own vision of the unfolding of the world in time. Similarly, Laruelle discusses Nietzsche, Spengler and Bergson in the context of Eurasianist ideas but does not provide the first hand reaction of the Eurasianist thinkers to Spengler himself (rather dismissive). The work of Othmar Spann with its all-embracing view of society, science, and nature is another direct source of Eurasianist thought (in particular, Trubetskoi’s theory of “ideocracy”) but was not included in Laruelle’s discussion. In a similar vein, Laruelle’s correct suggestion of the influence of the German Naturphilosophie upon the Eurasianist image of the all-embracing system of sciences is not supported by a textual analysis of their borrowing from the Russian soil scientist V. Dokuchaev or from the great chemist Dm. Mendeleev. While the latter reference is buried in Savitskii’s archival notes, the former is detectable in the published sources.
Despite the title of the book, Eurasianism is first of all a discourse identitaire for Laruelle. While discussing the Eurasianist attitude to Europe, Laruelle does not account for what “Europe” stands for in the tradition from which Eurasianism operated. Going back to Konstantin Leontiev, and to some extent even to Nikolai Karamzin and Dmitry Fonvizin, “Europe” meant first of all the unacceptable force of modernity, a standardizing, leveling process eliminating the diversity of cultural forms, one of which was Russian national uniqueness. Arthur Lovejoy called this longing for difference and multi-formality “diversitarianism,” and described it as one of the fundamental features of the Romantic thought, of which, as Laruelle correctly points out, the Eurasianists were heirs.^[23] In the Russian tradition, Konstantin Leontiev was the most important representative of diversitarianism as he celebrated the medieval efflorescence of societal and cultural forms and attacked the leveling force of modern bourgeois culture. This line of analysis focusing on the perception of modernity as a foreign, illegitimate, and destructive force represents one of the most important lines in the grid of Eurasianist ideas.
By treating Eurasianism as a geographical ideology focused on the enclosure of the imperial space Laruelle does justice to the role of geographical imagination in Eurasianism. Indeed, singling out the territory of Eurasia as a separate continent, the Eurasianist thinkers (and Savitskii in particular) went the usual Eurasianist way, deconstructing existing authorities (contemporary ideas of what the continents were) and inventing new ones. It is indeed in the geographical aspect of Eurasianism that the defense of the integrity of the former imperial space was most visible. It appears, though, that we need to know more about the specific ways in which the German Romantic notion of a territorial complex^[24] was borrowed and reworked in Russia. Deeply linked to the concept of the national state, the idea of the territorial complex was imposed by the Eurasianists upon the diverse space of the empire, and required enormously creative (if not outright voluntarist, to borrow Soviet terminology), thinking. The imperial context required incorporation of non-Russian spaces into the single imperial “continent,” and here the Eurasianists creatively used the work of the federalist thinker Afanasii Shchapov, who was the first to connect Russian ethnic diversity to the steppe zone stretching across Eurasia. As he suggested, “the very physical and geographical and geognostic relations of Eastern Asia and Europe preconditioned the specifically continuous and expansive mixture of peoples in Russia.” Shchapov also quoted Ritter and Humboldt, pointing to their description of the great geomorphologic freeway which went along Central Asia and which was “a natural path along which various peoples of mountainous Central Asia… little by little pushed into Russia and Siberia entire hordes of diverse tribes and races”.^[25] Shchapov proposed a parallel between the British (sea-based) and the Russian (continent-based) forms of colonization later picked up by Savitskii. Interestingly, if for Shchapov the movement of “elastic masses of nomads” along the Eurasian “Verkehrstrasse” (Humboldt’s expression) led to the mixing of peoples and the emergence of individual and specific regions, for the Eurasianists the steppe was “a clamp” that held the imperial space together. It also provided an outlet for the imperial and colonizing destiny of the Russians as they came to replace the nomads with the agriculturalist in the steppe.
