From Empire to Eurasia: Politics, Scholarship, and Ideology in Russian Eurasianism, 1920s–1930s 9781501757013

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FROM EMPIRE TO EURASIA

FROM EMPIRE TO EURASIA POL ITIC S , SCH O LA RSH I P , A ND IDEO LO GY I N RUS S I A N EURA SIAN I SM, 19 20 s– 193 0s

SERGEY GLEBOV

N I U Pre s s / De Kalb , IL

Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb 60115 © 2017 by Northern Illinois University Press First printing in paperback, 2017 ISBN 978-0-87580-781-2 All rights reserved Cover design by Yuni Dorr Composed by BookComp, Inc.

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978-0-87580-750-8 (cloth) 978-1-60909-209-2 (e-book) Part of chapter 5 was previously published as “Space and Structuralism in Russian Eurasianism,” in Empire De/Centered: New Spatial Histories of Russia and the Soviet Union, ed. Sanna Turoma and Maxim Waldstein (Farnam: Ashgate, 2013), 31–60, reprinted by permission of the publisher, copyright © 2013. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Glebov, Sergeĭ, author. Title: From empire to Eurasia : politics, scholarship and ideology in Russian Eurasianism, 1920s–1930s / Sergey Glebov. Description: DeKalb, IL : Northern Illinois University Press, 2017 | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2016015949 (print) | LCCN 2016033384 (ebook) | ISBN 9780875807508 (cloth : alkaline paper) | ISBN 9781609092092 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Eurasian school—History—20th century. | Soviet Union—Relations—Eurasia. | Eurasia—Relations—Soviet Union. | Learning and scholarship—Political aspects—Soviet Union—History. | Ideology—Soviet Union—History. | Russia—History—Philosophy. | Soviet Union—History—Philosophy. | Soviet Union—Intellectual life—1917–1970. | Soviet Union—Politics and government—1917–1936. Classification: LCC DK49 .G55 2017 (print) | LCC DK49 (ebook) | DDC 303.48/2470509042—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016015949

Contents

Acknowledgments

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INTRODUCTION Eurasia’s Many Meanings

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CHAPTER 1: EXILES FROM THE SILVER AGE 1. From the Silver Age to Exile 9 2. Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetskoi 13 3. Petr Petrovich Suvchinskii 19 4. Petr Nikolaevich Savitskii 26 5. The Eurasianist Universe: The Others 33

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CHAPTER 2: THE MONGOL–BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION The Eurasianist National Mystique 39 1. “We Are Alien to Debilitating Reflection”: Eurasianist Generational Rhetoric 42 2. The National Mystique and the Search for Asian Elements: Fin-de-Siècle Influences 48 3. Revolution as Revelation: Religious Interpretation of Social Change 58 4. Mongols as Bolsheviks: The Compression of Time 63 5. Phenomenology of Revolution: “The Ruling Selection,” Ideocracy, and the Future Eurasian State 66 6. Eurasianism and Fascism: A Reconsideration 71 CHAPTER 3: THE ANTICOLONIALIST EMPIRE N. S. Trubetskoi’s Critique of Evolutionism and Eurocentrism 1. Remapping the World: World War I, Russian Revolution, and Reconfigurations of the Global Map 78 2. Europe in Question: Interwar Kulturpessimismus 81

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3. After the Deluge: Russia as a Colony 83 4. Russia-Eurasia and Its World-Historical Mission: Leading the Anticolonial Uprising 88 5. “Hypnosis of the Words”: Critique of Eurocentrism and Evolutionism 91 6. The Debate across Time: Eurasianism as a Critique of Russian Evolutionism 100 7. The World as a Rainbow: Religious Diversitarianism and Rebellion against Universalism 102 CHAPTER 4: IN SEARCH OF WHOLENESS Totalizing Eurasia 111 1. Paradoxes of Eurasian Nationalism 112 2. In Search of Cultural Wholeness: From Slavdom to Turan 117 3. Eurasia’s Ukrainian Challenge 122 4. Geographical Pivot: Eurasia as a Geographical System 126 5. Eurasia as a Chronotope: In Search of Non-Eurocentric History

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CHAPTER 5: THE STRUCTURES OF EURASIA Trubetskoi, Savitskii, Jakobson, and the Making of Structuralism 148 1. A Forgotten Source 148 2. Lévi-Strauss and Jakobson 150 3. “Not Entirely Ours:” Roman Jakobson and the Eurasianists 152 4. In Search of Russian Science 157 5. The Empire of Language: Space and the Study of Structures 162 6. The Political Ontology of Eurasian Structures: Goal, Convergence, Evolution, Religion 169 EPILOGUE Eurasianism as a Movement Notes

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Index

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Acknowledgments

This project evolved over many years and I owe a debt of gratitude to many colleagues. Seymour Becker provided a welcoming yet intellectually challenging guidance of my doctoral work at Rutgers, and many scholars there helped me shape my understanding of Eurasianism in its European context. I am particularly grateful to Donald Kelley and Ziva Galili for their thoughtful input. Mark von Hagen and Richard Wortman led an amazing seminar on imperial Russia at Columbia, which provided a background for this study and informed my views of imperial history. Numerous other friends and colleagues shared with me their immense knowledge of Russian history and culture. I am forever grateful to Alla Zeide, David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Mark Bassin, Marlene Laruelle, Olga Maiorova, Michael Gordin, Willard Sunderland, Harsha Ram, Lazar Fleishman, Ilya Vinkovetsky, Martin Beiswenger, Vera Tolz, Galin Tikhanov, Charles Halperin, Alexander Antoshchenko, Patrick Seriot, Sanna Turoma, Michael Kunichika, Serguei Oushakine, and many others. My colleagues—Slavists and historians at Smith, Amherst, and the Five College consortium provided me with intellectual community and support. I thank Vera Shevzov, Stanley Rabinowitz, Polina Barskova, Cathy Ciepiela, Boris Wolfson, Dale Peterson, Bill and Jane Taubman, Stephen Jones, Audrey Altstadt, as well as Richard Lim, Jennifer Guglielmo, Darcy Burkle, Ernest Benz, Nadya Sbaiti, Jeffrey Ahlman, Joshua Birk, and Elizabeth Pryor Stordeur at Smith and Catherine Epstein, Frank Couvares, Trent Maxey, Ted Mellillo, Monica Ringer, Klara Moricz, and Adi Gordon at Amherst for intellectual companionship and many conversations about history. I owe a special debt to late Marc Raeff, whose ideas and comments on the earlier version of this book proved to be exceptionally helpful and whose intellectual generosity is unmatched. A number of wonderful connoisseurs of the archives of the Russian emigration—Edward Kasinec, Tanya Chebotarev, and Gabriel Superfin above all—helped me navigate the archipelago of Russia Abroad. My greatest debt of gratitude is to my colleagues and friends in Ab Imperio. My understanding of Russian imperial history and of Eurasianism is shaped by our

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common work and by many hours of discussions with Ilya Gerasimov, Marina Mogilner, Alexander Semyonov, and Alexander Kaplunovsky. I especially thank Ilya for his insights and critique, and Marina, who read this book and offered very valuable comments. Sasha Semyonov’s extraordinary knowledge of historiography and ability to complicate any narrative was truly inspirational. Finally, I want to thank Amy Farranto at the Northern Illinois Press for making the pre-publication process as smooth and efficient as possible, and Therese Malhame for helping me make this text comprehensible. All these friends and colleagues made this project better. Needless to say, all the faults of this book are my own.

INTRODUCTION Eurasia’s Many Meanings

The collapse of the Soviet Union laid bare the familiar but misleading Western conflation of “Soviet” and “Russian.” In the great reconfiguration of the cultural and geopolitical imageries of the late twentieth century, “Eurasia” emerged as the most successful contender to become the new geocultural concept embracing all or some of the “post-Soviet space.” On the one hand, “Eurasia” underwrites various Russian and non-Russian projects for integration of that space in an economic or political union.1 A radical neo-Fascist movement in Russia propagates war and expansion in the name of Eurasia and commands a very impressive media presence.2 On the other hand, scholars all over the world are rebranding former “Soviet and Russian studies” programs, centers, and associations as “Eurasian” to reflect a move away from the Russian-centric narratives of the past.3 In former Russian studies and beyond, “Eurasia” is often used to bring to light connections and entanglements across national boundaries and traditional disciplines alike and to emphasize the global context of historical processes.4 In Russian studies, scholars saw a kind of “Eurasian” manifestation in a range of historical and cultural phenomena, taking “Eurasia” as a term for Russia’s engagement with the “East,” or as a symptom of uneasiness and ruptures in discourses on its multifaceted identity.5 This new currency of the concept of Eurasia invites critique through a study of its origins and the historical contexts in which it operated. This book offers a first step in this direction by exploring the history in the 1920s and 1930s of the Eurasianist movement, which first appropriated the term “Eurasia” to describe the former Russian Empire. Launched by a group of young émigrés who had recently emerged from the years of fighting and destruction, the Eurasianist movement elaborated a complex and multifaceted language, in which it sought to reimagine the former imperial space in the wake of Europe’s Great War and in the aftermath of the collapse of continental imperial formations.

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The new movement sought to endow Eurasia, understood largely as coinciding with the former Russian Empire, with cultural, historical, geographic, and ethnographic content—but the movement was not nearly as homogeneous as its name may suggest.6 The founders of Eurasianism disagreed on a range of issues, and argued bitterly about what weight should be accorded to one or another idea in their overall conception of Eurasia. The movement’s leaders had socialized in different milieus in late imperial Russia, and brought diverse intellectual strategies and backgrounds to the common project of inventing Eurasia. Some stressed its alleged spatial unity, others looked for signs of the ethnographic or linguistic wholeness of its populations, and still others imagined Eurasia as a space of modernist creativity in arts or as a locus and object of radically new scholarship. Perhaps the best way to describe the movement’s heterogeneity is to understand it as something that gave many meanings to Eurasia. These meanings overlapped in contradictory ways, and in the decade of the 1920s this overlap enabled a basic consensus among Eurasianism’s various streams, which allowed the movement to coalesce. Above all, the Eurasianist leaders agreed on the crucial importance of Orthodox Christianity to Russian identity. Moreover, they saw the Russian Revolution as a climactic event, which, in realizing the ambitions of the radical Russian intelligentsia to destroy the old order and build a new one, confirmed the eternal truths of the church by revealing the horrors of Socialism. The Eurasianists saw modern European society—and for them the Russian Revolution was a disaster in part inflicted by European ideologies all too readily absorbed by the Russian intelligentsia—as a crisis-stricken world whose main ills were individualism, absence of spirituality, and belief in universal progress. In opposition to the decaying yet predatory Europe, Eurasianist thinkers suggested the Russian world of everyday life confession of faith (bytovoe ispovednichestvo) and a society permeated by the spirit of Orthodoxy. Drawing on the prerevolutionary interest of the educated classes in idealism and religion, the Eurasianist thinkers thus reflected a panEuropean turn to metaphysics and idealism that sought to ground human experiences in the spiritual sphere. However, they cast their project of Orthodox utopia as a national reinvigoration in the midst of European catastrophe.7 In the minds of the Eurasianist thinkers, this importance of Orthodoxy was tied to the fates of Russia-Eurasia after the Revolution. The Eurasianists expected that in the aftermath of the Russian revolutionary catastrophe a new class of people would emerge from under the Bolshevik “yoke.” Observing from a distance the rise of the New Economic Policy in Soviet Russia, the Eurasianists were sure that the Bolshevik Party’s retreat from ideology proved that many in Soviet Russia accepted the Bolsheviks’ state-building instincts but rejected their Communist ideology.8 The task of the Eurasianists, thus, was to offer a non-Marxist, spiritual ideology, which would help this new type of people to shed off European

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Socialist and Communist ideas and to build a new type of society, neither democratic nor Communist.9 The Eurasianists described this society as “ideocratic,” and explained that its ruling class would be selected neither on the grounds of ancestry nor wealth but based on the commitment to a powerful “ruling idea” (ideia-pravitel’nitsa).10 The Eurasianist thinkers saw examples of such a society, albeit incomplete and imperfect, in Soviet Russia and Fascist Italy. Mesmerized by Soviet successes, the Eurasianists became enmeshed in the web of underground activities of Soviet agents who penetrated the emigration in an effort to undermine its anti-Soviet work. Ultimately, some embraced Stalin’s Soviet Union and perished in its camps. Eurasianist thinkers saw a precedent for contemporary events in Russia in the history of medieval Russian principalities in the aftermath of the Mongol invasion.11 It was then, they argued, that as a result of destruction and the imposition of foreign rule, a wave of religious creativity was unleashed by the Russians who had built an organic, undivided national culture. The power of the Mongol khan was converted to Orthodoxy and the nomads’ encampment moved to Moscow, where the Russian tsar emerged as an heir to the great steppe empires. Although the Eurasianists argued that non-Russian peoples, and Turanian nomads in particular, helped to build the Russian state, Eurasianism was hardly an early instance of multiculturalism because in this vision the Mongols were of secondary importance and served as an instrument for the realization of Russian national destiny. The opposition between the spiritual and Orthodox Eurasia and the mechanistic and materialist Europe rested, somewhat unexpectedly, on the Eurasianist critique of Eurocentrism and cultural colonialism.12 The Eurasianists imagined future Russia-Eurasia as a leader of the colonized peoples of the world rising against their European colonialist oppressors. Russia itself was made subject to the rule of the Europeanized elite following Peter the Great’s reforms, the Eurasianists argued, and thus the Russian Revolution resolved the old divisions between that elite and the masses on the one hand, and between Russians and non-Russians in the former empire on the other. This resolution of Russia’s national trauma came as the non-European masses (both Russian and non-Russian) rose up against and destroyed the old Europeanized order. Pre-dating postcolonial scholarship by half a century, the Eurasianist thinkers linked Europe’s colonial domination of the world with modern disciplinary knowledge and suggested a critique of humanities and social sciences to purge them of their in-built Eurocentrism. However, the Eurasianists were not interested in restoring the suppressed subjectivity of the colonized.13 Rather, they built on the diversitarian ideas of nineteenth-century Russian philosophers and saw the future Russia as a leader of the global movement to protect God-given national and cultural differences from the onslaught of standardizing European modernity.14

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Although their Eurasia had a world-historical mission to lead the anticolonial struggle, it was also imagined as a holistic, autarkic world. The Eurasianist thinkers elaborated an unprecedentedly complex vision of Eurasia as an ethnographic, geographic, and linguistic whole. In their Eurasia, the genetic principles of kinship were replaced with acquired characteristics: the diverse, unrelated peoples of Eurasia had allegedly developed common traits due to historical convergence rather than biological descent. In the future Eurasia, these peoples would form a “multipeople nation” of Eurasia under the dome of the Russian Orthodox Church. The spatial unity of Eurasia was substantiated by drawing on the work of scholars in biology, soil studies, and forestry, who had begun to develop the notions of plant and animal communities on the eve of the Revolution. The Eurasianist scholar Petr Nikolaevich Savitskii extended these ideas about biocenosis to human societies and described Eurasia as a “place-development,” a unity of natural landscape and sociohistorical elements.15 Characterized by extreme “continentality,” Eurasia was a separate geographical world along with Europe and Asia. The geopolitical vision and anticolonial rhetoric together influenced the Eurasianist view of the continent’s history, which was imagined as a teleological process of Eurasia’s unity unfolding in time and in opposition to Romano-Germanic Europe. But if the Eurasianists stressed Orthodox religiosity, holistic unity, and anticolonial character of Eurasia, they also interpreted it as a locus of modern creativity in arts, literature, and scholarship. Freed from the bonds of realistic art and atomistic science, Eurasia was the place to develop new artistic approaches where form and content would merge, and where national science would uncover heretofore unknown laws and regularities. In its rebellion against the old Europe, Eurasia was seen as a leader of “religious revolution,” a center for the fermentation of a new culture based on spirituality, confession of faith, and modernist creativity, all of which would develop within the confines of an autarkic, national, and organic world. Petr Petrovich Suvchinskii and Prince Dmitrii Petrovich SviatopolkMirskii (known in the West as D. S. Mirsky), the leaders of aesthetic Eurasianism, in 1926 founded a literary journal Versty, in which they published works by both Soviet and émigré authors, Russian formalists, and European avant-gardists.16 While the Eurasianist ideologues imagined their Russia-Eurasia as the locus of a specifically Russian national scientific tradition, they understood the latter as shaped by holistic and teleological concerns. Russian science was supposed to approach its object of study as a whole, rather than as a collection of parts. The specificity of Russian science was allegedly defined by its very object, Eurasia, which was to be studied in a systemic fashion. This systemic analysis of the unity of Eurasia as revealed in flora and fauna, landscape and morphology, linguistics and history, sought to uncover correspondences between different rows of phenomena and establish deep-seated, invisible regularities that govern the seemingly

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chaotic assemblage of facts. Two fields, geography and linguistics, converged in both Eurasianism and the Prague Linguistic Circle to produce the scholarly rhetoric of “structuralism,” which assumed a life of its own following World War II.17 The consensus that included all these visions was, in fact, quite short. It barely lasted for the decade of the 1920s and collapsed as the Eurasianist movement progressed and its half-baked, emotional ideas infused with a sense of national catastrophe were developed in some detail. The lines of division were many. For instance, the avant-garde aesthetics of Suvchinskii, who viewed futurism as a new religious art, clashed with the Fascist aesthetics of Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetskoi. The latter’s categorical rejection of Marxism came to blows with Suvchinskii’s and Sviatopolk-Mirskii’s increasing embrace of the Soviet Union as a realization of Russia-Eurasia’s ideocratic principle. Scholarly pursuits and underground activities, although embraced equally by the Eurasianists, worked together poorly. Although the movement officially broke up over the issue of the unqualified proSoviet stance of left-wing Eurasianists, the greater cause was the fragility of the very consensus that brought together such different visions of the postimperial future of Russia.18 Historians often saw Eurasianism as a movement that sought to recuperate the former Russian Empire by giving it a content of ethnographic, linguistic, and geographic unity. My approach to the movement’s history is somewhat different. While I agree that Eurasianism sought to neutralize the nationalisms of the many peoples of the former Russian Empire by embracing them all under the umbrella of Eurasian unity, I see the Eurasianist movement primarily as growing out of the concerns and anxieties of Russian modernism in arts, scholarship, and politics in the last decades of imperial Russia. These concerns and anxieties included many topics, from the development of Russian and other nationalisms to parliamentary politics, and from an Asian interest in poetry to the intellectuals’ turn toward religion and idealism, especially following the Revolution of 1905. No matter how much Eurasianism claimed uniqueness and special path for Russia, the movement was, in fact, an element of that European modernity, which scholars of Russian history came to see as their comparative framework.19 Few periods saw a greater convergence of Russian and European modernity than the last decades of imperial Russia. Catherine Evtuhov recently suggested that we can extend the name of the Silver Age from the realm of literature, where it designates the efflorescence of arts and poetry, in particular in the last decades of imperial Russia, to the whole range of developments in arts, literature, science, and politics, all of which witnessed an unprecedented intensity of innovation.20 The Eurasianist movement drew on that era to develop a multifaceted language with which to describe the postimperial and postrevolutionary future of Russia, but in the aftermath of the tectonic changes inflicted by the Russian Revolution,

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World War I, and the Civil War, some themes of that language acquired new meanings. The Eurasianists borrowed freely from the religious revival of the early twentieth century yet rejected what they saw as the liberal interpretations of the thinkers of the Russian religious and philosophical renaissance of the 1910s. The Eurasianist rejection of modern European civilization fed on the nascent critique of the bourgeois order by intellectuals in late imperial Russia, but in the 1920s it coalesced with European proto-Fascist movements. The Asian interest of Russian writers and philosophers was instrumentalized by the Eurasianists to sustain the notion of Eurasia as fundamentally different from Europe and to ascribe a geocultural identity to a social phenomenon. The brilliant scholarship of Russian ecologists—students of soils and vegetation who had developed revolutionary notion of biocenosis—was employed by the Eurasianists to substantiate the existence of an autarkic world of Eurasia. Scholars of Russian history have rightly questioned the divide of 1917 and stressed continuity between pre- and postrevolutionary developments. Although the prerevolutionary developments were crucially important for the Eurasianists, they can, nevertheless, hardly be interpreted in terms of a direct line of descent.21 I see Eurasianism as an imperial phenomenon but not just in view of the movement’s attempts to recuperate the former imperial space. Eurasianism was the product of the imperial situation, of the unevenness and heterogeneity of the social and cultural space of imperial Russia, in which the conspicuous absence of bourgeois institutions coexisted with the rising critique of the philistine bourgeois order by intellectuals, and the aristocratic and religious rejection of the universal aspirations of modernity combined with a critique of Eurocentrism and cultural colonialism.22 The concept of the imperial situation points to the ways in which ideas and experiences are translated from one context to another, and the exchange rate in these transactions is never set, thus precluding the possibility of describing historical experiences and ideas with a single narrative. A history of Eurasianism, thus, is not a history of Russian nationalism or modernism, of geopolitics or structuralism, but of all these contexts that came to shape the movement in various, often contradictory ways. This book therefore approaches Eurasianism through a set of different yet interrelated topics. In the first chapter, I describe the lives of leading Eurasianists and their followers to illustrate the extent to which the movement was embedded in intellectual and cultural concerns of the last prerevolutionary decades, from music to literature and from politics to scholarship. However, I also show that the experiences of Russia’s disintegration along social and ethnic lines in the Revolution and the Civil War shaped the lives of the founders of the movement who had just begun their impressive careers in universities, embassies, and salons in the last years of empire. Their scenarios of successful integration into the world

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of bourgeois professions were interrupted by the historical eruption. When the Revolution came crashing in on their lives, the response of the Eurasianists was to interpret these historical developments as a national catastrophe and to develop their own national mystique.23 This national imagery of Eurasia forms the subject of the second chapter, which explores how the Eurasianists proposed to rejuvenate Russia after the catastrophe. Their national mystique included defining themselves against the older generation of Russian thinkers, who were blamed for the liberalism and decadence of the Silver Age. The Eurasianists counterposed to that “debilitating indecisiveness” of the 1910s the new vision of a totalizing national culture based on Orthodox religiosity. The Mongols were marshalled as evidence that this rejuvenation of national life was possible, for the Eurasianists saw the precedent for national renewal in the history of Russian principalities in the wake of the Mongol invasion and destruction. Alexander Blok’s premonitions, which had reinterpreted the Asian elements of Russian culture as a force of social renovation, helped to establish Eurasia as a revolutionary yet conservative force, thus restoring some lost virtues by destroying the colonial and Europeanized imperial Russia. As much as this national mystique insisted on the uniqueness of Russian experiences, the solutions offered by the Eurasianists—a society united by a powerful idea and ruled by an organically emerging “ruling selection”—placed their movement among the Fascist movements of interwar Europe.24 The third chapter takes up the subject of the Eurasianist anticolonial rhetoric and places it in the context of changes on the global and Russian maps after World War I. I explore Trubetskoi’s critique of Eurocentrism and cultural colonialism and trace it to several overlapping sources. The first concerns the loss of status by the Russian émigrés in the aftermath of the Revolution. The second connects Trubetskoi’s attack on Eurocentrism with his religious diversitarianism and belief in God-given ethnolinguistic diversity. The last context ties the Eurasianist rejection of Eurocentrism to the reception of evolutionism in Russia and in particular to the discussions of the organization of the empire’s political space according to evolutionary theories. As I show in the chapter, Trubetskoi’s anticolonial stance was a belated reaction to the ideas of Maksim Maksimovich Kovalevskii, Russia’s leading sociologist and a self-proclaimed student of Henry Sumner Maine. Eurasianist anticolonial rhetoric drew a boundary between Europe and RussiaEurasia but the Eurasianists also invented the latter as a cultural, ethnographic, geographic, and linguistic unity. The fourth chapter explores how Eurasianist thinkers attempted to redraw the boundaries and establish differences between Slavs in Russia and in Europe, while stressing commonalities between the Slavs and the Turkic and Finno-Ugric peoples within Eurasia. This project was accompanied by the construction of Eurasia as a geographical entity through uncovering regularities that govern Eurasia’s territoriality and proposing a historical narrative

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of convergence of Eurasian peoples into a predetermined unity. The fifth chapter deals with perhaps the most unexpected aspect of Eurasianism. As the movement disintegrated in the late 1920s, the Eurasianist scholars—Savitskii, Trubetskoi, and Roman Osipovich Jakobson—intensified their work to substantiate the existence of the continent through geography and linguistics. Their Eurasianist project overlapped with the emerging structuralist rhetoric and led to the crystallization of a new approach in humanities and social sciences. Jakobson’s intellectual encounters in the United States provided the opportunity to transfer these ideas, especially through exchanges between Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss in the 1940s. The epilogue of the book focuses on the history of Eurasianism as an organization and on its disintegration. As I tell the story of Eurasianism’s financial successes and publishing activities, I also want to stress that the movement was never a purely intellectual enterprise. In accordance with the Eurasianist national mystique, the movement’s leaders desired action as they sought to replace Marxist ideology with Eurasianism while retaining the Soviet state. Their political aspirations to ride the wave of the demotic revolution in Russia led the movement to become lethally mired in the underground activities of Soviet spies, who influenced their ideas. Eurasianism was an extraordinarily complex movement. Its leaders were, without any doubt, brilliant intellectuals. Each of them made a lasting contribution to scholarship or arts, and each had a particular sphere of expertise and an intellectual lineage. No single book can do justice to all these encounters of Eurasianism in scholarship and music, literature and politics. I see my book not as an exhaustive history of the Eurasianist movement but rather as a study of the particular consensus that emerged in 1920 between Eurasianist intellectuals and lasted for a decade. As the movement disintegrated in late 1928 to early 1929, some of the elements of this fleeting consensus continued to have a life of their own, in the new Eurasianism relaunched by Savitskii, in the structuralist rhetoric of Trubetskoi and Jakobson, in the literary collaboration of the scholar Vasilli Petrovich Nikitin and the writer Aleksei Mikhailovich Remizov, in George Vernadsky’s historical scholarship or in Suvchinskii’s cooperation with Igor Stravinsky. I hope that this study will help scholars to explore the lines of continuity or ruptures between the Eurasianist ideas of the 1920s and later iterations of Eurasianism in the writings of the Soviet maverick scholar Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev or in the politics of contemporary Russian Fascists like Alexander Dugin.

C H A P T E R

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EXILES FROM THE SILVER AGE

1. FROM THE SILVER AGE TO EXILE

On July 4, 1921, a group of young émigré scholars made a public appearance at the meeting of the Russian Religious and Philosophical Society just reestablished in the Bulgarian capital. The speakers were Prince Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetskoi and Georgii Vasil’evich Florovskii. Their presentations were undoubtedly provocative in the émigré milieu: they demanded a thorough reconsideration of key questions of Russian history and culture in light of the recent catastrophic events that had engulfed their homeland and turned them into refugees. Although the group “seemed to have gained very few followers after that meeting,” the event marked the official beginning of the Eurasianist movement.1 A few months prior to this appearance, the Russian-Bulgarian Publishing House in Sofia printed Nikolai Trubetskoi’s militant pamphlet “Europe and Mankind,” which presented a frontal assault on the intellectual treasures of the Russian intelligentsia and challenged the notion of European cultural superiority over the rest of the world. In two months following the public presentation, the group also published a collection of articles under an exalted title worthy of professional visionaries: Exodus to the East: Forebodings and Fulfillments: Assertions of the Eurasianists. In enervating style reminiscent of fin-de-siècle Russian modernists, the authors of the collection “did not hesitate to acknowledge that they were Eurasians,” representatives of a civilization different from both Europe and Asia.2 Russia’s catastrophic recent history, its moral and social collapse, had to be revisited and explained, they insisted, from a point of view that would take into consideration this unique geopolitical and cultural destiny. This collective manifesto of the new movement contained the double-edged appeal of Eurasianism as a movement both “conservative” and revolutionary. On the one hand, the contributors to the volume aspired to lay bare widespread clichés and claimed the return to some primordial knowledge: they differed widely in terms of topics and foci, yet reflected a common theme of rediscovery of Eurasia’s essential geopolitical, historical, and cultural traits. On the other hand, these articles

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addressed the implications of the Russian Revolution for the world and insisted that Russia-Eurasia had embarked upon a radically new path of development, epitomizing a worldwide break with the past and the coming of modernity. Russia-Eurasia had “fallen out of the mainstream of European life”; indeed, it left Europe “behind,” and joined the ranks of the colonial peoples of the world. In the new era that opened with the Revolution, old values and beliefs did not hold. A “complete refurbishing of culture,” even of life itself, was needed to address these tectonic transformations. Comparing Russia’s imperial experiences to those of Britain, Petr Savitskii argued that Russia-Eurasia was a separate and autarkic economic unit due to its continental nature, which prevented Eurasia from participating in the global economic exchange based on oceanic communication.3 However, Savitskii did not just apply contemporary geopolitical concepts to the Russian case. He also attempted to chart a dramatic destiny for Eurasia based on his idea of “migrations of culture.” According to his theory, in each historical epoch a particular geographic region hosted the most dynamic civilization and the shift of the center of gravity of world culture followed the path determined by changes in climatic conditions. As the scientific-like statistics demonstrated, in the new era, Eurasia was predestined to replace Western Europe as a new center of civilization.4 Nikolai Trubetskoi explored the problem of Russian nationalism and insisted, echoing the Slavophile ideas, that the Russian society had been split by Europeanization into indigenous masses and alienated elite. However, unlike the Slavophiles, who had idealized the pre-Petrine Muscovite past and sought to return the Russians to their spiritual Byzantine roots, Trubetskoi saw the solution to this problem in a repudiation of European culture and in reconsideration of the importance of Russia’s links with Asia.5 Even those forms of nationalism that the Russians copied from Europe were false.6 It was the task of the Russian intelligentsia to overcome this dependence on European models and to understand the composition of Eurasian culture.7 Petr Suvchinskii proclaimed that the Bolshevik antireligious propaganda and activities could not conceal the religious nature of the transformation that had occurred in Russia, its profoundly messianic and apocalyptic character. The Russian Revolution was a climactic event, which unfolded against the background of new developments in art and music, and these developments were in themselves a sign of a new epoch: There are frightening times, terrifying epochs, like apocalyptic visions, times of great realizations of the Mystery, times frightening and blessed, when in some general, mysterious burst entire generations reach out for and are uplifted to the great mysteries of the sky, or when the skies by their mysterious essence hover over, lowered, like huge wings, above the earth.8

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According to Suvchinskii, “our age is an age of great religious revelations, and, like any age of inspiration and unveiling, it flows through an accelerating alteration of events.”9 In order to overcome the revolutionary chaos, one had to embrace religious consciousness and interpret the recent events from the perspective of unyielding faith. For Suvchinskii, the border between the domains of faith and everyday life must be transgressed in order to build a new society. The concept of bytovoe ispovednichestvo (everyday life confession of faith) was to become the tool of renovation of life. The Bolsheviks with their energy and will approached the ideal of the new man required to complete this gigantic task, yet the Bolsheviks embraced a wrong materialist and atheist ideology. It fell to Eurasianism to reveal the true one: without sacrificing the Bolsheviks’ decisiveness and understanding of the masses, the Eurasianists will offer religious interpretations of the great historical changes in Russia. Suvchinskii celebrated recent events as the sign of the arrival of Romanticism, which he saw in developments in art and music, and affirmed that the “revolution, ideologically proclaimed under the stale slogans of the past century, is in reality flowing through the events of a new Romantic order.”10 A new tremble of life was sounding, and this tremble has already begun to beat in Russia; a fiery fever, raising the temperature of the entire human order, has clearly arrived—when all the seemingly steadfast arrangements of the past are fearlessly put up for reconsideration and reevaluation, when everything feverishly begins to listen to the tremblings of the earth and the sky. Russia has come to understand exactly what all of Europe, the whole world, must come to understand under the sign of Russian Romanticism and Russian religious culture.11

Many in the Russian émigré milieu failed to comprehend what was in common between interpreting the Revolution from the point of view of extreme Orthodox religiosity, hailing the fall of Europe under the pressures of decolonizing peoples of the Orient, celebrating the Mongols as the founders of the Russian state tradition, and proving the existence of a geographical unity called “Eurasia” through an array of orographical and climatological data. Eurasianism was often seen by contemporaries as a bewildering collection of ideas and emotions that emerged in response to the catastrophe of the Russian Revolution and the forced emigration. Yet, themes and ideas in this collection reflected the authors’ recent interests and encounters. The Eurasianist movement was founded by a group of five young intellectuals: Prince Andrei Aleksandrovich Lieven, Petr Nikolaevich Savitskii, Petr Petrovich Suvchinskii, Prince Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetskoi, and Georgii

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Vasil’evich Florovskii. Lieven almost immediately ceased his participation in the Eurasianist group, while Florovskii did so by 1923 (he was excluded from the editorial activities by the Eurasianists much earlier). Throughout the movement’s history, thus, Eurasianism was intellectually the product of the troika consisting of Savitskii, Suvchinskii, and Trubetskoi. Their agreements and conflicts, mostly reflected in heated debates on issues of editorial policies, defined the development of the movement as an intellectual construct and as a political grouping. Despite having different personal and professional paths, the leaders of Eurasianism had shared many generational experiences in late imperial Russia and the revolutionary years. All of them belonged to the most privileged segment of late imperial society. Some, such as princes Nikolai Trubetskoi and Andrei Lieven, came from the small, wealthy, titled aristocracy (curiously, the Trubetskois were among the most ancient Russian princely families claiming descent from the medieval Lithuanian prince Gediminas, while Lieven belonged to the Moscow and Orthodox branch of the well-known Baltic German clan). Others, such as Petr Petrovich Suvchinskii and Petr Nikolaevich Savitskii, descended from the Russified Polish and Ukrainian gentry of the Western borderlands of the Russian Empire. All founders of the Eurasianist movement had begun what appeared to be stellar careers in a variety of fields, from academic scholarship to diplomacy and cultural entrepreneurship. In all cases, these careers were based on exceptional education, talent, and family connections and resources. Their births roughly coincided in the 1890s with the onset of the so-called Silver Age, a period in the history of Russian modernism that engulfed literature and above all poetry, visual arts, and music. As scholars have recently suggested, the term could be expanded to the entire experience of late imperial Russia.12 After all, innovative developments occurred in politics and scholarship as much as in the realm of arts and belles lettres. The founders of the Eurasianist movement matured in this remarkable period and were infused with the artistic, scholarly, and political interests generated in the Silver Age. These interests and influences in many ways defined the strategies of ideological production in Eurasianism and served as reference points for the emerging intellectual movement of Eurasianism: Suvchinskii’s involvement in the conflict generated by the arrival of the “modernists” in Russian music; Trubetskoi’s encounter with religious philosophy in his family and with political implications of Oriental and ethnographic scholarship; and Savitskii’s studentship with P. B. Struve, Russia’s leading liberal nationalist and political economist, were all important milestones in shaping the Eurasianist ideology. The overall rejection of positivism, revival of idealist and above all religious philosophy, and tectonic shifts in the cultural and political orientations of a part of Russian intelligentsia formed the immediate background of the future leaders of Eurasianism.

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2. NIKOLAI SERGEEVICH TRUBETSKOI

Among the founders of the Eurasianist movement Prince Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetskoi clearly played a central role and remains the best-known figure.13 His family background, education, scholarly status, and contributions to the Eurasianist doctrine made him into a generally recognized leader of the movement. He was often called upon (or took the initiative into his own hands) whenever the relations within the circle of Eurasianist leaders underwent a crisis, especially since Savitskii and Suvchinskii grew apart after 1924. Trubetskoi’s name and title added tremendous prestige to the movement among the émigrés, and his scholarly career at a European university endowed the movement with an air of respectability and academic character. It is not surprising that Trubetskoi was named chairman of the Council of Eurasianism once the movement acquired official structures. The movement’s demise was clearly marked by Trubetskoi’s public withdrawal from it. Perhaps more important, Trubetskoi’s role in twentieth-century linguistics and in the emergence of structuralism made him a well-known figure beyond Eurasianism’s often obscure history. To some extent, this fame was also due to Roman Jakobson’s efforts to propagate Trubetskoi’s work after World War II.14 Prince Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetskoi was born in 1890 to Sergei Nikolaevich Trubetskoi and Praskov’ia Vladimirovna (née Princess Obolenskaia). Descendants of the Ruthenian nobility of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania who had switched their loyalty to Orthodox Moscow in the sixteenth century, the family had been at the center of a web of marital alliances of Russian aristocrats for centuries. Trubetskois intermarried with Golitsyns, Gagarins, Obolenskiis, Lopukhins, and many other notable clans of imperial Russia. Numerous family links connected them to the heart of power in the Russian Empire through the court, the imperial army, noble assemblies, and such. N. S. Trubetskoi’s branch of the clan belonged to the Moscow aristocracy with its Slavophile connections. Notably, Sergei Nikolaevich and Praskov’ia Vladimirovna Trubetskoi were related to the Samarins, a clan with strong Slavophile links. Yet, rather unusual for Russia’s top layer of the nobility, N. S. Trubetskoi’s family background was not limited to the aristocratic circles of old Moscow or St. Petersburg. Nikolai Sergeevich’s father, Prince S. N. Trubetskoi, was born in 1862, in the new era of postemancipation Russia.15 Sharing in the intellectual currents of the time, Sergei Nikolaevich emerged as one of Russia’s leading “religious philosophers.” His intellectual biography included a brief flirtation with positivism and “nihilism,” a deep and lasting influence of the Slavophiles, and, finally, a formative encounter and friendship with Vladimir Sergeevich Solov’ev, Russia’s greatest and most influential thinker. In 1900, surrounded by members of the Trubetskoi and Solov’ev families, Vladimir Solov’ev died on the Trubetskois’ estate of Uzkoe near

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Moscow (which belonged to Sergei Nikolaevich’s half-brother, Petr Nikolaevich). Trubetskoi’s association with Solov’ev was indicative of the former philosophical interests. In an attempt to reconcile the spiritual searches of the German classics, Russian Slavophiles, and “real life demands” with patristic writings, Trubetskoi developed philosophical views that were described as “concrete idealism” (konkretnyi idealizm).16 For Trubetskoi, the latter was premised on a combination of empiricism, abstract rationalism, and mysticism. In the well-known collection Vekhi, Nikolai Berdiaev later bemoaned the fact that the Russian intelligentsia did not pay attention to Trubetskoi’s philosophy, which, according to Berdiaev, contained the promise of constructing a truly Russian national philosophical school without abandoning the universal promises of philosophizing.17 S. N. Trubetskoi’s philosophical work was in no way radical or innovative as it sought a compromise between scholarship and religion, thought and faith. This eclectic philosophy underlined S. N. Trubetskoi’s politics. An active member of the liberal movement of towns and zemstvos, in 1905 he became famous for his address to the Emperor Nicholas II, in which Trubetskoi attempted to convince the monarch to grant parliamentary representation. While the outcome of the deputation to the tsar headed by Trubetskoi was more than modest (the Bulygin edict that followed promised a parliament with severely limited rights), Trubetskoi was feted by the liberal intelligentsia as a spokesman of freedom. At the same time, reportedly, the imperial family respected Trubetskoi for his moderation. In 1905, in the midst of the revolutionary events, Trubetskoi became the first elected rector of Moscow University, facing an impossible task of navigating between the need to preserve order and to push for university autonomy. His rectorship lasted only twenty-seven days: he collapsed during a meeting in the office of the minister of people’s enlightenment and died. His funeral became a hugely symbolic event for the educated public.18 Whether Sergei Nikolaevich’s philosophical views influenced his son’s work remains a question.19 Some general characteristics of their modes of thought are strikingly similar: S. N. Trubetskoi sought to create an all-embracing philosophical system based on Vladimir Solov’ev’s notion of “vseedinstvo” (all-unity), focusing primarily on gnoseological aspects of metaphysics.20 His son always fiercely defended his view of Eurasianism as a holistic system, in which scholarship, religion, and politics should be mutually dependent and interconnected. In Sergei Trubetskoi’s philosophy, the concept of sobornost’ played a fundamentally important role; his insistence that a human subject can be viewed as such only when it represents the whole, the society, and his critique of the West European tradition (in its positivist and empiricist or German idealist variations) were in some degree echoed by the Eurasianists at least as general themes.21 Sergei Trubetskoi’s ideas of “metaphysical Socialism” could have inspired Nikolai Trubetskoi’s vision of

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“ideocratic” societies, albeit the distance between an attempt to find metaphysical foundations for society characteristic of Trubetskoi senior and the plans for a society governed by a powerful idea developed by his son is, undoubtedly, great. S. N. Trubetskoi’s pronouncements on the sickness of Russian literature and his critique of its “democratic” traits was later repeated by Savitskii, as the Eurasianists brought the turn-of-the-century critique of the intelligentsia’s positivism and utilitarianism to the extreme.22 For both Sergei Nikolaevich and Nikolai Sergeevich, Orthodox Christianity was the core of Russian cultural identity. Yet, for all the parallels and lineages between Trubetskoi’s father and son, important, indeed crucial, differences remained. For N. S. Trubetskoi his father’s liberal politics was no longer acceptable, and in his thought, holistic constructions took precedence over any notion of individual liberty. Trubetskoi senior envisioned Russia as a European parliamentary state in which religion plays an important role. Nikolai Sergeevich sought entirely new forms of political organization that were closer in spirit to ideologies of the interwar right-wing movements. Their common roots in the Slavophile search for the wholeness of human experience produced different views of the contemporary world and politics. Perhaps more important, S. N. Trubetskoi’s academic career stimulated his son’s unusually early interest in scholarship. N. S. Trubetskoi received his education at home, passing annual examinations at Moscow’s Fifth Gymnasium and earning his graduation certificate in 1908. Since Trubetskoi senior was acquainted with most leading scholars of late imperial Russia, the house was frequented by university professors. This milieu proved stimulating, and by the time Trubetskoi senior died in 1905, his son had already published his first scholarly study. The article dealing with Finnish folk song appeared in Etnograficheskoe Obozrenie in 1905, when the author was barely fifteen years old. In the following years Trubetskoi junior regularly published in scholarly journals.23 Curiously, some of these works reveal Trubetskoi’s early interest in studying borderline zones of cultural contact reflected in mutual influences of Slavic and Finnish folklore. Still a gymnasium student, Trubetskoi established correspondence with leading scholars in ethnography and history, some of whom proved to be helpful when he became a refugee. For instance, in 1920 Bulgarian historian Ivan Shishmanov undoubtedly recalled “a Russian boy, who [you] sent 15 years ago your book . . . with an autograph and the lines reading ‘To the future historian of ancient Bolgars’” when he received Trubetskoi’s letter from Constantinople in 1920 and helped the refugee scholar acquire a position at Sofia University.24 Trubetskoi’s biographers like to cite the following episode: V. G. Tan-Bogoraz, a revolutionary exile turned ethnographer of Siberian peoples, who had received a letter from Trubetskoi seeking advice on Paleoasiatic languages, decided to pay a visit to his scholarly colleague. However, he left Trubetskoi’s house in anger at the aristocrats

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who had poked fun of him, when, following his request to see “Prince Nikolai Sergeevich,” he was greeted by a teenager.25 In 1908 N. S. Trubetskoi entered the historical and philological department of Moscow University, where his uncle, philosopher Evgenii Nikolaevich Trubetskoi, taught at the time. As V. K. Porzhezinskii, one of Russia’s outstanding linguists and Trubetskoi’s adviser, noted in his recommendation (written to support Trubetskoi’s application to the course of studies leading to a professorial position at Moscow University), Trubetskoi spent the initial two years first in the Department of Philosophy and next in the Department of Philology, where he concentrated on West European literature.26 Yet, he quickly turned away from these disciplines and began studying Caucasian languages and mythology, which was reflected in a number of scholarly publications.27 He recalled later that his decision was inspired by the belief that linguistics is the most scientific of all humanities and should therefore provide a method for research in humanities. As Anatol Liberman noted, this was a “radical statement for the year of 1909” and it certainly forecast the importance of the discipline in the twentieth century.28 In 1910–1911 Trubetskoi switched to comparative linguistics completely.29 This shift coincided with a range of developments in Russian linguistics, which had an influence on young Trubetskoi. The Dialectological Commission initiated research on the dialects of the Russian language (including Ukrainian and Belorussian, which were then considered dialects of Russian) and published, on the eve of World War I, the first results of this research.30 At Moscow University the Linguistic Circle, in which Roman Jakobson and Trubetskoi took an active part, started its deliberations.31 Jakobson recalled that at that time Trubetskoi “in vain sought a discussion with contemporary philosophers and psychologists at Moscow University, namely, a discussion on the most pressing issues of peoples’ psychology, historiosophy, and methodology of humanities. Both of us clearly remembered how we had taken turns in seeing each other off to our houses on foot after the meetings of the Commission for Popular Philology or the Moscow Dialectological Commission and vividly discussed the theoretical foundations of nationalism.”32 At the university, Trubetskoi attended lectures by the linguists V. K. Porzhezinskii and M. M. Pokrovskii, historian R. Iu. Vipper, and others. In the course of the 1910s he also participated in the travails of the Ethnographic Section of the Society of Lovers of Natural Sciences, Anthropology, and Ethnography. At this time, Trubetskoi closely cooperated with Vsevolod Fedorovich Miller, a scholar of Iranian languages (Ossetian, in particular), a researcher of Russian folklore and the founder of the journal Etnograficheskoe obozrenie (Ethnographic review), which published several articles by Trubetskoi from 1906 to 1914.33 At Miller’s dacha in the North Caucasus, near Kislovodsk, Trubetskoi spent summer months doing fieldwork on Caucasian languages and mythology. It is worth noting that Miller

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also served as director of the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages in Moscow, of which Roman Jakobson, who played such an important role in Trubetskoi’s life, was a graduate.34 Interestingly, in his early works on Russian folklore Miller tried to prove that Russian tales (byliny) were of Oriental origin.35 Apart from Miller, Trubetskoi cooperated with Stefan Kirovich Kuznetsov, a graduate of Kazan University, a traveler and ethnographer.36 Kuznetsov, who had studied the Mari and Udmurt cultures in the Volga region and served as the first librarian of Tomsk University, had retired in 1903 and lived in Moscow, taking part in the work of the Etnographic Section. Vladimir Il’ich Iokhelson, a revolutionary populist and ethnographer, was also among Trubetskoi’s correspondents and advisers. Iokhelson, who served his exile sentence in the Far East of Russia, studied the Kamchadal and the Yukagir languages. Trubetskoi addressed Iokhelson seeking advice on literature concerning Paleoasiatic languages and received a welcome response. Iokhelson even suggested sending Trubetskoi a list of Iukagir words, which he was compiling.37 Later on, when the Eurasianists assumed pseudonyms in their correspondence, Trubetskoi chose the name of Iokhelson, prompting his biographers to extol Trubetskoi’s loyalty to one of his teachers.38 However, the reason for Trubetskoi’s choice appears to be much less noble: in a bizarre game, anti-Semitic Eurasianists took Jewish sounding names as their pseudonyms, Suvchinskii becoming Reznik, Savitskii Elkind, and so on, apparently finding this amusing. Trubetskoi’s contacts with Russia’s leading linguists and philologists are well explored and need no special discussion here.39 It will suffice to say that he was a part of the so-called Moscow linguistic school, which featured A. A. Shakhmatov and V. K. Porzhezinskii as its leading scholars and which produced a phenomenal group of linguists prominent in the twentieth century: Nikolai Durnovo, Roman Jakobson, Nikolai Iakovlev, and Petr Bogatyrev. Of this group, many would be associated with the Prague Linguistic Circle in the 1920s. Others, such as Iakovlev, would be active in the process of creating alphabets and standardizing languages for Russian nationalities as the Bolshevik state embarked upon the policies of korenizatsiia in the early 1920s.40 In 1913, Trubetskoi successfully passed his university examinations and began his work to prepare for a professorial position at the university. In September 1913 the rector approved Trubetskoi’s application for a course of study abroad, and he went to Germany. In Leipzig he took advanced courses with German specialists in Indo-European languages. In particular, he studied Ancient Armenian with Bruno Lindner, Latin morphology and syntax with Karl Brugmann, Lithuanian with August Leskien, and ancient Indian literature with Ernst Windisch.41 Having returned to Moscow in the summer of 1914, Trubetskoi began preparations for his magisterial exams, which he passed in the form of two public lectures in the spring of 1916. On May 30, 1916, he became assistant professor (privat-dotsent)

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and taught a course of elementary Sanskrit in Moscow.42 In the fall of 1917, he took sick leave, and we do not know whether he did it for health reasons or because of the Bolsheviks’ takeover in the capitals. His branch of the Trubetskoi family had Cossack connections (one of their ancestors, a Count Orlov-Denisov, was a Cossack ataman, and P. N. Trubetskoi even maintained a Cossack allotment [pai] near Novocherkassk). Escaping the Bolsheviks to the Cossack Don region in the south made a lot of sense because the Trubetskois could count on a sympathetic reception there. According to the curriculum vitae dated June 22, 1920, which Trubetskoi submitted to the University of Sofia where he sought employment, in the fall of 1917, I received sick leave and departed for Kislovodsk in the Terskaia oblast. However, the beginning of the Civil War prevented me from returning to Moscow. It was only in the fall of 1918 that I managed to get out of Kislovodsk and to become a privat-dotsent of Don University.43 From the spring of 1919, I was a permanent faculty member of the Don University and (temporarily) occupied the vacant chair of comparative linguistics. At the same time, I was a lecturer at the Rostov High Women’s Courses and, in the spring of 1919, a lecturer at the Novocherkassk Teachers’ Institute. On December 19 (old style), 1919, when Rostov-on-Don was evacuated, I arrived in Yalta, wherefrom on February 27 (old style), 1920, I departed for Tsarigrad (Constantinople). I remained in Tsarigrad from that time until today.44

To be sure, Trubetskoi was evacuated not to Constantinople (Istanbul) itself but to the Prince Islands, just off the Asian side of the Bosporus, where many Russian refugees lived on the ships on which they arrived. It remains a question whether he met Savitskii and Prince Andrei Lieven on the Prince Islands as both stayed there in the spring of 1920. In the summer of 1920, Trubetskoi received an appointment at the University of Sofia and departed for Bulgaria, where he worked until the summer of 1922. Political and economic difficulties in Bulgaria forced him to leave the university, and he began a new job search, which, after many turns, finally resulted in the position at the University of Vienna. From the fall of 1922 to his death in 1938, Trubetskoi lived and worked in the Austrian capital. Unlike other founders and leaders of the Eurasianist movement, Trubetskoi did not live in a major center of Russian emigration and he felt lonely and isolated in Austria. Anyone who encounters Trubetskoi’s legacy is struck by the strange combination of two individuals in one: on the one hand—innovative scholar, brilliant thinker, and cosmopolitan European, and on the other—extremely parochial and anti-Semitic obscurantist. Trubetskoi’s correspondence in particular shows the less attractive side of the founder of Eurasianism. To his credit, it should be noted that he reconsidered many of the ideas he endorsed while in association with

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Eurasianism, and clearly recognized the damage his participation in the movement did to his scholarly work. More and more often in the late 1920s Trubetskoi suffered from depression, which he often associated with his unrealized potential as a scholar, blaming Eurasianism for the problem. Nevertheless, he continued to work on some of his more questionable Eurasianist ideas well into the 1930s, including the notion of the state based on the rule of a powerful idea.

3. PETR PETROVICH SUVCHINSKII

In all likelihood, Trubetskoi met another founder of the Eurasianist movement, Petr Petrovich Suvchinskii, in Sofia. Immediately after the publication of the first Eurasianist collection, Trubetskoi wrote to Jakobson that “Suvchinskii was the closest person to me [among the Eurasianists],” a characteristic that begs for analysis and explanations since it was hard to find two people more different from each other than the scholastic, logical, and organized Trubetskoi and the passionate, irresponsible lover of paradoxes Suvchinskii.45 Petr Petrovich Suvchinskii was born in Petersburg in 1892, to the family of Russified Polish-Ukrainian nobles. His father was a successful businessman and served as the vice-chair of a large oil company. His uncle, K. E. Suvchinskii, a wealthy landowner from the western borderlands, was a prominent politician in the Duma (on the right). The Suvchinskiis accumulated significant wealth, owning an estate near Kiev (leased to an industrial enterprise), a large apartment house in Petrograd, and shares in financial and industrial companies.46 As was the case with Trubetskoi, Suvchinskii received an exceptional education. After studying with private tutors at home (most summers were spent on the family estate of Tkhorovka in Ukraine), in 1903 he enrolled in the famous Tenishev School in St. Petersburg, an institution that deserves separate study for its role in twentieth-century Russian culture.47 Established by the industrialist, scholar, and philanthropist Prince Viacheslav Tenishev, the school was directed by one of Russia’s greatest pedagogues, A. Ia. Ostrogorskii, and was meant to serve as the experimental grounds for cutting-edge ideas in education. The institution was technically a commerce school, with the curriculum heavily tilted in favor of sciences, which were taught with extensive use of the hands-on approach, experiments, and excursions. Grades were abolished, and students’ initiative was encouraged. Despite its scientific orientation, the school produced two of Russia’s greatest writers in the twentieth century, Vladimir Nabokov and Osip Mandel’shtam, as well as the famous literary scholar V. M. Zhirmunskii, perhaps, due to the influence of Vladimir Gippius, a brilliant teacher of Russian literature. Gippius, who was related to Zinaida Gippius, a poet and one of the central figures in

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the literary world of late imperial Russia, was a promising Symbolist poet. In the early years of the twentieth century he distanced himself from literature and fully dedicated his talent to pedagogy. Due to his efforts, the Tenishev School was frequently the site of literary evenings and poetry readings, while students published their own literary journals. Vladimir Gippius was instrumental in shaping the literary tastes of his students. He also appears to have been an important factor in their spiritual searches. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Gippius experienced a religious turn, seeking to reconcile religion with literature. Osip Mandel’shtam, who had been under Gippius’s influence and recognized it, called him “a representative . . . of the principle of religious culture.”48 In 1915, Gippius published a book on Pushkin and Christianity, a reflection of his interest in religion.49 Tellingly, Suvchinskii dedicated his key article on the “era of faith” to Gippius and chose as an epigraph his lines.50 It is hardly a coincidence that Suvchinskii became fascinated by modernist literature in connection with religious searches characteristic of the Russian fin de siècle. Alexander Blok recorded his visits in notebooks, and Suvchinskii himself recalled meetings with Marina Tsvetaeva, Aleksei Remizov, Konstantin Bal’mont, and others. At the age of eight Suvchinskii began taking music lessons, and from the age of fifteen became a student of the renowned performer and pedagogue Feliks Mikhailovich Blumenfeld. As Suvchinskii wrote to the Soviet music historian Grigorii Schneerson, who had requested an outline of his musical biography, “at the age of fifteen I started taking private fortepiano lessons from Feliks Mikhailovich Blumenfeld. As you know, he was the first Russian director, who performed during the second Diaghilev season in Paris, directing ‘Boris Godunov’ with Chaliapin.”51 Through Blumenfeld Suvchinskii became close with his teacher’s nephews, the pianist Genrikh Neuhaus (Neigauz) and the composer Karol Szymanowski. Blumenfeld introduced Suvchinskii to the musical circles of Petersburg, and in particular to the household of A. I. Guchkov, a well-known politician. Guchkov was married to M. I. Siloti, whose brother, Aleksandr Il’ich Siloti, was a famous piano performer and pedagogue. Years later, Suvchinskii would marry Vera Guchkova, the daughter of A. I. Guchkov and the niece of A. I. Siloti. At the same time, Suvchinskii organized and directed a peasant choir in his family estate in Tkhorovka. Interest in folk music remained one of Suvchinskii’s passions throughout his life. This interest was combined with his friendship with Aleksei Remizov, whose prose mobilized popular registers of Russian language to create a universe of swamp- and forest-dwelling monsters. Remizov was renowned for his lifelong literary game of the Monkey Tsardom, in which participants received charters drawn in seventeenth-century Muscovite calligraphy. Suvchinskii received such a charter as “a monkey prince and a polpred of Eurasia.”52

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Suvchinskii’s introduction into the Russian musical world could hardly have happened at a more exciting time. Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes not only established the venue for a holistic vision of arts in combining music, dance, literature, and painting but also determined the strategy of Russian modernism in its European context: complex self-Orientalization of Russian culture on the European scene. For several years now, new talent had been bursting onto that scene and attracting increasing attention: the stars of Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Prokofiev began to rise in the last two decades of imperial Russia. Lesser composers such as Nikolai Miaskovskii and Boris Asaf ’ev also belonged to this circle of radical innovators. All became lifelong friends and intellectual counterparts for Suvchinskii. In Petrograd, Evenings of Contemporary Music (1901–1912) and in Moscow the journal Muzyka (Music) provided institutional platforms for the modernist searches and wove developments in Russian music into the web of cross-fertilizing connections and encounters between literature, visual arts, music, and dance. By 1915, Suvchinskii was sufficiently established in the musical world of Petrograd (even if he was barely twenty-three years old!) to become a coeditor of one of Russia’s leading musical journals Muzykal’nyi sovremennik (Musical contemporary). As Suvchinskii himself reported to Schneerson, “Feliks Mikhailovich Blumenfeld introduced me to Andrei Nikolaevich Rimsky-Korsakov. I had financial resources then and we published the journal Muzykal’nyi sovremennik together with Rimsky-Korsakov.”53 To be sure, his participation was largely dependent on Suvchinskii’s willingness to serve as a wealthy and benevolent Maecenas. Yet, he shared the editorial responsibilities with A. N. Rimsky-Korsakov and apparently played an important role in shaping the journal. Editing the journal for the first time provided Suvchinskii the platform for his beloved activity: cultural entrepreneurship. He came to specialize and excel in this art of learning about talent and making himself indispensable to writers, poets, musicians, and artists. Often, Suvchinskii managed to convey certain philosophical ideas to his counterparts. His lifelong association with Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Dukel’skii provided these composers with a connection to a thinker who processed ideologies and made them available for incorporation into the musical works. When the Eurasianist movement underwent a crisis in the late 1920s and Trubetskoi complained about the movement’s destroying his scholarly career, he told Suvchinskii that for the latter Eurasianism provided what he wanted: meeting new and interesting people and influencing them.54 Years later another observer, Stravinsky’s collaborator and biographer Robert Craft wrote that Suvchinskii was “renowned for his talent in discovering talent, and for his selfless efforts to enlist support for it, efforts entailing special difficulties in his case because he himself is poor to the point of hardship.”55 Over

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the years, the list of Suvchinskii’s protégés, friends, listeners, and correspondents grew tremendously and came to include Giuseppe Ungaretti, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Boulez, and even Julia Kristeva, whom Suvchinskii helped to acquire a scholarship to study in France (apparently, at the request of Roman Jakobson). After the war, Suvchinskii established a correspondence with the famous Soviet pianist Maria Iudina and the poet Boris Pasternak. A smaller circle of Russian musicians—Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Koussevitzky, Dukel’skii, Lourie, and Neuhaus among others—remained the immediate milieu of Suvchinskii’s life both in Russia and in Europe. Editing the journal Muzykal’nyi sovremennik revealed Suvchinskii’s cultural strategies for the first time: épatage, the destabilization of existing structures of authority, an association with innovation and experimentation. In this, he was clearly the man of the Russian Silver Age, a modernist rebel never shy of a loud paradox. In Muzykal’nyi sovremennik, this became clear as the affair with Boris Asaf ’ev’s articles (written under the pseudonym of Igor Glebov) unraveled. Asaf ’ev, publishing in Derzhanovskii’s Muzyka in Moscow, celebrated the innovators in Russian music, such as Stravinsky and Prokofiev, but his work was turned down by the more conservative Rimsky-Korsakov at Muzykal’nyi sovremennik. This is how Suvchinskii himself described the development: “At the beginning we cooperated [with Rimsky-Korsakov] on friendly footing, yet, two facts inspired my decision to stop my participation in this publication. The first fact was the appearance of very interesting articles, signed by Ig[or]. Glebov, in the Moscow journal Muzyka (Music) published by V. Derzhanovskii. As I found out, Ig[or]. Glebov was the pseudonym of Boris Vladimirovich Asaf ’ev . . . .”56 Suvchinskii’s intellectual alliance with Asaf ’ev developed as both saw the promise of experimentation in music and celebrated Stravinsky and Prokofiev. Importantly, it was not just a matter of music: both shared a belief that new trends in music were the sign of the impending transformation of creativity on national foundations. This alliance met with disapproval from Rimsky-Korsakov, whose editorial policy at the journal was critical of Prokofiev’s work. When Suvchinskii suggested organizing Prokofiev’s concerts in Petrograd and Moscow, Rimsky-Korsakov refused. This was the second (and final) reason for Suvchinskii’s departure from Muzykal’nyi sovremennik (deprived of Suvchinskii’s money, the journal quickly ceased its existence). Sergei Prokofiev cast this conflict as the struggle between the “conservative group” of A. N. Rimsky-Korsakov, M. O. Shteinberg, and Iu. L. Veisberg and the modernist composers such as Igor Stravinsky, Nikolai Miaskovskii, and Prokofiev himself: Asaf ’ev and Suvchinskii firmly came out on the side of the “moderns.” This conflict underscored Suvchinskii’s passion for the new form and experimentation in art but also pointed to his understanding of art as shaped by national

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reinvigoration. For Suvchinskii, art and nationalism, understood broadly, formed an inseparable bond. Suvchinskii left Muzykal’nyi sovremennik and hence deprived the journal of his financial support. He grew closer with Sergei Prokofiev, to whom he suggested Akhmatova’s poetry to produce a vocal cycle, which Prokofiev completed in 1916 with great success. It is interesting that in 1914 Prokofiev composed his famous Scythian Suite (1914), a piece that was originally destined to be a ballet for Diaghilev’s enterprise but was declined by the impresario. While the suite was really based on mythological subjects of pre-Christian Rus’ (the libretto was written by Sergei Gorodetskii), its association with Scythians was clearly related to the increasingly popular thematization of Russia’s Oriental connections both in arts and in scholarship. Prokofiev turned the refused ballet into an instrumental piece and performed it at the Mariinskii Theater in 1916, much to the consternation of the public. A flurry of attacks followed, but Suvchinskii and Asaf ’ev were firm in their support of the “youthful and coarse” music. Asaf ’ev in particular opposed Prokofiev’s music to that of other instances of “refined” Russian modernism “sucking on sweet candies, often of foreign manufacture.”57 Thus, the debates surrounding the Scythian Suite already contained the seeds of an Eurasianist interpretation of Russian modernism: radical formal innovation combined with a search for non-Western, “authentic” cultural substratum native to Russia’s soil.58 Suvchinskii did more than just edit the journal. When N. Ia. Miaskovskii, then a recent conservatory graduate, embarked upon composing an opera based on Dostoevsky’s Idiot, Suvchinskii was tasked with writing a libretto.59 As in many other projects by Suvchinskii, the opera was never produced, yet it is interesting to note Miaskovskii’s excited evaluation of Suvchinskii as an ideal partner: “Finally, I have a collaborator and I am not likely to ever have a better one. First, our plans coincided exceptionally; second, he is a Russian who understands and senses Dostoevsky wonderfully; third, he has great literary taste and talent; fourth, he has fire in his soul; fifth, he has genuine and even slightly overdone interest in my exercises . . . .”60 Miaskovskii characterized the libretto—to the best of my knowledge the only surviving literary text by Suvchinskii as “genius without exaggeration . . . Some scenes are like a storm, others are scary to the last extent.”61 As Muzykal’nyi sovremennik disappeared from the scene, Suvchinskii, Asaf ’ev, and Vladimir Gippius (another appearance of the latter in Suvchinskii’s early life) agreed to create a new journal focusing on music in the summer of 1917. Although initially it was to be called Muzykal’naia mysl’ (Musical thought), the two issues were published under the title Melos. In announcing the publication at the moment when Russia was more and more engulfed by revolutionary turmoil, the editors wrote that

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the events of our days commandingly call on Russian society to participate in all spheres of life. . . . The revolution that is happening is of great historical scale and it could not and has not become just a political or even just an economical revolution, for it already captivates and will further captivate the people’s soul. We do not predict its future destinies but already now, on the remote horizon, the most limitless religious possibilities open themselves, and on approach to those also open possibilities artistic.62

Suvchinskii’s main Eurasianist idea that the Russian Revolution was a religious event is already present in this announcement, in which the editors also promised to pay special attention to “a reconsideration of the national essence of Russian music.”63 The Bolshevik takeover in the fall of 1917 caught Suvchinskii in the midst of work on the new journal. Apparently, he agreed to cooperate with the Bolsheviks and began working for the MUZO (Music Department) of the Narkompros (People’s Commissariat for the Enlightenment).64 The MUZO director was Artur Lourie, a futurist composer and a future participant in Eurasianist publications.65 Lourie’s reputation among the Russian émigrés was undermined by his work with the Bolsheviks: the reactionary émigrés in particular could not forgive him the music for Mayakovskii’s “Our March” poem.66 Cooperation with the Bolsheviks provided for some benefits: Lunacharskii signed a document guarding Suvchinskii’s apartment in Petrograd from confiscation. Yet, life in Petrograd was increasingly dangerous and full of deprivations. In 1918, Suvchinskii traveled to Kiev and back several times as a “representative of the Music Department of the Ukrainian TsIK, whose task was to establish links with the Central Music Department of the Republic,” his papers signed by Artur Lourie. In early 1919 Suvchinskii failed to return to Petrograd and, having spent the winter in Kiev and the rest of the year in the Crimea, arrived in Sofia in the summer of 1920.67 As a refugee, Suvchinskii immediately set out to continue his entrepreneurial activities. He founded the Russian-Bulgarian Publishing House together with N. S. Zhekulin, a well-known journalist from Kiev, and R. G. Mollov, a Bulgarian who had made a career in the Russian service before 1917. Among their first projects was the initiative to collect and publish documents on the Revolution and the Civil War. Corresponding announcements came out in the Russian émigré press and a stream of letters and documents began to arrive in Sofia.68 The publishing house was also tasked with printing the journal Russkaia mysl’, edited by P. B. Struve, and it was likely because of this that the founders of the Eurasianist movement met each other—P. N. Savitskii, the author of the very term “Eurasia,” arrived in Sofia in the fall of 1920 to work as Struve’s representative at the publishing house. Discussions between Savitskii (who reported having been deeply impressed by Suvchinskii to his parents back in Constantinople), N. S. Trubetskoi,

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G. V. Florovskii, and A. A. Lieven focused on publication plans. Suvchinskii’s publishing resources made these plans seem very realistic: Savitskii, for example, wrote to his parents about the planned publication of an anthology of Russian poetry with his own foreword.69 In the following decade, Suvchinskii, undoubtedly, remained one of the four Eurasianist leaders. Residing in capitals of “Russia Abroad” such as Berlin (throughout 1924) and Paris (from 1925 to the end of his life in 1985), this frequenter of theater, ballet, symphonic concerts, and poetry readings brought to Eurasianism its aura of modernist experimentation and artistic épatage. From 1922, when Suvchinskii introduced Prince Dmitrii Petrovich Sviatopolk-Mirskii (better known in the West as D. S. Mirsky) to Eurasianism, the two formed a literary-left group within the Eurasianist movement. Detesting what they perceived as the degradation of Russian literature in emigration (in the midst of “decaying” Europe) they founded the literary journal Versty (Mileposts), which was to publish writers both from within and outside Soviet Russia. Suvchinskii and Sviatopolk-Mirskii were behind the organization of some high-profile poetry readings, such as Marina Tsvetaeva’s reading in London in 1926. While Sviatopolk-Mirskii was Suvchinskii’s main ally in literary politics of the emigration, his main associate in Eurasianist politics proper was Petr Semenovich Arapov, a much younger former officer of the Wrangel army. Together, Suvchinskii and Arapov secured funding for the Eurasianist enterprise and controlled it. They also engineered, first, the involvement of Eurasianism with the Soviet secret services, and later, the breakup of the movement, largely caused by Savitskii’s and Trubetskoi’s refusal to acquiesce in transforming Eurasianism into a proBolshevik force. After the crisis and disintegration of the movement in 1928, Suvchinskii almost immediately concentrated on music. He published irregularly in European journals on contemporary music developments, and after World War II emerged as an invisible yet fairly influential player on the French musical scene. His lifelong associations with Stravinsky and Prokofiev and his remarkable sense of promising innovation often made Suvchinskii indispensable to very different people. He introduced Boulez to Stravinsky and sorted out their disagreements. Gérard Masson described Suvchinskii as a crucial figure who helped pave the way for new music in postwar France. Suvchinskii played an important role in Domain Musicale and published a two-volume study of Russian music (which, incidentally, infuriated Stravinsky and almost caused an irreparable rift between the old friends). Robert Craft claims to have healed their disagreements, and Suvchinskii ghostwrote the chapter on Russian music in Stravinsky’s famous lectures on Musical Poetics, using the opportunity to deliver his analysis of the Russian national tradition and its ruptures through Stravinsky.

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Suvchinskii remained childless despite three marriages. His first marriage to Anna Dmitrievna Popova ended in 1924, and Suvchinskii married Vera Aleksandrovna Guchkova, the daughter of A. I. Guchkov, a famous politician of the Duma period and the niece of A. I. Siloti, a well-known performer and musical pedagogue. This matrimonial alliance did not last either and ended in divorce. Vera Aleksandrovna went on to become a Soviet agent after marrying the Scottish Communist Robert Traill, returned to the USSR, and then came to Great Britain in 1937, where she lived until her death. Suvchinskii subsequently married Marianna L’vovna Karsavina, the daughter of the philosopher and medievalist Lev Platonovich Karsavin who joined the Eurasianists in 1925. Some of Suvchinskii’s Eurasianist encounters continued to haunt him after the movement’s disintegration. He had luckily avoided the destiny of his associates who died in the USSR, but in 1936 he was accused by the French newspaper Le Jour, which alleged his contacts with the GPU (Soviet State Political Directorate, secret police) in an article on Soviet espionage.70 Suvchinskii took the editor to court, and the newspaper had to publish an apology. This was probably Suvchinskii’s last encounter with Eurasianist legacy, although he maintained correspondences with Roman Jakobson and P. N. Savitskii after the latter’s release from the Soviet camp and followed scholarly publications dedicated to the movement until the end of his life. Suvchinskii died in 1985, barely missing the beginning of perestroika and the revival of interest in Eurasianism.

