From Empire to Eurasia: Politics, Scholarship, and Ideology in Russian Eurasianism, 1920s–1930s

By Sergey Glebov

The Eurasianist movement was launched in the 1920s by a group of young Russian émigrés who had recently emerged from years of fighting and destruction. Drawing on the cultural fermentation of Russian modernism in the arts and literature, as well as in politics and scholarship, the movement sought to reimagine the former imperial space in the wake of Europe's Great War. The Eurasianists argued that as an heir to the nomadic empires of the steppes, Russia should follow a non-European path of development. In the context of rising Nazi and Soviet powers, the Eurasianists rejected liberal democracy and sought alternatives to Communism and capitalism. Deeply connected to the Russian cultural and scholarly milieus, Eurasianism played a role in the articulation of the structuralist paradigm in interwar Europe. However, the movement was not as homogenous as its name may suggest. Its founders disagreed on a range of issues and argued bitterly about what weight should be accorded to one or another idea in their overall conception of Eurasia. In this first English language history of the Eurasianist movement based on extensive archival research, Sergey Glebov offers a historically grounded critique of the concept of Eurasia by interrogating the context in which it was first used to describe the former Russian Empire. This definitive study will appeal to students and scholars of Russian and European history and culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Release date: May 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781609092092

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FROM EMPIRE TO EURASIA

POLITICS, SCHOLARSHIP, AND IDEOLOGY IN RUSSIAN EURASIANISM, 1920s–1930s

SERGEY GLEBOV

NIU Press

DeKalb, IL

Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb 60115

© 2017 by Northern Illinois University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

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978-0-87580-750-8 (cloth)

978-1-60909-209-2 (e-book)

Cover design by Yuni Dorr

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Part of chapter 5 was previously published as Space and Structuralism in Russian Eurasianism, in Empire De/Centered: New Spatial Histories of Russia and the Soviet Union, ed. Sanna Turoma and Maxim Waldstein (Farnam: Ashgate, 2013), 31–60, reprinted by permission of the publisher, copyright © 2013.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Glebov, Sergeĭ, author.

Title: From empire to Eurasia : politics, scholarship and ideology in Russian Eurasianism, 1920s–1930s / Sergey Glebov.

Description: DeKalb, IL : Northern Illinois University Press, 2017 | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016015949 (print) | LCCN 2016033384 (ebook) | ISBN 9780875807508 (cloth : alkaline paper) | ISBN 9781609092092 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Eurasian school—History—20th century. | Soviet Union—Relations—Eurasia. | Eurasia—Relations—Soviet Union. | Learning and scholarship—Political aspects—Soviet Union—History. | Ideology—Soviet Union—History. | Russia—History—Philosophy. | Soviet Union—History—Philosophy. | Soviet Union—Intellectual life—1917–1970. | Soviet Union—Politics and government—1917–1936.

Classification: LCC DK49 .G55 2017 (print) | LCC DK49 (ebook) | DDC 303.48/2470509042—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016015949