In the third part of her book, Laruelle presents an interesting view of the movement’s take on Russian history. While not embedded in a discussion of Russian historiography before 1917 or in an exploration of the internal discussion of historiographic problems by the Eurasianists, this part still offers a stimulating overview of the movement’s flirtation with the Mongols and of the Eurasianist peculiar interpretation of Muscovy in the two centuries following the Mongol conquest as a time of forging of organic Russian nationhood through humble yet creative religiosity. In fact, Laruelle remains the only scholar so far who had paid significant attention to this profoundly important theme. It can be added here that the Eurasianists did see their own time – in the aftermath of the Bolshevik takeover – as similar to the post-Mongol period in Moscow, and considered their writings to be inspired by the same combination of religiousity and national resurrection. This idea was deeply linked with Petr Suvchinskii’s notion of “bytovoe ispovednichestvo,” or “everyday life confession of faith,” which he recognized in post-Mongol Russia and which he saw as the foundation for a new, post-Communist Eurasia. This notion presupposed the elimination of the distinction between the domains of everyday life and faith, and was anchored in the efflorescence of arts in late imperial Russia and the intellectual and personal searches connected with it.^[26] In fact, Laruelle’s acute observation regarding similarities between Italian Fascism and Eurasianism would have been stronger had she attempted to analyze this historical/contemporary vision through the prism of integrative nationalism and a search for an organic national past so characteristic of the interbellum Europe. It is exactly the Moscow Princedom in the Mongol and post-Mongol period that became for the Eurasianists an image of an organic national culture cemented together by totalizing Orthodox religiosity, in which “the lower and the upper stories of Russia” took equal part, and which was ravaged by the reforms of Peter I.
Laruelle makes an interesting and correct point regarding the image of Asia in Eurasianist writings. Indeed, despite all the effort to identify with the “colonial world,” the Eurasianists remained overall remarkably little interested in the history, languages, or cultures of “Eurasians.” True, Savitskii wrote about the studies of the nomads, and Trubetskoi’s career included studying with Russia’s foremost specialist on Iranian languages Vsevolod Miller. Yet, the Eurasianist leaders remained much more at home in German or French rather than Mongol, and their knowledge of “Turan” remained rather superficial.
Some of the weaknesses of Laruelle’s work were magnified by poorly executed Russian translation. Thus, in the Russian version, Iurii Veniaminovich Kliuchnikov, one of the leaders of smenovekhovtsy, became Zh. Kliuchinov, Savitskii sent his famous letter on National-Bolshevism to G. V. Struve, not to his teacher Petr Berngardovich, the newspaper Evraziia became a journal, etc. Combined with the cumbersome Russian, numerous mistakes by the editor and the translator make the Russian edition a problematic source. Still, for almost a decade Marlene Laruelle’s work was the only modern scholarly interpretation of the Eurasianist movement available in Russian, while numerous neo-fascist interpreters moved quickly to incorporate the movement’s rhetoric into their own. The above criticisms notwithstanding, Laruelle’s was the first work after Nickolas Riasanovsky’s well-known articles that did not attempt to verify or falsify the Eurasianist theories but took them for what they were – a complex combination of ideas derived from a variety of lineages and cast through the prism of Russia’s imperial legacy, the Eurasianists’ own exile, and the rise of the Soviet Union.
Laruelle’s book relied on the ideas of the Swiss scholar Patrick Sériot, who analyzed the epistemological foundations of structuralist rhetoric by Trubetskoi, Savitskii and Jakobson in a series of articles and a path-breaking book “Structure et Totalite” published in French in 1999. Unlike the translation of Laruelle’s work, Sériot’s was executed by excellent translators and professionally edited. Highly erudite and brilliantly researched, Sériot’s work ventured into some of the most problematic and fascinating aspects of the history of the Eurasianist movement, namely, the relationship between the epistemology of the invention of Eurasia on the one hand, and the historical context of the Russian ideologies on the other. In doing so, Sériot inadvertently posed the most exciting question in the history of Eurasianism: to what extent the latter was a symptom of an imperial state and society’s encounter with modernity? We know a number of ideologies and movements – from Romanticism to various liberal and illiberal nationalisms – that signified the arrival of the era of the national state with its stress on individual citizenship, mass politics, industrial progress, universal literacy, etc. Apart from ideologies of external expansion (missionary in a strict religious sense, or missionary in the sense of mission civilizatrice, security, and ordering of the world), imperial expansions of the 19th century left remarkably few coordinated and sustained ideologies (albeit they permeated the contexts in which knowledge was produced). Eurasianism was distinctly one such ideology, aimed at salvaging the imperial space from the separatist forces of modern nationalism, and its mode of thought and epistemological foundations remain highly interesting.