4. PETR NIKOLAEVICH SAVITSKII

Petr Nikolaevich Savitskii was the youngest of the troika of Eurasianism’s intellectual leaders. He was born in 1895 in Chernigov to a family of Ukrainian gentry that descended from the Cossack starshina.71 Savitskii’s father, Nikolai Petrovich, was very well known among the local nobility. He was elected marshal of the Chernigov nobility, and also headed the Chernigov Zemstvo Administration. In 1906, he became a member of the State Council elected from the zemstvos. The Savitskiis belonged to those circles of “Little Russian” gentry among whom great interest in the Ukrainian past—in the colorful glories of Cossack culture or the architectural history of Kievan Rus’—did not necessarily translate into a nationalist Ukrainian mobilization. This interest was easily combined with loyalty to the Russian language and imperial cultural and political space. Representatives of this milieu in the Russian pre-Revolutinary elites were many. One needs to consider the names of Kovalevskii, Kotsiubinskii, Modzalevskii, or Vernadskii to realize the extent to which the “Little Russian nobility was a part of the imperial space. Yet, the acceptance by the “Little Russian”

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gentry of Russocentric narratives and views was not unambiguous. Beginning with Nikolai Gogol and Nikolai Kostomarov, a sense of regional distinctiveness and historical difference often translated into political or cultural projects with the potential to destabilize the Russian imperial establishment, be it in the form of the rich cultural layer of language and customs presented in Gogol’s “ethnographic” texts or in the form of “regionalist” historical writing as was the case of Kostomarov. Savitskii’s early life demonstrates that he was part of the cultural world of the “Little Russian” gentry and shared in their many interests and concerns. For instance, kraevedenie (local studies) that inevitably focused on the past of Ukrainian lands outside of the Russian state attracted Savitskii. He worked with the famous Vadim L’vovich Modzalevskii on a book dedicated to the architectural treasures of Chernigov (the whole run of the book was destroyed by fire in the printing house in 1917).72 Modzalevskii, the author of the genealogical codex of the “Little Russian” gentry, was one of the most important standard bearers of the noble “Little Russian” identity. Among other important contacts were Ukrainian historians (kraevedy): Yu. S. Vinogradskii, A. M. Lazarevskii (the author of a wellknown work on the history of serfdom in Ukraine), and the writer, statistician, and populist (narodnik) M. M. Kotsiubinskii. Growing up in Chernigov, P. N. Savitskii likely received a less glowing education than his Eurasianist colleagues in Moscow or Petersburg. More important, unlike Trubetskoi or Suvchinskii, he felt visibly uncomfortable in the milieu of titled aristocracy, a trait that Trubetskoi later pointed out to Suvchinskii in explaining Savitskii’s psychology. Yet, Savitskii graduated from the Chernigov classical gymnasium and entered Petrograd Polytechnic Institute. The choice was somewhat unusual for a scion of a noble family: Petrograd Polytechnic, founded in 1899 under the patronage of Sergei Witte, the godfather of Russian industrialization, was an institution tailored distinctly to the needs of the technological sectors of the economy. The choice of the institution was crucial for Savitskii’s intellectual development. From 1906, Petr Berngardovich Struve taught at the economics faculty chosen by Savitskii. In 1914, Struve acquired a professorial chair there. The encounter with Struve determined Savitskii’s academic interests and continued to play a role in his life throughout the 1920s in emigration. After 1905, P. B. Struve emerged as a leading Russian public intellectual interested in problems of empire, nationalism, social and economic development, and politics broadly speaking.73 Initially a Marxist and the author of the Manifesto of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers Party, Struve moved to liberal nationalism in 1905–1909 and was one of the key figures in the famous publication Vekhi, which accused the Russian intelligentsia of senseless and destructive tendencies and impoverished materialism. The editor of several publications, among which the

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periodical Russkaia mysl’ was probably the most important, Struve held a leading position in the progressive camp of the Russian educated classes. In terms of his influence upon Savitskii, Struve clearly imbued his student with tremendous interest in economics and economic geography. But he also introduced him to a range of other ideas: for Savitskii, the metaphysical and religious foundations of economic life were crucial. No doubt, this turn toward “spiritual economics” occurred under the influence of Struve and his colleague in the Vekhi publication, S. N. Bulgakov. Struve involved Savitskii in journalism, and the first articles that Savitskii produced for Russkaia mysl’ focused on the economic aspects of imperial expansion. In these articles, Savitskii analyzed the economic component of the Russian imperial space and argued that Russia, as a contiguous land empire, had always been different from the colonial empires of Western Europe.74 This early interest in empire as an economic organism combined with Struve’s focus on national political community and Savitskii’s own background in Ukraine. As Savitskii himself later recalled in a letter to George Vernadsky at Yale, he had developed a “dialectical concept of ‘protonation.’ Thus, the Ukrainian people are simultaneously an independent nation and a part of a larger national whole.”75 Consistent with later Eurasianist ideas on Eurasia as a “federation of nationalisms,” Savitskii’s thought betrays the influence of his teacher, Struve, one of the few Russian intellectuals who gave any consideration to the notion of the Russian Empire as a “composite” (mnogosostavnoe) state.76 Struve’s influence is also detectable in Savitskii’s persistent attempts to place Russian imperial experience in a comparative and global context. As Alexander Semyonov has demonstrated, Struve was an attentive student of British imperial experience as he sought models for his own solutions to Russia’s imperial problems.77 While Savitskii took this notion seriously, he nevertheless insisted on the specific path of the Russian Empire. As a contiguous empire, it was determined by the regularities of climate and soil. Correspondingly, in his first article in the Eurasianist collection Savitskii developed the notion of “continent-ocean” to counter geopolitical ideas of the British Mahan: as the Brits controlled the ocean through their “sea-power,” the Russians controlled the continent through their “continental” power. If the Brits treated their colonial subjects with racist disdain, the Russians, according to Savitskii, built Eurasia as a “space of fraternizing between different peoples.”78 Savitskii graduated from the institute in 1916 and began a career in the diplomatic corps as secretary to the Russian commercial mission in Christiania, Norway, where he served under Konstantin Nikolaevich Gul’kevich (Russian envoy to Norway in 1915–1917, and ambassador to Sweden in 1917). Gul’kevich, who remained Savitskii’s correspondent for many years in emigration, played an active role in Fritjof Nansen’s work with Russian refugees under the auspices of the

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League of Nations.79 After the Bolshevik takeover and dismissal of the imperial diplomats, Savitskii returned to Russia and traveled to his home in Chernigov. He later traveled to the south, where he joined the White Army and fought and worked for the White governments. In a letter to Gul’kevich written from Constantinople in February 1920, Savitskii described his recent experiences, which combined wounded national pride, disillusionment with the White cause, and awareness of the empire’s fragility: I saw the regime of the Central Rada; during three months by the force of word and the force of arms together with my friends-officers I had been defending my Chernigov estate from the Bolshevik gangs; I was liberated from this siege by the Germans and was a witness to their seven-month-long regime; as a subaltern I fought in the ranks of the Russian Corps, which defended Kiev from Petliura and I lived through the fall of the city; together with my father I fled—or left, who can tell?—the city of Kiev; I saw and touched the French in Odessa and waited long enough to see the “glorious” end of оccupation française. From March 1919 to August, I was in Ekaterinodar; from August to November, I was floundering in the whirls of the Russian “White Sovdepia,” the Russian South, which was just liberated from the Bolsheviks. I spent several weeks at the frontline and I lived in the cities and villages of Kharkov and Poltava. Then I moved to Rostov.80

For a brief period in the winter and spring of 1920, Savitskii served as an assistant to the representative of the Zemskii Soiuz (Union of Zemstvos) in Constantinople, where this organization assumed the task of helping the refugees.81 In the spring of 1920, P. B. Struve invited Savitskii to work in the Department of External Relations of the Crimean Government of General Wrangel. Struve himself headed the department in the unofficial role of minister of foreign affairs. Savitskii prepared statistical reports on the state of the Crimean economy and participated in the attempt by Struve to secure international help for General Wrangel in the summer of 1920, traveling between Paris, Constantinople, and Crimea.82 While we have limited information on Savitskii’s intellectual life from that period, he had clearly already come up with some ideas about Eurasia and Eurasianism. It is remarkable that as early as July 1920, long before the meeting of Eurasianists in Sofia, Savitskii wrote to his parents from Paris, where he was as a member of the Struve-led diplomatic mission: Despite the charming climate and the Parisians’ elegance I begin to long for the Orient. I desire to see you, my dear all, and I am feeling as well that my heart knows its homeland only in Eurasia, among the fields of Chernigov, the steppes of Kuban, under the palm trees of Batum and in the commotion of Constantinople! I

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industriously propagate “Eurasianism.” But in Paris you would not find a Lieven . . . and the virtuous Europeans listen to my heretical predictions with horror.83

Along with additional sources, this letter confirms Savitskii’s priority in using the term “Eurasia,” and also suggests that there was some discussion of it between Savitskii and Lieven prior to July 1920. In all likelihood, these discussions continued in the spring and summer of 1920 by mail or through personal encounters between the Eurasianist leaders. Well before the November 1920 Bolshevik takeover of Crimea, the last stronghold of the Whites in European Russia, Savitskii’s family acquired a small landholding near Istanbul. In Narli, as P. N. Savitskii liked to stress “on the Asian bank of the Bosporus,” they organized a sort of émigré agricultural cooperative. In the summer and fall of 1920 the affairs of the estate seem to have preoccupied Savitskii to the extent that he actually played with the idea of settling there permanently.84 He went to Narli as the Wrangel army was evacuated to Istanbul. Savitskii’s parents and brother remained there until 1922 and then had to flee (again) before the advance of the Kemalist forces. It was in Narli in November–December 1921 that he penned down a review of N. S. Trubetskoi’s brochure “Europe and Mankind” in which he outlined his Eurasianist ideas.85 There he received a letter from Prince Andrei Lieven, who informed him that a “Eurasianist” publishing house was being planned in Sofia and that Prince Nikolai Trubetskoi was charged with editing a Eurasianist collection of articles. Lieven invited Savitskii to participate and inquired about the addresses of other possible participants, such as P. B. Struve and A. V. Kartashev. In his reply to Lieven Savitskii wrote: “I received your letter (on the ‘Eurasianist publishing house’) and was very happy. May God help you, dear Prince, you and your comrades. I cannot express sufficiently how sympathetic I am to your initiative. On my side I can promise a ‘view and something else’ on ‘Russia’s destiny’ and an outline of the economic nature of Eurasia.”86 At the beginning of 1921, Savitskii himself departed for Sofia, where he became an editor of the journal Russkaia mysl’, relaunched by Struve in emigration. Struve was traveling all over Europe and Savitskii was to represent him at the Russian-Bulgarian Publishing House, which was given the task of printing the journal.87 Meetings with P. P. Suvchinskii, the head of the publishing house, and N. S. Trubetskoi, who had already published with it, provided the opportunity to discuss Savistkii’s geopolitical ideas and link them with the ethnographic and religious thought of Suvchinskii and Trubetskoi. After years of intellectual solitude during the Civil War and insignificant bureaucratic work in Crimea, Savitskii was impressed by the intensity of émigré Russian intellectual life in Sofia and

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by his meetings with publishers and scholars. He was in particular impressed by Suvchinskii, later his nemesis in the Eurasianist movement, whom he described in a most admiring tone to his parents. Under the influence of these conversations, Savitskii even entertained plans of working on an anthology of Russian poetry with his own introduction. In the spring and summer of 1921, as the Eurasianist ideas took shape in the form of a collective volume, Savitskii’s disagreements with his teacher and employer at Russkaia mysl’ began to mount. Struve, more and more critical of Eurasianism, gradually became a persona non grata for the Eurasianists, which placed Savitskii in an awkward position. Moreover, when Savitskii applied to the Czechoslovak government for a stipend to finish his doctoral dissertation, Struve denied Savitskii any support and, in fact, declared at the Russian Academic Commission meeting that Savitskii’s father “has an estate and can support his son’s studies.” Savitskii was outraged by this statement perhaps even more than by Struve’s assertion that “Bulgarian libraries are generally good and have enough materials for Savitskii to study there.”88 Embittered, Savitskii left Sofia and went to Prague on his own. He later secured an invitation to teach at the Russian Law School in Prague and remained in the Czechoslovak capital from the end of 1921 to the end of World War II. Throughout the 1920s and even after the breakup of the movement at the end of the decade, Savitskii remained its most dedicated proponent. He tirelessly published on geography, economics, politics, and even literature; ran a Eurasianist seminar in Prague; and actively participated in the underground activities of the Eurasianists when their organization was infiltrated by the Soviet secret services. It was Savitskii who recruited for Eurasianism Georgii Vladimirovich Vernadskii (George Vernadsky), later a prominent historian at Yale, and numerous other adherents. Savitskii’s proselytizing of Eurasianism had a maniacal feel: he often ran into public conflict with opponents and in general created an impression of a rash, sometimes even comical person. Trubetskoi and Suvchinskii often sarcastically discussed Savitskii’s “pathos” in promoting and defending Eurasianism. Within the movement, Savitskii displayed a similar attitude, which Suvchinskii considered to be a sign of bad taste. Trubetskoi left an interesting account of Savitskii’s character in his correspondence. He told Suvchinskii that Savitskii feels a “certain sociopsychological isolation among us, he feels himself a person of a different circle and cannot adapt himself to our ‘common tone.’” Trubetskoi noted Savtskii’s unease at Suvchinskii’s “aesthetic snobbism” and Arapov’s “guards’-style jokes.” Trubetskoi also believed that Savitskii had developed a “mania” with regard to Eurasianism and described him as a “neurasthenic,” explaining it by the latter’s irregular lifestyle.89 These personal traits contributed to the rift between Suvchinskii and Savitskii, which ultimately contributed to the movement’s breakup.

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Despite Savitskii’s difficulties within the Eurasianist circles, in the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s he actively participated in scholarly exchanges with Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetskoi. In many ways, Savitskii’s scholarly work was unduly forgotten. His interest in the nomadic steppe clearly had a scholarly underpinning, while his studies of geography and economy were innovative enough for Jakobson to recall him as a “genius founder of structural geography.” If cleansed of geopolitical and simply political bric-a-brac, they remain a fascinating example of an attempt to create a universal scholarly method for humanities and social sciences, a method that had a certain influence in the development of structuralism.90 Savitskii’s life after the breakup of the movement was hard and outright tragic. He taught at Russian institutions of higher learning in Prague while they were still supported by the Czechoslovak government. He then moved to the German University in Prague, which he had to leave after the Nazi occupation: Savitskii’s ardent Russian nationalism precluded any possibility of coexistence. He served as the director of the Russian gymnasium and as a semiofficial employee of the barely surviving Byzantinist Seminarium Kondakovianum. For the last years of the war he had to go into hiding from the Nazis. The Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia led to his arrest by SMERSH (together with Nikolai Andreev, later at Oxford, from whose memoirs we can get a glimpse of these tragic events). Andreev reports that Savitskii tried to convince the Soviet officers of his Russian patriotism by showing them his poems. The officers did not believe these poems were written by Savitskii and challenged him to write one celebrating the Soviet cavalry. Savitskii came up with the Eurasianist lines: “There is no name more honorable than that of a cavalryman, / For the cavalryman created Rus’ and defended her” (net imeni pochetnee, chem konnik, / ved’ konnik sozdal Rus’ i zashchishchal ee).91 However genuine, this illustration of steppe patriotism helped little, and Savitskii was deported to the USSR and imprisoned by the GULAG, where he spent almost ten years in Mordovia. After his release, he was allowed to return to Czechoslovakia, where he reestablished correspondences with G. Vernadsky, N.  N. Alekseev, R. Jakobson, and even P. P. Suvchinskii. He rushed to send a message to all of his correspondents that, despite his imprisonment, his convictions, Russian nationalism, and dedication to Eurasianism had grown even stronger. In 1962, after the publication of some of his poems in France under the pseudonym Petr Vostokov he was arrested again, this time by the Czechoslovak secret police. An international effort to ease his plight was mounted, with Isaiah Berlin, Donald Treadgold, and several other scholars writing on his behalf (Nikolai Andreev, apparently, organized it). Savitskii was released in 1964 and died soon thereafter, in the famous spring of 1968, a year when Soviet tanks rolled onto the streets of Prague.

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5. THE EURASIANIST UNIVERSE: THE OTHERS

Apart from the three founders and leaders of Eurasianism, a number of individuals participated in the movement with widely different degrees of involvement. Some remained loyal to Eurasianist ideas and goals, while others disentangled themselves from the Eurasianist ideological enterprise and became quite critical of the movement. Such was, undoubtedly, the case of Georgii Vasil’evich Florovskii (known in the United States as Father Georges Florovsky [1893–1979]), one of the movement’s original founders. Florovskii’s background was very different from that of the three Eurasianist leaders discussed above: he came from the clerical estate.92 Florovskii was born in Elisavetgrad in the south of Russia, and very soon his family moved to Odessa, where his father became rector of the Odessa Seminary and the priest of the city cathedral. Florovskii attended the local gymnasium and studied at the University of New Russia, where he enrolled in the Faculty of History of Philosophy. Apparently, his early interests combined humanities and sciences, especially biology and neuropsychology. In the latter field, one of his student papers was even approved for publication by academician I. Pavlov. After graduation in 1916, Florovskii remained at the university to prepare for a professorial position but the Revolution and the subsequent Civil War prevented him from continuing his work. In 1920 the Florovskii family left for Bulgaria, where Georgii encountered the founders of the Eurasianist movement. Florovskii was close with the Eurasianists in the first years of the movement’s history, but this alliance was not unambiguous. Trubetskoi noted in his letter to Roman Jakobson that “Florovskii is the most remote person from me [of the four authors of Exodus to the East].”93 While Florovskii shared a sense of catastrophe with the Eurasianists, he believed the movement was to become “a league of Russian culture” dedicated to intellectual creativity on religious foundations above all. He partook in the Eurasianist suspicion of Western denominations, and was clearly critical of Western rationalism. Yet, both intellectually and psychologically, Florovskii was closer to the older generation of Russian religious philosophers, such as Nikolai Berdiaev, Sergii Bulgakov, or Petr Struve. Initially, Florovskii attempted to defend Eurasianism from Struve’s accusations of materialism and populism (narodnichestvo): “the Eurasianist group” is neither a political party nor a sect of fanatics. In the phraseology of our days the name of “a league of Russian culture” suits it much more. We are not bound together by a dogmatized and tactically limited teaching of faith; we are only united by the homogeneity of the tone with which we perceive and live through the impressions of modernity.94

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The assessment proved too optimistic, though, and very soon Florovskii began to doubt the need to continue Eurasianist publications.95 As he approached the Eurasianists with the idea of joining the Brotherhood of St. Sofia—an Orthodox spiritual organization created by Fr. Sergii (Bulgakov) in emigration—a flurry of letter exchanges followed.96 The Eurasianist founders defined themselves against the generation of religious thinkers united by Bulgakov in the Brotherhood, and Florovskii seemed to be aligning himself with that group. Florovskii’s project for a religious and philosophical journal under the title Ustoi (Foundations) was turned down by the Eurasianists. Despite the fact that Florovskii and Savitskii became related (Florovskii married Ksenia Ivanovna Simonova and Savitskii her sister, Vera Ivanovna), by the end of 1923 the fallout between the Eurasianists and Florovskii was complete. Florovskii published an article in 1925 defending the Eurasianist appeals for the renewal of culture on religious foundations, but he later recognized that he had parted with the movement in 1923.97 This break was by no means accidental. As Marc Raeff has noted, Florovskii’s writings have always been out of tune with the rest of the Eurasianists and in fact represented his own vision of Russian culture and history.98 From the very beginning of the movement, Florovskii was concerned that Eurasianism’s “truth was the truth of questions and not answers.” He noted the Eurasianist focus on geopolitics and flirtation with the state as two problematic areas of the new movement. And even if Florovskii shared the notion of the importance of religiosity with the Eurasianists, he was not prepared to use Orthodoxy as a tool to create a utopian project of a totalitarian state. Similarly, he might have subscribed to the Eurasianists’ critique of the West, but his views were much more open to dialogue. After World War II, Florovskii emerged as one of the leaders of the ecumenical movement and became one of the founders of the World Council of Churches. Unlike Florovskii, Petr Semenovich Arapov (1897–1939) remained one of the leading Eurasianists throughout the 1920s until his departure for the USSR in 1930. His position in the movement differed from that of the three intellectual leaders, though. He joined the movement in 1922, when the Eurasianist conception had already taken shape, and he was less educated than the other three leaders. While Arapov shared with his Eurasianist colleagues an aristocratic pedigree, he was much younger. Unfortunately, not much is known about him before his appearance in the annals of Eurasianism. Some sources suggest he was a graduate of the Corps of Pages, a prestigious school in imperial Russia. He certainly served in the elite cavalry guards regiment on the eve of the Revolution and, according to the memoirs of Arapov’s comrade in the Soviet camp, Arapov was close with Prince Feliks Iusupov and even took part in the organization of the assassination of Grigorii Rasputin.99 Arapov served in the Volunteer Army during the Civil War. Savitskii later mentioned that

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Arapov was psychologically unstable due to his participation in mass executions while among the Whites.100 Arapov was evacuated to Gallipoli with the remainder of General Wrangel’s army from the Crimea in 1920. It follows from his correspondence with Suvchinskii that in emigration in 1922 Arapov took classes at Königsberg University, where he met Nikolai Arsen’ev, a theologian and church historian who was on good terms with most Eurasianists and who, most probably, communicated to Arapov the contents of the new doctrine.101 Unlike his colleagues in the Eurasianist movement, Arapov was not a prolific writer. His main focus was on émigré politics as the Eurasianists attempted to convert as many émigré youths as possible to their cause. Arapov’s family relationship to General Wrangel and his contacts among the White émigré military officers brought to Eurasianism a number of individuals from military circles, especially from the Russian All-Military Union (ROVS).102 He was also central in helping Eurasianism to become mired in the web of underground links and contacts organized by the Soviet secret services. In fact, in all likelihood, Arapov was an agent of the GPU as early as 1924.103 Arapov returned to the USSR in late 1929 and was arrested and executed there after serving a time in the Solovki camp. Arapov joined the Eurasianist movement in 1922 together with a group of former White Army officers of monarchist persuasion. Among them was also Baron Aleksandr Vladimirovich Meller-Zakomel’skii (1898–1977), a son of the former member of the State Council. The Meller-Zakomel’skiis owned copper mines in the Urals, and they managed to sell their rights to the mines to Leslie Urquhart. Meller-Zakomel’skii and his sister, E. V. Isakova, funded Eurasianist meetings and publications before 1924. A. V. Meller-Zakomel’skii later parted with the movement and became one of the leaders of Russian Nazis abroad. Arapov, who had close ties to the military circles around General Wrangel, brought to the movement Colonel Petr Nikolaevich Malevskii-Malevich (1891– 1974), a former White Army officer and a son of the Russian imperial ambassador to Japan. Malevskii-Malevich became the Eurasianists’ fundraiser and treasurer after he had successfully solicited financial support from Henry Norman Spalding (1877–1953), a British religious philanthropist. As the movement’s financial director, Malevskii-Malevich came to exercise significant influence. Arsenii Aleksandrovich Zaitsov (1889–1954), a prominent officer from the military organization of Russian émigrés loyal to General Wrangel and Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, became the movement’s official “military attaché.” Dozens of other individuals came into contact with Eurasianism, either by publishing texts in Eurasianist editions or through other forms of association. As if to balance Florovskii’s withdrawal and the entrance of the young former White officers led by Arapov, new members—established intellectuals—were recruited by Eurasianism. In 1922 the movement was joined by Petr Mikhailovich Bitsilli

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(1879–1953), a medievalist historian from Odessa, who settled in emigration in Bulgaria.104 At the same time, Prince Dmitrii Petrovich Sviatopolk-Mirskii (1890– 1939, the author of one of the best histories of Russian literature in English), a young and brilliant critic and a son of the former Minister of Internal Affairs, who assumed a teaching position at the London School of Slavonic and East European Studies under Bernard Pares, adhered to the Eurasianist movement.105 He was followed by Georgii Vladimirovich Vernadskii (George Vernadsky, 1988–1973), a historian and son of Vladimir Vernadskii, one of the most important natural scientists of late imperial Russia/early USSR.106 Together with Vernadskii, his protégé, Sergei Germanovich Pushkarev (1888–1984), also a historian took part in Eurasianist publications. In 1925, the Eurasianists attracted Vasilii Petrovich Nikitin (1885–1960), a scholar of Iran and a former Russian consul in Persia, and Lev Platonovich Karsavin (1882–1952), a medieval historian and philosopher with an established reputation.107 At approximately the same time, the movement was joined by Nikolai Nikolaevich Alekseev (1879–1964), a philosopher and a scholar of law, and Vladimir Nikolaevich Il’in (1891–1974), a Christian philosopher who also cooperated with Berdiaev. In 1926 a Kalmyk officer, Dr. Erenzhen Khara-Davan (1883–1942), joined the Eurasianist movement and remained the only representative of the “Turanian peoples of Eurasia” among the Eurasianists. A number of intellectuals of certain standing cooperated with the movement but did not become Eurasianists formally. Among them one should count Anton Vladimirovich Kartashev (1875–1960), a church historian and former minister of Confessions in the Provisional Government, the philosophers Semen Liudvigovich Frank (1877–1950) and Ivan Aleksandrovich Il’in (1883–1954), and the composer Arthur Vincent Lourie (1892–1966). A unique place among these intellectuals belongs to Roman Osipovich Jakobson (1896–1982), who hardly shared the Eurasianists’ political views yet participated in some of their scholarly projects. Iconoclastic as it was, Eurasianism also attracted writers, musicians, and artists, which was perhaps due to the eminence in the movement of Petr Suvchinskii, a connoisseur of arts and literature. In 1926 Suvchinskii and Sviatopolk-Mirskii established a literary journal, Versty, which featured publications by the philosopher Lev Shestov and poet Marina Tsvetaeva, the composers Igor Stravinsky and Artur Lourie, and the writers Aleksei Remizov, Isaak Babel, and Boris Pasternak. Versty positioned itself as a journal that published works by both Soviet and émigré writers and followed Sviatopolk-Mirskii’s controversial assessment of the “death of Russian literature in emigration.” Although Versty was not officially part of the Eurasianist publishing empire, it was edited by two Eurasianists and its editorial staff consisted of members of the Eurasianist group in Paris. Sergei Efron (1893–1941), Marina Tsvetaeva’s husband,

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became an executive editor of Versty, proclaiming that the Eurasianists were “the only really interesting group in emigration.”108 Moreover, the journal united artists and writers who subscribed to some extent to the Eurasianist vision of Russia’s past, present, and future.109 In 1928, the newspaper Evraziia continued the Versty set pattern: among its contributors were the future interpreter of Hegel Alexandre Kozhevnikov (Kojéve, 1902–1968) and a student of Heidegger and brilliant critic Emilia Litauer (1902–1941).110 Each of the movement’s leaders, with the notable exception of Trubetskoi, had a retinue of protégés and followers. Thus, Savitskii brought into the movement K. A. Chkheidze (1897–1974), G. N. Tovstoles (1887–1957), and numerous others. Suvchinskii patronized Sergei Efron, Konstantin Rodzevich (1895–1988), and Emilia Litauer. As a general rule, this “system” of patronage also defined loyalties when the movement split: Efron, Rodzevich, and others of the “Parisian” group followed Suvchinskii, while Chkheidze, Tovstoles, and other “Pragians” remained in Savitskii’s orbit. P. N. Malevskii-Malevich’s nephew, Sviatoslav Sviatoslavovich Malevskii-Malevich (1905–1974) was introduced to the movement in its later stages and became a Eurasianist activist in Belgium together with his wife, Zinaida (née Princess Shakhovskaia, 1906–2001). By 1927, the Eurasianist movement expanded to attract a significant number of Russian émigrés of different age and social groups. Albeit often confusing and contradictory, the Eurasianist rhetoric with its emphasis on Orthodox religiosity, national unification, “recognition” of the Revolution or Asian connections clearly appealed to émigré concerns and hopes. Even those who never subscribed to all of the movement’s tenets were fascinated by its “discovery” of Russia’s Chingisid roots, its vision of Eurasia as a space of modernist creativity, or by Eurasianism’s scholarly aura. The personal and intellectual trajectories of leading Eurasianists reverberated with those of the Russian émigré community that found itself in the midst of the crisis of European modernity. • • • The encounter in Sofia brought together young people—the oldest of them, Trubetskoi, was thirty, while the youngest, Savitskii had just reached twentyfive—who were successfully socialized in different milieus of late imperial Russian society. They also shared the common experience of losing their life worlds, which they had successfully begun to build on the eve of the Great War and the Revolution. Crucially, they had similar experiences of observing the collapse of the Russian Empire, in Ukraine, in the Caucasus, and in the Crimea, which imbued them with both a fear of “smaller” nationalisms and a sense of the importance of the peripheral or colonial peoples in Russia’s life. They also saw the anarchy of the

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revolutionary upheaval and were ready to assign the Russian Revolution the status of an apocalyptic event, an eruption of world historical significance that reached beyond Russia’s boundaries. Their personal loss was reinforced by the fact that their country was apparently ruined. It was no longer a member of the “civilized nations” club and it did not sit at the Versailles conference table. At their new residences they often felt themselves deprived and insulted by local nationalisms. The Revolution appeared to them not only as a collapse of the Russian Empire but also as a climax of modernity, as the epitome of the wrongs of modern civilization. For the Eurasianists, their entrance into adult life coincided with the beginning of the catastrophic twentieth century, and their attempt to come to terms with this beginning was marked by a sharp sense of the profound crisis that struck the modern world. But if the sense of the crisis was a general theme, specific questions hung over any interpretation of recent events in Russia. If the past two decades were, as the Eurasianists agreed, full of fascinating developments in imperial Russia, then why and how did their country collapse in the revolutionary turmoil? These questions became central to the Eurasianist self-representation as a new generation of national thinkers as they pursued their ideological debates in emigration.

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THE MONGOL–BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION The Eurasianist National Mystique

When the first Eurasianist publications began to pour out in the early 1920s, they left most contemporary observers bewildered by the love of paradox and the seemingly inherent contradictions that they displayed. The Eurasianists proclaimed that they “addressed their nationalism not just to the Slavs but to the whole range of peoples of the “Eurasian world,” among whom the Russian people occupy the central place.”1 They argued that this inclusion of the peoples of “Russian world culture” was based on the “proximity of souls, which makes Russian culture intimate and understandable for these peoples” and on the “fruitfulness of their participation in the Russian cause.”2 How many Russians, the Eurasianists asked, “did not have in their veins the blood of Khazars or Polovetsians, Tatars or Bashkirs, Mordovians or Chuvashes?”3 This radical and ostensibly inclusive revision of Russian identity was accompanied by a peculiar and rigid stress on Orthodox religiosity. The Eurasianist thinkers believed that the Russian Revolution confronted the people with the horror of Socialism and generated a new religiosity. They expected that the recent turmoil of the Revolution would resolve the centuries-old divisions between the educated classes and the people, so that the “experienced and pacified people and the newly enlightened intelligentsia will be humbly united under the single great and all-forgiving dome of the Orthodox Church.”4 The Eurasianists insisted on “the intellectual poverty and ignorance of the Bolsheviks” who aped European ideologies yet agreed that the Communist rulers of Russia had “identified real and important problems.” In the view of the Eurasianist thinkers, the Bolsheviks’ “ideas of federation and the ‘system of Soviets’ contained rich possibilities for future national development.”5 This paradoxical mixture of seemingly irreconcilable elements startled the Russian émigrés. After all, if, as the Eurasianists insisted, Russia was “a legacy of Chingis-Khan,” then what did Greek Orthodox religiosity have to do with it? If indeed, as Nikolai Trubetskoi suggested, “the elemental, national uniqueness

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and the non-European, half-Asiatic face of Russia-Eurasia was becoming more visible than ever” in the wake of the Russian Revolution, then how could the Revolution “be overcome on the firm grounds of Orthodox religiosity?”6 For many, the Eurasianist turn to a non-Russian legacy was a betrayal of national values at a moment of national catastrophe. In 1923, L. P. Karsavin, a philosopher and medievalist historian who would later join the movement and become one of its leaders, published a review of the first two Eurasianist publications. As most observers, he admitted that the Eurasianists raised important questions but he was scandalized by the “Eurasianizing” of Russian identity. He argued that the Eurasianists “are seeking out a new geographical term and ‘are not ashamed to call themselves Eurasianists.’” Karsavin expressed doubt that “both ‘European’ and ‘Russian’ would die, to be supplanted by something ‘Eurasian,’ an unknown entity.” He charged the Eurasianists with being “ashamed to call themselves Russians” and maintained that no special terms were required to distinguish a Russian from a European or an Asian. Karsavin bitterly exclaimed that “in the time of great tribulations it is not appropriate for me to reject my native tongue and name.”7 Another eventual participant in the Eurasianist publications, a medievalist historian, P. M. Bitsilli, echoed Karsavin’s initial bewilderment. According to him, “Eurasianism is the same mix of diverse and heterogeneous tendencies (learned antiquarian, archaeological, religious, prophetic, and historic-philosophical) that is characteristic of the Slavophiles and Romanticism in general.” Bitsilli charged that in the Eurasianist theories one aspect contradicted another: “they call for a rebirth but their rebirth slips into restorationism . . . therefore their loyalty to Orthodoxy is not just compatible with the cult of Chingis-Khan (which would have been fine because from a historical point of view the rehabilitation of Chingis-Khan and the Tatars is quite justified) but actually requires this cult and leads to it.”8 No less confusing for the contemporaries was the Eurasianist combination of fervent commitment to Orthodox Christianity and acceptance of the “truth” of the Revolution, whose leaders, the Bolsheviks, attacked the church and killed the priests. A liberal publicist, S. I. Gessen, accused the movement of producing an “ideological amalgam.” In his view, the Eurasianist claim “to represent a new beginning of thought and life” turns into a hasty desire to satisfy all tastes, to mix all the polarities, to mishmash everything to the extreme.”9 As Gessen perceptively observed, in the first two Eurasianist collections the primarily “right-wing” assertions still dominated: here we find the decisive rejection of Socialism and democracy, the Slavophile juxtaposition of European judicialism to the idea of the tsar’s patriarchal authority, the idea of religiously based statehood, the first task of which is to

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guard the purity of Orthodox faith, great power nationalism based on the economic self-sufficiency of the Eurasian continent, a rehabilitation of the Tatar yoke and the rejection of Western Slavdom as Europeanized by Catholics.

Based on these initial ideas, Gessen argued, Eurasianism was seen as a continuation of a “traditional, indigenous, Orthodox-Russian ideology and as an ideological substantiation of the ‘White counterrevolution.’” Gessen noted that in the following publications, “the Eurasianists . . . decisively separated themselves from their prerevolutionary predecessors and formulated their ‘recognition of the fact of revolution’ most sharply.” They now accepted Bolshevism as “an authentic popular movement, an uprising of the Russian people against the Europeanized intelligentsia and against the Romano-Germanic yoke.” The Eurasianist “left” turn included “decisive rejection of the ‘synodal Orthodoxy of the ober-procurators,’ of Katkov’s reactionary writings, and a recognition of ‘social-liberal practicism’ and even federalism of the future state organization of Russia.” For Gessen, Eurasianism was even akin to Socialism since it rejected capitalism as “militant economism.” Although the Eurasianists claimed that they “agreed with Bolshevism in the appeal for the liberation of the peoples of Asia and Africa,” Gessen argued that at the same time Eurasianism, “in the style of a great power, incorporates the peoples of Asia into the orbit of Eurasian statehood, and counters Montesquieu and Rousseau with the political ideal of pre-Petrine Russia.”10 What appeared to contemporaries as a mix of incompatible emotions was, in fact, an attempt to elaborate a coherent new language to describe state, society, and culture for the postimperial future of Russia. Reflecting the imperial situation of the last prerevolutionary decades, the Eurasianist language of national mystique relied on distinct and often barely compatible sources.11 It drew on budding Russian nationalism and aristocratic conservatism, anti-Westernism and Orthodox religiosity, modernist debates and Christian theology. In this chapter, I bring together various elements of the Eurasianist national mystique to argue that, contrary to the Eurasianists’ own insistence on their originality and Russia’s Sonderweg, their teaching was part and parcel of the common European reaction to the crisis of the bourgeois order in fin-de-siècle Europe, a crisis whose proportions became magnified by the dislocations of war and revolution. Not unlike European intellectuals of the interwar era, the Eurasianists felt betrayed by their liberal fathers and articulated a generational rhetoric that stressed decisiveness and the will to power.12 Similarly to various clerical right-wing and Fascist groups, the Eurasianist thinkers attempted to reconcile Christianity with a totalizing ideology.13 The Eurasianists, like French or Italian Fascists, drew on prewar modernism and experimentation in art and literature, and on Austrian and German thinkers with their defense of a powerful state and metaphysical foundations of the economy.14

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Even the Eurasianist benchmark of originality, their fascination with the Mongols, was an element of the totalizing national mystique and served to sustain the vision of an organic society untroubled by political and cultural divisions.15 The Eurasianist movement was imperial, but not just because it attempted to recuperate the imperial territories by giving them the ethnographic and cultural content of “Eurasia.” It was imperial because in the 1920s exile it revealed the complex processes underway in the last decades of imperial Russia, the emergent rebellion against the bourgeois order in a society that had barely begun to acquire one. The Eurasianists developed a new language to describe their Eurasia, but the elements of that language were part of the late imperial landscape with its social, cultural, and ethnic heterogeneity. It was this landscape that first generated the demand for rationalization and description of the imperial space. The collapse of the Russian Empire in the First World War and the Russian Revolution intensified the modernist calls for the reinvigoration of society and gave the Eurasianists plentiful material to work out their own myth of national rebirth, the palingenetic myth that Roger Griffin rightfully sees at the core of the Fascist ideologies.16

1. “WE ARE ALIEN TO DEBILITATING REFLECTION”: EURASIANIST GENERATIONAL RHETORIC

Any intellectual movement seeks to define itself vis-à-vis previous generations of thinkers. Still, the Eurasianist thinkers distinguished themselves by articulating the rhetoric of a new generation that they allegedly represented.17 Their novelty was to supersede the Russian intelligentsia and its atheist and antistate activities that led to the revolutionary catastrophe of 1917. However, the rhetoric of the new generation was also directed against those Russian intellectuals who, following the Revolution of 1905 and the introduction of the parliamentary regime, embraced neo-Kantian metaphysics and called for cooperation with the state. The Eurasianists saw the former as godless followers of the Enlightenment and direct predecessors of the Bolsheviks. The latter, according to the Eurasianists, failed to create a viable national ideology and to save Russia from its catastrophic unraveling in the Revolution. The required national reinvigoration of Russia after the Revolution and the war was to be pursued under the leadership of a new, Eurasianist generation of thinkers. Rooted in the crisis of the Russian intelligentsia’s worldview after the Revolution of 1905, this generational rhetoric was one of the building blocks of the Eurasianist national mystique, which added a strong emotional element to the Eurasianist diagnosis of Russia’s problems. The Eurasianists entered their adult lives by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. This particular timing was as crucial in shaping their

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generational experiences as was their social position at the top of late imperial Russian society. The Revolution of 1905, which introduced a limited parliamentary regime in Russia, also shattered the old identifications and strategies of the educated classes. The period witnessed a crisis in the ranks of the intelligentsia, this “peculiar but indubitably real class” in modern Russian history.18 Martin Malia defined a member of the intelligentsia of the second half of the nineteenth century as “any able, sensitive, and ambitious individual, from a more or less privileged group, who lives under an inflexible and ‘closed’ old regime which does not offer adequate scope for his energies, and who consequently goes over to integral, as well as highly ideological, opposition to that regime.”19 The gradual rise of professions in the second half of the nineteenth century and introduction of the parliament following the Revolution of 1905 led to the increased professionalization of intellectual activities in Russia.20 Although Russian political parties defined by their ideological traditions (for the opposition to the Tsarist regime these included liberalism, Marxism, and Populism) emerged by the beginning of the twentieth century, the complicated parliamentary history of the late imperial Russia notwithstanding, many liberals saw the opportunity to pursue politics in the framework of the parliament after 1905.21 The “underground Russia” of the radical intelligentsia did not disappear, but it no longer dominated the symbolic space of politics and culture. In art and literature this process was paralleled by an explosion of cultural life known in the Russian tradition as the Silver Age of Russian culture. More often than not, this flourishing of artistic and literary creativity was connected to the idea of “art for art’s sake,” a far cry from Nekrasov’s famous statement that one might not be a poet yet one must be a citizen. Needless to say, this does not mean that arts and literature became apolitical in this period. Suffice it to mention that writers and poets as diverse as Alexander Blok and Maxim Gorky threw their talent behind political causes. Nevertheless, connections between politics and culture became more complicated and multidimensional. The urgency of political messages, when they were encoded in the work of art and literature, was much less immediate than in the second half of the nineteenth century.22 After all, in the relatively open semiparliamentary regime, mass media or specialized collections of articles (which were prominent in this period) could much more successfully fulfill the role that Russian literature had assumed in the nineteenth century. The Eurasianists’ life experiences did not include the growing revolutionary momentum of the beginning of the century; they did not witness the rise of liberal intelligentsia activity in the 1890s following the famine of 1892; and even during the Revolution of 1905 they were still gimnazisty, secondary school students. Having left universities in the years 1913–1916, the future Eurasianists themselves were not intelligenty in the “traditional” sense of the term, which implied a critical

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attitude toward the autocratic regime and fascination with positivist and Socialist programs for rebuilding the society. Rather, they were professional intellectuals for whom the intelligentsia’s radical mythology appeared neither attractive nor necessary.23 They were, in many ways, children of this remarkable period in the last two decades of imperial Russia when the latter began to converge with other European societies. The founders of Eurasianism began successful careers as professional academics and scholars or, as was the case with Suvchinskii, as entrepreneurs in the artistic world. Their generational energy was directed not against the atavisms of autocracy that still very much existed in Russia but against the bourgeois milieu and modern institutions that were still very much in their incipient stage. Characteristically, this energy did not embark on the path of propagating Socialism. Instead, it paralleled what in other European societies became the critique of modernity from the right and it cast this critique in terms of a search for the moral, political, and aesthetic regeneration of society. In the imperial situation of Russia, with its multiplicity of estates surviving into the twentieth century, this critique of modern life from the right drew on the aristocratic loathing of the philistine and materialist middle classes. Eurasianist antibourgeois sentiment was infused with this aristocratic sense of despair at the disappearance of cultural forms of the Ancien Régime that was so powerfully expressed in Russia by the philosopher Konstantin Leont’ev. As recalled by N. S. Trubetskoi’s cousin and study partner in their university years, Prince Sergei Evgen’evich Trubetskoi, his visit to Versailles was overshadowed by the view of “these little self-satisfied ‘bourgeois,’ who were profaning the park.” S. E. Trubetskoi saw the world around him as “so colorless and tasteless in comparison to the epoch that had truly appreciated the beauty of the forms of life.”24 N. S. Trubetskoi himself believed that the Renaissance marked the beginning of the decline of European (“Romano-Germanic”) civilization and the elimination of the complexity of human societies.25 However, the Eurasianists did not belong to those conservatives who simply longed for the restoration of the tsarist regime. Their interpretation of the Revolution and their historical theories all provided room for criticism of late imperial Russia’s political and social health, and that criticism was bitter and decisive. In the atmosphere of world war and “high imperialism,” not unexpectedly, their search for new forms of social, political, and cultural life was taking the form of nationalism, a term that frequented mass media and political discourse in the 1910s.26 Ironically, they carried their attack on modernity to what they presumed to be its source—Europe—because in Russia those features of modern life that they criticized, such as individualism or democratic politics, were either not yet present or had not survived the test of war and revolutionary upheaval. And yet,

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Eurasianism reacted to the interrupted normalization of the Russian state and society before the Revolution, and that reaction was strengthened by the dislocations of civil war and exile. Perhaps the most striking element of the Eurasianists’ generational rhetoric was that it was directed at the generation of their fathers and teachers. N.  S.  Trubetskoi’s father, Prince Sergei Nikolaevich Trubetskoi, was a liberalminded professor. Similarly liberal was P. N. Savitskii’s father, N. P. Savitskii, a known activist in the zemstvo movement.27 D. P. Sviatopolk-Mirskii was the son of a high-ranking imperial bureaucrat, yet his father’s tenure as minister of the interior was marked by liberal attitudes. George Vernadsky’s father, Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadskii, was a member of the Kadet Party. Petr Berngardovich Struve, P. N. Savitskii’s teacher, was arguably Russia’s most influential liberal and one of the masterminds of the series of collections critical of the radical intelligentsia. In fact, between 1903 and 1917, intellectuals such as Petr Berngardovich Struve, Sergii Nikolaevich Bulgakov, and Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdiaev contributed to a series of collections of articles, such as Problemy idealizma (Problems of idealism, 1903), Vekhi (Landmarks, 1909), and Iz glubiny (From the depth, 1917).28 The latter publication is irrelevant for our discussion because, although printed in 1918, it did not reach the audience until 1921. The former two, however, represented the determined attempt of a group of publicists, scholars, and philosophers to draw the attention of the Russian public to the intelligentsia’s materialist, positivist, and radical outlook. The premise of this group of critics was that the intelligentsia ought to reconsider its political and even epistemological assumptions. It ought to embrace idealism (in fact, the authors did not share a specific version of idealism and drew on both the neo-Slavophile ideas and neo-Kantianism) and to start fulfilling its presumed duties by engaging in cultural work for the good of the nation. Put forward by people who often began their careers as Socialists (indeed, Struve was the author of the Social Democratic Party Program) but subsequently moved to liberalism and conservative Orthodoxy and even monarchism, these publications were met with fierce criticism by the intelligentsia.29 The authors, who suggested the possibility of the Rechtstaat and proposed cooperating selectively with the state instead of opposing it in principle, were accused of treason and reaction.30 Yet, the very appearance of these publications and participation of some of Russia’s leading intellectuals underscored the process of transformation under way among the Russian educated classes. The group around the Vekhi publication was not homogeneous. It can be divided roughly into the followers of Petr Berngardovich Struve, who propagated a version of liberal nationalism in the 1910s, and those thinkers who coalesced around the publishing house and journal Put’ (Path). The latter group, which included S. N. Bulgakov, E. N. Trubetskoi (N. S. Trubetskoi’s uncle), V. F. Ern,

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and, at some point, N. A. Berdiaev, did not concentrate on issues of immediate political concern. Rather, in the tradition of Russian utopian thought, it advanced a vision of Christian liberal nationalism that was formulated in a highly abstract way.31 One of the major postulates of this group was the need to rebuild society on the principles of Christianity, which would render the choice between Socialism and capitalism obsolete. Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetskoi, reportedly, was close to participants in this group in 1909–1910, whereas Savitskii was intellectually closer to the first group, for he was Petr Struve’s student in Petrograd’s Polytechnic Institute.32 At first glance, the Eurasianist vision of rebuilding society on Orthodox religious values resembled the ideas of the Put’ group. However, the Eurasianist ideology lacked any sympathy with the liberal component of the Put’ and Vekhi philosophy. The premises of the Vekhi group—the critique of the intelligentsia’s utilitarianism, the emphasis on the need to embrace idealism and the state, nationalism, and an insistence on the importance of religion and culture—were all very close to the ideas professed by the Eurasianists. As Petr Savitskii proclaimed in one of the first Eurasianist collections of articles, the Eurasianists “placed themselves firmly in one line” with the “religious and national” tradition of Russian thought. The Eurasianists’ predecessors in this line were the Slavophiles, Nikolai Gogol, Fedor Dostoevsky, Vladimir Solov’ev, Alexander Ivanov, and Mikhail Vrubel’.33 Savitskii contrasted this world of religious and national thought to the world of “enlighteners” and “critics” of the nineteenth century, who were at the roots of the intelligentsia’s “nihilist and materialist” attitudes.34 It is even more remarkable, then, that the Eurasianists’ generational rhetoric was directed against those very representatives of the generation of Vekhi, such as Petr Struve, Nikolai Berdiaev, Sergii Bulgakov, or Trubetskoi’s uncle Grigorii Nikolaevich Trubetskoi, who had reproached the intelligentsia for its utilitarianism and materialism. After all, like Berdiaev and Bulgakov, the Eurasianists believed in the centrality of the Orthodox religion for Russia; they also shared with Petr Struve his passionate nationalism and his veneration of the state. This shared ground aside, the Eurasianists chose to define themselves against the religious thinkers of the early twentieth century. Throughout the 1920s the Eurasianists repeatedly criticized those intellectuals who participated in the philosophical and religious “Renaissance” of the 1910s both in published materials and in private correspondence, where they repeatedly referred to their generational predecessors as “old grumblers” (starye grymzy). Discussing the personality of Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdiaev, Trubetskoi wrote to Petr Suvchinskii in January 1923: “I know Berdiaev. He appears to me first of all as a light-minded person. A while ago he told me that Christianity is outdated and needs a female deity.”35 When in 1926 the Eurasianists discussed possible participation in the movement

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of the philosopher Lev Platonovich Karsavin, Trubetskoi reminded Suvchinskii of “our old rule not to accept anyone of the previous generation.”36 In the same letter Trubetskoi criticized his own uncle, Prince Grigorii Nikolaevich Trubetskoi, for his lack of decisiveness and told Suvchinskii that “indecisiveness is characteristic of this entire generation.”37 In their private correspondence, the Eurasianists assigned P. B. Struve the pseudonym Sukinskii (derived from the Russian word for “bitch”) and in general referred to representatives of the older generation with loathing and disrespect.38 In 1922 a group of outstanding intellectuals—all of whom were prominent before the Revolution—was exiled from Russia on the orders of Lenin.39 Petr Suvchinskii wrote from Berlin to Trubetskoi that he “endured the arrival of these exiles as the greatest disaster.” He compared the exiles to “a piece of turf from a cemetery” that was transplanted from Russia. These exiled intellectuals were “a completely outlived layer of culture,” and Lenin must have exiled them “on purpose . . . in order to lead the emigration and speak on its behalf and, therefore, to stifle everything which is new and vital and therefore dangerous for the Bolsheviks.” Suvchinskii thought that “this intelligentsia . . . does not represent anything anymore and will just compromise the new émigré generations.”40 In 1924 the Eurasianists decided to explain publicly their critique of the older generation of religious philosophers. In a programmatic article published in the Eurasianist annual almanac, Petr Suvchinskii wrote about the “religious and philosophical renaissance” of the 1910s.41 Referring to the Vekhi publication, he reminded his readers how the “‘Nihilist moralism’ and militant materialism [of the intelligentsia] were condemned and instead of these two, to use the Vekhi formulas, we heard appeals to embrace ‘concrete idealism’ and ‘religious humanism.’” But this change had no impact on the course of Russian history. Suvchinskii saw as proof of the futility of the previous generation’s work the fact that “despite the ‘renovated ideals’ the second revolution has erupted and has been going on under the fanatic leadership of the outlived principles of the militant materialism.” The work of the religious thinkers of the 1910s failed to become a broad national movement and “appeared meaningful and significant only in the limited milieu of the intelligentsia, which was undergoing its internal crisis.”42 The Eurasianists’ scornful reaction to the generation of “indecisive” thinkers and activists was aimed at constructing their own group as one that learned the lessons of the Revolution and the Civil War. Their own ideological products, they believed, could bridge the gap between the intelligentsia and the ocean of “elemental” forces of the masses by transgressing the intelligentsia’s narrow horizons, which were determined by the artificial European civilization. The Eurasianist project of Russia’s national reinvigoration privileged this decisiveness and strength and detested the “shabbiness” and “lack of will which led to the revolution.”43

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When a younger member of the Eurasianist movement wrote to P. N. Savitskii to ask about the emerging conflict with religious thinkers around Father Sergii Bulgakov (an active participant in the religious and philosophical renaissance of the 1910s, who had initiated a religious Brotherhood of St. Sofia in emigration),44 Savitskii responded by suggesting that “they sense a different nature of will (prirodu voli) in us.” Savitskii also pointed out that “compared to previous generations, the Eurasianists are a new type of men due to their spiritual constitution and societal actions.” The main difference between the older generation and the Eurasianists, in his view, was that the former “are corrupted by reflection. We, for better or for worse, are alien to this debilitating reflection.”45 The Eurasianist criticism of the prerevolutionary intellectuals did reverberate with some Russian émigrés. Fedor Stepun, who had been a Socialist revolutionary and served under Kerenskii in the Provisional Government, expressed very similar ideas in his memoirs.46 He argued that “we lived well in the old Russia but it was a sinful life.” Not unlike the Eurasianists, Stepun blamed both “the government and the decaying revolutionary forces for lust for authority,” and “the liberal intelligentsia for empty talk.” Stepun believed that the Russian intellectuals were “idle” not because they were inactive but because “they planted Russian culture that was very high yet little connected with the ‘depth’ of the people’s life.”47 In essence, Stepun agreed with the Eurasianists that the prerevolutionary educated classes failed to rejuvenate Russian national life and thus escape the catastrophe of the Revolution. This reinvigoration of national life thus remained an unfulfilled task. The Eurasianists presented themselves as a new, decisive generation ready to assume the task for themselves. They were ready to offer ideological formulas, historical interpretations, and a vision of future national life. Free of Russian decadence and blind following of European models, the Eurasianist movement presented itself as a group ready to offer Russia a path to national salvation in catastrophic times— not unlike its peers in Western and Eastern Europe in the interwar period.

2. THE NATIONAL MYSTIQUE AND THE SEARCH FOR ASIAN ELEMENTS: FIN-DE-SIÈCLE INFLUENCES

Eurasianist discussions in Sofia in the winter of 1920–1921 often focused on literary matters. In a letter to his parents, P. N. Savitskii described how he and P. B. Struve had dined with P. P. Suvchinskii, N. S. Zhekulin, and Prince A. A. Lieven and “talked the whole time about poetry and prose.”48 The Russian-Bulgarian Publishing House directed by Suvchinskii primarily focused on books, covering recent experiences of the war and Revolution, and published a selection of Russian

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literary oeuvres. One of the earliest publications of the Eurasianist circle in Sofia was Alexander Blok’s poem “The Twelve,” widely seen as a complex commentary on revolutionary events. Petr Suvchinskii commented on Blok’s ideas about the religious nature of the Revolution in his foreword to the publication and suggested that the new generation of Russian intelligentsia would be able to understand and accept the Revolution only “when it comes as close to the Revolution as Blok did and listens to it as Blok did.”49 Two years later, in a programmatic article in the Eurasianist almanac, Suvchinskii emphasized the importance of Blok for the Eurasianists’ own “perception of the times.”50 Referring to Blok’s celebration of the steppe mare, flying in the great Asian spaces of Russia, Suvchinskii saw the poet as the great revolutionary prophet since he had “already felt these elements— this wind—which later, in his poem “The Twelve,” will have embraced all of ‘God’s world.’”51 Discussing Blok’s premonitions of the destiny of the Russian intelligentsia in his prerevolutionary essays, Suvchinskii took note of Blok’s vision, reminding his own readers that Blok “spoke of the vengeance of the elements against the laboratory-like human culture of steel and concrete.”52 When Nikolai Trubetskoi wrote to Roman Jakobson in 1922 to explain Eurasianism, he suggested that Blok’s poetry contained a similar mood.53 Why were the Eurasianists, who claimed that Russian state and culture were an outcome of “the constant mutual interaction of the Russian-Slavic world with the Turko-Tatar peoples of the East,” so interested in the greatest poet of Russian Symbolism and a representative of the age that they decried as decadent and empty?54 The Eurasianist interest in Blok was not accidental. The poet’s writings between the two Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 crowned a long period of fascination with Asia in Russian culture. This interest in Russia’s Asian connections was complex and multifaceted, and oscillated from typical European “Orientalism” to notions of Russia’s own particularity vis-à-vis the West or Europe because of her Asian ties. These ideas were articulated by historians and writers, artists and poets, and often combined with specific sociopolitical programs.55 Beginning with the writings of Nikolai Karamzin, Alexander Pushkin, Fedor Tiutchev, Alexander Herzen, and the Slavophiles, Russian intellectuals thematicized Russia’s Asian encounters in connection with its position vis-à-vis Europe and, more broadly, the modern world. At the same time, these encounters were tied to the resolution of Russia’s domestic problems of emancipation, progress, or empire. In his pathbreaking study of connections between Russian literature and empire, Harsha Ram termed this discourse “the imperial sublime” and argued that it “envisioned Russia’s future in terms that ambitiously straddled both Europe and Asia, even as it realigned Russia against western Europe as the leader of a newly imagined religious, cultural or ethnic union.”56

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The Eurasianist movement drew on the imperial sublime and the searches of Russian modernist writers and poets of the late nineteenth–early twentieth century, whose writings were often influenced by Vladimir Sergeevich Solov’ev (1853–1900), arguably Russia’s most important modern philosopher.57 For any interpretation of the emergence of Eurasianism, Solov’ev’s ideas are crucially significant because they bridge the new cultural geopolitics of the Russian Silver Age with the Slavophile hopes for Russia’s world-historical and spiritual mission and concerns about the imitative nature of modern Russian culture. Solov’ev’s primary interests lay in the possibility of Christian universalism. As did the Slavophiles before him, Solov’ev viewed Russia’s Hegelian destiny in the “reconciliation” of the world’s cultures under the Christian “all-unity.” At least initially, Solov’ev’s vision was not necessarily xenophobic but it did imply the incompleteness of rationalism associated with the West. In his famous poem “Ex Oriente Lux,” Solov’ev suggested the initial failure of Western rationalism and the worldwide longing for spiritual rebirth answered by Christianity: И силой разума и права— Всечеловеческих начал— Воздвиглась Запада держава, И миру Рим единство дал. Чего ж еще недоставало? Зачем весь мир опять в крови? Душа вселенной тосковала О духе веры и любви! И слово вещее—не ложно, И свет с Востока засиял. И то, что было невозможно, Он возвестил и обещал. И, разливаяся широко, Исполнен знамений и сил, Тот свет, исшедший от Востока, С Востоком Запад примирил. О Русь! в предвиденье высоком Ты мыслью гордой занята; Каким же хочешь быть Востоком: Востоком Ксеркса иль Христа?

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And by the force of reason and law— The all-human principles— The power of the West was built And Rome gave unity to the world. What else was lacking? Why the world is covered in blood again? The soul of the universe was longing For the spirit of faith and love! The word prophetic is not false The light from the East began to shine And announced and promised that What had been impossible before And overflowing in breadth Full of forebodings and strength That light, arriving from the East Reconciled the West to the East O Russia, in your sublime foreboding, You are preoccupied with a proud thought; What kind of Orient do you wish to be, That of Xerxes or of Christ?58

In this vision of world history, Russia had to make a geopolitical and cultural choice that would help it to realize its ultimate reconciliatory mission. However, as Ram notes, Solov’ev’s major dilemma was how to “extricate the metaphysical category of [Christian] universality from the political coercion that allowed it to prevail as a historical force.”59 Russia’s imperial expansion in the Far East provided an immediate context for how this dilemma was complicated. As Russia expanded into the former Qing territories and into Manchuria, Russia’s elites shared in panEuropean anxieties about “le peril jaune.”60 In the Russian case, the “yellow peril” was ultimately connected to the problem of the relationship between Russia and modern European civilization. Solov’ev articulated a complex and ambivalent vision of the “Yellow Peril,” a fear of the destruction of both Europe and Russia by the supposedly resurgent “pan-Mongolism.” Russia was told “to forget its former glory” as “the double-headed eagle is defeated, and the torn pieces of Russia’s banners are given to the yellow children for amusement.”61 However, in Solov’ev’s later, eschatological thought, the “Yellow Peril” came to stand for the end of history. In a

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bewildering essay “A Short Tale of the Antichrist” (Kratkaia povest’ ob Antikhriste), which was published entirely only in 1903, Solov’ev described the world of the twentieth century, in which the defeat of Europe and Russia by the united forces of the East under Japanese leadership would precipitate the arrival of the Antichrist (described almost as an embodiment of Socialism as he united the world and established “the universal law of satiety”).62 Solov’ev used the generic notion of “the East” to articulate an almost prophetic, xenophobic, and yet antitotalitarian fear common to him and Dostoevsky. In this vision, the “Oriental” masses prepare the ground for the mechanistic and soulless universalism associated with Socialism and the Russian intelligentsia, whereas the ultimate resolution of human history was eschatological and mystical: it ended in Jerusalem with Christ rising. Solov’ev imagined the rise of “Pan-Mongolism” as God’s punishment for Russia’s imperial pride. The “flatterers of Russia continued to speak of the Third Rome”: Пусть так! Орудий Божьей кары Запас еще не истощен. Готовит новые удары Рой пробудившихся племен. That may be so! But the resource of God’s penalty Has not been exhausted yet And the swarm of awakened tribes Prepares new strikes.

Ram has suggested that Solov’ev, who exercised an enormous influence on Russian modernism, through his “panmongolian vision  .  .  . temporally anticipated the apocalyptic closure of history such that all contemporary events had to be seen in the light of what they foreshadowed; spatially, it configured a vast Eurasian continent sundered into two competing sides, east and west.”63 Solov’ev’s mystical and apocalyptical vision created a matrix of meanings and references, in which Russia’s own historical destiny became somehow intertwined with humanity’s last questions in anticipation of the end of the world. This historical destiny was presented geopolitically, as a pivot, because Russia could be both Christian and universalist, and Eastern and particularist. Vladimir Solov’ev’s eschatological ideas and geocultural visions informed the work of many intellectuals and writers in late imperial Russia, who often cast their striking forebodings of the upcoming social revolution in Russia in geocultural terms. Asians—steppe nomads of Inner Asia, Chinese, or Japanese—were often used as metaphors for the elemental forces of the Revolution, or for the lower classes of Russians, or even for soulless and pragmatic European modernity. For

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instance, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, often considered to be the godfather of Russian modernism, wrote an essay “Yellow-Faced Positivists,” in which he ascribed the general crisis of European civilization to pragmatism: “The material prosperity of man in all spheres, utility, utility, and again utility, such is the slogan of the European peoples in the nineteenth century. We laugh at the madness of past centuries, which valued the divine above the human, altruism above the useful, the ideal above the practical. The spirit of merciless and joyless positivism is increasingly drying up the sources of creativity, which used to give people immeasurable joy in the course of millennia.” Merezhkovskii envisioned this new pragmatism as associated with Chinese culture: “But we have before us, as a great and ominous example, a centuries-old culture founded on strict positivism in service to the principle of utility. The name of this truly grandiose culture is China, its essence is petrification, the defeat of the human spirit by a slow death.”64 Drawing on the inaugural lecture of the French sinologist Édouard Chavannes, Merezhkovskii’s essay reconfigured European Romantic despair about the “simplicity and utility” of European modernity into an Orientalist trope of “stagnating China.”65 Other Russian modernists expected the “Asian” forces to play a positive historical role by destroying the philistine and soulless European civilization. For instance, Valerii Briusov in his poem “The Coming Huns” expected the nomadic “drunken horde” to descend “on us” from the “dark encampments / to enliven the decrepit body / with the wave of flaming blood.” And although this expectation of a refreshing conquest was tempered by a sense of loss (“Maybe everything will vanish without a trace / That only we knew”), Briusov welcomed the arrival of the destructive: “But you, who will destroy me / I welcome with a greeting hymn!” As Mikhail Gasparov suggests, Briusov’s poem “The Coming Huns” was pivotal in his writing because it signified a shift from a universalist vision of all human history to a notion of autarchic civilizations: Civilizations replace each other but do not inherit from one another: clashing at the borders of eras, they are not able to understand each other, the same way that contemporary European culture and the culture of the “coming Huns” cannot understand each other. There is no continuity, there is no progress, changes of culture do not mean that humanity gets closer to some higher goal of its existence, be it the true cognition of God or the kingdom of social justice. Each culture follows its own path, all of them are autarchic and self-sufficient.66

But the crucial turn in Russian modernism’s Asian theme was enforced by Alexander Blok, who married the Asian fascination with a biting critique of the nascent bourgeois order in late imperial Russia. In his poetry and essays Blok articulated an eschatological, Solov’evian vision, in which the upcoming Russian

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catastrophe was interpreted as the end of the old, suffocating European civilization of the bourgeois and the beginning of a new era of creativity. At the same time, Blok often saw the elemental forces that would enforce this historical rupture as “Asian,” while at the same time locating them within the domain of Russian history and culture. As such, Blok’s was a crucial influence in the process of Russian “self-Orientalization,” a discourse that was inscribed into the process of geocultural orientation and political preferences, bringing together expectations of national and social reinvigoration, Russian Messianism, and Asian imagery.67 The “Asian” masses were no longer just a sign of the imminent end of European civilization, or a metaphor for soulless and mechanical European modernity. They were appropriated as Russian, and their arrival signified the beginning of the new era of creativity unleashed by Russia’s Revolution. Blok’s views were in part rooted in the Populist tradition. Similarly to the intelligenty of the previous decades, he was fascinated by the Russian people and saw in them a great potential for transformation. However, he combined this Populism with a genuine loathing of the middle classes, and he was appalled by the bourgeois world of modern European civilization. For Blok, the people—he even used the word “masses”—were the source of the much expected and desired, albeit feared, renovation of the whole European civilization, which he saw as imprisoned in the tenets of humanism and artificial cultivation.68 In 1908 Blok wrote his famous cycle of poems On the Kulikovo Battlefield, which was inspired by the struggle of the Muscovite forces against the Tatars in 1380. In the same year, 1908, Blok delivered a lecture to the Religious and Philosophical Society under the title “The People and the Intelligentsia,” in which he lamented the divisions between the people and the educated classes and pondered the metaphor of Gogol, who represented Russia as a troika flying in an unknown direction. What, Blok asked, if the noise that we are hearing is the sound of that troika’s bell, and what if “the troika is flying right into us?” Seeking truth with the people, the intelligentsia is throwing itself under the horses of the troika.69 In the same lecture, Blok experimented with temporal parallelism in understanding the Russian Revolution. He linked the prerevolutionary divisions between the people and the intelligentsia to the opposing camps of Russians and Tatars on the eve of the Battle of Kulikovo in 1380. The educated classes in the cities were living “in a hasty fermentation, among an incessant change of directions, moods, military banners.” The social upheaval of modern urban Russia was linked by Blok to “a roaring . . . in the cities, such that even an experienced ear cannot make out; such a roaring that was above the Tatar encampment during the night on the eve of the Kulikovo battle, as the legend says.” But among the people “it is as if dreaming and quiet are reigning.” This quietness of the Russian social masses was misleading: “it was also quiet above the camp of Dmitrii Donskoi. However, the

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voevoda Bobrok began to cry as he listened to the earth: he heard the cry of the inconsolable widow, he heard how a mother beats herself on her son’s stirrup. . . . A remote, ominous dawn flamed up above the Russian camp.”70 In the essay “Elements and Culture” Blok again returned to the issue of the upcoming revolutionary catastrophe and compared it to the earthquake that destroyed Calabria and Messina. Blok proclaimed that the Russian intelligentsia had found itself caught between the vengeance of culture, which appeared in the form of steel bayonets and machines, and the vengeance of the elements, the rising masses of the people.71 Blok’s vision of the great clash between the educated classes and the people was profoundly pessimistic with respect to the intelligentsia’s destiny. He saw no signs of “the will to live” in the “degenerate” intelligentsia and in “civilization in general.” In the coming of the masses, though, Blok sensed a new creative force that would transform human experience and help the rebirth of culture as opposed to soulless civilization. When the revolutionary events broke out, Blok published an essay titled, “The Intelligentsia and the Revolution,” to the ideas of which the Eurasianists would likely have subscribed. Blok’s essay appealed to the educated classes to “listen to the music of the revolution” and embrace it as a means of destroying the world of the philistine bourgeois. As Blok suggested, “the bourgeois has firm ground under his feet, as the pig has its manure. He has family, capital, a service position, decorations, and rank, God on the icon and the tsar on the throne. Take all this away from him and everything will collapse.”72 Blok celebrated that collapse and hoped that it would help to free the way for what he called “music,” the elemental powers of creativity hidden in the masses, connected in his imagination with the elemental powers of the social revolution: “All that was the object of veneration by the civilization, all these cathedrals of Rheims, all these Messinas, all these ancient estates [of Russia], all this will vanish without a sign. Undoubtedly, there will remain just one thing that was persecuted and chased away by the civilization: the spirit of music.”73 In a striking manner, Blok brought together the Russian Populist fascination with the downtrodden people and concerns and anxieties of modernist Kulturpessimismus. Blok’s vision of the end of civilization through the Russian Revolution opened the way, for the first time in Russian history, for a positive vision of “Asiatic barbarism” as capable of sweeping away the artificiality of the philistine bourgeois world, a vision that replaced the traditional “Orientalization” of the Russian peasant masses by the members of the educated classes. In this vision, “the Orient” meant not just a mystical and stagnant opposition to the dynamic and powerful Occident but rather a force that may be brutal and savage yet capable of destroying the philistine bourgeois and imperialist world of European civilization.74 It is worth noting that in Blok’s mind, Russia’s Asiatic character was not at all bucolic.

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In his famous poem The Scythians, written in the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik takeover of power in Petrograd and the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly by Lenin, on January 30, 1918, Blok proclaimed: Throughout the woods and thickets In front of pretty Europe We will spread out! We’ll turn to you With our Asian muzzles. Come everyone, come to the Urals! We’re clearing a battlefield there Between steel machines breathing integrals And the wild Tatar Horde! But we are no longer your shield, Henceforth we’ll not do battle! As mortal battles rage we’ll watch With our narrow eyes! We will not lift a finger when the cruel Huns Rummage the pockets of corpses, Burn cities, drive cattle into churches, And roast the meat of our white brothers! . . .  Come to your senses for the last time, old world! Our barbaric lyre is calling you One final time, to a joyous brotherly feast To a brotherly feast of labor and of peace!

In Blok’s revelation, the Asiatic elemental powers of the Russian Revolution were perfectly compatible with the “steel machines breathing integrals.” At the same time, Blok saw the Russian Revolution as the last warning to the old world of Europe, whose only chance for the salvation of civilization in facing the eventual rebellion of the elemental “Asiatic” powers was to join the Russian Revolution for the celebration of the “brotherly feast of labor and of peace.” Drawing on an established trope in the Russian historical imagination, Blok also suggested that Russia, with its revolutionary transformation, ceased to be a bulwark of Europe in Asia: “For you, the ages, for us a single hour / We, like obedient slaves, / Held up a shield between two enemy races— / The Tatars and Europe!” The Russian Revolution became a breach, a rupture in the chronotope, simultaneously reorienting Russian

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history in time and space, ascribing it an eschatological meaning temporally and an “Asian” orientation spatially. The Eurasianist fascination with Blok was due to this reorientation and reimagination of Russia’s Asian connections. In the years leading up to the Russian Revolution, the “Eurasian sublime” in Russian culture was increasingly coalescing with the critique of the modern bourgeois order. The latter was linked to the Russian intelligentsia (understood as the educated classes in general) and Europe, and opposed to the elemental powers of the Revolution, linked to the Russian masses and indigenous (“Asian”) layers of culture and history. Such, for instance, were the ideas of the “Scythian” literary movement led by R. V. Ivanov-Razumnik, who interpreted the work of “new poets” like Nikolai Kluev or Sergei Esenin as a reflection of this conflict between the European and the “Scythian” in Russian culture.75 This coalescence was crucial for the Eurasianist teaching, which embraced both the aristocratic critique of the bourgeois order, and the Slavophile and Populist fascination with the masses dressed by the literary discourses in Asian clothes. Yet, the Eurasianist thinkers also had reservations about Blok’s ideas. As Suvchinskii put it, “Blok remained until the end in the stormy twilight and he did not reach out to the dawn. . . . He remained deaf to music. He thought he was listening to music but in fact he heard only . . . the noise of chaos.”76 For Suvchinskii, Blok remained a thinker who was capable of conveying the feeling and yet failed to get across the formula. It was up to the Eurasianists to coin these ideological formulas to approach the problems raised by Blok: the feeling of disillusionment in the European civilization, the sense of the elemental powers of the Russian Revolution, and the promise of renovation that they brought with them. It should be noted that scholars have already pointed out Blok’s role as a predecessor of the Eurasianists. However, these comments have focused for the most part on Blok’s vision of the revolutionary “elements” as Asian and Scythian, as was reflected in his celebrated poem Scythians.77 Yet, most comments by historians did not recognize the continuity between Blok and the Eurasianists in their assessment of Russia’s destiny. Blok represented a new cultural climate in prerevolutionary Russia, a climate in which loathing of the bourgeois world did not necessarily translate into radical Socialist politics but rather took the form of a general critique of modern civilization. High hopes were placed on the people, but not because the latter was supposed to have any specific traditions, such as the commune, conducive to Socialism. The people, the masses, were seen as an elemental force capable of shattering the bourgeois world and opening up the way for a new—and often religious—transformation of humanity. Socialism itself was deplored because it was perceived as related to the materialist and positivist world of Europe and was treated on the same footing as the bourgeois culture. Building on these new interpretations, the Eurasianist thinkers presented Russia’s Asian

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connections in a new light and ascribed to them new meanings. They now served to shield Russia from Europe and to underwrite a specific vision of Russia’s future outside of European culture.