Contents

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

Eurasia’s Many Meanings

CHAPTER 1: EXILES FROM THE SILVER AGE

1. From the Silver Age to Exile

2. Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetskoi

3. Petr Petrovich Suvchinskii

4. Petr Nikolaevich Savitskii

5. The Eurasianist Universe: The Others

CHAPTER 2: THE MONGOL–BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION

The Eurasianist National Mystique

1. We Are Alien to Debilitating Reflection: Eurasianist Generational Rhetoric

2. The National Mystique and the Search for Asian Elements: Fin-de-Siècle Influences

3. Revolution as Revelation: Religious Interpretation of Social Change

4. Mongols as Bolsheviks: The Compression of Time

5. Phenomenology of Revolution: The Ruling Selection, Ideocracy, and the Future Eurasian State

6. Eurasianism and Fascism: A Reconsideration

CHAPTER 3: THE ANTICOLONIALIST EMPIRE

N. S. Trubetskoi’s Critique of Evolutionism and Eurocentrism

1. Remapping the World: World War I, Russian Revolution, and Reconfigurations of the Global Map

2. Europe in Question: Interwar Kulturpessimismus

3. After the Deluge: Russia as a Colony

4. Russia-Eurasia and Its World-Historical Mission: Leading the Anticolonial Uprising

5. Hypnosis of the Words: Critique of Eurocentrism and Evolutionism

6. The Debate across Time: Eurasianism as a Critique of Russian Evolutionism

7. The World as a Rainbow: Religious Diversitarianism and Rebellion against Universalism

CHAPTER 4: IN SEARCH OF WHOLENESS

Totalizing Eurasia

1. Paradoxes of Eurasian Nationalism

2. In Search of Cultural Wholeness: From Slavdom to Turan

3. Eurasia’s Ukrainian Challenge

4. Geographical Pivot: Eurasia as a Geographical System

5. Eurasia as a Chronotope: In Search of Non-Eurocentric History

CHAPTER 5: THE STRUCTURES OF EURASIA

Trubetskoi, Savitskii, Jakobson, and the Making of Structuralism

1. A Forgotten Source

2. Lévi-Strauss and Jakobson

3. Not Entirely Ours: Roman Jakobson and the Eurasianists

4. In Search of Russian Science

5. The Empire of Language: Space and the Study of Structures

6. The Political Ontology of Eurasian Structures: Goal, Convergence, Evolution, Religion

EPILOGUE

Eurasianism as a Movement

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

This project evolved over many years and I owe a debt of gratitude to many colleagues. Seymour Becker provided a welcoming yet intellectually challenging guidance of my doctoral work at Rutgers, and many scholars there helped me shape my understanding of Eurasianism in its European context. I am particularly grateful to Donald Kelley and Ziva Galili for their thoughtful input. Mark von Hagen and Richard Wortman led an amazing seminar on imperial Russia at Columbia, which provided a background for this study and informed my views of imperial history. Numerous other friends and colleagues shared with me their immense knowledge of Russian history and culture. I am forever grateful to Alla Zeide, David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Mark Bassin, Marlene Laruelle, Olga Maiorova, Michael Gordin, Willard Sunderland, Harsha Ram, Lazar Fleishman, Ilya Vinkovetsky, Martin Beiswenger, Vera Tolz, Galin Tikhanov, Charles Halperin, Alexander Antoshchenko, Patrick Seriot, Sanna Turoma, Michael Kunichika, Serguei Oushakine, and many others.

My colleagues—Slavists and historians at Smith, Amherst, and the Five College consortium provided me with intellectual community and support. I thank Vera Shevzov, Stanley Rabinowitz, Polina Barskova, Cathy Ciepiela, Boris Wolfson, Dale Peterson, Bill and Jane Taubman, Stephen Jones, Audrey Altstadt, as well as Richard Lim, Jennifer Guglielmo, Darcy Burkle, Ernest Benz, Nadya Sbaiti, Jeffrey Ahlman, Joshua Birk, and Elizabeth Pryor Stordeur at Smith and Catherine Epstein, Frank Couvares, Trent Maxey, Ted Mellillo, Monica Ringer, Klara Moricz, and Adi Gordon at Amherst for intellectual companionship and many conversations about history. I owe a special debt to late Marc Raeff, whose ideas and comments on the earlier version of this book proved to be exceptionally helpful and whose intellectual generosity is unmatched. A number of wonderful connoisseurs of the archives of the Russian emigration—Edward Kasinec, Tanya Chebotarev, and Gabriel Superfin above all—helped me navigate the archipelago of Russia Abroad.

My greatest debt of gratitude is to my colleagues and friends in Ab Imperio. My understanding of Russian imperial history and of Eurasianism is shaped by our common work and by many hours of discussions with Ilya Gerasimov, Marina Mogilner, Alexander Semyonov, and Alexander Kaplunovsky. I especially thank Ilya for his insights and critique, and Marina, who read this book and offered very valuable comments. Sasha Semyonov’s extraordinary knowledge of historiography and ability to complicate any narrative was truly inspirational.

Finally, I want to thank Amy Farranto at the Northern Illinois Press for making the pre-publication process as smooth and efficient as possible, and Therese Malhame for helping me make this text comprehensible.