To be sure, this is not the stated interest of Sériot himself. His work focuses on the history of the production of knowledge, on the second part of the equation between empire and Eurasianist encounters with human sciences. Due to the influence executed by leading Eurasianists (Trubetskoi and Savitskii) and Jakobson on the development of linguistic theories, in particular through the medium of the Prague Circle, Sériot is able to analyze their Eurasianist writings in the context of the history of linguistics and the change of the paradigm that led to the emergence of structuralist thought. In doing so, Sériot’s work presented a complex picture of the mutual influences between discourses on language and the method of its study and the identity discourse for the transformed Russian empire so characteristic of the Eurasianist thought. It should be noted that this work is only a part of a larger project focusing on the discourse on language in late imperial Russia and the early USSR.^[27]
Sériot’s book is divided into four parts. The first, “The State of the Problem,” presents an introduction to the history and ideas of the Eurasianist movement. The second, “Enclosure,” treats the problem of the external boundaries of the object of thought in the thinking of Eurasianist ideologues; the third, “Nature,” explores explanations of natural unity of organizations (convergence, Savitskii’s concept of “place of development”); the fourth, “Science,” looks at Eurasianist attempts to develop a synthetic system of sciences and to present it as a specific outcome of a distinctly Russian intellectual development.
The first part, as in the work of Laruelle, is the weakest of Sériot’s book. It is based on published sources^[28] and presents a confusing picture of the movement’s development. It is exactly here that Sériot’s complex vision of Eurasianism’s relationship to the emerging structuralist rhetoric in the context of the production of knowledge (which the author derives from the methodological insights of Bachelard, Canguillem, and Foucault, and which is meant to show that the boundary between science and ideology is not at all impenetrable) is contradicted by the statement that “initially Eurasianism was an apolitical, philosophical and scholarly movement” (p. 61). Even more problematic is Sériot’s timid treatment of Eurasianism’s similarities with fascism. According to the author, “the Eurasianists, unlike fascists, were not inclined to act or to struggle as a goal in itself, they did not celebrate the will and did not aestheticize force and violence” (p. 64). Sériot cites neither the articles by Leonid Luks that explored Eurasianism in the context of the German Conservative Revolution (although he cites Breuer), nor general works on that peculiar type of modernized Romaniticism with a national fervor that created a climate conducive to fascism.^[29] While these works may be too specific and historical, Berdiaev’s famous comment linking Eurasianism with the fascist “emotion” should provide sufficient impetus to look into the problem deeper.^[30] Indeed, Savitskii specifically stressed the Eurasianists’ own “decisiveness” and animosity to the “debilitating reflection” that he deemed so characteristic of the older, liberal generation of Russian intellectuals.^[31] Sériot’s statement that the Eurasianists did not attempt to lead the youth demonstrates little familiarity with primary sources on Eurasianism: it is exactly the issue of propaganda among the émigré youth, as well as within the USSR, that occupied so much of the Eurasianist correspondence from the very beginning of the movement’s history, and which attracted to this “most interesting group in emigration” (S. Efron) young officers of the White armies. Indeed, sources demonstrate the important role of Baron A. V. Meller-Zakomel’skii, who later became the leader of the Russian Nazis abroad, in the early history of the movement. Sériot mistakenly believes that no non-Russian took part in the Eurasianist movement^[32] and overlooks the complexity of the Ukrainian connections of the leading members and some participants of Eurasianism.^[33]
Little familiarity with the inner history of the movement leads Sériot to some chronological confusion. Thus, he suggests that “in the 1930s the Parisian group of the Eurasianists was becoming more pro-Soviet” (p. 65), while the famous Clamart group around Suvchinskii and Arapov simply ceased to exist by the end of 1930 with Arapov’s departure for the USSR and Suvchinskii concentrating on his musical studies and parting with Eurasianism. More importantly, it was not an accident that the Eurasianists began to pursue political activity and became embroiled in the underground web of agents, spies, and terrorists, both émigré and Soviet. The Eurasianists own perception of the Revolution and the social changes it introduced called for political action; the Bolsheviks were rejected not as anti-democratic or violent dictators but as ideologically mislead followers of the European Marxist theories; they still were perceived as reflecting the forces of the Eurasian masses. Under the Bolshevik Marxist yoke, the healthy forces of the Eurasian masses were destined to produce a new class of decisive leaders free from European cultural colonialism, and this class needed to become the object of Eurasianist propaganda. Hence the need for connections with the USSR, secret trips, smuggling of literature, and, above all, a frenzied scanning of Soviet publications for signs of the expected developments.
