EURASIANISM. - A political-spiritual orientation developed within the Russian emigration but which also found connections and reflections within the U.S.S.R. Eurasianism can be considered both as a development and a negation of Slavophile doctrine. The Slavophiles believed in a great spiritual, religious, and political mission of Russia, more or less closely linked to the other Slavic peoples, which were to cast off their foreign elements, a sediment of centuries of domination by other peoples. The Eurasians, while also opposing Russia to Europe, deny or diminish the racial ties with the other Slavic peoples (which they consider deeply Westernized): the Eurasians see the originality of Russia precisely in the confluence of the many Asian races with the Russian element. Eurasianism thus resumes, with a greater development of cultural and spiritual problems, one of the fundamental traditions of Russian politics: the tendency toward Asia, a detachment at least partially maintained from the directives of Peter the Great and from Westernism.
Eurasianism is closely connected to the thought of Leontyev, a keen though paradoxical Russian thinker of the late 19th century. There are also undeniable links between Eurasianism and an artistic and philosophical movement of the first decades of the present century, the "Ski" movement, which drew inspiration from a famous poem by Vladimir Solovyov, *Pangmongolism*. Although Eurasianism developed, as mentioned, in emigration, it then drew on the currents of religious philosophy that had developed so notably among Russian intellectuals before the Bolshevik Revolution and in the very early years of the Soviet regime: a wave of confused and often dubious mysticism led many intellectuals toward communism, in the belief that from the destruction of material goods would spring forth lofty "spiritual goods." Here it is worth recalling two poems by A. Blok: *The Scythians* and *The Twelve*; the former exalting a Eurasian Russia, the latter a curious blend of communism and Christian themes; one might also recall in this context the famous expression by the poet Bely that the revolution carried "the culture of eternity."
Among the followers of Eurasianism were, among others, Prince N. S. Trubetskoy, the geographer P. Savitsky, the literary critic D. Sviatopolk-Mirsky (who later converted to Bolshevism), the historian G. V. Vernadsky, the orientalist V. P. Nikitin, and more sporadically the philosopher P. Karpov and the historian G. Florovsky. The Soviet regime officially viewed Eurasianism as a romantic, confused, and anti-Marxist ideology; yet it sometimes made very skillful use of both the left-leaning mystical effusions of "philosophers" and a few, as well as the neo-nationalist elements inherent in Eurasian doctrine itself. Indeed, Soviet neo-nationalism, while in many respects following in the footsteps of old Russian imperialism, sees the new State and conceives of the new patriotism as a symbol of the European and Asian races constituting the U.S.S.R. This is an important (though not the only) point of confusion between the curious and complex Eurasian ideology that sprang from the old "intelligentsia" and the concrete Soviet reality.