All these friends and colleagues made this project better. Needless to say, all the faults of this book are my own.

INTRODUCTION

Eurasia’s Many Meanings

The collapse of the Soviet Union laid bare the familiar but misleading Western conflation of Soviet and Russian. In the great reconfiguration of the cultural and geopolitical imageries of the late twentieth century, Eurasia emerged as the most successful contender to become the new geocultural concept embracing all or some of the post-Soviet space. On the one hand, Eurasia underwrites various Russian and non-Russian projects for integration of that space in an economic or political union.¹ A radical neo-Fascist movement in Russia propagates war and expansion in the name of Eurasia and commands a very impressive media presence.² On the other hand, scholars all over the world are rebranding former Soviet and Russian studies programs, centers, and associations as Eurasian to reflect a move away from the Russian-centric narratives of the past.³ In former Russian studies and beyond, Eurasia is often used to bring to light connections and entanglements across national boundaries and traditional disciplines alike and to emphasize the global context of historical processes.⁴ In Russian studies, scholars saw a 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.⁵

This new currency of the concept of Eurasia invites critique through a study of its origins and the historical contexts in which it operated. This book offers a first step in this direction by exploring the history in the 1920s and 1930s of the Eurasianist movement, which first appropriated the term Eurasia to describe the former Russian Empire. Launched by a group of young émigrés who had recently emerged from the years of fighting and destruction, the Eurasianist movement elaborated a complex and multifaceted language, in which it sought to reimagine the former imperial space in the wake of Europe’s Great War and in the aftermath of the collapse of continental imperial formations.

The new movement sought to endow Eurasia, understood largely as coinciding with the former Russian Empire, with cultural, historical, geographic, and ethnographic content—but the movement was not nearly as homogeneous as its name may suggest.⁶ The founders of Eurasianism disagreed on a range of issues, and argued bitterly about what weight should be accorded to one or another idea in their overall conception of Eurasia. The movement’s leaders had socialized in different milieus in late imperial Russia, and brought diverse intellectual strategies and backgrounds to the common project of inventing Eurasia. Some stressed its alleged spatial unity, others looked for signs of the ethnographic or linguistic wholeness of its populations, and still others imagined Eurasia as a space of modernist creativity in arts or as a locus and object of radically new scholarship. Perhaps the best way to describe the movement’s heterogeneity is to understand it as something that gave many meanings to Eurasia. These meanings overlapped in contradictory ways, and in the decade of the 1920s this overlap enabled a basic consensus among Eurasianism’s various streams, which allowed the movement to coalesce.

Above all, the Eurasianist leaders agreed on the crucial importance of Orthodox Christianity to Russian identity. Moreover, they saw the Russian Revolution as a climactic event, which, in realizing the ambitions of the radical Russian intelligentsia to destroy the old order and build a new one, confirmed the eternal truths of the church by revealing the horrors of Socialism. The Eurasianists saw modern European society—and for them the Russian Revolution was a disaster in part inflicted by European ideologies all too readily absorbed by the Russian intelligentsia—as a crisis-stricken world whose main ills were individualism, absence of spirituality, and belief in universal progress. In opposition to the decaying yet predatory Europe, Eurasianist thinkers suggested the Russian world of everyday life confession of faith (bytovoe ispovednichestvo) and a society permeated by the spirit of Orthodoxy. Drawing on the prerevolutionary interest of the educated classes in idealism and religion, the Eurasianist thinkers thus reflected a pan-European turn to metaphysics and idealism that sought to ground human experiences in the spiritual sphere. However, they cast their project of Orthodox utopia as a national reinvigoration in the midst of European catastrophe.⁷