In discussing the Eurasianists’ attack on the universal civilization, Sériot presents a familiar overview of the roots of this idea: Danilevsky and Spengler. Konstantin Leontiev does not figure here as a predecessor of the Eurasianists in the grand diversitarianist rebellion against modern civilization on behalf of authentic cultures. While noting Trubetskoi’s ideas on ideocracy, Sériot does not provide European parallels and sources of this notion, Spann’s aforementioned theory of Staendestaat in particular. Sériot’s exposition of Trubetskoi’s teleological philosophy of history, which notes its Hegelian roots, is brilliant but misses the reverse teleology: Trubetskoi, not unlike Leontiev, saw history moving from more complex forms (Middle Ages) to simpler and ruder forms (Renaissance as the beginning of decline). In that sense, Trubetskoi’s goal of history, ideally, would have been the emergence in post-Bolshevik Russia of some organic culture which he viewed as a new edition of the post-Mongol Muscovite princedom.
Sériot’s work is at its strongest in dealing with problems in the history of ideas. In particular, Sériot has produced to date the best analysis of the formation of Savitskii’s geographical views. Though Sériot overlooks the dynamics of exchanges between the Eurasianist authors and sometimes incorrectly attributes ideas (some of which were communicated, for example, by Trubetskoi to Savitskii well before the latter had put anything into print), the analytical power of Sériot’s work allows him to draw a complex picture of the emergence of Savitskii’s “structural geography” under the influence of the Russian naturphilosophical tradition. Here, Sériot should be credited with noting the proto-structuralist and holistic views of Savitskii’s intellectual predecessor, Vasilii Vasil’evich Dokuchaev. Still, important sources such as Afanasii Shchapov’s vision of the steppe zone as the main artery injecting new races into Eurasia and providing for the mixture of peoples (Savitskii quoted Shchapov verbatim without providing a reference when he spoke about “the elastic masses of nomads sweeping across the steppe zone”) remained beyond Sériot’s attention.
This latter source becomes especially important when one begins to think about the relationship between Eurasianism and the efflorescence of literary and artistic life in late imperial Russia. Here, Sériot is again most perceptive. He notes how the image of Asia in turn-of-the-century Russian thought simultaneously referred to the mechanistic and egalitarian modern civilization and to the danger to that very Western civilization from the “Asiatic hordes.” Sériot also notes the importance of the rejection of bourgeois culture that was common to the left and the right in Russian intellectual history. Perhaps, what is missing here is the beginning of the connection between this rejection of European modernity with the rise of the middle class on the one hand, and Russia’s Asian ties on the other. The two authors that stand out as the ones with most influence upon the explication of this connection were Nikolai Karamzin (the author of the well-known dictum that “Moscow owned its greatness to the Khans”) and Alexander Herzen. The latter is also extremely important because here we can see how emerging Russian socialism – and later Populism – became an unexpected source of Eurasianism; it also explains Savitskii’s interest in Shchapov, as well as Struve’s critique of Populist elements in Eurasianism. In this line of thought, full of Blokian “almost physical loathing of the middle class,”^[34] the Russian masses, alien to the European civilization, are the only resource capable of sweeping off the artificial layer of European civilization from the vast expanses of Eurasia. It is exactly this interest that one notes in Alexander Blok’s famous poems and essays (possibly, Rostovtsev’s work on Scythians in the Black sea region contributed to Blok’s interest). Nevertheless, the issue of modernity and bourgeois civilization in Eurasianism is brilliantly presented by Sériot. He also explains the unusual intellectual alliance between the conservative Trubetskoi and Savitskii on the one hand and the left-leaning Roman Jakobson on the other. As Sériot suggests, this was an anti-European alliance, where the conservatives rejected Europe as a source of potential revolution, while the radical saw in the bourgeois world an obstacle on the path of social renovation.
