Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire

by Marlène Laruelle

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia has been marginalized at the edge of a Western-dominated political and economic system. In recent years, however, leading Russian figures, including former president Vladimir Putin, have begun to stress a geopolitics that puts Russia at the center of a number of European-Asian, Christian-Muslim-Buddhist, Mediterranean-Indian, Slavic-Turkic, and so on. This volume examines the political presuppositions and expanding intellectual impact of Eurasianism, a movement promoting an ideology of Russian-Asian greatness, which has begun to take hold throughout Russia, Kazakhstan, and Turkey. Eurasianism purports to tell Russians what is unalterably important about them and why it can only be expressed in an empire. Using a wide range of sources, Marlène Laruelle discusses the impact of the ideology of Eurasianism on geopolitics, interior policy, foreign policy, and culturalist philosophy.

Genres: Russia, Politics, History, Nonfiction, Philosophy

296 pages, Hardcover

First published August 5, 2008

About the author

Dr. Marlene Laruelle is Associate Director of the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (IERES) and Research Professor of International Affairs at the Elliott School of International Affairs, The George Washington University. She previously was a Visiting Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (2005–2006). She holds a Ph.D. from the National Institute for Oriental Languages and Cultures in Paris. She has authored numerous books, including Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), In the Name of the Nation: Nationalism and Politics in Contemporary Russia (Palgrave, 2009), and Russia’s Strategies in the Arctic and the Future of the Far North (M.E. Sharpe, 2013). She recently edited Eurasianism and the European Far Right. Reshaping the Russia-Europe relationship (Lexington, 2015). She is a co-PI on several NSF grants devoted to Arctic Urban Sustainability.

Reviews

[Mana-tasia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Heavy read but incredibly fascinating and tantamount to understanding Russian political thought.

[Raya Paul Gracchus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Broad overview of the subject and its key thinkers, Gumilev, Panarin, and Dugin in particular. Great introduction. Laruelle is a dry writer though.

[James Rooney · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book deals with the enigmatic and protean ideology of Eurasianism.

I found that this book was excruciating to read, it is all philosophy and not so much history. The author certainly does a great job of describing Eurasianism, but I found I was not as interested in the this concept as I thought.

While Laruelle gives a solid introduction to the emergence of Eurasianism in the 1920s, curiously enough the same time as its Polish rival, Prometheism, emerged, both to be unimportant at the time but found resurrection in the 1990s, the focus of her work is on the so-called Neo-Eurasianism that emerged after the fall of the Soviet Union.

She devotes chapters to major figures in this revival, namely Lev Gumilev, Alexander Panarin, and Alexander Dugin. The concluding chapters sum up the movement and shed light on the a Turkish counterpart to the classic Russocentric Eurasianism.

Some of these insights are very interesting, such as Laruelle's suggestion that the terms post Soviet or former Soviet imply some intrinsic unity to the Eurasian space, and suggest that it will at some point be reunited. It is also clear that Euranasianism is an attempt to combat nationalist particularity and stress the basic unity of the post-Soviet space.

But for the most part the ideas of the Russian (and Turkic) figures examined are all lunacy. Crackpot nonsense. Leontiev, for instance, argues that the Russians, while Slavic-speaking, are Turkic or even Scythian in origin, similar to the claim of Bulgarians to be Turanian.

Gumilev is said to have a large following in Russia, but he completely dismisses the humanities and attempts to impose biochemical explanations for all history. He asserts such bizarre arguments as passionarities, which are supposedly the expression of biological or environmental energy. This has extremely little historical value.

Dugin is even further off the deep end. He is described as believing in occultism, and in such absurdities as Hyperborea. Dugin is a political force of some importance in Russia, so it's difficult to get a grasp on him. What are his real thoughts?

Laruelle argues that Dugin and his Neo-Eurasianist colleagues are implicitly authoritarian and anti-democratic. They are hostile to the United States and to what they perceive as its liberal world order. Curiously, they share with leftists like David North the conviction that American support for democracy and human rights is just a cloak for American neo-imperialism.

The chapter on Turkish Eurasianism is illuminating in establishing that while Eurasianism is ostensibly inclusive and anational, in reality it is strongly nationalistic. Classic Eurasianism, and the Neo-Eurasianists in Russia, presume that the dominant force in Eurasia will be Russia. The Turkic Eurasianists similarly champion Turkish or Kazakh nationalism.

Laruelle is at her best in explaining how the Neo-Eurasianists differ from the Eurasianists of the 1920s, and states convincingly that like Fascism the original Eurasianism was a product of its time, originating among conservative Russian emigres and opponents of the Bolsheviks, and who were trying to secure their identity against their new European hosts.

Neo-Eurasianism seems to have taken leave of any sort of rationality or reality. It is hard to believe that Dugin or Gumilev could hold the views they do, but it is certainly useful to learn what those views are even if they're insane.

[Jesse Morrow · Rating 4 out of 5]

Russian Eurasianism is often seen as an attempt to build a new Tsarist/Soviet empire. But it is more complex than that. Founded in the ashes of Tsarist thought, Russian Eurasianism became almost a utopian dream to obfuscate the failures of the Whites.

Laruelle follows the three main Russian Eurasianist. The first two are from the Soviet era - Gumilev and Panarin. The last is the modern alt-Right Aleksandr Dugin. Each of these theorists have slightly different takes on what Eurasianism is and its purpose. It might be a civilization led by ethnic Russians or a civilization led by the Russian nationals or it might be a civilization with a common ethnos.

Throughout, each of these (and the earlier therorists) appears to try to create a "non-European" ideal where Russia can reject both the Russia of the contemporary and the European ideals - whether Marxist or liberal.

She finishes with a chapter on non-Russian Eurasianism. While interesting, I find it a tack on.

[Stefaan Van ryssen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely must read to understand Putin's position and ambitions.