In the minds of the Eurasianist thinkers, this importance of Orthodoxy was tied to the fates of Russia-Eurasia after the Revolution. The Eurasianists expected that in the aftermath of the Russian revolutionary catastrophe a new class of people would emerge from under the Bolshevik yoke. Observing from a distance the rise of the New Economic Policy in Soviet Russia, the Eurasianists were sure that the Bolshevik Party’s retreat from ideology proved that many in Soviet Russia accepted the Bolsheviks’ state-building instincts but rejected their Communist ideology.⁸ The task of the Eurasianists, thus, was to offer a non-Marxist, spiritual ideology, which would help this new type of people to shed off European Socialist and Communist ideas and to build a new type of society, neither democratic nor Communist.⁹ The Eurasianists described this society as ideocratic, and explained that its ruling class would be selected neither on the grounds of ancestry nor wealth but based on the commitment to a powerful ruling idea (ideia-pravitel’nitsa).¹⁰ The Eurasianist thinkers saw examples of such a society, albeit incomplete and imperfect, in Soviet Russia and Fascist Italy. Mesmerized by Soviet successes, the Eurasianists became enmeshed in the web of underground activities of Soviet agents who penetrated the emigration in an effort to undermine its anti-Soviet work. Ultimately, some embraced Stalin’s Soviet Union and perished in its camps.

Eurasianist thinkers saw a precedent for contemporary events in Russia in the history of medieval Russian principalities in the aftermath of the Mongol invasion.¹¹ It was then, they argued, that as a result of destruction and the imposition of foreign rule, a wave of religious creativity was unleashed by the Russians who had built an organic, undivided national culture. The power of the Mongol khan was converted to Orthodoxy and the nomads’ encampment moved to Moscow, where the Russian tsar emerged as an heir to the great steppe empires. Although the Eurasianists argued that non-Russian peoples, and Turanian nomads in particular, helped to build the Russian state, Eurasianism was hardly an early instance of multiculturalism because in this vision the Mongols were of secondary importance and served as an instrument for the realization of Russian national destiny.

The opposition between the spiritual and Orthodox Eurasia and the mechanistic and materialist Europe rested, somewhat unexpectedly, on the Eurasianist critique of Eurocentrism and cultural colonialism.¹² The Eurasianists imagined future Russia-Eurasia as a leader of the colonized peoples of the world rising against their European colonialist oppressors. Russia itself was made subject to the rule of the Europeanized elite following Peter the Great’s reforms, the Eurasianists argued, and thus the Russian Revolution resolved the old divisions between that elite and the masses on the one hand, and between Russians and non-Russians in the former empire on the other. This resolution of Russia’s national trauma came as the non-European masses (both Russian and non-Russian) rose up against and destroyed the old Europeanized order. Pre-dating postcolonial scholarship by half a century, the Eurasianist thinkers linked Europe’s colonial domination of the world with modern disciplinary knowledge and suggested a critique of humanities and social sciences to purge them of their in-built Eurocentrism. However, the Eurasianists were not interested in restoring the suppressed subjectivity of the colonized.¹³ Rather, they built on the diversitarian ideas of nineteenth-century Russian philosophers and saw the future Russia as a leader of the global movement to protect God-given national and cultural differences from the onslaught of standardizing European modernity.¹⁴

Although their Eurasia had a world-historical mission to lead the anticolonial struggle, it was also imagined as a holistic, autarkic world. The Eurasianist thinkers elaborated an unprecedentedly complex vision of Eurasia as an ethnographic, geographic, and linguistic whole. In their Eurasia, the genetic principles of kinship were replaced with acquired characteristics: the diverse, unrelated peoples of Eurasia had allegedly developed common traits due to historical convergence rather than biological descent. In the future Eurasia, these peoples would form a multipeople nation of Eurasia under the dome of the Russian Orthodox Church. The spatial unity of Eurasia was substantiated by drawing on the work of scholars in biology, soil studies, and forestry, who had begun to develop the notions of plant and animal communities on the eve of the Revolution. The Eurasianist scholar Petr Nikolaevich Savitskii extended these ideas about biocenosis to human societies and described Eurasia as a place-development, a unity of natural landscape and sociohistorical elements.¹⁵ Characterized by extreme continentality, Eurasia was a separate geographical world along with Europe and Asia. The geopolitical vision and anticolonial rhetoric together influenced the Eurasianist view of the continent’s history, which was imagined as a teleological process of Eurasia’s unity unfolding in time and in opposition to Romano-Germanic Europe.

