Eurasianism was born in Bulgaria – who are its ideologues and where does their sense of a continent come from
Nothing seems to have changed in the world, except that Russia is no longer present in the well-developed cultural world. And in that absence is the change. Because in their peculiarities, the “nonexistence” of Russia in a certain sense becomes an ideological focus of the world.
Translated into the language of reality, this means that a cultural-geographical world has entered the arena of world history that has not previously played a leading role. A strained gaze stares into the future: is not the goddess of Culture going East, the numerical tent of so many centuries to be pitched among the valleys and hills of the low West? Doesn’t it go to the good-looking, the cool and the suffering?..
We are in the power of a premonition… And in this premonition may be found a source of complacency, a special kind of complacency of the suffering… To indulge in complacency is to perish. You can’t hide what you think is true. But you shouldn’t rest on a hunch. Not with quietism, but with a feat of perfection, the work of all history is created. He who is proud will leave the grace of seeking. And the curse of barrenness will befall the self-confident… There is no inevitable. It is possible. Only on the path of intense creativity, without fear of repenting of mistakes and admitting weaknesses, only at the cost of unceasing efforts, carried out within the framework of the discoveries of the will, a “plastic” world will possibly become real.
Even if it sounds familiar and almost contemporary to someone, these lines were written exactly 101 years ago, and the place is Sofia, Bulgaria. In 1921, a book in Russian was published in Sofia entitled “Exit to the East. Forebodings and events. Confirmation of the Eurasians”. It is this collection of essays that is considered the beginning of the philosophy of Eurasianism. It should be noted here that Eurasianism first claimed its existence in N. S. Trubetskoi’s book “Europe and Humanity”, also published in Sofia in 1920, but “Exit to the East” became a manifesto of the new movement created by a group of young Russian scientists, emigrants from Russia, who met in the Bulgarian capital in 1920. The authors of the essays are the geographer Piotr Savitsky, the musicologist Piotr Suvchinski, the religious philosopher Giorgi Florovsky and the linguist Nikolai Trubetskoi (the latter is considered the intellectual leader of the movement). All four were opponents of the Bolsheviks and left Russia after the defeat of the White Movement in the Civil War.
The newly born Eurasians did not stay in Bulgaria and in 1921-1922 they dispersed to different cities of Europe.
“Exodus to the East” belongs to the genre popular in previous years not only among Russian emigrants, but also among Western intellectuals – it is a manifesto about the impending inevitable catastrophe in which the known world (its economy, culture) will perish. And also about what world order should replace it and what role Russia should play in it. She, of course, gets the main one.
After the publication of the book, in the 1920s and 1930s, Eurasianism experienced a rapid flowering: it had its editions, cells in many European capitals, congresses and almost had a party. Many emigrant intellectuals joined the movement, including the linguist Roman Jacobson, the historian Georgi Vernadski and the religious historian and philosopher Lev Karsavin.
At various stages of the development of Eurasianism, the philosophers Nikolai Alekseev, Nikolai Arseniev, Vasily Sezeman, Semyon Frank, the literary critic D.P. Svyatopolk-Mirsky, representatives of Russian culture such as Igor Stravinsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, Alexey Remizov, Vsevolod Ivanov, etc., as well as former officers of the White Army.
The Eurasians are considered to be the ideological heirs above all of the Slavophiles. They take as an axiom the idea that the nation is a “collective personality” with a special character. The character, and with it the history and culture of a people, is determined by the landscape in which it lives.
Russia, according to Eurasians, is a vast space without clear borders. The landscapes and climatic zones are not separated by the mountains or the sea, but smoothly flow into each other. Peoples and cultures spread like spilled milk on the table. There are no definite boundaries between them.
Developing the concept of cultural-historical types, Piotr Sawicki dwells on “feeling” – a particular way of perceiving ordinary reality, a sense of the sea and a sense of the continent, calling one Western European and the other Mongolian: “in the space of world history, Western European sense of the sea as equal, though polar, is opposed to the single Mongol sense of the continent,” he writes. According to Savitsky, Russians are also Mongols to some extent, because “in Russian ‘travellers’, in the scope of Russian conquests and research, they use the same spirit, the same sense of the continent”.
He believes that Russia is part of a special “peripheral-coastal” world, the bearer of a deep cultural tradition that combines both historically “sedentary” and “steppe” elements. After in the first centuries the Russian people experienced the influence of the steppes The step element, introduced into the Russian element as one of its compositions from the outside, strengthens and deepens its meaning, transforming into its integral part.
Here, last but not least, it should be mentioned that, for example, Nikolay Berdyaev notes that Eurasianism is primarily an emotional, not an intellectual movement, and its emotionality is a reaction to the creative national and religious instincts of the catastrophe (revolution) that occurred.
So, according to Eurasians, all of Russia represents a complete gradient of languages, ethnicities, economic styles and ways of life.
