ABSTRACT
Communism in the USSR was hardly a superstructure that, once collapsed, would only need to be vigorously swept away in order for the principles of economic and political competition to spring up as if spontaneously from the cleared ground. It was, on the contrary, an effective political form that shaped institutions, oiganized social relations, and fabricated ideology – a political mode of production of social life. The end of the Cold War, therefore, could not thoroughly transform the world vision of the rulers and citizens of the former USSR We should not be surprised at the success certain American authors, especially Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel Huntington, for whom communism seems a less salient reality than Russian Orthodoxy, have had with Russian geopolitical theorists, or at the return of “Eurasianism,” an often muddled doctrine that was first developed in the context of the Russian emigration of the 1920s and then reappeared in the early 1990s in what may be called the Russian “new right” (a political current with personal and ideological ties to the French “new right”). The insistence on Russian specificity, the defense and demonstration of Russia’s grandeur, are at once substitutes for communist ideology and means of continuing the Soviet period. They are also sometimes an expression of nostalgia for the Tsarist empire.