3. REVOLUTION AS REVELATION: RELIGIOUS INTERPRETATION OF SOCIAL CHANGE

Firmly at the center of the Eurasianist national mystique stood a view of the Russian Revolution as an event of a religious order. Paradoxically, in the uprising of the Bolsheviks and the destruction of the old imperial order, the Eurasianists saw an eruption of religious spirit. As the first Eurasianist publication put it, “we do not refuse to define, even if for ourselves, the content of the truth that Russia, in our opinion, reveals with its Revolution. This truth is the rejection of Socialism and the affirmation of the Church.”78 The Eurasianists insisted on the religious and the mystical interpretation of the revolution: “We know that epochs of volcanic shifts, eras of revelations of the mysterious, dark depths of the chaos are at the same time epochs of mercy and enlightenment.”79 The Russian Revolution was an event that marked how “the era of science” was replaced with the “era of faith,” “not in the sense of the destruction of science but in the sense of recognition of forceless and sacrilegious nature of attempts to resolve with scientific means the main and finite problems of existence.”80 That the Eurasianist thinkers turned to Orthodox Christianity as a resource to resolve modern society’s deadlocks was not surprising. Since the 1830s, the Slavophiles pointed to Orthodox Christianity as a marker of Russian historical distinctiveness from the West. In the last two decades of imperial Russia, modernist intellectuals had already engaged with Christianity, especially following the Revolution of 1905, and attempted to combine it with liberal nationalism in the framework of the “religious and philosophical renaissance.”81 For many of these intellectuals, Orthodoxy could be marshaled to support new visions of idealism as they sought to oppose the realm of metaphysics and spirituality to the materialist and positivist intelligentsia. As a matter of fact, religion was alive and well not just among the intellectuals. As elsewhere in Europe, religious revival in late imperial Russia precludes any generalizations about “secularization.”82 Importantly, the Russian monarchy in its search for new legitimacy in the age of nationalism relied on the myth of the “resurrection of Muscovy,” an idealized never-never land in which the monarch and the people inhabited a homogeneous national culture permeated by faith and spiritual unity.83

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Given this potential of the language of confessional solidarity, it should not be surprising that the Eurasianist thinkers heavily relied on it. However, in the wake of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, they reinscribed this language into a new context of interwar illiberal politics. Seeing Russian Orthodoxy as the core of Russianness, the Eurasianist thinkers offered new and sometimes troubling visions of the national community and Russia’s relations with Christians in Europe and non-Christians at home. Taking the critique of European modernity to a new level, the Eurasianist thinkers offered a totalizing vision of the national community permeated by Orthodox religiosity and guarded by the powerful state based on the “ruling idea.” The philosophical and theological foundations of the Eurasianist response to Russian modernism’s critique of modern civilization were inspired by the Russian philosophical tradition. Nineteenth-century Russian philosophers, Vladimir Solov’ev and Nikolai Fedorov in particular, were concerned with the Orthodox concept of theosis, or deification, the transformation of the individual to reach likeness to God.84 In the Russian tradition, the concept was often referred to as obozhestvlenie, the transfiguration of the human world on religious, sacral foundations. Theosis stood for the deeply religious, Christian transformation of all aspects of human life. In Nikolai Fedorov’s philosophy, this interest in theosis led to the elaboration of a philosophical conception of the “common cause,” with the latter referring to the overcoming of death by the united forces of Christian humanity.85 The Orthodox discourse on deification was and remains complex and multifaceted. Yet the Eurasianist thinkers focused primarily on the simpler, one might even say cruder, versions offered by the so-called lay theologians, such as Vladimir Solov’ev and Nikolai Fedorov. The Eurasianist thinkers discussed deification in terms of the relationship between the world and the Church. Although “the Church is complete,” argued L. P. Karsavin in a treatise that underwent a thorough editorial discussion by the leading Eurasianists, it is not static. The purpose “of the Church’s ‘development’ is not in ‘forcing’ the world into the Church but in the free transformation of the world into the Church. This purpose is in that each creation, in its own quality freely becomes ecclesiastical, and therefore a living and growing member of Christ’s body.”86 The Church and the state were to be construed as a “symphony,” with the Church enjoying both freedom from the state and the ability to influence the state. The latter “has the task of becoming ecclesiastical (although it cannot fully become ecclesiastical on earth), it is in the process of becoming ecclesiastical and as such is good.”87 Although this interpretation of theosis by Karsavin clearly drew on theocratic ideas of Dostoevsky, most clearly expressed in Brothers Karamazov, the

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Eurasianist engagement with Orthodox theology also took this interest in theosis in unusual directions.88 As Irina Paperno has demonstrated, the philosophical and theological concerns of Solov’ev and Fedorov played an important role in the cultural strategies of Russian modernism. Late imperial artists and writers engaged in a range of activities meant to “create life” by eliminating the boundaries between everyday life and art.89 Similarly, the Eurasianist interpretation of this philosophical tradition focused on the construction of a new society permeated by the totalizing spirit of Orthodox spirituality. In such a society, the boundaries between the domain of faith and the domain of everyday life were to be overcome and everyday life was to be infused with the mystical spirit of faith. Petr Suvchinskii was the leading Eurasianist thinker who undertook the work of elaborating the Eurasianist religious response to the Revolution by drawing on the modernist cultural fermentation. Bringing together the religious searches of the Russian modernist writers and poets and Nietzschean and Bergsonian philosophy (the latter never acknowledged), Suvchinskii elaborated his own theory of historical events and psychological responses to them. According to Suvchinskii, the Russian Revolution was an elemental event, and therefore it was futile to resist it or seek those who were guilty. People can complain about elemental events, they can resist them, but most people instinctively choose to accept such events as something beyond their control.90 The Revolution was a profoundly significant event, and such events have the potential to unite people and imbue them with a new spirit of unity. As Suvchinskii argued, “An event is just some form, which is registered by human psyche. There are formless epochs, epochs of formless human beings, poor in real events, but there are also inspired and engraved epochs, when every day and every hour bring with them changes of life activities, ferments of the heroic and eventful principles.” For Suvchinskii, the Russian Revolution was an event of the latter order. He thought that “events always organize and unite humanity. The absence of events gives birth to psychological flabbiness, which breeds divisiveness. Instead of an organized psychological order there emerge individual, divided moods, contradictory and egocentric worldviews.”91 And if the prerevolutionary era bred “psychological flabbiness,” the Revolution, on the contrary, produced an “organized psychological order.” Suvchinskii believed that this immediate psychological response to grandiose historical transformations must be opposed to “dead” historical analysis, which sees every event as part of a logical and rational process understood by economists and sociologists. For Suvchinskii, this immediate psychological response is the only one that has the potential to open “the great revelations of spirit. It is the most precious of all that any contemporary can possess.”92 On the contrary, a historical analysis deprived of that immediacy of experience does not allow people

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to understand “those changes and breaks in the main order of the human psyche, which occurred in our own days.”93 In arguing the religious nature of the Russian Revolution as a period of spiritual unraveling and creativity, Suvchinskii wrote, “No, this is not a metaphor: one needs to believe that there are times when Heaven is given to humans, when it opens for the blind in convulsions of its deepest forces, in the saturation of its profound being, and then humanity catches the flight of the stars, humanity understands the order and the choir of the earth, and gives to its coming descendants its visions and dreams.” He also opposed it to the decadent prerevolutionary era: “But the link closes and the time ends, the skies fly away from the earth again and appear empty, and for the new generations these visions and dreams seem to be alien and wild.94 For Suvchinskii, the Russian prerevolutionary intelligentsia was exactly the generation that lived during the times when the sky flew far away from earth. As Suvchinskii put it, “the upper layers of [Russian culture before the revolution] flew upward, into the empty and dull skies, and closed themselves in ‘pure’ spirituality.”95 Spirit without the flesh becomes a ghost, Suvchinskii argued, and this was the fate of Russian modernist culture. Its fascination with Symbolism was for Suvchinskii a sign of losing firm grounding in the sense of reality.96 Suvchinskii argued that historically Russian religiosity was based on the sacralization of everyday life. Unlike Roman Catholicism, which sought to root itself in abstract ideas and canon theology, “Russia lived by the everyday-life confession of its faith (bytovym ispovednichestvom).”97 Suvchinskii imagined old Russian life as permeated by faith: “The Russian religious element translated itself in its entirety and transformed itself into material imagery and forms of everyday life.”98 Although the everyday-life confession of faith was professed by the people while abstract theorizing was the domain of the intelligentsia in old Russia, the Revolution, according to Suvchinski, dramatically changed the prospects of the Russian religious consciousness. Now the people betrayed their holy relics and destroyed the churches, while the intelligentsia has recognized its past errors and is looking for confession of faith.99 The Bolshevik attacks on the church, the reform movement of the “Living Church” in Russia, suggested to Suvchinskii that Orthodox reliance on the sacred order of everyday life can give way to the abstract theologizing so characteristic of Catholicism. To avoid this potential loss, the task was “to create a healing and holistic worldview, above all Orthodox and Russian, in which the image of faith would be reflected in the way of life.”100 The Eurasianist vision of society permeated by Orthodoxy drew fire even from the one-time allies, Florovskii and Berdiaev. Georgii Florovskii, later to emerge as one of the Orthodox leading theologians of the twentieth century, wrote to N. S. Trubetskoi in 1923: “We should be building Holy Rus . . . and for Suvchinskii

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the essence is in religious everyday life. This is a diminution of the idea.”101 Referring to Suvchinskii’s position, Nikolai Berdiaev wrote that the Eurasianists’ “will is directed toward simplification, elementarization, toward everyday life forms of Orthodoxy, toward traditionalism, which is afraid and suspicious of any religious creativity.”102 The Eurasianist thinkers believed that modern civilization was caught in the struggle “between the bourgeois masses and the Communist collective.”103 This struggle not only endangered the life of the spirit but also raised the need to infuse all forms of everyday life with the spiritual. As Suvchinskii put it, “in our age, when any empirical and real activity becomes a surreal and ugly function of the world’s capitalist and economic order, spiritual life must be realized in concrete forms of confession, it must become real religious action.”104 Eurasianism, with its orientation of religious consciousness toward the national revival, “must become the engine to return the lost theosis, that very kind of knowing God that sanctifies the empirical and all aspects of life.”105 For Suvchinskii, Russian prerevolutionary Symbolism and its interest in “false mysticism” were all omens of how abstract and rationalistic Russian prerevolutionary culture had become. His own alternative suggested a holistic vision of life imbued with religious meaning and practice: “Only in a combination of mysticism and realism in one organic whole, only in real religious culture, that is, in a mystic revival of the multiplicity of life experiences and in reconcretization of abstract mysticism are the salvation and the exit from the dead end of modern cultural and spiritual consciousness, which is torn into pieces, divided, and lost.”106 But if modern consciousness, traumatized by loss of coherence and misled by rationalistic interpretations of reality, had to find its salvation in the transgression of boundaries between the realms of “realism” understood as immediate life experiences and their interpretations, and of “mysticism,” which for Suvchinskii meant Orthodox religiosity, then what were the signs that such salvation was possible? Where could people find the signposts to determine their path to spiritual regeneration? What should this “real religious culture” entail? How could it be achieved, and where could it seek historical inspiration? The Eurasianist thinkers—led by Petr Suvchinskii in this instance—imagined such new religious culture in terms of “bytovoe ispovednichestvo” (everyday-life confession of faith). Suvchinskii believed that religious mysticism should penetrate the everyday life of Russians and that the Russian Revolution opened the possibility for this development. The historical precedent for an era colored by “everyday-life confession of faith” was located by Eurasianist thinkers in the experiences of Slavic principalities in the wake of the Mongol invasion, and the utopian vision of a society permeated by totalizing religiosity was linked to Russia’s “Eastern” and “Mongol” experiences.

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4. MONGOLS AS BOLSHEVIKS: THE COMPRESSION OF TIME

The Eurasianists’ critique of the prerevolutionary period of Russian culture and their search for a new, religiously inspired national mystique found a remarkable parallel in the view of Russian history that the movement came to expose. This view, as is well known, privileged Russia’s Asian connections. However, the Eurasianist attention to Asian influences in Russia’s past were not informed solely by a desire to salvage the former imperial space from the centrifugal forces of minority nationalisms by endowing the empire with the cultural content of a Slavic-Turkic historical alliance. The Eurasianist thinkers used their controversial reinvention of the Russian Empire as an heir to the nomadic empires of the East to sustain their vision of a totalizing national spirit born out of humiliation and devastation. In 1923–1924, Nikolai Trubetskoi elaborated some of the key postulates of Eurasianism with regard to Russian history, which resulted in the publication of several articles and brochures. Even for the general public, his new account of Russian history was quite shocking. Although prior to 1917 one of the leading Russian historians, Aleksandr Evgen’evich Presniakov, admitted that it was impossible to define to which nation, Russia or Ukraine, the medieval Kievan period belonged, Trubetskoi’s new idea that there was virtually nothing in common between Kiev and Moscow was very radical.107 Trubetskoi argued that Kievan Rus’ occupied a territory different from the territory of Russia as a whole: “that state, or rather that group of more or less independent principalities subsumed by the name Kievan Rus’ in no way corresponds to the Russian state which we presently consider our motherland.”108 In part, Trubetskoi’s dismissal of the Kievan period was geopolitical and imperial. Kievan Rus’ occupied just one part of the Russian imperial space. According to Trubetskoi, this medieval Slavic principality based on the Dnepr river basin was doomed. It was surrounded by more powerful and economically more viable neighbors, such as the Khazars in the lower Volga. Kievan Rus’ could not extend its territory and was open to attack from the steppe. The only outlet for Kievan energies was in internal strife, which proved fatal when the Mongols arrived. Therefore, as Trubetskoi suggested, Russian historians were wrong to assign Kievan Rus’ to the position of the ancestor of modern Russian statehood. What was, then, the historical precedent for the state that Trubetskoi “considered his motherland?” As he suggested, “a glance at a historical map reveals that at one time almost all the territory of the present day USSR constituted a part of the Mongolian empire founded by the Great Genghis-Khan.”109 Correspondingly, Trubetskoi proposed considering not the principalities of the Kievan period but the empire of the Mongols as the predecessor of the Russian state. The core of the Mongol empire was formed by the geographical system of the steppe

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and the rivers. This system covered Eurasia, a separate continent on the landmass of the Old World, and its population represented a gradual transition from the Buriat-Mongolian race in the East, through the Finnish and Turkic tribes in the Volga basin, to the Slavs in the West. Trubetskoi’s favorite metaphor to describe that transition was “rainbow.” The integrity of the ethnographic rainbow was determined by the geographic systemic factors. As Trubetskoi put it, “by its very nature, Eurasia is historically predestined to comprise a single state entity.”110 The importance of Genghis-Khan in Eurasian history was underscored by the fact that he fulfilled the unification of Eurasia, and since “Eurasia is geographically, ethnographically, and economically an integrated system, its political unification was historically inevitable.”111 Thus, for Trubetskoi, Genghis-Khan was of profound historical importance because his actions had helped realize the “systemic” nature of the Eurasian continent in the form of a single state. But Genghis-Khan was important not just because he united the entire Eurasian continent. The great Mongol warrior, according to Trubetskoi’s reconstruction, professed ideas that corresponded to what the Eurasianists called “ideocracy”: the rule of a powerful idea that transcended particular realms of culture, scholarship, religion, or politics. For Genghis-Khan, according to Trubetskoi, this idea was in the absolute superhuman law, to which he himself and his entire realm were made subject. Genghis-Khan selected his associates from those people who understood these great principles and who valued their honor and their principles more than life itself. Generally, Genghis-Khan despised representatives of settled societies as people corrupted by material interest; he preferred nomads, who had little attachment to material goods. Correspondingly, Genghis-Khan valued deeply religious people, for whom earthly comfort was of minor importance. According to “Genghis-Khan’s state ideology,” “the power of the ruler must rest not upon some ruling class, estate, nation, or official religion, but upon people of a specific psychological type.”112 The “organized psychological order” that Suvchinskii claimed to have identified in the Russian Revolution found a parallel in Genghis-Khan’s “state ideology.” Trubetskoi connected the past and the present in his account of the period following the Mongol invasion of Russian principalities in a way that allowed him to see both the Mongol invasion and the Bolshevik Revolution as periods of dramatic spiritual transformations crucial to the emergence of Russian national identity.113 It is hard not to recognize in Trubetskoi’s description of Genghis-Khan’s nomads the utopian project that the Eurasianists developed for contemporary Russia, where the Revolution had allegedly produced a new psychological type of men, decisive and powerful, who would transform Russia on the Eurasianist principles of the state ruled by a powerful idea. But, perhaps, nowhere in Trubetskoi’s historical

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account was the connection of the past and the present as visible as in his description of the emergence of Muscovite Russia as a result of the Mongol yoke. Trubetskoi’s description of the conditions of the Russian principalities after the Mongol conquest could easily strike a recognizable note among the émigrés: “The Russians’ anguish and their keen awareness of the humiliation suffered by Russian national pride merged with a strong new impression engendered by the grandeur of a foreign conception of the state. All Russians were disoriented, the abyss seemed to yawn before them at every step, and they began to search desperately for some solid ground. An eruption of acute spiritual tumult and turmoil was the result—complex processes whose significance is generally undervalued.”114 Trubetskoi had found in the distant past a pattern for the emergence of “national spirituality” and “national rigor” and that pattern was also rediscovered by the Eurasianists in Bolshevik Russia. The Bolsheviks, too, had impressed upon the Russians a “foreign conception of the state,” and the Eurasianists spoke in their first collection of the need to find firm grounds after the catastrophe. The Bolshevik “yoke,” according to the Eurasianists, also generated a religious and spiritual revival, of which the Eurasianists themselves were but a part, and it led to the emergence of a new type of people in Russia, active and decisive. According to Trubetskoi, the Mongol invasion and the destruction of the Russian principalities by the Mongols resulted in the “extraordinary vigorous development of religious life. For ancient Rus’ the period of Tatar rule was above all else an epoch of religion.”115 Let us recall that Suvchinskii, one of Trubetskoi’s closest friends, insisted that the Russian Revolution “flew under the banner of religious transformation.”116 Trubetskoi insisted that the period of the Mongol yoke saw “an intense religious orientation of the inner life of Russians which suffused every product of the spirit, especially art, with its colors.  .  .  . This powerful upsurge in religious life was a natural accompaniment to that revaluation of values, to that disillusionment with life, which were caused by the calamity of the Tatar invasion.”117 The religious upheaval was paralleled in thirteenth- and fourteenthcentury Russia, according to Trubetskoi, by “an idealization of the national past” and by the rise of the spirit of heroism, “religious and nationalistic.”118 At the same time, examples of heroism were offset by cases of “abject moral degeneration,” yet another sign of a “creative” epoch. Trubetskoi’s conclusion was itself suffused with a hope for national renovation and reinvigoration, at least insofar as his interpretation of the post-Mongol period promised: “Epochs of this sort, with their soaring flights and steep decline, epochs characterized by extreme psychological contradictions that reflect a profound shock to a nation’s spiritual life—such epochs create an atmosphere congenial to the emergence of a new national type; they are harbingers of the birth of a new era in the nation’s history.”119

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In this image of Russia’s past the Mongols themselves had no agency or subjectivity. They were an elemental force that gave the impulse for the emergence of Russia’s national culture, but it was the Orthodox religiosity that gave content and meaning to that culture. The Mongols were instrumentalized by the Eurasianists to underscore the birth of the homogeneous nation and its religious culture and not to illustrate the heterogeneity of Russian historical experiences. In accordance with these historical parallels, the Eurasianist scholars sought to uncover in Soviet Russia signs of the dawn of a new national era. Some, like Suvchinskii and Sviatopolk-Mirskii, found them in the realm of art and literature, and some, like Trubetskoi and Jakobson, recognized these elements in the emergence of a particularly Russian science. All Eurasianist thinkers believed that the Bolshevik dictatorship was presiding over a profound transformation of Russian life, and they waited for the emergence of that new and decisive “psychological type” of Russians that would recognize the fault of the Bolsheviks’ Europeanizing spirit and embrace Eurasianism as a guiding ideology.

5. PHENOMENOLOGY OF REVOLUTION: “THE RULING SELECTION,” IDEOCRACY, AND THE FUTURE EURASIAN STATE

Trubetskoi did not consider the ideas in the “The Legacy of Genghis Khan” to be solidly scientific. He chose to publish this brochure under a pseudonym and demanded that Suvchinskii distribute the brochure only in Soviet Russia.120 He was worried that his “amateurish” take on Russian history could easily be dismantled by émigré scholars. Most important, though, Trubetskoi recorded in a letter to Suvchinskii that while writing he kept thinking “about those [Soviet] officers of the new formation that Kasatkin spoke to us about.”121 “Kasatkin” was the Eurasianist pseudonym of Otto Eduardovich Uppelin’sh, a Soviet agent who met with the Eurasianists as a representative of the alleged underground monarchist organization, Trest, in Russia and pretended to share their views.122 The encounter with representatives of Trest seemed to confirm to the Eurasianists that their ideas had a practical application since the new type of men was already on the rise in Soviet Russia.123 Trubetskoi’s ideas about the Mongols’ role in Russian history were aimed at this new group of people, the “internal Eurasianists” in the USSR. Trubetskoi’s admission also suggests that the Eurasianists did not just pursue a highly abstract discourse about culture and history. Suvchinskii’s notion of “organized psychological response” to the Revolution and Trubetskoi’s idea of a new spirit of religiosity born out of national humiliation and destruction informed the Eurasianist interpretation of the Russian Revolution and the rising Bolshevik regime and inspired them to seek confirmation of their ideas from Soviet visitors.

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Perhaps the most telling case that we know of occurred in the fall of 1925. The Eurasianists began to merge their movement with the underground monarchist organization Trest set up by Soviet secret services to infiltrate the anti-Bolshevik emigration. Agents of Trest, such as Iuri Artamonov and Aleksandr Langovoi joined the Eurasianist meeting in Prague and told the Eurasianists that a part of their “underground organization” in Russia was ready to accept Eurasianism as a guiding ideology. N. S. Trubetskoi reported to Suvchinskii in December 1925 that “if everything goes well, we will have achieved a great result, we will set up a self-sufficient Eurasianist organization in Russia.”124 The Eurasianist excitement did not just concern matters of organization. In the relations with Trest and in encounters with visitors, the movement’s leaders saw a confirmation of their ideas about the new type of men emerging in Russia. A. A. Langovoi, the cadre officer of the Soviet intelligence who came to visit the Eurasianists in 1925, was accompanied by a certain “Shubin.” As a matter of fact, Shubin was a young Soviet intellectual and self-taught philosopher, Nikolai Evgen’evich Kozelkov.125 Savitskii in his later notes described him as an “authentic and big thinker, about whom I as yet cannot say much.”126 Trubetskoi, who met Shubin in Prague in 1925 and heard Savitskii read parts of his work, described him as either a “madman” or a “genius,” and reported that meeting Shubin was the strongest experience of his trip to Prague. In Trubetskoi’s interpretation, Shubin’s philosophy proceeded from biology and reached idealistic conclusions. In Trubetskoi’s words, Shubin rejected Marxist ideology but was sympathetic toward the “organizational side” of Bolshevism. Langovoi told Trubetskoi that this attitude was characteristic of the entire Soviet youth. In the encounter with Shubin Trubetskoi saw a living proof that the Eurasianist expectations were being fulfilled, and that the Eurasianist attitude to the state was in a positive way different from both the revolutionaries and the liberals of the imperial period. Unlike the latter, the Eurasianists did not aim to destroy both the ideology and the organizational aspect of the Soviet state but rather aimed to replace the ideas governing it. “It is exactly this,” Trubetskoi wrote, “that makes us the real ideologists of the new ruling layer in Russia.”127 Trubetskoi told Suvchinskii that Shubin’s take on Bolshevism fits very well with L. P. Karsavin’s ideas about the arrival, in the latest stages of the Revolution, of a new “ruling selection” of people who are less interested in the ideology and more in the business of state building. Trubetskoi thought that Shubin’s case attested to “the emergence, right now, of a new ruling selection, which rejects the ideology of utopian fanatics but not the elements of construction that characterize their power.”128 Three major developments influenced the way Eurasianists imagined the Revolution and the future state. One was the encounter with the Soviet agents described above, which seemed to confirm the Eurasianists’ basic assumptions

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about the revolutionary process. Another was the observation of the rise and strengthening of Soviet power, and the last was the reading of some contemporary European theorists. In the course of 1926, L. P. Karsavin composed an article, “The Phenomenology of Revolution,” in which he discussed the Eurasianist key concept of “ruling selection” (praviashchii otbor). The latter was not a class, a caste, or an estate, but rather a grouping of individuals whose political life “is most conscious and active.”129 The ruling selection of prerevolutionary Russia, according to Karsavin, included “all of educated society, from the government to the revolutionaries.”130 The ruling selection realizes the will of the people neither through a party (which is part of the ruling selection) nor elections. Karsavin argued that “the ruling selection and the government remain truly national as long as they remain in organic communication with the people’s continent.”131 Specific forms of this communication were to Karsavin “epiphenomena,” while the real crisis was in the greater distance of ruling selections and peoples all over Europe. Karsavin defined the Revolution itself as a “long process of the degeneration of ruling selection, followed by its annihilation by national state elements, and by the creation of new ruling selection.”132 Karsavin divided the course of the Revolution into several phases, from the destruction of the old ruling selection, through anarchy, and finally to the emergence of a new ruling selection. People’s will toward statehood brings to the surface violent and ambitious fanatics, and the state itself emerges as a primitive and violent force. These fanatics are still drawn from elements of the old ruling selection, those who were in opposition to the old government, and hence are the “worst epigones of the old intelligentsia ideologies.”133 However, faced with the realities of everyday-life governance, the new state apparatus is forced to look for new ways. In its depth the old and the new merge, and a new ruling selection gradually emerges under the pressure of life itself. “New people” and “old people” amalgamate, and are “reborn into the new ruling selection of the future, which is destined to become the foundation of new statehood.”134 The Bolshevik New Economic Policy with its turn to the market and private initiative served as proof that the ideological veracity of the Communists was waning and the pragmatism of state construction was on the rise. The Eurasianists argued that “the emergence of the tyrannical party and the resurrection of the state apparatus was the only way to transition from revolutionary anarchy to new statehood.”135 But the Communist Party in Russia itself was being “reborn,” as new members joined whose state instincts overrode their interest in Communist ideology—hence, the need for a new national ideology that “would return the people onto its historical path.”136 The emergence of the new state, not unlike in Russian principalities under the Mongols, “is to be accompanied by the creativity of ideas and their religious explanation and substantiation.”137 Karsavin’s musings on the processes of change

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in Soviet Russia brought to the fore most clearly the ideas of the Eurasianists with respect to the Soviet state. As Karsavin argued, the new program for the restoration of Russia “must include the foundations of the “system of Soviets” and the solution of the socioeconomic problem by recognizing the functional nature of property.”138 The Soviet state was to be essentially retained as a reflection of some organic process of the emergence of the ruling selection. All its attributes, like the Red Army, were to be recognized as national elements The Soviet state offered the Eurasianists a model to be retained, but their approach to explaining that state, of course, differed from that of the Bolsheviks. The Eurasianists denied the class nature of the state and argued for its metaphysical origins in the “people’s will.” These ideas were summed up by N. N. Alekseev, who joined the movement in 1926 under the patronage of Suvchinskii and Karsavin and in 1931 published a voluminous book, The Theory of State. Alekseev followed Trubetskoi’s ideas and argued that in an ideal state the “unity of the leading group should rest on the unity of worldview,” and the “cessation of party activities.”139 Alekseev imagined an ideal state where “the demos is permeated by the eidos” and the ideals of social service do not necessarily translate into democratic participation.140 The ideocratic principle, according to Alekseev, could help overcome the egoistic desires of the “voting population” so characteristic of democratic states and their party politics. The future Eurasian state should also become, according to Alekseev, a “guarantee state,” in which following the law would be secured by “internal,” moral truth, revealed by the very act of publication of the law.141 It is possible that Trubetskoi’s renewed attention to the problem of the organization of the state and his elaboration of the concept of “ideocracy” in 1926–1928 was due to the influence of his colleague in Vienna, Othmar Spann. On December 17, 1926, Trubetskoi reported to Suvchinskii that he met Spann and was struck by the commonalities between his teachings and those of the Eurasianists. He listed the state’s duty to organize culture rather than to protect property, the organization of the state on corporate principles, limited or functional property, and religious philosophy as the main points shared by Spann and the Eurasianists. The rejection of contemporary European culture, perception of the Renaissance as the beginning of Europe’s decline, and anti-Semitism were all listed by Trubetskoi positively as shared ideas. Finally, Trubetskoi communicated to Suvchinskii Spann’s offer to establish contacts with “Aryan” publishing houses in Germany for the Eurasianists.142 Very soon, the Eurasianist Chronicle published Trubetskoi’s own text about the future state forms of government.143 Possibly under Spann’s influence, Trubetskoi argued that competitions between monarchies and democracies were meaningless, whereas the central question to be resolved was that of the elaboration of a truly ideocratic state. For any modern person, Trubetskoi argued, “all democratic

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phraseology is as atavistic as aristocratic traditions of the nineteenth century.”144 Trubetskoi believed that the ideocratic type of state was as characteristic of the contemporary era as bourgeois democracy was of the nineteenth century, and that the current moment was witnessing the dying out of the “plutocraticdemocratic system” and the birth and development of the ideocratic one.145 Trubetskoi thought that in two instances one could speak of incomplete examples of an ideocratic state: the Soviet Union and Fascist Italy. In both cases, he believed that the forces building those states were acting almost unconsciously. In Italy, “the cult of Mussolini and empty organizational activity prevent true ideocracy,” whereas in the USSR the Communist Party promotes the materialist teaching of Marx while in fact building the foundations of an ideocratic regime.146 The experience of Italy and the USSR, however incomplete, suggested to Trubetskoi the main parameters of the ideocratic state. In an article that he published in the newly established newspaper Evraziia, N. S. Trubetskoi argued that “the unity of the worldview of the ruling group is the essential characteristic of the Soviet state . . . and therefore that state should be called ‘ideocratic.’”147 It was to be characterized by “state maximalism,” that is, by etatization of societal organizations and intervention of the state into various areas of human activity. The power of the single party in such states should not mean the suppression of freedom of thought and speech according to Trubetskoi since elections can be conducted on the principles of corporatism, “through the focus of the electoral technology on “professional representation” of groups organized in corporations or unions (as practiced in Italy or the USSR) rather than representation of the individual.”148 As the Eurasianists developed their visions of the future Eurasian state in which the interests of the individual would be made subject to the interests of the collective (or even, as Alekseev argued, to the interests of “all past, present, and future generations”), they also elaborated a range of ideas about property. One of the primary Eurasianist leaders, P. N. Savitskii, was an economist, and, as Martin Beisswenger has shown, he developed his ideas of the metaphysical foundations of the economy very early.149 Drawing on the work of S. N. Bulgakov and P. B. Struve and on Suvchinskii’s conception of “everyday-life confession of faith,” Savitskii elaborated a theory of a religiously inspired economy, where laboring meant partaking in the deification of life. At the center of Savitskii’s conception of the economy was the idea of the “master” (khoziain), who was different from both “owner” and “entrepreneur.” The master engages in economic activity in way that does not privilege the economic output alone but recognizes his role as a steward of property and his responsibility for the social aspect of economic production. In short, the “master’s” right of property is intrinsically limited by moral and social considerations derived from metaphysical, essentially religious, foundations.150

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Savitskii’s ideas about functional property and religiously inspired economic activity were further developed by N. N. Alekseev, who claimed that “proletarization and pauperism are eternal characteristics of private property.”151 Alekseev drew on European debates about the crisis of liberalism and the socialization of property (in particular, on French scholars Henri Hayem and Leon Duguit) and their conceptions of the social function of property.152 At the insistence of Trubetskoi, Alekseev also engaged with Othmar Spann’s conception of the restoration of feudal-type property. However, Alekseev thought that the choice between the return to a feudal type of property and socialization was a false one. Rather, as he argued, “property is a social phenomenon . . . in the sense that its concept logically includes the notion of a certain social connection, without which property is unthinkable.”153 Therefore, Alekseev saw the way to transform property not in the alteration of the subject of property but in the change of the relationship between the subject and the object. The system that would emerge from such a transformation would be “neither Socialist nor capitalist” but a “state-private economy.”154 Such an economy would be characterized by “relative property,” which “exists in society and in which the society exists.”155 At the end of the day, Alekseev’s vision of property was, in essence, not much different from corporatist ideas of Italian syndicalists, such as Sergio Panunzio, whom Alekseev quoted approvingly.156 The Eurasianist conception of the future state and society in Russia envisioned a corporatist, one-party state, in which the Soviet institutions would be preserved yet their content would change according to Eurasianist ideology. The economy of that state would preserve private property in a limited, “functional” way, substantiated by moral and religious considerations. Corporate bodies of professionals would elect their representatives to state institutions. All these changes were supposed to be underwritten by “ideocracy,” the shared commitment of the political class to a powerful (in this case, Eurasianist) ideology.

6. EURASIANISM AND FASCISM: A RECONSIDERATION

The modernist celebration of primeval Asian forces and attacks on the debilitated intelligentsia, the discovery of the birth of the totalizing Russian national spirit in the era of the Mongol domination, and the propagation of the functional property and corporatist state were all elements of the language with which Eurasianism sought to describe the future of the postimperial space of Russia. The very eclecticism of that language was reflective of the heterogeneous experience of late imperial Russia, in which advances of modern science and high culture coexisted with social and economic backwardness. Many historians pointed to that belated socioeconomic development to explain the lack of Fascism in Russia. Stemming

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from Max Weber’s and Petr Struve’s analyses of the weakness of Russian middle class, these interpretations pointed to the state’s role in sponsoring right-wing movements in late imperial Russia and their quick dissolution in the Revolution of 1917.157 In recent years, however, a “new consensus” emerged in the study of Fascism, which centers on the primacy of culture and ideology in the emergence of European ultra-right movements.158 For Zeev Sternhell, Fascism was rooted in the generational cultural “revolution” that engulfed Europe from the 1890s on. As Sternhell argued, “the word did not exist yet, but the phenomenon it would eventually designate had its autonomous existence, and thenceforward awaited only a favorable combination of circumstances in which to hatch into a political force.” Sternhell saw Fascist ideology “as the immediate product of crisis that had overtaken democracy and liberalism, and bourgeois society in all its fundamental values: the break-away so disruptive as to take on the dimensions of a crisis in civilization itself.”159 Sternhell sees Fascism as a cultural and intellectual transformation that was endemic to “the intellectual atmosphere saturated with Darwinian biology and Wagnerian aesthetics, Gobineau’s racialism, Le Bon’s psychology, as well as the black prophesies of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, and, later, the philosophy of Bergson.”160 Of course, the particular constellation of intellectual influences stemming from this “cultural revolution” depended on national specifics: the fact that Russia had a developed tradition of anti-Darwinism closely associated with nationalism accounts for the Eurasianist anti-Darwinist stress. The legacy of Russian modernism’s “Eurasian sublime,” to use Harsha Ram’s expression, explains the Eurasianists’ stress on the role of Asian peoples in the Russian identity. The peculiarity of responding from exile to contemporaneous turmoil in Russia also shaped the Eurasianist version of the pan-European phenomenon, and so did the fact of the Communist takeover in Russia. Perhaps the most penetrating analysis that shifted the attention of historians from approaching European Fascisms as mindless and eclectic combinations of various ideas to viewing them as specific cultural and political revolutions in their own right belongs to George L. Mosse. Mosse explored a variety of Fascisms in Europe and offered an interpretation of the Fascist worldview that combined structural sociopolitical factors with an interpretation of the Fascist myth: nationalist mystique, a specific vision of modern culture (not necessarily and not always antimodernist), incorporation of technology and science in a neo-Romantic ideology, and preference given to “Romantic realism” in literature and the arts.161 In addition, antidemocratic and mass politics stressed collectivism, decisiveness, and strength. As Mosse points out, “Fascism was everywhere an ‘attitude toward life,’ based upon a national mystique which might vary from nation to nation. It was also a revolution, attempting to find a ‘third way’ between Marxism and

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capitalism, but still seeking to escape concrete economic and social change by a retreat into ideology—the ‘revolution of the spirit’ of which Mussolini spoke; or Hitler’s ‘German revolution,’” or, we might add, the Eurasianist religious and etatist utopia.162 The most thoughtful contemporaries realized that behind Eurasianism’s paradoxes were both novelty and unity, and they located Eurasianism on the political spectrum. For Fedor Stepun, Eurasianism had “a characteristically modern, Bolshevik and revolutionary passion.”163 He thought that “the Eurasianists feel very acutely what I would call the psychological landscape of the post-revolutionary consciousness of the Russian intelligentsia.”164 Stepun linked the Eurasianist emotional response to the crisis of the intelligentsia and emphasized that the Eurasianists “tied into one knot all those emotions that are now residing in the soul of the Russian intelligent. Eurasianism is spread in the air, and it will have success.”165 He attributed the Eurasianist views both to the emotional state of the Russians after the national catastrophe and to the pan-European crisis: “after all the humiliations and misfortunes, into which Russia was thrown, in front of Europe, by the very European principles of republic and Socialism, it is almost impossible to completely restrain oneself from the Eurasianist emotions, especially given that Europe, represented by not the worst representatives, is seemingly disappointed in itself and awaiting help not from European Russia but from Asiatic and Eastern Russia. Modernity is, undoubtedly, Eurasianizing.”166 Stepun thought that Eurasianism was a part of the pan-European Fascist reaction and the Eurasianist amalgam of ideas “taken together give us grounds to define Eurasianism as “Russian Fascism.” Stepun argued: in favor of this analogy . . . speaks the passionate, imperialist nationalism, the cocky pathos of the “state minority,” and the fashionable idea of replacing “popular representation” with the representation of professional groups, and rejection of the people’s will in favor of a metaphysical ideal of people power . . . and, finally, the rejection of the present and the past in favor of a future imagined as something long past: “The rebirth of Great Italy!” “The rebirth of glorious Rus’!”167

S. I. Gessen, a liberal, seconded Stepun’s identification of the new movement and argued that “Eurasianism stylistically reminds one of Fascist ideology.” Gessen believed that “having emerged as a reaction against communism, Fascism opposed to it its ideological principles of nationalism, hierarchism, and national (in this case Catholic) religion.”168 However, Gessen suggested that whereas Fascism was benefited by its indefinite and amalgamated ideology, it was a political movement in power and supported by the mass politics of the street. Unlike Fascism, “Eurasianism is deprived of the cement of power and dictatorship, which

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is a kind of mutual guarantee of the unity of Eurasianism’s Italian prototype.”169 Eurasianism was bound to remain a movement of intellectuals, and its lack of ideological coherence was to catch up with it. Quite perceptively, Gessen predicted the split of the movement. N. A. Berdiaev, generally more sympathetic to the movement, nevertheless thought that “Eurasianism is first of all an emotional, not an intellectual movement. Its emotion is the reaction of creative national and religious instincts to the catastrophe we endured. This kind of spiritual formation can turn into Russian Fascism.”170 The Eurasianist “emotional reaction to the national catastrophe was similar to other iterations of pan-European cultural pessimism and “derationalization” of history in the wake of the First World War and multiple European revolutions. Although in each national context the causes and the courses of this derationalization may have been unique, Carl E. Schorske offered a general explanation of these processes. He interpreted the rise of illiberal politics and intellectual movements inimical to liberal modernity in the late Habsburg Empire by the fact that Austrian liberals succeeded in awakening the masses to the struggle against the Old Regime but failed to take control of the political mobilization once it occurred. In much of continental Europe, that control was increasingly exercised in the 1920s and 1930s by illiberal, Communist, conservative, or outright Fascist forces, often with implicit or explicit support of modernist writers and artists.171 While Russian liberals and democratic Socialists led the charge against autocracy and the limitations imposed upon the democracy in the Duma period, they failed to take control of the social and political mobilization following the fall of the monarchy in February 1917. This failure was due to multiple factors—the weakness of the bourgeois class in late imperial Russia; the tactical and strategic mistakes of the liberals, who failed to respond to the problem of the land and the war in 1917 and articulate an acceptable model for accommodating ethnic diversity; and the rapid radicalization of the masses. Combined with the defeat of the anti-Bolshevik forces in the Civil War (often led by liberal or democratic socialist leaders), the crisis of liberalism produced an increasingly conservative and reactionary emigration, which became the arena in which the Eurasianist thinkers played their ideological spectacle.172 Although scholars often hesitate to describe Eurasianism as a Russian variation of the pan-European Fascist moment, the movement’s search for a renewal of national life, its preference for the organic emergence of the ruling class and functional property, its paradoxical rejection and embrace of modernity and scathing attacks on principles of humanism and liberalism place it on the spectrum of Fascist movements in Europe.173 For Eurasianism, as for its European counterparts, the imperial roots of the Fascist language were very important. Hanna Arendt famously traced European totalitarianism to imperialism, and especially

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to “continental pan-movements, “ which, “though they had no specific programs for world conquest, generated an all-embracing mood of total predominance, of touching and embracing all human issues.”174 However much the Eurasianists celebrated the uniqueness of Russia’s Sonderweg, their teaching selectively deployed elements of late imperial modernism to produce a totalizing vision befitting the interwar illiberal moment.

C H A P T E R

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THE ANTICOLONIALIST EMPIRE N. S. Trubetskoi’s Critique of Evolutionism and Eurocentrism

If the Eurasianist transfiguration of Russian national identity and embrace of Russia’s Asian elements was confusing for the Russian émigrés, the movement’s anticolonial rhetoric was flatly disregarded. No contemporary thinker seriously engaged with the Eurasianist appeal to revise European notions of cultural superiority. Among scholars who dedicated any attention to Eurasianism, the movement’s ideas regarding colonialism and European cultural imperialism were simply misinterpreted. They were seen either as a reflection of Russia’s multiethnic composition, or, more recently, as a brilliant predecessor of critique of colonialism in the second half of the twentieth century.1 The founders of Eurasianism were hardly colonial subalterns. They enjoyed superb education and were raised in the most privileged strata of one of the world’s largest empires, and even in exile most of them enjoyed positions as university professors and cultural entrepreneurs in European capitals. And yet, they reinvented their homeland as a colonial country and themselves as the leaders of an anticolonialist ideology. To be sure, the postcolonial rhetoric is possible in the absence of a structurally colonial situation.2 Since the mid-nineteenth century, Russian intellectuals had often perceived their own position as similar to that of the colonial subjects of European powers, citing what they believed were the imitative qualities of Russian culture.3 Was Eurasianism, then, an early instance of postcolonial critique, an ideological reflection of the fact that Russia was both a subject and an object of European “Orientalism”?4 If the Eurasianists saw European colonial power as embedded in disciplinary knowledge in the humanities and social sciences, should they not be understood as an unusually early and dramatic example of postcolonial theorizing?5 The answer to this question lies not in formal comparison but in a contextual reading of Eurasianist ideas. The anticolonial critique of the Eurasianists

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constructed a subjectivity that was to be liberated from colonial domination by Europe. And yet, if the Eurasianist project were realized, it would give rise to an imperial, essentially corporatist state, in which all the allegedly celebrated diversity and multiplicity of forms would be made subject to a powerful, totalizing idea of Orthodox religiosity and Eurasian unity. It was not accidental that Eurasianist ideas acquired little appeal among the intellectuals of Russia’s nationalities. The Eurasianist ideologues, with the exception of the professional linguist Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetskoi and the orientologist Vasilii Petrovich Nikitin, knew nothing about the Asian or colonial peoples on whose behalf they allegedly spoke. The Eurasianist anticolonialist view of the world did not presuppose a postcolonial subject and the leaders of Eurasianism never experienced anything similar to a colonial situation. And yet, their anticolonial theory became a staple of the movement’s ideological diet elaborated primarily by Trubetskoi. The latter was the only Eurasianist thinker to offer ideas about various aspects of Eurasianism’s take on colonialism. Trubetskoi’s other intellectual concerns, such as his religious diversitarianism or antievolutionism, played a role in shaping the Eurasianist anticolonial rhetoric. In this chapter I explore the Eurasianist anticolonial rhetoric and suggest several interrelated contexts in which it can be understood. First, the Eurasianists, like many Russian émigrés, experienced a dramatic loss of status after the Russian Revolution. Their anticolonial rhetoric, paradoxically, proclaimed both Russia’s death as a European power and its rise as a leader of the worldwide uprising of the colonized against the colonizers, thus endowing the lost homeland with a world-historical mission. Second, the Eurasianists, who imagined themselves as eventual successors to the Bolsheviks in Soviet Russia, appropriated what they saw as the “positive” achievements of Communist rulers. One such positive achievement was the Bolsheviks’ outreach to the colonial world and their seeming ability to mobilize the national-liberation and anticolonial movements for the support of Soviet Russia itself. Third, the Eurasianists’ anticolonialism was a function of the their conservative rebellion against modern European civilization. Not unlike the “Asian masses” of late imperial modernists, the colonized of the world were supposed to rise against the “Godless” attempts to create a universal human civilization, which the Eurasian thinkers detected in modern Europe. The Eurasianists described this civilization and its universal and individualist order as an ugly abomination and the destruction of God-given differences. Finally, as the close reading of Eurasianist texts shows, their rebellion against colonialism was linked to the their overall criticism of evolutionism, which complicated Russia’s own position on the scale of civilization and, at the same time, drew civilizational boundaries within the national body of Russia-Eurasia. As I show below, the Eurasianist critique of colonialism,

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Eurocentrism, and evolutionism was rooted in prerevolutionary debates about the organization of the imperial space.

1. REMAPPING THE WORLD: WORLD WAR I, RUSSIAN REVOLUTION, AND RECONFIGURATIONS OF THE GLOBAL MAP

The Eurasianist strategic reorientation of Russia toward “Asia” and the “East” responded to multiple desires and anxieties of Russian intellectuals in the wake of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the Civil War. While some of these anxieties were bequeathed by the modernist efflorescence of Russia’s “Silver Age,” some were distinct outcomes of reconfigurations of the global map following the war and revolutions in Europe. In the center of Europe the multiethnic Habsburg Empire gave rise to the new nation-states; on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire there emerged a new, Kemalist Turkey, and a range of colonial mandates of France and Britain; in the Balkans, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes united in the Yugoslav state former subjects of the Habsburgs and the Ottomans; and in Soviet Russia, Lenin and Stalin presided over a historically unprecedented construction of new nations under the umbrella of Socialist ideology. The overseas colonial empires of West European states began to experience political mobilizations among the colonized. Inevitably, these dramatic changes opened the space for reimagining the postimperial future of Europe and the world. In some cases, European intellectuals began to revisit their own identities and compared their own positions to those of colonial peoples. Jared Poley has explored literary responses in Weimar Germany to the loss of colonial empire and Germany’s occupation by the French, and Peter Collar has done so for the German press. These anxieties of German intellectuals took the form of a fear that Germany would be colonized, often by the racialized figure of the Senegalese French occupation soldier.6 In the center of Europe, a former Habsburg aristocrat, Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, founded and led the pan-Europa movement, which envisioned the creation of a federated European continent, die vereinigten Staaten von Europa.7 Coudenhove-Kalergi’s movement, influential as it was in preparing the post–World War II emergence of European integration, presented a peculiar vision of the European federation. It excluded both Russia and Britain from the European project on the grounds that both countries were looking outward, toward their empires, rather than inward into Europe. At the same time, CoudenhoveKalergi included the African colonies of European states in his vision of the European federation. In this, he followed French and Belgian Socialists, who during World War I discussed “Eurafrica,” a concept that was supposed to help overcome

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divisions between European countries by uniting them in exploitation of the resources of the Black Continent.8 These radical changes on Europe’s and the globe’s map also drew conservative reactions. Thus, Spanish intellectual Ramiro de Maeztu offered a vision of Hispanidad, Spanishness, which united the peoples of Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula in one cultural and political world. De Maeztu was certain that this unity was not based on race or geography: “The Hispanidad is composed of people of white, black, Indian and Malayan races, and of their combinations, and it would be absurd to seek its characteristics by the methods of ethnography or by those of geography . . . The Hispanidad does not inhabit one land but many and diverse ones.”9 De Maeztu saw the unity of the world of Hispanidad as defined by the tradition of the monarchy and the Roman Catholic Church. His religious, antimodernist vision was akin to the reactions of the German nobles, who also envisioned a conservative future for Europe.10 Similarly to the Eurasianists, de Maeztu relativized the internal divisions and power relations within the Hispanic world and stressed the overall unity of that space. Perhaps the most influential visions of the post–World War I globe were articulated, respectively, by the U.S. president Woodrow Wilson and the founder of the first Communist state, Vladimir Lenin. Wilson’s vision of the war goals was based on American progressivism and a belief in “self-determination,” in essence, the notion that a homogeneous ethnic community should correspond to a political entity. To that end, Wilson supported the creation of independent states on the ruins of the European empires: Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Italy, and Turkey had to receive national boundaries based on ethnographic principles, whereas “colonial claims” had to be “readjusted” taking into consideration the interests of involved populations. Although the ideas articulated in Wilson’s Fourteen Points were never fully applied, they nevertheless became the guiding principle of the postwar treaties in establishing the international order.11 In a paradoxical way, the national principle was also supported by the architects of the Soviet Communist project. As Stalin argued in his 1913 article, nations were historical phenomena associated with the rise of capitalism.12 In 1913, the only developed Marxist conception of the organization of multiethnic, imperial spaces was elaborated by the Austrian Social-Democrats. The Austro-Marxists proposed a nonterritorial solution to the problem of ethnic diversity, in which a common political space would coexist with national-cultural autonomy. Stalin, on the other hand, insisted that nations were territorial units and hence a solution to the problem of diversity had to reflect this reality. As the Bolshevik Party grabbed power in the former Russian Empire and embarked on building Socialism, both Lenin and Stalin believed that the former oppressed peoples of the Russian Empire were to be given forms of national statehood to facilitate their transition to modernity and,

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ultimately, Socialism. These forms of national statehood were to help bring Socialism to the masses in the national tongues as well as alleviate any lingering mistrust by the former colonized peoples toward the policies of the “Russian” center. Under the influence of these theories, the former Russian Empire was reconfigured in the 1920s as a Socialist federation of nationally delimited republics (the extent of national independence in matters of culture was always limited by unquestionable loyalty to the Communist project in the USSR).13 The Communist experiment in grand “national engineering” often led to unexpected results. For instance, Stalin’s own deputy in the Commissariat for Nationalities, a Tatar, Mir-Said Sultan-Galiev, developed his own conception of decolonization following the Russian Revolution. According to Sultan-Galiev, certain formerly colonized peoples, like the Tatars, were not split by the class struggle into bourgeoisie and the laboring classes, as Lenin and Stalin maintained, but represented “proletarian nations” by virtue of their having been oppressed, as entire national groups, in imperial Russia. Sultan-Galiev’s ideas went against Lenin’s notion of the need to neutralize nationalism as a self-described “classless” ideology and reflected the rising tide of nationalisms among the “Eastern” peoples of the former Russian Empire.14 Similarly, Ukrainian Communists often viewed Soviet Bolshevism in national terms and articulated a Marxist anticolonial rhetoric directed at the “Russian” center.15 The activities of non-Communist intellectuals, such as the Bashkir leader Akhmet Zeki Togan Validov or the Tatar Yusuf Akcura (Akchurin) brought to the fore the prospect of pan-Turkism, a movement for the unification of Turkic-speaking peoples of the former Russian and Ottoman empires.16 Despite the fact that in many parts of the USSR national elites continued to articulate goals not entirely in line with the ideas of the Bolshevik leaders, in the course of the 1920s a veritable army of ethnographers, linguists, geographers, and orientologists set out to delimit the national boundaries of the Soviet republics, define the ethnographic contents of the new nations, and standardize national languages.17 Often, these scholars combined beliefs in evolutionism and European superiority with complex criticisms of European scholarship on the Eastern peoples, claiming a special status for Russian orientology and forecasting the ideas of postcolonial scholarship and Edward Said.18 The Bolsheviks’ outreach to the colonial world was not limited to the peoples of the former Russian Empire. In 1921, the Soviet government opened the Moscow University for the Toilers of the East, which also had branches in Baku, Tashkent, and Irkutsk. The school was initially designed to offer training to cadres from the “eastern” regions of the USSR, primarily from Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Siberia. In 1922, though, the school was transferred to the authority of the Comintern and began to offer two years of study to activists of the left-wing, anticolonial movements in the countries of Asia and Africa. Among its students

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and faculty, this school as well as the University for the Toilers of China (Sun Yatsen University, 1925–1930), had individuals such as the future Vietnamese and Chinese leaders, Ho Chi Minh, Deng Xiaoping, and Liu Shaoqi, and also future leaders and founders of the Communist parties of India, Iraq, and Syria. These changes in the conceptualizations of the global map following World War I and the Russian Revolution did not, however, mean the cessation of imperialist activities and propaganda. The British Empire Exposition in Wembley Park in London in 1924 and the French International Colonial Exposition in Bois de Vincennes in Paris in 1931 became the most auspicious displays of imperialism in interwar Europe. “Miniatured and sanitized,” each exposition “gave the viewer the immediate illusion of a whole which exceeded the sum of its parts, a worldwide enterprise of divergent peoples and ecologically different territories brought together under one flag for the declared benefit of colonizer and colonized alike.”19 As Raymond Betts has suggested, “if the European colonial attitudes toward the colonized varied, they usually ranged narrowly between undisguised contempt and romantic condescension.”20 Europeans generally believed that they were providing to the colonial world “cultural advancement and order, much vaunted ideals of Europe before World War I.”21

2. EUROPE IN QUESTION: INTERWAR KULTURPESSIMISMUS

The notions of European civilizational superiority were undoubtedly shattered by the experiences of the war itself. Nevertheless, the change in viewing the empire was one “of tone and temper rather than purpose.”22 There was now more focus on economic betterment in the colonies, a notion that was enshrined in the mandates system inaugurated by the Treaty of Versailles and the subsequent League of Nations. Still, the discourse of empire in France, Britain, the Netherlands, or Belgium continued to be that of “power, the arrangement of lands and peoples according to European purposes and principles.”23 In the interwar period, few voices challenged the notions of European cultural and technological superiority and the generally “beneficial” nature of the European “civilizing mission” in the colonial world. Still, as Michael Adas has demonstrated, such voices did exist. They represented “a minority of intellectuals and maverick politicians, who traced the calamities that the Europeans had inflicted upon themselves to flaws inherent in the science- and technology-obsessed civilization of the West, and . . . tended to a pessimistic prognosis of the colonial powers’ chances of maintaining their global domination.”24 This new Kulturpessimismus was focused on the ability of Europeans to maintain their power but did not question Europe’s right to colonize the world or

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criticize the notions of progress and scientific rationalism that underwrote the European and American colonial projects. Fears about the rising Asian rivals, such as Japan and China, were combined with a new and apprehensive attention to the mood in the colonies. Writers as diverse as William Inge, Paul Valéry, George Duhamel, and George Orwell all expressed concern about Europe’s ability to maintain its global power in the face of the mobilized—and now often Europeaneducated and -trained—colonial peoples.25 European intellectuals disappointed in the belief in progress often turned to “Eastern” traditions to find alternatives to Europe’s technology-centered notions of progress. Moeller van den Bruck in Germany had already presented the reading public with twenty-three volumes of Dostoevsky’s works, excited by the antiliberal and spiritual stances of the Russian writer.26 Hermann Hesse’s search for the truth in the “Oriental traditions” became very popular in Germany, along with works by Graf Hermann von Keyserling, a former Russian subject from the Baltics, whose explorations of theosophy and the Eastern philosophies responded well to the crisis of German mind following the war.27 Curiously, Keyserling had repeatedly attempted to establish cooperation with the Eurasianists, such as inviting Trubetskoi to give lectures at his institute, a proposal that the Eurasianists brushed aside because they viewed Keyserling’s activities as anti-Christian.28 Perhaps the best-known example of the cultural pessimism of the postwar years was Oswald Spengler’s fundamental work on the “decline of the west,” the first volume of which came out in 1918 and the second in 1922. While Spengler himself refused to be labeled a “pessimist,” his work was widely perceived as an indictment European civilization’s ability to maintain its pace of development and global standing.29 Probably influenced by the writings of the Russian antievolutionist Nikolai Iakovlevich Danilevskii, Spengler claimed to have challenged the traditional linear and Eurocentric view of history from the classical times to the modern period, replacing it with eight “high cultures,” each of which had a span of a thousand years. Spengler’s ideas were immediately and fondly interpreted by Russian intellectuals, who saw in his work a confirmation of nineteenth-century Russian criticisms of the materialist and individualist Western “civilization” as opposed to religious and spiritual “culture.” Even a thinker as liberal as Nikolai Berdiaev appreciated Spengler’s embrace of the “death of the Faustian civilization of Europe.”30 Trubetskoi maintained that Spengler’s work “had some ideological points in common with his own Europe and Mankind and considered inviting him to write a foreword to the German translation of the book.”31 The interwar Kulturpessimismus was akin to Eurasianism in that it saw the end of European civilization and doubted the ability of Europe to maintain its global reach, but significant differences remained. The Eurasianists did not see Europe as declining in power and thought of it as a dangerous and aggressive predator.

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They categorically rejected interwar European interest in Eastern religions and theosophy as anti-Christian. Whereas European cultural pessimists focused on the distinction between Zivilisation and Kultur (with the former concept referring to the leveling effect of modernity and stifling of spirituality), the Eurasianists did not see the distinction as particularly important.32 As Nikolai Trubetskoi argued in his Postscriptum to the German translation of Europe and Mankind, many of my critics believe that the “flaw” in my system is caused by a lack of distinction between the concepts of “civilization” and “culture,” which are used in my book as if interchangeably, and that my system would collapse if the distinction is properly maintained. However, this is no more than an illusion, which is resolved under more careful consideration. Anyone who cares to think through my points will understand that from the standpoint of the problems that I treat, the distinction is irrelevant and that the mutual replacement of these concepts in my thought is absolutely appropriate.33

From Trubetskoi’s point of view, this distinction was important when dealing with Europe’s internal problems. Even if he shared in the critique of the rise of “Zivilisation” in Europe, the universalist claims of European culture are what he found most disturbing.

3. AFTER THE DELUGE: RUSSIA AS A COLONY

Russian intellectuals reacted with dismay and horror to the collapse of their country in the war and Revolution. As many of them found themselves in exile, deprived of any political influence and often at odds with political leaders in the European countries where they now resided, their despair about Russia’s future was reflected in gloomy, pessimistic predictions. One Eurasianist leader, Petr Nikolaevich Savitskii, reported in a letter to his parents that he had met the famous Socialist Revolutionary and former commisar of the Provisional Government, Boris Savinkov. Savitskii asked Savinkov what he thought about Russia’s prospects in the international arena and whether Russia would be able to participate in international affairs in the future. Responding to Savitskii’s doubts, Savinkov coldly remarked, “Russia will of course participate in world affairs. After all, Abyssinia and India participate in these affairs, too.”34 When Savinkov was lured onto Soviet territory and arrested in 1924, he appealed to the Russian émigrés to accept the Soviet regime. In this appeal Savinkov insisted that foreigners saw Russia as a potential colony and equated the émigrés with “colonial slaves.”35 Many Russian exiles in Europe, former members of the country’s elites, watched

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helplessly as the victorious powers set up the new world order. In 1924, Anton Vladimirovich Kartashev, the chairman of the Russian National Committee in Paris, a liberal-conservative émigré organization with an ambition to represent the entire Russian emigration, wrote to the French president to protest against France’s acceptance of the incorporation of Bessarabia into Romania. Kartashev pointed out that this incorporation would not be recognized by the future government of Russia. Obviously, Kartashev’s appeal had no effect on French foreign policy.36 For Russian émigrés, many of whom belonged to the privileged strata of a great European power, Russia’s Revolution, its defeat in World War I, and the rise of the Bolsheviks meant a loss of subjectivity and historical agency of the nation, which they perceived as the ability to participate in European politics. In the autumn of 1920, H. G. Wells, renowned author of science fiction and a Fabian Socialist, visited Bolshevik Russia and published a book of his impressions, Russia in the Shadows. Although Wells made no secret of his animosity toward Marxism and candidly recorded what he believed to be the unprecedented collapse of modern civilization in Russia, he also argued that the Bolshevik government was the only force for order and civilized life in Russia. In a little-quoted passage, Wells expressed concern for the well-being of Western Europe, now deprived of Russian-supplied raw materials: The collapse of the civilised system in Russia into peasant barbarism means that Europe will be cut off for many years from the mineral wealth of Russia, and from any supply of raw products from this area, from its corn, flax, and the like. It is an open question whether the Western powers can get along without these supplies. Their cessation certainly means the general impoverishment of Western Europe.37

Although Wells called Lenin, whom he met during the trip, “the Kremlin dreamer,” he nevertheless suggested that the Bolshevik government at the present time was the “only one that can stave off the final collapse of Russia, and the only one capable of resurrecting Russia’s economic life, for which it will need the help of foreign powers.”38 In Wells’s view, the United States of America was uniquely poised to offer such assistance. Wells’s book quickly became known among Russian émigrés who were eager to get a glimpse of Soviet life, and in 1921 the Russian-Bulgarian Publishing House in Sofia put out a Russian translation.39 The Russian text of the book was introduced by Nikolai Trubetskoi. In Trubetskoi’s mind, Wells’s sympathy with the Bolsheviks could be explained not by his interest in Russia’s resurrection or by his Socialist views. Instead, according to Trubetskoi, Wells must be seen as a representative of the colonialist European world, which has little interest in political, cultural, or social life in Russia, as long as the latter yields raw materials and provides cheap labor.40

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In 1922, Trubetskoi took up the issue of Russia’s “colonial future” in the essay “The Russian Problem,” which he published in the second Eurasianist volume.41 Trubetskoi argued that the Russian émigrés who expected the restoration of Russia in its former glory were awaiting a miracle. It was common sense that “the establishment in Russia of more or less passable conditions of life, security of life, and material needs of the population is possible only under the conditions of foreign help and foreign intervention.”42 This foreign help, of course, could come only from the “great powers” that had fought in the world war. But these foreigners, he maintained, are representatives of those very “great powers” that had conducted the world war. By now, we know who they [truly] are. The war has washed away the ceruse and the rouge from the humanist Romano-Germanic civilization, and now the descendants of the ancient Gauls and Germans have shown the world their true face, the face of the predator greedily chattering its teeth. . . . This predator needs prey and food . . . and if you won’t give it, the beast will take it for itself, because it has technology, culture, and science at its service, and, most important, cannons and battleships.43

For these powers, Trubetskoi argued, the “Russian problem” was that, after the war, Russia remained “nobody’s” and these powers continued to look at Russia as a potential colony. They see Russia as a “territory, on which certain plants grow and certain mineral resources are located.”44 Its population can be of interest only as a labor force. Trubetskoi did not believe it was possible that Russia would be divided into separate colonial territories that would be included in the official list of colonial possessions: “Russia will be given a shadow, a semblance of independence, a certain government which is unconditionally submissive to foreigners’ power will be installed, and it will have the same rights as those formerly given to the governments of Bukhara, Siam, and Cambodia.”45 The destruction of the war and the Revolution, as well as the experiments of the Bolshevik government, made the historical transformation of Russia irreversible: “The page of history upon which it was written that ‘Russia is a great European power’ is over once and forever. From now on Russia has entered a new phase of development, the phase of the loss of independence. The future Russia is a colonial country, similar to India, Egypt, or Morocco.”46 Trubetskoi ascribed the new historical situation of Russia to the outcomes of war and revolution. As he suggested, “we, the Russians, are in a particular position. We were witnesses when what we used to call ‘Russian culture’ suddenly collapsed. Many of us were struck by the speed and ease with which it happened, and many began to think about the causes of these events.”47 Nevertheless, he

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saw Russia’s coloniality as profoundly embedded in its history. As the Eurasianists maintained, the reforms of Peter the Great imposed an alien cultural norm on Russia and generated ruptures between the upper and lower “stories” of Russian culture. Trubetskoi believed that “if prior to Peter the Great Russia and its culture could be considered the most talented and fruitful heiress of Byzantium, then after Peter the Great, having embarked on the path of Romano-Germanic orientation, it found itself tailing European culture, it found itself at the margins of civilization.”48 In 1925, Trubetskoi wrote an essay outlining the difference between the Eurasianists and the major political groupings in the Russian emigration.49 He argued that the divisions among the Russian educated classes in the post-Petrine period could not conceal the fact that all of them had accepted the European orientation of Russia and measured its development against Europe. The representatives of the “government reaction” wanted to see Russia as a great European power, even “at the expense of the complete enslavement of the people and society, at the expense of complete rejection of the enlightening and humanist traditions of European civilization.”50 On the other hand, the representatives of the “radical and progressive society” wanted to realize the “ideals of European civilization (e.g., democracy, in the opinion of some, or Socialism, in the opinion of others), even at the price of rejecting state might—the great power status of Russia.”51 Both of these ideas “were born out of the reforms of Peter the Great. Peter introduced them violently, without asking if the Russian people wanted them, and therefore both ideas remained organically alien to the Russian people.”52 As Trubetskoi put it, on a foundation that they did not build, these engineers installed the walls of the buildings and began debating what kind of roof might be best, but they had completely forgotten to explore how and for what the very foundation had been built, the foundation on which they conducted their debates . . . the foundation turned out to be alive, it began to move, the walls of the building cracked and fell, burying under the ruins some of the engineers, and the whole debate about the roof lost any meaning.53

Trubetskoi attacked the old nationalism of the imperial period as false and alien to the national culture. He believed that the “Russian spirit” of the old reactionaries “did not go beyond some false, fake popular phraseology, .  .  .  beyond stupid quasi-Russian lubok of the nineteenth century, through which one can see the uniform of the Prussian type.”54 Similarly, the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia (the Populists in particular), were nothing more than “a variant of Socialism.”55 They selected only some aspects of people’s original being and “proclaimed

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everything in the daily life and worldview of the people that did not fit in with their conception as ‘backward’ and a result of the ‘darkness of the popular masses,’ which were to be overcome with the help of schooling and propaganda.” The latter would provide the people with the features they were “lacking” but that were essential to “the advanced democracies of the West.”56 Trubetskoi concluded: Eurasianism rejects not just this or that political idea of the old factions but the cultural and historical context with which these ideas are related in the consciousness of old thinkers, such as the Left, the Right, and the Moderate, conservatives and revolutionaries and liberals, all of whom revolve in a sphere defined by the notions of post-Petrine Russia and European culture.57

The Eurasianists proclaimed loudly that Russia-Eurasia had “fallen out of the mainstream of European life.”58 The association of Russia-Eurasia with the colonial world was not without its pitfalls for the Eurasianist thinkers and their émigré audiences. Many Russian émigrés saw the non-Russian populations of Russia as allies of the Boslheviks during the Revolution and the Civil War. The White propaganda depicted the Bolsheviks assaulting Russian peasants and Orthodox priests with the help of the Chinese, the Latvians, and, of course, the Jews. Some émigrés, on the other hand, credited the Bolsheviks with the restoration of Russia’s great power status and its territories, and argued that the Bolsheviks should now be treated as the national government of Russia.59 Trubetskoi, on the other hand, did not take much solace in the hopes for a world Revolution under the Russian Bolshevik leadership. Echoing Mikhail Bakunin’s debate with Marx, Trubetskoi believed that the world revolution, should it succeed, had little chance of helping Russia to become independent. He saw Socialism and Communism as “products of the Romano-Germanic civilization. They presuppose certain conditions of a social, economic, political, and technological order. These conditions exist in all Romano-Germanic countries but are absent in “backward” countries, that is, countries that had not yet become completely identical to the Romano-Germanic nations.” According to Trubetskoi, should a worldwide Communist takeover occur, surely, those Romano-Germanic countries that have reached “the top of progress” will become the most perfect, ideal Communist states. They will continue to “set the tone” and to dominate. “Backward” Russia, which had lost its last energies in realizing Socialism under the most unwelcoming circumstances and in the absence of the necessary social and economic preconditions will be completely subjugated by these “advanced” Communist states and will be subjected to their most shameless exploitation.60

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For Trubetskoi, the world revolution was irrelevant in determining the colonial future of Russia: “Without this revolution, Russia would have been a colony of bourgeois Romano-Germanic nations, and after that revolution she will be a colony of Communist Europe.”61 Trubetskoi also rejected any attempts to link Eurasianism to Bolshevism just because “Eurasianism agrees with Bolshevism in the appeal for the liberation of the peoples of Asia and Africa enslaved by the colonial powers.”62 The Bolsheviks, he argued, only play on the nationalist mood of the Asian peoples and view these feelings only as a means to mount social revolution in Asia, the goal of which is not so much to abolish economic domination by the “civilized” powers as to install the Communist way of life accompanied by that particular “proletarian” culture that is essentially antinational and is built on the most negative aspects of European civilization, brought to the point of caricature.63

The Bolsheviks were in essence the epitome of the wrongs of European civilization: “under the pretense of helping Asian nationalisms, Bolshevism conceals the same standardizing and equalizing ‘civilizing’ Kulturträgershaft that displays itself in an even more radical form than one finds in the Romano-Germanic colonial imperialists.”64 The Bolsheviks’ goal is to “deprive countries of national particularities and to destroy all national foundations, and this is where they want to lead the peoples of Asia and Russia.”65

4. RUSSIA-EURASIA AND ITS WORLD-HISTORICAL MISSION: LEADING THE ANTICOLONIAL UPRISING

The Eurasianist thinkers agreed with the assumptions of the nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals, who, following Hegel, believed that each “historical” people should bring a specific and original contribution to the common history of humankind. In the nineteenth century, these ideas of Russian intellectuals focused primarily on the Christian spirituality that allegedly was lost in the West or on the intrinsically Socialist qualities of the Russian commune. It is not difficult to discern that they often transformed what was commonly believed to be a regrettable difference from Europe (the separation of the churches or “backwardness” of Russian institutions) into supposedly strong foundations of their nation’s messianic destiny. The Eurasianists followed in this tradition and interpreted the scale of the Russian Revolution and the unprecedented goals of the Bolsheviks as a sign of Russia’s messianic future. Since Bolshevism had a global mission, Eurasianism,

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with its aspiration to overcome Bolshevism, had to elaborate a global mission for the future Russia-Eurasia. As Ksenia Florovskaia put it, “Eurasianism sees itself as a planetary response to Communism.”66 For the Eurasianist thinkers, Russia, with its Revolution and unprecedented Communist experiment, was the pivotal center of the crisis into which the world had descended, and thus all hopes for the resolution of that crisis were connected to Russia’s own historical development. “Russia, in a certain sense, becomes the ideological center of the world,” wrote Petr Savitskii in the first Eurasianist publication.67 In the editorial introduction to their literary journal Versty, Petr Suvchinskii and D. Sviatopolk-Mirskii proclaimed that “Russian [developments] are currently more than just Russian; Russian [developments] are now a special and most acute reflection of modernity.”68 The Eurasianists saw their own ideas as part of the European rebellion against democracy and liberalism politically, and against humanism, positivism, and evolutionism intellectually. They were ready to assign Russia a messianic role in this process of pan-European rebellion against the perceived ills of the modern civilization. As Petr Suvchinskii argued, Russia had an opportunity to “religiously elevate and ideologically lead the ‘revolutionary reaction’ of the future, glimpses of which can be seen in different countries of Europe.”69 This messianism of the Eurasianists was also reflected in the anticolonial rhetoric of the movement. Although Trubetskoi decisively associated postrevolutionary Russia with the colonial world, he did not see its future in an entirely pessimistic way. His dismissal of the Bolsheviks as the ultimate carriers of “Romano-Germanic ideology” did not mean that Russia-Eurasia did not have a world-historical mission to accomplish. Trubetskoi argued that “Russia’s entrance into the family of colonial countries is taking place under relatively beneficial circumstances.”70 Echoing the ideas of Paul Valéry, George Duhamel, and Maurice Muret, Trubetskoi claimed that the prestige of Romano-Germans was in decline everywhere, in part due to the actions of the Europeans themselves, who “discredited each other through propaganda in each other’s colonies during the war” and “taught the natives military skills and made them fight against other RomanoGermans at the fronts, making them accustomed to victories over the ‘race of lords.’”71 The Europeans “bred among the natives a class of intellectuals with European education, and, along with that, showed these intellectuals the true face of European culture, one that could not but lead to disappointment.”72 As a result, Trubetskoi thought, one could see the “prospect of coming emancipation of the exploited humankind from the yoke of Romano-German predators.”73 This emancipation could be strengthened by the entrance into the milieu of colonial countries of Russia, “an enormous country that is accustomed to independence and to viewing Romano-German countries as more or less equal.”74 The catastrophe of Russia’s destruction in the war and revolution could turn

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into a new world-historical mission insofar as “Russia can immediately assume a place at the helm of the new worldwide movement” for the “emancipation of the colonial world from the Romano-German oppression.”75 In some ways, Trubetskoi’s ideas about Russia’s anticolonial messianism resembled Lenin’s take on the subject. In his Draft Theses on the National and Colonial Question published in June 1920, exactly at the time when Trubetskoi published his Europe and Mankind, the Bolshevik leader also envisioned Soviet Russia at the center of the anticolonial struggle: Political developments globally are of necessity concentrated on a single focus—the struggle of the world bourgeoisie against the Soviet Russian Republic, around which are inevitably grouped, on the one hand, the Soviet movements of the advanced workers in all countries, and, on the other, all the national liberation movements in the colonies and among the oppressed nationalities, who are learning from bitter experience that their only salvation lies in the Soviet system’s victory over world imperialism.76

Trubetskoi’s take on the role of the Bolsheviks in the colonial world was dialectical. On the one hand, the Bolsheviks “undoubtedly, by their experiments, brought Russia to the point of becoming a foreign colony.” Yet, they also “prepared it for a new historical role as the leader of the liberation of the colonial world from the Romano-Germanic yoke.”77 Although the Bolshevik propaganda in the non-European societies often resulted in a misunderstanding (with the colonial peoples interpreting the Communist internationalist propaganda as a nationalist appeal against the Europeans and their lackeys), “the business is done and, in the consciousness of a significant number of Asians, the Bolsheviks, and Russia along with them, are firmly associated with the ideas of national liberation, with the protest against the Romano-Germans and European civilization.”78 This view of Russia by the colonial peoples “prepares the future role of Russia not as a great European power but as an enormous colonial country leading its Asian sisters in the common struggle against the Romano-Germans and European civilization.”79 The “Asian orientation” should become the only option for a true Russian nationalist because “the victorious outcome of this great struggle is the only hope for the salvation of Russia itself.”80 But in Trubetskoi’s view this victorious outcome depended on the ability of the Russian intelligentsia “to pitilessly overthrow the idols of all these social ideals and prejudices, which were borrowed from the West and have so far guided the thinking of our intelligentsia.”81 The task of the political struggle was to “shift the center of gravity from the technical aspects of state building to the realm of creating a worldview and strengthening an authentic national culture.”82 The battleground

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was to be defined by the realm of culture and knowledge, where the supremacy of the Europeans had to be challenged.