While Sériot recognizes the overlapping images of the Other and of Modernity in the Eurasianist thought, his analysis shies away from the writings of Petr Suvchinskii, whose interest in Blok and modern art so paradoxically underscored the Eurasianist contradictions and led Fedor Stepun to term them “Slavophiles of the Age of Futurism.” To be sure, Suvchinskii does not appear to be important for the formulation of the Eurasianist “structuralist” rhetoric. Yet, it was his thought that contributed powerfully to the merger of Trubetskoi’s and Savitskii’s scholarship with a modernist search for organic societies, national destinies, and historical memories recast in contemporary terms.^[35]
In the second part of his study, Sériot develops what amounts to the best analysis of the emergence of the notion of enclosed space in the writings of the Eurasianists. Here, Sériot looks at Jakobson’s work on the union of languages (Sprachbund) and Trubetskoi’s view of the development of common features between languages. As is well known, Jakobson’s work was based on Savitskii’s geographical analysis, as well as on Trubetskoi’s vision of historical parallelism in acquisition of linguistic characteristics in a given territory. Sériot carefully and attentively analyses Jakobson’s ideas on the area defined by the existence of palatalized consonants (largely coinciding with “Eurasia”) and notes that Jakobson refused to recognize such facts as an outcome of common descent. For Trubetskoi, this acquisition is a common process in a range of languages bound by common territory, and described as “convergence.” In an important way, this aspect of the Eurasianist epistemology is profoundly “imperial,” not just as a defense of the imperial space of Russia, but as a symptom of the imperial situation itself, which provided the context for the coincidence of such diverse and multifaceted responses to a range of phenomena in the Eurasianist thought. Sériot also pursues his main argument in this part of the study: the Eurasianist vision of the language union is based not on the commonality of abstract principles (which would be phonems) but on the specific, empirical sound phenomena (such as palatalization). In this sense, “Eurasia” understood as a language union is not a “system,” or “structure,” composed of common and interacting abstract elements and their relations constructed by the researcher, but an a priori existing essence to be discovered.
It is in this latter distinction that Sériot sees a profound difference between the post-war structuralism and the inter-war structuralist rhetoric of the Eurasianists. Without denying the latter’s influence on the former, Sériot views the Eurasianist “structuralism” as “neo-Platonic,” “ontological,” and “essentialist,” more concerned with the discovery of pre-existing entities given in observation (Eurasia) than with the intellectual construction of the objects of study. This argument runs throughout the book, and presents a powerful and convincing evidence of the “deviant” nature of Eurasianist structuralism.^[36] On the way, the reader is introduced to a fascinating comparison between Marr and Trubetskoi; the Eurasianists’ take on evolutionism; history of genetic classifications; Lev Semenovich Berg’s conception of nomogenesis and zakonomernost’ as the governing principle of evolution (the term is untranslatable into English and is calqued from the German Gesetzmaessigkeit) and the way in which it inspired Jakobson to speak of the “Russian science;” and a perceptive study of Savitskii’s theory of “discovering correspondences” (metod uviazki) which saw regularity in visibly random coincidences of specific boundary-making phenomena (such as, for instance, the correspondence of climatic and linguistic changes along a geographical line).
Sériot’s work, albeit it deals with the history of Eurasianism insofar as it pertains to the emergence of structuralist rhetoric in interwar Europe, is complex and erudite, and ought to be obligatory reading for anyone interested in the history of epistemology in general and in the history of Eurasianism in particular. As such, it generates a number of responses and questions. The first, and the most general, pertains to the following: Eurasianism in its theoretical edition was a language to describe a complex phenomenon. It combined perceptions of history with analytical studies, and married visions of wholeness common to Romanticism with structuralist rhetoric. To what extent can one claim that this combination in itself was a product of the imperial situation, the uneven, abrupt, at times catastrophic movement of the extremely diverse society of imperial Russia along the path of modernization with its fellow traveler, the homogenization of society in the form of modern nationalism? In order to approach answers to this question, each specific theme in Eurasianism needs to be placed in the context of studies of a corresponding phenomenon in historiography.
For instance, Sériot’s claim that Eurasianist thought was inspired by neo-Platonism is well founded and brilliantly argued. Yet, it is hard to imagine Trubetskoi (let alone Savitskii or Jakobson) reading Plotinus for leisure. It is less hard to see how their visions of the ideal world might have been inspired by the patristic literature, of which Trubetskoi and Suvchinskii were both avid readers (and which became quite popular among liberal religious philosophers of the 1910s). The interest in patristics, though, invokes yet another perspective on the emergence of Eurasianism: its deep roots in the evolution and uneasy position of Orthodoxy in the Russian Empire as both the dominant religion and the one completely under the control of the bureaucratic Europeanized state, reflecting the double stance of the Eurasianists as imperialists and anti-colonialists.
During the past year, two more studies of Eurasianism have appeared in print. Both were written by professional historians, and treat Eurasianism with the methodological tools of the discipline. The first of these two is the work by a Russian scholar, Vladimir Bystriukov. His monograph “V poiskakh Evrazii” provides an intellectual biography of arguably the most dedicated Eurasianist, Petr Nikolaevich Savitskii. Bystriukov’s work is based on a wide range of sources, including collections at the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow. The first 90 pages of the book (of 245 total) are dedicated to a historiographic introduction but really represent a continuous summary of mostly Russian publications with little critical analysis. The purpose of this summarizing is both unclear and uneven: the author included in it a thoughtful reading of Sériot’ complex work along with summaries of poor quality or openly apologetic texts with a nationalist flavor.
