ABSTRACT
One of the main trends in modern civilization is the growing recognition of cultural diversity and the need for dialogue between different cultures and worldviews. Globalization is blurring the cultural and civilizational boundaries of the past. The world finds itself at a cultural divergence. Humankind is transitioning from a world of numerous distinct civilizations to an integrated whole. In both academic and public discourse there is a greater focus on adaptation, acculturation and integration, as well as the countervailing forces of differentiation, ethno-cultural stratification, the growing ethnicization of social relations, and interethnic tensions. Society faces problems related to cultural differences and national identity, and in order to preserve the integrity of multicultural communities, we must forge compromises between ethno-cultural groups living in a diverse cultural landscape. At their core, these problems are the product of the mutability, indeterminacy
and instability of the modern world, and the contradictory, nonlinear forces that shape it, including globalization and localization, national integration and multiculturalism, and international migration. All this has particular relevance for Russia as a multi-ethnic and multi-faith country. Russia has responded to globalization by coming to self-identify in increasingly civilizational terms. There is greater recognition in the country of the need to evolve a truly national self-consciousness, to determine the Russian state’s place in the world, and better to understand Russia’s essence and originality, which are above all related to its geopolitical position within the Europe-Asia/East-West system of relationships. Ethno-national issues have always figured prominently in Russian philosophical and social thought, an apparent consequence of Russia’s multi-ethnic composition and its search for an identity of its own at the intersection of two continental cultures. Russian intellectual history is characterized by disputes between Westerners
and Slavophiles, and Eurasianists and their opponents. It is against this backdrop that the ideas of Eurasianism, which date back to the 1920s, continue to be a source of so much theoretical and practical interest in modern-day Russia. When the Bolsheviks took power in Russia, a number of Russian intellectuals fled the revolution and ensuing civil war and tried to define anew the essence of Russian culture and the meaning of their national history in
order to understand what was happening in their country: Russia was entering a new historical stage and moving toward a new and modern civilizational structure, gradual modernization was disrupted, and revolutionary events took over in 1917. Eurasianism is a complex ideological, theoretical and geopolitical move-
ment that took shape in a controversial transitional period of Russian history. It bears the imprints of an era in which core values were being re-evaluated, and this shaped the Eurasianist interpretation of Russian history and culture and Russia’s attitude to both West and East. Despite its relatively brief ‘official’ existence, Eurasianism addressed the most vexed issues of Russian history and attempted to answer ‘eternal’ questions about the essence of Russia as a distinct civilization that had absorbed both Eastern and Western influences but was not fully defined by either. The Eurasianists were a group of brilliant philosophers, historians, economists,
geographers, linguists, writers and other intellectuals, who emigrated to Europe after the 1917 revolution in Russia. The Eurasian movement was led at different stages by the linguist and culture expert Nikolai Trubetskoi, geographer and economist Pyotr Savitsky, art critic Pyotr Suvchinsky, historian George Vernadsky, and philosophers Georgy Florovsky and Lev Karsavin. Other prominent figures include philologists and literary scholars Roman Jakobson, Dmitry Svyatopolk-Mirsky and Alexander Kozhevnikov (Kojève), lawyers Ivan Ilyin and Nikolai Alexeev, writer Vsevolod Ivanov, historian Pyotr Bicilli, and Erendzhen Hara-Davan. The Eurasian movement arose out of the debate sparked by Trubetskoi’s
1920 book Europe and Mankind, which denounced the oppressive influence that the excessively ideological Romano-Germanic culture had on other cultures. He believed the intrinsic aggressiveness of that culture was distilled in the ideology of Eurocentrism. Under the influence of this ideology, other cultures developed inferiority complexes and set themselves the false goal of ‘catching up’ with the West. To accomplish this, the ‘backward’ country had to foster a class of ‘genuine’ Europeans, but this inevitably created social tension. Development moved forward fitfully, disrupting the natural rhythm of the people and sapping their vitality. After catching up with the West in certain fields, the country would find itself even further behind in others. Moreover, the pro-Western mindset is a predominately utilitarian worldview with an emphasis on a civilization’s external achievements rather than the inner spiritual and creative processes that make these achievements possible. Native cultures were degraded by neglect of their natural creativity and the disease of imitation. As a current of socio-political thought in its own right, Eurasianism was
born on 3 June 1921, at a meeting of a Russian religious and philosophical society in Sofia, where Nikolai Trubetskoi and Georgy Florovsky spoke. This was followed not long after by the publication of an important collection of scholarly articles on the subject, Exit to the East: Presentiments and Accomplishments. It laid out the basic principles of Eurasianism and the way forward. Later, Eurasianism spread to Russian émigré communities in other European
cities, including Prague, Paris and Berlin. Eurasianists published the collection On the Path (Berlin, 1922), followed by Russia and Latinism (Berlin, 1923). The periodicals Evraziiskaya Khronika (Eurasian Chronicle) and Evraziiskii Vremennik (Eurasian Annals) were launched in Berlin and Paris. In 1926, the manifesto of the Eurasianist movement,Eurasianism: An Attempt at a Systematic Exposition, was published, providing a theoretical and ideological framework. Eurasian periodicals were established in other European cities as well. Eurasianism had such appeal because it fit the ‘catastrophic worldview’
shared by various segments of the Russian émigré community. The Eurasianists sought to help fellow exiles overcome their social and spiritual crisis by explaining how Russia got to this point and suggesting possible solutions. Savitsky wrote in one of his unpublished articles that ‘the name Eurasianism denotes a Russian movement that came into being in the post-revolutionary period and set itself the goal of creating a new Russian ideology that could make sense of what had happened in Russia. Eurasianism demonstrates to the younger generation the aims and methods of action’.1 In fact, a considerable part of the intelligentsia that left the country after 1917 were eager to redefine the essence of Russian culture and the meaning of their national history in order to understand what had happened in Russia. However, explanations of what happened varied. The Eurasianists were among the first to intuit that the revolutionary events in Russia were the result of far-reaching, fundamental changes rather than localized circumstances. A change of epochs was under way. The Eurasianists viewed the Russian revolution and the parallel crisis in West
European culture as a profound cultural transformation at the junction of these two historical epochs. Eurasianism was the product of two variables: the past and the alien. The West was alien. Tsarist Russia was the past. Moreover, the Eurasianists believed that the crisis-fuelled transformation of Europe was more profound and destructive than developments in Russia. In their view, a new cultural and historical type was being born. To sustain themselves spiritually, they turned to their ethnic roots, national tradition and the Russian soil. Eurasianism emerged as both a socio-political movement and a conceptual
framework designed to bring together differing and, in fact, opposing ideological trends and theoretical approaches around the concept of a Russian-Eurasian civilization. However, there were no clear-cut solutions to the problem explored by the Eurasianists – finding the right balance between West and East in the Russian mentality. Still, even though the luminaries of Eurasianism – Trubetskoi, Savitsky, Vernadsky, Karsavin, Shakhmatov, Alexeyev, Ilyin and others – failed to answer all the questions troubling the Russian émigré community at that time, their ideas greatly influenced how Russians self-identified during one of the most trying and controversial periods in Russian history. While the ideas of Eurasianism evolved over time, the movement has a
common conceptual foundation:
1 Understanding Eurasia as a specific cultural-geographical and sociohistorical entity: ‘a community of different peoples on the soil of Eurasian
place-development, their reciprocal attractions and repulsions, and their attitudes – collectively and in isolation – to outside (non-Eurasian) peoples and cultures.’2