5. “HYPNOSIS OF THE WORDS”: CRITIQUE OF EUROCENTRISM AND EVOLUTIONISM

The Eurasianist anticolonial rhetoric was based on N. S. Trubetskoi’s critique of Eurocentrism elaborated in a short but very belligerent book Europe and Mankind. The brochure was published in Sofia in 1920, through the Russian-Bulgarian Publishing House, the main outlet for early Eurasianist publications. Curiously, Trubetskoi chose to write his book without specific references to the Russian experience, focusing instead on a generalized critique of the Eurocentric worldview. As Trubetskoi put it in the introduction to his book, “my ideas concern not just the Russians but all other peoples who more or less accepted European culture without being Romano-German by origin.”83 In the introduction Trubetskoi explained that he had arrived at the ideas expressed in the book more than ten years earlier. He suggested that the delay in publication was due to the lack of understanding of his ideas that he encountered in personal conversations: “most people simply did not understand my thoughts. And they did not understand them not because I expressed them poorly but because for most European educated people these ideas were almost organically unacceptable as contradictory to some indestructible psychological foundations, upon which the European way of thinking rests.”84 Trubetskoi suggested that in recent years some fundamental shift in the thinking of educated classes had taken place. He attributed this shift to “the Great War, and especially to the ‘peace’ that followed it and into which we still have to put commas, which shattered the faith in ‘civilized humanity’ and opened the eyes of many.”85 He echoed this point in a letter to Roman Jakobson, explaining that a shift in the consciousness of the intelligentsia is about to arrive, it may well sweep off all the old directions and create new ones on entirely new foundations. All this is too indefinite at this point but undoubtedly “something is coming, something is being prepared,” and in these conditions it is necessary to arouse thought, to shake it out of slumber, to awaken it, to move it from a dead point, to tease it with unacceptable paradoxes, to stubbornly reveal what people attempt to hide from themselves.86

According to Trubetskoi, he had conceived these ideas in 1909–1910, and was planning to write a trilogy under the common title “Apology for Nationalism.” The first part, which was supposed to be dedicated to Copernicus, was to be titled

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“On Egocentrism.” The second part of the trilogy was supposed to be titled “On True and False Nationalism,” and was to be dedicated to the memory of Socrates; the third, and final part, was to focus on “The Russian Elements” and to be dedicated to the memory of Russian peasant rebels Stepan Razin and Emelian Pugachev.87 Trubetskoi explained that he dropped the dedication to Copernicus as pretentious and replaced the title with the “brighter” “Europe and Mankind.”88 Trubetskoi told Jakobson that “the purpose of the book is purely negative. . . . It is just to destroy certain idols, and, having placed the reader in front of the empty pedestals, make him think in search of solution.”89 This exchange with Jakobson clearly suggests that Trubetskoi’s ideas in Europe and Mankind were part of his general critique of Eurocentrism and of his neo-Slavophile critique of the imitative nature of the imperial period of Russian culture. The second and third part of the planned trilogy actually appeared in Eurasianist publications.90 Trubetskoi’s starting point in Europe and Mankind was the problem of cosmopolitanism. The author claimed that a European can take one of two possible positions with respect to the national question: a cosmopolitan or a chauvinistic one. For most Europeans these two positions appear to be opposites, fundamentally different from each other. However, a closer look at the problem reveals that they are not, in fact, in opposition to each other. A chauvinist “proceeds from an a priori notion that his own nation is the best in the world.”91 A cosmopolitan, on the other hand, “denies all distinctions between nationalities. If such distinctions exist, they need to be destroyed. Civilized humanity must be whole and must have a single and universal culture. Uncivilized peoples must accept that culture, and, having entered the family of civilized nations, must accompany them on the path of world progress.”92 In this representation of the two opposites they do indeed “appear as strikingly different from each other. In the first case one postulates the supremacy of one ethnographic and anthropological unit, whereas in the second it is postulated for the culture of supra-ethnographic humanity.”93 The trick, however, is in “what contents the European cosmopolitans ascribe to concepts such as ‘civilization’ and ‘civilized humankind.’ Under ‘civilization’ they understand the same culture that was created in the common work of the Roman and Germanic peoples of Europe, and under ‘civilized peoples’ they understand the same Romans and Germans, followed by other peoples who accepted European culture.”94 Since European cosmopolitans thus propagate the culture of a “specific ethnographic and anthropological unit, the same unit whose supremacy the chauvinist dreams of, there is no principal difference between chauvinism and cosmopolitanism.”95 From this point Trubetskoi concluded that “European culture is not the culture of humankind. It is a product of history of a very definite ethnic group. Germanic and Celtic tribes, influenced in varying degrees by the Roman culture and

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thoroughly intermixed, created a certain common way of life from the elements of their national and Roman culture.”96 Trubetskoi believed that “these common elements were so significant that the feeling of Romano-Germanic unity always lived subconsciously in these peoples.”97 When these peoples turned to the sources of their culture, “cosmopolitan ideas of antiquity became the foundation of education in Europe. Planted on the favorable soil of a subconscious feeling of RomanoGermanic unity, these foundations generated the theoretical principle of so-called European cosmopolitianism, which ought to openly be called “common RomanoGermanic chauvinism.”98 Trubetskoi believed that the psychological foundations of European cosmopolitanism were to be found in egocentrism, which again makes cosmopolitanism indistinguishable from chauvinism. “Few Europeans,” Trubetskoi argued, “can move beyond so-called cosmopolitanism, that is, Romano-Germanic chauvinism. We do not know any such Europeans whatsoever who would have accepted the cultures of so-called savages as equal to Romano-Germanic culture. It appears that such Europeans simply do not exist.”99 Since at the basis of cosmopolitanism, “this religion of common humankind, we find an anticultural principle of egocentrism . . . an earnest Romano-German ought to refute both chauvinism and cosmopolitanism.”100 How, then, should representatives of non–Romano-Germanic peoples relate to the notion of European cosmopolitan culture? Trubetskoi bemoaned the fact that “among the Slavs, Arabs, Turks, Indians, Chinese, and Japanese there are already a lot of cosmopolites.”101 “A Russian intelligent angrily rejects any thought that he could be a tool of German nationalist Junkers, whereas he is not scared by submission to the common Romano-Germanic chauvinists.”102 The solution to this paradox is to be found in the “hypnosis of words.”103 The Romano-Germans were so sure that “only they are human beings that they called themselves “humanity” and their own culture “the all-human civilization,” and their own chauvinism “cosmopolitanism.”104 Thus, the commitment of non–Romano-Germans to “European civilization” was the outcome of an “optical illusion.” They need to open their eyes and “change their attitude to the culture of their own peoples.”105 They can only decide on the value of Europeanization if they consider the following questions: Can it be objectively proved that the culture of Romano-Germans is more perfect than any other culture in existence now or in the past? Is it possible for a people to completely enjoin a culture created by another people without the anthropological mixing of both peoples? Is joining European culture (to the extent that it is possible) good or bad? If these questions are answered negatively, Europeanization needs to be refuted and new questions need to be posed: Is general Europeanization unavoidable? How can the unwelcome consequences of Europeanization be fought?106

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To respond to the first question, Trubetskoi addressed the problem of evolutionary development, which in his view was “permeated by egocentrism”: “Evolutionary ladder” and “stages of developement” are deeply egocentric concepts. The foundation of these concepts is the idea that the development of humankind proceeds along the path of so-called world progress, and this path is thought to be a certain straight line. Humankind was allegedly proceeding along this line, but certain peoples stopped at different points on the line, where they remain, whereas other peoples have gotten farther on the line. . . . Correspondingly, we can observe . . . all of human evolution, for at each particular point on the path already trodden by humanity, a particular people remains even now.  .  .  . Contemporary humanity, in its entirety, represents a kind of cinematogram of evolution, unfolded and cut into pieces, and cultures of various peoples differ from each other exactly as different phases of the common evolution, as different stages of the common path of world progress.107

For Trubetskoi, if one accepts this vision of human civilization, one is still unable to determine where the evolution begins and ends. One can only determine the beginning and the end in some irrational, suprascientific way. While remaining objective, we can only group cultures according to the presence of common or similar traits in these cultures. But in this case we do not get a “ladder” but a “rainbow,” and we still do not know the exact sequence of colors in that rainbow.108 The Europeans determined their own position at the top of evolutionary progress due to their own “egocentric” psychology, which suggested that Europe was the beginning and the end of evolutionary development: “Instead of remaining objective . . . the Europeans simply took themselves and their own culture to be the crown of human evolution.”109 However, as Trubetskoi maintained, “objectively speaking, this entire ‘ladder of progress’ just groups peoples and cultures according to how much they resemble Europeans.”110 The historical argument, which asserted that Europeans were also savages in the distant past, did not withstand criticism, Trubetskoi thought. The fact that the Europeans, as savages, were maximally different from their current stage of development, does not suggest that the universal evolutionary principles work. The concept of “savage culture” is negative and deprived of any meaningful content because today’s European scholars apply it to both their own distant path and to Eskimo and African cultures, and it is obvious that these cultures have nothing in common. To call them “savage” in this context is just to assert that they are maximally different from modern European civilization. And when European scholars argue that “savage” cultures are “stagnant,” they fall victim to an optical distortion. At any given moment in history, a culture different from the European

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civilization remains that way; and a European scholar, who is seeking out signs of commonality, will not find any dynamics in “savage” cultures because they will always remain maximally different from contemporary Europe. History in these cultures does not exist for Europeans, but for the representatives of these cultures it is a dynamic process full of meaningful events.111 This notion that the evolution of humankind was “objective” did not withstand the trial of logic: “The moment of judgment, which makes a ladder of stages of perfection from this classficiation is not objective and is founded on purely subjective egocentric psychology.”112 Similarly, Trubetskoi refuted the argument that compared representatives of “backward” cultures to European children. In his opinion, this comparison was also based on a misunderstanding. According to Trubetskoi, each person’s psyche consists of hereditary and acquired features. Since we have only hereditary features in common with peoples who are culturally distant from us, we recognize only these during an encounter, whereas the acquired features, as shaped by a foreign culture, remain invisible to us. After all, Trubetskoi argued, the so-called savages also often view Europeans as “child-like.”113 The idea of the “elementary nature of the savage’s psyche is based on an optical illusion.”114 Trubetskoi considered another popular argument in favor of the supremacy of European civilization— the often claimed European superiority in military matters and Europe’s victories over the “savages.” He thought that the rudeness and naiveté of this argument ought to be clear to every objectively thinking person. This argument clearly shows the extent to which the veneration of brute force that constitutes an essential feature of the national character of those tribes that created European civilization is still alive in the consciousness of every descendant of ancient Gauls and Germans. Gallic “vae victis!” and Germanic vandalism systematized and deepened by the traditions of Roman soldiery appear here in all their clarity, even if covered by the masque of scientific objectivity.115

Even European scholarship has to admit that historically often the “less developed” nomads emerged victorious over the “civilized” settled populations. Hence, “no positive conclusion can be derived from the mere fact of European victory over the savages.”116 Trubetskoi also subjected to criticism popular arguments in favor of Europe’s supremacy. Europeans often argue that their intellectual advantage over the “savages” is evident because a European’s intellectual “baggage” is vaster. Trubetskoi suggested that “a good savage—who possesses all the qualities that his tribe values in a person—keeps in his mind an enormous storage of various kinds of knowledge.”117 This knowledge is not chaotic, it is systematized, but it is also fundamentally different from the knowledge a European could perceive as valuable. Hence,

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“the intellectual baggage of the savage and the European ought to be recognized as incomparable, and the issue regarding the supremacy of one or the other is unsolvable.”118 Similarly, Trubetskoi refuted the notion that European culture is allegedly more complex than non-European cultures. The “savages” follow codes of behavior common to the whole collective, whereas in Europe only the upper classes have “good manners.” The “savages” often have more complex ways of decorating their bodies than Europeans. Similarly, whereas in Europe the monogamous family officially exists under the protection of law, it is accompanied by the most unbound sexual liberty, theoretically condemned by state and society but tolerated in practice. Compare this to the detailed and thought-through institution of the group marriage of Australian Aborigines, where sexual life is placed in the strictest framework and, whereas individual marriage is absent, all measures are taken to care for the children and to prevent incest.119

All historical arguments that Europeans put forward to support their alleged “supremacy” are based on logical inconsistencies: What is considered the latest outcry of civilization in Europe, or the top of progress not yet achieved, could be encountered among the savages but is then declared to be a feature of extreme backwardness. Futurist paintings drawn by Europeans are treated as products of the most refined aesthetic taste, but similar products by “savages” are viewed as naive attempts, the first dawn of primordial art. Socialism, communism, anarchism, are all “bright ideals of the coming and highest progress” but only when they are proselytized by a modern European. When these “ideals” turn out to have been realized in the everyday life of “savages,” they are immediately described as revelations of primeval wilderness.120

Trubetskoi concluded that there can be no “objective proofs of European supremacy over the savages, and there can be none simply because when comparing different cultures Europeans know only one measure: what looks like ours is better and more perfect than what differs from ours.”121 Hence, the “ladder of civilization  .  .  . needs to be destroyed. If its top is not higher than its foundation, then obviously it is also not higher than the stages between the top and the foundation.”122 For Trubetskoi, the power of the notion of European supremacy rested on European control of modern disciplinary knowledge, which was infused with “egocentric” European chauvinism. In a startling passage that linked European imperialism and colonialism with knowledge, Trubetskoi demanded that

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the moment of evaluative judgment be purged once and forever from the ethnography and history of culture, as well as from all evolutionary disciplines in general, for evaluative judgment is always based on egocentrism. There are no superior and inferior [cultures]. There are only similar and different ones. To declare that those similar to ours are superior and those that differ from ours are inferior is arbitrary, nonscholarly, naive, and, finally, simply unintelligent. European evolutionary disciplines, in particular ethnography, anthropology, and the history of culture can become real scientific disciplines only when they have overcome this deeply rooted superstition and expunged its consequences from their very methods and conclusions. Until this is done, they remain in the best case a means of fooling people and justifying in the eyes of the Romano-Germans and their accomplices the imperialist colonial policies and the vandalistic Kulturträgershaft of the great powers of Europe and America.123

Echoing a century-long concern of Russian intellectuals with the imitative nature of their own culture, Trubetskoi also considered the possibility for one people to accept the culture of another. To analyze this problem, he turned to the ideas of the French sociologist Gabriel de Tarde. Tarde’s sociological works focused on the problem of the diffusion of cultural values. Tarde argued that the entire process of the production of culture can be broken down into several fundamental processes. First, a new cultural value is created by combining the existing elements with some innovation in what Tarde called “invention.” New “inventions” are then spread through the process of “propagation,” entering into competition with the existing cultural norms and values in what Tarde described as duel logique. Since both “invention” and “propagation” involve cultural norms that already exist, Tarde proposed that the overall framework for understanding cultural change should be described through the notion of “laws of imitation.”124 Trubetskoi described Tarde as “an outstanding European sociologist of the past century—unfortunately, comparatively little known and wrongly evaluated in Europe.”125 Trubetskoi thought that Tarde “came closer to the truth than most in his general views of the nature of social processes and methods of sociology.”126 Still, “his passion for generalizations and his striving  .  .  . to give a view of the entire evolution of ‘humankind’ ruined this erudite scholar.”127 Trubetskoi believed that the roots of Tarde’s misconceptions were in “European egocentric prejudices,” which made it impossible for Tarde to understand the “equal value and qualitative incomparability” of peoples and cultures. Consequently, Tarde could not “think of ‘humanity’ other than a single whole, the separate parts of which are located on the evolutionary ladder.”128 Given that both tradition and heritage play a role in the process of imitation, Trubetskoi argued that the culture of the people imitating the culture of another

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will never be equal to the culture that is being imitated. Whereas new cultural values are propagated by school, the army, factories, and other such institutions, the family will remain the source of cultural values inherent in the people attempting imitation. As a result, the overall “cultural direction” of the people attempting the imitation will be a mixture and never a complete identity with the culture being imitated. The distinction between “assimilation” (priobshchenie) and “mixture” (smeshenie) was a crucial one for Trubetskoi. Whereas he was determined to argue against Europeanization as a harmful process, he was not opposed to a mixture or “synthesis” of cultures. After all, the Eurasianist project attempted to endow the geographical space of Eurasia with a cultural content of cultural and ethnographic mix, and the notion of any cultural mix as harmful would have undermined that project. As an example, Trubetskoi turned to the legacy of the Roman Empire and argued that the culture of Romanized provinces had always been mixed. After all, even the socalled Roman culture itself, which was more or less implanted in all the provinces of the empire was a motley mix of heterogeneous elements of the most diverse cultures of the Greco-Roman world. As a result, we do not have an assimilation of different peoples by the culture created by one people, instead we have eclecticism, a synthesis of several cultures.129

For Trubetskoi, complete Europeanization was undoubtedly harmful in that it led to the loss of subjectivity of Europeanized peoples. Whereas “the RomanoGerman in the realm of culture accepts as valuable only what makes an element of his own contemporary culture . . . A Europeanized people . . . does not assume the place of a European but evaluates itself and its own culture from the point of view of Romano-Germans.”130 As a result, Europeanized peoples are placed at a disadvantage in the process of production of cultural values: they have “to be guided not by their own but by an alien, Romano-Germanic national psychology, and they must, without a blink, accept all that is created and considered valuable by true Romano-Germans.”131 This phenomenon makes “the process of absorption and propagation of imported cultural values very difficult.”132 Europeanization, according to Trubetskoi, is also harmful because it tends to generate ruptures in the national body. In those peoples who had accepted an alien culture “each generation lives by its own separate culture, and the difference between ‘fathers and sons’ will always be stronger here than in those peoples that have their own national culture.”133 Due to different paces of Europeanization by different social groups, “at any given moment in time different parts of the Europeanized people, its classes, estates, and professions would represent different

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stages of absorption of the Romano-Germanic culture, different types of combinations in different proportions of the elements of the national and the foreign cultures.”134 In a clear reference to the notion of rupture in Russian imperial society between the Europeanized elites and the Eurasian masses, Trubetskoi thought that “all these different classes do not represent parts of one national body but are separate cultural units, as if separate peoples with their own traditions and cultures, customs, concepts, and languages.”135 These differences caused by Europeanization “generate the spread of class struggle and complicate transition from one class to another.”136 These negative aspects of Europeanization translated into the perennial backwardness of a Europeanized people. Put at a disadvantage and forced into competitive comparison with Romano-Germans, Europeanized peoples have to compete while dealing with ruptures in the national body and difficulties in generating authentic cultural output. As Trubetskoi argued, the degree of Europeanization did not matter: any people entering a relationship with the Romano-Germanic culture of Europe “enters into the sphere of necessary cultural exchange with Romano-Germans, which makes its ‘backwardness’ a law of destiny.”137 A Europeanized people thus becomes an object of what Trubetskoi termed “jumping evolution.” Always falling behind the Romano-Germans and becoming more and more backward in comparison to them, “a Europeanized people from time to time makes an attempt to catch up, making more or less protracted leaps.” According to Trubetskoi, a Europeanizing people has to jump over an entire row of historical stages and to create immediately, “ex abrupto, what in Romano-Germanic culture was an outcome of consequent historical changes.”138 Although these “historical leaps give the temporary illusion of achieving a ‘common European level of civilization,’  .  .  . this jumping evolution spends national energies even more, whereas the people’s energies are overtaxed by the very fact of Europeanization.”139 Trubetskoi concluded that the “overall consequences of Europeanization are so heavy and terrible that it has to be considered evil.”140 But if European cosmopolitan culture was a deception and Europeanization was not the spread of a universal civilization but a traumatic encounter with a predatory colonialist power, how could a conscious representative of a non-European people counter it? Trubetskoi asked, “What if this fight is impossible and universal Europeanization is a necessary worldwide law?”141 He believed that a general uprising by the colonized peoples against the Romano-Germans was not very likely. Instead, Trubetskoi suggested that non-Europeans should free themselves from the hypnosis that makes them believe in the universal nature of European cultural norms. He recognized, “the solution that I offer has no historical precedents, but this does not make it impossible.”142 The solution was to be found in the realm of culture and “psychology of the intelligentsia of Europeanized peoples.”143

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Members of this intelligentsia “used to be agents of the Romano-Germans. Having recognized that Europeanization is absolute evil and cosmopolitanism is a barefaced deception, they will stop helping the Romano-Germans and the triumphal spread of ‘civilization’ would stop.”144 Trubetskoi envisioned a global, totalizing cultural struggle, in which the intelligentsias of non-European peoples would act together and in alliance: We should not be distracted from the core problem even for a moment. We should not be distracted by particularist nationalisms and partial solutions such as panSlavism and other “pan-isms.” These particularities only cloud the essence of the problem. We need to always firmly remember that the juxtaposition of Slavs and Germans or Turanians and Aryans will not provide a solution to the problem, and that there is just one real opposition: the Romano-Germans versus the other peoples of the world, Europe versus Mankind.145

6. THE DEBATE ACROSS TIME: EURASIANISM AS A CRITIQUE OF RUSSIAN EVOLUTIONISM

Trubetskoi’s rebellion against evolutionism relied on a long tradition of Russian reception of evolutionary ideas. Although most Russian scholars in biological fields accepted Charles Darwin’s conception and sought to add new experimental data or theoretical refinements to it, a few powerful voices challenged Darwin’s conception of the accidental nature of evolutionary change.146 One of Europe’s greatest pre-Darwinist biologists and a towering figure of the Russian scientific establishment of the nineteenth century, Karl von Baer accepted the main postulates of evolutionary theory but passionately defended the purposeful and teleological nature of biological change. Unlike Darwin, who perceived the world from a mechanistic point of view, von Baer understood nature from the vantage point of Naturphilosophie and the metaphysical principles of classical German philosophy. Following in von Baer’s footsteps, Nikolai Iakovlevich Danilevskii (who had served as von Baer’s scholarly aide-de-camp during the Astrakhan expedition of 1853–1857) subjected Darwin’s work to a critical reading and argued in favor of a teleological and “regular” understanding of evolutionary change.147 Perhaps more significantly, Danilevskii married this teleological critique of Darwin’s theories with a fervent assault on the perceived hierarchy in the production of knowledge and insisted that Russian scholarship should cease its uncritical acceptance of European ideas. Danilevskii’s anti-Darwinism was also combined with a panSlavic ideological project and a diversitarian view of history.

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The Russian reception of evolutionism was not limited to theoretical debates in the biological sciences. In sociology, evolutionist ideas found their most dedicated proponent in the figure of Maksim Maksimovich Kovalevskii, a self-proclaimed student of Sir Henry Sumner Maine.148 Kovalevskii believed in the possibility of using a comparative method in order to uncover universal evolutionary processes in human societies. Not unlike Sir Henry Sumner Maine, who studied the institutions of colonial India to better understand Europe’s own past and to establish cultural and civilizational hierarchies, Kovalevskii explored the origins of family and property using the material of medieval European and contemporary Russian societies.149 Importantly, Kovalevskii emerged as one of Russia’s leading scholars of ethnic diversity. He argued that it was the task of Russian ethnographic scholarship, privileged with access to empire’s extraordinary diversity, to supply European scholarship with data and thus participate in the worldwide “mapping of mankind.”150 His massive study of legal traditions in the Caucasus was an attempt to process such data on the basis of evolutionary theory.151 Although Kovalevskii spent many years of his life in Europe and often wrote in French, his influence in late imperial Russian scholarship should not be underestimated. Most of his works were immediately published in Russian translation and he corresponded with Russian scholars and reviewed their works. Perhaps more important, in the atmosphere of political change and mobilization during the Russian Revolution of 1905, Kovalevskii, who was also an important player in liberal politics, defended a particular vision of how Russian imperial diversity had to be structured. The demands of progress and liberal reform, in his view, required the separation of the legal order of the Russian Empire into “the metropolitan sphere of political freedom and equality versus the sphere of a particularistic colonial legal order.”152 Such separation was warranted by the alleged backwardness of “inorodtsy,” whose level of cultural development was below what is required by modern political institutions: “let us imagine a Caucasian mountaineer who discusses some articles of the Criminal Code while being convinced that blood should be wiped away only by blood or compensated with cows and sheep.”153 As Marina Mogilner has demonstrated, such visions of the imperial space were challenged even by liberal Russian anthropologists, who refused to ascribe political hierarchies to cultural differences.154 Kovalevskii’s role in shaping the Eurasianist discourse of antievoluntionism appears to have been more direct, and we can count him as an “antisource” in the emergence of the Eurasianist critique of evolutionism, Eurocentrism, and Europe’s cultural colonialism. Some of the evidence for this role is indirect, suggesting the possibility that Trubetskoi was aware of Kovalevskii’s work and reacted to it. One such instance is Trubetskoi’s interest in the work of Gabriele de Tarde, whose Russian translations appeared in the early 1900s with introductions by

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Kovalevskii. Both in Europe and Mankind and in correspondence with Roman Jakobson, Trubetskoi insisted that he had conceived of the ideas expressed in Europe and Mankind “a decade ago.” In the early 1910s, Trubetskoi spent summers at the estate of Academician Vsevolod Fedorovich Miller in the Caucasus, where he studied Ossetian language and folklore. Miller was Kovalevskii’s collaborator on the Caucasian expedition of 1883 and we can presume that Kovalevskii’s evolutionary views were discussed by Miller and Trubetskoi. But the conclusive evidence of Trubetskoi’s a posteriori reaction to Kovalevskii’s evolutionism comes from an archive. In 1927, Trubetskoi sent Petr Savitskii his comments on Nikolai Nikolaevich Alekseev’s brochure “On the Paths Toward Future Russia (Soviet Order and Its Political Opportunities).” In the comments, Trubetskoi criticized Alekseev’s celebration of the unification of criminal law in the USSR: “It was exactly in the North Caucasus that they used to refer to criminal law to substantiate the need for regional differentiation of legislation: the mountaineers’ notions of some crimes are so different from the Russian criminal code that the decisions of the Russian courts always appeared unjust to them.” Trubetskoi stressed the Eurasianists’ difference from Soviet evolutionism and cautioned Alekseev against falling into a heresy: “If contemporary Soviet government argues for the unification of criminal law, this is in significant measure because regional differences of legal consciousness mostly rest on so-called backwardness (that is to say on the difference of native psychology from the Romano-German one) or on ‘religious prejudices.’ For us, of course, this cannot be a valid argument.”155 In this context, Trubetskoi’s diversitarian critique of universalism and evolutionism appears to have been at least in part rooted in a rejection of the “internal evolutionism” of Kovalevskii and other liberal thinkers who defended the separation of the Russian Empire into a civilized core “metropole” and a “backward” ethnic periphery. Whereas the Eurasianist project was to defend the unity of Russia-Eurasia and endow it with ethnographic, cultural, and geographical content, “internal evolutionism” threatened to rupture the national body of Russia-Eurasia. The Eurasianist thinkers took their critique of late imperial developments and reformulated them in the conditions of postrevolutionary emigration, not unlike the way they carried their rejection of the beginnings of Russia’s modern bourgeois culture on the eve of the Revolution into the illiberal juncture of interwar exile.

7. THE WORLD AS A RAINBOW: RELIGIOUS DIVERSITARIANISM AND REBELLION AGAINST UNIVERSALISM

Trubetskoi’s unusually early critique of European cultural colonialism and Eurocentrism was largely forgotten for most of the twentieth century and was only

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rediscovered by the century’s end when US Slavic studies entered into a dialogue with postcolonial studies.156 Contemporary responses were not very welcoming: most critics of Trubetskoi’s ideas reiterated standard notions of the supremacy of European civilization in technology and culture. The book did not generate much international response, either, even though it was actually translated, perhaps not surprisingly, into German and Japanese. The German translation was accomplished by Sergei Jakobson, the great linguist’s brother, with assistance from the German economist Friedrich Schlömer. The book was published by the Drei Masken Verlag, with an introduction by Otto Hoetzsch, a leading German expert in Osteuropaforschung and Sergei Jakobson’s dissertation adviser.157 In another development, a Japanese specialist in Russian studies, who was a former employee of the state railroad company in Manchuria and one of the founders of Japanese Soviet studies, Shimano Saburo, translated Europe and Mankind into Japanese in 1926 and, apparently, used it and other Eurasianist ideas to propagate his vision of pan-Asianism.158 The Eurasianists’ attempts to organize translations of Europe and Mankind into Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, Turkish, and other languages failed, though the attempt itself was telling.159 In the second half of the twentieth century two main attempts were made to interpret Europe and Mankind. In a curious development reflective of Roman Jakobson’s incessant concern with hierarchies in the production of knowledge, Trubetskoi’s main interlocutor in linguistics and tireless propagator of his legacy sponsored an Italian translation of Europe and Mankind. In the process, he prepared his own introduction to the text, in which he argued, somewhat cumbersomely, that the iconoclastic nature of Trubetskoi’s critique of Eurocentrism and cultural colonialism was linked to his search for innovation in humanities: The negative position of this platform (which was further developed by the author’s ideology) essentially corresponds to the pathos of fundamental revision of the foundations of traditional linguistics, a revision that Trubetskoi had feverishly elaborated since 1917 despite all external troubles.160

The second, also sympathetic attempt to analyze Europe and Mankind was undertaken by the Russian-American historian Nicholas Riasanovsky, who wrote two essays on Eurasianism in the 1960s.161 Riasanovsky considered Trubetskoi’s ideas “an early and extreme anticolonial pronunciamento by a European intellectual” and described them as a “striking example of a tract for the times and an outstanding Russian contribution to the debate on the colonial problem.”162 Riasanovsky argued that Europe and Mankind had three meanings. One explicit meaning was genuine sympathy for the plight of colonial peoples and outrage with the cultural colonialism of Europe. The other two, more implicit, reasons

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had to do with the Eurasianist movement, in the context of which Europe and Mankind had to be read. Since the Eurasianists were Russian nationalists and were concerned with the preservation of the great Russian state, Trubetskoi’s views constituted a tour de force: if Russia-Eurasia was a colonial entity, it was spared the anti-imperial and anticolonial movements of other European empires. Finally, the third implicit meaning had to do with the Asian interest of late imperial Russian modernism. Riasanovsky argued, entirely unconvincingly, that Europe and Mankind transmutated the fears of the “yellow peril” into an anticolonialist stance.163 It is curious that Riasanovsky, who knew the Eurasianist literature well, avoided a discussion of Trubetskoi’s religious views and their reflection in Europe and Mankind. Trubetskoi’s way of thinking, his most fundamental premise, was based on what Arthur Lovejoy called “diversitarianism”: an assertion of the absolute necessity of diversity of human aesthetic experience.164 Difference for Trubetskoi was the very condition for the emergence of meaning, and, therefore, the condition for the spiritual life of human beings. It is important to note that the concept of difference played an important role in his linguistic theories. In Trubetskoi’s phonology, a phoneme becomes meaningful through the realization of difference: phoneme, the unit of phonological analysis, is determined by a series of acoustic oppositions that provide it with meaning.165 Without the opposition, the phoneme is just a mechanical sound. This diversitarianism comes from the writings of one of Russia’s most remarkable conservative philosophers of the late nineteenth century, Konstantin Leont’ev.166 Leont’ev was called the “Russian Nietzsche,” “a colorful and complex personality,” for whom beauty—the most fundamental aspect of his worldview— “revealed itself in clear-cut distinction, peculiarity, individuality, specific coloring.”167 According to Vladimir Solov’ev’s precise description, what Leont’ev primarily considered valuable and worth preserving (1) the truly mystic, strictly ecclesiastic and monastic Christianity of the Byzantine and partly Roman type; (2) strong and condensed monarchical statehood; and (3) the beauty of life in its original national forms. All this had to be protected against one common enemy: the leveling bourgeois progress that is victorious in the newest European history. Enmity toward this progress constituted the major pathos of Leont’ev’s writings.168

In his rebellion against what he saw as the standardizing influence of modern civilization and in his celebration of “flourishing diversity,” Leont’ev was not only a proponent of “freezing Russia” according to Pobedonostsev’s ultraconservative recipe but also a harsh critic of “tribal” nationalism, which he condemned, not unlike Trubetskoi, as a mask for the same leveling force of European modernity,

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or, as Andrzej Walicki brilliantly put it, “a specific metamorphosis of the universal process of disintegration.”169 Trubetskoi, too, was appalled by nationalism, especially by the nationalism of the newly independent states in Eastern Europe, and he blamed it for unscrupulously trying to copy the foreign models of Europe.170 The similarities between Trubetskoi and Leont’ev are striking even in a geographic respect: Leont’ev served as a diplomat in the Ottoman Empire (where he fell in love with the Turks and came to detest the Slavs); in exile, Trubetskoi had stayed first in Constantinople and later in Sofia, and he shared Leont’ev’s feelings for the Slavs, whom he criticized for “mindlessly” copying modern national forms from Europe. Leont’ev was the first to proclaim a special relationship between the Turkic peoples and the Russians, thus breaking the pan-Slavic image of genetic unity. The Eurasianists were followers of Leont’ev in that respect, insisting that in the course of Eurasian history Turkic and Slavic peoples had developed common features. Leont’ev envisioned a union between “the Orient” and Russia directed against the threat of Germany on Russia’s western borderlands.171 However, one major difference between Leont’ev and the Eurasianists has to be mentioned: whereas Leont’ev saw his “Byzantinism” (a cultural type influenced first of all by the lasting influence of Orthodox Christianity and the cultural and political traditions of the Byzantine Empire) primarily as an aesthetic form, an image of a long gone past, the Eurasianists attempted to create an all-embracing ideology for the autarkic space of the Russian Empire and to apply it to the mass politics of their own day.172 No less important as a source for Trubetskoi’s ideas was Nikolai Iakovlevich Danilevskii, one of the first Russian thinkers to link the critical reception of evolutionism to the problem of Russia’s relationship to Europe. Danilevskii was also possibly the first Russian thinker to use the term “Romano-Germanic” to describe Western Europe. He was critical of the ability of non-European cultures to import European norms without harmful consequences and insisted on the historical process as localized in “historical and cultural types.” Danilevskii also rejected Eurocentric notions of progress and asserted the incomparability of historical developments of different “cultural and historical types.” Regardless of how close he was in these ideas to Trubetskoi, though, he believed in the struggle between the Germanic and the Slavic worlds in Europe. Unlike Trubetskoi, who embraced Russia’s alleged coloniality, Danilevskii envisioned Russia as a powerful European state leading the Slavs of Europe.173 Unlike Danilevskii, Trubetskoi was not especially concerned with Slavdom. He was passionately committed to Christianity in general and the Orthodox Church in particular. He, therefore, had to reconcile his insistence on the “flourishing plurality of cultures” with the universalist claims of the Christian Church. In 1922, when the Eurasianists commissioned a “linguistic article” from Trubetskoi, he

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responded to Petr Suvchinskii with “a plan for a home-bred theological substantiation of the idea of nationally delimited cultures.” He described his theses in the following manner: International culture eo ipso is godless and leads only to the construction of the tower of Babel; the plurality of languages (and cultures) is established by God in order to prevent a new tower of Babel; any attempt to break this law established by God is godless; true cultural values can be created only by a nationally delimited culture; Christianity is above cultures and can sanctify any national culture by transforming it without decreasing its originality; as soon as the spirit of internationalism begins to spread in Christianity, it ceases to be true.174

When the article materialized, it was a curious combination of these ideas about the godless nature of cosmopolitan universal culture with a discussion of the plurality of languages. In his text, Trubetskoi argued that the Scriptures describe two punishments for the collective sins of humanity. The first was punishment by the need to labor in response to Adam’s primordial sin, and the second was the mix of languages as a penalty for the human attempt to build the Tower of Babel. Trubetskoi saw the mixture of languages as “a natural law against which humanity is helpless.”175 For Trubetskoi, “the dialectic fragmentation of language and culture is so organically connected to the very essence of the social organism that an attempt to destroy the plurality of national forms would bring about cultural impoverishment and death.”176 Trubetskoi argued that the Scriptures drew an image of a linguistically homogeneous humanity and “it turns out that this united all-human culture deprived of any individual, national cultural feature is very one-sided.”177 While the very story of the attempt to build the tower suggests highly developed material skills and technology, it is spiritually impoverished and permeated by pride and self-congratulation. As a result, it was God himself who established “the law of fragmentation” by mixing the languages to put a limit to humanity’s sacrilegious self-adulation. For Trubetskoi, the inner connection between materialist and technological “tower-building” and universal human culture was evident. In any cultural organism, individual characteristics are neutralized to generate an acceptable common norm. The larger the cultural unit, the more neutral its “median” characteristics. Such a universalizing culture must be built on psychological traits common to all people, which reduces the cultural baggage of a universal culture to rationalism, logic, and material interests. Logic and material technology that are “not ennobled by spiritual depth ‘dry up’ the human being, complicate his true self-cognition, and strengthen pride.”178 Consequently, such a universal

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human culture becomes “godless.”179 Trubetskoi saw in this process “the main sin of contemporary European civilization: It attempts to bring all individual national differences to one level, to introduce everywhere the same forms of everyday life, state and society, and concepts.”180 The leveling of cultural differences cannot lead to the brotherhood of peoples or universal humanity because it can only be based on rationalism and material interest. As Trubetskoi argued, “the brotherhood of peoples bought at the price of spiritual facelessness of all peoples is a revolting fake,” which “abolishes or degrades to secondary place the spiritual part of culture and leads to moral savagery and the development of personal egoisms.”181 To illustrate his argument about the God-given plurality of cultures, Trubetskoi turned to the linguistic diversity of humanity. As he suggested, “the distribution and mutual relations of cultures are based on the same principle as the relations of languages,” while “the action of the law of fragmentation is at its clearest in the realm of language.”182 In this realm, the law of fragmentation secures the persistence of different genetically united dialects and tongues—for example, descending from a “protolanguage.” Besides the genetic grouping, languages that are not related in terms of descent but have shared territory or history can be combined in “language unions.”183 Taking into account these two types of grouping, the genetic and the acquired, “one can say that all the languages of the globe represent an uninterrupted network of chains flowing into each other, as if in a rainbow.”184 Despite all the linguistic diversity, this network secures a certain degree of wholeness of the linguistic realm, albeit “only an abstractly intelligible one.”185 The law of fragmentation in the realm of language does not lead to dispersal but rather “to a well-composed, harmonious system, in which every part, even the smallest one, preserves its bright and unique individuality, while the unity of the whole is achieved not by a defacing of the parts but by the very uninterrupted nature of the rainbow-like linguistic network itself.”186 Since cultures and languages are both governed by “the law of fragmentation,” in the realm of cultures one sees the same “rainbow network, whole and harmonious as a result of its uninterrupted nature and at the same time infinitely diverse as a result of its differentiated nature.”187 In this vision, in a dialectical way, cultural diversity coexisted with the wholeness of the world’s “system . . . the foundation of the unity of the whole is in the coexistence of these bright, individual cultural and historical units.”188 For Trubetskoi, the law of fragmentation and plurality of languages and cultures were phenomena established by God: “As is everything natural, flowing from the God-given laws of life and development, this picture is majestic in its unintelligible and infinite complexity as well as in its complex harmony.”189 These

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differences not only provided meaning to human spiritual life but also were fundamental to the existence of the human notion of beauty. Beauty itself is threatened by the advance of uniform modern European civilization, which is equivalent to the Tower of Babel in its godless attempt to annihilate differences. In 1923, Trubetskoi debated about modernist styles in art with Suvchinskii (who had suggested to Trubetskoi Ilya Ehrenburg recently published book, And Still, It Is Turning!). Trubetskoi admonished his friend for his fascination with futurism: “When a Futurist who rebelled against beauty paints or describes the European culture of plants and factories, this hideous and perverted creation of human hands, this abominable Tower of Babel, this Futurist is in his sphere, because savoring and enjoying deformity is a rebellion against beauty.” For Trubetskoi, “the essence and the first cause of Futurism lies precisely in this savoring and celebration of the machine–gas–concrete, etc., European modernity, and this is exactly what attracts Futurism’s adepts.”190 A self-described anti-Semite, Trubetskoi saw this leveling modernity as connected to Jews. He depicted Ehrenburg’s book as a celebration of decline and “a total song by a victorious Kike,” who “pushes [the world] into the abyss.”191 He told Suvchinskii, “I am becoming more and more convinced that the connection of Futurism with the Bolshevizing Jews (and through them to Satan and Antichrist) is not accidental. The essence is in the rebellion against beauty.”192 It is notable that this passage in Trubetskoi’s letter coincides almost verbatim with the text of an anti-Semitic brochure, “The Horrific Question: Russia and the Jewry,” by Baron A. V. Meller-Zakomel’skii, who joined the Eurasianist movement in 1922 and financed its early publications. Meller wrote that “Jewry is an actual factor of national degeneration, an eternal source of internal disorder in the states where it finds shelter. Cosmopolitan Jewry is a leveling, antinational factor par excellence and it is characteristic that Dr. Pasmanik thinks Europeanization is the ideal of Russia’s future and arrogantly mocks ‘the Tatar rags’ of Eurasianism.”193 Trubetskoi’s religious diversitarianism substantiated, on the one hand, an unusually early critique of cultural colonialism, and on the other hand, the most repulsive kind of anti-Semitism that cleared the path to Nazism in interwar Europe. If national and cultural differences were God-given, and international culture was nothing more than the sacrilegious rebellion of prideful humans, then how was Christianity possible as a universal, supranational religion? Trubetskoi argued that “the profession of Christianity is not equal to introducing into a culture some new element. . . . Christianity is above races and cultures but it abolishes neither the multiplicity nor the uniqueness of races and cultures.”194 Trubetskoi considered Christianity to be “‘yeast’ that can be put into different kinds of dough, and the result of fermentation will be different in accordance with the content

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of the dough.”195 Moreover, blind copying of a foreign but Christian culture can be harmful: “As we can see, the spread of Christianity was successful precisely where it was accepted as a ferment and not as an element of a ready-made foreign culture.”196 Christian missionaries were guilty of spreading not Christianity as such but a specific culture under the guise of Christianity. Trubetskoi admitted, “Orthodox missionaries sinned in this way for it is no secret to anyone that missionizing within Russia was quite often a tool of Russification, whereas outside of Russia it served the spread of Russian political influence.”197 Even guiltier were “Romano-Germanic missionaries, who saw themselves primarily as Kulturträgers.”198 Their missionary activity was “connected to ‘spheres of influence,’ colonization, Europeanization, civilization, concessions, factories, plantations, and so on.”199 As a result, Christ’s bequest to teach all peoples, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit “remains essentially incomplete due to the fact that missionizing was turned into a tool of Europeanization—for example, a tool to establish a homogeneous universal human culture, whose antiGod nature we discussed above.”200 The diversitarian “law of fragmentation” applied even to the Christian churches. As Trubetskoi passionately argued in an article with the telling title “The Temptations of Unification” the idea of the unity of Christian churches can only appear attractive if one accepts it without analysis.201 In reality, the drive to create a united church not only was in line with godless attempts to destroy differences but also was meaningless from a believer’s point of view. Any unification of the churches is possible only if one church gives up its principles. For a member of the church, this cannot be acceptable because it would mean that his church is not the true one. When the worldly concerns of political necessity drive unification attempts (even with the godly goal of struggling against Bolshevism), they cannot be treated without suspicion by a believer. The real unification of churches for Trubetskoi could occur only in a mystical way, with the arrival of the Messiah, when all doubts would be resolved. In the meantime, the true Christian should belong to his own church and resist any attempts at unification. This suspicion toward ecumenical ideas led Trubetskoi and the Eurasianists to harsh pronouncements not only with regard to Latin Christians but also with regard to those Russian intellectuals, like Father Sergii Bulgakov, who pursued contacts with the Anglicans. Trubetskoi’s anticolonialist rhetoric was inspired by religious diversitarianism, which saw the persistence of “God-given” difference as a condition of meaningful human existence. In contrast to the economic anticolonialism of the Marxists, the Eurasianists criticized European colonial projects and universalist aspirations from the right, rather than from the left, and saw left-wing movements as the pinnacle of the godless spread of standardizing and soulless modernity. In presenting

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this critique of colonialism, the Eurasianists did not attack specific forms of colonial domination, be they economic or political. Rather, their anticolonial liberation project required a cultural revolution, an ideological change alone. The latter would be possible only if and when the presumably colonial subject recognized the European colonial domination of culture and scholarship and accepted participation in the ideocratic Christian project for Eurasia.

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IN SEARCH OF WHOLENESS Totalizing Eurasia

The Eurasianist movement not only claimed to have discovered a new continent, Eurasia, on the territory of the former Russian Empire. It also sought to endow this new continent with tangible ethnographic, linguistic, and historical content. For Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetskoi, who was largely responsible for elaborating the cultural and ethnographic component of Eurasianism, the discovery of the new continent had to be holistic and systematic, reflecting the nature of the continent itself. As late as 1926, five years into the movement’s history, Trubetskoi expressed concern that the Eurasianists “have elaborated in detail the diagnostics [of Eurasia],” yet, as he claimed, they “have not yet even approached” developing a “systematic teaching.”1 He argued that “our task is to create a single and coherent logical system, a utopia logically connected with a certain philosophy of history and with the general system of sciences.” The leader of Eurasianism argued that the Eurasianists cannot not oppose Bolshevism with practice but they “can and must counterpose оur own systematic theory to the Bolshevik theoretical system.” He imagined this work proceeding in two directions: on the one hand, we had to elaborate certain theoretical principles and to attach new ideas to those principles, which would be logically connected. Thus, we had to build a single theoretical system. On the other hand, we had to interpret specific real-life phenomena from the standpoint of that theoretical system, thus creating an illustration of the system in politics and a systematically uniform compendium of knowledge in science. . . . I have always considered it obligatory to establish logical connections with other parts and with the entire whole. I considered “Eurasianist” only those statements that could be logically reconciled with the general system.2

In the middle of the decade, the Eurasianist group expanded, and began to include in its ranks the literary scholar D. P. Sviatopolk-Mirskii, the historian G. V.

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Vernadskii, the scholar of Iran and former diplomat V. P. Nikitin, and others. The expansion of the movement’s organization and publishing in 1924–1928, fueled by the generous contribution of Henry Norman Spalding, allowed its leaders to push for more specific and professional elaboration of the content of their “Eurasia.” Both Trubetskoi and Savitskii, very young intellectuals in 1920, by the middle of the decade had developed their respective conceptions in linguistics and geography. As a result, an interconnected and complex “system” emerged that tied together geography and geopolitics, linguistics and history. The underlying motif of the system was the unity and wholeness of Eurasia, its existence as an outcome of multiple yet converging teleological processes. The Eurasianist conception of Eurasia’s unity was an extraordinary and unprecedented attempt to redescribe the former Russian Empire as a separate civilization on the map of the Old World.

1. PARADOXES OF EURASIAN NATIONALISM

The Eurasianist reinvention of Eurasia began with an attempt to come to terms with nationalism. Was nationalism as a phenomenon good or bad for Eurasia? Would it not undermine its own principles in the diverse Eurasian space? As Benedict Anderson has argued, modern nationalism was a European phenomenon that spread to different corners of the globe on the ships and trains of colonial empires.3 For the Eurasianists, the very principle of the modern nation-state was an invention of the particular, Romano-Germanic, culture. In March 1921, responding to Roman Jakobson’s critique of his Europe and Mankind, Trubetskoi wrote that “nationalism is good when it comes out of an original culture and is directed to that culture. It is false when it does not result from such culture and leads a small, essentially non-European (non-Romano-Germanic) people to act as a great power, which has everything ‘as by the lords.’”4 The Eurasianists were aware of the distinctly European origins of the most powerful modern ideology, and this awareness complicated their anticolonial and anti-European rhetoric. Modern nationalism was too modern and too European, yet the Eurasianists could not describe themselves other than in its very terms. In 1925, Petr Semenovich Arapov wrote a memorandum to the Council of Eurasianism, in which he argued that “nationalism and nationalist movements are senseless in Russia, for the latter has never been built upon the national principle.” Arapov argued that “the acute development of national movements was one of the main causes of Europe’s moral degradation” and pointed out that Konstantin Leont’ev was the Eurasianist predecessor in understanding that.”5 But modern nationalism presented even greater problems for the Eurasianists, who were concerned with the authenticity of national life. Trubetskoi wrote in

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1921 that “nationalism is . . . false when it prevents other peoples from being what they are and attempts to force them to accept a culture alien for them. ‘National self-determination’ as it is understood by former president Woodrow Wilson and all sorts of separatists [samostiiniki] like Georgians, Estonians, Latvians, and so on, is a typical example of the first type. German chauvinism or Anglo-American Kulturträgershaft is the second type of false nationalism. Our Russian [russkii] ‘nationalism’ of the prerevolutionary period is both. True nationalism is still to be constructed.”6 In his 1925 memorandum Arapov argued that “nationalism was deadly for Russia,” because it “foreclosed the possibility of expansion.” But most important, nationalism was harmful because it was bound to tear apart the space of Eurasia: “‘Russian’ [russkii] nationalism will always be just ‘Great Russian’ nationalism and will lead to the dissolution of Russia-Eurasia, for it will cause the development of local narrow nationalisms, such as Ukrainian, Belorussian, Georgian, and so on.”7 This view was made public when another “younger Eurasianist,” Ksenia Florovskaia (Georgii Florovskii’s sister) declared, in the article “Leont’ev as Predecessor of the Eurasianists,” that the danger of “tribal nationalism” is that peripheral peoples will oppose their own national movements to Russian nationalism. Thus, she argued, it is advisable to replace Russian nationalism with Eurasianism.8 But if modern nationalism based on ethnicity and language was not a solution, then what were the foundations on which Eurasia could be rebuilt in the future? In his memorandum to the other members of the Eurasianist group, Arapov claimed that cosmopolitan “internationalism was not a solution either, for internationalism lies in the same perspective as nationalism; internationalism is just a simple negation of nationalism, its logical stage of development.” He saw “the solution . . . in refuting both nationalism and internationalism and in putting forward a new principle . . . Russia is not a national whole but rather something more than that.”9 An outline of new, Eurasian principles of true nationalism was suggested by Trubetskoi in a short polemical article, published by the Eurasianist Publishing House in 1927 and titled “All-Eurasian Nationalism.”10 Troubled by his experiences during the Revolution and the Civil War, Trubetskoi was concerned about the unity of the Eurasian space, putatively restored by the Bolsheviks. His article contained some tough analysis of the current situation in the Soviet Union, including the Bolshevik efforts to enlist the support of nationalities for their cause and the contemporary composition of the Soviet empire. According to Trubetskoi, some sort of substratum was required for the common state of the Eurasian peoples. Prior to 1917, the Russian people and the tsar had acted as “owners” of the Russian Empire and bound it together. With the fall of the old regime, the social ideal of the proletariat became this supranational substratum for the USSR, often at the expense of nationalism. As Trubetskoi put it, “the struggle against nationalism is

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actualized by the very fact of the social ideal, for the popular attention is shifted from the sphere of national emotions to the sphere of social emotions.”11 Thus, “one can again argue . . . that there is a commonly recognized owner who binds different parts of today’s USSR into a single whole; if previously the Russian people headed by the tsar were commonly recognized as such an owner, now the proletariat of all Soviet peoples, headed by the Communist Party, is considered to be such an owner.”12 For the time being, Trubetskoi agreed, this social ideal and the dictatorship of the proletariat can keep Eurasia together. However, Trubetskoi disagreed with the way the Bolsheviks divided the Eurasian peoples into “bourgeoisie” and “proletariat” to strike supranational alliances and maintain the unity of the Eurasian space. The “affirmative action” of the Bolsheviks—who granted territories, standardized languages, and political participation to the elites of Eurasian nations—in Trubetskoi’s view, only helped to awaken these nations’ aspirations. He saw “the nationalism of separate peoples of the USSR . . . developing as these peoples become increasingly accustomed to their new position!” The processes set in motion by the Bolsheviks could turn against them in the long run because their continued investment in the national elites would inevitably result in greater national tensions: “The development of education and literacy in different national languages as well as the appointment first of all of the locals to administrative and other positions deepen national distinctions between separate regions and create among aboriginal intelligentsias a jealous fear of competition with the ‘newly arrived elements’ as well as a desire to confirm and preserve their own recently acquired positions.”13 In what appears to be a fairly accurate estimation of the prospect of the Soviet state, Trubetskoi suggested that it would disintegrate along national lines once the Bolshevik ideals of Socialism failed. Since the dialectical development of Soviet nationality policy would lead to the state’s disintegration, Trubetskoi suggested that the former imperial space of Russia needed to find a new substratum, a binding force that could replace the Bolsheviks’ social ideals. No single people in the USSR could claim the status of owner of the common space any longer, not even the Russian people. Thus, Trubetskoi suggested, the national substratum of the state that used to be called the Russian Empire and is now called the USSR can only be constituted by the entire conglomeration of peoples who populate that state. This conglomeration must be viewed as a special multipeople nation, which as such possesses its own nationalism. We call this nation Eurasian and its territory Eurasia . . . [we call] its nationalism Eurasianism.14

In what appears to be a rhetorical tour de force, Trubetskoi replaced the imperial, supranational model with a national one that would subsume all national

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divisions under the umbrella of Eurasian nationhood. “Eurasia” was not an entity distinct from the national units; rather, it was itself a national unit absorbing the smaller ones. Perhaps it is not surprising that Trubetskoi’s favorite verb in describing the new Eurasian nationalism was “must.” He suggested that with respect to Eurasia  .  .  . the nationalism of each particular people of Eurasia (current USSR) must be combined with the all-Eurasian nationalism, that is, with Eurasianism. Every citizen of the Eurasian state must recognize that he not only belongs to a particular people (or to a branch of such people) but also that this very people belongs to the Eurasian nation. The national pride of that citizen must find satisfaction in both facts. The nationalism of these particular peoples must be constructed accordingly: the all-Eurasian nationalism must be a widening of each particular people’s nationalism; it should be a fusion of all these particular nationalisms into one single whole.”15

This vision of pan-Eurasian nationalism did not presuppose a subjectivity on behalf of the participating groups but was to happen under the pressure of Eurasianism’s inevitable logic, which must be recognizable to all. The hegemonic imagination of the Eurasianists became especially obvious when they spelled out their attitude to various attempts to forge supranational identities in the modern world of nation-states.16 Trubetskoi recognized that lines of division in Eurasia crossed linguistic and confessional boundaries: Judged by a particular characteristic, each particular people of Eurasia can belong to some other non-Eurasian group of peoples: thus, the Russians, according to linguistic characteristics, belong to the group of Slavic peoples, and the Tatars, Chuvash, Cheremis, and others belong to the so-called Turanian group, whereas according to religious characteristics the Tatars, Bashkirs, Sarts, and others belong to the group of Muslim peoples.

And yet, he insisted that the Eurasian identification was the most mutifaceted and comprehensive and that for all these peoples all these ties should be less strong and bright than those ties that bind them into the Eurasian family: Eurasianism should count first, not pan-Slavism for the Russians, pan-Turanism for the Eurasian Turanians, and pan-Islamism for the Eurasian Muslims. For all these “pan-isms” strengthen the centrifugal forces of particular nationalisms and stress a one-sided connection of a given people with some other peoples only on the basis of a single characteristic, and therefore these

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ties are incapable of creating a real and vital multipeople nation out of the conglomeration of different peoples.17

The Eurasianists were in fact aware of the inherent contradictions of their Eurasian national project. After all, the anticolonial thrust of the movement ran counter to its totalizing and imperial design for the imperial space of Russia. However, they saw the Russian Revolution as proof that not just ethnic Russians were rising against the alleged cultural domination of Europe. As Petr Savitskii wrote in 1920 in his review of Trubetskoi’s anticolonial book, the opposition between Europe and Eurasia is supported ideologically and militarily not only by the strength of ethnographic Russia but also by the entire circle of peoples that adjoin it. The forces of these peoples were partially responsible for the creation of Russian power and culture and they are also active in the phenomenon of Bolshevism . . . which has, despite its deplorable and wild face, certain elements of protest by the non–Romano-Germanic world against the Romano-Germanic cultural (and not just cultural) “yoke.”18

Savitskii was aware that the Eurasianist argument about the Eurasian brotherhood of peoples might be criticized. Would this involvement of the Asians in the common Eurasian space just mean the replacement of the Romano-Germanic yoke by the Russian yoke? His tone took on an imperialist attitude when he answered this question: “Life is cruel and the weakest peoples of Eurasia might suffer under the Russian yoke equivalent to the Romano-Germanic oppression.”19 However, for Savitskii it was the politics of imperial comparisons that helped in responding to this question. He argued that as far as the peoples “of some cultural potency” are concerned, the national conditions of Eurasia are characterized by the construction of relations between the Russian nation and the other nations of Eurasia, and that this is fundamentally different from the construction of such relations under European colonial rule. According to Savitskii, “Eurasia is a sphere of certain equality and brotherhood of nations that has no analogues in the relations between peoples in colonial empires. And the Eurasian culture can be imagined as being, to one or another degree, a common creation and a common possession of the peoples of Eurasia.”20 The Eurasianists’ project of reinventing Eurasia as a new “multipeople nation” hinged on their ability to redescribe the multitude as a singularity and diversity as a unity. Since the Eurasianist project lacked a clearly defined subject—a people, a nation, or a class—whose demands could be brought to bear on the projected Eurasian nationalism, a subject had to be discovered. The Eurasianist thinkers thus

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embarked on an ambitious project, whose goal was to prove that the “external” ties of different peoples of Eurasia were less important than the “internal” ones. The established categories of nationalist thinking, such as the common descent of ethnic groups, had to give way to new modes of imagining the diversity of peoples of Eurasia.

2. IN SEARCH OF CULTURAL WHOLENESS: FROM SLAVDOM TO TURAN

The discovery of Eurasia’s multipeople nation was confronted by established ways of imagining kinship and proximity between peoples. The ethnic collectivities of Europe and the world were classified in a grid of linguistic families and groups, and the intellectual legacies of pan-Germanism and pan-Slavism presupposed deep relationships between peoples of allegedly common descent. In a feat of paradoxically essentialist constructivism, the Eurasianist invention of Eurasia had to demonstrate that these ties were less important than those that bound together different peoples within the Eurasian space. Inevitably, the Eurasianist charge was directed against the idea of Slavic unity. On this, as with other theoretical works on culture, Nikolai Trubetskoi was the leading Eurasianist authority. In 1927 the Eurasianist Publishing House in Paris brought out his collection of articles, K probleme russkogo samopoznania (On the problem of Russian self-cognition), in which the only new text was Trubetskoi’s article “Obshcheslavianskii element v russkoi kul’ture” (The common Slavic element in Russian culture).21 The article presented a short history of Slavic languages and was meant to prove that these languages developed along paths different from the history of the Russian literary language. As with other Eurasianist ideas, the text mixed Eurasianist concerns with problems of contemporary scholarship. In this article Trubetskoi asserted that the Russian language is a Slavic tongue that descended from a proto-Slavic dialect of the proto-Indo-European language. As a spoken language distinct from the literary language, this dialect had existed as a single subject of linguistic evolution until the period of eleventh to thirteenth centuries, when the last change common to all dialects of the proto-Slavic language had occurred.22 From that period on, the common Slavic language had ceased to exist and separate groups of dialects emerged: the Russian language (which included Southern Russian, Western Russian, and Eastern Russian) in the East, the Southern Slavic language in the South, and the Western Slavic in Central Europe. The Russian protolanguage had dissolved into three large groups by the mid-thirteenth century and ceased to be a subject of evolution (e.g., diverse groups within it had no common simultaneously occurring changes). However,

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Trubetskoi noted, this did not mean that three separate languages emerged: in fact, none of these three large groups of the Russian language could qualify as a subject of evolution because each of them in turn was a collection of dialects: “[We can only say] that the common Russian language dissolved not into three dialects but into an indefinite mass of dialects that can be divided into three groups, and each of these groups can be called a dialect (the Great Russian, the Belorussian, the Little Russian).”23 As far as the Russian literary language proper was concerned, its roots were to be found in the Church Slavonic language created by Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius in the ninth century on the basis of the Greek literary tradition and the Slavic dialect of a Bulgarian city. Of all the local varieties of the first version of Church Slavonic, only the Old Bulgarian Church Slavonic survived and became the foundation of written Slavic culture. Again, this Bulgarian Church Slavonic was adapted to local needs—by Serbia, Bulgaria, and Russia—but only in Russia did it survive, under the protection of an independent state.24 In fact, in “Russia” itself two versions of Church Slavonic emerged, one in the southwest, in the Polish-dominated Ukraine, and one in Moscow.25 In the seventeenth century, the Kievan version of Church Slavonic became the dominant one in Russia, and, due to the prestige of the Russian state among the Slavs, the most popular version in Slavdom in general. By the beginning of the nineteenth century the modern Russian literary language emerged out of the interaction between Church Slavonic (its Ukrainian version) and the spoken language of Moscow’s elite: “the modern Russian literary language emerged as a result of the cross-breeding of the old cultured ‘garden’ plant (the Church Slavonic) with the wild plant (the spoken language of the ruling classes of the Russian state).” For Trubetskoi, modern Russian was a unique Slavic language because it carried the legacy of Slavic baptism to Christianity: “Ultimately, the literary Russian language is a direct heir of the Old Church Slavonic, which the saints who taught the Slavs created as the common literary language for all the Slavic tribes at the end of the era of Slavic unity.”26 The other Slavic languages, which were allegedly part of the common descent, shared little of Russian’s history. Of all the Slavic languages only Bulgarian had connections to Russian due to the influence of Church Slavonic. As Trubetskoi argued, modern Serbo-Croatian emerged “ex abruptio,” due to the efforts of the great reformer Vuk Karadzic, in the mid-nineteenth century from the spoken language of Serbia. The same was true of the Slovenian language: in contrast to the gradual transformation of Russian, Southern Slavic languages were “abruptly” created in the nineteenth century on the basis of spoken dialects. The Western Slavic languages—mainly Czech and Polish—“from the very beginning had no relationship to the Church Slavonic tradition (except for a brief period

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in the early history of the Czechs).” The Czech literary language emerged very early, about the thirteenth century, and was later standardized by the efforts of Jan Hus. Almost forgotten by the Czechs by the nineteenth century, it was undergoing a process of revival, the source of which was in the Czech medieval literature and spoken dialects. The Polish literary tradition, although never interrupted, evolved in interaction with the Catholic West. The Slovak language emerged last among all the Slavic languages, in the late eighteenth century, and, of course, had little to no relation with the Russian language. In general, Trubetskoi argued, each of the modern Western Slavic languages emerged independently, on the basis of a given spoken language; nevertheless, they are all connected to each other by a certain literary and linguistic tradition. However, this tradition is not that of descent but of mutual influence, and the main source of this influence was the Czech literary language, which had a strong influence on Polish in the Middle Ages and on the Slovak . . . in the modern times.27

Trubetskoi subdivided the Slavic languages into two groups: the first included Bulgarian and Russian and was based on genetic descent; the second included Polish, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, and Serbo-Croatian and was based on mutual influence. Western Slavdom “converged” into a linguistic grouping separate from Eastern Slavdom and experienced a strong influence from the Latin Christian world. “Slavdom” could thus not be substantiated on the grounds of the only visible affinity between the Poles and the Russians, the Bulgarians and the Czechs. But if Russians, Ukrainians, and other Slavs in Eurasia had shared no ties to the Slavs in Europe, their very national character was determined by their historical coexistence within one cultural, geographical, and political space with the Turkic and Finno-Ugric peoples of Eurasia. In 1924, Trubetskoi wrote to Suvchinskii and explained that he had shared his ideas about the history of Eurasia with P. N. Savitskii. He wrote, The core of my construction is in particular an understanding of the relationship between the Moscow tsardom and the Mongol Khans. . . . I formulate it as follows: there was never any liberation from the Tatar yoke but, rather, the Russification and transformation of the Tatars [tatarshchiny] into Orthodoxy, which occurred when the Khan’s encampment moved to Moscow, the Orthodox Russian tsar replaced the khan, and the steppe turned from the nomad’s realm into a cultivated field.28

Trubetskoi recognized that his “scheme” of Russian history was open to professional criticism and that “a certain Kizevetter could demolish it with one flick,”

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so he decided not to pursue the argument in its historical outline. Instead, he suggested that “all this contains an ethnopsychological side, and I can work with it without pretending to be a historian.”29 His plan was to define “the Turanian psychological type on the basis of ethnographic data and explain its role in the order of life in pre-Petrine Russia.”30 The article was soon published in the Eurasianist almanac. Trubetskoi began his analysis of the influence of the “Turanian” peoples of Eurasia with a brief classification of their languages and cultures.31 He singled out five “Turanian” groups inhabiting Eurasia: the Ugro-Finns, the Samoeds, the Turks, the Mongols, and the Manchurs. Trubetskoi agreed that the question of their genetic ties remained problematic. However, “we have the right to speak about a single Turanian psychological type.” To explore this psychological type, Trubetskoi briefly analyzed Turanian languages, art, and music. He took the Turks to be the best representatives of the Turanians and concentrated on their cultural traits.32 Trubetskoi defined the overarching feature of Turkic languages and culture as characterized by the “comparative poverty and rudimentary nature of the material and its complete subjugation to clear and simple schematic laws, which bind that material together and give it a certain schematic clarity and transparency.”33 Turkic phonetics is very simple and follows the rule of harmony, which regulates the use of particular vowels in a word. These rules create a feeling that the Turkic speech is monotonous yet they make the phonetic structure of the language exceptionally symmetrical. Turkic grammar is also simple and schematic and the rules lack exceptions. The observer is struck “by . . . the economy of these grammatical tools: there are no grammatical categories [in the Turkic languages] with a meaning that is not supported by material or logic.”34 Turkic music, if not “polluted by the city music of the Osmans or Azeris,” produces melodies “characterized by a special harmonic and rhythmic clarity and transparency. Each such melody is one or several similar, very simple musical phrases; however, these phrases can be repeated an indefinite number of times, thus forming a long and monotonous song.”35 If the “spiritual creativity of the Turks is dominated by one major psychological feature—the clear systematization of relatively poor and rudimentary material”—Turkic psychology is characterized, according to Trubetskoi, by the love of a system and schemata: “A typical Turk does not like to get involved with details and complexities.”36 He likes to operate with important clear images and to group these images into simple schemes. Therefore, Turks need stability in their systematic and symmetrical worldview. “Uncovering and creating the major foundations of his life is always torturous for a Turk because such a search for foundations means an absence of stability and clarity.” It follows that, for example, a religious belief that is accepted by the Turks becomes crystallized

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and petrified, and it is not a coincidence that Turkic Muslims did not produce many theologians.37 But if the Turanian psychological and cultural type did exist and was shared by all the Turanian peoples of Eurasia, what was its influence on the Russians? According to Trubetskoi, pre-Petrine Muscovite Russia had experienced a positive influence of the Turanians because Russia possessed a blessed unity between the confession of faith and everyday life (bytovoe ispovednichestvo). Within this paradigm, “state ideology, material culture, art, and religion were inseparable parts of a single system, which was not made theoretically explicit, yet was present in the subconsciousness of everybody. This entire system bore the imprint of the Turanian type.” Thus, the Turanians taught Muscovite Russians to live a life governed by an underlying deep structure. Even when superficial foreign observers noted the Russian slavishness before the highest authority, they failed to comprehend that in the Turanian worldview everyone and everything, even the autocrat, had to follow a certain higher principle.38 Even the Orthodox faith— although it was imported by the Russians from Byzantium and opposed to the Tatar influences in the Russian national consciousness—was a reflection of Turanian influence. The Orthodox religion was characterized by little theology and a lot of ritual, both of which had roots in the Turanian psychological type.39 Finally, the Russian state itself “emerged due to the Tatar yoke. The Muscovite tsars had begun to gather the lands of the Western Ulus of the great Mongol monarchy before they finished gathering Russian lands. . . . The Russian tsar became the heir to the Mongol khan.”40 The Russians thus inherited from the Turanians an attitude toward religion in which the latter becomes an ontologic reality, a fundamental background of spiritual life and external well-being, and not an object of philosophical speculations as in Western Europe. Russian Orthodoxy and the Turanian psychological type are both characterized by the “absence of flexibility and a striving for concretization, by an attempt to immediately translate religious experiences and ideas into forms of external life and culture.”41 Trubetskoi granted that a negative result of the Turanian influence was a lack of theological creativity and a “clumsiness and laziness of theoretical thought.”42 The Russians should get rid of this negative influence but certainly without sacrificing the positive role played by the Turanians in Russian history and culture. As Trubetskoi put it, “we have the right to be no less proud of our Turanian ancestor than we are of our Slavic forefathers.”43 Although the linguistic argument was not yet available to Trubetskoi to prove the inherent ties between the Slavs and the Turanians within Eurasia (this argument would be developed by Roman Jakobson in 1929–30), he attempted to resolve this problem by recourse to an alleged “psychological type” bequeathed by the Turanians to their Russian heirs.

