Bassin, Mark; Glebov, Sergey and Laruelle, Marlene (eds) Between Europe and Asia: The Origins, Theories, and Legacies of Russian Eurasianism (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 551 Bassin, Mark; Glebov, Sergey and Laruelle, Marlene (eds). Between Europe and Asia: The Origins, Theories, and Legacies of Russian Eurasianism. Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA, 2015. 267 pp. Notes. Index. $27.95 (paperback). However postmodern Moscow’s ideological narrative might be, Eurasianism and its contemporary offshoot, Neo-Eurasianism, remain a staple in the Kremlin’sarsenal,withEurasiathecentrepieceofRussia’sgeopoliticalambitions. For this reason, continuing to investigate the genesis and repercussions of early twentieth-century Eurasianism is essential in understanding the geopolitical frictions that dog Russia’s Near Abroad. This is exactly what Mark Bassin, Sergey Glebov and Marlene Laruelle, the editors of Between Europe and Asia: The Origins, Theories, and Legacies of Russian Eurasianism attempt — to ‘go beyond the narratives produced by the Eurasianists themselves and to reconstruct multiple context within which the movement and the ideas functioned, to which they responded, and which they generated’ (p. 2). The volume’s Introduction sets the stage with an overview of the history of the Eurasianist movement, its main proponents and tenets, and some of the doctrinal tensions that have characterized it from the outset. The first two chapters probe the movement’s origins. Olga Maiorova argues that the first attacks on the Western paradigm dominating Russian intellectual life in the middle of the nineteenth century came from the political essayist, Alexander Herzen, who claimed that the Mongols tore Russia away from Europe, triggering a period of convergence of the local population with other Asian ethnicities that infused it with a type of barbaric energy that, in contrast to sclerotic Europe, had the capacity to reshape the world. Maiorova sees Herzen as one of the first to recognize Asian traits in Russia’s identity, and its likely influence on the subsequent emergence of Eurasianism. Vera Tolz, by contrast, traces Eurasianism’s origins to the scholarly assault sweeping through Western Europe and Russia around 1880, which posited that non-European models of development were superior to the established European discourse. This led to the emergence of the Kondakov and Rozin schools which championed Russia’s distinctiveness from Europe, whilst still seeing it as a unique fusion of the Western and Eastern traditions. Chapters three to five consider some of the theories of Eurasianists themselves. Sergey Glebov revisits Trubetskoi’s assault on Russia’s Europeanization and argues that his theories emerged as a critical response to the views of the liberal thinkers of the day, most notably the leading late nineteenth-century Russian sociologist, Maksim Kovalevskii. Marlene Laruelle examines the innovative stance taken by Petr Savitskii and Georgii Vernadskii, who mapped the correspondence between cultural space and geographical territory in their attempts to find a metaphysical totality that SEER, 94, 3, july 2016 552 they believed Eurasia represented. This is why, she argues, their approach should be seen as a form of geographical ideology. Finally, Stefan Wiederkehr looks at how Karl Popper’s activist concept of historicism helps us understand the core of Eurasianism’s philosophy. Chapters six to eight explore the beliefs of three leading Eurasianists. Whilst Martin Beissenger investigates the religious and economic underpinnings of Savitskii’s concept of Eurasianism, Igor Torbakov attributes Vernadskii’s historical revisions, beginning with 1917 to his search for national identity, to his Ukrainian roots and state of exile. Harsha Ram poses a possible nexus between Velimir Khlebnikov’s futurist vision of a common linguistic space centred in Russia and Roman Jakobson’s concept of the ‘Eurasian linguistic alliance’ and the extent to which this distanced him from the original intention of the Russian symbolist movement (p. 147). In the last two chapters Hama Yukiko investigates Eurasianism’s influence on Japan’s pan-Asianism, whilst Mark Bassin focuses on the contemporary legacy of the Eurasianists, which is torn between Eurasian revisionists such as Lev Gumilev on one hand and increasingly radical positions taken by Russian nationalists on the other, and has resulted in the polemic and contradictory stance taken by Neo-Eurasianists such as Aleksandr Dugin. As Laruelle concludes in the Postface, the legacy of Eurasianism has been mired by neo-Eurasianists’ Russia-centric and highly opportunistic take on the philosophy of the 100-year-old movement. However, this...