Despite this lengthy historiographical introduction, many sources remained beyond Bystriukov’ attention. The author only refers to an abridged translation of Otto Boess’ monograph on Eurasianism, as well as misses a number of works in English, including some that have become a must in the study of the movement (e. g., Gerald Smith’ biography of Sviatopolk-Mirskii, Jindrich Toman’s work on the Prague Circle),^[37] to name just a few. These include also some crucial publications in the Russian language, such as the exchange of letters between Suvchinskii and Sviatopolk-Mirskii, or the much more accessible documentary collection on Sviatopolk-Mirskii in Russian.^[38]
A bit more problematic is the author’s apologetic language in reference to Eurasianism in general and Savitskii in particular: “Deep patriotism, sincere love for the Motherland, faith in its great future, as well as their high intellectual level made Eurasianism one of the most interesting phenomena of the Russian emigration” (p. 7). Bystriukov sees Savitskii as a “brilliant scholar who dedicated his life to grounding and analyzing Russia’s national and cultural distinctions and to the search for her optimal development” (p. 6). Such an unqualified celebration of a historical figure – admittedly, a brilliant thinker – should not be part of a serious historical work with at least a degree of professionalism. Even if Savitskii’s patriotism had not combined anti-European rhetoric with xenophobic nationalism, and his analysis of national distinctions had not deprived some, such as Ukrainians, of their national rights, such an identification with the object of study would have been problematic. To Bystriukov’s defense it might be said that authors of biographies in general tend to identify with their protagonists, understandably drawn into the details of their subjects’ lives.^[39]
The second chapter of Bystriukov’s work explores Savitskii’s scholarly life and effort in organizing the Eurasianist movement in great detail. Here, Bystriukov draws on the solid base of several collections in the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow (where Savitskii’s papers arrived after World War II as part of the so-called “Prague Archive”). This chronologically structured list of events gives one a more or less full idea of Savitskii’s activities in emigration and his organization of the movement. Unfortunately, Bystriukov takes for granted Savitskii’s comments on his papers (which he jotted down before giving away his archive). Since Bystriukov bases his discussion almost exclusively on Savitskii’s view of events, the picture of the development of the Eurasianist movement is a little bit skewed. We don’t learn about the profoundly important role of Petr Arapov as one of the four leading Eurasianists, and we don’t see the Parisians’ perspective on the conflict between Savitskii and Suvchinskii. In the complex history of their mutual relations, Savitskii emerges as a persistent and honest scholar attempting to salvage Eurasianism from the danger of the pro-Communist Suvchinskii. Indeed, the picture was more complex, and in the struggle between the two leaders of the movement one can see two different complexes of ideas, or rather directions of thought, competing. For Suvchinskii, “Eurasia” was above all a field of spiritual search for renovation. This search included religion and arts, and might include scholarship as well. For Savitskii, the scientistic description of Eurasia, the logical flowing of arguments about the ever-deeper discovery of the existing entity, was more important. While Trubetskoi supported Savitskii’s intellectual views, in terms of human relations and religiosity (extremely important in the circles that defined themselves above all as Orthodox), he was much closer to Suvchinskii. In fact, Bystriukov is not aware of Trubetskoi’s letter to Suvchinskii preserved in the latter’s archive and outlining Trubetskoi’s view of Savitskii’s character and abilities. All of them shared interest in politics, all were disappointed in emigration, all looked to the USSR for signs of expected developments. No clear picture of the Eurasianist movement’s inner dynamics can be constructed until one takes into account available archival material that illustrates the thinking of all four Eurasianist leaders, and such work will require an analysis of Suvchinskii’s own archival collection, which contains a significant correspondence between the latter and Trubetskoi and Arapov.