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3. EURASIA’S UKRAINIAN CHALLENGE

Russian imperial projects often experienced the most profound difficulty where Russian nationalists did not expect them, namely, in Ukraine, widely considered by many Russians to be a region of greater Russia rather than a separate nation, and the process of reinventing the Russian Empire as Eurasia encountered few obstacles as significant as the Ukrainian challenge.44 As G. V. Vernadskii argued, “the Ukrainian question is one of the most complex and painful questions of Russian national self-cognition,” and inscribing Ukraine into the Eurasianist project proved that point.45 Ukraine was central for the Eurasianists for a number of reasons. First, surprisingly many founders and important members of the movement came from Ukraine and were interested in its culture, language, and history. As Savitskii argued, “if we consider the origins of the Eurasianist authors and the cultural tradition that nourished them, it will turn out that Eurasianism is in equal measure a Ukrainian and a Great Russian phenomenon.”46 Savitskii himself was born and raised in Chernigov and published his first texts on the history of Ukrainian architecture and embroidery.47 Savitskii cherished his Ukrainian legacy and even wrote under the pseudonym “Stepan Lubenskii,” after his ancestor, a Cossack coronel of Lubno in the seventeenth century. P. P. Suvchinskii organized a peasant choir on his family’s estate Tkhorovka near Kiev and personally supervised the building of a church there.48 Both Suvchinskii and Savitskii collected Ukrainian folklore and art. Perhaps even more dramatic was G. V. Vernadskii’s encounter with his Ukrainian ancestry. Over the years in exile, Vernadskii was at times engaged in anguishing self-invention as a scholar, a Ukrainian, and a Russian. As Igor Torbakov has convincingly argued, it was the Eurasianist supranational ideology that allowed one of the founders of Russian history in the United States to reconcile his multiple and at times contradictory identifications.49 Why were these intellectuals so prominent in Eurasianism and how did they reconcile their Ukrainian ancestry and apparent recognition of Ukrainian language and culture with a commitment to an ideology that aimed to absorb Ukraine into the larger Eurasian project? The somewhat simplified answer lies in the dynamics of late imperial processes in Ukraine, where descendants of Cossack starshina and Polish szlachta developed various identities vis-à-vis Ukrainian, Russian, and imperial spaces.50 As Ernest Gyidel argues, on the eve of the imperial collapse there emerged a small yet intellectually visible “type” of imperial identification by “Ukrainians of Russian culture,” shared by V. I. Vernadskii (G. V. Vernadskii’s father), sociologist B. Kistiakovskii, theologian V. V. Zenkovskii, and others. Gyidel suggests that the Eurasianists P. N. Savitskii and G. V. Vernadskii shared in this identification, accepting the separate existence of Ukrainian language and culture

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yet considering the modern Russian Empire a product of the common history of Russians and Ukrainians.51 The Ukrainian connections of the movement’s leaders complicated the treatment of the Ukrainian question in Eurasianism, but the fact that, unlike other national groups in projected Eurasia, the Ukrainians mounted a sustained response complicated things even more. Ukrainian intellectuals among the émigrés variously saw Eurasianism either as a new edition of imperial Russification or, more troubling for the Eurasianists, as a confirmation of Russia’s fundamentally Asian national character, in opposition to Ukraine’s European and Western identity.52 In the Ukrainian case, the Eurasianist leaders, who spoke on behalf of the multitude of Eurasian peoples, encountered a subject that could articulate an alternative vision for the postimperial space and challenge Eurasianist interpretations. In 1927 Trubetskoi published an article in the fifth volume of Evraziiskii vremennik, the annual almanac of the movement. The title of the polemical article was “On the Ukrainian Problem.”53 In this article Trubetskoi argued that the Petrine transformation of Russia was not as radical a change as it is often perceived to be. In fact, the cultural transformation of Russia had begun in the mid-seventeenth century, when, as a result of the incorporation of Ukraine, “the question arose in regard to the combination into one of the two different cultural traditions, the Western Russian or the Eastern Russian.” The government chose the side of the Ukrainian version of Russian culture and promoted it through its church reforms under Patriarch Nikon, thus pushing the old Great Russian tradition into the underground of the Schism (Raskol).54 According to Trubetskoi, by the beginning of the eighteenth century the Western Russian cultural tradition, which came from Ukraine, had become the dominant culture for the educated classes of Moscow. Peter the Great’s reforms finally annihilated the remnants of the Great Russian, or Moscow, tradition of Russian culture. In fact, the Ukrainian “redaction” of Russian culture became the standard for the educated classes of the Russian state because it better suited the Europeanizing pathos of Peter the Great, in contrast to the “Great Russian tradition, Europhobic, and self-contained.” As Trubetskoi put it, “Peter  .  .  . attempted to root out and to annihilate the Great Russian tradition of Russian culture and made the Ukrainian one the point of departure for further development.”55 Therefore, the entire Russian culture of the post-Petrine imperial period was “an organic and immediate continuation not of the Moscow, but of the Kievan, Ukrainian redaction [of Russian culture].”56 The very view of the old Great Russian culture as backward and illiterate was inherited from the Ukrainians and persisted throughout the entire post-Petrine period. This view, Trubetskoi argued, persisted until his own day.57 Thus, at the turn of the eighteenth century, the Moscow redaction of the Russian culture was “abolished” and Russian culture became united and Ukrainized.

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Its center moved to St. Petersburg as the capital of the all-Russian state and it lost some of its provincial features as it became the culture of a great European power, or, as Trubetskoi put it, “of statehood in the grand style.”58 As a result this formerly Ukrainian culture lost its specifically Ukrainian character but could not acquire a specifically Great Russian character. It turned out to be an “abstract” and “Petersburg” Russian culture, unable to establish contact with the popular masses either in Ukraine or Great Russia.59 Russian society (by which Trubetskoi clearly meant both Russian and Ukrainian societies) began to experience diverse forms of protest and many began to search for specifically national features. This search necessarily had to be regional, for any attempt to make that culture a more specific and national one had to choose a specific “individuation” of Russian culture, be it Ukrainian, Belorussian, Siberian, or Cossack. These searches—for Slavophilism, a literary return to folklore, democratic traits, Populism, and even the famous “going to the people” movement—all occurred in every region of Russia. These processes were strikingly parallel in Great Russia, Ukraine, and elsewhere.60 The alienation of the high culture of the educated classes from the culture of the general population was an all-Russian phenomenon because its very roots—the abstract character of culture—had an all-Russian presence. Thus, the problem that faced the educated classes of Ukraine, Russia, and other “Russian” parts of the former empire was a common one: how to create a culture where “the upper stories” would grow “organically” from the lower stories.61 This alienation put the Russians and the Ukrainians in the empire on equal footing, according to Trubetskoi. The Ukrainians at times sharply felt that the Petersburg culture was alien to them, but so did the Great Russians. In the Petersburg version of Russian culture, its upper stories (“high culture”) perfectly satisfied “the intelligentsia.”62 It was the people—in Ukraine, in Russia, or in Siberia—who felt that this culture did not correspond to its “ethnic nature.” Imagine, Trubetskoi asked, what would happen if a common Russian culture were replaced in Ukraine by a specifically Ukrainian, national culture? There is little doubt that the common people would opt for it because it would correspond to their ideals. However, the “best of the Ukrainian intelligentsia” were unlikely to integrate into this culture and would always opt for a common Russian one, as offering more possibilities. This specific Ukrainian culture would have to be built on anti-Russian sentiment and was bound to become a tool “of bad, angry, and chauvinistic politics.”63 With the arrogance of a Russian aristocrat, Trubetskoi suggested, “such a national culture in Ukraine will not be an organic reflection of Ukrainian national individuality but a ‘copy’ of those ‘cultures’ that are hastily created by the ‘younger peoples,’ the supernumeraries of the League of Nations.”64 Ukrainian nationalism was thus not a force for the emancipation of difference but a specific variant of the general

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phenomenon of modern European nationalism, a standardizing and leveling tool of European Kulturträgers. As a solution, Trubetskoi offered a two-layered cultural edifice for the former Russian Empire, in which a common Russian culture would serve the intelligentsia, and the local, regional Russian cultures—Ukrainian, Byelorussian, Siberian, and Cossack—would serve the needs of the people. For this construction to be valid, Trubetskoi believed that a common organizing principle had to be found, and it had to be acceptable to all groups of “the Russian people.” Such a principle can only be found in Orthodoxy. It was Orthodoxy that allowed “Russian” versions of culture to reintegrate in the seventeenth century and it was a “fascination with the secular, anti-Christian European culture that undermined the foundations of Russian life” and finally led to the emergence of centrifugal forces in the “Russian nation.”65 Curiously, Trubetskoi, who had deplored divisions within the national body of Russia as a result of Europeanization, was not hesitant to offer a solution to the Ukrainian problem that would reestablish the cultural divisions between the lower and upper layers of culture. Trubetskoi’s article provoked an interesting rebuke from professor Dmitrii Ivanovich Doroshenko (1882–1951), a moderate Ukrainian nationalist who had served as the minister of foreign affairs in the short-lived government of hetman P. Skoropadskii.66 Doroshenko categorically rejected Trubetskoi’s theory of “Ukrainization” of Muscovite culture at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century, citing Peter’s very selective borrowing of European and Ukrainian elements. He argued that Moscow culture remained centered on the state, and that Ukrainians dreaded Moscow’s courts and brutality. According to Doroshenko, Trubetskoi’s idea of a common process of turning to ethnographic layers of culture in the nineteenth century was different in Ukraine because it did not focus, as in Russia, only on social concerns but also involved questions of national life. Trubetskoi, according to Doroshenko, completely overlooked the existence of Ukrainian culture in Galicia, beyond the borders of the Russian Empire, where it enjoyed a revival. Finally, following the activities of Ukrainian scholars and intellectuals in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, Doroshenko considered the question of Ukrainian intellectuals “opting” for Russian culture a purely academic one.67 The exchange between Trubetskoi and Doroshenko brought to the fore another element of the imperial situation. In his response, Doroshenko used traditional Orientalist tropes to explain the difference between Ukraine and Russia. He argued that the Russians were the Orientals, and that the Russian despotic tradition had its roots in the Tatar yoke over Muscovy (Doroshenko used the word “pogrom” to refer to the Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century), whereas Ukraine was part

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of the European tradition with developed schooling and scholarship that dated back to the fourteenth century. Trubetskoi felt compelled to publish a response to Doroshenko’s response, in which he, the representative of the imperial center, proudly proclaimed that for him the Tatars also possessed a civilization that was no less valuable than the European, and that he saw the historical role of the Ukrainian people not in the defense of Europe against “Asian” barbarism, but in the centuries-long tradition of resistance to Polish and Catholic attempts at domination.68 In a reversal of roles, the imperial aristocrat who defended the unity of the imperial space against the challenge of minority nationalism resorted to cultural relativism and criticism of Eurocentrism. The exchange between Trubetskoi and Doroshenko, lively as it was, did not convince many Ukrainians. In 1930, Oleh Mitsiuk, a Ukrainian economist residing in Czechoslovakia, published a brochure in which he criticized Eurasianism and Trubetskoi in particular.69 Mitsiuk argued, “we do not care about that ‘Ukrainian intelligentsia’ Trubetskoi writes about and to which a lot of Eurasianists belong; this intelligentsia decidedly opted for Muscovite culture and fulfills the task of Russification.”70 Savitskii responded by arguing that Mitsiuk “wants to cut off from the Ukrainian tradition all those Ukrainians who do not support the separatist stance.” According to Savitskii, Mitsiuk, to be consistent, should also cut Nikolai Gogol from the Ukrainian tradition because Gogol “had opted for Muscovite culture.” In so doing, Mitsiuk would “have beheaded his own people by depriving them of their first genius.” Savitskii assumed a new role in this debate and described himself as a “Ukrainian and Eurasianist,” whose task is to “preserve Gogol in the Ukrainian tradition.” The way to do this was to accept the movement as an all-Eurasian one, the teachings of which were applicable “to all East Slavic peoples.”71 The Ukrainian encounter with the Eurasianist movement did not just illustrate the fluidity of self-identifications of the movement’s leaders, who thought of themselves as Ukrainians or Russians depending on the context in which they self-identified. It also demonstrated that late imperial developments were crucially significant to the Eurasianist project of reinventing the former Russian Empire as a separate civilization. Drawing on the identities and strategies of the so-called Ukrainians of Russian culture, the Eurasianist leaders also encountered the sustained and organized response of Ukrainian intellectuals, who challenged Eurasianist aspirations to construct a supranational identity for the postimperial space.

4. GEOGRAPHICAL PIVOT: EURASIA AS A GEOGRAPHICAL SYSTEM

The backbone of Eurasianist theory was constituted by the geographical description of Eurasia as a specific world, determined by territoriality, climate, and

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physical conditions. The authorship of Eurasianist geography clearly belongs to Petr Nikolaevich Savitskii, an extraordinarily erudite and productive scholar of political economy and geosciences and Eurasianism’s tireless propagator and chronicler.72 It is hard to overestimate Savitskii’s role in Eurasianism and in elaborating its ideological postulates. It was Savitskii who began using the very term “Eurasia” to designate “the Russian world” as distinct from Alexander von Humboldt’s usage of “Eurasia” as the Old World: in his 1930 letter to Jakobson, Savitskii insisted that he came up with the idea of Eurasia in 1918; in a 1920 letter to his family from Paris, written well before the Eurasianists met in Sofia, Savitskii mentions his “Eurasianist” mood.73 As a matter of fact, Savitskii briefly formulated in writing his geocultural conception of Eurasia as a separate world as early as 1921, before the publication of the first Eurasianist collection of articles came out. Trubetskoi recalled that “Eurasianism was born from the debates and objections” to his book Europe and Mankind.74 Savitskii’s publication, a review of the book, was part of these discussions.75 For Savitskii, Trubetskoi’s opposition between “Europe” and “Mankind” in general was an empty premise and “propaganda of weakness.” He was particularly critical of Trubetskoi’s proposition that European sciences are of no use to colonial peoples. Savitskii suggested, instead, that strong will and technological strength are essential to the projected liberation and that the strength of states is measured by their military capacities, which heavily depend on modern sciences. Perhaps, Savitskii argued, Trubetskoi is right and, spiritually, an Australian aborigine is in no sense inferior to a European. But if we measure the strength of a boomerang against the strength of a rifle, spirituality is of no use.76 Later, Ksenia Florovskaia, G. V. Florovskii’s sister and an active Eurasianist, repeated Savitskii’s point and argued that the Eurasianists “recognize and accept those great achievements in the realm of technology made by the West, but cannot agree with the attitude toward these technological achievements by the West European mind  .  .  . characterized by spiritual poverty.”77 The task was thus to spiritualize technology and sciences and put them on proper, religious foundations. In this idea of finding metaphysical and spiritual foundations for modern sciences the Eurasianist paralleled the “paradox of reactionary modernism” of their German counterparts.78 In Savitskii’s case, an important element of his invention of Eurasia was derived from the tradition of Naturphilosophie. Unlike Trubetskoi, whose intellectual roots were in the philosophical and literary milieu of Moscow, or Suvchinskii, who came from the artistic environment of St. Petersburg, Savitskii was a scholar of political economy and geography by background. If Trubetskoi and Suvchinskii referenced the philosopher Vladimir Solov’ev or the poet Alexander Blok, Savitskii cited as his intellectual heroes the chemist D. I. Mendeleev, the geoscientist

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V. I. Vernadskii, the student of soils V. V. Dokuchaev, and Russia’s most prominent scholar of forests, G. F. Morozov. All these scientists were also interested in naturphilosophical systems, in one or another way encompassing the world into a single meaningful concept (e.g., Vernadskii’s “geosphera”) and linking the natural world that they studied to social imageries. Vladimir Vernadskii’s conception of the complex and systematic study of Russia’s natural productive forces, stimulated by war needs, also had an effect on Savitskii’s study of economic geography, as Savitskii translated Vernadskii’s environmentalist ideas into his own vision of Eurasia as a compound of geographical, biological, and social entities.79 Dmitrii Ivanovich Mendeleev played an especially important role for Savitskii because of his interest in Russia’s position with respect to the West. In a letter to the Eurasianist treasurer, Colonel P. N. Malevskii-Malevich, Savitskii wrote that “Mendeleev was a Eurasianist of common sense [evraziets zdravogo smysla]. He, too, argued that we should not mold our nature according to the single model of Western Europe . . . and made reasonable judgments about our Tatar and Turkish ancestors.”80 Although Savitskii’s relations with his teacher, P. B. Struve, deteriorated because of the latter’s critical attitude toward Eurasianism, Struve’s early Marxist ideas about the development of Russian capitalism and its dependence on the exchange between the North and the South with their respective industrial and agricultural specializations could have influenced the crystallization of Savitskii’s ideas about Eurasia’s “regularities.”81 Taking these scientists as his role models, Savitskii elaborated his own general principle for interpreting facts through a “periodical system of being,” a structured and strictly organized methodology of uncovering repetitions and coincidences in history, geography, or linguistics and seeking out regularities and symmetries that allegedly governed these repetitions and coincidences. Both history and geography became fields in which this system could be applied to make sense of chaotic facts. In Savitskii’s words, “characteristics of internal regularity and deliberate coordination shine through even the most disorderly and seemingly most chaotic features of phenomena.”82 After his release from the Soviet camp in Mordovia in 1956, Savitskii sent to G. V. Vernadskii the poems he had written in the camp, and added the following clarification: “These poems cover my conception of the periodical system of being, which . . . includes the periodic conception of [geographical] zones and the periodical rhymes of history.”83 Savitskii’s “periodical system of being” thus sought to uncover regularities that govern both space and territoriality, and historical transformation.84 Although such a classification might be somewhat simplistic, one can discern several building blocks of Savitskii’s vision of Eurasia as a spatial, geographical phenomenon. First, it included a revision of the existing mental maps, elimination of the boundary between Europe and Asia, and a proposal for the existence of a

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separate, third geographical world of “Eurasia.” Second, the description of Eurasia involved the fascinating concept of “place-development” (mestorazvitie), which Savitskii developed by extending the emerging notions of biocenosis (or ecosystem in the Anglophone tradition) to the realm of interactions between nature and humans. Third, by seeking to establish regularities that governed the Eurasian “system” of territoriality, Savitskii claimed to have uncovered certain principles, such as the coincidence of boundaries created by types of soil and humidity, morphology and flora, language and confession. These principles allowed for a systematic mapping of Eurasian zones characterized by multiple features. Finally, by drawing on British geopoliticians and German geographers, Savitskii claimed for Eurasia the status of “exceptional continentality” and brought it to bear on his ideas about Eurasia’s economic position in the world. In his review of Trubetskoi’s anticolonial brochure, Savitskii argued that the general opposition between Europe and the rest of humanity was too abstract, and for practical purposes the focus should be on the “opposition between Europe and Russia.”85 This opposition, although cultural, had to rest on the firm ground of territoriality. The first task was, thus, to establish in geographical terms that Russia was no part of Europe and that it constituted a separate world. It should be noted that since the first half of the eighteenth century the traditional division of the Old World into Europe and Asia had become firmly established in Russian geography. As Mark Bassin argues, the very notion of the European boundary along the Ural Mountains was a product of the ideological need to demonstrate that the Russian Empire was a European power with its own Asian colonies.86 This geographic perception remained in place until the 1870s, when two individuals, both convinced pan-Slavists, argued that Europe was, in fact, an irrelevant geographic term. Vladimir Ivanovich Lamanskii, a historian and cofounder of the journal Zhivaia starina, divided the Old World into three parts: Europe, or the RomanoGermanic world; Asia; and the Middle World, or Russia.87 Nikolai Danilevskii, too, argued that Russia was a specific world separate from both Europe and Asia.88 For both Lamanskii and Danilevskii, though, the fact of non-Russian influence on Russian culture remained virtually nonexistent and they argued that Siberia was, undoubtedly, as Russian as the European part of the country. Lamanskii’s and Danilevskii’s views were inspired by a desire to see a homogeneous Russia within the borders of the empire and were thus part of the rise of the nationalist perception of space. The difference between the colonial empires of European powers and Russia was obvious for Lamanskii: We can speak of Asian Russia but we can hardly at this point speak (and it is unlikely to be possible in the future) about Asian England, France, Holland, Spain, or Portugal. For the nationalities of these countries, their Asia cannot be and will never

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be Homeland and Fatherland but will forever remain just a place of exploitation, lucrative markets, practical school of administrative and state talents, more or less appropriate career field and attraction for missionaries and scholars.89

Thus, Russia, different from other European empires, was a single and indivisible entity. This entity emerged partly due to geographic conditions, which reflected the existence of a separate, naturally delimited geographical world. Savitskii agreed that there are always significant difficulties related to mapping or drawing the borders of a specific region (raionirovanie), due to a multitude of characteristics that might allow such mapping. Nevertheless, he proclaimed that “in purely geographical terms Russia in its borders of 1914 [sic] represents a specific world, different from both Europe (as a community of lands to the west of the Pulkovo meridian) and Asia.”90 Russia “was a ‘continent in itself ’ due to its special scale, and to its geographical nature, which is the same all over its territory and . . . distinct from that of adjacent countries.” This “continent, bordering on both ‘Europe’ and ‘Asia’ and yet different from each of them, ought to be called . . . ‘Eurasia.’ Instead of the usual two, we distinguish three continents on the mainland of the Old World: Europe, Eurasia, and Asia.”91 To be sure, in a manner common to the Eurasianists, Savitskii acceded that “the limits of ‘Eurasia’ cannot be established according to a single indubitable characteristic, in the same way that no firm border can be established between Europe and Asia.”92 The search for such characteristics to establish lines of division, their discovery, and exploration was the task of Eurasianist scholarship. For Savitskii, “Eurasia is a whole,” an indivisible geographical world, and thus “European” Russia and “Asian” Russia do not exist. As he argued in 1927, “the Urals divide Russia into Cisuralian (to the West) and Transuralian (to the East).”93 Thus, old notions of “Western” and “Eastern” Europe should be revised as well. What used to be referred to as parts of “Eastern Europe” should properly be called “Eurasia,” whereas old “Western and Central Europe” are covered by the concept of “Europe” proper.94 Importantly, Savitskii distinguished between the old concept of “part of the world,” such as Europe, Asia, or Australia, and his own notion of the “geographical world.” These parts of the world were traditionally defined based on a single characteristic—their delimitation by water. In contrast, a “geographical world” is defined by a multitude of characteristics, including morphology of the surface, flora and fauna, climate, types of economic life, and so forth.95 But if Eurasia was a separate geographical world rather than a juncture of Europe and Asia, then how could it be described and what are the specific characteristics of that world? To elaborate a response to this question, Savitskii relied on a long tradition in German geography and Russian ecological thought. The German tradition treated territory not as a separate entity but as a complex that

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included natural conditions of all sorts and the anthropogenic landscape, and it was warmly received and elaborated upon by nineteenth-century Russian geographers, so that the idea of a “territorial complex” became firmly rooted in Russian geographic tradition, too.96 The German tradition found its best-known representative in Friedrich Ratzel, the author of Anthropogeographie.97 Ratzel was interested in the mutual influence of the territory as such, on the one hand, and human societies with their specific forms of social and political organization, on the other. In Russia, the reception of Ratzel’s ideas was especially visible among scholars who studied soils and forests.98 Vasilii Vasil’evich Dokuchaev (1846–1903), the most important scholar of soils, developed a theory of natural zones, which embraced Ratzel’s holistic approach.99 He saw particular soils as both a product and a factor in human-influenced ecosystems. G. F. Morozov, whose work on forests helped to develop a modern notion of biocenosis, spoke of the forest as a “geographical individual” (geograficheskaia lichnost’) and as a “commonwealth” (obshchezhitie) of various elements of a biological, geological, and even social nature.100 Savitskii extended the emerging notion of biocenosis or ecosystem in the works of these scholars to the complex of interdependence between humans and nature. The centerpiece of his approach was the concept of “place-development” (mestorazvitie), which he defined as the “coexistence of living creatures who are mutually adapted to each other and to the environment and who adapted the environment to themselves.”101 For Savitskii, the notion of place-development emerged logically from a series of “localities” or “places” (mest) described by natural sciences: the deposits of minerals (mestorozhdenie), places of soil formations (mestoformovan’ia pochv), the habitats of plant and animal communities (mestoproizrastanie rastitel’nykh soobshchestv, mestoobitanie zhivotnykh soobshchestv).102 In this line, the place-development of human societies (mestorazvitie chelovecheskikh soobshchestv) became a logical step of analysis. The development of this analysis also pointed to the need to cross disciplinary boundaries and to “connect sciences,” which, according to Savitskii, would help in clarifying and delimiting concepts.103 For Savitskii, “the geological organization, the hydrological specifics, the quality of soil, and the character of vegetation are interdependent; they are also connected to the climate and to the morphologic outlook of a given part of the Earth’s surface.”104 Geology and mineralogy, along with studies of soils and forestry, can provide insights and help establish methods for understanding diverse localities of development of plants and animals, and, ultimately, humans, since “not only is the sociohistorical milieu unthinkable without reference to territory but also, without knowing the features of a territory, one cannot comprehend specific phenomena, developments, and the way of life of that sociohistorical milieu.” Hence, Savitskii argued, citing Morozov’s study of the forest, “the sociohistorical milieu and its territory ‘must become one single

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whole for us, it must become a geographical individual or landscape.’”105 Eurasia, thus, should be comprehended “as a separate and holistic place-development.”106 Savitskii also put to ideological use this synthetic geographical science armed with innovative vocabulary as he attempted to uncover the underlying regularity that helped to establish Eurasia as a separate geographical world: natural climatic zones of Russia-Eurasia were to prove the existence of the autarkic Eurasian civilization. Building on Dokuchaev’s method of defining soil zones that stretch roughly from east to west in Russia, Savitskii suggested dividing Russia into a series of latitudinal stripes, each defined by climate, soil, flora, and predominant agricultural methods.107 Savitskii argued that two factors were of prime importance in this process of structuring the territory of Eurasia. First, there was the factor of climate, or temperature changes, with the direction south–north. Under ideal conditions the annual average temperature would fall as we move northward. Savitskii termed this factor “south–north regularity.”108 However, in defining the Earth’s surface this factor does not act alone but in combination with the second factor—humidity. In Eurasia, under ideal conditions, humidity will decrease as we move toward the point most remote from the seashore, a point that will be located in the continental heart of Eurasia. Savitskii termed this factor “center–periphery regularity” since humidity increases with increased distance from the continental center. These two factors together shaped the disposition of soils, the climate, the distribution of flora and fauna and, consequently, regional specializations in agriculture. Savitskii recognized that ideal conditions do not exist in nature and that the relief, the morphology of the Earth’s surface, could influence climatic conditions. Yet, for Savitskii the uniqueness of the Eurasian landmass consisted in the fact that its three great plains are almost completely “excluded from the influence of the relief.” The principles of “south–north” and “center–periphery” regularities ought to work with mathematical precision on the Eurasian plains.109 Considering the predominant influence of the Arctic Ocean, whose shoreline is the greatest in Eurasia, vectors of both regularities will coincide on the south–north line, with minor exceptions. As we move from the south of Russia northward, the temperatures will increase (in absolute numbers), and so will the humidity.110 Of course, the humidity will also increase from east to west, as one approaches the Atlantic Ocean. But, according to Savitskii, this “horizontal” increase is ten times less drastic than the “vertical” south–north increase.111 Accordingly, no longitudinal zones could be established on the territory of Russia. The Russian landscape, flora and fauna, soils, and agriculture change only when one moves northward from the south. Departing from Europe and going eastward, one will encounter a drastic change somewhere along the line of Scandinavia–Baltics–Poland–Ukrainian Black Sea coast, after which the character of the territory, climate, and so on will be essentially the same well into

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Siberia for as long as one remains in one of the latitudinal zones running from West to East. Savitskii’s structuring of Eurasia’s territoriality relied on his notion of a “multicharacteristics region,” which in itself suggested correlations or correspondences of various zones. It is possible that the very idea of “correlations” was suggested to Savitskii by the work of the Russian mathematician and statistitian Evgenii Evgenievich Slutskii (1880–1948), who had popularized Karl Pearson’s notion of correlation in Russia and whose texts were used in statistics courses at the St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute.112 For Savitskii, the principle of correlation was that the zone of a particular type of soil corresponded to a particular kind of vegetation, and both were defined by the climatic conditions (correlations of temperatures and humidity). However, Savitskii also borrowed from early twentiethcentury Russian botanists, such as B. A. Keller and V. V. Alekhin, who developed conceptions of phytocenosis and plant communities, which had implications for the zonal mapping of large territories. Savitskii created what he called “synchorological tables,” in which every botanically defined zone corresponded to a zone based on soil type. Thus, the botanical zone of the tundra corresponds to the soil zone of the swamps, the botanical zone of the forest corresponds to the podzol zone of the soil, the botanical zone of the steppe corresponds to the soil zone of the black soils (chernozem), and the botanical zone of the desert to the soil zone of salinized soils.113 Savitskii repeatedly emphasized that one can observe these regularities in their uninterrupted, continuous work only in Eurasia as a separate world. On the basis of these regularities, he suggested a “synchorological theory,” that is, “a system of mutual correspondences in terms of locality of botanicalgeographical and soil-type zones.”114 The separate geographical world of Eurasia, structured by the regularities of its climate morphology, soils, and vegetation into the subsequent zones of tundra, forest, and steppes, was also unique because “[Russia] is the most continental of all geographical worlds that can be singled out on the continents of the globe and it is of the same spatial scale: nowhere on the surface of the Earth can we observe such a significant landmass whose territory is in general so remote from the sea. Russia-Eurasia is constituted by its ‘continentality’ [kontinental’nost’].”115 In the first Eurasianist collection of articles, Savitskii published a text under the title “Continent-Ocean.” The text clearly drew on British and German commercial geography and Halford Mackinder’s “geopolitics” to create a distinction between the continental and oceanic worlds. According to Savitskii, contemporary economic life hinged on oceanic communication since even the tariff of the efficient German railroad was fifty times higher than tariffs for oceanic shipment over a similar distance.116 Among the different parts of the world most remote from unhindered access to the oceans (the hindrance here can be political, as was

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the case with the Bosporus, or natural, such as long periods of freezing), RussiaEurasia occupied a special place because of the distance between each of its locations and the points of access to the sea. Savitskii argued that Russia-Eurasia was “the most deprived” among the world’s geographical worlds in terms of sea access.117 This, however, did not mean that Eurasia ought to fight for the seas. On the contrary, Savitskii suggested that “even in the case of its most extensive great power expansion, in the observable future Russia has no chance of access to the open sea, if the latter is understood as a water basin that takes direct part in the hydrographic circulation of the world ocean.”118 Given the tremendous cost of participation in the world economy for this continental world, Savitskii argued that Eurasia should not spend energy and resources in pointless attempts to acquire this or that coastal area. For most of Eurasia, no access to the sea would help resolve the curse of continentality and free it from the burden of economic backwardness inherent in its geographic position. The distinction between the oceanic and continental climates hinged on the difference between the thermal capacities of water and the hard land surface. In this distinction, Savitskii saw a parallel to the “juxtaposition of the oceanic economic principle to the continental one, where everything depends on the cost of transportation.”119 It was nature itself that predetermined the need for a separate model of economic exchange on the continent because “for those countries that are distinguished by their continentality, the potential to become the backwater of the world economy if they actively enter the world oceanic exchange becomes a fundamental reality.”120 Savitskii suggested that the solution to this destiny of backwardness was the “elimination of the full domination of the principle of oceanic world economy within the continental world.”121 The self-conscious avoidance of participation in the remote world market and promotion of exchanges between neighboring economic regions should become the guiding principles of economic policy within the increasingly autarkic continental world. Savitskii had a brilliant mind, as did other Eurasianist leaders, and some of his ideas were extraordinarily innovative and creative. He daringly crossed all conventional boundaries and applied his spatial vision of Eurasia to various fields. For instance, he developed a conception of “literary colonization of Russia.” As Trubetskoi described it in a letter to Suvchinskii, “by following the geographic localization of certain literary oeuvres on the map, Savitskii discovers that certain regions are densely colonized in literary sense, while others are not.” According to Savitskii, different regions of Russia were colonized by literature in different periods: in the nineteenth century, it was the Caucasus that attracted the literary creativity, whereas the years of the Revolution and the Civil War saw the increased literary colonization of the Volga region.122 On February 8, 1926, Savitskii gave a talk at the Union of Russian Writers and Journalists in Prague, in which he

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discussed the “place-development” of Russian literature and argued that in recent years, in the works of B. Pilniak, L. Seifullina, N. Tikhonov, and V. Ivanov, he had observed a “convergence of these authors” with Eurasianism as their literary texts reflected greater attention to regions such as the Middle Volga, the Caucasus, and Transuralian Russia.123 Soviet literary creativity thus confirmed the Eurasianist vision of Russia’s territoriality. Savitskii’s geographical invention of Eurasia as a separate, self-contained continent, whose territoriality was governed by the regularities of climate and morphology, natural zones and continentality, presented it as a holistic “placedevelopment,” a logical step in the hierarchy of ecosystems. This invention opened the way to imagining the history of Eurasia as a chronotope, a process that involved both spatial and temporal characteristics. Eurasia could now be imagined as more than just a specific geographical world but also as a locus of development of particular state traditions, cultures, and religions. The geopolitical implications of geographic Eurasia could now be translated to a historical narrative of the emergence of the Russian state in its proper “place-development,” the Eurasian continent.

5. EURASIA AS A CHRONOTOPE: IN SEARCH OF NON-EUROCENTRIC HISTORY

The Eurasianist attempt to construct a historical narrative for the geographical world of Eurasia faced tremendous challenges. Most historical scholarship of the early twentieth century was firmly behind the notion of Europe’s hegemony of the past. Historians and scholars of Russia’s past were no exception, and developed national narratives, which overtime acquired a sanctified status.124 To combine a radical attack on the imperialism of European great powers with an all-inclusive narrative for the former empire was hardly an easy intellectual exercise. It should come as no surprise, then, that this new interpretation caused real consternation, serious criticism, and fierce opposition from contemporaries.125 For educated émigré Russians the Eurasianist vision of Russian history as influenced by the Mongols and Tatars appeared to be an outright attack on Russia’s “established” identity, in particular as it concerned the well-developed narrative of national history, solidified in the works of the great nineteenth-century historians such as S. M. Solov’ev and especially V. O. Kliuchevskii. The students of the latter, P.  N.  Miliukov and A. A. Kizevetter, both liberal and positivist historians, were the most outspoken critics of the Eurasianist vision of history.126 Eurasianism stressed particularism and Russia’s special path; most Russian intellectuals, including leading historians, were fervent defenders of the universal features of the world-historical process,

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and when they spoke of Russia’s specificity, it was to stress its backwardness compared to the standards set by West European nations.127 And yet, the Eurasianist historical view of Russia ultimately differed little from the nineteenth-century nationalist historiography. Although it stressed Asian influences and privileged geographical and ecological determinism, the narrative itself was teleological, positing the goal of Russian control of Eurasia. The critical reception of Eurasianist theories always drew on the works of the great nineteenth-century historians of Russia, who had elaborated a structured and detailed narrative of Russian national history. The main concern of the Eurasianists—the role of the Mongol presence in Russian history—was generally downplayed in the works of these historians, albeit for different reasons.128 The first historian to detail his views on the Mongol presence in Russia, Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin (1766–1826), widely considered the father of both modern historical writing in Russia and modern literary Russian, was also the first court historiographer. Karamzin’s writing developed against the background of intellectual crisis generated by the rise of revolutionary France, which problematized the heretofore highly successful integration of the Russian Empire into the absolutist order of eighteenth-century Europe. Thus, Karamzin sought historical features of Russia (and found them in autocracy) that could prevent it from falling into revolutionary chaos to explain Russia’s lack of enlightenment and to assert its status as a European nation. To achieve these goals, Karamzin traced Russia’s origins to Germanic tribes (Varangians), even if Russia “stood between European and Asian kingdoms” and presented a mixture of influences: “the Oriental mores, which the Slavs brought to Europe, and which were reinvigorated by our long-term ties with the Mongols, the Byzantine [influence] that the Russians borrowed together with the Christian faith and some German [customs], which the Varangians communicated to them.”129 However, in his multivolume history of the Russian state, Karamzin described the Mongol invasion as “the shadow of barbarity, which darkened Russia’s horizon, and had hidden Europe from us at the very time when the most valuable knowledge and skills were multiplying there more and more.” The time of European Renaissance was a time of great tribulations for Russia, which explained its lack of progress in comparison to other European societies: “at this very time Russia, tortured by the Mongols, strained its forces only in order to survive: how could we think about Enlightenment!”130 Russian national character bore the imprint of slavishness developed during the Mongol domination, which deprived the country of its ancient rights and liberties.131 And yet, “the invasion of [the Mongol Khan] Batyi, the mountains of ashes and corpses, the imprisonment and slavery for such a long time, they all were, of course, . . . the greatest disasters,” yet Karamzin still believed that “the

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positive consequences of that invasion are beyond doubt.” If not for the Mongol invasion, Russian principalities would have been swallowed by Poland, Hungary, or Lithuania. Only the greatness of Moscow and its sovereigns saved them, “and Moscow owed its greatness to the khans.”132 The great sovereign and autocratic tradition of Moscow was derived from the political necessity created by the Mongol invasion. But even if the Mongols provided Russia with state unity and helped the evolution of autocracy, their influence on the Russian society, according to Karamzin, was minimal. Russians were aware of “their civic superiority over the nomadic people,” he asserted.133 The Mongols did not intervene in Russian trade, law, or customs, and in terms of cultural development Russia was far ahead of the “Asiatics.”134 In the mid-nineteenth century Sergei Mikhailovich Solov’ev (1820–1879), whose Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen (The history of Russia from ancient times) was another milestone in the development of Russian historical writing, proclaimed the Mongols to be entirely irrelevant for the course of Russian history.135 For Solov’ev, Russian history was a Hegelian teleological process, in which the familial law of the Riurikid princely dynasty was replaced by the more progressive state law of Moscow tsardom. Solov’ev argued that “the relationship to the Mongols must be important for us to the extent that they helped the new order of things [the state principle] to be established.” Solov’ev believed “that the influence of the Tatars was not the dominant or the decisive one” because they “remained far away; they were only interested in gathering the tribute, without intervening in domestic affairs, they left everything as it used to be and, thus, they left full freedom of action to those new relations that had begun in the North [of Russia] before them.” Whatever relations the Russian princes had with the Mongols, Solov’ev argued, “the historian has no right to interrupt the natural course of events from the middle of the thirteenth century, namely, the gradual transition from familial princely relations to state relations, and to insert the Tatar period, to advance the Tatars to the prominent place because this will cover up the main events, the main causes of these events.”136 For Vasilii Osipovich Kliuchevskii (1841–1911), who created perhaps the most influential nationalist narrative of Russian history,137 the Mongols “had removed or facilitated many difficulties created by the Northern Russian princes for themselves and their own country” on the path to national unification.138 Kliuchevskii wrote, “the power of the khan gave at least an illusion of unity to the diminishing and mutually increasingly alien familial corners of the Russian princes.”139 Thus, for Kliuchevskii, the Mongols secured the political unity of the Great Russian nationality at the moment when the princely families were breaking it apart: “the power of the khan was a barbaric Tatar knife that cut through the knots, into which all the affairs [of Russia] were tied by the descendants of Vsevolod III.”140

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Although Kliuchevskii recognized Russian ethnic diversity and labeled the genealogical books of the Muscovite boyars of the sixteenth century “the catalogue of a Russian ethnographic museum” because they contained “Russian, German, Greek, Lithuanian, and even Tatar and Finnish elements,”141 he nevertheless believed in a cultural frontier that separated Russia, “a civilized European nation,” from the “nomadic barbarians.” Moreover, in Kliuchevskii’s historical conception, Russia had shielded Europe from the barbaric menace of the nomads. Kliuchevskii ended his volume of lectures dedicated to the emergence of the “national” Muscovite state with a dramatic illustration of his views: Our nation was by destiny placed at the eastern gates of Europe to guard them from the intrusion of the predatory nomadic Asia. For entire centuries our people had been straining its forces, holding out against this pressure of the Asiatics; it repelled some of these attacks, and fertilized the wide steppes of the Don and the Volga with their bones and its own; it peacefully introduced the others, through the doors of the Christian Church, into the European commonwealth. . . . In this way we became the arrière-garde of Europe, we guarded the rear of European civilization.142

Although Kliuchevskii’s account of the emergence of the Great Russian national state (formirovanie Velikorusskogo gosudarstva) became the blueprint for generations of historians,143 there were dissenting voices in Russian historical writing. In the 1850s Afanasii Prokop’evich Shchapov began his studies of Russian history from a perspective that differed drastically from that of Solov’ev or Kliuchevskii.144 Shapov reproached Russian historians for not paying attention to the country’s ethnic diversity.145 Similar to the Eurasianists, Shchapov believed in the importance of geography in historical developments and compared the Russian colonization of the steppes to British overseas colonization.146 For Shchapov, “the very physical and geographical and geognostic relations of Eastern Asia and Europe preconditioned the specifically continuous and expansive mixture of peoples in Russia,” predetermined by “the great geomorphologic freeway that went along Central Asia and was a natural path by which various peoples of mountainous Central Asia . . . pushed entire hordes of diverse tribes and races little by little into Russia and Siberia.”147 And, thus, “our ethnographic and colonization history represents this very meticization and mixture of the Slavic, Finnish, Turkic, and Mongol tribes.”148 In contrast to Solov’ev and Kliuchevskii, for Shchapov, these processes of meticization and mixing of peoples on the great plains of Eastern Europe and Northern Asia contributed not to the emergence of a united Russian nationality, but, rather, to the creation of regional diversity. Mixing with locals in the north, in Siberia, in the Volga region, the Russians developed regional cultural and linguistic traits, and therefore Russian history had to be studied as histories of

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the regions (oblasti).149 Politically, Shchapov defended a federation of such regions rather than a centralized Russian state.150 In the first postrevolutionary decades Mikhail Nikolaevich Pokrovskii blended Marxist theory, anti-imperialist rhetoric, and assumptions of the classic narrative of Russian national history (from Karamzin to Kliuchevskii) to offer his own version of the Tatar role in Russian history.151 Pokrovskii, who wrote at the time of korenizatsiia policies,152 believed that “the conquest of Russia by the Tatars was by no means an invasion by wild steppe nomads of a civilized agricultural country, as Solov’ev taught; it was a clash of two equal cultures and it is by no means clear which one was at a relatively higher [stage of development].” Pokrovskii was aware of the Eurasianist views and noted that his interpretation was not far from what the Eurasianists believed, but in his mind the lack of a firm Marxist ideology accounted for the fault of the Eurasianist historical account, which was unable to provide a convincing interpretation of history.153 Yet, Marxist ideology did not quite change the outcomes: Pokrovskii asserted that the Tatar yoke had a positive influence in Russian history because it “objectively” helped the emergence of the centralized “feudal” state in Russia thus preparing the ground for the onset of progressive capitalism. The rise of Stalin-sponsored Great Russian nationalism in the mid-1930s again led to new interpretations in the history of the Tatar presence.154 In a normative account of the “history of the USSR” personally supervised by Stalin, the authors claimed that “the Golden Horde did not help create the Russian state; it was in the struggle against the Tatar yoke, as Comrade Stalin defined it, that the Russian people created its state.”155 The new Soviet account, unlike the classic national Russian narrative, provided a detailed description of the emergence of the Mongol Empire, analyzed its social structure in terms of “primitive nomadic feudalism,” and maintained that the princes and the ruling classes of Russia united with the Mongol invaders and suppressed the uprisings by the Russian masses to maintain the exploitative feudal order.156 Despite Soviet innovations, the role of the Mongols in Russian history was still evaluated by how much they contributed to the rise of the Russian state, the ultimate goal of all historical narratives of the scheme of Russian history. Eurasianist historical approaches thus emerged against the background of a very well-established narrative of Russian history. The attack on Eurocentric views unleashed by the Eurasianists opened the possibility to challenge these established views, and this was reflected in a contribution to the second Eurasianist collection by Petr Mikhailovich Bitsilli,157 who taught at the universities of Skopje and Sofia.158 In a brilliant article that built on Trubetskoi’s ultrarelativism, Bitsilli argued that the traditional opposition between “West” and “East” with the implied contrast and “struggle between the principles of freedom and despotism, ‘progress’ and stagnation” can be true only for those who view the history of the

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Old World from the European perspective.159 Bitsilli pointed out that the very concepts of “West” and “East” did not reflect a coherent reality: within the “West” is its own “East,” such as countries under the Byzantine influence and Russia. In the “East,” Iran is opposed to nomadic and Turkic “Turan,” and in the Far East the nomadic Eurasian world is opposed to China. In the latter case, the geographical and cultural roles are reversed: China is a geographical “East” for the nomadic world, whereas culturally it represents “the West.” Bitsilli’s argument was truly relativist: he argued that the view of the historical process depended on the precise location of the observer. From the point of view of Russia, the entire history of the Old World should be seen not as a conflict between the West and the East, but as a process of interaction between the continental center—the nomadic continental world—and the three maritime regions: Europe, Iran and India, and China.160 Accepting the Eurasianist position that the nomadic world of Eurasia, Eastern Europe, and Western Asia was a vital artery that connected together various parts of the Old World, Bitsilli nevertheless offered his own vision of the historical process. In fact, he replaced the Eurasianist stress on the border between Eurasia and Europe and on the holistic unity of Eurasia with one of the first attempts to provide a model of world history. In his conception, the entire Old World constituted a unit of history, and the influence of events in the Far East, such as Chinese advances into the north, was transported by the waves going through the volatile and “elastic” nomadic world of Eurasia to the far western reaches of the great landmass. In an attempt to displace predominant historical views at the time, Bitsilli argued that the East exercised a profound influence on West European development. As Vera Tolz has recently argued, Bitsilli’s views also betrayed the influence of Nikodim Petrovich Kondakov, the founder of Byzantine art history, who had stressed Eastern influences on European art.161 Following Kondakov, Bitsilli argued that not only was the Renaissance made possible by the Byzantine influences, but Frankish and Visigothic art, especially jewelry, was inspired by Persia; “the prototype of the Langobard ornaments was to be found in Egypt”; and the distinction of Western scholastics and Eastern mysticism in Christian thought is contradicted by the predominance of neo-Platonic thought in the East.162 Initially, Trubetskoi was very positive about Bitsilli’s contribution to Eurasianism. In a letter to Suvchinskii he mentioned “an article by Bitsilli, quite interesting, which depicts the history of the entire Old World as a struggle between two geographical elements: the maritime regions (Greece, Rome, Arabia, Persia, India, China), which are striving for separation, and the central regions (Mongols, then Russia), which are striving for unification and the establishment of the “great ways” through the entire continent.”163 Yet Bitsilli’s article, which had been solicited and

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published, did not much satisfy Trubetskoi and by the end of February 1922 he already reported to Suvchinskii: Of the contributors to the second collection I don’t like Bitsilli, either. He sent me a letter from which it follows that he doesn’t really understand what we are talking about. In general, judging by his letter, he is a typical provincial intelligent from S[ocialist]R[evolutionaries], who hasn’t overcome his intelligentsia worldview at all. . . . His article contains obsolete things, and also stupid and tactless things, and he insists on them as a matter of principle. I think his contribution is some kind of misunderstanding. His whole relation to Eurasia consists in the fact that in his article he talks about both Europe and Asia.164

Whereas Trubetskoi had hoped to construct a vision of Eurasia as an autarkic world permeated by Orthodox religiosity, Bitsilli’s contribution aimed to destabilize existing boundaries. Trubetskoi’s dismissal led to Bitsilli’s distancing from the movement, and the latter published only one more article in the collection sponsored by the Eurasianists.165 Bitsilli’s article inspired P. N. Savitskii to write his own text about the relationship between the historical regions.166 Savitskii argued that his work presupposed “the exploration of historical destinies and the geographical nature of the Old World as a [holistic] unity.”167 In response to Bitsilli, Savitskii argued that the dynamics of the Old World history was defined by the opposition between the borderline and maritime regions (China in the east, India and Iran in the south, and the Mediterranean and Western Europe in the west) and the “central world . . . filled by the elastic mass of nomadic inhabitants of the steppe.”168 For Savitskii, the steppe culture was absorbing and dispersing the results of the creativity of settled cultures across the Old World.169 Savitskii’s vision of the steppe was informed by the politics of imperial comparisons: the steppe in his analysis functioned in the same way as oceans in the theory of Alfred Thayer Mahan. The steppe was the major artery of communication, and control over the steppes of the Old World’s heartland gave one or another state immense power. Savitskii used the concept of “sea power” developed by Mahan to describe the steppe region of Central Eurasia.170 This comparison between the steppes and the oceans in the context of linking British and Russian colonialism was first made by A. P. Shchapov, and Savitskii’s borrowing from Shchapov was evident even in his vocabulary. The importance of the steppe in Russian history was linked in Savitskii’s imagination with the positive role of the Tatars: “without tatarshchina [a negative word referring to the Tatar culture] there would have been no Russia.”171

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For Savitskii, pre-Mongol Kievan Rus’ was in decline. Its culture was becoming petty and provincial, and its politics fractional. In architecture, the cathedrals of the earlier Kievan period are superior to those of the later period.172 Critically referring to Platonov’s description of the Tatar conquest as “an accident,” Savitskii argued that in the history of pre-Mongol Russia the elements of instability and inclination toward degradation were visible. In contrast to the West, the Tatars represented a “neutral cultural sphere, which accepted various gods and tolerated different cults” and allowed Russian “national creativity to develop.” Had Russia been conquered by the Turks, “poisoned by Iranian fanaticism and exaltation, its test would have been more challenging and its fate more bitter. If it had been taken by the West, the latter would have ‘taken its very soul out.’”173 The Tatars did not alter the spiritual essence of Russia, but due to their specific role as founders of states, they undoubtedly influenced Russia. According to Savitskii, the Tatars “gave Russia its quality of organizing the military, creating a state center, and achieving stability; they gave it the ability to become a powerful Horde.”174 By creating the powerful Horde out of Russian principalities, the Tatars, with their “feeling of continent,” bequeathed to the Russians their destiny as the great colonizers of the Eurasian spaces. Trubetskoi was not particularly impressed by Savitskii’s contribution and thought that it was “short and in general unclear in its conclusions about the colonization of the steppes as Russia’s mission.”175 He continued to think about historiographic schemes that would integrate Savitskii’s geopolitics and Eurasianist stress on the Mongol influence on Russia. In 1923, Baron Meller-Zakomel’skii invited the Eurasianists to write articles for a collection that was to appear in the United States. Although the book never came out, Trubetskoi began writing a text and shared his ideas with Savitskii. He proposed seeing the Eurasian continent as united by the single system of the steppes, which runs from the west to the east and serves as a continental highway. Unlike the single steppe system, the river systems are several and they connect the north and the south in a number of locations. From, this, Trubetskoi concluded that “he who controls the steppe, controls the entire continent, and he who controls the river, controls only a part of it and is in danger of being subjugated by the lord of the steppes.”176 Initially, only “river-based” states existed in Eurasia, such as the Kievan-Novgorodian, the Uighur, the Bulgar, and so on, but they were all destroyed by the steppe invasions. Chingis-Khan unified Eurasia but made a mistake common to all Turanian conquerors: he absorbed regions into his empire that did not “naturally” belong to Eurasia, such as China. Their separation caused the rise of separatism in the Mongol Empire, and the common Eurasian state fell apart. Finally, Trubetskoi argued, “Russia completed the unification of Eurasia, and this time it was completed firmly since Russia gave a new role to the system of the steppes—apart from

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its role as a means of communication—as an economic, agricultural region.”177 In a conversation with Suvchinskii, Savitskii referred to Trubetskoi’s scheme as a “philosophy of the steppe.”178 However, Trubetskoi was aware of his own limitations. In 1924 he wrote to Suvchinskii that when I tried to develop these ideas in the form of an article, I immediately realized that I am not an historian. Without a significant amount of factual material and without a knowledge of specialized literature I was not capable of illustrating my ideas in detail and convincingly. I could not find any formulae that, without contradicting the results of specialized historical research, would at the same time imbue the facts with the necessary content.179

The task of this specialized historical work was fulfilled by Georgii Vladimirovich Vernadskii (known in the United States as George Vernadsky) (1887– 1973). Vernadskii, who graduated from the same gymnasium in Moscow as Trubetskoi, studied history at Moscow University under Kliuchevskii, Kizevetter, and R. Iu. Vipper. His master’s thesis focused on Russia’s expansion into Siberia, which he treated in the liberal nationalist vein, as free colonization by the people and the fulfillment of the national state.180 Similar to other Eurasianists, Vernadskii left Russia after the defeat of the Wrangel army in Crimea. After a brief sojourn in Athens, Vernadskii settled in Prague, where he became close to Savitskii and began attending Eurasianist seminars. In 1923, the Eurasianists commissioned an article from Vernadskii on the problem of the unification of churches for their anti-Catholic collection, Russia and Latinism, and were apparently satisfied with Vernadskii’s fervent criticism of the Catholics and his opposition to the unification of churches.181 Trubetskoi in particular appreciated Vernadskii’s unassuming style and clarity.182 In 1925, he published his first clearly Eurasianist contribution. The article, “The Two Feats of St. Alexander Nevskii,” presented the period of the Mongol invasion as a pivotal time in Russian national history. According to Vernadskii, the Prince of Galich Daniil Romanovich (1201–1264) chose to seek alliance with the Latin West against the Mongols, and as a result his lands fell under Hungary and Poland, causing a centuries-long split of the Russian national body. On the other hand, Prince Alexander Yaroslavich, called Nevskii (1220– 1263), chose to submit to the Mongols in order to seek their protection from the Germans and the Swedes.183 Following Savitskii, Vernadskii claimed that “Alexander [Nevskii] saw in the Mongols a friendly cultural force that could help him to preserve and confirm Russia’s cultural originality in the face of the Latin West.”184 In two years, Vernadskii published another text in the Eurasianist

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almanac, which explored the influence of “the Mongol Yoke” on Russian history from a non-Eurocentric perspective. Vernadskii claimed that “the cultural hegemony of Europe . . . is a temporary phenomenon. . . . We will witness grandiose shifts among the peoples of Asia and Africa.”185 The Mongols were important for Russia not just because they provided Russia with models of expansion: they included the country in a world empire that tied together maritime agricultural regions (the Black Sea region and part of the Balkans on the one side and China on the other) through the single steppe highway. The Mongol Empire, according to Vernadskii, had equal status with the Roman Empire in terms of its influence on the world, for it, too, united under its power the agricultural regions with the steppes of Eurasia.186 Trubetskoi reacted approvingly to Vernadskii’s writings. He reminded Suvchinskii, “last year we doubted whether we should show him The Legacy of Chingis-Khan. This year, however, I just read his article on the Mongol Yoke (for the almanac) and I see in it the scheme of The Legacy of Chingis-Khan, deepened by a serious and honest spets [Soviet abbreviation for specialist], who also added absolutely wonderful and new facts.” Trubetskoi saw in Vernadskii a scholar who is “working entirely according to our schemes while preserving all the solidity of a good spets and his ability to be originally creative.” Trubetskoi thought of this as proof that the Eurasianist “schemes are so polished that a historian can jump on them and ride, as if on rails, in the direction that we require.” Trubetskoi insisted that “the time has come for us to write textbooks” and expressed his certitude that Vernadskii would do his best in writing a standard historical narrative that the Eurasianists had commissioned from him.187 Vernadskii’s “textbook” indeed rode on the rails of Eurasianist schemes, albeit with a great admixture of the traditional Russian national narrative. It argued, “Eurasia represents that geographical region, with its natural boundaries, that was predestined to be inhabited by the Russian people in an elemental historical process.”188 According to Savitskii’s geographical analysis, Vernadskii defined Eurasia as a system of three great plains—the White Sea–Caucasian, Western Siberian, and of Turkestan—through which stretched the horizontal system of zones, that of tundra, forest, steppe, and desert. The geographic distribution of zones was responsible for the initial importance of the steppe in Eurasia and for the prominence of nomadic states. With the arrival of the Russians, who advanced agriculture into the Eurasian steppe, the forest-zone-based agriculturalists won over the nomads of the steppe and united Eurasia by the end of the nineteenth century, when Russian and Eurasian history, in the words of Vernadskii, “finally merged.”189 Vernadskii presented the entire history of Eurasia as a sequence of single statehoods replaced by systems of states. The list below illustrates this sequence:

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First period a. Single statehood (the Scythians) b. System of states (Sarmatians, Goths) Second period a. Single statehood (empire of the Huns) b. System of states (Avars, Khazars, Volga Bulgars, Rus’, Polovtsy) Third period a. Single statehood (the Mongol Empire) b. System of states—the first stage in the dissolution of the Mongol Empire (Golden Horde, Persia, China) c. System of states—the second stage in the dissolution of the Mongol Empire (Lithuania, Rus’, Khanate of Kazan, Kirghiz, Uzbek, and Oirat-Mongol states) Fourth period a. Single statehood (Russian Empire–Union of Soviet Republics)190

Logically, in the fourth period the single statehood of the Russian Empire and the USSR should be replaced by the system of states. Vernadskii was very careful to explain that the unity of Eurasia achieved by the USSR was not in danger of being destroyed in the logically following period of dissolution: in the USSR, Eurasia acquired an unprecedented degree of economic unity and was not likely to fall apart.191 Vernadskii’s work was not original. It faithfully combined Eurasianist ideas with a national narrative of prerevolutionary Russian historiography and saw Eurasian history as a teleological process, in which Russians came to occupy the Eurasian space that was predestined for them. The non-Russians, and the Mongols in particular, were an element of this process without any particular subjectivity or agency. As in the works of Solov’ev or Kliuchevskii, their function was preserving Russian originality vis-à-vis the West, or creating the circumstances for the emergence of the Russian national state. The Eurasianist group was not united in evaluating Vernadskii’s historical writing. For Arapov, Vernadskii’s work lacked a “formula containing our understanding of the logic and purpose of the historical process (we in general lack such a formula and this is a big problem!), and, correspondingly, that particular understanding is not pursued and emphasized sufficiently in the text itself, whereas it must be drawn as a red line, like the struggle of classes for the Communists.”192 D. P. Sviatopolk-Mirskii wrote to Suvchinskii: “I have read Vernadskii. It’s weak. I think he is simply quite stupid. The only merit of the book is that it introduces

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a certain amount of interesting and little-known material.”193 Suvchinskii, who had the power of de facto veto over the Eurasianist publishing activities, kept the book from being published long enough for Vernadskii to write an outraged letter to Savitskii, in which Vernadskii asserted that he was not prepared to accept Suvchinskii’s censorship.194 Since Suvchinskii also objected to the publication of Vernadskii’s article on the Mongol yoke in the Vremennik of 1925, Vernadskii pointed out that the situation had become quite extraordinary: he kept writing and submitting articles to the Eurasianist Publishing House and the articles did not appear, whereas other Eurasianists—Sviatopolk-Mirskii and MalevskiiMalevich in particular—were busy writing historical surveys themselves. In his letter to Savitskii, Vernadskii presented strict conditions under which the book was to be published.195 The Eurasianist movement underwent a crisis and disintegrated in 1928–1929. However, Savitskii continued his cooperation with Vernadskii and in 1934 organized the publication of another “textbook.” By that time, with the help of M. Rostovtzeff, Vernadskii had moved to the United States and assumed a teaching position at Yale.196 Vernadskii’s Experiment in Eurasian History (Opyt istorii Evrazii), unlike his “Outline of Russian History,” was an explicit attempt to write a retrospective history of the existence of the Russian Empire/USSR as a single state. True to Eurasianist dogmas, Vernadskii sought to provide a history of Eurasia as a “history of the commonwealth of different peoples on the grounds of Eurasian place-development [mestorazvitie], of their mutual gravitation and repulsion, and of their relation, together and separately, to external, extra-Eurasian peoples and cultures.”197 Although Vernadskii admitted that in terms of social and economic conditions, culture, and religion the peoples of Eurasia differed, he referred to Eurasianist research to illustrate the traits of unity. In particular, without naming Jakobson, he pointed out the major characteristics of the Eurasian language union as described by the latter, and also repeated Trubetskoi’s theses about the shared political culture of all peoples of Eurasia (in particular, the alleged necessity to be subject to a strong central authority).198 Vernadskii did not conceal the fact that his “Eurasian history” was in a sense an attempt to find a “third way” between two different interpretations of Russian history. The first, represented by émigré historians, heirs of nineteenth-century historiography, insisted on “Russian history” as a history of the Russian people and its state. The second, represented by the Bolshevik historian M. N. Pokrovskii, denied the term “Russian history” its right to existence because it was a reactionary and chauvinist attempt to suppress the nationalities of Russia. Instead, the Soviet historians chose the term “history of the peoples of the USSR.” Vernadskii argued that in Marxist historiography the latter term was not well elaborated and was used interchangeably to designate “Russian history” or just history of national

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minorities. Only gradually did Soviet historians arrive at a sense of the history of the peoples of the USSR as something coherent, “united by a projection of the future cultural and historical unity.”199 Although Vernadskii admitted that his history of Eurasia was “history of the peoples of the USSR from the point of view of cultural and historical unity,” he objected to the Soviet term because in his view “it presupposes studies of each separate people’s history” rather than a more holistic approach implied by “history of Eurasia.”200 The very logic of his understanding of Russian history as a history of the Russians’ taking possession of Eurasia implied that at a certain point the history of Eurasia simply coincides with Russian history. What had begun as a project of inclusion of different peoples in the common historical process ended as a celebration of Russian colonial expansion and imperialism.201 As he argued, with the Russian subjugation of Turkestan in the 1860s, the firm and final political unity of Eurasia was achieved and the periodic change of Eurasian rhythms had ended. As Vernadskii put it, “history merged with modernity.”202 Although Eurasianist historical views included historical relativism and a criticism of Eurocentrism, their focus remained on the holistic unity of Eurasia underwritten by geographical determinism. In Eurasianist conceptions of history, non-Russian populations featured minimally, except for the Mongols. The latter, though, functioned either as a factor that underscored Russia’s national specificity vis-à-vis Europe and the West, or, following nineteenth-century nationalist historiography, as a simple mechanical factor in the emergence of the Russian national state. The Eurasianist attempt to create a new “Eurasian” history was ultimately futile because they failed to produce an alternative to the nation- and state-centered narrative of nineteenth-century historians, so that the subject of their history essentially merged with “the Russian people” predestined to occupy the national territory of Eurasia. The subject of the historical process as viewed by the Eurasianists remained the same as that in the histories of the great nineteenthcentury historians.

C H A P T E R

5

THE STRUCTURES OF EURASIA Trubetskoi, Savitskii, Jakobson, and the Making of Structuralism

1. A FORGOTTEN SOURCE

For most Western scholars the East European roots of structuralism remain, at best, a vague or contested notion. Many authors noted the influence of Roman Jakobson and of structuralist linguistics of the Prague Circle on Claude LéviStrauss and Jacques Lacan, and the two scholars repeatedly acknowledged the fundamentally important role of Jakobson’s structural phonology in providing theoretical foundations for their own work. The role of linguistics as a “model” for the emerging structuralist paradigm of the post–World War II period has thus been sufficiently documented.1 Still, it would probably come as a great surprise to most Western scholars that some of the ideas that Jakobson communicated to his French counterparts in the 1940s and 1950s took shape in the context of his collaboration with participants in the Eurasianist movement. That collaboration is the subject of this chapter, in which I analyze the paradoxical intellectual alliance between two Eurasianist thinkers, the linguist Nikolai Trubetskoi and the geographer and economist Petr Savitskii, on the one hand, and Roman Jakobson, on the other, in the course of the 1920s and 1930s. This alliance emerged across many lines of division and was founded on the participants’ shared commitments to what Patrick Sériot in his pathbreaking study so aptly termed “national epistemology.”2 The three thinkers subscribed to a vision of a unique Russian scholarly tradition based on a holistic approach, teleology, and resistance to positivism and evolutionism. Developing alongside the anticolonialist rhetoric of the Eurasianist thinkers, this national epistemology also allowed the trio to question and subvert what they perceived as a hierarchy in the production of knowledge in Europe. Although Jakobson and the Eurasianist thinkers arrived

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at that consensus from vastly different political and intellectual backgrounds, they all shared a critical attitude to European modernity: for Jakobson, “Europe” stood for bourgeois conformism resistant to intellectual innovation, while for the Eurasianist thinkers Europe was both a leveling force that eliminated differences and a source of the detested Marxist Socialism.3 The relationship between the emerging structuralist approaches in linguistics and Eurasianism was not a straightforward one. As Jakobson and Trubetskoi developed the structuralist approach in phonology, they increasingly relied on the rhetoric of “systemic” study of Eurasia produced by the Eurasianist thinkers. Concepts were shared between Eurasianism and emerging phonology in what we can call, following Pierre Bourdieu, the “political ontology” of the scholarly and ideological language of the Eurasianist scholars.4 For instance, the idea of the language union introduced by Trubetskoi in 1923 in his famous article on linguistic diversity and developed by Jakobson responded to phonology’s concern for the priority of acquired characteristics over genetic ones and satisfied the Eurasianist insistence on the unity and historical convergence of Eurasia’s groups. Similarly, the Eurasianist scholars rose against what they saw as the standardizing and leveling work of modernity and mourned the destruction of God-given differences. The understanding of phonemes as “bundles of distinctive features” fulfilling the basic meaning-producing function in the language became one of the building blocks of rising phonology. The Eurasianist commitment to the notion of teleological and law-governed (Gezetsmaessig [Germ.], zakonomernyi [Russ.]) evolution— the idea upon which the concept of Eurasia as a historically constituted entity rested—was paralleled by the centrality of teleology to phonology’s shift of focus to the function of distinctive elements of the system of sounds in language. As historians of Russia insist on exploring their subject within the “comparative framework of European modernity,” this overlapping of Eurasianism and linguistics shows how an ideology that developed as a reaction to the dissolution of the Russian imperial space and stressed Russia’s Sonderweg turned out to be an important influence in shaping an international scholarly movement.5 This overlap of Eurasianism and structuralism, peculiar or arcane as it might have been, sheds light on the ways in which empires and their disintegration were conceptualized. It also suggests that the concepts and ideas of some of the central intellectual streams of the twentieth century, such as formalism and structuralism, were connected to these conceptualizations.6 Scholars increasingly uncover imperial contexts of anthropology, sociology, geography, and historical writing, but tracing the imperial roots of as highly technical and abstract a discipline as linguistics proved to be a more challenging task. Nevertheless, Eurasianism’s influence on structuralism complicates our understanding of how empires and their legacies shaped the production of disciplinary knowledge.7

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My approach to the interconnectedness of structuralism and Eurasianism relies on the work of Patrick Sériot, whose brilliant study uncovered epistemological connections between these two intellectual realms.8 Sériot argued that Russian Eurasianists represented a deviation in the story of the Western intellectual movement—because they replaced structure, understood as a mental construct and an intellectual instrument, with an ontological object (Eurasia), whose existence was taken as a matter of faith. The neo-Platonic and Orthodox Christian roots of this move are easily identifiable and are beyond doubt. Yet there is no reason to think that structuralism as it developed in the work of Lévi-Strauss and others after their encounter with Jakobson’s thought was any different. The former in particular wholeheartedly accepted the Eurasianist understanding of structure. Instead of the cursed question of Russian deviation from the perceived “norm” of Western thought, I focus on the historical contexts that shaped the uneasy and often contradictory role of imperial imaginations in developing what was arguably the world’s most influential intellectual movement in the twentieth century.

2. LÉVI-STRAUSS AND JAKOBSON

Claude Lévi-Strauss met Roman Jakobson in New York at the École Libre des Hautes Études, an institution established under the charter of de Gaulle’s government in exile (the École was formally inaugurated on February 12, 1942).9 Among many refugee scholars who came to the United States to join the École were several Russian émigrés: the political theorist Boris Mirkine-Guetzevitch (whom Lévi-Strauss credited with the idea of the École in exile), Alexandre Koyré (a historian of philosophy and the École’s secretary), and the linguist Roman Jakobson. Koyré introduced Lévi-Strauss to Jakobson.10 The two scholars agreed to attend each other’s lectures in New York. Their discussions continued in the summer of 1942 on the campus of Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, where Jean Wahl revived the interwar tradition of the Pontigny seminars.11 As Lévi-Strauss himself admitted, the encounter with Jakobson was crucial for his intellectual biography. He explained that he “was at the time a kind of a naive structuralist.” Lévi-Strauss confessed, “[I] did structuralism without knowing it. Jakobson uncovered for me a doctrine that was already constituted in a discipline: it was linguistics, which I never practiced. For me, it was a revelation.”12 Elsewhere, Lévi-Strauss engaged the work of Jakobson and Trubetskoi (calling the latter “the illustrious founder of structural linguistics”) to demonstrate his own method of synchronic analysis of kinship systems as opposed to

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“individualist” and “atomistic” interpretations based on history.13 He also told the story of Jakobson’s contacts with Jacques Lacan, who was already influenced by another former Eurasianist, Alexandre Kojève, whose lectures on Hegel Lacan had attended.14 Jakobson inspired Lévi-Strauss to write The Elementary Structures of Kinship, a work that revolutionized anthropology by moving it from genetic analyses of ethnic cultures to the study of structures of culture and of acquired characteristics. The encounter between Lévi-Strauss and Jakobson did not end with the former’s departure for France after the war. Until Jakobson’s death in 1982, the two corresponded actively and met regularly both in the United States and Europe.15 Their correspondence began in 1942, when Lévi-Strauss shared with Jakobson his knowledge of the replacements of consonants in native languages in Brazil.16 In subsequent years, they discussed the mutual relations of phonology and anthropology, produced a structuralist analysis of a Baudelaire poem, and discussed contemporary political and scholarly affairs. Lévi-Strauss assisted in producing Jakobson’s book on Prince Igor’s campaign, the author’s controversial attempt to prove the authenticity of the Russian medieval tale; and Jakobson counted LéviStrauss in “his camp” against Andre Mazon.17 Jakobson shared Slavic terms of kinship with Lévi-Strauss and provided explanations for them.18 Moreover, the two scholars exchanged opinions on contemporary works in anthropology, and Lévi-Strauss sought Jakobson’s advice on the use of linguistic material in his structuralist conception of kinship.19 While there can be little doubt that Jakobson (and, via Jakobson, Trubetskoi and Savitskii) exercised a powerful influence on the main structuralist, the conspicuously missing element in this story is a study of the intellectual and political context in which the structuralist rhetoric of Jakobson and Trubetskoi emerged in interwar Europe. When Jakobson met LéviStrauss, he had just arrived from Europe as a refugee. He also came with a history of almost two decades of collaboration with two Eurasianist scholars, Trubetskoi and Savitskii. This collaboration was not necessarily part of the formal structure of the Eurasianist movement. In the late 1920s, the leaders of the Eursianist organization were N. S. Trubetskoi, P. N. Savitskii, P. P. Suvchinskii, P. S. Arapov, and P. N. Malevskii-Malevich. The scholarly trio of Trubetskoi, Savitskii, and Jakobson thus did not coincide neatly with the Eurasianist leadership. Their collaboration intensified with the foundation of the Prague Linguistic Circle in 1926,20 and continued throughout the 1930s, while the Eurasianist movement as an organized political group disintegrated in 1929. But if the Eurasianist consensus of the 1920s was broken in 1929, another one began to emerge between the scholars who sought to substantiate the existence of Eurasia through the overlapping studies of language and geography.

