Between Europe and Asia. The Origins, Theories, and Legacies of Russian Eurasianism. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015. 267 S. = Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies. ISBN: 978-0-8229-6366-0

Between Europe and Asia. The Origins, Theories, and Legacies of Russian Eurasianism. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015. 267 S. = Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies. ISBN: 978-0-8229-6366-0.

Table of contents:

http://bvbr.bib-bvb.de:8991/F?func=service&doc_library=BVB01&local_base=BVB01&doc_number=028068373&line_number=0001&func_code=DB_RECORDS&service_type=MEDIA

In their introduction to this stimulating and integrated collection of essays, the editors assert that their aim is to consider Eurasianism from different disciplinary and thematic perspectives in the framework of European modernity. They indicate their subject’s heterogeneity, its European context of war and revolution and its facets both religious and cultural.

Considering origins, Olga Maiorova finds them in nineteenth-century discourse, especially by Alexander Herzen. Engaging with the East-West dichotomy to be found in Western thinkers such as John Stuart Mill and the likes of Belinsky in his homeland, the famous exile turned in his later years to the idea of a Russo-Turanian symbiosis. However, Maiorova notes, he looked across the Atlantic as well as the great continent, rejecting the United States as a ‘last, well-produced edition’ of old Europe ‘in a crude English translation’. However, it must be said, he also expressed the conviction that American individualism and Russia communalism complemented rather than excluded each other.

Continuity and change across the 1917 divide is considered by Vera Tolz, who recalls that, while Spengler’s Decline of the West owed much to the emergence of German and Austrian Orientology in the late nineteenth century, Eurasianism drew heavily on comparable developments in Imperial Russia. A key aspect of the 1917 divide that could have received more attention is the full emergence of the USA as a world power: there was much more than the principle of self-determination to Wilsonism, which in general constituted a major threat to Eurocentrism.

Four essays follow on what might be called the ‘classical’ Eurasianism enunciated in the years following 1917. Focusing on N. S. Trubetskoi’s little-known brochure entitled Europe and Mankind and published in 1920, Sergey Glebov finds in it an antithesis to the evolutionary interpretation to be found in Kovalevskii in particular. Marlene Laruelle scrutinises Eurasianism as a geographical ideology, as a systemic, regular and hermetic totality, pointing out how its devotees looked beyond the unity of sciences to the enunciation of a new, transfiguring discipline, ‘personology’, that would give a more complete meaning to humankind. She appropriately notes the influence of Sir Halford Mackinder’s view that whoever dominated the steppes would dominate the world island of Eurasia. She also comments that, paradoxically, away from the great land mass, the United States constituted ‘a model for the Eurasianists with its strong economic nationalism, its Monroe Doctrine, unifying the north and south of the continent, its continental consciousness, and its nonmembership of the League of Nations.’ (p. 81) Stefan Wiederkehr suggests that Eurasianism may be considered as a form of Popperian historicism. Reminding us, like Tolz, that the idea may be seen in the wide context of Spengler’s Kulturpessimismus, its morphology of cultures in particular, he argues that the Eurasianists were open to illiberal ideologies from left as well as right because of their acceptance of the historical prediction that was at the heart of Popper’s distinctive view of historicism, the teleological converse of German Historismus. Martin Beisswenger analyses the religious and economic foundations of P. N. Savitskii’s interpretation, which went beyond a previous primary emphasis on geography, especially geopolitics, to insist that economic modernisation would preserve Eurasian cultural and religious identity.

A link to consideration of later forms of Eurasianism is to be found in Igor Turbakov’s description of Georgii Vladimirovich Vernadsky’s intellectual odyssey, contrasting its destination via a deep consideration of the Ukrainian question with that of a fellow immigrant to the USA, Mikhail Karpovich, who accepted the Western, liberal view of the history of their fatherland. Is there any lesson to be drawn, one wonders, from the fact that Karpovich’s interpretation was more influential although he wrote far less? Harsha Ram looks for spatialisation of the sign in the futuristic adaptations of Roman Jakobson and Velimir Khlebnikov. However, he concludes, while Khlebnikov was moving towards a global linguistic and social utopia, Jakobson reduced this generous vision to a focus on the Soviet Union. Going in the other direction, so to speak, Hama Yukiko moves towards a global history of the Russian intellectual movement via its reception in Japan, where it contributed to the formulation of Pan-Asianism. In the short run, there was a clash of ideas as well as of armies in Manchuria. Further on after World War II, Hama Yukiko notes, the perspective on the subject shifted through the Cold War to the present period. Taking the discussion into these recent times, Mark Bassin looks at Lev Gumilev, Russian nationalism and the troubled emergence of Neo-Eurasianism, bringing Gumilev’s vaporous interpretation of etnos down to earth. Entitled Narrative Kulikovo, Bassin’s essay uses the metaphor of that famous battle to discuss Gumilev’s interpretation of the significance of the Golden Horde in the light of more recent writing on its place in Russian nationalism.

This theme is continued in a Postface where Marlene Laruelle scrutinises the many contemporary faces of ‘Eurasia’ before concluding that, paradoxically, the more the term enters state and popular discourse, the more the founding fathers of Eurasianism are forgotten.

Many of the contributors to this most worthwhile collection have written further articles, even books on aspects of the subject. In the face of such formidable learning, a few comments on the contents of the work under review, most of them matters of nuance rather than substance, are offered in a tentative manner on origins, theories and legacies as in the subtitle.

On origins, learning before Herzen may have been hinted at Montesquieu in particular deserving mention for more than his Persian Letters. Further back, Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, with its division of the world into three parts including a North and North-East in which ‘the mighty Empire of Russia’ and ‘diverse kingdoms of Tartaria’ are both to be found, is among palpable precursors. Hakluyt’s division is also a reminder of Eurasianism’s emphasis on the East-West axis to the comparative neglect of North-South.

Concerning theories, if ultimate objectivity is to be found in a global approach, more might be said about Europe and Asia and the world beyond, especially as it was taking shape after World War I. To consider the phenomenon in its original setting, the period following 1917 together with 1914–1918 was one of ‘universal revolution in human affairs and the human mind’, to quote the then authoritative Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1926. Eurasianism was one among a number of responses to this challenge in the failed Russian Empire. While other failed European empires, German, Austrian and Turkish, also promoted new ideas, the victorious empires, notably the British and French, made noteworthy if less comprehensive adjustments. In Asia, Japan and China reasserted their distinctive varieties of nationalism. Above all, the USA realised its ‘manifest destiny’ in the Washington Conference of 1921–1922, a neglected sequel to Versailles.

Finally, on legacies, Neo-Eurasianism is partly responsible for putting Putin’s fief in an enclave, however vast. In this case, it may be asked, which influence came first, Russian neo-imperialism or Western neo-Russophobia? Perhaps the time has come for the adoption of a wider view, as taken by George Vernadsky’s father, Vladimir, in 1926, that is to say, cosmism, involving the reduction of chaos on earth and in space through united human effort.

Paul Dukes, Aberdeen