According to the Eurasians, the amorphous mass of Russia could not be united either by purely economic or clearly understood national ties. A lofty idea is required. For Trubetskoi and his associates, this idea is Orthodoxy. It is godlessness that is their main claim to Bolshevism. As well as to the West, where they see complete decadence everywhere.
Perhaps the most provocative idea of the Eurasians is that Russia is not at all the successor of Kievan Rus, as claimed – by the chroniclers of the 16th century to the authors of history textbooks for high school students. For Eurasians, the real beginning of the history of “Russia and Eurasia” (this is their term) is the Golden Horde. They perceive the Mongols not as an external force that invaded Russia and destroyed everything, but as the founders of a new statehood and a great continental empire. The subsequent collapse of the Horde, the conquest of Kazan and Astrakhan by Ivan the Terrible and the centuries-old subjugation of Siberia are perceived by Eurasians as the de facto restoration of the Chingizid empire – only on a “correct” (orthodox) ideological basis.
Eurasianism as a political movement has been around for less than two decades and never really made it into the masses. The main form of existence remains newspapers, magazines and collections of articles, in which everyone is constantly arguing with each other about the goals and means, as well as about the fate of Russia, and it is for this reason that several divisions occur – Eurasianism is divided into left and clear.
Left Eurasianism recognizes not only the national character of the October Revolution, which put an end to the Russian Empire, oriented towards Eurasians towards Europe, and opened up an opportunity for the original development of Eurasian civilization, but also its international character, which opened a new era in world history, bringing original ideas and hopes of all humanity, connecting them with the depths of the Russian spirit. Left Eurasianism, unlike what it clearly sees in Soviet civilization, does not pass a stage to some “new Moscow kingdom”, but a subsequent, original, creative period of history with its own tasks.
Accepting Soviet civilization, left Eurasianism recognizes Marxism as one of its manifestations, but not in its “Western vulgarized version”, but in the creative version saturated with “soil”.
Left Eurasians believe that Russian religious philosophy in its new Soviet version should and must enter into a dialogue with Marxism, taking its most fruitful ideas and creatively rethinking them. According to them, the state can be a theological ideocracy based on Orthodoxy. While not denying the orthodox nature of Eurasian ideology, especially for Russian Eurasians, left Eurasians declare religion a private matter and focus attention on geopolitical, cultural, historiographical and other aspects of Eurasian doctrine.
The main division is between those who recognize the USSR as the new incarnation of “Russia-Eurasia” and those who remain implacable opponents of Soviet power. Some Euro-Russians became agents of Soviet intelligence, and later returned to Russia – and were repressed (such was the fate of Sergey Efron, husband of Marina Tsvetaeva).
It should be noted here that as early as December 1922 the Chekist provocation organization “Trust” was associated with the Eurasians, and in the spring of 1924 the GPU of the NKVD tried to establish control over them by starting a disinformation campaign that in the USSR several influential illegal Eurasian organizations have emerged that need ideological leadership from the founders of this movement.
From that moment on, many Eurasian articles gradually began to be addressed to Russian readers (in the USSR) or young supporters of the emigration movement, which was due to their level and tone. The discussion of philosophical questions, cultural, historical and ideological problems in Eurasian periodicals is gradually being replaced by rather crudely politicized journalism.
Which becomes the “cornerstone of the whole Eurasian concept” – the multitude of “classics” are separated from the movement.
In their seminal works, collective manifestos and articles, the Eurasians tried to creatively respond to the challenge of the Russian Revolution and offered a number of historiosophical, cultural and political ideas for further realization. These people are united by the experience of the last “normal” years of the Russian Empire, the First World War, the two revolutions and the Civil War. They share the general sense of crisis – more precisely the impending catastrophe – of what they consider to be modern European civilization. They believe that salvation lies in marking the boundaries between their cultures, in erecting “walls reaching to the sky” (Trubetskoi). They have a deep contempt for liberal values and democracy and believe in the coming of a new, as yet unseen order.
According to the Eurasians, a new era is beginning in which Asia is trying to seize the initiative, and Russia, whose catastrophe is not as severe as the decay of the West, will restore its strength through unity with the East. They call the Russian catastrophe of 1917 a dark result of the forced Europeanization carried out by Peter the First. After condemning the revolution, however, they suggest that it is possible to use its research to strengthen the anti-Western choice to rule the communist clique, proposing to replace the Marxist doctrine with a Eurasian one and start a new stage in the country’s historical development. As you Eurasians think, the new stage should be oriented towards Eurasia, not Communism or Romano-Germanic Europe, which has centrally looted all the rest of humanity in the name of an invented ideology of a universal human civilization with ideas of “stages of development”, ” progress” and so on.
The core ideas of Eurasianism—anti-Westernism and reverence for the Genghisian Empire—were later adopted by some of these followers.