But if the Eurasianists stressed Orthodox religiosity, holistic unity, and anticolonial character of Eurasia, they also interpreted it as a locus of modern creativity in arts, literature, and scholarship. Freed from the bonds of realistic art and atomistic science, Eurasia was the place to develop new artistic approaches where form and content would merge, and where national science would uncover heretofore unknown laws and regularities. In its rebellion against the old Europe, Eurasia was seen as a leader of religious revolution, a center for the fermentation of a new culture based on spirituality, confession of faith, and modernist creativity, all of which would develop within the confines of an autarkic, national, and organic world. Petr Petrovich Suvchinskii and Prince Dmitrii Petrovich Sviatopolk-Mirskii (known in the West as D. S. Mirsky), the leaders of aesthetic Eurasianism, in 1926 founded a literary journal Versty, in which they published works by both Soviet and émigré authors, Russian formalists, and European avant-gardists.¹⁶

While the Eurasianist ideologues imagined their Russia-Eurasia as the locus of a specifically Russian national scientific tradition, they understood the latter as shaped by holistic and teleological concerns. Russian science was supposed to approach its object of study as a whole, rather than as a collection of parts. The specificity of Russian science was allegedly defined by its very object, Eurasia, which was to be studied in a systemic fashion. This systemic analysis of the unity of Eurasia as revealed in flora and fauna, landscape and morphology, linguistics and history, sought to uncover correspondences between different rows of phenomena and establish deep-seated, invisible regularities that govern the seemingly chaotic assemblage of facts. Two fields, geography and linguistics, converged in both Eurasianism and the Prague Linguistic Circle to produce the scholarly rhetoric of structuralism, which assumed a life of its own following World War II.¹⁷

The consensus that included all these visions was, in fact, quite short. It barely lasted for the decade of the 1920s and collapsed as the Eurasianist movement progressed and its half-baked, emotional ideas infused with a sense of national catastrophe were developed in some detail. The lines of division were many. For instance, the avant-garde aesthetics of Suvchinskii, who viewed futurism as a new religious art, clashed with the Fascist aesthetics of Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetskoi. The latter’s categorical rejection of Marxism came to blows with Suvchinskii’s and Sviatopolk-Mirskii’s increasing embrace of the Soviet Union as a realization of Russia-Eurasia’s ideocratic principle. Scholarly pursuits and underground activities, although embraced equally by the Eurasianists, worked together poorly. Although the movement officially broke up over the issue of the unqualified pro-Soviet stance of left-wing Eurasianists, the greater cause was the fragility of the very consensus that brought together such different visions of the postimperial future of Russia.¹⁸

Historians often saw Eurasianism as a movement that sought to recuperate the former Russian Empire by giving it a content of ethnographic, linguistic, and geographic unity. My approach to the movement’s history is somewhat different. While I agree that Eurasianism sought to neutralize the nationalisms of the many peoples of the former Russian Empire by embracing them all under the umbrella of Eurasian unity, I see the Eurasianist movement primarily as growing out of the concerns and anxieties of Russian modernism in arts, scholarship, and politics in the last decades of imperial Russia. These concerns and anxieties included many topics, from the development of Russian and other nationalisms to parliamentary politics, and from an Asian interest in poetry to the intellectuals’ turn toward religion and idealism, especially following the Revolution of 1905. No matter how much Eurasianism claimed uniqueness and special path for Russia, the movement was, in fact, an element of that European modernity, which scholars of Russian history came to see as their comparative framework.¹⁹

