Abstract
The article examines the genesis of the Eurasian ideology of the 1920–1930s from the point of view of discourse analysis. Discourse is defi ned as a set of statements refl ecting different points of view on the same issue. In accordance with this defi nition, the author isolates the Eurasian discourse from two adjacent ones - the pre-revolutionary imperial and religious-philosophical. The problematics of pre-revolutionary imperial discourse were focused on justifying the right of Russian tsars to own lands and peoples within the existing borders of the empire, as well as the right to expand these borders. The religious and philosophical discourse about Russia was built around the question of its divine purpose in the history of mankind. In contrast, Eurasian discourse focuses on ethnocultural synthesis within the boundaries of a special geographical area, most of which is located within the Russian state. But before the revolution of 1917, this problem was not considered at all in this formulation. The predecessors of Eurasianism include only a few authors who recognized and positively assessed the Turkic-Mongol infl uence on the Russian mentality and statehood. However, by the beginning of the twentieth century, the prevailing tendency was to downplay or deny this infl uence altogether. The turn to the Eurasian issues is associated with the work of symbolist poets A. Blok and A. Bely. Being infl uenced by the religious and mystical prophecy of the philosopher V. Solovyov, they accepted the revolutionary upheavals of the early twentieth century, as the awakening of the “inner East” in the Russian people. Together with other representatives of the Russian intelligentsia, they were the creators of the Eurasian myth, born in the elements of revolution and civil war. The founders of the Eurasian movement rationalized this myth, reducing it to political ideology. This was a version of the new imperial ideology, which explained and justifi ed the preservation of a united and indivisible Russia within its former borders.
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