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3. “NOT ENTIRELY OURS:” ROMAN JAKOBSON AND THE EURASIANISTS

Roman Osipovich Jakobson was born in Moscow in 1896 to a Russian Jewish family.21 His father, an immigrant from the Habsburg Empire, was a prominent chemist, engineer, and industrialist. Roman Jakobson studied at the gymnasium of the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages, a prestigious school in Moscow (initially founded as an Armenian school but later emerging as a leading school of Oriental scholarship). Lazarev Institute was a colonial institution, as it sought to prepare the children of the elites of eastern borderlands of Russia for imperial service.22 The institute was directed by the academician Vsevolod Fedorovich Miller, one of Russia’s leading folklorists and specialists in Iranian languages. Jakobson entered Moscow University in 1914. At the university he became involved with an extraordinary group of philologists and linguists and in 1915 founded the Moscow Linguistic Circle (MLC), of which he was chair until 1919.23 He also became fascinated with the poetry of the Futurists Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Maiakovskii, and published, together with the renowned Aleksei Kruchenykh, transrational poetry of his own under the pseudonym Aliagrov. It was in Moscow that he met and befriended a fellow student of philology, Prince Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetskoi. Jakobson recalled in the 1970s how he and Trubetskoi regularly returned from meetings of the MLC or the Dialectological Commission together and spent hours discussing linguistics, history, and literature. This friendship developed into a lifelong intellectual collaboration. Jakobson remained deeply committed to the memory of Trubetskoi and to the promotion of his work after the latter’s death in June 1938. It is difficult to imagine how this strange intellectual alliance emerged and developed, transcending differences of origin, social position, and political views, not to mention the psychological traits of both scholars. Trubetskoi was personally conservative, extremely religious, and deeply nationalist. He was also a fervent anti-Semite who associated Jews with the destructive force of all-leveling modernity (Jakobson tended to dismiss Trubetskoi’s anti-Semitism as a cultural atavism of the Russian aristocracy).24 His literary tastes were very timid compared to Jakobson’s: Trubetskoi thought little of Ilya Ehrenburg’s experimental novels and famously dismissed Boris Pasternak as “overrated.” Jakobson, on the contrary, was revolutionary, innovative, experimental, cosmopolitan, and left-wing. Trubetskoi’s life appears to have been compartmentalized to a great extent: he functioned in two different planes of existence—in one, he sought to recover the lost foundations of life, culture, and religion through the holistic teaching of Eurasianism, and in the other, he pursued a radically innovative scholarly agenda. Jakobson’s biographical trajectory was less schizophrenic: he made innovation and change his most important intellectual and even biographical pursuits. His involvement with Russian modernist

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poetry, Formalism, Eurasianism, Slavic studies in the United States, and structuralism colored those intellectual ventures with a reddish shade of revolutionary turmoil.25 While Trubetskoi often reflected pan-European Kulturpessimismus and saw modernity as a leveling and standardizing force that eliminates differences, Jakobson’s texts radiated with cultural optimism and futuristic pathos. In the years of the Revolution, Jakobson shared some of the Eurasianists’ experiences. Not unlike Suvchinskii, Jakobson translated his cultural optimism into an attempt to work in Soviet Russia, hoping that the Revolution would open up new paths for creativity. He continued to serve as chair of the Moscow Linguistic Circle until 1919, and actively participated in the work of OPOJAZ (Society for the Study of Poetic Language), an informal group of literary scholars who laid the foundations of the formalist school. The Revolution did not disrupt Jakobson’s focus on the Futurists, and in 1919 he wrote his first book on Velimir Khlebnikov, the famous author of innovative “transrational” poetry. However, as the Bolshevik grip on the country tightened, Jakobson went abroad and became head of the press bureau of the Soviet Red Cross mission in Prague. His position in Russian émigré circles was precarious: he was working for the Soviets, he remained a Soviet citizen, he was Jewish, and he was left-wing. Although he departed from Russia, he was not a full-fledged participant in émigré life. After the publication of his famous article “On a Generation That Squandered Its Poets” in 1930, Jakobson chose not to return to the Soviet Union. By that time, he had already embarked on a scholarly career abroad. In the early 1920s Jakobson developed close ties with the Czech literary milieu and published scholarly studies of Czech poetry. In 1930, following Trubetskoi’s advice, he defended his doctoral dissertation at the German University in Prague (where Savitskii taught geography and economics) and soon received a position at the University of Brno, which he occupied until 1939. Jakobson’s dissertation was a study of the historical evolution of phonological changes in Russian, which together with Trubetskoi’s Grundzuege der Phonologie laid the foundation for phonology as a distinct field preoccupied with differentiating the functions of sounds in language. The Nazi occupation of Central Europe interrupted Jakobson’s scholarly career. A mind-boggling flight from Czechoslovakia to Denmark in April 1939, then Norway (where Jakobson arrived as Europe officially descended into World War II on September 1, 1939) and Sweden (to which he fled literally before the advancing Nazi occupation forces from Norway and where he completed his famous work on aphasia) followed. In May 1941, Jakobson and his wife departed from Sweden for the United States on a cargo ship (Ernst Cassirer was another refugee passenger).26 Jakobson and Trubetskoi began their correspondence in emigration in 1920, as soon as they arrived in Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, respectively, and continued it until Trubetskoi’s death in 1938. They also met regularly, even if not

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often, in person. Jakobson visited Trubetskoi in Vienna, and Trubetskoi came to Prague on various occasions. Their very last meeting occurred on February 12, 1938, when the Austrian chancellor Schuschnigg met Hitler at Berchtesgaden in a vain attempt to prevent the Anschluss.27 This final meeting was focused on discussions regarding interpretations of distinctive features in phonology, and Jakobson shared his idea of the binary nature of all distinctive features in phonemes with a skeptical Trubetskoi. Judging from their correspondence, one cannot say that Trubetskoi regularly informed Jakobson about Eurasianist developments. He nevertheless felt obliged to explain his first book Europe and Mankind as soon as it came out in 1920 and to discuss it with Jakobson.28 Soon, Trubetskoi sent Jakobson the first Eurasianist collection of articles (Exodus to the East) and introduced him to the tenets of Eurasianism: it would be very interesting to know your opinion about it [the collection]. Its essence is in finding and probing new paths for some new direction that we call Eurasianism [evraziistvo], a term that might not be entirely apt but it strikes the eye, it is provocative and therefore suitable for agitation purposes. This direction is in the air, I sense it in the poetry of M. Voloshin, A. Blok, Esenin, in “Russia’s Paths” by Bunakov-Fundaminskii, and, at the same time, in conversations with some extreme right-wingers and even with an inveterate Kadet.29

Trubetskoi presented Eurasianism to Jakobson not as a local Russian ideology that redefined the country’s identity vis-à-vis Europe but as a part of some universal and critical revolution in the zeitgeist, which was undoubtedly appealing to Jakobson. Trubetskoi stressed “a shift in the consciousness of the intelligentsia” which “may well sweep off all the old directions and will create new ones, on entirely new foundations,” so the intellectual’s task was to “arouse thought, to shake it out of slumber, to awaken it, to move it from a dead point, to tease it with unacceptable paradoxes, to stubbornly reveal what people attempt to hide from themselves.”30 During their meetings throughout the 1920s, Trubetskoi attempted to convert Jakobson to the Eurasianist ideas and spirit. In the winter of 1926, Suvchinskii sought Trubetskoi’s advice on potential authors for the literary journal Versty, which Suvchinskii had cofounded with D. P. Sviatopolk-Mirskii in Paris. Suvchinskii considered Jakobson’s candidacy, and Trubetskoi warned Suvchinskii: “I would wait with inviting Jakobson. After all, he has a certain reputation and the appearance of his name in the first issues of the journal would create a presumption. With time, though, you need to invite him: he is very talented.” This advice was coupled with a typically anti-Semitic diatribe by Trubetskoi: “In general, fewer

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kikes. You shouldn’t pursue Pasternak: I think his reputation is overrated.”31 Still, Trubetskoi again communicated his opinion about Jakobson to Suvchinskii after a Prague meeting with prominent Soviet philologists. Trubetskoi conceded that he was “especially close to and united with Jakobson.” Jakobson was Trubetskoi’s closest ally in scholarship and even beyond it: “Even about everyday life [byt] he is now saying the ‘right’ words. He is going to write about it for Versty, although he asks not to reveal his name.”32 However, Trubetskoi’s Eurasianist proselytizing efforts appear to have failed and he conceded to Suvchinskii in the fall of 1927 that “unfortunately, [Jakobson] is hopeless not only with respect to religion but also with respect to his political convictions. He accepts neither ideocracy nor étatism, however much I try.”33 The Eurasianist movement operated in the milieu of anti-Bolshevik Russian émigrés, however ambivalent the Eurasianists themselves might have been toward the rulers of Soviet Russia. They hesitated to embrace Jakobson for a number of reasons. His Jewish origin was an important consideration for them in the context of their attempts to secure broad support among the generally conservative and anti-Semitic émigrés. Similarly, Jakobson’s association with Futurists such as Vladimir Maiakovskii, his left-leaning sympathies, and, above all, his work for the Soviet mission in Prague were barely acceptable to the Eurasianists and their émigré audience. Still, Trubetskoi saw Jakobson as his immediate ally in the scholarly battles that accompanied the emergence of structural phonology. As Trubetskoi grew increasingly disenchanted with Eurasianism’s political entanglements, which he blamed for taking up his scholarly time, he also grew closer to Jakobson, with whom he shared his linguistic ideas. Trubetskoi introduced Jakobson to Savitskii, another Eurasianist scholar. Since Jakobson and Savitskii both lived in Prague (where Jakobson resided until he assumed a position at the Masaryk University in Brno), they became close and actively exchanged ideas. When the Eurasianist movement as a political organization and a publishing venture disintegrated in 1928–1929, both Trubetskoi and Savitskii broke off relations with Suvchinskii. However, a new alliance emerged. This time, it was informal and scholarly, and consisted of Jakobson, Savitskii, and Trubetskoi. The new alliance had little liking for the Eurasianist ambitions to convert the Soviet leadership or participate in underground networks of spies and terrorists. However, it continued to pursue at least some of the issues that preoccupied the Eurasianists in the 1920s: the unity of the Eurasian space as reflected in geography, linguistics, and history. Instead of the religious and metaphysical substantiation of Eurasia, the new alliance promoted the “systemic” and “structural” methods of describing that unity. As Savitskii wrote to Jakobson in 1930, their work had to be based on the understanding of “Russian studies as a ‘system’” and “autarkic regularity” (samozakonnost’).34

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Trubetskoi’s correspondence contains certain clues that allow us to reconstruct the attitude of the Eurasianist leaders toward Jakobson. The latter himself, though, left very few specific hints as to what attracted him to the circle of the Eurasianists. He called Savitskii “a genius inventor of structuralist geography” after Savitskii’s death, and made the propagation of Trubetskoi’s legacy his personal mission.35 Beyond that, it seems we know very little about Jakobson’s ideas with respect to Eurasianism as a whole. We can speculate that he found himself in relative isolation in the Russian-speaking world (as a former Soviet employee, he was suspicious of the émigrés, and as an émigré he was persona non grata for the Soviets). Although Jakobson established close and lasting ties to Czech intellectuals, especially in the period of the Prague Linguistic Circle, the Eurasianists were the only Russians in the immediate proximity with whom he socialized. Certain biographical details—such as Jakobson’s baptism in 1936 into Orthodox Christianity (Savitskii was his godfather) and the warmth and intensity of his personal correspondence—seem to confirm this notion. Jakobson’s lifelong rift with Viktor Shklovsky centered on the question of where a Russian philologist should reside, and Jakobson’s connection to the fiercely nationalist Eurasianists might have been recompense for the inability to practice Russian philology “normally,” that is, in Russia proper. On the other hand, Jakobson recognized and valued the Eurasianist rhetoric of drastic innovation and the reconsideration of established ideas and assumptions. Eurasianism was a radically innovative movement that promoted a conservative vision of Eurasia as an antimodernist utopia. Jakobson was attracted to the radically innovative method if not to the vision itself. His lasting commitment to some Eurasianist ideas may substantiate this point. In 1972 Jakobson suggested to an Italian publisher in Turin a translation of Trubetskoi’s early ideological work, Europe and Mankind, and wrote a preface to this publication. In this text, Jakobson fondly interpreted Trubetskoi’s vicious attack on European civilization and his critique of European cultural imperialism as informed by his search for innovation in humanities.36 Yet, among the members and fellow-travelers of Eurasianism Jakobson’s position was unique. On the one hand, he did not—and could not—fully participate in all aspects of the movement. He did not take part in the editorial work of Eurasianist publications and was not part of the movement’s policymaking. He was completely excluded from all the meetings and conversations regarding the underground activities of the Eurasianists. The movement’s leaders treated him as an outsider, whose occasional contributions might be helpful for Eurasianism’s overall cause. At the same time, Jakobson shared some of Eurasianism’s key interests. These interests, however, were reinterpreted by Jakobson in his typical manner. Throughout his scholarly and literary career, Jakobson created communities of

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belonging, which often coincided with intellectual projects that had geocultural underpinnings. From the Futurists and the OPOJAZ in Russia, to Czech literature and Eurasianism in emigration, to Slavic studies and structuralism in the United States, these intellectual projects allowed the great linguist to reinvent himself and to endow his communities of belonging with new meanings. In the case of Eurasianism, its rhetoric of innovation and its scholarly edge were appealing to Jakobson, yet, he creatively reinterpreted Eurasianism’s ideology to suit his own interests: with its critique of the hierarchies of cultural and scholarly production, Eurasianism, not unlike phonology, was for him a field capable of revolutionizing epistemological foundations of scholarly research. Last but not least, Jakobson found the Eurasianist vision of a specifically Russian scientific tradition appealing and took part in its elaboration.

4. IN SEARCH OF RUSSIAN SCIENCE

For all Eurasianist thinkers the new scientific era of which they were the harbingers was connected with ideas and methods rooted in the Russian intellectual tradition. They viewed their scholarly debates in respective disciplines—such as linguistics—in light of the epistemological differences between “cultures.” As Trubetskoi reminded Jakobson in 1934, the French dislike of Jakobson’s scholarly work was related to a “certain repulsion of the French from those forms of Eurasian-Danubian culture in which contemporary phonology expresses itself.”37 Contemporary, that is, structuralist phonology rooted in “Eurasian-Danubian” culture was to become a tool to subvert the hierarchy of scholarly production in Europe. Reflecting the new intellectual mood of the 1920s that stressed national scholarly traditions, the Eurasianist thinkers spoke of the specific “Russian science,” which differed from its Western counterpart by preferences in the object of study and a specific method.38 That method—“systemic” or “structuralist”—was opposed to the “atomistic” science of the nineteenth century. “Russian science” was teleological, and it embraced the entirety of facts and attempted to find regularities that governed the ocean of data. The Eurasianists offered an unprecedented attempt to translate their ideological doctrine of Russia’s “special path” into a conception (a range of conceptions, to be precise) of a “Russian science” as the source of a new scholarly paradigm. Petr Savitskii, a geographer, was probably the first Eurasianist thinker to offer a vision of national science. His own geographical method was derived from the Russian tradition of Naturphilosophie and Russian geographical scholarship, in particular, from Vasilii Dokuchaev’s and Gavriil Tanfil’ev’s systemic study of soils.39 Savitskii spatialized scholarly tradition by suggesting that Dokuchaev’s approach

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was determined by its very location (which, in this case, was also the object of study) in Russia. This idea fitted neatly with Savitskii’s key geographical concept of “place-development” (mestorazvitie) designed to describe Russia-Eurasia as a close and autarkic system. For the Eurasianist scholar the connections between Russian geography’s allegedly unique methods and its unique object of study were obvious and natural. He suggested that in European geography there existed a geomorphologic focus defined by Europe’s intense geomorphologic structure, whereas in Russian geography the emphasis is upon geobiology and the study of soils. Morphology, due to the lack of mountains, is relatively unimportant. The lack of significant mountain ranges that could have changed the climatic conditions across the country as well as Russia’s vast expanses made it possible to observe the zonal structure of soils and flora (the structure dependent on the south–north direction of climatic change) at its clearest. In a way, Russia was a polygon for the study of climate and vegetation zones running uninterruptedly from the Atlantic seabed to the Pacific. That is why, Savitskii believed, the study of forests became so prominent here, and that is why the science of soil conditions was born. While specifically Russian geographic methods and objects stressed the uniqueness and wholeness of Eurasia as a natural complex, they also illustrated the opposition between Europe and Eurasia. Savitskii even asserted that it was possible to speak of two different worlds of geography, the Russian and the European, each with its specific poetics and language. Was it not true that Russians borrowed from the Germans most of the terms used in geomorphology, whereas Russian words that designate soils and natural zones, such as chernozem, podzol, or steppes, gained currency abroad? But Russian geographical science was not just a “place-development.” For Savitskii, it was methodologically unique because it also promoted a synthetic method of studying natural and social phenomena.40 In the Russian geographic tradition, Savitskii saw the tendency of Russian geography not to limit itself to descriptions of “atomized objects” (we can note the appearance of this term in Savitskii’s work here and follow it through Jakobson to Lévi-Strauss) but to engage in a systemic exploration of interrelationships between different forms of organic and nonorganic nature on the given territory, including humans and their societies. In his 1927 work on Russia’s geographic specifics, Savitskii quoted Dokuchaev’s work On the Teaching of Natural Zones, in which the latter stressed the interrelationships between elements as deriving from a holistic approach of Naturphilosophie: It cannot be doubted that the knowledge of nature—of its forces, its elements, its phenomena, and its physical bodies—has made such gigantic steps in the course of the nineteenth century that the century itself is often called the age of natural sciences

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and natural scientists. However, it was mostly separate bodies that were studied, such as minerals, rocks, plants, and animals, and separate phenomena, separate elements, such as fire (volcanism), water, earth, air. We shall repeat: in that science may have reached astounding results. But it did not study their interrelationships, this genetic, eternal, and always regular [zakonomernyi, Gesaetzmaessig] connection that exists between forces, bodies, and phenomena, between organic and nonorganic nature, between the realms of plants, animals, and minerals on the one hand, and man, his life, and even his spiritual world, on the other. Yet, it is these interrelationships, these regular mutual interactions that form the essence of our cognition of nature, the kernel of true Naturphilosophie, the best and highest charm of natural sciences!41

One of the key elements of Savitskii’s work was his attempt to substantiate the specificity and geographical unity of Russia-Eurasia. To do so, he constructed a series of regularities that allegedly governed this unity and sharply separated Eurasia from Europe. One such regularity consisted in the principle of climatic change (temperature and humidity) along the axis north–south, which in turn established the regular transition from the zone of the tundra to that of the forest and finally the steppe. Savitiskii interpreted this regularity as an increase in “continental characteristics” in the heart of the Eurasian steppes. Savitskii’s work outlining his geographical views was published in 1927 as part of the ambitious Eurasianist publishing venture.42 As soon as it appeared, Trubetskoi rushed to report about it to Roman Jakobson: “Savitskii’s Geographical Specifics [of Russia] has been published. Do read it. It’s interesting. It’s the first attempt to bring structure to a field that has traditionally been marred by chaos.”43 As we shall see later, Jakobson did read it and assimilated Savitskii’s methodological “system,” which assumed the existence of a deep structure underlying the visible surface of “atomistic” facts and governing the configuration of territoriality. While Savitskii primarily elaborated on the legacy of the German Naturphilosophie and especially the work of Friedrich Ratzel with its conception of the “territorial complex” in Russian geography, for Roman Jakobson, Russian Slavic studies represented the field that promised innovation in scholarly research. In the first programmatic article that he published in the Slavische Rundshau in 1929 (the article was originally solicited from Trubetskoi, who did not live up to the promise to deliver the text), Jakobson outlined his vision of Russian Slavic studies as a locomotive of structuralism.44 Jakobson claimed the centrality of Slavic studies to methodological innovation: “studies of Russia [Russlandkunde] witness the fact that in an entire range of disciplines, for example, in literary studies, art history, linguistics, very heated discussions are taking place on crucial theoretical issues,” and, correspondingly, “one senses an uplifting and a teleological movement of Russian studies to their future significance.”45 Jakobson noted—in a clear reference to

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Eurasianist geocultural preferences—that in Russian scholarship, exploration of Romano-Germanic languages and cultures was in disarray compared to the very developed Oriental studies. Eurasianist preferences and influences permeated Jakobson’s text. He claimed that the most important, indeed crucial feature of modern Russian studies was that “Russia was explored as a structured whole.” Any province tends to become autarkic within its territory “but in Russian scientific thought the desire to embrace the entire Russian world and to view its temporary and spatial representations from the point of view of the whole was prevalent.”46 Thus, Jakobson made clear that in his view the methodological innovation was intrinsically linked to the holistic conception of Russia and its territory and culture. To make his preferences and sources clear, he immediately listed examples of these new structuralist studies: Savitskii’s conception of Russia as a “special geographic world” and Trubetskoi’s works that revealed “the unity of the Eurasian cultural circle [Eurasische Kulturzyklus].”47 The text of the article contained Jakobson’s announcement of his own work: “exploration of the structural unity of Eurasian languages originally not tied by genetic bonds is currently under preparation.”48 The fact that in his 1929 article Jakobson inserted those very lines of Dokuchaev that had been quoted by Savitskii in his 1927 book on the geographic characteristics of Russia in order to illustrate the holistic and all-embracing nature of the Russian scholarly tradition points to the fact that Jakobson’s thought was under the direct influence of the “systemic” science promoted by Savitskii.49 If the latter believed that Russian science was focused on the unity of the universe, Jakobson argued that for the fundamental and deeply original line of development of contemporary Russian science the following is characteristic: the correlation [Korrelativität] of separate rows of facts is not viewed in terms of causal dependence . . . the main concept with which [Russian] science operates is a system of correlating rows of facts, a structure immanent for the observer,50 and subjected to its own internal laws.51

Curiously, scholars of Russian literature and of formalism have not yet paid attention to the fact that the famous “manifesto of the rebirth of the OPOJAZ” composed by Jakobson and Tynianov in Prague in 1928 contained strikingly Eurasianist lines: “The history of literature (respectively of art), while correlated with other historical rows, is characterized, like every one of these other rows, by a complex of specifically structural laws. Without clarifying these laws, one cannot establish the correlation [sootnesennost’] of the literary row with other historical rows.”52

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Jakobson’s publication came out at an interesting juncture in the history of Eurasianism. The long-running conflict between Savitskii and Suvchinskii, shattering revelations of the extent of the Soviet secret services’ penetration of the emigration through the fake monarchist organization Trest and the Eurasianist involvement with the underground operations of the GPU, and the increasingly pro-Soviet orientation of the newspaper Eurasia that Suvchinskii operated from Paris finally exploded the movement from within. Outraged by “dangerous flirtation with Marxism,” Trubetskoi publicly withdrew from organized Eurasianism in January 1929 (confirming, however, his commitment to all his Eurasianist writings). Informed by Savitskii about the pro-Soviet publications in Eurasia, Henry Norman Spalding cut funding to the Parisian Eurasianist group. Petr Arapov, a Soviet agent and the central figure in the organized political movement of Eurasianists, secretly left for the USSR in 1930. All this left the movement shattered yet gave Savitskii a unique opportunity to reshape what was left according to his own taste. The resurrection of Eurasianism à la Savitskii began with the publication of the volume of collected essays. Savitskii wrote to Jakobson that he sensed “a general cultural uplifting in the Eurasianist milieu” a year after the collapse of the movement. Savitskii envisioned this period as a new 1921 and suggested that the new volume “would in its content equal Exodus to the East [the first Eurasianist publication that had appeared in 1921].”53 When the volume saw the light of day, it bore the title Tridtsatye gody: Utverzhdeniia evraziitsev (The 1930s: Affirmations of the Eurasianists), echoing the title of the first collective Eurasianist manifesto.54 It contained seventeen contributions, six of which Savitskii wrote himself (under three different names). The rest belonged to the Kalmyk scholar Erenzhen Khara-Davan (“On Nomadic Customs”), the well-known philologist Petr Nikolaevich Bogatyrev (under the pseudonym Ivan Savel’ev, “On the Specifics of Russian Folkloric Studies”), Georgii Vernadskii (“Notes On Lenin”), Vladimir Nikolaevich Ilyin (“On Science and Dialectics”), N. N. Alekseev (“On Eurasianist Interpretations of Law”), Ia. Bromberg (“On Jewish Eurasianism”), and Konstantin Chkheidze (“On Geopolitics”). Markedly absent were typical Eurasianist texts of the 1920s on Orthodoxy and modernity, usually penned by Suvchinskii, and Trubetskoi’s political writings. The general character of the collection was in line with the “scholarly” Eurasianism promulgated by Savitskii. The overall goal of the collection was to “plan the decade” of Eurasianist studies in the 1930s, and central to the revival of Eurasianism were scholarship and the “systemic” study of Eurasia. In this spirit, Savitskii began to approach Jakobson about his contribution in the spring of 1930 but, as of August, Jakobson had failed to deliver and the volume appeared without his work. Sometime in October, Jakobson shared with Savitskii the draft of his planned chapter and it was decided that it

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would appear as a separate publication under the title K kharakteristike evraziiskogo iazykovogo soiuza (On the Eurasian language union), which it did in late 1931.

5. THE EMPIRE OF LANGUAGE: SPACE AND THE STUDY OF STRUCTURES

The overlapping interests and concerns of rising structuralist phonology and Eurasianism became strikingly visible with the publication of Roman Jakobson’s work on the Eurasian language union. Written at the time that Jakobson’s cooperation with the Eurasianists reached its peak, the work set out to demonstrate that languages spoken on the territory of Eurasia developed similarities that crossed the boundaries of genetic linguistic families. In analyzing those characteristics, Jakobson used the methods of phonology and the structuralist principles elaborated by the geographer Savitskii. To be sure, the very notion of the “language union” (Sprachbund; iazykovoi soiuz) was developed by Trubetskoi in 1923. The context in which Trubetskoi developed this concept is in itself quite interesting. It did not appear in a specialized linguistic journal, where Trubetskoi regularly published his linguistic studies. Rather, it was introduced in the article “The Tower of Babel and the Mixing of Languages,” which appeared in the third annual almanac of the Eurasianist movement.55 In the article, Trubetskoi not only attacked the possible monolingual international culture as a sin against the God-given diversity of tongues and cultures, a guarantee of the spiritual richness of humanity. He also suggested a new linguistic concept that spelled out a break with the linguistic tradition of the nineteenth century that insisted on analyzing languages according to the “genetic tree”: Apart from the genetic grouping, the geographically close languages often can be grouped independently of their origins. It happens that several languages of one geographic and cultural-historical region reveal features of particular similarity despite the fact that these similarities are not conditioned by common descent but only by prolonged spatial proximity and parallel development. For such groups not based on the genetic principle we propose the term “language unions.”56 Such language unions exist not only between single languages but also between language families, that is, it happens that several linguistic families, which are not genetically related to each other but which occupy one geographic and cultural-historical zone, are united into a union of linguistic families by a range of common features.57

The Eurasianist context of Trubetskoi’s argument is evident: the replacement of the genetic model with that of historical convergence offered a possibility to remap Eurasia’s linguistic makeup. Instead of the conglomeration of languages

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belonging to the Indo-European, Uralic, and Altaic families, one could attempt to find language unions that would endow Eurasia with a degree of linguistic homogeneity. Language unions also have the potential to construct boundaries that would coincide with other lines of division, such as confessional, between, for example, the Czechs and the Russians, both of whom belong to the Slavic group of the Indo-European family of languages but are divided by the boundary between Latin Christendom and Greek Orthodoxy. This is exactly what Jakobson undertook in his work on the Eurasian language union. He provided linguistic material for Trubetskoi’s concept and outlined the existence of a distinct region characterized by the presence of phonologically determined characteristics. For Jakobson, this work was part of a greater scholarly task that was “to capture correlations of phenomena of different planes and to discover in these correlations a regular [zakonomernyi] order.”58 Although Jakobson called this approach a “method of correlations” (metod uviazki) one can easily recognize the influence of Savitskii’s “synchorological tables,” which established correspondences between natural zones and types of soils.59 This method consisted in comparing data from various disciplines and followed Savitskii’s attempt to put Russian dialects on the map side by side with the lines marking major climatic and orographic changes. Trubetskoi and Jakobson were impressed by Savitskii’s work, which was presented to the Prague Linguistic Circle in 1928, and it motivated Jakobson to pursue his study of the Eurasian language union.60 As Jakobson suggested, “the unexpected fact that the Russian dialectological map reproduces characteristic features of the zonal composition of the Eurasian geographical map stimulates us to expand the framework of our studies and to subject, along with the Russian language, the entire diversity of the languages of Eurasia to a confrontation with data of geography.”61 For Jakobson, the discussion of the language union was predicated on the notion of convergence. Linguists had long discovered similarities between territorially adjacent but genetically unrelated languages and explained them through borrowing. Jakobson argued that this outdated approach was due to “the preeminence of genetic interests above the functional problematic.”62 Yet, with the help of the new synthetic approach and a structuralist understanding of the development of language, scholars can determine that “borrowing and convergence do not exclude one another and cannot be categorically opposed to each other.”63 It is crucial to understand whether a specific borrowing is “sanctioned by the system” and whether it “corresponds to the system’s needs and evolution.”64 Convergence of languages, then, can only be determined if scholars are capable of discovering the intrinsic laws governing each language’s development. While any language, according to Jakobson, is a system of systems, “the most fruitful research of similarities between neighboring languages can be achieved

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in the science of the linguistic sound order” because of the advances in phonology. Jakobson defined the latter as a study of phonological systems, each of which is “the inventory of such acoustic differences that make the differentiation of meaning possible.”65 Such inventory was based on the phoneme, the smallest acoustic element capable of distinguishing meaning in a language. The phonemes are “combined in certain relations in the language and form a system.”66 These relations are repeatable and may become systemic or structural correlations. For instance, Czech, Magyar, Latin, and Serbian are characterized by the quantitative correlations of vowels: oppositions between long and short vowels are capable of distinguishing meaning. In Russian, such correlations include stressed versus unstressed vowels, timbre correlation of consonants (hard vs. soft), and so on. One such phonological correlation, according to Jakobson, is in the changes in musical tone of the voice. As long as such changes form part of oppositions and are capable of producing differences in meaning, one can speak of “polytonic” languages. Jakobson discovered the existence of the Baltic polytonic union, which included “Swedish, Norwegian, most Danish dialects, some German Baltic dialects, Northern Kashubian, Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian.”67 Although these languages did not use polytony to the same extent as the great Pacific polytonic language union, Jakobson claimed that “Eurasia appears to be symmetrically delimited from two sides by the polytonic language unions, by the Baltic from the Northwest and by the Pacific from the Southeast.”68 To the languages of Eurasia itself, then, “polytony is entirely alien.”69 This vision of Eurasia, though, was vague. After all, most languages of Europe and Asia were monotonic. Jakobson suggested that another phonological distinction—the timbre distinction between the presence and the absence of soft versus hard consonants—should be used to define the linguistic map of Eurasia. The primary example of the language characterized by the phonological juxtaposition of soft versus hard consonants was, of course, Russian. The western boundary of the language union based on the timbre correlation ran, according to Jakobson, between Ukrainian and Slovak dialects, with Polish dialects representing a transition from those where the correlation of soft versus hard consonants had a phonological function to those (in the west) where it did not. In the south, Jakobson found that “only eastern Bulgarian speech knows the phonological juxtaposition of soft and hard consonants, but even there . . . its use is very limited.”70 Timbre correlation thus created a boundary separating genetically close Czech, Polish, Slovak, Serbian, Croatian, and Bulgarian from Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian. Similarly, the only Romance language in Eastern Europe, Romanian, was divided by this line: “The correlation of softness characteristic of Moldavian dialects and literary language is unknown in the Romanian literary language.”71 As in other cases in Eastern Europe, Jakobson determined that “in the direction from

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east to west this correlation first diminishes and then disappears altogether.”72 Finno-Ugric languages demonstrated a similar picture according to Jakobson. Languages within Eurasia—such as Komi, Udmurt, Mordovian, and Karelian— all know phonological oppositions between soft and hard consonants, “unlike the language of Saami and most dialects of Suomi (that is, the language of Finns in Finlandia) . . . and Magyar.”73 Turkic languages presented a more difficult challenge for Jakobson. These languages are characterized by the harmony of vowels, where all vowels in a word belong to the same category. Jakobson claimed that a recent discovery confirmed the presence of the timbre correlation in some Turkic languages, and argued that these languages are characterized by what he called “syllabic harmony.”74 In the Turkic languages of Eurasia, according to Jakobson, it is more appropriate to talk about the timbre correlation of syllables, where the oppositions between types of vowels is inseparable from the oppositions between hard and soft consonants. Jakobson believed that the presence of timbre correlation of syllables is established beyond doubt in Tatar, Kazakh, Bashkir, Turkmen, and Azerbaijani languages, and in the speech of Bessarabian Gagauz as well as in most Uzbek dialects.75 In Jakobson’s work, visions of Eurasia as a geographical unity, an ethnopsychological whole, a leader of an anticolonialist uprising against European cultural dominance, or a site of scientific modernity were supplanted with another hypostasis. It became the first language union discovered with the help of structuralist linguistics. It was a world populated by speakers of languages characterized by monotony and the correlation of soft and hard sounds. These languages fully cover three great plains—the White Sea–Caucasian, the Western Siberian, and the Turkestan plains—that is, the very main core where we observe the most characteristic geographic particularities of the Eurasian world. The southwestern periphery of this phonological union occupies the western edge of the Eurasian steppes, hanging along the coast of the Black Sea from Odessa to the Balkans. Finally, in the east, the monotonic languages with timbre correlation apparently cover “the Mongolian core of the continent,” which belongs to Eurasia on the basis of several features.76

To be sure, certain areas that belonged to the former Russian Empire and formed part of the USSR could not be included in the Eurasian linguistic design. For instance, “the languages of Transcaucasia (the Armenian language and the Kartvelian group) do not possess the timbre correlation of consonants.”77 Similarly, Iranian languages such as Ossetian or Tadjik did not display phonological oppositions between hard and soft sounds, and neither did many languages of the Far East, such as the Chukchee or the Yukagir. The Eurasianists, however, were

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not concerned with minor exceptions, and dismissed them as a confirmation of the correctness of the map of Eurasia: “already now we have the right to speak of a Eurasian language union, without predicting, however, the exact correlation of its isophones with other geographical lines.”78 It is telling to follow Jakobson’s attempt to draw a rough picture of the diachronic development of the Eurasian language union, that is, to create a historical narrative of the emergence of the discovered convergence. Characteristically, he chose as one of his examples the loss of the correlation of soft and hard consonants in medieval Czech to illustrate the influence of Europeanization: Jan Hus was the witness to the elimination of the last remainders of the differentiation of soft and hard consonants. He defended the original antiquity, with pathos he declared that “those Praguers and other Czechs who speak half-Czech half-German” and remove the difference between li and ly . . . deserve flogging. Hus’s indignation was in vain and those Czechs who spoke more Teutonicorum emerged victorious.79

This example was fully in line with the Eurasianist rebellion against Europeanization and loss of authenticity under the assault of difference eliminating European cultural expansion. Jakobson’s work appeared at the time when Soviet linguists had largely completed the implementation of Latin scripts for Soviet Turkic and Finno-Ugric languages and discussions were under way about the introduction of Latin script for Ukrainian, Russian, and Belarusian. Jakobson found Latinization to be a “pointless waste to please Westernizers.”80 Transcribing a Belarusian text with Latin script would increase the number of symbols by 7.5 percent in comparison to Cyrillic, as Latin is not designed to reflect the timbre correlation between soft and hard consonants and other phonological specificities of Eurasian languages.81 Jakobson also paralleled the Eurasianists in the way he described the role of the Russians in the Eurasian space. As Eurasianist thinkers described non-Christian peoples of Eurasia as “potentially Orthodox” and Eurasianist historians saw the history of Eurasia as the history of Russian expansion, Jakobson envisioned Russian language as paradigmatic and dominant in the Eurasian language union: The Great Russian timbre correlation of consonants sets the standard. It is regularly used in the interest of differentiating meanings, both in words and grammatically. It is realized on the greatest scale before almost all consonants and at the end of the word . . . tendencies that characterize the Eurasian language union found their most complete expression in Russian. It is not a coincidence that the Great Russian phonology formed the basis of the Russian literary language, that is, the language with an all-Eurasian cultural mission.82

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Jakobson’s work on the language union was not without a consequence in linguistics. While linguists did not find much in the idea of the Eurasian language union as such, elsewhere the concept proved to be a useful tool to conceptualize similarities between genetically unrelated languages, in particular in the Balkans or in India. Jakobson himself continued to promote the concept and associated apparatus for most of his career. In his Dialogues with Krystyna Pomorska, Jakobson explained that in the 1930s he “published a number of studies proving the existence of a vast ‘Eurasian linguistic alliance,’ which encompassed Russian, the other languages of Eastern Europe, and the majority of the Uralic and Altaic languages, all of which make use of the phonemic opposition of palatalized and nonpalatalized consonants.”83 Jakobson stressed that these ideas were parallel to the work of Franz Boas, “who revealed the existence of phonic and grammatical phenomena common to the Amerindian languages and encompassing large zones of these languages without regard to origin.”84 In a sweeping move characteristic of Jakobson’s thought, he related the problem of the language union and the resulting issue of acquired characteristics to a range of topics, such as bilingualism or aphasia. Jakobson argued that “with every step, one finds in the ever-growing number of these secondary linguistic affinities [Wahlverwandschaften] an entire series of problems that have yet to be resolved. In much that at one time appeared to be a mosaic of chance events we now perceive geolinguistic regularities awaiting explanation.”85 He added, in a reference to Savitskii’s method, that “only the creation of atlases will oblige linguists to reflect in a consistent manner upon isoglosses such as the boundary line between the West European mass of languages with articles and the East European languages without articles.”86 Jakobson insisted that linguistic boundaries determined by acquired characteristics do often coincide with, although do not necessarily depend upon, the sphere of particular language domination, or with a sociocultural zone as such: “We should also point out that these widespread isoglosses generally coincide with other puzzling lines encountered in the geographical distribution of anthropological traits. These often unexpected connections require a many-sided analysis in accordance with the methodological theses advanced by the ingenious scholar Petr Nikolaevich Savitskii, the precursor of structural geography.”87 In 1936 Jakobson presented his conception of the language union to the Fourth International Congress of Linguists in Copenhagen, and included the text of his presentation in the French translation of Trubetskoi’s magnum opus.88 He also included this text in his selected writings and in the key Soviet publication of Jakobson’s work.89 These inclusions confirm that Jakobson clearly did not see his Eurasianist encounter as a passing or deviant moment in his intellectual evolution

-All other Romance languages

-Lithuanian -Eastern -Eastern Romanian? Latvian dialects

European and -Western Asian Types Latvian (“peripheral” dialects with respect to the continental landmass of the Old World)

Transitional Type

Types / LettoFamilies Lithuanian Romance Eurasian Type -------Moldavian -(Eastern Romanian?)

-Armenian -Kartvelian (Georgian languages)

Caucasian -Abkhaz -Lakian -Chechen -Dagestani languages

-Kashubian -Luzhica -Czech -Western Slovak -Slovenian -Serbo-Croatian

-Saami -Suomi (Finnish) -Western dialects of Estonian

-Magyar -Gagauz of Dobrudzha? -Ottoman Turkish -Uzbek

-Ossetian -Chukchee -Tat -Yukagir

UgricPaleoSlavic Finnish Samoedic Turkic Mongolian Iranian Asiatic -Great Russian -Mordovian -Ostiak -North-Kalmyk -Ukrainian -Cheremis -Samoed western -Belorussian (Mari) Karaim -Literary Polish -Votiak -Gagauz of (Udmurt) Bessarabia -Zyrian -Chuvash (Komi) -Tatar -Bashkir -Turkmen -Kara-Kirgiz -Kazak-Kirgiz -Polish dialects -Revel -Giliak -Eastern Slovak dialect of (Nivkh) -Western CarEstonian patho- Rusyn -Eastern Bulgarian

Table 1. Types of Languages on the Basis of Presence/Absence of Timbre Correlation

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and that he remained committed to the centrality of the Eurasianist spatializing approach to the development of structuralism.

6. THE POLITICAL ONTOLOGY OF EURASIAN STRUCTURES: GOAL, CONVERGENCE, EVOLUTION, RELIGION

The Eurasianist scholars saw their own approach to substantiating the existence of Eurasia as part of an epistemological revolution that replaced genetic ties with acquired characteristics and the nineteenth-century observation of “atomistic” facts with discovering structural regularities. When Savitskii complained to Trubetskoi about the critical reception of his work on depression in precapitalist societies, Trubetskoi responded, “the problem is that until now history has been a very atomistic discipline and it taught all historians its atomistic approach. Your attempt to apply a structuralist [struktural’nyi] approach to historical facts therefore remains unappreciated by ‘professional’ historians.”90 In a letter to Vera Guchkova-Suvchinskaia, who had begun studying linguistics under Antoine Meillet and sought Trubetskoi’s opinion of the teacher, Trubetskoi wrote: “Meillet indeed quite deserves this respect that you pay him. He is the best linguist of our time. Of course, he represents a certain epoch in the history of linguistics, an era that maybe will have to end soon and to be replaced by another one.”91 The new era that opened up with the retreat of “atomistic” scholarship was characterized by a change in perspective. If the nineteenth-century scholars explored causality, the structuralist approach focused on teleology: “In the current hierarchy of values, the question ‘where to?’ is ranked higher than the question ‘where from?’”92 “The goal,” wrote Jakobson, “this Cinderella of the ideology of the recent past, is being rehabilitated everywhere.”93 It should be noted that discussions on teleology also reveal significant differences in perspective between the Eurasianists and Jakobson. The latter argued that human collectivities were to be viewed differently in accordance with the new parameters: “Instead of the genetic indicators, self-determination becomes a feature of nationality, the idea of caste is replaced with the idea of class, and both in societal life and scholarly constructions, commonality of origin retreats into the background in comparison with the unity of a common goal.”94 Jakobson’s teleology stressed the constructed nature of collectivities, their inventedness, and thus openness to reformulation of the principles upon which they are based. Unlike the Eurasianists, for whom the eternal characteristics of Russianness are omnipresent, Jakobson sought to stress teleology as an element of constructedness. For Jakobson, the predisposition of the national epistemology toward structuralism relied on the Russian philosophical tradition, which was characterized by an

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animosity toward positivism. Jakobson listed as his lineage the works of thinkers as different as Nikolai Danilevskii, Fedor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Fedorov, Konstantin Leont’ev, and Vladimir Solov’ev, all of whom pursued religious philosophy. In another remarkable reference, Jakobson suggested that Russian teleology manifested itself in the works of the geographer Karl von Baer, the Orthodox critic Nikolai Strakhov, the economist Ivan Vavilov, and, finally, the biogeographer Lev Semenovich Berg. The striking list of names is united only by adherence to the critical reception of Darwin’s thought in Russia.95 Of those on this list, the name of Lev Semenovich Berg is especially telling. A student of the leading ethnographer and anthropologist in late imperial Russia, D. Anuchin, Berg was a universalist scholar with contributions ranging from biology to geography and history, who continued Dokuchaev’s work by establishing the “natural zones of the Soviet Union,” which became the foundation of Soviet geography textbooks in the twentieth century.96 His best known, and controversial, legacy was his work on “nomogenesis,” a law-governed, regular evolution. For Berg, differences between his theory and Darwinism consisted in his belief in multiple origins of evolutionary development; species developed both by divergence and convergence, with the prevalence of the latter; species are strictly delimited; and evolutionary convergent development is in essence based on preexisting conditions. Although the Eurasianists were not aware of Berg’s work until 1926 (and Jakobson was not aware of it until 1929),97 they immediately recognized intellectual affinity. In a letter to Suvchinskii dated March 5, 1926, Trubetskoi wrote: Savitskii told me of two interesting books that were published in Russia.  .  .  . The first is Nomogenesis by Berg. . . . It is especially interesting because Berg proclaims himself as a follower of Danilevskii and in his theses he develops propositions that are close to ours (in particular to my ideas developed in Europe and Mankind and The Tower of Babel).98

Trubetskoi’s admission is important because he clearly identifies the areas where the Eurasianists found their ideas resonating with those of Berg. Trubetskoi’s Europe and Mankind focused on the role of evolutionism in European history and ethnology as a masque for Europe’s colonial domination of the world. It also suggested, following the nineteenth-century Pan-Slavist Nikolai Danilevskii, that there exist large cultural units, “cultures,” and that cultural borrowings from one to another are harmful and destructive. Trubetskoi’s Tower of Babel, apart from proposing the concept of the language union, also offered a theological take on differences: according to Trubetskoi, “attempts to create a

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universal culture eo ipso are godless.” Berg’s “alternative evolutionism” reverberated with the Eurasianist insistence on the plurality of cultural worlds and multiple origins of human culture. We can note here Trubetskoi’s famous presentation on the Indo-European problem, which questioned the original unity of Indo-European languages and proposed that the Indo-European family might have been an outcome of convergent development.99 Berg’s ideas fitted well with the grand Eurasianist task of turning what Arthur Lovejoy called “diversitarianism” into a central ideological premise of Eurasianism.100 At the same time, Berg’s anti-Darwinist model connected Eurasianism with a range of native theories, from Karl von Baer’s to Danilevskii’s, in which a critique of Darwinism and evolutionism were closely interwoven with attempts to construct an extra-European, autochthon civilization in Russia. Berg’s “nomogenetic” evolutionism saw biological changes as following a goal-oriented pattern. As Berg pointed out in the introduction to his key work on evolution, “teleology is the main characteristic of all living beings.”101 For the Eurasianists, teleology was a key principle upon which the unity of Eurasia rested: its cultural, ethnic, and geographical homogeneity was regular and corresponded to a series of laws, some of which were yet to be discovered. The goal of Eurasianism—and of all scholarship—was to uncover those yet-to-berevealed teleological “regularities.” When Savitskii received the manuscript of Jakobson’s work on phonological union in Eurasia, he responded with excitement: “I just sent you a letter, received your manuscript, read it, and became drunk from happiness. I congratulate you: Russia’s phonology as a system has been created by you. I was taken over by a storm of thoughts and ideas during two hours.”102 Savitskii found Jakobson’s work to be “uncovering an entirely new sphere of life.” Nothing in the lines drawn by Eurasianist scholars on the maps was accidental: “If you could only imagine,” Savitskii wrote to Jakobson, “with what precision every single line you describe correlates with geographical and historical background!” Savitskii immediately drew a picture of a synthesis: “Apparently, there is a close parallelism between the tasks of Eurasian phonology and the tasks of general Eurasian history (political, social, cultural). As Russia’s history needs to expand to become a history of Eurasia, to acquire Eurasian horizons and Eurasian perspectives, so Russian linguistics—a branch of Slavic linguistics—has to become a chapter in Eurasian studies of language.”103 As Patrick Sériot has demonstrated, Eurasianist scholars viewed Eurasia as an ontological reality, whose diverse manifestations revealed themselves to an attuned eye in limitless numbers.104 Lines of climate change, geological elevations, types of soil and vegetation coincided with nomadic and settled civilizations. The

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discovery of phonological lines of division that so neatly matched with other data just proved, yet again, the validity of the ontological reality of Eurasia. These coincidences, or, as Jakobson called them, “correlations of rows of data,” were interpreted by Savitskii within his “periodic system of being,” a structured and strictly organized methodology of uncovering repetitions and coincidences in history, geography, or linguistics. The “system” combined a scientific search for regularity with a deep commitment to religious and metaphysical foundations of knowledge and to the Orthodox concept of deification. As Savitskii himself noted: “The entire ideological system of Eurasianism is deduced from the idea of personality: the idea of personal God, the idea of Russia-Eurasia as a ‘symphonic personality,’ the idea of personality as the creator of life. Without the idea of personality, the religious transformation of life for which Eurasianism strives is impossible.”105 The systemic study of Eurasia thus revealed unexpected bridges to the Eurasianist national mystique. It was Orthodox religiosity that provided Eurasianist scholars with philosophical—or, rather, theological foundations for their “systemic” study of Eurasia. As Eurasianism envisioned as its ideal a society permeated by the spirit of totalizing religiosity, so its scientific pursuits relied on neo-Platonic visions of “discovery” of the ontological reality of “structure” through iconic representation by rows of data. Eurasia’s existence was not in question: the task was to uncover the almost miraculous “correlations” revealed in ever-increasing quantities. Curiously, Trubetskoi actually described this method when he subjected medieval Russian texts produced by pilgrims to formal analysis: The greatest happiness that can befall a Christian is the heavenly beatitude that consists in a suprasensory perception of God. A Christian can achieve this highest happiness only after death under the condition of a sinless life. Here, on Earth, one can only incompletely approach this happiness in the form of visions. . . . A necessary spiritual condition could be achieved by a pilgrim because the pilgrim stood before the external world as before an icon—he “iconized” the world inside himself. In everything that a pilgrim encountered on his path he noted only what he could connect, though his suprasensory vision, with his religious thoughts and ideas of Heavenly Kingdom. He passed the rest without noting it and without reacting to it. The land of his pilgrimage was for him a great temple with many bright icons.106

In this context, Jakobson’s conversion to Orthodoxy in 1936 appears in a new light. It underscored his encounter with Eurasianist thought and its neo-Platonic currents over and above his personal relations with Eurasianist scholars. His work on the Eurasian language union, if taken in the context of Jakobson’s encounter with the movement, appears to have been based on assumptions that drew on

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religious interpretations of Eurasia. Jakobson might not have accepted some political implications of Eurasianism but he shared in the Eurasianist “systemic discovery” of Eurasia’s multiple characteristics while taking the object’s primordial existence as a matter of faith. Yet this was not a full-scale commitment. Jakobson’s texts contain suggestions that he saw structure as immanent to the observer rather than an ontological reality; he also repeatedly stressed the constructed nature of collectivities and the role of teleology in these constructions. It may well be that this peculiar oscillation between the wholehearted acceptance and partial absorption of Eurasianist premises enabled what we can call the Jakobsonian revolution in humanities and social sciences—the rapid spread of structuralist rhetoric after the war and the development of studies of culture as system of significations.107 Curiously and ironically, the Jakobsonian revolution powerfully contributed to critiques of many modern narratives, from Marxism to liberalism; rooted in attempts to describe the Russian imperial space, it enabled the paradigmatic changes in humanities that allowed for postcolonial studies to articulate conceptions critical of European imperial regimes, Russian not excluded. It was this peculiar structuralism—with its emphasis on the relations between different elements in a structure underlying the visible phenomena—that Jakobson conveyed to his French interlocutors in the 1940s. Boris Gasparov described this structuralism as a “systemic principle” that “emphasized the interconnectedness of all the elements within a system and the impossibility of defining the features of any element without considering its relation to other elements and its position in the system as a whole.”108 Its political ontology revealed itself in persistent attempts to recuperate the space of the former Russian Empire by reinventing it as “Eurasia.” The fight against the positivist and “atomistic” scholarship was part of the general turn toward metaphysical foundations of scholarship and life and was closely linked to the element of the Eurasianist consensus of the 1920s that envisioned Orthodox deification, or theosis, as the goal of Eurasianism. To be sure, in the following decades, as he continued his reinvention of communities of belonging, Jakobson himself moved structuralism in a number of different directions. He also followed what Gasparov termed “the constructive principle, which noted diverse phenomena of human communication in their elusive multiplicity through a surface, empirical examination, and then proceeds to pick out the key features of internal structure, the study of which is the specific matter and prerogative of linguistics and semiotics.”109 It was exactly this constructive element in structuralism that secured the “widespread dissemination of structuralist poetics and semiotics” after World War II, whereas the “systemic branch of structuralism receded in the past and could be perceived as its prehistory, a preliminary and insufficiently focused stepping-stone to what later became the dominant theme of linguistic and semiotic structuralism.”110

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However deviant or passing, though, it was the holistic, teleological, and “systemic” structuralism of the Eurasianists that provided the material and the apparatus for the emerging international intellectual movement. The new language of structuralism served Eurasianist scholars well: with its seeming ability to resolve the impasse between unity and diversity, with its emphasis on the wholeness and all-embracing nature of the structure, it combined the Russian tradition of counter-Enlightenment and antievolutionism with the vision of a grand, universal project of a systemic suprascience—an ideal language for empire in the twentieth century.

Epilogue

Eurasianism as a Movement

Those historians who compared Eurasianism to Fascist movements often emphasized that unlike Fascists, the Eurasianists were elite intellectuals with little taste for street politics. Eurasianism was often viewed as peculiar, at times bizarre and at times brilliant, but nevertheless a game of Ivory Tower scholars and ideologues. No doubt, this view of the movement was shaped by the fact that until the last decade of the twentieth century no archival materials of the movement were used to explore its history. In reality, the Eurasianist movement was enmeshed in the politics of Russian emigration in Europe, which, in turn, was the arena of Soviet secret services. Eurasianist scholars and intellectuals used coded correspondence, secretly traveled to the USSR, and smuggled literature and people across borders. But we might want to ask, was that entanglement of the Eurasianists of any importance for the movement’s ideas? To be sure, the core of the Eurasianist ideology—its anti-European rhetoric, its geographic holism and determinism, and its stress on the Mongol legacy and Russian Orthodoxy—was formed independently of the immediate concerns of émigré politics. It drew on the legacies of Russian historiography and geosciences, modernist experimentation, and Civil War experiences. Still, significant elements of Eurasianist ideology, especially as it concerned the evaluation of the current state of affairs in Soviet Russia and projections of its future, were shaped by the movement’s encounters with fellow émigrés and Soviet visitors. As we saw in the case of some key Eurasianist texts, such as Trubetskoi’s famous essay “The Legacy of Chingis-Khan,” they were written specifically with the Soviet audience in mind, and the image of that Soviet audience was shaped by the Eurasianists’ contacts with Soviet agents. Initially the Eurasianists saw their movement as a purely intellectual enterprise. In fact, the early Eurasianists celebrated their apolitical and antipolitical stance. In the debate that followed Petr Struve’s criticism of early Eurasianism, Georgii Florovskii stated, “‘the Eurasianist group’ is neither a political party nor a sect of fanatics . . . the name of ‘a league of Russian culture’ suits it much more.”1 Nikolai Trubetskoi compared Russian émigrés to the Great Polish emigration

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after the failed uprising of 1831 and emphasized that Poland had survived not because the Polish émigrés engaged in petty politics but because “there were also Mickiewicz, Krasiński, and Słowacki, who did not participate in party catfights and did not do politics, they worked for Polish culture.”2 But Trubetskoi combined this insistence on cultural creativity with a desire to engage the masses. In this same letter to Suvchinskii, he demanded that the movement undertake more “action.” He believed the Eurasianists could do this without “becoming a party” because the latter “is a sin and one has to be afraid of it. But to be afraid of the crowd, that is, to essentially despise one’s neighbor, is also a sin. The average man, in any case, deserves less contempt than that émigré academic, newspaper, and journalist scum for whom we have in fact been writing our collections so far.”3 As the Eurasianist leaders left Sofia and settled in Prague (Savitskii), Berlin (Suvchinskii), and Vienna (Trubetskoi), their contacts with various émigré groups expanded. Their publications became known and attracted attention. On September 27, 1922, Trubetskoi reported to Suvchinskii that “a certain Baron MellerZakomel’skii” had begun corresponding with him. Trubetskoi described Meller as “an attractive, educated, and very cultured man” who “is quite at one with ideas of both [our] collections and on behalf of a group of several people he offers their services.”4 Aleksandr Vladimirovich Meller-Zakomel’skii, the son of former member of the State Council and progressive entrepreneur V. V. Meller-Zakomel’skii, belonged to a group of extremely right-wing monarchist officers of the former White armies, which also included P. S. Arapov and Iu. A. Artamonov. All three actively participated in the Eurasianist movement. However, by 1925 Meller had grown disenchanted with Eurasianism and become a leader of the Russian Nazis in Europe. Arapov, on the other hand, quickly emerged as a leader of Eurasianism, and together with Artamonov helped the Soviet secret services to penetrate the movement. Although Trubetskoi argued in his letter to Suvchinskii that the Eurasianists should accept Meller’s offer in order to convert his group to Eurasianism, the arrival of these young officers had a significant influence on the movement itself. The officers were men of action who had experience fighting the Bolsheviks in the Civil War. They were radicals who sought quick, violent solutions, and hoped to return to Russia and were mesmerized by the successes of the Bolsheviks. The intricacies of the Eurasianist ideas were of little interest to these men. They often simplified Eurasianist ideas and brought Eurasianist leaders into direct contact with military groups around Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, the uncle of the last tsar and a leader of the military White emigration, and General Kutepov, who organized and led the Russian All-Military Union in the hope of preserving the remnants of the White armies and being ready for intervention in Soviet Russia when the time came.

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But the initial influence of the new members was, in fact, financial. The Eurasianists needed money to publish their article collections. In 1920–1921 they were dependent on the Russian-Bulgarian Publishing House.5 When Suvchinskii left for Berlin, he established ties to the Gelikon publishing house, which published the second collection of the Eurasianists.6 When the Eurasianists planned their anti-Catholic collection Russia and Latinism, Trubetskoi rejected out of hand Suvchinskii’s proposal to use church funds. He also insisted, with the antiSemitism very characteristic of his private letters, that no publishing houses belonging to Jews could be used, which precluded further cooperation with Vishniak’s Gelikon.7 Instead, Trubetskoi suggested using Meller’s contacts with the monarchist Bronze Horseman publishing house based in Berlin.8 However, Suvchinskii was opposed to cooperation with the monarchists and Trubetskoi’s suggestion was declined. The movement was in need of money and again Meller came to play a role. His father was co-owner, along with the well-known industrialist Leslie Urquhart, of the Kyshtym copper works. In 1922, Urquhart was engaged in negotiations with the Soviet government about concessions to mine copper, and he subsidized the Meller family in Europe.9 Meller and his sister, Elena Vladimirovna Isakova, provided money to print Russia and Latinism.10 Yet, Meller’s contribution was a singular event, and Suvchinskii complained to Trubetskoi in early 1924 that all Eurasianist funds were depleted. If in the first half of the 1920s, German inflation secured relatively cheap labor and sponsored publishing activities, by the mid-1920s the German mark had stabilized, prices went up, and many Russian-language publishers ceased their activities in the German capital. In 1924 Suvchinskii began thinking about moving to Paris, where most Russian émigré intellectuals had moved from Berlin, and settled there in 1925.11 In Paris, the Evraziiskoe knigoizdatel’stvo (Eurasian Publishing House) was founded, with the help of Meller’s money, and printed all Eurasianist books at the Imprimerie de Navarre, owned by a group of Russian émigrés. The solution to the Eurasianist financial challenge came unexpectedly through the contacts of Arapov, who had joined the movement with Meller’s group. Arapov lived in Berlin, Brussels, and Paris but often visited London, where his mother resided in the house of Prince Vladimir Emmanuilovich and Princess Ekaterina Vladimirovna Golitsyn. There, Arapov met Colonel Petr Nikolaevich Malevskii-Malevich, a self-proclaimed sympathizer of Eurasianism. Malevskii and the Golitsyns had ties to Henry Norman Spalding, a British philanthropist, who made his fortune in South Africa. Spalding was interested in theology and even founded the Chair of Eastern Christianity at Oxford.12 The leaders of the movement were probably overwhelmed when, during a trip to London, Arapov wrote to them about the negotiations with Malevskii and Spalding, and communicated to the leaders “the most improbable news.” Arapov reported that “the amount that

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Malevich has equals 10,000 pounds! It was given by one Englishman to Eurasianism! Malevich himself, according to the locals, confesses himself to be a Eurasianist, and he places the money at our disposal.” Hinting at previous negotiations, Arapov wrote, “the scale is so much greater than anything we had expected,” and requested the opinion of the leaders about a new budget for the movement.13 Although Spalding had initially committed £10,000 to Eurasianism, his entire contribution over the next five years far exceeded that amount, for he sponsored many projects beyond the limits of the first grant. We can evaluate the significance of Spalding’s donation if we compare it, following Gerald Smith, to the budget of the London School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Bernard Pares ran the school, with its significant staff, offices, and other expenses, on an annual grant of 2,000 pounds.14 We can add to Smith’s comparison that in the mid-1920s the exchange rate of the pound and the dollar fluctuated between 3.6 and 4.5 dollars to the pound. Trubetskoi told Suvchinskii in 1923 that his family of four plus the nanny lived comfortably (“like a bourgeois”) on 60 dollars per month in Vienna.15 Given that many Eurasianist activities were conducted in Central and Eastern Europe, the money committed by Spalding—around 40,000 dollars—was very significant. All in all, in 1925–1927 alone, Spalding spent at least 12,000 pounds on Eurasianist activities, according to Malevskii’s financial reports.16 Spalding also paid for the newspaper Evraziia in 1928–1929, and after the breakup of the movement he paid the debts of the Eurasianist publishing houses. He also subsidized, albeit on a much smaller scale, the activities of Savitskii’s group in Prague and of Belgian Eurasianists led by Malevskii-Malevich’s nephew, Sviatoslav MalevskiiMalevich, in the 1930s. From Spalding’s letters to Suvchinskii one gets the impression that the unexpected benefactor was little informed about Eurasianism and its Russian context. On April 12, 1928, Spalding wrote to Suvchinskii that “the success of the E[urop] A[sianism] seems to me of the utmost importance, not only for Russia but for the entire world.” Spalding perceived Eurasianism in the context of the colonial question and the threat of Marxism: In India, in China, in Japan, in several states of Islam an intelligentsia is arising, Westernized and secularized, fundamentally like that of Russia: is it going to follow the lead of the old Mother Russia into Bolshevism or on the other hand the lead of Europasians in their attempt to build a state on the principles of the Gospel? To my mind it is the crucial question of our century; and it is a privilege to help toward the right solution, in however small a degree.17

Most probably, Spalding was aware of the Eurasianists’ underground activities, including the movement’s contacts with Trest. In any event, in 1928, he mentioned

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“the misfortunes” that plagued the movement in 1927: in the spring of 1927 the full extent of the Trest provocation became known among the émigrés.18 It is also possible that Spalding, like the Eurasianists themselves, was attracted by the romanticism of the underground struggle. He often called himself a “Eurasianist” (a “Europeasian” to be more precise; the term outraged Dmitrii Sviatopolk-Mirskii who said scathingly that he was appalled by the need to use the name of “some wogs in Ceylon”).19 He discussed the tactics and the strategy of the movement with Suvchinskii, and even authored a little book that summed up Eurasianism for the English audience.20 Spalding himself admitted, though, that while writing the book he relied entirely on his conversations with Karsavin, Malevich, and Arapov.21 Trubetskoi found Spalding’s outline of Eurasianism “unexpectedly not bad” but was horrified by how the latter presented Eurasianism as an organization with real strength on the ground in Soviet Russia.22 Arapov made characteristically sarcastic remarks about Spalding’s intellectual strengths after their first meeting. As he reported to Suvchinskii, “H[enry]N[orman Spalding] is something like our Arsen’ev . . . he is very naive and excited beyond the limits.”23 Despite the Eurasianists’ sarcasm about Spalding’s capacities, his money secured rapid expansion of the movement’s publication and organizational activities. Beginning in January 1925, when the first funds became available, apart from the annual collection of articles, the Eurasianist almanac (Vremennik), which had the status of an “official” dogma of the movement, the Eurasianists began publishing the semi-annual Chronicle, which was meant to provide a venue for the publications of “younger” Eurasianists or of those authors with whom the Eurasianists did not want to associate fully. In 1925 an entire series of offprints from the Eurasianist collections of articles was published en masse, including Trubetskoi’s popular “The Legacy of Chingis-Khan.” In 1927 Vernadsky’s “Outline of Russian History” was published, as well as a separate edition of Trubetskoi’s Eurasianist writings. Beginning in the fall of 1928, thirty-five issues of the weekly newspaper Evraziia had appeared, funded by Spalding. The leaders of Eurasianism, of course, had different ideas about how Spalding’s donation should be spent. Savitskii sent Arapov a letter containing his proposal for the budget. In his project, Savitskii suggested that the money should first go to maintaining contact with Soviet Russia and to delivering Eurasianist literature to the USSR. He also mentioned the production of flyers and posters to be smuggled into the Soviet Union. Remarkably, he planned to spent 12 pounds per month (roughly 1,150 pounds per year) to pay salaries to underground representatives of the movement in Siberia, the Caucasus, Turkistan, Ukraine, Leningrad, and Moscow. His proposed budget also included three trips to the USSR per year, roughly estimated at 450 pounds total. The organizational costs of representatives in the USSR were estimated at 1,500 pounds per year. Savitskii also outlined a

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publishing program worth 5,000 pounds, which would include regular Eurasianist almanacs, an “unofficial encyclopedia” in the form of three books per year on Eurasianist topics, “a monograph about Eurasianism in English, one of the Indian languages, and in the French, German, and Tatar languages,” and special book series (“Eurasianists for Children” and “Eurasianists for Youth”). In Europe, Savitskii insisted, the Eurasianist leaders must receive no remuneration for their work and the movement should rely on volunteers. Only P. P. Suvchinskii as director of the publishing house would receive a salary of 180 pounds per year. The Eurasianists would spend 500 pounds, according to Savitskii, on organizational trips and lecturing. The projected Eurasianist newspaper, according to Savitskii, “would require, in order to begin, approximately 20,000 pounds more.”24 Savitskii’s project failed to be realized completely, not least because control over the funds received from Spalding became one of the points of contention among the movement’s leaders. Suvchinskii’s and Arapov’s salaries grew to 25 pounds per month, whereas the entire Prague group received 15 pounds per month for salaries and organizational needs.25 Suvchinskii, Malevskii-Malevich, and Arapov came to control Eurasianist money and often blocked certain publications. Savitskii had to independently finance the printing of his book on Russian geography. Trubetskoi several times had to request 10 pounds from Malevskii-Malevich (he requested the money to go to Prague for a meeting with Soviet philologists, organized by Jakobson).26 Nevertheless, Spalding’s contribution helped to dramatically expand the movement’s activities. A permanent Eurasianist colloquium was established in 1924 in Prague, led by P. N. Savitskii. From 1925 a similar colloquium, led by L. P. Karsavin, began to function in Paris. In Vienna, Trubetskoi organized a Eurasianist reading and discussion group for his students. However, one should not overestimate the number of people who were involved in the movement in this way. According to the list of members of the Eurasianist club in Paris, in 1926 it had no more than twenty-five subscribers.27 Vice-director of the Counterintelligence Organ of the GPU Styrne reported to his superior, A. Artuzov, that more than a thousand individuals supported the Eurasianists in Prague. Such figures appear to be completely unrealistic and most were probably connected with the GPU agent’s desire to present Eurasianism, successfully penetrated by the Soviets, as a much more dangerous and influential movement than it really was.28 As the Eurasianist movement expanded with the help of Spalding’s money, it also became entangled in the web of underground activities of Soviet spies. Between 1922 and 1927, the Counterintelligence Organ of the Main Political Administration (KO GPU) organized a fake monarchist group under the name Monarchical Union of Central Russia (MOTsR). Representatives of this group, in particular A. A. Iakushev (“Fedorov” in secret correspondence) traveled to Europe, where they met representatives of various groups of émigrés. The goal

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of the Soviet operation was to infiltrate and neutralize organized émigré groups, especially the Russian All-Military Union (ROVS) of General Kutepov. The success of the entire Soviet operation (which came to be known as Trest) was considerable and by 1926 ROVS practically merged with Trest.29 Eurasianism became enmeshed with Trest because Petr Semenovich Arapov, who joined the movement in 1922, brought Spalding’s money to it, and emerged as one of its leaders. It is not clear even now whether Arapov was a Soviet agent from the very beginning of the operation in 1922. Arapov was on friendly footing with Iu. A. Artamonov, who became Trest’s representative in Warsaw. He also brought officers from the entourage of General Kutepov, such as A. A. Zaitsov, to the movement. Arapov organized meetings between Suvchinskii and Trubetskoi on the one hand, and representatives of Trest on the other. Initially, the Eurasianists were not impressed. Soviet agents stressed monarchism and told the Eurasianist leaders that religion had lost its attractiveness for the absolute majority of the Soviet population, and hence the Eurasianist program and ideology had to be significantly modified in order not to appear conservative and reactionary to the Soviet people. For the Eurasianists, whose Orthodox religiosity was one of the key elements of group identity, this explanation was unacceptable, and their interest in Trest seemed to have been lost altogether.30 But the Soviet agents quickly modified their position: a representative of Trest came forward, claimed that he accepted Eurasianist ideas, and offered to work for the conversion of the entire organization to the Eurasianist creed. This representative was “Aleksandr Alekseevich Denisov,” also known as Aleksandr Alekseevich Langovoi, a cadre officer of the GPU. Langovoi came from a well-known Moscow family: his father, Aleksei Pavlovich, a famous Moscow physician, was the speaker of the city Duma. A. P. Langovoi was also an art collector and a member of the trustees’ council of the Tretiakov Gallery. For the Eurasianists he must have appeared as an individual of their own milieu. At a meeting of the Eurasianist leadership with Langovoi’s participation, which took place in January 1925 in Paris, it was decided to attempt the conversion of the entire Trest to Eurasianism.31 “Denisov”-Langovoi became leader of the Eurasianist Party in the USSR and until 1927 he took part in Eurasianist meetings and correspondence. Trest’s representative in Warsaw and Arapov’s friend, Iu. A. Artamonov, also proclaimed himself an Eurasianist. For over a year, Langovoi successfully misled the Eurasianists, and the scale of the venture was significant: Arapov and Savitskii traveled to the USSR, Savitskii twice, and Arapov practically every year from 1924. Both met “internal” Eurasianists in Moscow and other Soviet cities. The Eurasianists were sending a flood of literature to the USSR (one would assume that most of it landed in GPU departments), whereas Trest supplied the Eurasianists with “information bulletins,” which provided the movement’s leaders with details of particular events in the country or discussed the popular mood, the state of the economy, and so on.