Few periods saw a greater convergence of Russian and European modernity than the last decades of imperial Russia. Catherine Evtuhov recently suggested that we can extend the name of the Silver Age from the realm of literature, where it designates the efflorescence of arts and poetry, in particular in the last decades of imperial Russia, to the whole range of developments in arts, literature, science, and politics, all of which witnessed an unprecedented intensity of innovation.²⁰ The Eurasianist movement drew on that era to develop a multifaceted language with which to describe the postimperial and postrevolutionary future of Russia, but in the aftermath of the tectonic changes inflicted by the Russian Revolution, World War I, and the Civil War, some themes of that language acquired new meanings. The Eurasianists borrowed freely from the religious revival of the early twentieth century yet rejected what they saw as the liberal interpretations of the thinkers of the Russian religious and philosophical renaissance of the 1910s. The Eurasianist rejection of modern European civilization fed on the nascent critique of the bourgeois order by intellectuals in late imperial Russia, but in the 1920s it coalesced with European proto-Fascist movements. The Asian interest of Russian writers and philosophers was instrumentalized by the Eurasianists to sustain the notion of Eurasia as fundamentally different from Europe and to ascribe a geocultural identity to a social phenomenon. The brilliant scholarship of Russian ecologists—students of soils and vegetation who had developed revolutionary notion of biocenosis—was employed by the Eurasianists to substantiate the existence of an autarkic world of Eurasia. Scholars of Russian history have rightly questioned the divide of 1917 and stressed continuity between pre- and post-revolutionary developments. Although the prerevolutionary developments were crucially important for the Eurasianists, they can, nevertheless, hardly be interpreted in terms of a direct line of descent.²¹

I see Eurasianism as an imperial phenomenon but not just in view of the movement’s attempts to recuperate the former imperial space. Eurasianism was the product of the imperial situation, of the unevenness and heterogeneity of the social and cultural space of imperial Russia, in which the conspicuous absence of bourgeois institutions coexisted with the rising critique of the philistine bourgeois order by intellectuals, and the aristocratic and religious rejection of the universal aspirations of modernity combined with a critique of Eurocentrism and cultural colonialism.²² The concept of the imperial situation points to the ways in which ideas and experiences are translated from one context to another, and the exchange rate in these transactions is never set, thus precluding the possibility of describing historical experiences and ideas with a single narrative. A history of Eurasianism, thus, is not a history of Russian nationalism or modernism, of geopolitics or structuralism, but of all these contexts that came to shape the movement in various, often contradictory ways.

This book therefore approaches Eurasianism through a set of different yet interrelated topics. In the first chapter, I describe the lives of leading Eurasianists and their followers to illustrate the extent to which the movement was embedded in intellectual and cultural concerns of the last prerevolutionary decades, from music to literature and from politics to scholarship. However, I also show that the experiences of Russia’s disintegration along social and ethnic lines in the Revolution and the Civil War shaped the lives of the founders of the movement who had just begun their impressive careers in universities, embassies, and salons in the last years of empire. Their scenarios of successful integration into the world of bourgeois professions were interrupted by the historical eruption. When the Revolution came crashing in on their lives, the response of the Eurasianists was to interpret these historical developments as a national catastrophe and to develop their own national mystique.²³ This national imagery of Eurasia forms the subject of the second chapter, which explores how the Eurasianists proposed to rejuvenate Russia after the catastrophe. Their national mystique included defining themselves against the older generation of Russian thinkers, who were blamed for the liberalism and decadence of the Silver Age. The Eurasianists counterposed to that debilitating indecisiveness of the 1910s the new vision of a totalizing national culture based on Orthodox religiosity. The Mongols were marshalled as evidence that this rejuvenation of national life was possible, for the Eurasianists saw the precedent for national renewal in the history of Russian principalities in the wake of the Mongol invasion and destruction. Alexander Blok’s premonitions, which had reinterpreted the Asian elements of Russian culture as a force of social renovation, helped to establish Eurasia as a revolutionary yet conservative force, thus restoring some lost virtues by destroying the colonial and Europeanized imperial Russia. As much as this national mystique insisted on the uniqueness of Russian experiences, the solutions offered by the Eurasianists—a society united by a powerful idea and ruled by an organically emerging ruling selection—placed their movement among the Fascist movements of interwar Europe.²⁴

