Abstract
Books review: Bassin M. The Gumilev Mystique: Biopolitics, Eurasianism, and the Construction of Community in Modern Russia. Cornell University Press, 2016. 400 p.; Bassin M., Pozo G. (eds). The Politics of Eurasianism: Identity, Popular Culture and Russia's Foreign Policy. Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. 384 p.; Clover Ch. Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia's New Nationalism.Yale University Press, 2017. 360 p. The review considers three works on Eurasianism, the theoretical geography of Lev Gumilev and contemporary Russian ethnonationalism. It places the reviewed works in the context of the historical ideological evolution of Eurasianism. The principal argument in all three reviewed texts is that there are three forms of Eurasian ideology: classical Eurasianism, Gumilevian Eurasianism and neo-Eurasianism. This essay argues that instead of a rank appropriation of Eurasian ideology into contemporary Russian ethnonationalist discourses, there remains a great intellectual and theoretical power in Gumilevian Eurasianism that could yet be applied to contemporary Eurasian and Russophere geographies in a more positive and empowering manner than the current misappropriated form of Russian ethnonationalist Eurasianism. While neo-Eurasianism is a misappropriation of Gumilevian Eurasianism, a revival of a new fork of neo-Gumilevian Eurasianism could diffuse the contemporary Russian misappropriation and return to a more objective and inclusive Eurasian ideology.
Highlights
While neo-Eurasianism is a misappropriation of Gumilevian Eurasianism, a revival of a new fork of neo-Gumilevian Eurasianism could diffuse the contemporary Russian misappropriation and return to a more objective and inclusive Eurasian ideology
How did Soviet historians, geographers and ethnographers imagine the space of these Soviet geographies and the wider conceptions of Eurasia? And how are the ideas of Russian-language political geography, geopolitics and ethnogeography continuing to shape contemporary discourse in Russia and the Central Asian republics on a Eurasian political space?
The three books reviewed help us to understand Gumilev’s own work, the misappropriation of Gumilev’s ethnogenesis theory by the contemporary Russian Right, and some of the more positive ways that Gumilevian Eurasianism is being practiced by various polities both within Russia and more importantly by the contemporary states which have formed around Central Asian geographies
Summary
Eurasianism is generally typologised into three historical branches: early classical Eurasianism of the end of the tsarist silver age, Gumilevian radical Eurasianism of the Soviet Union, and the contemporary neo-Eurasianism of the ethnonationalist movement in the Russian Federation. Gumilevian and neo-Eurasianism are all really struggling with a redefinition of the political state, not as the Westphalian legal construct, but as a biopolity, to find something in traditionalism and natural geography to explain the development of human geographic institutions of the proto-state. Gumilev’s ideas never made it to critical social theory and are virtually unknown to the Frankfurt School, the relationship of regions to economic development, and the process of legitimation of the concept of state through political geographic theory overlap here This is not an argument for Soviet exceptionalism, that throughout the Cold War this theoretical geography of Gumilev evolved, promulgated, took root, and flourished in an intellectual space that was sequestered from the western academic circles. Far from condemning Central Asia to a simplistic cooptation into Moscow’s Grand Strategy, Gumilev’s Eurasianism can still be read by contemporaries as offering an alternative to both Russian ethnonationalism, and “Atlantic” liberalism
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