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V. A. Styrne, deputy director of the GPU Counterintelligence Organ, reported to his superiors that Trest’s infiltration of Eurasianism had reached such proportions that “our agents are introduced into the leading organs of the movement, while certain participants in the movement are ready to fulfill almost anything we would ask of them.”32 The Eurasianist movement began to fashion itself a party. A “Council of Five” was established in 1924, with Arapov, Trubetskoi, Suvchinskii, Savitskii, and Malevskii-Malevich as members, and a “Council of Seven” with the addition of Artamonov and Langovoi in 1925.33 the organization was divided into two departments: “ideological” and “organizational.” The intellectual founders were the ideologues, and the officers, Arapov and Malevich, the “organizers.” Beginning in 1924, the Eurasianist correspondence became coded as members of the movement referred to each other by pseudonyms and assigned code names (for instance, “oil” for Eurasianism, “competitors” for the Bolsheviks, “manufacture” for the emigration, Suvchinskii became “Reznik,” Trubetskoi “Iokhelson,” and Savitskii “Elkind”). Curiously, these codes initially corresponded to the codes used by Trest. Although it may look like a game, the consequences were probably deadly. For example, Arapov asked Suvchinskii to write a program of Eurasianism in regard to art to be distributed to the addresses of Suvchinskii’s acquaintances in the music milieu in Russia through Trest channels. Arapov mentioned that this idea was put forward by “Denisov”-Langovoi.34 One can only assume that the fates of Suvchinskii’s addressees were tragic: connections with Eurasianism were among the immediate causes for the arrest and imprisonment even of individuals as remote from politics as the great linguist N. N. Durnovo, who returned to the USSR and became one of the first victims of the well-known “affair of the Slavists.” Arrested in 1932, Durnovo was executed in 1937.35 Contacts between the Eurasianists and Trest also led to many trips of Eurasianists to the USSR. G. N. Mukalov, Savitskii’s associate in the Prague group, was sent to Leningrad. As Savitskii recalled in the late 1930s, Mukalov stopped responding to letters and returned only after Trest’s collapse, in 1927.36 Even before Mukalov’s trip, another young Prague Eurasianist, L. E. Kopetskii, was supposed to go the Soviet Union. Kopetskii, however, experienced a psychological breakdown on the border and returned to Czechoslovakia.37 The peak of cooperation between Trest and Eurasianism was Savitskii’s trip to the USSR in order to meet the “Moscow Eurasianists.” According to Sergei Voitsekhovskii, he met Savitskii in 1927 in Warsaw, just hours before the latter’s departure for the Soviet border.38 In Moscow, Savitskii took part in a masterfully prepared spectacle that included not only meetings with “Eurasianists” but even an underground church service! It was in Moscow that Savitskii, very much excited about what he saw, wrote the Eurasianist program of 1927.39

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The Eurasianist contacts with Trest reflected the Eurasianist belief in the new type of Soviet people who shared the state instincts of the Bolsheviks yet were ready to reject Soviet ideology, but their attempts to establish ties with Soviet Russia were not limited to the Trest affair. After the collapse of Trest in the spring of 1927, P. P. Suvchinskii and L. P. Karsavin, acting on behalf of the Eurasianists, sought to enter into negotiations with Soviet representatives.40 In late 1927, Suvchinskii and Karsavin met G. L. Piatakov, a prominent Bolshevik who at the time served as the Soviet trade representative in France. Trubetskoi advised Suvchinskii to tell Piatakov, “we accept three-quarters of the Bolshevik policies or even more but we don’t accept your ideology.” Unfortunately for the Eurasianists, Piatakov saw one of their anti-Bolshevik propaganda leaflets and considered the Eurasianists “banal anti-Bolsheviks.”41 As negotiations with Piatakov collapsed, Suvchinskii and D. P. Sviatopolk-Mirskii established contacts with Maksim Gorky, who resided in Sorrento.42 Their proposal to Gorky was to use the resources of a group of intellectuals in Europe for the Soviet cause. It appears that neither Trubetskoi nor Savitskii knew of the entire affair with Gorky. Gorky reported to Stalin about Suvchinskii’s and Sviatopolk-Mirskii’s visit to his house,43 and noted that both Suvchinskii and Sviatopolk-Mirskii were people of greater intellectual caliber than those who had busied themselves with Soviet propaganda in Europe. It appears that Stalin expressed no interest in Gorky’s offer.44 Tantalized by the seeming success of the Bolsheviks, some Eurasianists on the left, such as Suvchinskii, Sviatopolk-Mirskii, and others came to share Petr Arapov’s idea, as expressed in one of his letters to Suvchinskii: “Isn’t it better for us to leave Stalin to do calmly what we like so much in his activities?”45 These pro-Soviet leanings contributed to the growing cracks within the movement. In 1926–1928 the rift both personal and ideological, grew between Suvchinskii and Savitskii. Suvchinskii detested what he considered Savitskii’s excessive activism and lack of style. Savitskii, in turn, was appalled by Suvchinskii’s free juggling of Eurasianist ideas. Suvchinskii practically ceased writing to Savitskii, and his group openly ridiculed Savitskii’s work and ideas. In 1927, Suvchinskii vetoed the publication by the Eurasianist Publishing House of Savitskii’s Geographical Specifics of Russia, whereas in 1926 he published Zaitsev’s pro-Soviet The Recruitment of the Red Army without Savitskii’s consent. In the spring and early summer of 1928 Trubetskoi, who had just suffered a heart attack, attempted to arrange a meeting in Austria of the three intellectual leaders of the movement, but Suvchinskii did not show up. Finally, in July 1928, the leaders met in Evian in France and then in September 1928 in Vienna. Trubetskoi wrote long “therapeutic” letters to both, in which he tried to reconcile the polarities. They seemed to have reached an agreement on how to proceed insofar as the new project, the publication of the newspaper Evraziia (Eurasia), was conceived as a common effort.

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The decade-long consensus among the Eurasianists fell apart in the fall of 1928. Trubetskoi attempted several times to mediate and to reconcile the two poles of the movement. In October, on the eve of the newspaper launch, he acceded that the newspaper might pursue Eurasianism “under the mask” of Marxism, as Suvchinskii had told him.46 However, he made it clear that such a newspaper may not bear the title “Eurasia” and that his personal convictions would not allow him to participate in a publication that celebrates Marxism while pretending to be Eurasianist. For the first time, he raised the prospect of a “civilized divorce,” arguing that such a separation was preferable to a breakup.47 He asked Suvchinskii to rethink his actions and to postpone the launch of the newspaper. Yet, the first issue was published in November 1928, featuring, among others, Trubetskoi’s own article on “Ideocracy and the Proletariat.”48 At the same time, the newspaper assumed its own dynamic: it became the domain of Sviatopolk-Mirskii, Karsavin, Suvchinskii, Emilia Litauer, and Sergei Efron, all of whom saw Eurasianism as a convenient stage on the path to full acceptance of the Soviet regime. The newspaper increasingly emphasized those aspects of Eurasianism that were approving of the Soviets, and completely avoided those that were critical of the Soviet reality. In the fall of 1928 Savitskii suspected that Suvchinskii might lead the newspaper toward the left. He sent a group of his Prague associates, P. I. Dunaev, K. A. Chkheidze, and A. G. Romantiskii, to Paris, where they were supposed to join the editorial group of the newspaper. Officially, the newspaper was edited by the trio of Chkheidze (Savitskii’s protégé), S. Ia. Efron, and K. V. Rodzevich (both members of the left-wing Paris group with ties to Soviet secret services).49 The Prague envoys were asked to inform Savitskii about the state of affairs in the Paris organization. They faithfully reported, sending weekly bulletins to Prague. From the outset, these bulletins demonstrated the parting of the ways in Eurasianism: the Praguers complained that they did not recognize Eurasianist ideas when talking to the Parisians and that the Parisians were more Marxist than Eurasianist.50 Savitskii regularly forwarded complaints to Suvchinskii and Trubetskoi. In response, Suvchinskii complained that the envoys of Prague were not suited to work on the newspaper: he characterized Dunaev as an alcoholic, and called Chkheidze a “mediocrity” and Romanitsky a “Whiteguardist.” The tensions grew with every week and an emotional exchange between Suvchinskii and Savitskii made their further work on the newspaper impossible. The tenth issue of the newspaper, which was published on January 29, 1929, carried the names of the editorial board, which included only Parisian allies of Suvchinskii: P. S. Arapov, P. P. Suvchinskii, L. P. Karsavin, A. S. Lur’e, P. N. Malevskii-Malevich, S. Ia. Efron, and V. P. Nikitin. The newspaper ceased criticizing Marxism as an ideology and focused on the problems of “modernity,” which were presented as a mix of reactions to contemporary European intellectual life and a celebration of

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Soviet achievements. The newspaper looked increasingly like Pravda except for Emilia Litauer’s lengthy reviews of Heidegger, V. P. Nikitin’s articles on contemporary Asian countries, and D. P. Sviatopolk-Mirskii’s encyclopedia-style articles on Soviet nationalities. Trubetskoi perceived these events through the prism of his intellectual loneliness in Vienna, and was annoyed by the clashes within the movement. As he wrote to Suvchinskii in late November 1928, “my Viennese loneliness depresses me more and more. I will die here; I won’t endure it for a long time.”51 Trubetskoi’s reaction to the growing rift reflected his increasing disappointment in the Eurasianist venture. In March 1928, commenting on the continued conflict between Savitskii and Suvchinskii, Trubetskoi wrote to the latter, “writing about all this Eurasianist nightmare, I feel I could have spent all this time and labor on scholarship with much greater use for myself and others.  .  .  . I might not have that much time left and I will disappear without having achieved anything in my field of scholarship, I will bury my talent. . . . Please, understand how tragic it is.” In a dramatic passage, Trubetskoi expressed his feelings about Eurasianism: “Please, understand that deep in my soul I hate it and I cannot avoid hating it. Eurasianism broke me, it did not allow me to be who I should have and could have been. It would be my greatest joy to drop it, to leave it, and to forget about it altogether.”52 Although Trubetskoi hoped that Suvchinskii would refrain from expressing his Marxist turn, his hopes were crushed when Suvchinskii sent him the draft of his article “Revolution and Power,” which immediately appeared in the newspaper.53 In the article, Suvchinskii repeated the Eurasianist idea that Communism was significant in the Russian Revolution because it solved some of the structural problems of Russian history and offered the Russian people opportunities to heal the wounds inflicted by the alienated culture and political regime of the imperial period. However, Suvchinskii stopped short of pointing out the ideological shortcomings of Communism according to Eurasianist theory. His article could be read as an outright acceptance of Communism as a logical outcome of Russian development, an outcome that corresponded to the deepest hopes of the Russian people. After reading the article, Trubetskoi realized that reconciliation of the movement was impossible and sent the leaders his proposal for a “divorce.” He had already told Suvchinskii, “if I cannot understand your [flirtation with Marxism], how could a stranger understand you?”54 In late November 1928, in his last letter to Suvchinskii, he suggested that the movement be split into Suvchinskii’s “social-Eurasianism” and Savitskii’s “national-Eurasianism.” Trubetskoi warned that he had no ambition to continue the Eurasianist enterprise and planned to retreat into scholarship.55 His proposals were in vain and in early January he sent a letter to the newspaper in which he announced his decision to leave Eurasianism altogether, while reconfirming his commitment to and responsibility for all his

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Eurasianist writings to date.56 Curiously, Trubetskoi did not openly criticize the direction of the newspaper under Suvchinskii. Following Trubetskoi’s withdrawal, Savitskii arrived in Paris and on January 17 he met Suvchinskii and Karsavin, the leaders of the Parisian group. He told them that “the direction of the newspaper Eurasia is a deviation from Eurasianism.” Stressing the importance of Trubetskoi’s withdrawal, Savitskii demanded that the newspaper “be transformed in the Eurasianist spirit and the funds given for its publication be deposited in the joint account of P. N. Savitskii, P. P. Suvchinskii, and L. P. Karsavin.”57 Karsavin noted in the protocol of the meeting, considering that P. N. Savitskii, having described the actions of P. P. Suvchinskii as “unacceptable and contradictory to the notion of the moral principle,” refused to revoke his description despite L. P. Karsavin’s attempts to find a way to reconciliation, and considering Karsavin’s statement pointing to the fact that Savitskii’s accusations are subjective and groundless, the further communication of the abovementioned individuals within the Eurasianist Council is accepted by all three as impossible.58

Any semblance of unity of the movement was now crushed. When Savitskii returned to Prague, he immediately wrote to Spalding about the situation around the newspaper Eurasia. He offered Spalding a selection of articles and requested that Spalding have them translated and read them. Spalding’s letter to Suvchinskii demonstrates his bewilderment. He acknowledged that he understood Suvchinskii’s argument about the need to change from an attack against Communism to persuasion. However, Spalding registered his disagreement with “the way in which this policy has been carried out, particularly in the paper. . . . The line adopted in it seems to me to be wrong, both intellectually and practically.” Spalding thought, “S[avitskii] states a very reasonable case—to the general effect that Clamart [the town of Suvchinskii’s residence] was overturning fundamental E[urop]A[sian] principles wholesale.” Spalding was bewildered by Suvchinskii’s arguments and questioned, “why is it so necessary to accommodate E[urop]A[sianism] to M[arxis]m, and how is it being done? How does Fedorov’s philosophy (with which I am unfamiliar) come in?”59 In Spalding’s view, the differences between the newspaper and his own views went too far. “It may be that at this stage I stand too far upon one side, and you too far upon the other; the new Programme may be too Marxian for me, and not Marxian enough for you,” he wrote.60 Soon, Spalding cut funding for the newspaper and for the Parisian group. Savitskii’s associate, K. A. Chkheidze, cheerfully wrote to G. V. Vernadskii at Yale in the summer of 1929, “we just received a report from England that the newspaper Eurasia and the entire action of P. P. Suvchinskii is deprived of financial

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backing. . . . This does not mean that the stream of money will be redirected to us, but it is already good enough that the Clamartian dirt is losing ground.”61 In June 1929, Savitskii established a temporary “executive committee,” which included himself, N. N. Alekseev, and N. A. Klepinin. The committee resurrected the Eurasianist Publishing House, and the movement officially condemned Suvchinskii in the new publication in 1931. Trying to energize the movement, Savitskii organized a congress of the Eurasianist organizations in Brussels in 1931, and sponsored the publication of the Eurasianist Almanac and the Chronicle.62 P. N. Malevskii-Malevich joined Savitskii and arranged for some modest funding from Spalding. However, throughout the 1930s the movement remained a bleak shadow of the Eurasianism of the 1920s. Deprived of Trubetskoi’s active participation (he published occasional papers in Savitskii-sponsored publications but dedicated most of his time to writing his Principles of Phonology) and Suvchinskii’s modernist aura, the movement was also marred by scandals and allegations of spying. It lacked funding and public support, for the split in the movement delivered an irreparable blow to its prestige. For all intents and purposes, the movement’s zenith was in the past: Eurasianism never achieved either the level of intellectual novelty and sophistication it had in the 1920s or the attention paid to it by the public. Even more important, the particular consensus that brought together Suvchinskii’s religious modernism, Savitskii’s geopolitical visions, and Trubetskoi’s neo-Romantic diversitarianism was no longer there to keep the movement and ideology together. Eurasianism seemed a fleeting moment in Russian intellectual history. After the split of 1929, in the remaining decade of his life Trubetskoi focused on his scholarship and Suvchinskii on his music. Sviatopolk-Mirskii, Arapov, Sergei Efron, and N. A. Klepinin finally returned to the USSR and perished in Stalin’s terror campaigns. Although Savitskii, arrested in Prague in 1945 and freed from the Soviet camp in 1956, rushed to inform his old correspondents of his commitment to the movement’s ideas, no one appeared interested. G. V. Vernadskii and Roman Jakobson had successful careers as American academics, and V. P. Nikitin as a French diplomat and scholar of the Orient. Against the background of the epic tragedy of World War II and the onset of the Cold War, Eurasianism appeared a strange atavism, a product of the wild imagination of a traumatized generation of displaced individuals. Yet, some interest in it lingered on, albeit always in the margins. The nephew of P. N. Malevskii-Malevich, S. S. Malevskii-Malevich, who had participated in the movement in the 1930s, became a Belgian diplomat in the USSR and wrote a strangely neo-Eurasianist book advocating a Western–Soviet alliance. His ideas remained marginal and arcane.63 Both P. N. Savitskii and G. V. Vernadskii maintained correspondence with Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev, the self-professed “last Eurasianist.” Gumilev’s ideas of the

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unity of the Eurasian space, proximity of the peoples inhabiting it, and fervent anti-Westernism gained widespread popularity in the late Soviet period. The son of two Russian cultural icons, the poets Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilev, Lev Gumilev suffered Stalinist persecution and was imprisoned twice. This lineage and persecution secured the sympathetic attention of the Soviet intelligentsia to Gumilev’s views in the last decade of the USSR. Along with interesting ideas about the continuity between the nomadic empires of Eurasia and Russia and the role of the environment in the historical process and genuine respect for the Turkic and Mongolian peoples of Eurasia, Gumilev also propagated bewildering theories of “passionarnost,’” which explained the rise and expansion of ancient kingdoms by the increase in human energy allegedly connected to physical factors such as cosmic radiation. Gumilev envisioned “Eurasia” as a geocultural entity opposed to Europe, and saw as the task of any Russian state to defend this difference. His theories, even if they drew on Eurasianist texts, were far removed from the consensus of the Eurasianist thinkers of the 1920s, and his self-presentation as “the last Eurasianist” was more an attempt to establish a glorious genealogy for his conceptions. The story of post-Soviet Eurasianism, important as it is, falls beyond the scope of this study, which, I hope, will help scholars to identify both continuities and ruptures in the development of this remarkable ideology.

Notes

Notes to Introduction 1. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, made “Eurasian integration” one of his priorities after his return to power in 2011. Vladimir Putin, “Novyi integratsionnyi proekt dlia Evrazii: budushchee, kotoroe rozhdaetsia segodnia,” Izvestiia, October 3, 2011, http://izvestia.ru/news/502761 (accessed October 10, 2013). However, it was the Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev, who first suggested a “Eurasian” integration project in 1994. In Kazakhstan’s case, a form of “Eurasianism” serves as a national ideology that allows for an emphasis on Kazakh national roots in the steppe traditions without alienating the sizable and politically important Russian population and the powerful Russian neighbor. Nursultan Nazarbaev, “Evraziiskii Soiuz: ot idei k istorii budushchego,” Izvestiia, October 25, 2011, http://izvestia.ru/news/504908 (accessed October 10, 2013); Golam Mostafa, “The Concept of ‘Eurasia’: Kazakhstan’s Eurasian Policy and Its Implications,” Journal of Eurasian Studies 4, no. 2 (July 2013): 160–70, doi:10.1016/j.euras.2013.03.006. 2. For a recent study of Eurasianist influences on Russian politics in the European context of the Far Right, see M. Laruelle, ed., Eurasianism and the European Far Right: Reshaping the Europe– Russia Relationship (London: Lexington Books, 2015). See also Alexander Höllwerth, Das sakrale eurasische Imperium des Aleksandr Dugin. Eine Diskursanalyse zum postsowjetischen Rechtsextremismus (Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag, 2007); M. Bassin, “Eurasianism Classical and Neo: Lines of Continuity,” in Beyond the Empire: Images of Russia in the Eurasian Cultural Context, ed. Michizuki Tetsuo (Sapporo: Slavic Research Center, 2007), 279–94. 3. Tellingly, the title of the annual 2007 conference of scholars interested in post--Socialist transformations (Soyuz group) was “Locating ‘Eurasia’ in Postsocialist Studies: The Geopolitics of Naming.” Another interesting example of a conference dealing with Eurasia was the colloquium at Lancaster University “Constructing Regional Identities in the Post-Communist Space: Eurasia or Europe?” held on June 27–28. See http://www.lancs.ac.uk/ias/annualprogramme/regionalism/eurasia/index.htm (accessed June 15, 2008). See also the annual conference of the Havighurst Center at Miami University of Ohio, 2006, http://www.units.muohio.edu/havighurstcenter/publications/paperarchive.htm #orienting (accessed June 15, 2008). The Eighth World Congress of the International Council for Central and East European Studies took place in Stockholm, Sweden, on July 26–31, 2010, titled “Eurasia: Prospects for Wider Cooperation,” www.iccees2010.se. 4. For recent historiographic discussions, see Mark von Hagen, “Imperii, okrainy, diaspory: Evraziia kak antiparadigma dlia postsovetskogo perioda,” as well as comments, Ab Imperio 4, no. 1 (2004): 127–90; von Hagen, “Empires, Borderlands, and Diasporas: Eurasia as Antiparadigm for the Post-Soviet Era,” American Historical Review 109, no. 2 (2004): 445–68; Stephen Kotkin, “Ab Imperio: Exchange and Governance across the Post-Mongol Space,” keynote address at the 2007 annual meeting of the Soyuz group, Princeton University, April 27–29, 2007, http://www.princeton.edu/~restudy /soyuz_papers/Kotkin.pdf (accessed June 15, 2008). See also the published version Stephen Kotkin, “Mongol Commonwealth? Exchange and Governance across the Post-Mongol Space,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 8, no. 3 (2007): 487–531; and Mark von Hagen, “From Russia to Soviet Union to Eurasia: A View from New York Ten Years after the End oft he Soviet Union,”

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Osterreichische Osthefte 44, nos. 1–2 (2002): 43–60. See also Peter Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); and the special section on “Eurasian Comparisons” in Social Science History 32, no. 2 (2008): 235–304 with the participation of Daniel Little, Peter Perdue, and Victor Liberman; and Sanjay Subrakhmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes Towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (1997): 735–62; for a discussion of Eurasia in the context of world history, see David Christian, “Inner Eurasia as a Unit of World History,” Journal of World History 5, no. 2 (1994): 173–211. 5. See, for example, Edith Clowes, Russia on the Edge: Imagined Geographies and Post-Soviet Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); Harsha Ram, “The Poetics of Eurasia: Khlebnikov,” in Social Identities in Revolutionary Russia, ed. Madhavan K. Palat (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 209–31. For Ram, Khlebnikov’s vision in the end entailed a promise of “understanding and perhaps dismantling the mechanism of empire” (223). See also Alexandra Smith, “Between Art and Politics: Tsvetaeva’s Story ‘The Chinaman’ and Its Link with the Eurasian Movement in the 1920–30s,” Soviet & Post-Soviet Review 28, no. 3 (2001): 269–85; and Gerald Smith, D.S. Mirsky: A Russian-English Life, 1890–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) for examples of works on the relationship between literature and Eurasianism. On examples of “Eurasian manifestations,” see Boris Gasparov, “Eurasian Roots of Phonological Theory: Baudouin de Courtenay in Kazan,” in Kazan, Moscow, St. Petersburg: Multiple Faces of the Russian Empire, ed. C. Evtuhov et al. (Moscow: OGI, 1997), 302–24; Michael G. Smith, “The Eurasian Imperative in Early Soviet Language Planning. Russian Linguistics at the Service of the Nationalities,” in Beyond Sovietology: Essays in Politics and History, ed. Susan Gross Solomon (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1993), 159–91; Michael G. Smith, Language and Power in the Creation of the USSR, 1917–1953 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1998). 6. For general studies of Eurasianism, see Otto Böss, Die Lehre der Eurasier: Eine Beitrage zur Russische Ideengeschichte des 20 Jahrhunderts (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1961); Nicholas Riasanovsky, “Prince N. S. Trubetskoi’s ‘Europe and Mankind,’”  Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 13 (1964): 207–20; Riasanovsky, “The Emergence of Eurasianism,” California Slavic Studies, no. 4 (1967): 39–72; Riasnaovsky, “Asia through Russian Eyes,” in Russia and Asia: Essays on Russian Influence upon Asian Peoples, ed. Wayne S. Vuchinich (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1972), 3–29. For more recent studies, see Marlene Laruelle, L’Idéologie Eurasianiste russe ou Comment penser l’empire (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999); Stefan Wiederkehr, Die Eurasische Bewegung (Cologne: Böhlau, 2007); Sergey Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom: istoriia v dokumentakh (Moscow: Novoe Izdatel’stvo, 2009), 7–173. For a review of recent studies of Eurasianism, see Sergey Glebov, “Wither Eurasia? History of Ideas in an Imperial Situation,” Ab Imperio, no. 2 (2008): 345–76. For an excellent, albeit now dated, review of Russian literature on Eurasianism, see A. V. Antoshchenko et al., O Evrazii i evraziitsakh (bibliograficheskii ukazatel’) (Petrozavodsk: PetrGU, 2000); and for a more recent and reliable bibliographic guide, L. G. Filonova, Evraziistvo v filosofsko-istoricheskoi i politicheskoi mysli russkogo zarubezh’ia 1920-kh–1930-kh godov: Bibliograficheskii ukazatel’ (Moscow: Russian State Library, 2011), http://www.rsl.ru/datadocs/doc_4677ri.pdf (accessed May 1, 2015). 7. See in particular P. Suvchinskii, “Sila slabykh,” in Iskhod k vostoku. Predchustvia i svershenia. Utverzhdenie evraziitsev (Sofia: Rossiisko-Bolgarskoe knigoizdatel’stvo, 1921), 4. The Eurasianist movement could be productively compared with a variety of “clerical Fascisms” in Europe, although the latter were primarily led by Christian clerics seeking to reconcile their church teachings with solutions to the European problems offered by Fascist ideologies. Matthew Feldman and Marius Turda, “ ‘Clerical Fascism’ in Interwar Europe: An Introduction,” in Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 8, no. 2 (June 2007): 205–12. For a review of recent works on the religious turn in modern Europe, see Thomas Albert Howard, “A ‘Religious Turn’ in Modern European Historiography?” Historically Speaking 4, no. 3 (2003): 24–26. 8. L. P. Karsavin, “Fenomenologia Revoliutsii,” Evraziiskii vremennik 5 (1927): 28–74. 9. In this respect, Eurasianism was often compared to German Conservative Revolution. Leonid Liuks, “Evraziistvo i konservativnaia revoliutsiia: Soblazn antizapadnichestva v Rossii i Germanii,” Voprosy filosofii, no. 6 (1996): 57–69; Luks, “Die Ideologie der Eurasier im zeitgeschichtlichen

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Zusammenhang,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 34 (1986): 374–95; Luks, “Der ‘Dritte Weg’ der ‘Neo-Eurasischen’ Zeitschrift ‘Elementy’: zurück ins Dritte Reich?” Studies in East European Thought 52 (2000): 49–71. 10. N. S. Trubetskoi, “Ob idee-pravitel’nitse ideokraticheskogo gosudarstva,” Evraziiskaia khronika 11 (1935): 29–37. 11. Sergey Glebov, “The Mongol–Bolshevik Revolution: Eurasianist Ideology in Search for an Ideal Past,” Journal of Eurasian Studies, no. 2 (2011): 103–14. 12. N. S. Trubetskoi, Evropa i Chelovechestvo (Sofia: Rossiisko-bolgarskoe knigoizdatel’stvo, 1920). 13. For a typical misreading of Eurasianist anticolonialism, see David Chioni Moore, “Colonialism, Eurasianism,” Orientalism: N. S. Trubetzkoy’s Russian Vision. Rev. of N. S. Trubetzkoy, The Legacy of Gengis Khan and Other Essays on Russia’s Identity, ed. Anatoly Liberman (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1991), Slavic and East European Journal 41, no. 2 (1997): 321–29. 14. For a discussion of the Eurasianist critique of colonialism, see Sergei Glebov, “Granitsy imperii kak granitsy moderna: antikolonial’naia ritorika i teoriia kult’urnykh tipov v evraziistve,” Ab Imperio, no. 2 (2003): 267–92. For a broader discussion of Russian Orientalism, see David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian Mind from Peter the Great to Emigration (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). I understand “diversitarianism” in the sense of Artur Lovejoy, who saw diversitarianism as a characteristic of Romanticism, which “asserted the value of diversity in human opinions, characters, arts and cultures.” See Arthur O. Lovejoy, “The Meaning of Romanticism for the Historian of Ideas,” Journal of the History of Ideas 2, no. 3 (June 1, 1941): 257–78. 15. Biocenosis refers to the cohabitation of animal or plant species in a given landscape. In the Anglo-American tradition, the concept is often referred to as “ecosystem.” 16. For the history of the relations between Suvchinskii and Sviatopolk-Mirskii, see G. Smith, ed., The Letters of D. S. Mirsky to P. P. Suvchinskii, 1922–1931 (Birmingham: Department of Russian Language and Literature, University of Birmingham, 1995). See also an interesting take on Eurasianist aesthetics in Katerine Levidou, “The Artist-Genius in Petr Suvchinskii’s Eurasianist Philosophy of History: The Case of Igor’ Stravinskii,” Slavonic and East European Review 89, no. 4 (October 2011): 601–29. See also Klara Moricz, Introduction and notes, “Arthur Lourié’s Eurasianist and Neo-Thomist Responses to the Crisis of Art,” in Stravinsky and His World, ed. Tamara Levitz (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 127–35. 17. Jindrich Toman, The Magic of a Common Language: Jakobson, Mathesius, Trubetzkoy, and the Prague Linguistic Circle (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995); Boris Gasparov, “The Ideological Principles of Prague School Phonology,” in Language, Poetry and Poetics. The Generation of the 1890s: Jakobson, Trubetzkoy, Majakovskij. Proceedings of the First Roman Jakobson Colloquium, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, October 5–6, 1984, ed. K. Pomorska, E. Chodakowska, H. McLean, and B. Vine (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1987), 49–78; Patrick Sériot, Structure et totalité: Les origines intellectuelles du structuralisme en Europe centrale et orientale (Paris: PUF, 1999); Sériot, Les langues ne sont pas des choses: Discours sur la langue et souffrance identitaire en Europe centrale et orientale (Paris: Petra, 2010). 18. For a good overview of the conflict leading to the movement’s collapse, see M. Iu. Panchenko, “Politicheskaia istoriia evraziiskogo dvizheniia 1926–29 godov: Fraktsionnaia bor’ba i klamarskii raskol,” (Master’s thesis, Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia, St. Petersburg, 2007). 19. Yanni Kotsonis, “Introduction,” in Russian Modernity. Politics, Knowledge, Practices, ed. D. Hoffman and Y. Kotsonis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 3; on Sonderweg interpretations of Russian history, see Ab Imperio 2, no. 1 (2002): 15–101 (contributions by Carl E. Schorske, Hans van der Loo, Gunilla-Friederike Budde, Jurgen Kocka, and Manfred Hildermeier). 20. Catherine Evtuhov, The Cross and the Sickle: Sergei Bulgakov and the Fate of Russian Religious Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 1–17; on the origins and circulation of the term “Silver Age,” see Omry Ronen, The Fallacy of the Silver Age in Twentieth-Century Russian Literature (London: Taylor and Francis, 1997).

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21. See Vera Tolz, “The Eurasians and Liberal Scholarship of the Late Imperial Period: Continuity and Change Across the 1917 Divide,” in Between Europe and Asia: Origins, Theories and Legacies of Russian Eurasianism, ed. M. Bassin, S. Glebov, and M. Laruelle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), 27–47. For a less convincing argument, see Daniel Beers, Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity, 1880–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). 22. On the concept of the imperial situation, see Ilya Gerasimov et al., “New Imperial History and the Challenges of Empire,” in Empire Speaks Out: Languages of Rationalization and Self-Description in the Russian Empire, ed. I. Gerasimov, J. Kusber, and A. Semyonov (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 23. 23. The concept of the national mystique was developed by George Mosse in George L. Mosse, Masses and Man: Nationalist and Fascist Perceptions of Reality (New York: Howard Fertig, 1980), esp. the essay “Toward a General Theory of Fascism,” 159–97. 24. For a discussion of culture as a central element in understanding Fascism, see R. Griffin, “The Primacy of Culture: The Current Growth (or Manufacture) of Consensus within Fascist Studies,” Journal of Contemporary History 37, no. 1 (2002): 21–43.

Notes to Chapter 1 1. P. N. Savitskii to his family, July 4, 1921. Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF), f. R-5783, op. 2, d. 326, l. 32–33. 2. P. N. Savitskii, “Povorot k Vostoku,” in Iskhod k vostoku. Predchustvia i svershenia. Utverzhdenie evraziitsev (Sofia: Rossiisko-Bolgarskoe knigoizdatel’stvo [RBK], 1921), 1–3. 3. P. N. Savitskii, “Kontinent-Okean (Rossiia i mirovoi rynok),” in Iskhod k Vostoku, 104–25. Savitskii applied geopolitical theories, in particular that of Alfred Thayer Mahan, to the Russian case. Savitskii’s theory can be seen as a reformulation of Mahan’s concept of “sea power”: in Savitskii’s case, “sea power” is replaced with “continental power.” A. T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1918). On Mahan and his conceptions, see John B. Hattendorf, ed., The Influence of History on Mahan:Tthe Proceedings of a Conference Marking the Centenary of Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 1991); William E. Livezey, Mahan on Sea Power (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980). 4. P. N. Savitskii, “Migratsiia kul’tury,” in Iskhod k Vostoku, 40–51. 5. N. S. Trubetskoi, “Verkhi i nizy russkoi kul’tury: Etnicheskaia osnova russkoi kul’tury,” in Iskhod k Vostoku, 86–103. 6. Trubetskoi wrote to Jakobson in early 1922 that he despised “false” European nationalism and the way in which it was copied both by the nationalities of the former Russian Empire and the tsarist regime. N. S. Trubetzkoy’s Letters and Notes, prepared for publication by Roman Jakobson, with the assistance of H. Baran, O. Ronen, and Martha Taylor (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), 15–16. 7. N. S. Trubetskoi, “Ob istinnom i lozhnom natsionalisme,” in Iskhod k Vostoku, 71–85. 8. P. P. Suvchinskii, “Epokha very,” in Iskhod k Vostoku, 14–27; Suvchinskii, “Sila slabykh,” in Iskhod k Vostoku, 4–8. Here quoted from the English edition, Exodus to the East, ed. Ilya Vinkovetsky and Charles Schlacks Jr. (Idylwild, CA: Charles Schlacks Jr., 1996), 17. 9. Ibid., 19. 10. Ibid., 27. 11. Ibid. 12. Catherine Evtuhov, The Cross and the Sickle: Sergei Bulgakov and the Fate of Russian Religious Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 1–17. 13. What follows is not a complete list of works on Trubetskoi but it can attest to the emergence of a virtual cult of Trubetskoi in today’s Russian humanities. D. Chizhevskii, “Kniaz’ Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetskoi,” Sovremennye zapiski 68 (1939): 445–67; P. Kretschmer, “Nikolaus Fürst Trubetzkoy,” in Almanach der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien für das Jahr 1938, bd. 88 (1939):

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335–45; Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, “Prince N. S. Trubetskoy’s ‘Europe and Mankind,’” Jahrbücher Für Geschichte Osteuropas, Neue Folge 12, no. 2 (July 1, 1964): 207–20; G. Wytrzens, “Fürst Trubetzkoy als Kulturphilosoph,” Wiener Slavistisches Jahrbuch, bd. 11 (1964): 154–66; Nikolaj Trubeckoj, L’Europa e l’umanità: la prima critica all’eurocentrismo, introduction by R. Jakobson (Torino, G. Einaudi, 1982); Iu. A. Kleiner, “N. S. Trubetskoi: Biografiia i nauchnye vzgliady,” Uchenye zapiski vysshikh uchebnykh zavedenii Litovskoi SSR 35, no. 3 (1985): 98–110; V. N. Toporov, “Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetskoi— uchenyi, myslitel’, chelovek: k 100-letiu so dnia rozhdenia,” Sovetskoe slavianovedenie, no. 1 (1990): 51–84; and no. 6 (1991): 78–99; N. A. Kondrashov, “N. S. Trubetskoi: K 100-letiu so dnia rozhdenia,” Russkii iazyk v shkole, no. 2 (1990): 98–103; V. K. Zhuravlev, “N. S. Trubetskoi: k 100-letiu so dnia rozhdenia,” in Russkaia rech’, (1990), n. 2, 91–96; V. P. Neroznak, “Slovo o N. S. Trubetskom: k 100letiu so dnia rozhdenia,” Izvestiia RAN, Series Literatura i iazyk 49, no. 2 (1990): 148–51; A. Sobolev, “Kniaz’ N. S. Trubetskoi i evraziistvo,” Literaturnaia ucheba, no. 6 (1991): 121–30; A. Liberman, “N. S. Trubetzkoy and His Works on History and Politics,” in N. S. Trubetzkoy, The Legaсy of Genghis Khan and Other Essays on Russia’s Identity (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1991), 293–375; A. A. Nikishenkov, “N. S. Trubetskoi i fenomen evraziiskoi etnografii,” in Etnograficheskoe obozrenie, no. 1. (1992): 89–92; N. I. Tolstoi, “N. S. Trubetskoi i evrziistvo,” in N. S. Trubetskoi, Istoriia. Kul’tura. Iazyk (Moscow: Progress, 1995), 1–4; L. N. Gumilev, “Istoriko-filosofskie trudy kniazia N. S. Trubetskogo (zametki poslednego evraziitsa),” in ibid., 5–28; V. A. Kochergina, “N. S. Trubetskoi— indoevropeist,” in Vestnik MGU, Seria 9 Filologiia, no. 5 (1998): 28–35; A. V. Antoschenko, “Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetskoi (1890–1938),” Istoriki Rossii XVIII–ХХ vekov, no. 5 (1998): 106–21. More recent and reliable works include Nikolai S. Trubetzkoy, Russland–Europe–Eurasien: Ausgewählte Schriften zur Kulturwissenschaft, ed. Fedor B. Poljakov (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. 2005). 14. This effort in itself requires some documentation. While the publication of Trubetskoi’s letters and notes remains the best-known incident of Jakobson’s work in this respect, a number of other instances should be noted: Jakobson clearly conveyed to Claude Lévi-Strauss the importance of Trubetskoi’s phonology so that Lévi-Strauss called Trubetskoi “the illustrious founder of structural linguistics.” See C. Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, vol. 1 (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 34. Jakobson delivered a lecture on “N. S. Trubetskoi Then and Now” at Yale University in 1976, and wrote a preface to the Italian translation of Trubetskoi’s “Europe and Mankind,” in which he connected Trubetskoi’s iconoclastic attack on the tenets of European evolutionism with his revolutionary stance in linguistics. See MIT Archives, MC 72, box 28, f. 103. Po povodu knigi N. S. Trubetskogo “Evropa i Chelovechestvo” (manuscript). 15. Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak, Sergei N. Trubetskoi: An Intellectual Among the Intelligentsia in Prerevolutionary Russia (Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1976). 16. For an overview of S. N. Trubetskoi’s philosophical views, see P. P. Gaidenko, “Konkretnyi idealism S. N. Trubetskogo,” in S. N. Trubetskoi, Sochineniia (Moscow: Mysl’, 1994), 3–42; Trubetskoi’s key philosophical work is S. N. Trubetskoi, “Osnovaniia idealizma,” in Sobraniie sochinenii kn. S. N. Trubetskogo, vol. 2 (Filosofskie stat’i), (Moscow: Tipografiia G. Lissnera I D. Sobko, 1908), 161– 284. For a brief overview of contemporary literature on Trubetskoi, see also V. V. Zen’kovskii, Istoriia russkoi filosofii, vol. 2, pt. 2 (Leningrad: Ego, 1992), 94–95. 17. N. A. Berdiaev. “Filosofskaia istina i intelligentskaia pravda,” in Vekhi (Moscow: In. N. Kushnerev, 1909), 1–22, cited from N. Berdiaev, Dukhovnyi krizis intelligentsii (Moscow: Kanon, 1992), 190. 18. See O. N. Trubetskaia, Kniaz’ S. N. Trubetskoi: Vospominaniia sestry (New York: Izdatel’stvo im. Chekhova, 1953). 19. For a discussion of this problem, see Anatoly Liberman, “Postscript,” in Nicholas Trubetzkoy, The Legacy of Genghis Khan and Other Essays on Russia’s Identity, ed. Liberman (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1991), esp. 294–97. 20. See J. Deutsch Kornblatt, “Who Is Solovyov and What Is Sophia?” in Vladimir Solovyov, Divine Sophia: The Wisdom Writings of Vladimir Solovyov (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009),

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16.; Paul Valliere, Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), 120–27. 21. Sergei N. Trubetskoi, Sochinenia (Moscow: Mysl’, 1994), 590–95. 22. Ibid., 540–45; Sergei Trubetskoi, Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 3 (Moscow: Tipografiia G. Lissnera and D. Sobko, 1909), 370–82. 23.Trubetskoi published a series of articles before he entered university: N. S. Trubetskoi, “Finnskaia pesn’ Kulto neito kak perezhivanie iazycheskogo obychaia,” Etnograficheskoe obozrenie 17, no. 2–3 (1905): 231–33; Trubetskoi, “K voprosu o ‘Zolotoi Babe,’” Etnograficheskoe obozrenie 18, no. 1–2 (1906): 52–62; Trubetskoi, “Review of V. J. Mansikka, Das Lied von Ogoi und Hovatitsa. FinnischUgrische Forschungen VI, 1906,” Etnograficheskoe obozrenie 19, no. 3 (1907): 124–25. 24. N. S. Trubetzkoy’s Letters and Notes, 2nd ed., ed. R. Jakobson (Amsterdam: Mouton, 1985), 445–49. 25. Ibid., 443. 26. Tsentral’nyi istoricheskii arkhiv Moskvy (TsIAM), f. 418, op. 91, l. 4. 27. N. S. Trubetskoi, “Review of Sbornik materialov dlia opisaniia mestnostei i plemen Kavkaza (vyp. 37, otd. 3, Tiflis, 1907),” Etnograficheskoe obozrenie 20, no. 3 (1908): 146–51; Trubetskoi, “Kavkazskie paralleli k frigiiskomu mifu o rozhdenii iz kamnia (-zemli),” Etnograficheskoe obozrenie 20, no. 3 (1908): 88–92; Trubetskoi, “Rededia na Kavkaze,” Etnograficheskoe obozrenie 23, no. 1–2 (1911): 229–38. 28. Liberman, “Postscript,” 297. 29. TsIAM, f. 418, op. 91, l. 4. 30. See Trudy Moskovskoi dialektologicheskoi komissii (1908–1919), in particular, Opyt dialektologicheskoi karty russkogo iazyka v Evrope s prilozheniem ocherka russkoi dialektologii, ed. N. N. Durnovo, N. N. Sokolov, and N. N. Ushakov (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Moskovskogo universiteta, 1915). 31. G. Vinokur, “Moskovskii Lingvisticheskii Kruzhok,” Nauchnye Izvestiia Akademicheskogo Tsentra Narkomprosa, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1922). 32. R. Jakobson, “O knige N. S. Trubetskogo “Evropa i chelovechestvo,” manuscript, MIT Archives, MC 72, box 28, f. 103, 2. 33. M. K. Azadovskii, Istoriia russkoi fol’kloristiki, vol. 2 (Moscow: Uchpedgiz, 1962), 296–306. 34. Liberman, “Postscript,” 24. 35. Azadovskii, Istoriia russkoi fol’kloristiki. 36. N. S. Trubetskoi, “Stepan Kirovich Kuznetsov,” Etnograficheskoi obozrenie 25, nos. 96–97 (1913): 325–31. 37. N. S. Trubetskoi to V. G. Bogoraz, n.d., in N. S. Troubetzkoy Letters and Notes, 443–44. 38. Toporov, “Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetskoi,” 12. 39. In particular, Liberman, “Postscript,” 303–7. 40. In the 1920s, the Communist rulers of the Soviet Union developed a far-reaching policy that promoted national cadres and cultures in the Soviet republics. For an overview, see Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Michael G. Smith, Language and Power in the Creation of the USSR, 1917–1953 (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1998) explores the role of linguists in the processes of “korenizatsiia.” 41. TsIAM, f. 418, op. 91, l. 38. 42. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii. September 27, 1922, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 201. 43. Trubetskoi also wandered in the Caucasus, in Tiflis and Baku, in particular, in the course of 1918. Apparently, he spent the winter of 1918 in these cities, so that he left Baku for Kislovodsk after March 1918 and Kislovodsk for Rostov in the fall of 1918. 44. Quoted from Boris Simeonov, “Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetskoi v Bolgarii,” Bolgarskaia Rusistika, no. 2 (1976): 43.

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45. N. S. Trubetzkoy’s Letters and Notes, 21. 46. Vypiska iz scheta A. I. Suvchinskoi v Moskovskom Kommercheskom Banke, 1912. Bibliotheque Nationale Française, Department de Musique (hereafter BNF DdM). Not catalogued. 47. Istoricheskii arkhiv S. Peterburga, f. 176, op. 1, d. 96. I am grateful to Katie Pillars for this reference. Suvchinskii spent seven years at Tenishev school, graduating in 1910. 48. O. E. Mandel’shtam to V. V. Gippius, April 27, 1908, in Clarence Brown, Mandelshtam (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 35. 49. V. Gippius, Pushkin i Khristianstvo (St. Petersburg: Sirius, 1915). 50. Suvchinskii, “Epokha very,” 14. 51. Petr Suvchinskii to Grigorii Schneerson, July 1980. Fonds Pierre Souvtchinsky, BNF DdM, Rés. Vm. Dos. 92 (13). 52. Perhaps Remizov’s use of the Soviet abbreviation of “polpred” (plenipotentiary representative) pointed to Suvchinskii’s collaboration with the Bolsheviks in 1918 and the pro-Soviet orientations of later Eurasianists. 53. The journal was founded in 1915. Petr Suvchinskii to Grigorii Shneerson, July 1980. BNF DdM, Rés. Vm. Dos. 92 (13). 54. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, March 10, 1928. Quoted from Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 434. 55. Robert Craft, Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship, 1948–1971 (New York: Knopf, 1972), 61. 56. Petr Suvchinskii to Grigorii Schneerson, July 1980. BNF DdM, Rés. Vm. Dos. 92 (13). 57. Cited in I. Nest’ev, Prokof ’ev (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Muzykal’noe Izdatel’stvo, 1957), 133. 58. See Michail M. Kunichika, “The Penchant for the Primitive: Archaeology, Ethnography, and the Aesthetics of Russian Modernism,” PhD diss. (University of California Berkeley, 2007). 59. On Miaskovskii, see Z. Gulinskaia, Nikolai Iakovlevich Miaskovskii (Moscow: Muzyka, 1985). 60. Letter to Derzhanovskii, May 3, 1918. Cited from I. Vishnevetskii, Sergei Prokof ’ev (Moscow: Molodiaia gvardiia, 2009), 139–40. 61. Miaskovskii. Letter to Derzhanovskii. 62. Cited from Vishnevetskii, Sergei Prokof ’ev, 162. 63. Ibid. 64. On the relationship between Narkompros and representatives of the arts in 1918 Petrograd, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of the Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky, October 1917–1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). 65. Notably, Lourie was fascinated by Blok and in 1921 wrote a ballet based on “The Snow Mask.” On Lourie, see Klára Móricz, “Shadows of the Past: Akhmatova’s Poem Without a Hero and Lourie’s Incantations,” Twentieth Century Music 4, no. 1 (2008): 1–30; Klára Móricz and Simon Morrison, eds., The End of Russia: Essays on Arthur Vincent Lourie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 66. Lourie bitterly recalled attacks by conservative émigrés in his Artur Lur’e, “Nash Marsh,” Novyi zhurnal, no. 94 (1969): 127–31. 67. Sofia Kochanska to Petr Suvchinskii, n.d. BNF DdM, Rés. Vm. 92 (24). Sofia Kochanska, a singer, was close to Suvchinskii, Sergei Prokofiev, and A. I. Siloti. 68. N. S. Zhekulin and P. P. Suvchinskii, eds., Revolutsiia i grazhdanskaia voina v Rossii: Sobranie istoricheskikh materialov. Primernyi plan izdania (Sofia: Rossiisko-Bolgarskoe knigoizdatel’stvo, 1921). 69. Savitskii mentioned a project for publishing an anthology of Russian lyrics with his own foreword, which he discussed with Suvchinskii in Sofia. P. N. Savitskii to his family, February 21, 1921. GARF, f. P-5783, op. 2, d. 326, l. 19. 70. Pierre Souvtchinsky to the editor of Le Jour, n.d. 1936. BNF DdM. Not catalogued. 71. Starshina is a collective term that refers to officers of the Cossack hosts. See Paul R. Magocsi, A History of Ukraine: The Land and Its Peoples (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 195, 235.

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72. P. N. Savitskii to George Vernadsky, n.d. 1935. Bakhmeteff Archive at Columbia University (hereafter BAR), George Vernadsky Papers, box 7, folder P. N. Savitskii 1935. 73. For a biographical study of Struve, see Richard Pipes, Struve: Liberal on the Right, 1905– 1944 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). 74. Petr Savitskii, “Bor’ba za imperiiu: Imperializm v politike i ekonomike,” Russkaia mysl’ 36, no. 1 (1915): 51–77; no. 2 (1915): 56–77; Savitskii, “K voprosu o razvitii proizvoditel’nykh sil,” Russkaia mysl’ 37, no. 3 (1916): 41–46; Savitskii, “Problema promyshlennosti v khoziaistve imperskoi Rossii,” Russkaia mysl’ 37, no. 11B (1916): 54–77. 75. Petr Savitskii to Nikolai Andreev, n.d. BAR, George Vernadsky Papers, box 8, folder Savitskii 1958. 76. Cited from P. B. Struve, “Istoricheskii smysl russkoi revoliutsii i natsional’nye zadachi,” in Iz glubiny: sbornik statei o russkoi revoliutsii (New York: Telex, 1991), 285–306. 77. Alexander Semyonov, “‘Greater Britain’ into ‘Greater Russia’: A Case of Imagining Empire and Nation in the Early 20th Century Russian Empire,” in Eutropes: The Paradox of European Empire, no. 7: Cahiers Parisiens/Parisian Notebooks (Chicago: University of Chicago Center in Paris, 2014), 25–48. 78. Savitskii, “Kontinent-Okean,” 104–25. 79. On Gul’kevich, see Claus Wittich, “Konstantin Nikolaevich Gul’kevich: Biograficheskie zametki,” in Nansenovskie chteniia 2007 (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo SPbGU, 2008), 107–36. 80. P.N. Savitskii to “Friend and Superior” (K. N. Gul’kevich), February 4, 1920. GARF, f. P-5783, op. 2, d. 323, l. 1–3. 81. The Union of Zemstvos and Towns, an independent association of local administrations in late imperial Russia, assumed charity functions in the course of World War I and assisted refugees and displaced persons. 82. G.N. Mikhailovskii describes the mission of Russian diplomats to the United States sent by General Denikin, in which Savitskii took part. Mikhailovskii blames Savitskii for the failure of the mission, which stalled in Paris, was recalled by General Wrangel, and never reached the United States. See G. N. Mikhailovskii, Zapiski: Iz istorii rossiiskogo vneshnepoliticheskogo vedomstva, 1914–1920, vol. 2 (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 1993). 83. P. N. Savitskii to his parents, July 4, 1920. GARF, f. R-5783, op. 2, d. 326, l. 2. 84. The estate in Narli occupied an important place in Savitskii’s thoughts during 1921. He was planning to exchange his active “intellectual” life in Sofia for agricultural work in Narli. See Savitskii’s letters to his family. GARF, f. P-5783, op. 2, d. 323–326. 85. P. N. Savitskii, “Po povodu broshiury N. S. Trubetskogo Evropa i Chelovechestvo” (Sofia: Rossiisko-Bolgarskoe Knigoizdatel’stvo, 1920), Russkaia mysl’, no. 2 (1921): 119–38. 86. P. N. Savitskii to A. A. Lieven, December 2, 1920. GARF, f. P-5783, op. 2, d. 325, l. 3. 87. Rossiisko-Bolgarskoe knigoizdatel’stvo was founded by another prominent Eurasianist, Petr Petrovich Suvchinskii, and a former Kievan journalist N. S. Zhekulin. The official chairman of the company was Ruschu Georgievich Mollov, a Bulgarian who made a career in the Russian imperial service. The publishing house provided the means for the first Eurasianist publications. P. N. Savitskii to his family, January 26, 1921. GARF, f. P-5783, op. 2, d. 326, l. 14–17. 88. Letters of P. N. Savitskii to his family, 1920. GARF, f. R-5783, op. 2, d. 326, l. 14–17. 89. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, n.d. (dated from context June 1926), in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 433–35. 90. See more on Savitskii’s method in S. Glebov, “A Life with Imperial Dreams: Petr Nikolaevich Savitsky, Eurasianism, and the Invention of “Structuralist Geography,” in Ab Imperio 6, no. 2 (2005): 299–329. For a complete list of Savitskii’s works, see M. Beisswenger, Petr Nikolaevich Savitskii (1895–1968): bibliografiia opublikovannykh rabot (Prague: Narodni Knohovna, 2008). 91. N. E. Andreev, To, chto vspominaetsia: Iz semeinykh vospominanii Nikolaia Efremovicha Andreeva (1908–1982), vol. 2 (Tallinn: Avenarius, 996), 93. 92. On Florovskii, see Andrew Blane, “A Sketch of the Life of Georges Florovsky,” in Georges Florovsky: Russian Intellectual and Orthodox Churchman, ed. Blane (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s

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Seminary Press, 1993), 11–217; see also P. Gavrilyuk, Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). However, the latter account often overstates Florovskii’s role in Eurasianism. It also mistakenly argues that when Florovskii left the movement, “he was replaced by A. V. Kartashev” (61). 93. N. S. Trubetzkoy’s Letters and Notes, 21. 94. G. V. Florovskii, “Pis’mo P. B. Struve o evraziistve,” Russkaia mysl’, no. 1–2 (1922): 269. 95. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, December 5, 1921, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 175. 96. On the conflict between the older generation of Russian thinkers associated with the publication Vekhi and the Eurasianists, see Modest Kolerov, “Bratstvo Sv. Sofii: ‘vekhovtsy’ i evraziitsy (1921–1925),” Voprosy filosofii, no. 10 (1994): 143–66. 97. For Florovskii’s last defense of Eurasianism, see G. Florovskii, “Okameneloe beschustvie: po povodu polemiki protiv evraziitsev,” Put’, no. 2 (1926): 128–33. In 1928, he made his break with the movement public in G. Florovskii, “Evraziiskii soblazn,” Sovremennye zapiski, no. 34 (1928): 312–46. In the latter article Florovskii blamed Eurasianism for its fascination with the state and sociogeographic materialism. He later confirmed his break with Eurasianism in 1923. See Gavrilyuk, Georges Florovsky, 78. From the perspective of the movement’s leaders, this falling out began much earlier. 98. Marc Raeff, Russia Abroad: Cultural History of Russian Emigration, 1919–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 166–68; see also Marc Raeff, “Georges Florovsky and Eurasianism,” in Twenty-Five Year Commemoration to the Life of Georges Florovsky (1893–1979), ed. G. Mazur (New York: Sememnenko Foundation, 2005), 87–119. 99. See remarkable memoirs of Arapov’s life in the concentration camp in Solovki in Iu. Chirkov, A bylo vse tak . . . (Moscow: Politizdat, 1991), esp. 121–27. Arapov’s participation in Rasputin’s assassination is, however, doubtful. 100. GARF, f. R-5783, op. 2, d. 359, l. 16. 101. P. S. Arapov to P. P. Suvchinskii, December 12, 1922, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 570. 102. On ROVS, see Paul Robinson, The White Russian Army in Exile, 1920–1941 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); as well as the multivolume documentary collection, Russkaia voennaia emigratsiia 20-kh–40-kh godov (Moscow: Triada-f; Triada-x; 1988–2007). 103. For biographical information on Arapov, see Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiiei i modernom, 41–45. 104. On Bitsilli, see A. M. Birman, “P. M. Bitsilli (1879–1953): Shtrikhi k portretu uchenogo,” in P. M. Bitsilli. Izbrannye trudy po srednevekovoi istorii: Rossiia i Zapad, ed. M. A. Iusin (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskoi kul’tury, 2006), 633–718. Bitsilli was a student of N. P. Kondakov, Russia’s leading scholar of Byzantium and its art. Bitsilli was also a notable scholar of Dostoevsky. 105. Sviatopolk-Mirskii’s part in Eurasianism is ambiguous. One the one hand, he remained a very close friend and collaborator of Petr Suvchinskii, one of the movement’s established leaders. On the other hand, Sviatopolk-Mirskii was always only a superficial Eurasianist who persistently ridiculed the Eurasianists’ “Asiatism.” For Sviatopolk-Mirskii, Eurasianism was a means of épatage, not an ideology that he fully subscribed to. See an extensive biography in G. S. Smith, D. S. Mirsky: A RussianEnglish Life, 1890–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Certainly, Sviatopolk-Mirskii was one of the brightest intellectuals associated with the movement: not unlike Trubetskoi, Jakobson, and Suvchinskii, he left a lasting mark on twentieth-century intellectual history. Suffice it to say that generations of Slavic scholars in the West have been taught using his famous D. S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature from the Earliest Times to the Death of Dostoyevsky (1881) (New York: Knopf, 1927). See also the very useful D. P. Sviatopolk-Mirskii, Poety i Rossiia. Stat’i, retsenzii, portrety, nekrologi, ed. V. V. Perkhin (St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2002); and D. Mirskii, O literature i iskusstve (1922–1927), ed. O. Korostelev and M. Efimov (Moscow: NLO, 2014). 106. On George Vernadsky, see N. G. Andreyev, “V. Vernadskii (20 avgusta 1887 g.–12 iunia 1973 g.),” Zapiski russkoi akademicheskoi gruppy v SShA 9 (1995): 182–93; Charles J. Halperin,

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“George Vernadsky, Eurasianism, the Mongols, and Russia,” Slavic Review 41 (1983): 477–83; Halperin, “Russia and the Steppe: George Vernadsky and Eurasianism,” Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte 36 (1985): 55–194. 107. There is no work on Nikitin, who after World War II was employed as a consultant by the French Foreign Ministry on Middle Eastern affairs. His extensive archive is located in the Bakhmeteff Archive of Russian and East European History at Columbia University (BAR), Vasilii Nikitin Papers. On Karsavin, whose sister Tamara was a ballet star of international reputation, see G.  Mazheikis and I. Savkin, “Lev Platonovich Karsavin,” Novyi mir, no. 1 (1991): 193–94; A.  V.  Sobolev, “Poliusa evraziistva: L. P. Karsavin (1882–1952), G. V. Florovsky (1893–1979),” Novyi mir, no. 1 (1991): 180–82; G. Mazheikis, “Svoia svoikh ne poznasha: Evraziistvo: L. P. Karsavin i drugie (konspekt issledovania),” Nachala, no. 4 (1992): 49–58; A. Shidlauskas, “Biografiia L. P. Karsavina,” in Russkie istoriki emigranty v Evrope, ed. V. T. Pashuto (Moscow: Nauka, 1992), 229–30; L. G. Filonova, “Lev Platonovich Karsavin: 1882, Peterburg–1952, Abez,” in Russkie filosofy: konets XIX–seredina XX veka: Antologiia, vyp. 1 (Moscow: Knizhnaia Palata, 1993), 243–55; S. S. Khoruzhii, “Karsavin i de Mestr,” Voprosy filosofii, no. 2 (1989): 79–92; S. S. Khoruzhii, “Karsavin, evraziistvo i VKP,” Voprosy filosopfii, no. 2 (1992): 78–84. It should be noted that P. Suvchinskii’s collection contains a significant number of documents related to Karsavin, which still await research. The collection is at the Bibliotheque Nationale Française, Department de Musique, Rés. Vm. Dos. 0092 (61) “Collection Pierre Souvtchinsky.” 108. S. Ia. Efron to L. G. Nedzel’skii, 1926 (n.d.), in Pis’ma Sergeia Efrona L. G. Nedzel’skomu (Abo/Turku: Abo Akademi, 2000), 36. 109. The editors published only three issues of Versty but the journal certainly became an event in émigré literary life, partly due to its openly anti-émigré rhetoric. About the emergence of the idea of the journal and its editing, see G. S. Smith, ed., The Letters of D. S. Mirsky to P. P. Suvchinskii, 1922–31, Birmingham Slavonic Monographs, no. 26. (Birmingham: Department of Russian Language and Literature, University of Birmingham, 1995). 110. Litauer returned to the USSR together with the group that included the poet Marina Tsvetaeva, her Soviet agent husband Sergei Efron, and the Klepinin family, all of whom were active Eurasianists. On Litauer, see Galin Tihanov, “When Eurasianism Met Formalism: An Episode from the History of Russian Intellectual Life in the 1920s,” Die Welt der Slaven 48, no. 2 (2003): 359–82.

Notes to Chapter 2 1. Iskhod k vostoku. Predchustvia i svershenia. Utverzhdenie evraziitsev (Sofia: RossiiskoBolgarskoe knigoizdatel’stvo, 1921), vii. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid., 1. 4. P. Suvchinskii, “Sila slabykh,” in Iskhod k vostoku, 8. 5. L. P. Karsavin, Fenomenologiia revoliutsii (Berlin: Eurasia Verlag, 1926), 55. 6. I. R. (N. S. Trubetskoi), Nasledie Chingiskhana: Vzgliad na russkuiu istoriiu ne s Zapada, a s Vostoka (Berlin: Evraziiskoe knigoizdatel’stvo, 1925). Here and after quoted from the English translation N. S. Trubetskoi, “The Legacy of Genghis Khan: A Perspective on Russian History Not from the West but from the East,” in Nicholas Trubetzkoy, The Legacy of Genghis Khan and Other Essays on Russia’s Identity, ed. A. Liberman (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1991), 161. 7. L. P. Karsavin, “Evropa i Evraziia,” Sovremennye zapiski 25 (1923): 298. 8. P. M. Bitsilli, “Narodnoe i chelovecheskoe (po povodu Evraziiskogo Vremennika, Kn. IV, Berlin, 1925 g.),” Sovremennye zapiski 25 (1925): 493–94. 9. S. I. Gessen, “Evraziistvo (Evraziiskii Vremennik. Neperiodicheskoe izdanie pod red. Petra Savitskogo, P. P. Suvchinskogo i kn. N. S. Trubetskogo. Kniga chetvertaia. Evraz. Knigoizdatel’stvo. Berlin, 1925, str. 445),” Sovremennye zapiski 25 (1925): 497–98. 10. Ibid.

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11. The concept of “national mystique” was elaborated in George Lachmann Mosse, Masses and Man: Nationalist and Fascist Perceptions of Reality (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1987), 178. 12. See, for instance, Roger Woods, The Conservative Revolution in the Weimar Republic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997). 13. For an excellent discussion of the relationship between Christianity and Fascism in interwar Europe, see Matthew Feldman and Marius Turda, “ ‘Clerical Fascism’ in Interwar Europe: An Introduction,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 8, no. 2 (June 2007): 205–12. 14. Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Mark Antliff, Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art and Culture in France, 1909–1939 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Walter Adamson, Avant-Garde Florence: From Modernism to Fascism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 15. For interesting parallels, see Claudio Fogu, The Historic Imaginary: Politics of History in Fascist Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003). 16. See Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1994). Roger Griffin, “The Palingenetic Political Community: Rethinking the Legitimation of Totalitarian Regimes in Interwar Europe,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 3, no. 3 (2002): 24–43. 17. Although sociologists are critical of the liberal use of the term generation and suggest instead the concept of cohort, I use “generation” in the sense of Karl Mannheim, who saw in generation a group united by a common historical experience or a similar lifestyle. Karl Mannheim, “The Sociological Problem of Generations,” in Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, vol. 5 (London: Routledge, 2013), 286–320. For a critique of “generation” and defense of the concept of “cohort,” see David E. Kertzer, “Generation as a Sociological Problem,” Annual Review of Sociology 9 (1983): 125–49. 18. Martin Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 5. 19. Ibid. The literature on the Russian intelligentsia is too voluminous to survey here but some of the most important works include Daniel R. Brower, “The Problem of the Russian Intelligentsia,” Slavic Review 26, no. 4 (1967): 638–47; Otto Wilhelm Müller, Intelligentsija: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte eines politischen Schlagwortes (Frankfurt am Main, 1971); Jane Burbank, “Were the Russian Intelligenty Organic Intellectuals?” in Intellectuals and Public Life, ed. Leon Fink, Stephen T. Leonard, and Donald M. Reid (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 97–120; also a collection of articles, Richard Pipes, ed., The Russian Intelligentsia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961); Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter touches briefly on intelligentsia in her Social Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997), 89–91; V. R. Leikina-Svirskaia, Intelligentsia v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine 19 veka (Moscow: Mysl’, 1971) and Leikina-Svirskaia, Russkaia intelligentsia v 1900–1917 gg. (Moscow: Mysl’, 1981). 20. Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow, and James L. West, eds., Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). 21. Obviously, any successful attempt to do so would have required the acceptance of the state and distancing from the more radical political forces, which did not happen in the case of the Russian liberals. Yet the party itself was split on the issue of parliamentary politics and many of its supporters among the intellectuals believed that the time had come to distance the liberal movement from the revolutionaries. 22. Although there was marked cultural development—which Irina Paperno has interpreted as the “creation of life”—and transgression of the border between art and life, thus implying the realization of literary scenarios in everyday life by intellectuals in this period. The sources of these utopian projects by Russian intellectuals were not the writings of radicals such as Chernyshevsky, but, rather, the eschatological and idealist philosophy of Vladimir Solov’ev. These projects influenced the thinking of revolutionaries even in the Socialist camp, whereas the Symbolists, the leaders

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of this cultural development, could hardly be said to have experienced any influence of Plekhanov, Lenin, or even Bogdanov. Irina Paperno, “Introduction,” in Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism, ed. I. Paperno and Joan D. Grossman (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 1–12. See also Paperno’s contribution in that volume, “The Meaning of Art: Symbolist Theories,” 13–23. 23. The term “intellectuals” may have connotations that remind one of the political concerns of the Russian intelligentsia, too, as Stephen Leonard’s analysis of the concept demonstrates. Stephen T. Leonard, “Introduction: A Genealogy of the Politicized Intellectual,” in Intellectuals and Public Life between Radicalism and Reform, ed. Leon Fink, Stephen T. Leonard, and Donald M. Reid (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), esp. 9–10. For my own interpretation I take the “simple materialist approach” of Geoff Eley, who defines intellectuals as “a particular component of the new middle class, the one that performs cultural, ideological, and mental functions in the complex division of labor of a capitalist society, on the basis of qualifications acquired in higher education.” Geoff Eley, “Intellectuals and the German Labor Movement,” in Fink, Leonard, and Reid, Intellectuals and Public Life, 74. 24. S. E. Trubetskoi, “Minuvshee,” in S. E. Trubetskoi (Moscow: DEM, 1991), 84. Prince Sergei Evgen’evich Trubetskoi (1890–1949) was N. S. Trubetskoi’s cousin and the son of Evgenii Nikolaevich Trubetskoi, a Christian philosopher. Nikolai and Sergei Trubetskoi were the same age and were both part of the small neo-Slavophile circle in Moscow, which also included D. Samarin and S. Mansurov. 25. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, December 17, 1926. Sergei Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom: istoriia v dokumentakh (Moscow: Novoe Izdatel’stvo, 2009), 459. 26. The nationalist rhetoric in the public space of Russia became especially intense with the start of the war. For research on the popular imagery of nationalism, see Hubertus F. Jahn, Patriotic Culture in Russia during World War I (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). The heightening of the nationalist rhetoric was reflected in the search for the enemy within the nation, when Germans and Jews, among others, were targeted: Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). The war effort also linked nationalist mobilization with mass politics, as was reflected in drafting for the army. Joshua A. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905–1925 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003), esp. ch. 1. 27. P. G. Kurlov, Gibel’ imperatorskoi Rossii (Moscow: DirectMedia, 2002), 157–58. 28. Problemy idealizma (Moscow, 1903). In the collection Problemy idealizma, both N. S. Trubetskoi’s father, S. N. Trubetskoi, and his uncle, E. N. Trubetskoi, published essays critical of materialist approaches to philosophy. Vekhi: Sbornik statei o russkoi intelligentsia (Moscow, 1909) caused an uproar among the progressive intelligentsia, who often saw the authors’ call for a return to idealism and the prevalence of law as a betrayal of the intelligentsia’s social duty. The collection Iz lubiny (De Profundis) (Moscow, 1918) was more a reflection on the role of the intelligentsia in the Revolution of 1917. A detailed discussion of these collections can be found in Christopher Read, Religion, Revolution and the Russian Intelligentsia, 1900–1912: The Vekhi Debate and Its Intellectual Background (London: Macmillan, 1979). A study of these collections appeared in Russia: M.  Kolerov, Industriia idei (Russkie obshchestvenno-politicheskie i religiozno-filosofskie sborniki, 1887–1947) (Moscow: OGI, 2000). 29. Christopher Read (Religion, Revolution, 141–61) explores the range of attitudes among the defenders of the revolutionary tradition to the Vekhi argument. See also Leonard Schapiro, “The Vekhi Group and the Mystique of Revolution,” Slavonic and East European Review 34, no. 82 (1955): 56–76. 30. Read, Religion, Revolution, 141–61. 31. These divisions were obvious in the debate on nationalism that took place in the pages of newspapers and literary journals in 1909–1916. For Struve, whose opponent was Vladimir (Zeev) Zhabotinsky, nationalism was a matter of politics; for philosophers such as the Trubetskoi brothers, it had more to do with the ethical principles of Christianity. See Natsionalizm: Polemika 1909–1917, ed. M. Kolerov (Moscow: Dom Intellektual’noi Knigi, 2000).

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32. E. A. Gollerbakh, “Dukhovnye otsy i uzhasnye deti: Politiko-ideologicheskoe tvorchestvo moskovskoi religiozno-filosofskoi gruppy ‘Put’’ (1910–1919) i evraziistvo,” Zapiski russkoi akademicheskoi gruppy v SShA 29 (1980): 107–40. 33. P. N. Savitskii, “Dva mira,” in Na Putiakh (Berlin: Gelikon, 1922), 9–26. 34. Ibid. 35. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, January 1, 1923, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 206. 36. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, May 5, 1924, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 276. Lev Platonovich Karsavin, who joined the movement in 1926 despite opposition from Trubetskoi and Savitskii, had an established prerevolutionary reputation as a philosopher and medievalist. At the same time, he was a participant in the “religious and philosophical Renaissance” of the 1910s, and in his writings he often explored issues that the Eurasianists found unacceptable, such as the relationship between religion and sex. 37. Ibid. Prince Grigorii Nikolaevich Trubetskoi (1870–1930), N. S. Trubetskoi’s uncle, was a diplomat and religious publicist. He was active in the church in 1917–18, and actively participated in the White movement as a member of different governments in the South of Russia. In emigration, he became close to P. B. Struve. 38. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, October 9, 1925, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 321. 39. Stuart Finkel, “Purging the Public Intellectual: The 1922 Expulsions from Soviet Russia,” Russian Review 63, no. 4 (2003): 589–613; Lesley Chamberlain, Lenin’s Private War: The Voyage of the Philosophy Steamer and the Exile of the Intelligentsia (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007). 40. P. P. Suvchinskii to N. S. Trubetskoi. November 25, 1922, quoted from Rossiiskii Arkhiv, vol. 5 (Moscow, 1994), 478. 41. The Eurasianist correspondence demonstrates that the leaders of the movement treated these annual publications (Evraziiskie vremenniki) as their official tribune. All articles published there had to receive approval from the “editorial troika,” which consisted of N. S. Trubetskoi, P. N. Savitskii, and P. P. Suvchinskii. It is, therefore, safe to assume that the leaders of the movement subscribed to the ideas expressed in these articles. 42. P. P. Suvchinskii, “Idei i metody,” Evraziiskii vremennik 4 (1925): 50–51. The reference to “concrete idealism” is notable; it was a teaching promulgated by N. S. Trubetskoi’s father. 43. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, May 18, 1926, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 418. 44. In 1923–24 the Eurasianists were embroiled in a conflict with Father Sergii Bulgakov and members of his Brotherhood of St. Sophia. Bulgakov initially invited the Eurasianists to take part, but his invitation was declined by the Eurasianists, who saw in this initiative a continuation of “degenerate” traditions of the prerevolutionary intelligentsia. Moreover, the Eurasianists thought of Bulgakov’s initiative as a submission to Catholic influences (since the brotherhood reminded them of a Catholic order). On the development of this conflict, see M. Kolerov, “Bratstvo Sv Sofii: ‘vekhovtsy’ i evraziitsy (1921–1925),” Voprosy filosofii, no. 3 (1994): 143–49. 45. P. N. Savitskii to M. N. Enden, August 2/15, 1924. GARF, f. R-5783, op. 2, d. 332, l. 8. 46. On Stepun, see Christian Hufen, Fedor Stepun: Ein Politischer Intellektueller aus Russland in Europa. Die Jahre 1884–1945 (Berlin: Lukas Verlag, 2001). 47. Fedor Stepun, Byvshee i nesbyvsheesia (St. Petersburg: Aleteia, 2000), 239. 48. P. N. Savitskii to his parents, February 1, 1921. GARF, f. 5873, op. 1, d. 326. 49. Petr Suvchinskii, “Predislovie,” in Aleksandr Blok, Dvenadtsat’ (Sofia: RBK, 1920), 12. 50.Petr Suvchinskii, “Tipy tvorchestva (Pamiati A. Bloka),” in Na Putiakh (Berlin: Gelikon, 1922), 147–76. 51. Ibid., 171. 52. P. Suvchinskii, “Tipy tvorchestva,” 170. 53. N. S. Trubetzkoy’s Letters and Notes, 15.