In the third chapter, Bystriukov writes about Savitskii’s “scholarly conception.” Here, the author chose to simply relate Savitskii’s views on geography, climate, culture, and history as they were presented in Savitskii’s numerous publications. The chapter contains virtually no analysis and Savitskii’s views are not connected with either contemporary theories (e.g., Berg), or with those of his predecessors. Needless to say, the particular brand of geographical scholarship practiced by Savitskii, geopolitics, played a very important role in interwar Europe. Bystriukov does not explore any possible parallels between geopolitics in Great Britain or Germany and Savitskii’s own views; no serious discussion of the historical development of Russian geographical scholarship is included. The author does not use some of the best works on the intellectual history of Russian geography, in Russian (such as Sukhova’s study of the idea of the “territorial complex”) or in other languages (Bassin). Savitskii’s ideas are not linked to that of his Eurasianist colleagues, either, and we do not learn about his contributions to the Prague Circle, or about his complex intellectual relations with George Vernadsky.
For a historical work, Bystriukov’s study minimally engages questions that are crucial for the understanding of the Eurasianist movement historical contexts. Thus, the reader will not find in Bystriukov’s study a discussion of the relationship between Savitskii (and his generation) and his father or P. B. Struve (and their generation), or any attempt to analytically discuss the place of Eurasianism in the history of Russian intelligentsia and professions. Similarly, the reader will not find any exploration of the relationship between the Eurasianist (and Savitskii’s) vision of Russian history and 19th century historical writing. While useful as a reference work on Savitskii’s life, Bystriukov’s monograph will not provide suggestions for an interpretation of how some aspects of this biography may have contributed to the emergence of Eurasianism, or complicate our understanding of the dynamics of identities in late imperial Russia. For instance, Bystriukov does not engage the rich materials that illustrate Savitskii’s perceptions of the collapse of the imperial state in Ukraine and the following carousel of governments. Similarly, Savitskii’s Ukrainian background surely played a role in his early interest in empire and stimulated his thinking about the relationship between empire and nation in Russian history. Savitskii himself reported to Nikolai Andreev that his early thought revolved around the relationship between Ukraine and Russia.^[40]
The last work under review here is also the most recent. Stefan Wiederkehr’s monograph Die Eurasische Bewegung: Wissenschaft und Politik in der Russische Emigration der Zwischenkriegszeit und in der Postsowjetischen Russland, a doctoral dissertation written at the University of Zuerich, was published in 2007. Wiederkehr’s study looks at two instances of “Eurasianism,” the émigré and the post-Soviet.^[41] Such a choice of chronological limits presents its own challenges to the author. Indeed, the much more complex interwar Eurasianism occupies a mere 160 pages of the book, while the cruder version of its post-Soviet “discovery” takes up another hundred. Moreover, it seems that the interwar Eurasianism, a complex response to a range of phenomena, engaged a variety of fields and traditions; it touched on scholarship, arts, music, literature, historiography, and involved intellectuals of certain standing. On the contrary, the post-Soviet Eurasianism is rarely more than a bizarre combination of nationalist or fascist rhetoric with some quotes from Trubetskoi or Savitskii in defense of the wholeness of imperial state and territory. The continuity between these two “Eurasianisms” is questionable both intellectually and in terms of personalia, and treating them together as stages of one specific “ideology” barely does justice to each, while depriving the author of a chance to offer a more in-depth discussion of the much more complicated case of the interwar Eurasianism.
Wiederkehr’s study is thus divided into two uneven parts. In the first, dedicated to “classic” Eurasianism and under review here, he explores the movement’s history and main tenets of its teaching. Wiederkehr suggests that Eurasianism ought to be studied as a response to the deep crisis of the Russian intellectuals in the aftermath of the Revolution, as an anti-Western ideology cutting off Russia from Europe (Abgrenzideologie), and as an ideology legitimating the restoration of the imperial state (Legitimationideologie). At the same time, Wiederkehr attempts to describe Eurasianism against the background of the “totalitarian model,” and links it to the German Conservative Revolution and contemporary fascist movements. Wiederkehr engages a respectable range of published sources and masterfully uses available archival materials from Moscow and Prague. This combination of breadth of material and theory makes Wiederkehr’s monograph the best and most reliable published treatment of the Eurasianist movement so far in any language.