The third chapter takes up the subject of the Eurasianist anticolonial rhetoric and places it in the context of changes on the global and Russian maps after World War I. I explore Trubetskoi’s critique of Eurocentrism and cultural colonialism and trace it to several overlapping sources. The first concerns the loss of status by the Russian émigrés in the aftermath of the Revolution. The second connects Trubetskoi’s attack on Eurocentrism with his religious diversitarianism and belief in God-given ethnolinguistic diversity. The last context ties the Eurasianist rejection of Eurocentrism to the reception of evolutionism in Russia and in particular to the discussions of the organization of the empire’s political space according to evolutionary theories. As I show in the chapter, Trubetskoi’s anticolonial stance was a belated reaction to the ideas of Maksim Maksimovich Kovalevskii, Russia’s leading sociologist and a self-proclaimed student of Henry Sumner Maine.

Eurasianist anticolonial rhetoric drew a boundary between Europe and Russia-Eurasia but the Eurasianists also invented the latter as a cultural, ethnographic, geographic, and linguistic unity. The fourth chapter explores how Eurasianist thinkers attempted to redraw the boundaries and establish differences between Slavs in Russia and in Europe, while stressing commonalities between the Slavs and the Turkic and Finno-Ugric peoples within Eurasia. This project was accompanied by the construction of Eurasia as a geographical entity through uncovering regularities that govern Eurasia’s territoriality and proposing a historical narrative of convergence of Eurasian peoples into a predetermined unity. The fifth chapter deals with perhaps the most unexpected aspect of Eurasianism. As the movement disintegrated in the late 1920s, the Eurasianist scholars—Savitskii, Trubetskoi, and Roman Osipovich Jakobson—intensified their work to substantiate the existence of the continent through geography and linguistics. Their Eurasianist project overlapped with the emerging structuralist rhetoric and led to the crystallization of a new approach in humanities and social sciences. Jakobson’s intellectual encounters in the United States provided the opportunity to transfer these ideas, especially through exchanges between Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss in the 1940s.

The epilogue of the book focuses on the history of Eurasianism as an organization and on its disintegration. As I tell the story of Eurasianism’s financial successes and publishing activities, I also want to stress that the movement was never a purely intellectual enterprise. In accordance with the Eurasianist national mystique, the movement’s leaders desired action as they sought to replace Marxist ideology with Eurasianism while retaining the Soviet state. Their political aspirations to ride the wave of the demotic revolution in Russia led the movement to become lethally mired in the underground activities of Soviet spies, who influenced their ideas.

Eurasianism was an extraordinarily complex movement. Its leaders were, without any doubt, brilliant intellectuals. Each of them made a lasting contribution to scholarship or arts, and each had a particular sphere of expertise and an intellectual lineage. No single book can do justice to all these encounters of Eurasianism in scholarship and music, literature and politics. I see my book not as an exhaustive history of the Eurasianist movement but rather as a study of the particular consensus that emerged in 1920 between Eurasianist intellectuals and lasted for a decade. As the movement disintegrated in late 1928 to early 1929, some of the elements of this fleeting consensus continued to have a life of their own, in the new Eurasianism relaunched by Savitskii, in the structuralist rhetoric of Trubetskoi and Jakobson, in the literary collaboration of the scholar Vasilli Petrovich Nikitin and the writer Aleksei Mikhailovich Remizov, in George Vernadsky’s historical scholarship or in Suvchinskii’s cooperation with Igor Stravinsky. I hope that this study will help scholars to explore the lines of continuity or ruptures between the Eurasianist ideas of the 1920s and later iterations of Eurasianism in the writings of the Soviet maverick scholar Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev or in the politics of contemporary Russian Fascists like Alexander Dugin.

