EURASISMO. – A political-spiritual orientation that developed within the Russian emigration, but which also found its points of contact and reflections in the U.S.S.R. Eurasism may be regarded at the same time as 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 connected with the remaining Slavic peoples, who were supposed to «scrape away» their foreign elements, the sediment of centuries of domination by other peoples. The Eurasists, on the other hand, while likewise opposing Russia to Europe, deny or attenuate ties of common descent with the other Slavic peoples (who seem to them profoundly Westernized): the Eurasists see Russia’s originality precisely in the confluence of the many Asian peoples with the Russian element. Eurasism thus takes up, with a greater development of cultural and spiritual problems, one of the fundamental traditions of Russian policy: the tendency toward Asia, a temporary and more or less partial detachment from the directives of Peter the Great and from Westernism.
Eurasism is very closely connected with the thought of Leon'ev, an acute, if paradoxical, Russian thinker of the second half of the nineteenth century. The ties between Eurasism and an artistic and philosophical movement of the first decades of the present century, the movement of the «Scythians», which referred back to a famous poem by Vladimir Solov'ev (Solovjov), Pan-Mongolism, are also undeniable. Although, as has been said, Eurasism developed within the emigration, it subsequently appealed to the currents of religious philosophy that had developed so considerably among Russian intellectuals before the Bolshevik Revolution and during the very first years of the Soviet regime: a wave of confused or often turbid mysticism in fact led many intellectuals toward communism, in the conviction that the destruction of «material goods» would bring forth the loftiest «spiritual goods». Here it is especially necessary to recall two short poems by A. Blok: The Scythians and The Twelve, the former an exaltation of a Eurasian Russia and the latter 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».
Among the followers of Eurasism were, among others, Prince N. S. Trubeckoj, the geographer P. Savickij, the literary critic D. Svjatopolk-Mirskij (who subsequently passed over to Bolshevism), the historian G. V. Vernadskij, the Orientalist V. P. Nikitin, and, more eclectically and sporadically, the philosopher P. Karavin and the historian G. Florovskij. The Soviet regime officially regarded Eurasism as a romantic, confused, and anti-Marxist ideology; nevertheless, it occasionally knew how to exploit, with considerable skill, both the bombastic left-leaning mysticism of «philosophers» and poets and the elements of neo-nationalism inherent in Eurasist doctrine proper. In fact, Soviet neo-nationalism, although in various respects following in the footsteps of the old Russian imperialism, views the new State and conceives the new patriotism as a symbiosis of the European and Asian peoples constituting the U.S.S.R. This constitutes an important (though not the only) point of convergence between the curious and complex Eurasist ideology that germinated within the old «intelligentsia» and the concrete Soviet reality.