Eurasianism

EURASIANISM. - A political-spiritual orientation that developed within the Russian emigration, but which also finds its connections and reflections in the U.S.S.R. Eurasianism can be considered at the same time as both a development and a negation of the Slavophile doctrine. The Slavophiles believed in a great spiritual, religious and political mission of Russia, more or less closely joined to the remaining Slavic peoples, who were supposed to "detach" their foreign elements, the sediment of centuries-old dominations by other peoples. The Eurasianists, on the other hand, while also opposing Russia to Europe, deny or attenuate the ties of blood with the other Slavic peoples (who seem to them profoundly Westernized): the Eurasianists see Russia's originality precisely in the confluence of the many Asiatic stocks with the Russian element. Eurasianism thus takes up again, with a greater development of cultural and spiritual problems, one of the fundamental traditions of Russian policy: the tendency toward Asia, a detachment at least momentary and more or less partial from the directives of Peter the Great and from Westernism.

Eurasianism is quite closely connected to the thought of Leont'ev, a keen though paradoxical Russian thinker of the second half of the nineteenth century. The links between Eurasianism and an artistic and philosophical movement of the first decades of the present century, the movement of the "Scythians," which harked back to a famous poem by Vladimir Solov'ev (Solovjov), Pannongolism, are also undeniable. Eurasianism, although it developed, as has been said, within the emigration, also harked back to the currents of religious philosophy that had such a notable development among Russian intellectuals before the Bolshevik Revolution and in the very first years of the Soviet regime: a wave of confused or often murky mysticism in fact led many intellectuals toward communism, in the conviction that from the destruction of "material goods" the most exalted "spiritual goods" would spring. One must here recall especially two short poems by A. Blok: The Scythians and The Twelve, the first an exaltation of a Eurasian Russia and the second a curious mixture of communism and Christian motifs; but one may also recall in this connection the famous expression of the poet Belyj that the revolution brought "the culture of eternity."

To the group of followers of Eurasianism there adhered, among others, Prince N. S. Trubeckoj, the geographer P. Savickij, the literary critic D. Svjatopolk-Mirskij (who later went over to Bolshevism), the historian G. V. Vernadskij, the orientalist V. P. Nikitin and, more eclectically and superficially, the philosopher P. Karavin and the historian G. Florovskij. The Soviet regime officially saw in Eurasianism a romantic, confused and anti-Marxist ideology, yet it sometimes knew how to take advantage quite skillfully both of the bloated, left-leaning mysticism of "philosophers" and poets, and of the elements of neo-nationalism inherent in the Eurasianist doctrine proper. Indeed, Soviet neo-nationalism, while in various respects following in the footsteps of the old Russian imperialism, sees the new State and conceives the new patriotism as a symbiosis of the European and Asiatic stocks constituting the U.S.S.R. This is an important (though not the only) point of confluence between the curious and complex Eurasianist ideology that sprouted from the bosom of the old "intelligentsia" and concrete Soviet reality.

Wolf Giusti