CHAPTER 1

EXILES FROM THE SILVER AGE

1. FROM THE SILVER AGE TO EXILE

On July 4, 1921, a group of young émigré scholars made a public appearance at the meeting of the Russian Religious and Philosophical Society just reestablished in the Bulgarian capital. The speakers were Prince Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetskoi and Georgii Vasil’evich Florovskii. Their presentations were undoubtedly provocative in the émigré milieu: they demanded a thorough reconsideration of key questions of Russian history and culture in light of the recent catastrophic events that had engulfed their homeland and turned them into refugees. Although the group seemed to have gained very few followers after that meeting, the event marked the official beginning of the Eurasianist movement.¹

A few months prior to this appearance, the Russian-Bulgarian Publishing House in Sofia printed Nikolai Trubetskoi’s militant pamphlet Europe and Mankind, which presented a frontal assault on the intellectual treasures of the Russian intelligentsia and challenged the notion of European cultural superiority over the rest of the world. In two months following the public presentation, the group also published a collection of articles under an exalted title worthy of professional visionaries: Exodus to the East: Forebodings and Fulfillments: Assertions of the Eurasianists. In enervating style reminiscent of fin-de-siècle Russian modernists, the authors of the collection did not hesitate to acknowledge that they were Eurasians, representatives of a civilization different from both Europe and Asia.² Russia’s catastrophic recent history, its moral and social collapse, had to be revisited and explained, they insisted, from a point of view that would take into consideration this unique geopolitical and cultural destiny.

This collective manifesto of the new movement contained the double-edged appeal of Eurasianism as a movement both conservative and revolutionary. On the one hand, the contributors to the volume aspired to lay bare widespread clichés and claimed the return to some primordial knowledge: they differed widely in terms of topics and foci, yet reflected a common theme of rediscovery of Eurasia’s essential geopolitical, historical, and cultural traits. On the other hand, these articles addressed the implications of the Russian Revolution for the world and insisted that Russia-Eurasia had embarked upon a radically new path of development, epitomizing a worldwide break with the past and the coming of modernity. Russia-Eurasia had fallen out of the mainstream of European life; indeed, it left Europe behind, and joined the ranks of the colonial peoples of the world. In the new era that opened with the Revolution, old values and beliefs did not hold. A complete refurbishing of culture, even of life itself, was needed to address these tectonic transformations.

Comparing Russia’s imperial experiences to those of Britain, Petr Savitskii argued that Russia-Eurasia was a separate and autarkic economic unit due to its continental nature, which prevented Eurasia from participating in the global economic exchange based on oceanic communication.³ However, Savitskii did not just apply contemporary geopolitical concepts to the Russian case. He also attempted to chart a dramatic destiny for Eurasia based on his idea of migrations of culture. According to his theory, in each historical epoch a particular geographic region hosted the most dynamic civilization and the shift of the center of gravity of world culture followed the path determined by changes in climatic conditions. As the scientific-like statistics demonstrated, in the new era, Eurasia was predestined to replace Western Europe as a new center of civilization.⁴

Nikolai Trubetskoi explored the problem of Russian nationalism and insisted, echoing the Slavophile ideas, that the Russian society had been split by Europeanization into indigenous masses and alienated elite. However, unlike the Slavophiles, who had idealized the pre-Petrine Muscovite past and sought to return the Russians to their spiritual Byzantine roots, Trubetskoi saw the solution to this problem in a repudiation of European culture and in reconsideration of the importance of Russia’s links with Asia.⁵ Even those forms of nationalism that the Russians copied from Europe were false.⁶ It was the task of the Russian intelligentsia to overcome this dependence on European models and to understand the composition of Eurasian culture.⁷

Petr Suvchinskii proclaimed that the Bolshevik antireligious propaganda and activities could not conceal the religious nature of the transformation that had occurred in Russia, its profoundly messianic and apocalyptic character. The Russian Revolution was a climactic event, which unfolded against the background of new developments in art and music, and these developments were in themselves a sign of a new epoch:

There are frightening times, terrifying epochs, like apocalyptic visions, times of great realizations of the Mystery, times frightening and blessed, when in some general, mysterious burst entire generations reach out for and are uplifted to the great mysteries of the sky, or when the skies by their mysterious essence hover over, lowered, like huge wings, above the earth.⁸

According to Suvchinskii, our age is an age of great religious revelations, and, like any age of inspiration and unveiling, it flows through an accelerating alteration of events.⁹ In order to overcome the revolutionary chaos, one had to embrace religious consciousness and interpret the recent events from the perspective of unyielding faith. For Suvchinskii, the border between the domains of faith and everyday life must be transgressed in order