SUMMARY

Mark von Hagen’s article offers an interpretation of the changes that occurred in the study of Russian and Soviet history, and suggests the concept of “Eurasia” as an anti-paradigm facilitating the description of the region that combines the legacies of multinational empires and of Soviet-style socialism. At the same time, “Eurasia” is an anti-paradigm because it points to a variety of ways to revise many assumptions about Russian, Soviet, and Eurasian histories.
For von Hagen, three separate processes heralded the arrival of new historiographical approaches. First, there is the increasingly prominence of works interpreting the history of Russia and the USSR not as that of a national state, but rather stressing its multinational and imperial character. Second, historians are constantly paying a greater attention to borderlands in the context of the prevailing view of boundaries as porous and fluctuating. Third, diasporas – including йmigrйs and exiles – have been “rediscovered” and their works are now returning to their countries of origin.
Von Hagen also analyzes what he considers as “two paradigms” of the historical perception of Russia and the USSR. The first, “Russia as Orient”, attempted to present the Russian-Soviet historical experience as essentially rooted in centuries long Oriental and despotic traditions of Russia. Using Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism, von Hagen argues that this perception of Russia as Orient helped sustain a Western “occidental” identity. It often walked hand in hand with a belief in the unique experience of Russian history, a belief that von Hagen terms “neo-Slavophile”.
The second paradigm is that equates the Soviet Union with modernization. According to von Hagen, this paradigm was partly rooted in the liberal tradition of the Russian “state school” of historiography, which saw the privileged role of the state led by an enlightened bureaucracy as the driving force of Russia’s path to modernization. Opposed to attempts to “essentialize” Russian history within the “Russia as Orient” paradigm, the modernization paradigm attempted to “normalize” the Soviet experience. Assumptions of the inevitable ethnic and national homogenization of the Soviet Union became prevalent in the modernization paradigm.
Von Hagen then explores the legacy of Eurasianist thinkers, a group of Russian йmigrйs who offered their vision of Eurasia as a space of interaction between the Russians and the Turkic and Finnish peoples. Their vision of Eurasia also implied a positive evaluation of the Mongol presence in Russian history and a critical approach to Eurocentric assumptions. Von Hagen asserts that, in his view, the new Eurasian anti-paradigm avoids problematic apects of the Eurasianist legacy, such as the political views of the Eurasianist thinkers and their geopolitical views. The new Eurasian anti-paradigm retains their critique of “essentializing” approaches to such concepts as Europe and Asia in order to offer an opportunity to deepen our understanding of the complex pasts of Central and Eastern Europe and Northern Asia.
For von Hagen, the Eurasian anti-paradigm has been profoundly impacted by the current “decentralization” of historical narratives, which is the result of interaction between historians and linguists, anthropologists, sociologists, etc. Eurasia allows one to part with the dominance of national narratives while accepting the importance of modern nationalism in historical processes. According to von Hagen, Eurasia does not coincide with the former Russian Empire or the former Soviet Union or with any other particular state. Its chronological boundaries are also not rigidly determined. In the age of globalization, von Hagen argues, it is important to remember that the great continental empires constituted an important element of global history.
In the last part of his article, von Hagen surveys literature that he believes attests to the emergence of the Eurasian anti-paradigm in Russian-Soviet history. According to the author, the Eurasian anti-paradigm does not preclude any specific approaches to the past; even less is it meant as a judgment about the likelihood of one or another country of joining the European Union, NATO, or for that matter any of the Asian organizations. It is meant as a concept that opens up new horizons in the study of history and signifies a return of the Eurasian space into global history after almost a century of isolation.