Russia's Asian Temptation

Abstract

THE RUSSIAN SYMBOLIST POET Aleksander Blok wrote 'The Scythians' in January 1918. The Romanov dynasty had collapsed less than a year earlier, and Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik party now ruled the former empire. Shortly before Blok wrote the poem, Soviet officials signed an armistice with Imperial Germany that took Russia out of the First World War. On 3 March 1918, a little over a month after the poem was completed, Lenin's infant regime concluded a peace with its central European adversaries. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk traded huge swaths of territory in the former Russian empire's west for much-needed peace. But the agreement also incurred the wrath of Russia's former allies, England and France.'The Scythians' was both an appeal and a warning to Europe. Elsewhere in his poem, Blok beseeched the West to accept the Bolshevik Revolution: 'Come to us! Leave the war's horrors and join us in peace!' Were the Europeans to continue their hostility to Soviet Russia, they would only earn its undying enmity. 'We have nothing to lose,' Blok reminded the great occidental powers. He promised them that: 'Century upon century you will be cursed by your children's enfeebled progeny.' No longer would Russia protect the civilized West against the barbarous East. Indeed, 'We will turn our Asiatic face to you.'(1)Blok's notorious reference to the Scythians was an allusion to an aggressive inner Asian nomadic people who had occupied Ukraine's steppes some 25 centuries earlier. Russians usually claim their heritage from the more peaceful and more European Slavs. By reminding the world that 'We are Scythians! We are Asians, too!' Blok's poem was an audacious response to the German notion of the Russians as barbarous Asiatics. Blok was mocking an important theme of Wilhelmine propaganda during the war. Just as Great Britain called Germans the Hun to suggest that they were savage orientals ravaging the civilized West, the Germans similarly hurled Asian epithets at the enemy on their eastern front.In proclaiming his Asiatic provenance, Blok was in a distinct minority among his compatriots. During the Great War, educated Russians generally placed themselves in the same part of the world as the other powers in the Triple Entente, France and Britain. Like their allies, most Russians saw their racial roots as firmly planted in European soil.(2) But Blok's provocative poem shows that there were Russians who were more ambivalent about their continental allegiance.In the twilight years of Imperial Russia, a few intellectuals had begun to stress their nation's affinity with the East rather than the West. Poets like Vladimir Solovev rhapsodized that 'From the East is light, from the East is power.'(3) Others actively called for closer political ties with the great oriental autocracy of China. The vostochniki, or Asianists, believed it was the tsar's holy mission to 'reunite' Russia with China, like some latter-day Genghis Khan, with St Petersburg as the new Xanadu.(4)In the 1920s and the 1930s, a group of emigre intellectuals in Prague began to argue that Russia was neither European nor Asian, but something entirely different: Russia was a world onto itself, a sixth great continent called Eurasia. As they explained it, the peoples of Eurasia were the offspring of Asian nomads who had intermingled with Europeans over the millennia. If the geographical emphasis of the post-revolutionary Eurasianists was a little different from that of the pre-revolutionary Asianists, they shared a strong antipathy to the West.The Asianists of tsarist Russia and the emigre Eurasianists were small groups, but their ideas survived and can now, after the fall of the Soviet Union, be found among prominent political movements in the Russian Federation. Profoundly uneasy about a 'new world order' dominated by the West's premier power, some find solace in emphasizing their nation's differences with Europe. Opposition parties of the so-called red-brown tendency - old-line communists, new-line fascists, and extremist nationalists - often claim a racial affinity to the East. …