The second part of Widerkehr’s work (dedicated to classic Eurasianism) is subdivided into four chapters. The first deals with individual contributors, the history of the Eurasianist political organization, the crisis of 1928-1929, and the decline of the movement in the 1930s. The second chapter explores the ideology (and is the longest), the third émigré reactions to the movement, and the last summarizes the political theories of Eurasianism. The first part is well-researched and provides a detailed history of the movement’s participants and dynamics. Wiederkehr’s research is largely based on archival collections at GARF, where Savitskii’s papers offer a good deal of insight into the movement’s history. One important question that applies to this part (as well as to the entire work) is the lack of the Parisian perspective on the movement. This remarkable omission is common to all studies of Eurasianism under discussion here. One can imagine that it is difficult for Russian historians to work at Suvchinskii’s archive in Paris, but why this source is omitted in the studies of scholars based in Paris or Zurich is not entirely clear. Some details that are misinterpreted due to the lack of use of Suvchinskii’s materials are minor (for instance, Lieven kept in touch with Trubetskoi after 1922, Kartashev’s relationship to Eurasianism was superficial as the latter pursued his own version of national mystique, Karsavin was imposed upon the movement by Suvchinskii against active protests by Trubetskoi and Savitskii and thus his intellectual influence upon the latter two was minimal). More importantly, the Eurasianists were hardly a “small, closed circle of people” (p. 39), as Wiederkehr suggests, as they engaged figures as different as Otto Hoetsch, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Marina Tsvetaeva, Aleksei Remizov, and so on. Even more crucially, the lack of Suvchinskii’s perspective on the history of the movement leaves out of the picture the role of the Russian-Bulgarian publishing house in Sofia (co-directed by Suvchinskii and Ruschu Mollov), around which the Eurasianists congregated. This publishing house not only published Blok’s “Twelve” with a profoundly important introduction by Suvchinskii and the first Eurasianist texts but also gathered materials for the history of the Russian revolution (such materials were sent to Suvchinskii by Savinkov, Miliukov, and many other figures in the emigration). The house also published Russkaia Mysl’, P. B. Struve’s journal, at which Savitskii was employed. The developments around the journal are absolutely crucial for the understanding of the generational dynamics of the Eurasianist group and hence for its place in the history of the Russian intelligentsia.
Wiederkehr provides short biographies of the leading Eurasianists in the footnotes but does not engage in a discussion of their family background. However, this problem is of crucial significance for the movement’s history. All four leading Eurasianists with the exception of Florovsky, who was a descendant of the clergy, came from nobility (none, contrary to Wiederkehr, came from upper bourgeoisie). In several instances, they were children of prominent liberal figures (by the standards of late imperial Russia). The names of Sergei Trubetskoi or Petr Sviatopolk-Mirskii were familiar to every educated Russian. Yet, in the voluminous correspondence by Trubetskoi his father’s name is not mentioned even en passant, while his uncle, a well-known philosopher Evgenii Nikolaevich, is only mentioned critically. The same applies to the whole range of intellectuals prominent in fin-de-siècle Russia, such as Berdiaev, Bulgakov, Struve, Merezhkovskii. The general attitude of the Eurasianist circles to the older generation was negative and combatant, and a thorough discussion of this attitude can shed light not only on the history of Eurasianism but also on the history of the Russian intelligentsia and professions in this crucial period. In that sense, the social history of the movement should take into account the diverse backgrounds of its leaders in late imperial Russia.
No less important is the minimal presence in Wiederkehr’s study of Petr Arapov among figures that played a crucial role in Eurasianismin. By 1924, Arapov became the fourth leader of Eurasianism next to the troika of ideologues. He left a voluminous correspondence with Suvchinskii and others (not utilized by Wiederkehr), which is preserved in Suvchinskii’s archive and which sheds light on the movement’s relationship with the Trest, the publishers, and the funders, as well as documents the gradual emergence of the militant wing of Parisian Eurasianism (which, at one point, even suggested physically eliminating Savitskii!).
Perhaps the greatest consequence of omitting Suvchinskii’s materials (both published and archival) is the absence of a discussion of the relationship between Eurasianism and Russian modernism. Suvchinskii’s philosophical views provided Eurasianism with an aura that was attractive not just to those who were interested in geopolitics or scholarship. Due to Suvchinskii, Eurasianism linked together Orthodox revival of the turn of the century, modernist searches for the transformation of life and society, and national mystique. Omitting this element in Eurasianism turns it into a scholarly and political movement alone and provides a skewed perspective on Eurasianism’s emergence as a complex response to modernity.
Nevertheless, Wiederkehr’s work is rich in empirical data and is an excellent source on the movement’s history to be consulted by every student of Eurasianism. The same should be said about the author’s treatment of the Eurasianist ideology. Despite the rather artificial application of Popper’s critique of historicism to Eurasianism, Wiederkehr offers a thoughtful discussion of the “coordination of sciences in Eurasianist perspective.” Here, Wiederkeh