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54. [S. G. Pushkarev], “Rossiia i Evropa v ikh istoricheskom proshlom,” Evraziiskaia khronika 2 (1925): 2. Another crucial figure in the “Eastern” orientation fo Russian literature of the Silver Age was Andrey Bely, whose novel “Petersburg” made several important references to Russia’s Asian roots. However, since Bely was barely referenced by the Eurasianists, I am not discussing his work. 55. See, for example, Susan Layton, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian Mind from Peter the Great to the Emigration (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); Harsha Ram, The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). For Russian studies, see Yu. Lotman, “Problema Vostoka i Zapada v tvorchestve pozdnego Lermontova,” in Lermontovskii sbornik (Leningrad: Nauka, 1985), 5–22. 56. Ram, The Imperial Sublime, 213. The discussion below relies on Ram’s interpretation. 57. Konstantin Mochulsky, Vladimir Soloviev: Zhizn’ i uchenie (Paris: YMCA Press, 1936); Paul Valliere, Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov (Edinburgh: T&T Lyd, 2000), 109– 223; Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, “Soloviev on Salvation: A Story of the ‘Short Story of the Antichrist,’” in Russian Religious Thought, ed. J. Deutsch Kornblatt and Richard E. Gustafson (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 68–89. N. S. Trubetskoi, the leading Eurasianist, grew up in the family of Solov’ev’s closest friends and followers. In 1900, Solov’ev died on the estate of Uzkoe, which belonged to the Trubetskoi family. N. S. Trubetskoi’s uncle, Prince Evgenii Nikolaevich Trubetskoi, produced one of the more exhaustive studies of Solov’ev’s thought. E. N. Trubetskoi, Mirosozertsanie Vl. S. Solovieva, 2 vols. (Moscow: Put’, 1913). 58. Translation by Harsha Ram. 59. Ram, The Imperial Sublime, 223. 60 . J. Novicow, Le peril jaune (Paris: Giard and Briare, 1897). 61. V. Solov’ev, “Panmongolizm,” in V. S. Solov’ev, “Nepodvizhno lish’ solntse liubvi . . .” Stikhotvoreniia. Proza. Pis’ma. Vospominaniia sovremennikov (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1990), 88–89. 62. Vladimir Sergeevich Solov’ev, Tri razgovora: o voine, progresse i kontse vsemirnoi istorii: s vkliucheniem kratkoi povesti ob antikhriste i s prilozheniami (St. Petersburg: Trud, 1904), 159–95. 63. Ram, The Imperial Sublime, 225. 64. D. Merezhkovskii, “Zheltolitsye pozitivisty,” Vestnik inostrannoi literatury, no. 3 (1895): 71. For more on Merezhkovskii’s views on Asia, see Susanna Soojung Lim, China and Japan in the Russian Imagination, 1685–1922: To the Ends of the Orient (London: Routledge, 2013), 156–58. 65. On Merezhkovsky’s borrowing from Chavannes, which bordered on plagiarism, see Elena Andrushchenko, Vlastelin chuzhogo: Tekstologiia i problem poetiki D. S. Merezhkovskogo (Moscow: Vodolei, 2012). 66. M. L. Gasparov, “Briusov i bukvalizm,” in Poetika perevoda, ed. S. F. Goncharenk (Moscow: Raduga, 1988), 29–62. 67. Some of the key works on Alexander Blok include James Forsythe, Listening to the Wind: An Introduction to Alexander Blok (Oxford: W. A. Meeuws, 1977); I. V. Ivanov-Razumnik, Aleksandr Blok, Andrei Belyi (Letchworth: Bradda Books, 1971); Avril Pyman, The Life of Aleksandr Blok, Vol. 1: The Distant Thunder (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). For one of the best (although short) works on Blok’s ideas beyond poetry, see Leonard Schapiro, “The Last Years of Alexander Blok,” in Russian Studies: Leonard Schapiro, ed. E. Dahrendorf (London: Collins Harwell, 1986), 359–74. For an appraisal of Blok’s ideas about revolution, see Galina Rylkova, “Literature and Revolution: The Case of Aleksandr Blok,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 3, no. 4 (2002): 611–30. 68. Aleksandr Blok, “Narod i Intelligentsiia,” in Sochineniia v 2-kh tomakh, vol. 2 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1967), 85–91; Blok, “Stikhiia i kul’tura,” in Sochineniia, 92–101; Blok, “Intelligentsiia i Revoliutsiia,” in Sochineniia, 218–28; Blok, “Iskusstvo i Revoliutsiia (po povodu tvoreniia Rikharda Vagnera),” in Sochineniia, 229–33. 69. A. Blok, “Intelligentsiia i Revoliutsiia,” 91–92.

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70. Ibid. 71. A. Blok, “Stikhiia i kul’tura.” 72. A. Blok, “Intelligentsiia i Revoliutsiia,” 227. 73. A. Blok, “Intelligentsiia i Revoliutsiia.” 74. Apart from Blok, the literary “movement” of the “Scythians” emerged headed by IvanovRazumnik, who was himself a Socialist revolutionary. 75. On Scythianism, see Katerina Clark, Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 52; S. Hoffman, “Scythian Literature and Theory, 1917–1924,” in Boris Pasternak. Essays, ed. Ake Nilsson (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1976), 138–64; Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 391–94. For “Scythian” themes in music, see Simon Alexander Morrison, Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 258–59; and especially, Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works through Mavra (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 856–60. 76. P. Suvchinskii, “Tipy tvorchestva,” 174. 77. Riasanovsky pointed out the Russian literary current of Symbolism as one of the most important sources for Eurasianism but stopped short of illustrating the continuity of interpretations between Blok and the Eurasianists. N. Riasanovsky, “The Emergence of Eurasianism,” California Slavic Studies, no. 4 (1967): 39–72; N. Riasanovsky, “Prince N. S. Trubetskoy’s ‘Europe And Mankind,’” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 13 (1964): 207–20; Georges Nivat, “Du ’Panmongolisme’ au ‘Mouvement eurasien’ (Histoire d’un thème littéraire),” Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 7, no. 3 (1966): 460–78. For Nivat, Eurasianism with its celebration of Russia’s Asian legacy was a logical development that followed Blok’s poetic images of the revolutionary forces as “Asian” and “Scythian” elements, yet Nivat did not focus on similarities between the attitudes of Blok and the Eurasianists to “people,” Revolution, European civilization, and so on. 78. Iskhod k Vostoku, vi. 79. Ibid. 80. Ibid. 81. The literature on the Russian “religious renaissance” in the late imperial period is voluminous. Only select titles can be referenced here: Christopher Reed, Religion, Revolution, and the Russian Intelligentsia, 1900–1912: The “Vekhi” Debate and Its Intellectual Background (London: Macmillan, 1979); Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, Dmitrii Sergeevich Merezhkovsky and the Russian Silver Age: The Development of a Revolutionary Mentality (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975); Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, ed., Nietzsche in Russia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); Jutta Scherrer, Die Petersburger religiös-philosophische Verenigungen: Die Entwicklung des religiösen Selbstverständnis ihrer Intelligencija-Mitglieder (1901–1917) (Berlin: Otto Harrassowitz, 1973); Peter Scheibert, Die Petersburger religiös-philosophischen Zusammenkünfte von 1902 und 1903 (Berlin: Otto Harrassowitz, 1964); Karl Schlögel, Jenseits des Groβen Oktober: Das Laboratorium der Moderne, Petersburg, 1909–1921 (Berlin: Siedler Verlag, 1988); Evgenii Gollerbakh, K Nezrimomu gradu: Religiozno-filosofskaia gruppa “Put’ ” v poiskakh novoi russkoi identichnosti (St. Petersburg: M. A. Kolerov, 2000); see also G. M. Hamburg and Randall A. Poole, A History of Russian Philosophy 1830–1930: Faith, Reason, and the Defense of Human Dignity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), esp. ch. 8–10, 11, 13–14. 82. Nadiezhda Kizenko, A Prodigal Saint: Father John of Kronstadt and the Russian People (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000); Vera Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Mark D. Steinberg and Heather J. Coleman, Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007); Valerie Ann Kivelson and Robert H. Greene, Orthodox Russia: Belief and Practice under the Tsars and Beyond (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003). For a critique of secularization in a comparative European context, see Margaret L. Anderson, “The Limits of Secularization: On the Problem of the Catholic Revival in 19th Century Germany,”  Historical Journal 38,

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no. 3 (1995): 647–70; Anderson, “Piety and Politics: Recent Work in German Catholicism,” Journal of Modern History (December 1991): 681–716. 83. Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: From Alexander II to the Abdication of Nicholas II (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 84. See Paul Valliere, Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), esp. 160–62, for a discussion of the role of “theosis” in the encounter of Orthodoxy with modernity in Solov’ev’s phiosophy. A useful overview of Orthodox literature on theosis can be found in Vladimir Kharlamov, ed., Theosis: Deification in Christian Theology (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2012), 1–20. For an interesting critique of the political implications of the concept of theosis in Orthodox theology, see Aristotle Papanikolaou, The Mystical as Political: Democracy and Non-Radical Orthodoxy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012). 85. Nikolai Fedorov, Filosofiia obshchego dela (Vernyi,1913). On Fedorov, see Michael Hagemeister, Nikolaj Fedorov: Studien zu Leben, Werk und Wirkung (Munich: Otto Sagner, 1989). 86. L. P. Karsavin, Tserkov,’ lichnost’ i gosudarstvo (Paris: Evraziiskoe knigoizdatel’stvo, 1927), 5. 87. Ibid., 17. 88. On Dostoevsky’s “theocratic” views, see Marina Kostalevsky, Dostoevsky and Soloviev: The Art of Integral Vision (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 120–23. 89. On Fedorov’s influence on the Silver Age, see Irene Masing-Delic, Abolishing Death: A Salvation Myth of Russian Twentieth-Century Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992); Paperno, “Introduction,” and “The Meaning of Art.” 90. P. P. Suvchinskii, “Vechnyi Ustoi,” in Na Putiakh (Berlin: Geölikon, 1922), 99–102. 91. Ibid., 102. 92. Ibid. 93. Ibid., 103. 94. Ibid., 107. 95. Ibid., 110. 96. Ibid., 111. 97. P. P. Suvchinskii, “Inobytie russkoi religioznosti,” Evraziiskii vremennik 3 (1923): 82. 98. Ibid. 99. Ibid., 91. 100. Ibid., 102. 101. Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 241. 102. Nikolai Berdiaev, “Evraziitsy (Rets. na Evraziiskii Vremennik, kn. IV, Berlin, Evraziiskoe knigoizdatel’stvo, 1925),” in Put’ 1 (September 1925): 135. 103. P. Suvchinskii, “Pis’ma v Rossiiu (tri otryvka),” Versty 3 (1928): 130. 104. Suvchinskii, “Inobytie russkoi religioznosti,” 102–3. 105. Ibid., 103. 106. Suvchinskii, “Vechnyi Ustoi,” 112. 107. A. E. Presniakov, “Mesto ‘Kievskogo perioda’ v obshchei sisteme ‘russkoi istorii,’” in Presniakov, Lektsii po russkoi istorii, vol. 1 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoe izdatel’stvo, 1938), 1–11. 108. I. R., Nasledie Chingis-Khana, ili vzgliad na russkuiu istoriu ne s zapada, a s vostoka (Berlin: Evraziiskoe knigoizdatel’stvo, 1925). Here and hereafter quoted from the English translation N. S. Trubetskoi, “The Legacy of Genghis Khan: A Perspective on Russian History Not from the West but from the East,” in Nicholas Trubetzkoy, The Legacy of Genghis Khan and Other Essays on Russia’s Identity, ed. A. Liberman (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publicaitons, 1991), 161. 109. Ibid., 163. 110. Ibid., 164–65. 111. Ibid., 167. 112. Ibid., 174.

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113. Methodological insights for analyses of “national historical narratives” informed by the reading of the past through particular lenses of the present are provided by seminal works in Jewish history. Perhaps, the most influential work has been Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982). See also Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 114. Trubetskoi, The Legacy of Genghis Khan, 175. 115. Ibid., 176. 116. P. P. Suvchinskii, “Epokha very,” in Iskhod k Vostoku, 14–27; on Suvchinskii’s vision of national community and organic religiosity, see Sergey Glebov, “Le frémissement du temps: Petr Suvchinsky, l’eurasisme et l’esthétique de la modernité,” in Pierre Souvtchinski, cahiers d’étude, ed. Eric Humbertclaude (Paris: l’Harmattan, 2006), 163–223. 117. Trubetskoi, The Legacy of Genghis Khan, 176. 118. Ibid., 176–77. 119. Ibid., 177. 120. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, July 4, 1925, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 312. 121. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, February 23, 1925, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 292–93. 122. On Kasatkin-Uppelin’sh, see Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 294. 123. On the encounter between Eurasianism and Trest, see the Epilogue in this book. 124. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, December 31, 1925, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 360. 125. P. N. Savitskii, note. GARF, f. R-5783, op. 1, d. 359, l. 136. 126. P. N. Savitskii, note, January 17, 1937. GARF, f. R-5783, op. 1, d. 363, l. 73. After the visit to Prague, “Shubin”-Kozelkov became active in Christian circles in Russia. Possibly on the recommendation of George Vernadsky, Kozelkov began working at the Commission for the Study of Productive Forces under academician V. I.Vernadsky, was arrested, and likely executed by the OGPU. 127.N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, December 31, 1925, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 365–66. 128. Ibid. 129. L. P. Karsavin, “Fenomenologiia revoliutsii,” Evraziiskii vremennik 5 (1927): 34. 130. Ibid., 35. 131. Ibid., 38. 132. Ibid., 41. 133. Ibid., 54. 134. Ibid., 56. 135. Ibid., 60. 136. Ibid., 64. 137. Ibid., 72. 138. Ibid., 74. 139. N. Alekseev, Teoriia gosudarstva (Paris: Izdanie evraziitsev, 1931), 169. See also Alekseev’s works on state and law: N. N. Alekseev, “Narodnoe pravo i zadachi nashei pravovoi politiki,” Evraziiskaia khronika 8 (1927): 36–42; Alekseev, “Evraziitsy i gosudarstvo,” Evraziiskaia khronika 9 (1927): 31–39; Alekseev, Na putiakh k budushchei Rossii: Sovetskii stroi i ego politicheskie vozmozhnosti (Berlin: Evraziiskoe Knigoizdatel’stvo, 1927); Alekseev, “Sovetskii federalizm,” Evraziiskii vremennik 5 (1927): 240–61. 140. Alekseev, Teoriia gosudarstva, 174. 141. Ibid., 176–79. 142. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, December 17, 1926, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 459–60; on Spann, see Klaus-Joerg Siegfried, Universalismus und Faschismus.

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Das Gesellschaftsbild Othmar Spanns. Zur politischen Funktion seiner Gesellschaftslehre und Staendestaatskonzeption (Vienna: Europaverlag, 1974). 143. N. S. Trubetskoi, “O gosudarstvennom stroe i forme pravleniia,” Evraziiskaia khronika 8 (1927): 2–9. 144. Ibid., 7. 145. N. S. Trubetskoi, “Ideokratiia i iproletariat,” Evraziia, November 24, 1928, 1–2. 146. N. S. Trubetskoi, “O gosudarstvennom stroe i forme pravleniia,” Evraziiskaia khronika 8 (1927): 7. 147. Trubetskoi, “Ideokratiia i proletariat,” 1–2. 148. Trubetskoi, “O gosudarstvennom stroe,” 8. 149. M. Beisswenger, “Metaphysics of the Economy: The Religious and Economic Foundations of P. N. Savitskii’s Eurasianism,” in Between Europe and Asia: The Origins, Theories and Legacies of Russian Eurasianism, ed. M. Bassin, S. Glebov, and M. Laruelle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), 97–112. 150. P. N. Savitskii, “Khoziain i khoziaistvo,” Evraziiskii vremennik 4 (1925): 406–45. See also polemics between A. K. Melkikh and P. N. Savitskii about the concept of “master,” in Evraziiskaia khronika 6 (1926): 31–38. 151. N. N. Alekseev, Sobstvennost’ i sotsializm: opyt obosnovaniia sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoi programmy evraziistva (Paris: Evraziiskoe knigoizdatel’stvo, 1928), 4. 152. M. C. Mirow, “The Social-Obligation Norm of Property: Duguit, Hayem, and Others.” Florida Journal of International Law 22 (2010): 191–226. 153. Alekseev, Sobstvennost´ i sotsializm, 17. 154. Ibid., 64. 155. Ibid. 156. N. N. Alekseev, Obshchaia teoriia gosudarstva. Kurs lektsii na Russkom iuridicheskom fakul´tete v Prage v 1924–1925 (Prague: n.p., 1925), 203. 157. For an introduction to the problem, see Stephen D. Shenfield, Russian Fascism: Traditions, Tendencies, Movements (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2001), esp. 26–47. However, Shenfield’s account has to be taken cautiously because it lists, for example, the Slavophile thinker Yuri Samarin among the forerunners of the Russian Fascist tradition. It also makes an unsupported statement that the postrevolutionary emigration had no liberal groups. See Weber’s analyses of Russia’s political development in P. Lassman and R. Speirs, eds., Weber: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and P. B. Struve, Patriotika: Politika, Religiia, Kul’tura, Sotsializm. Sbornik statei za piat’ let (1905–1910) (Moscow: Respublika, 1997). For examples of studies of right-wing movements in late imperial Russia, see H. Rogger, Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1986); Heinz-Dietrich Löwe, Antisemitismus und reaktionäre Utopie: russische Konservatismus im Kampf gegen der Wandel von Staat und Gesellschaft, 1890–1917 (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1978). 158. R. Griffin, “The Primacy of Culture: The Current Growth (or Manufacture) of Consensus within Fascist Studies,” Journal of Contemporary History 37, no. 1 (2002): 21–43. See also R. D. Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Pinter, 1991) for a discussion of Fascism as an appeal for renewal of society. 159. Zeev Sternhell, “The Crisis of Fin-de-Siècle Thought,” in International Fascism: Theories, Causes and the New Consensus, ed. Roger Griffin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 170. 160. Ibid., 171. 161. See Mosse, Masses and Man, in particular, the essay “Toward a General Theory of Fascism,” 159–97. 162. Ibid., 195. 163. Fedor Stepun, a former Social Revolutionary and a philosopher, was at times close to leaders of Eurasianism. Stepun visited Trubetskoi in Vienna and stayed at his apartment. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, December 31, 1924, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 284.

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Trubetskoi noted, “little is left of his Social Revolutionary past.” Stepun also actively corresponded with Trubetskoi, Savitskii, and Suvchinskii. On Stepun, see Christian Hufen, Fedor Stepun: Ein Politischer Intellektueller aus Russland in Europa. Die Jahre 1884–1945 (Berlin: Lukas Verlag, 2001). F. A. Stepun, “Evraziiskii Vremennik.” Kniga tret’ia. Evraziiskoe knigoizdatel’stvo, 1923, Sovremennye zapiski 21 (1924): 400–407, here 400. 164. Ibid., 401. 165. Ibid. 166. Ibid. 167. Ibid., 404. 168. Gessen, “Evraziistvo,” 499. 169. Ibid. 170. Nikolai Berdiaev, “Evraziitsy (Rets. na Evraziiskii Vremennik, kn. IV, Berlin, Evraziiskoe knigoizdatel’stvo, 1925),” Put’ 1 (September 1925): 101. 171. Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Random House, 2012); for a case of modernist support for Fascism, see Griffin, Modernism and Fascism.; Antliff, Avant-Garde Fascism; Adamson, Avant-Garde Florence. 172. On the Russian emigration and its right-wing connections, see Catherine Andreyev and Ivan Savický, Russia Abroad: Prague and the Russian Diaspora, 1928–1939 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004); Michael Kellogg, The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Paul Robinson, The White Russian Army in Exile 1920–1941 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Greta Slobin, Russians Abroad: Literary and Cultural Politics of Diaspora, ed. Nancy Condee, Katerina Clark, Mark Slobin, and Dan Slobin (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2013); John J. Stephan, The Russian Fascists: Tragedy and Farce in Exile, 1925–1945 (New York: Harper and Row, 1978). 173. Anatol Liberman has suggested that “in retrospect the very idea of comparing such people as Trubetzkoy and Savitskii to Fascists seems sacrilegious,” in view of the tragic lives of the movement’s leaders. Trubetskoi allegedly died after harassment by the Gestapo in Vienna, while Savitskii spent ten years in Stalin’s GULAG, a fate that also befell D. P. Sviatopolk-Mirskii, P. S. Arapov, L. P. Karsavin, and other Eurasianists. See Anatoly Liberman, “Postscript,” in Nicholas Trubetzkoy, The Legacy of Genghis Khan and Other Essays on Russia’s Identity, ed. Liberman (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1991), 355. 174. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland, OH: Meridian Books, 1958), 225.

Notes to Chapter 3 1. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak et al., “Are We Postcolonial? Post-Soviet Space,” PMLA 121, no. 3 (May 1, 2006): 828–36. 2. See a discussion of the “colonial situation” in Georges Balandier, “La situation coloniale: approche théorique,” Cahiers internationaux de sociologie 11 (1951): 44–79. 3. I. Gerasimov, S. Glebov, and M. Mogilner, “The Postimperial Meets the Postcolonial: Russian Historical Experience and the Postcolonial Moment,” Ab Imperio 2 (2013): 97–133. 4. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978); Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America,” International Sociology 15, no. 2 (June 2000): 215–32; for discussions of the applicability of “Orientalism” to Russian history, see Adeeb Khalid, “Russian History and the Debate over Orientalism” and Nathaniel Knight, “On Russian Orientalism: A Response to Adeeb Khalid,” Kritika 1, no. 4 (2000): 701–15; for a debate that includes perspectives on Russia as both an object and a subject of Orientalizing practices in the context of a modernizing multinational empire, with the participation of D. Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, I. Gerasimov, A. Etkind, N. Knight, E. Vorob’eva, and S. Velychenko, see Ab Imperio 3, no. 1 (2002): 239–367. 5. For a critical discussion of postcolonial studies, see Jean-François Bayart, “Postcolonial Studies: A Political Invention of Tradition?” Public Culture 23, no. 1 (2011): 55–84. Vera Tolz has

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convincingly argued that Russian Orientologists of the Baron Rosen school were already critical of West European attitudes toward the peoples of the Orient. Vera Tolz, Russia’s Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Tolz also sees these scholars as predecessors of the Eurasianists. See Vera Tolz, “The Eurasians and Liberal Scholarship of the Late Imperial Period: Continuity and Change Across the 1917 Divide,” in Between Europe and Asia: Origins, Theories and Legacies of Russian Eurasianism, ed. M. Bassin, S. Glebov, and M. Laruelle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), 27–47. Although they might have had some influence on P. N. Savitskii, we have little evidence that N. S. Trubetskoi´s main anticolonial tract, “Europe and Mankind,” which was published in 1920, had any influence on these scholars. 6. Jared Poley, Decolonization in Germany: Weimar Narratives of Colonial Loss and Foreign Occupation (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007); Peter Collar, The Propaganda War in the Rhineland: Weimar Germany, Race and Occupation after World War I (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013). 7. Richard Nicolaus Coudenhove-Kalergi, Kommen die vereinigten staaten von Europa! (London: Paneuropa Verlag, 1938); Richard Nicolaus Coudenhove-Kalergi, Pan-Europe (New York: A.  A.  Knopf, 1926); Richard Nikolaus Coudenhove-Kalergi, Ein Leben für Europa: meine Lebenserinnerungen (Köln: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1966). See also Mark Hewitson and Matthew D’Auria, Europe in Crisis: Intellectuals and the European Idea, 1917–1957 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012) for an overview of the idea of Europe in the interwar period. The Eurasianists were aware of the pan-Europa movement: Trubetskoi’s student in Vienna, Mikhailovsky, attended the Congress of the pan-European movement in Vienna in 1926 and presented a report on it to the Eurasianist seminar, which Trubetskoi conducted. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, November 4, 1926, in Sergei Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom: istoriia v dokumentakh (Moscow: Novoe Izdatel’stvo, 2009), 449. After the withdrawal of Trubetskoi from Eurasianism, the newspaper Evraziia published a report on the Pan-Europa movement, in which it was described as an “amateurish and poorly substantiated brain-child of Coudenhove-Kalergi.” See “Pan-Evropa,” Evraziia, no. 32 (July 27, 1929): 5. 8. Charle-Robert Ageron, “L’idée d’Eurafrique et le débat colonial Franco-Allemand de l’entredeux-guerres,” Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 22, no. 3 (1975): 446–75. 9. Ramiro de Maeztu, Defensa de la Hispanidad (Madrid: Ediciones Rialp, 1898), 84. See also L. Ponomareva, “Idei evraziitsev i doktrina ‘ispanidad’ Ramiro de Maestu,” in Kul’turnoe nasledie rossiiskoi emigratsii: 1917–1940, vol. 1, ed. E. Chelyshev and D. Shakhovskoi (Moscow: Nasledie, 1994), 116–23. 10. Dina Guseinova, “Noble Continent? German-Speaking Nobles as Theorists of European Identity in the Inter-War Period,” in Europe in Crisis: Intellectuals and the European Idea, 1917–1957, ed. Mark Hewitson and Matthew D’Auria (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), 111–34. 11. Derek Heater, National Self-Determination: Woodrow Wilson and His Legacy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994). 12. J. V. Stalin, “Marxism and the National Question,” in J. V.  Stalin, Collected Works, vol.  2 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954), 300–381. 13. Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001). 14. Bulat Sultanbekov, Pervaia zhertva Genseka: Mir-Said Sultan-Galiev: sud’ba, liudi, vremia (Kazan’: Tatarskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1991); B. F. Sultanbekov, D. R. Sharafutdinov, and Mir-Said Sultan-Galiev, Neizvestnyi Sultan-Galiev: rassekrechennye dokumenty i materialy (Kazan’: Tatarskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 2002). 15. Stephen Velychenko, “Ukrainian Anticolonialist Thought in Comparative Perspective: A Preliminary Overview,” Ab Imperio 12, no. 4 (2012): 339–70. 16. Jacob M. Landau, Pan-Turkism: From Irredentism to Cooperation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), esp. 7–28; Serge A. Zenkovsky, Pan-Turkism in Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960); Alexandre A. Bennigsen, Muslim National Communism in the Soviet Union: A Revolutionary Strategy for the Colonial World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

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17. Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); Michael G. Smith, Language and Power in the Creation of the USSR: 1917–1953 (The Hague: Walter de Gruyter, 1998). 18. Tolz, Russia’s Own Orient. 19. Raymond F. Betts, Decolonization (London: Psychology Press, 2004), 5. 20. Ibid., 6. 21. Ibid., 7. 22. Ibid., 9. 23. Ibid. 24. Michael Adas, Machines As the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 383. 25. Ibid., esp. ch. 6. 26. On Moeller van der Broek and his encounters with Dostoevsky, see Fritz Richard Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), esp. 209–11. 27. On Keyserling, see Walter Struve, Elites against Democracy: Leadership Ideals in Bourgeois Political Thought in Germany, 1890–1933 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), esp. 274– 316; George E. Cooper, “Count Hermann Keyserling and Cultural Decadence: A Response to a Myth, 1900–1930,” PhD diss. (University of Michigan, 1978). 28. For the Eurasianist take on Keyserling see letters of N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 219–23, 231–32. 29. Oswald Spengler, “Pessimismus?,” Schriftenreihe der Preussischen Jahrbücher, no. 4 (1921). 30. Nikolai Berdiaev et al., Osval’d Shpengler i Zakat Evropy (Moscow: Bereg, 1922). 31. N. S. Trubetskoi to S. O. Jakobson, August 24, 1921, MIT Archives, Roman Jakobson Papers, MC 72, box 28, folder 109, l. 3–4. 32. On the emergence of the conflict between Zivilisation and Kultur in the German context, where Zivilization stood for the negative influence of modernity, see Jörg Fisch, “Zivilisation, Kultur,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegrife: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, Band 7, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart: Klett-Gotta, 1992), 679–774. 33. N. S. Trubetskoi, “Post-Scriptum zur deutschen Auflage” (manuscript dated February 14, 1922), in MIT Archives, Roman Jakobson Papers, MC 72, box 28, folder 109, l. 1–2. 34. P. N. Savitskii to his relatives, not dated. GARF, f. R-5783, op. 2, d. 328. It is remarkable that Savinkov, not unlike the Eurasianists, was fully aware of the role played by the borderland peoples’ nationalisms in the Russian Revolution and the Civil War. However, unlike the Eurasianists, Savinkov believed that a secession of these peoples from Russia was desirable, whereas the Eurasianists ferociously defended the unity of the imperial space. 35. Boris Savinkov, “Pochemu ia priznal Sovetskuiu vlast’,” in Boris Savinkov na Lubianke: Dokumenty, ed. A. A. Litvin (Moscow, 2001), 105–6. 36. “A.V.Kartashev, Chairman of the Russian National Committee, to R. Poincaré, 1924,” n.d. BAR, Russian National Committee Papers, box 4, folder “1924.” 37. H. G. Wells, Russia in the Shadows (New York: G. H. Doran, 1921), 173. 38. Ibid. 39. See also I. Bunin’s reaction in “Neskol’ko slov angliiskomu pisateliiu,” in I. A. Bunin, Velikii durman: neizvestnye stranitsy, ed. O. Vasil’evskaia (Moscow: Sovershenno sekretno, 1997), 63–72. 40. N. S. Trubetskoi, “Predislovie,” in H. Wells, Rossiia vo t’me (Sofia: RBK, 1921), iii–xvi. 41. N. S. Trubetskoi, “Russkaia Problema,” in Na Putiakh (Berlin: Gelikon, 1922), 294–316. 42. Ibid., 296. 43. Ibid., 296–97. 44. Ibid., 297. 45. Ibid., 298. 46. Ibid., 302.

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47. N. S. Trubetskoi, Evropa i Chelovechestvo (Rossiisko-Bolgarskoe Knigoizdatel’stvo: Sofia, 1920), 4. 48. N. S. Trubetskoi, “Verkhi i nizy russkoi kul’tury (Etnicheskaia baza russkoi kul’tury),” in Iskhod k vostoku. Predchustvia i svershenia. Utverzhdenie evraziitsev (Sofia: Rossiisko-Bolgarskoe knigoizdatel’stvo, 1921), 86–103. 49. N. S. Trubetskoi, “My i drugie,” Evraziiskii vremennik 4 (1924): 66–81. 50. Ibid., 67. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., 68. 53. Ibid., 69. 54. Ibid., 71. 55. Ibid., 72. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid., 69. 58. P. N. Savitskii, “Povorot k Vostoku,” in Iskhod k Vostoku, 1–3. 59. An example of such an attitude was the “Changing Landmarks” ideology, which suggested that the Russian intelligentsia should support the Bolshevik regime out of sheer patriotism. The collection of articles that marked the beginning of the movement was Smena Vekh: Sbornik statei Iu. V. Kliuchnikova, N. V. Ustrialova, S.S. Luk’ianova, A. V. Bobrishcheva-Pushkina, S. S. Chakhotina i Iu. N. Potekhina (Prague: Politika, 1921). See also Mikhail Agursky, Ideologiia natsional-bol’shevizma (Paris: YMCA-Press, 1980); Hilde Hardeman, Coming to Terms with the Soviet Regime: The “Changing Signposts” Movement among Russian Émigrés in the Early 1920s (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1994). 60. Trubetskoi, “Russkaia Problema,” 301–2. 61. Ibid., 302. 62. Trubetskoi, “My i drugie,” 77. 63. Ibid., 80. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid. 66. K. V. Florovskaia, Leont’ev kak predshestvennik evraziistva. Na pravakh rukopisi (Prague: Unpublished manuscript, 1925), 12. 67. Savitskii, “Povorot k Vostoku,” 3. 68. P. P. Suvchinskii and D. P. Sviatopolk-Mirskii, editorial introduction in Versty, no. 1 (1926): 5. 69. P. Suvchinskii, “Inobytie russkoi religioznosti,” Evraziiskii vremennik 3 (1923): 105. 70. N. S. Trubetskoi, “Russkaia problema,” 303. 71. Ibid. On the similar ideas of Duhamel and Murret, see Adas, Machines As the Measure of Men, 384. 72. Trubetskoi, “Russkaia problema,” 303. 73. Ibid., 304. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid. 76. V. I. Lenin, “Preliminary Draft Theses on the National and the Colonial Questions for the Second Congress of Communist International,” in Lenin, Collected Works, 4th ed., vol. 31 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966), 146. Lenin’s views on the colonial question, although colored by pragmatic considerations of the moment, always stressed the class solution to the colonial question. However, Lenin’s violent anticolonialist rhetoric resembled Trubetskoi’s. In 1908 Lenin attacked Russia for suppressing a “revolution” in Persia and reproached the liberal bourgeoisie of Britain for “demonstrating what brutes the highly ‘civilised’ European ‘politicians,’ men who have passed through the high school of constitutionalism, can turn into when it comes to a rise in the mass struggle against capital and the capitalist colonial system, i.e., a system of enslavement, plunder and violence.” V. I. Lenin, “Inflammable Material in World Politics,” in Lenin, Collected Works, 4th ed., vol. 25 (Moscow: Progress

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Publishers, 1963), 182. In 1913, in “Theses on the National Question,” designed to provide a program for the European nationalities policy of the Bolsheviks and to secure the support of the nationalities, Lenin argued in favor of a complete and unconditional right of nations to self-determination; however, the Social-Democratic Party had to be united and purged of any federalist inclinations. V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, 4th ed., vol. 19 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968), 243–51. In his famous pamphlet, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, in Lenin, Selected Works, vol. 1, part 1 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1952), Lenin explicitly linked colonialism to the development of monopoly capitalism. Correspondingly, any solution to the problem of colonial exploitation was to be found in a revolutionary transformation of capitalism, and not in a cultural revolution along the lines suggested by Trubetskoi. Overall, Lenin’s opinion on national self-determination and the anticolonialist movement was shaped by the extent to which these items were deemed useful for the proletarian class struggle. 77. Trubetskoi, “Russkaia problema,” 304. 78. Ibid., 305. 79. Ibid., 306. 80. Ibid. 81. Ibid., 314. 82. Ibid. 83. Trubetskoi, Evropa i Chelovechestvo, 5. 84. Ibid., iv. 85. Ibid. 86. Nikolaus S. Trubetzkoy and Roman Jakobson, N. S. Trubetzkoy’s Letters and Notes (The Hague: Walter de Gruyter, 1985), 22. 87. Ibid., 12–13. 88. Ibid., 12. 89. Ibid. 90. N. S. Trubetskoi, “Verkhi i nizy russkoi kul’tury (Etnicheskaia baza russkoi kul’tury),” and “Ob istinnom i lozhnom natsionalizme,” in Iskhod k Vostoku, 86–103; 71–85. 91. Trubetskoi, Evropa i Chelovechestvo, 1. 92. Ibid., 2. 93. Ibid. 94. Ibid. 95. Ibid., 3. 96. Ibid., 5. 97. Ibid. 98. Ibid., 6. 99. Ibid., 8–9. 100. Ibid., 10. 101. Ibid., 13. 102. Ibid. 103. Ibid. 104. Ibid. 105. Ibid., 14. 106. Ibid., 15. 107. Ibid., 17. 108. Ibid., 18. 109. Ibid., 20. 110. Ibid., 21. 111. Ibid., 33–35. 112. Ibid., 21. 113. Ibid., 27–30.

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114. Ibid., 31. 115. Ibid., 22. 116. Ibid., 23. 117. Ibid., 39. 118. Ibid. 119. Ibid., 40. 120. Ibid., 42. 121. Ibid. 122. Ibid. 123. Ibid., 42–43. 124. See Gabriel de Tarde, The Laws of Imitation (New York: H. Holt, 1903); Gabriel de Tarde, La Logique Sociale (Paris: G. Baillière, 1895); Gabriel de Tarde, Interpsychologie infantile (Paris: Rey, 1909). Gabriele de Tarde’s sociology is currently being rediscovered and is assuming a central position in contemporary sociological debates. See Robert Leroux, “Gabriel Tarde: Vie, Oeuvres, Concepts,” in Robert Leroux, Les Grands Théoriciens. Sciences Humaines (Paris: Ellipses, 2011); Matei Candea, ed., The Social after Gabriel Tarde: Debates and Assessments (London: Routledge, 2010); Sergio Tonkonoff, “A New Social Physic: The Sociology of Gabriel Tarde and Its Legacy,” Current Sociology 61, no. 3 (May 2013): 267–82; see also a very interesting discussion of the political implications of Tarde’s sociology: Alberto Toscano, “Powers of Pacification: State and Empire in Gabriel Tarde,” Economy and Society 36, no. 4 (November 2007): 597–613. Toscano’s focus on Tarde’s concern with “pacification” and avoidance of social conflict highlights Trubetskoi’s most sympathetic reading of the French thinker. 125. Trubetskoi, Evropa i chelovechestvo, 45. 126. Ibid. 127. Ibid. 128. Ibid. 129. Ibid., 55. 130. Ibid., 58. 131. Ibid., 61–62. 132. Ibid., 62. 133. Ibid. 134. Ibid., 63. 135. Ibid. 136. Ibid., 64. 137. Ibid., 67. 138. Ibid., 68. 139. Ibid., 69. 140. Ibid., 70. 141. Ibid., 71. 142. Ibid., 79. 143. Ibid. 144. Ibid., 82. 145. Ibid. 146. On the reception of Darwinism in Russia, see Alexander Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture: 1861–1917 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1970), 275–85; Vucinich, Darwin in Russian Thought (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988). 147. N. Ia. Danilevskii, Darvinizm: Kriticheskoe issledovanie, vols. 1–3 (St. Petersburg, 1885, 1889). 148. Vucinich, Darwin in Russian Thought, 236–37; D. N. Anuchin, “Pamiati Maksima Maksimovicha Kovalevskogo,” Etnograficheskoe pbozrenie, no. 102 (1916): 1–16; N. S. Timasheff, “The Sociological Theories of Maksim M. Kovalevsky,” in An Introduction to the History of Sociology, ed.

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H. E. Barnes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 441–457; A. Walicki, A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1979), 367–380; E. Badredinov, “Problems of Modernization in Late Imperial Russia: Maksim M. Kovalevskii on Social and Economic Reform,” PhD. diss. (Louisiana State University, 2006). A. Matieva, “M. M. Kovalevskii i ego sovremenniki,” Voprosy Istorii 3 (2001): 135–43. On Henry Sumner Maine, see Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). 149. Maksim Kovalevskii, Ocherk proiskhozhdeniia sem’i i sobstvennosti (St. Petersburg: Iu. N. Erlikh, 1896). 150. М. Kovalevsky, “Le clan chez les tribus indigènes de la Russie,” Revue Internationale de Sociologie, no. 2 (1905): 6–101. 151. Maksim Kovalevskii, Zakon i obychai na Kavkaze, 2 vols. (Moscow: A. I. Mamontov, 1890). 152. Marina Mogilner, “Russian Physical Anthropology in Search of ‘Imperial Race’: Liberalism and Modern Scientific Imagination in the Imperial Situation,” Ab Imperio 8, no. 1 (2007): 213–14. 153. Maksim Kovalevskii, “Otnoshenie Rossii k okrainam,” Russkie vedomosti, October 9, 1905, 2. Cited in Mogilner, “Russian Physical Antropology,” 213. 154. Ibid., 214. 155. GARF, f. 5783, op. 1, d. 312, l. 62ob. 156. David Chioni Moore, “Colonialism, Eurasianism, Orientalism: N.S. Trubetzkoy’s Russian Vision, rev. of N. S. Trubetzkoy, The Legacy of Gengiz Khan and Other Essays on Russia’s Identity, ed. Anatoly Liberman (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1991),” Slavic and East European Journal 41, no. 2 (1997): 321–29. 157. Fürst N. Trubetzkoy, Europa und die Menscheit, aus Russisch überzetzt durch S. Jakobson und F. Schlömer (Munich: Drei Masken Verlag, 1922). The circumstances of the publication are described in Sergei Jakobson’s letter to his brother, December 18, 1975, in MIT Archives, Roman Jakobson Papers, MC 72, box 28, folder 110, l. 2–3. On Hötzsch, see Uwe Liszkowski, OsteuropaForschung und Politik: Ein Beitrag zum historisch-politischen Denken und Wirken von Otto Hoetzsch, in Osteuropaforschung, Bd. 19, 2 Bde (Berlin, 1986). 158. Trubetsukoi-Cho, Seiobunmei to jinrui no shora, trans. Shimano Saburo (Tokyo: KochishaShuppanbu hakko, 1926). Shimano Saburo was a translator and an intelligence officer for the state-run Manchuria Railroad Company and one of the founders of Soviet studies in Japan. I am grateful to Kimitaka Matsuzato for information on Shimano Saburo. See also Yukiko Hama, “Russia from a PanAsianist View: Saburo Shimano and His Activities,” Ab Imperio no. 3 (2010): 227–43. 159. Such attempts were undertaken through General V. Gurko, who resided in Paris. Gurko was charged with hiring translators and negotiating editions of Trubetskoi’s book. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, April 26, 1922, Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 188. 160. MIT Archives, MC 72, box 28, f. 103. Po povodu knigi N. S. Trubetskogo “Evropa i Chelovechestvo” (manuscript). The implications of the relationship between Jakobson and Trubetskoi and their shared concern about hierarchies in the production of knowledge are discussed in chapter 5. 161. Nicholas Riasanovsky, “Prince N.S. Trubetskoy’s ‘Europe And Mankind,’” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 13 (1964): 207–20; Riasanovsky, “The Emergence of Eurasianism,” California Slavic Studies 4 (1967): 39–72. See also Riasanovsky, “Asia through Russian Eyes,” in Russia and Asia: Essays on Russian Influence upon Asian Peoples, ed. Wayne S.Vuchinich (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1972), 3–29. 162. Riasanovsky, “Prince N. S. Trubetskoy’s ‘Europe And Mankind,’” 212. 163. Ibid. 164. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), 293–94. 165. N. S. Troubetzkoy, Grundzüge der Phonologie (Prague: Cercle linguistique de Prague, 1939).

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166. The most important work by Leont’ev was a two-volume collection of essays Vostok, Rossiia i Slavianstvo (Moscow, 1885–86). For an English edition of Leont’ev’s most important works, see K. N. Leont’ev, Against the Current, ed. and introduction George Ivask (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1969). 167. Walicki, A History of Russian Thought, 300–301. 168. Vladimir Solov’ev, “Konstantin Nikolaevich Leont’ev,” in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’, ed. F. A. Brokgauz and I. A. Efron, vol. 50 (1895). 169. Walicki, A History of Russian Thought, 303. Leont’ev’s views on nationalism were outlined in K. N. Leont’ev, Natsional’naia politika kak orudie vsemirnoi revoliutsii (Moscow: I. H. Kushnerev, 1889). 170. N. S. Trubetskoi, “Ob istinnom i lozhnom natsionalizme.” 171. This idea was put forward in the first article published by Leont’ev: N. Konstantinov [K. N. Leont’ev], “Panslavizm i Greki,” Russkii vestnik (February 1873). 172. See on Leont’ev’s criticism of the Slavs, Olga Maiorova, From the Shadow of Empire: Defining the Russian Nation through Cultural Mythology, 1855–1870 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), 175–82. 173. N. Ia. Danilevskii, Rossiia i Evropa: vzgliad na kul’turnyia i politicheskia otnoshenia slavianskogo mira k romano-germanskomu (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo N. Strakhova, 1895). 174. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, July 18, 1923, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 220. 175. N. S. Trubetskoi, “Vavilonskaia bashnia i smeshenie iazykov,” Evraziiskii vremennik 3 (1923): 107–24. 176. Ibid., 108. 177. Ibid., 109. 178. Ibid., 111. 179. Ibid. 180. Ibid., 112. 181. Ibid., 114. 182. Ibid., 118, 114. 183. Ibid., 116. I discuss the concept of language union in more detail in chapter 5 of this book. 184. Ibid., 117. 185. Ibid. 186. Ibid., 117. 187. Ibid., 118. 188. Ibid., 119. 189. Ibid. 190. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, August 9, 1922, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 193–96. 191. Ibid., 193. 192. Ibid., 194. 193. A. V. Meller-Zakomel’skii, Strashnyi vopros: Rossiia i evreistvo (Paris: n.p., 1923). Meller later moved to become one of the leaders of Russian Nazis in emigration. 194. N. S. Trubetskoi, “Vavilonskaia bashnia,” 120. 195. Ibid. 196. Ibid., 122. 197. Ibid., 123. 198. Ibid. 199. Ibid. 200. Ibid., 124.

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201. N. S. Trubetskoi, “Soblazny edineniia,” in Rossiia i Latinstvo (Berlin: Gelikon, 1923), 121–40.

Notes to Chapter 4 1. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, January 3, 1926, in Sergei Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom: istoriia v dokumentakh (Moscow: Novoe Izdatel’stvo, 2009), 370. 2. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, November 26–27, 1928, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 553. 3. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983) 4. N. S. Trubetzkoy’s Letters and Notes, 14. 5. P. S. Arapov, memorandum to members of the Council of Eurasianism, September 7, 1925. GARF, f. 5783, op. 2, d. 410, l. 45–46. 6. N. S. Trubetzkoy’s Letters and Notes, 14. 7. Arapov, memorandum, September 7, 1925. 8. Ksenia Florovskaia, “Leont’ev kak predshestvennik evrazitsev,” Evraziiskaia khronika, no. 1 (1925): n. p. Cited from the manuscript in the Rare Book and Manuscript Department, Firestone Library, Princeton University. Collection С0586 (Georges Florovsky). Folder 60. 9. Arapov, memorandum, September 7, 1925. 10. N. S. Trubetskoi, “Obshcheevraziiskii natsionalizm,” Evraziiskaia khronika 9 (1927): 24–31. 11. Ibid., 24–28. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 28. 14. Ibid., 29. 15. Ibid. Emphasis added. 16. Louis Snyder sees these pan-movements as “macro-nationalisms”: Louis L. Snyder, Macro-Nationalisms: A History of the Pan-Movements (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984). Roger Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League, 1886– 1914 (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1984); Charles W. Hostler, The Turks of Central Asia (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1993); Hostler, Turkism and the Soviets: The Turks of the World and Their Political Objectives (New York: Praeger, 1957); Jacob M. Landau, Pan-Turkism: From Irredentism to Cooperation, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995); Serge A. Zenkovsky, Pan-Turkism and Islam in Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univerisity Press, 1960); Alexandre Bennigsen and Chantal Quelquejay, Les mouvements nationaux chez les musulmans de Russie (Paris: Mouton, 1960); Fredrick B. Pike, Hispanismo, 1898–1936: Spanish Conservatives and Liberals and Their Relations with Spanish America (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1971). On the pan-European movement, see Arnold J. Zurcher, The Struggle to Unite Europe, 1940–1958 (New York: New York University Press, 1958); Menno Spiering and Michael Wintle, eds., Ideas of Europe Since 1914: The Legacy of the First World War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 17. Trubetskoi, “Obshcheevraziiskii natsionalizm,” 31. 18. P. N. Savitskii, “Po povodu broshiury N. S. Trubetskogo Evropa i Chelovechestvo” (Sofia: Rossiisko-Bolgarskoe Knigoizdatel’stvo, 1920), Russkaia mysl’, no. 2 (1921): 119–38, 134. 19. Ibid., 135. 20. Ibid. 21. N. S. Trubetskoi, “Obshcheslavianskii element v russkoi kul’ture,” in Problema russkogo samopoznania (Paris: Evraziiskoe knigoizdatel’stvo, 1927), 54–94. 22. Ibid., 54–55. 23. Ibid., 61. 24. Ibid., 63–65.

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25. Trubetskoi repeatedly projected the modern name “Russia” onto the linguistic realm of eastern Slavic dialects. 26. Trubetskoi, “Obshcheslavianskii element v russkoi kul’ture,” 67. 27. Ibid., 68–72. Here Trubetskoi hints at the importance of convergence in the development of languages, a theme he developed in 1923. This idea of convergent development will be used by Roman Jakobson in his work on the Eurasianist language union. See chapter 5 of this book. 28. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, April 7, 1924, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 267. 29. Ibid. A. A. Kizevetter was a professional historian of liberal views, who resided in Prague. 30. Ibid., 267. 31. N. S. Trubetskoi, “O turanskom elemente v russkoi kul’ture,” Evraziiskii Vremennik 4 (1925): 351–76. 32. Ibid., 351–53. 33. Ibid., 359. 34. Ibid., 355. 35. Ibid., 359. 36. Ibid., 361. 37. Ibid., 363–64. 38. Ibid., 371. 39. Ibid., 372. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., 374. 42. Ibid., 375. 43. Ibid. 44. For an overview of Russian attitudes toward Ukraine, see Voldymyr A. Potulnytskyi, “The Image of Ukraine and Ukrainians in Russian Political Thought (1860–1945),” Acta Slavica Iaponica 16 (1998): 1–29; A. Miller, “Ukrainskii vopros” v politike vlastei i russkom obshchestvennom mnenii (vtoraia polovina 19 veka) (St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2000); see also Faith Hillis, Children of Rus’: Right-bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian Nation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014). 45. G. V. Vernadskii, “Kn. N. S. Trubetskoi i ukrainskii vopros,” prepared by Ernest Gyidel, Ab Imperio 6, no. 4 (2006): 347. 46. P. N. Savitskii, V bor’be za evraziistvo: Polemika vokrug evraziistva v 1920-kh godakh (Prague: Evraziiskoe knigoizdatel’stvo, 1931), 8. 47. For an overview of Savitskii’s relationship to his Ukrainian roots, see M. Beisswenger, “Eurasianism Then and Now: A Russian Conservative Movement and Its Ukrainian Challenge,” in Ukraine, the EU and Russia: History, Culture and International Relations, ed. Stephen Velychenko (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 27–50. 48. On Suvchinskii’s Ukrainian ties, see Sergey Glebov, “Le frémissement du temps: Petr Suvchinsky, l’eurasisme et l’esthétique de la modernité,” in Pierre Souvtchinski, cahiers d’étude, ed. Eric Humbertclaude (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006), 163–223. 49. Igor Torbakov, “Becoming Eurasian: The Intellectual Odyssey of Georgii Vladimirovich Vernadsky,” in Between Europe and Asia: Origins, Theories and Legacies of Russian Eurasianism, ed. M. Bassin, S. Glebov, and M. Laruelle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), 113–36. 50. For a discussion on the applicability of terms “ukrainophile” and “russophile” to late imperial actors, see R. Vulpius, “Slova i liudi v imperii: k diskussii o ‘proekte bol’shoi russkoi natsii,’ ukraino- i rusofilakh, narechiiakh i narodnostiakh,” and M. Dolbilov and D. Staliunas, “Slova, liudi i imperskie konteksty: diskussiia prodolzhaetsia,” Ab Imperio 6, no. 1 (2006): 353–65. Starshyna was a collective term for the officers of the Zaporozhian Cossack Host. Szlachta refers to Polish nobility. On starshyna, see Paul R. Magocsi, A History of Ukraine: The Land and Its Peoples (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 234; on szlachta, see Norman Davies, God’s Playground A History of Poland: Volume 1: The Origins to 1795 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 156–95.

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51. Ernest Gyidel, “Ob ukrainofil’stve” Georgiia Vernadskogo, ili variatsiia na temu natsional’nykh i gosudarstvennykh loial’nostei,” Ab Imperio 6, no. 4 (2006): 329–46. 52. P. N. Savitskii surveyed Ukrainian criticisms of Eurasianism in his V bor’be za evraziistvo, 8–9. 53. N. S. Trubetskoi, “K ukrainskoi problem,” Evraziiskii Vremennik 5 (1927): 165–84. 54. Ibid., 165–66. 55. Ibid., 167. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid., 170. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid., 171. 60. Ibid., 172. 61. Ibid., 173. 62. Obviously, Trubetskoi’s use of the term “intelligentsia” was different from the understanding of today’s historians. He meant “educated classes.” 63. Trubetskoi, “K ukrainskoi probleme,” 177–78. 64. Ibid., 178. 65. Ibid., 181–82. 66. See his memoirs: Dmytro Doroshenko, Moi’ spomyny pro nedav’n’e mynule (1914–1920), 2nd ed. (Munich: Ukrains’ke Vydavstvo, 1969). 67. D. I. Doroshenko, “ ‘K ukrainskoi probleme’: po povodu stat’i kn. N. S. Trubetskogo,” in N. S. Trubetskoi, Istoriia. Kul’tura. Iazyk (Moscow: Progress, 1995), 380–92. 68. N. S. Trubetskoi, “Otvet D. I. Doroshenko,” Evraziiskaia khronika 10 (1928): 51–59. 69. O. Mitsiuk, Evrazyistvo (Prague, 1930). 70. Cited from Savitskii, “V bor’be za evraziistvo,” 9. 71. Ibid. 72. Savitskii’s most important geographical works include “Kontinent-Okean (Rossiia i mirovoi rynok),” in Iskhod k Vostoku, 104–25; Rossiia–osobyi geograficheskii mir (Prague: Evraziiskoe knigoizdatel’stvo, 1927); Geograficheskie osobennosti Rossii-Evrazii, part 1 (Prague: Evraziiskoe knigoizdatel’stvo, 1927); “Geopoliticheskie zametki po russkoi istorii,” in G. Vernadskii, Nachertanie russkoi istorii (Prague: Evraziiskoe knigoizdatel’stvo, 1927), 234–60; O zadachakh kochevnikovedeniia: Pochemu skify i gunny dolzhny byt’ interesny dlia russkogo (Prague: Evraziiskoe knigoizdatel’stvo, 1927). 73. P. N. Savitskii to his family, July 4, 1920. GARF, f. 5783, op. 2, d. 326, l. 2. The term “Eurasia” in application to a part of the Old World was also used by the Swiss geologist Eduard Suess. See his Face of the Earth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904), 596–530, but there is no evidence that Savitskii was familiar with that work. 74. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, July 18, 1923, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 220. 75. This review was the first outline of “classical Eurasianism” in print: Savitskii, “Po povodu broshiury,” 119–38. 76. Savitskii, “Po povodu broshiury,” 120–21. 77. K. I. Florovskaia, Leont’ev kak predshestvennik evraziistva. Na pravakh rukopisi (Prague: Unpublished manuscript, 1925), 11. 78. Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 1. 79. On Vernadsky, see Kendall E. Bailes, Science and Russian Culture in an Age of Revolutions: V. I. Vernadsky and His Scientific School, 1863–1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). 80. P. N. Savitskii to P. N. Malevskii-Malevich, n.d. 1925. GARF, f. P-5783, op. 2, d. 334, l. 65. On Mendeleev, see Alexander Vucinich, “Mendeleev’s Views on Science and Society,” Isis 58, no.  3 (1967): 342–51. A well-documented study explores Mendeleev’s scientific worldview in the context

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of the cultural and political life of the Russian Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century: Michael D. Gordin, A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table (New York: Basic Books, 2004), esp. ch. 6: “The Imperial Turn: Economics, Evolution, and Empire.” 81. P. B. Struve, Kriticheskie zametki k vorposu ob ekonomicheskom razvitii Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1894), 240. On Struve’s imagining of the Russian imperial space, see Alexander Semyonov, “ ‘Greater Britain’ into ‘Greater Russia’: A Case of Imagining Empire and Nation in the Early 20th Century Russian Empire,” in Eutropes: The Paradox of European Empire, no. 7: Cahiers Parisiens/Parisian Notebooks (Chicago: University of Chicago Center in Paris, 2014), 25–48. 82. P. N. Savitskii, “Pod’em’ i ‘depressiia’ v drevne-russkoi istorii,” Evraziiskaia khronika, no. 11 (1935): 65. 83. P. N. Savitskii to G. Vernadsky, December 9, 1956. BAR, George Vernadsky Papers, box 8, folder “Mordovskaia ASSR 1945–46 gg.” 84. Savitskii referred to the idea of the “periodical system of soils” by the Russian soils scholar Ia. N. Afanas’ev in Savitskii, Geograficheskie osobennosti Rossii, 173. Afanas’ev work is Ia. N. Afanas’ev, Zonal’nye systemy pochv (Ottisk iz “Zapisok Goretskogo S.-Khoziaistvennogo Instituta”) (Gorki, 1922). 85. Savitskii, “Po povodu broshiury,” 128. 86. Mark Bassin, “Russia between Europe and Asia: The Ideological Construction of Geographical Space,” Slavic Review 50, no. 1 (1991): 1–17; V. N. Tatishchev’s ideas on the boundary of Europe can be found in V. N. Tatishchev, “Obshchee geograficheskoe opisanie Sibiri,” in V. N. Tatishchev, Izbrannye trudy po geografii Rossii (Moscow: Geografgiz, 1950), esp. 50. 87. V. I. Lamanskii, Tri mira Aziisko-Evropeiskogo materika (St. Petersburg, 1916). 88. N. Ia. Danilevskii, Rossiia i Evropa: Vzgliad na kul’turnye i politicheskie otnosheniia Slavianskogo mira k Germanskomu, 5th ed. (St. Petersburg: L N. Strakhov, 1889), esp. 54–60. 89. Lamanskii, Tri mira. Quoted from V. I. Lamanskii, “Tri mira Aziisko-Evropeiskogo materika,” Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta 12, no. 1 (2001): 102; see also a synopsis of Lamanskii’s geographic ideas in V. I. Lamanskii, Rossiia: polnoe geograficheskoe opisanie, ed. P. P. Semenov-TianShanskii (St. Petersburg, 1899–1914). 90. Savitskii, “Po povodu broshiury,” 130–31. 91. Ibid., 132–33. 92. Ibid. 93. P. N. Savitskii, Rossiia osobyi geograficheskii mir (Prague: Evraziiskoe knigoizdatelästvo, 1927), 26. 94. Ibid., 27. 95. Ibid., 28. 96. N. G. Sukhova, Razvitie predstavlenii o prirodnom territorial’nom komplekse v russkoi geografii (Leningrad: Nauka, 1981). 97. Friedrich Ratzel, Anthropogeographie: Grundzüge der Anwendung der Erdkunde auf dis Geschichte (Stuttgart: J. Engelhorn, 1899). On Ratzel, see James M. Hunter, Perspective on Ratzel’s Political Geography (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983). 98. For an excellent study of the development of applied biological sciences in Russia, see M.  Loskutova and A. Fedotova, Stanovlenie prikladnykh biologicheskikh issledovanii v Rossii: Vzaimodeistvie nauki i praktiki v 19-m–nachale 20 v. Istoricheskie ocherki (St. Petersburg: Nestor, 2014). 99. Vasilii Vasil’evich Dokuchaev (1846–1903), ed. I. G. Bebikh (Moscow: Nauka, 1997); see also V. V. Dokuchaev, Uchenie o zonakh prirody (Moscow: Geografgiz, 1948). For an overview of Dokuchaev’s life and work, see David Moon, The Plough That Broke the Steppes: Agriculture and Environment on Russia’s Grasslands, 1700–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 53–86. 100. On Morozov, see I. Beilin and A. Parnes, Georgii Fedorovich Morozov (1867–1920) (Moscow: Nauka, 1971); For Morozov’s classical study, see G. F. Morozov, Uchenie o lese (St. Petersburg, 1912). 101. Savitskii, Geograficheskie osobennosti Rossii, 29–30.

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102. Savitskii, Rossiia osobyi geograficheskii mir, 28. 103. Ibid., 28. 104. Savitskii, Geograficheskie osobennosti Rossii, 30. 105. Savitskii, Rossiia osobyi geograficheskii mir, 29. 106. Ibid., 28. 107. Savitskii, Geograficheskie osobennosti Rossii, 9–10. 108. Ibid., 9–12. 109. Ibid., 18–19. 110. Ibid., 20. 111. Ibid. 112. E. E. Slutskii, Teoriia korreliatsii i elementy ucheniia o krivykh raspredeleniia (Kiev, 1912). 113. Savitskii, Geograficheskie osobennosti Rossii, 94. 114. P. N. Savitskii, K poznaniiu russkikh stepei (Paris: Evraziiskoe knigoizdatel’stvo, 1927), 27. 115. P. Savitskii, “Po povodu brochiury,” 131. 116. Savitskii, “Kontinent-Okean,” 105. 117. Ibid., 108. 118. Ibid., 111. 119. Ibid., 114. 120. Ibid. 121. Ibid. 122. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, December 31, 1925, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 366–67. Trubetskoi also suggested to Suvchinskii that a similar approach could be developed toward “musical colonization” of the country. 123. “Novaia russkaia literatura v evraziiskom ponimanii,” Evraziiskaia khronika, no. 4 (1926): 55–56. See the draft of Savitskii’s report in GARF, f. R-5783, op. 1, d. 71, l. 1–10. 124. George Vernadsky, Russian Historography: A History (Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1978); Anatole G. Mazour, Modern Russian Historiography, rev. ed. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975); V. I. Picheta, Vvedenie v russkuiu istoriiu (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1922); and the oldest Soviet work in use N. A. Rubinshtein, Russkaia istoriografiia (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1941). 125. The only monograph on the Eurasianist vision of Russian history is little more than a summary of Eurasianist views in general, rather than a specific discussion of the historical conception of the movement. M. Vandalkovskaia, Istoricheskaia nauka rossiiskoi emigratsii: “evraziiskii soblazn” (Moscow: Pamiatniki istoricheskoi mysli, 1997). 126.A. A. Kizevetter, “Evraziistvo,” in Russkii ekonomicheskii sbornik (Prague: n.p., 1925), 50–65; for a brief outline of Miliukov’s objections to Eurasianism in English, see Paul Miliukov, “Eurasianism and Europeanism in Russian History,” in Festschrift Th. G. Masaryk zum 80. Geburstag, vol. 1 (Bonn: F. Cohen, 1930), 225–36. M. M. Karpovich, a Russian historian at Harvard, repeatedly called Eurasianist theories “unscientific.” See a report on P. N. Malevskii-Malevich’s talk in the United States in Evraziiskaia khronika, no. 4 (1926), 50. 127. Terence Emmonse, “On the Problem of Russia’s ‘Separate Path’ in Late Imperial Historiography,” in Historiography of Imperial Russia: The Profession and the Writing of History in a Multinational State, ed. Thomas Sanders (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), 163–87. 128. The issue of the Mongol influence on Russian history has received adequate attention from historians, both in Russia/USSR and in the West. A list of select publications includes Charles J. Halperin, “Soviet Historiography on Russia and the Mongols,” Russian Review 41, no. 3 (1982): 306–22; Halperin, The Tatar Yoke (Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1985); Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); Halperin, “Omissions of National Memory: Russian Historiography on the Golden Horde as Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion,” Ab Imperio 5, no. 3 (2004), 131–44; for one of the most important Soviet works, see A. N. Nasonov, Mongoly i Rus’ (istoriia tatarskoi politiki na Rusi) (Moscow–Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1940). See also Leo de Hartog, Russia and the Mongol Yoke: The History of the Russian Principalities and the

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Golden Horde, 1221–1502 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1996); Donald Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Michael Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500–1800 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). 129. N. M. Karamzin, “Zapiska o drevnei i novoi Rossii,” quoted from N. M. Karamzin, “Iz Zapiski o drevnei i novoi Rossii,” in Sbornik materialov po istorii istoricheskoi nauki v SSSR (Moscow: Vysshaia Shkola, 1990), 67–72. 130. N. M. Karamzin, Istoriia gosudarstva rossiiskogo, 4th ed., vol. 5 (St. Petersburg: Smardin, 1834), 358–59. 131.Ibid., 360–61. 132. Ibid., 369–70. 133. Ibid., 374. 134. Ibid. 135. For a discussion of Solov’ev’s vision of Russia’s diversity, see C. Reddel, “S. M. Solov’ev and Multi-National History,” Russian History/Histoire russe 13, no. 4 (1986): 355–66. 136. S. M. Solov’ev, Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen, vol. 1 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo sotsial’noekonomicheskoi literatury, 1962), 57–58. 137. R. Byrnes, “Kliuchevskii on the Multi-National Russian State,” Russian History/Histoire russe 13, no. 4 (1986): 313–30. 138. V. O. Kliuchevskii, Kurs russkoi istorii, vol. 2, part 2, lecture 22 (Moscow, 1906). Hereafter quoted from Kliuchevskii, Kurs russkoi istorii, vol. 2, part 2 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe sotsial’noekonomicheskoe izdatel’stvo, 1937), 44. 139. Ibid. 140. Ibid., 45. 141. Ibid., 148. 142. Ibid., 148. 143. S. F. Platonov called it “a historical accident,” which resulted only in the division of the national body of Russia between the Southwest and the Northeast. S. F. Platonov, Lektsii po russkoi istorii, 5th ed. (St. Petersburg: Iv. Blinov, 1907), 92–96. 144. Shchapov held a regionalist view of Russian history and supported federalist solutions to the problems of imperial Russia. On “federalist alternatives” in Russian history writing, see Mark von Hagen, “Writing the History of Russia as Empire,” in Kazan, Moscow, St. Petersburg: Multiple Faces of the Russian Empire, ed. M. von Hagen, Catherine Evtuhov, Boris Gasparov, and Alexander Ospovat (Moscow: ITS-Garant, 1997), 393–410. 145. A. P. Shchapov, “Etnograficheskaia organizatsiia russkogo narodonaseleniia,” in Sochinenia A. P. Shchapova, vol. 2 (St. Petersburg: M. V. Pirozhkov, 1906), 365–87. The text was first published under the same title in the journal Biblioteka dlia chtenia, no. 1 (1864): 1–42. 146. Shchapov, “Etnograficheskaia organizatsia russkogo narodonaselenia,” 368. 147. Ibid., 369. 148. Ibid., 370. 149. Ibid., 376. 150. Shchapov’s regionalist views were influential in shaping the Siberian regionalist movement in the wake of the Great Reforms. Wolfgang Faust, Russlands goldener Boden: der sibirische Regionalismus in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Vienna: Böhlau, 1980). 151. For a general overview of the struggles in the early Soviet period of Russian historical writing, see John Barber, Soviet Historians in Crisis, 1928–1932 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1981), esp. 12–30. 152. See Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001) for a discussion of korenizatsiia policies. 153. M. N. Pokrovskii, Istoricheskaia nauka i bor’ba klassov (Moscow–Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoe izdatel’stvo, 1933), 307.

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154. The “Russocentric” turn in Stalin’s USSR from the early 1930s has been the subject of several works. For an overview as well as an argument that links the creation of modern Russian national idenity to Stalin’s “national bolshevism,” see David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 155. V. I. Lebedev, B. D. Grekov, and S. V. Bakhrushin, eds., Istoriia SSSR, vol. 1 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoe izdatel’stvo, 1939), 177–78. 156. Ibid., 162–77. 157. Petr Mikhailovich Bitsilli (1879–1953) emigrated from Russia in 1920. He formerly taught universal history in Odessa, and in emigration he taught at the universities of Sofia and Skopje. He contributed articles to two Eurasianist collections, and actively published in the émigré press. He became critical of Eurasianism in the mid-1920s. 158. P. M. Bitsilli, “ ‘Vostok’ i ‘Zapad’ v istorii Starogo Sveta,” in Na Putiakh (Berlin: Gelikon, 1922), 317–40. 159. Ibid., 317–18. 160. Ibid., 320–24. 161. Vera Tolz, “The Eurasians and Liberal Scholarship of the Late Imperial Period,” in Between Europe and Asia: Origins, Theories and Legacies of Russian Eurasianism, ed. M. Bassin, S. Glebov, and M. Laruelle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), 46. On Kondakov’s work and life, see I. L. Kyzlasova, ed., Mir Kondakova (Moscow: Russkii put’, 2004). 162. Bitsilli, “ ‘Vostok’ i ‘Zapad,’” 326–27. 163. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, December 15, 1921, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 176. 164. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, February 26, 1922, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 185. 165. Bitsilli published an article in the Eurasianist-sponsored “anti-Catholic” collection in 1923: P. M. Bitsilli, “Katolichestvo i Rimskaia Tserkov,” in Rossiia i Latinstvo (Berlin: Gelikon, 1923), 40–79. Later he became critical of Eurasianism and published a series of articles on various aspects of the doctrine. In P. M. Bitsilli, “Dva lika evraziistva,” in Sovremennye zapiski 31 (1927): 421–34, he was apologetic about the Eurasianists’ interest in Eurasia’s ethnic diversity and about the Eurasianists’ federalism. At the same time, he severely criticized Eurasianist social and political views. 166. P. N. Savitskii, “Step’ i Osedlost’,” in Na Putiakh (Berlin: Gelikon, 1922), 341–56. On Savitskii’s text as a reaction to Bitsilli’s, see N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, December 15, 1921, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 176. 167. Savitskii, “Step’ i Osedlost’,” 341. 168. Ibid. It is striking to see Savitiskii’s words a verbatim reference to Shchapov, who also talked about “elastic nomadic masses.” 169. Ibid., 342. 170. Savitskii, “Kontinent-Okean,” 104–25. 171. Savitskii, “Step’ i Osedlost’,” 342. 172. Ibid., 342–43. 173. Ibid., 344. 174. Ibid. 175. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, December 15, 1921, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 176. 176. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. N. Savitskii, December 30, 1923, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 562. 177. Ibid. 178. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, April 7, 1924, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 266.

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179. Ibid., 267. 180. G. V. Vernadskii, “Protiv solntsa: Rasprostranenie russkogo gosudarstva k vostoku,” Russkaia mysl’, no. 1 (1914): 57–58. 181. G. V. Vernadskii, “ ‘Soedinenie tserkvei’ v istoricheskoi deistvitel’nosti,” in Rossiia i latinstvo (Berlin, 1923), 80–120. 182. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, 1923 (n. d.), in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 249. 183. G. V. Vernadskii, “Dva podviga sv. Aleksandra Nevskogo,” in Evraziiskii vremennik 4 (1925): 318–37. 184. Ibid., 327. 185. G. V. Vernadskii, “Mongol’skoe igo v russkoi istorii,” Evraziiskii vremennik 5 (1927): 154–55. 186. Ibid., 157. 187. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, April 28, 1926, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 407–9. Trubetskoi also wrote approvingly about the work of Sergei Germanovich Pushkarev (1888–1984), a historian and a graduate of Kharkov University. He took part in the Civil War and was evacuated from Crimea in 1920. From 1921 he lived in Prague, where he collaborated in various Russian academic institutions. After World War II Pushkarev moved to the United States and taught Russian at Yale University, where Vernadskii taught Russian history. Pushkarev wrote important memoirs: S. G. Pushkarev, Vospominania istorika, 1905–1945 (Moscow: Posev, 1999). It should be noted that Pushkarev stopped cooperating with the Eurasianists in 1928. For his contribution to Eurasianism, see S. G. Pushkarev, “Rossiia i Evropa v ikh istoricheskom proshlom,” Evraziiskii vremennik 5 (1927): 121–52. 188. Vernadskii, Nachertanie russkoi istorii, 6. 189. Ibid., 7–9, 13. 190. Ibid., 16. 191. Ibid. 192. P. S. Arapov to P. P. Suvchinskii, n.d. (1927), BNF DdM. Not catalogued. 193. D. P. Sviatopolk-Mirskii to P. P. Suvchinskii, October 11, 1927, in G. Smith, ed., The Letters of D. S. Mirsky to P. P. Suvchinskii, 1922–1931 (Birmingham: Department of Russian Language and Literature, University of Birmingham, 1995), 90. 194. G. V. Vernadskii to P. N. Savitskii, January 21, 1927, prepared by A. Antoshchenko, Ab Imperio 4, no. 1 (2003): 286. 195. Ibid., 286. Liberal historians also remained critical. As Kizevetter wrote to Vernadskii, “I do not approve of the Eurasianist content of your book and I am going to criticize certain parts of it in public.” A. A. Kizevetter to G. Vernadskii, November 25, 1927. BAR, George Vernadsky Papers, box 5, folder “A. A. Kizevetter 1927–1931.” 196. Savitskii kept Vernadskii informed of the developments in Europe and Vernadskii might have had the impression that by 1933 the movement had cleansed itself of pro-Soviet elements. 197.G. V. Vernadskii, Opyt istorii Evrazii s poloviny VI veka do nastoiashchego vremeni (Berlin: Izdanie Evraziitsev, 1934), 6. 198. Ibid., 13. 199. Ibid., 6–7. 200. Ibid., 7. 201. Ibid., 8. 202. Ibid., 27–28.

Notes to Chapter 5 1. François Dosse, History of Structuralism, vol. 1: The Rising Sign, 1945–1966, trans. Deborah Glassman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), esp. ch. 3–4, 8. See also the recent

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biography by Patrick Wilcken, Claude Lévi-Strauss: A Poet in the Laboratory (New York: Penguin Press, 2010). 2. Patrick Sériot, Structure et totalité: Les Origines intellectuelles du structuralisme en Europe centrale et orientale (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999). Further references are to the Russian edition: P. Serio, Struktura i Tselostnost’: Ob intellektual’nykh istokakh strukturalizma v Tsentral’noi i Vostochnoi Evrope, 1920–1930 (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskoi kul’tury, 2001). See also a somewhat confusing attempt to rehabilitate structuralism in N. Avtonomova, Otkrytaia struktura: Iakobson-Bakhtin-Lotman-Gasparov (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2009), esp. ch. 1, 27–102. 3. N. S. Avtonomova and M. L. Gasparov, “Jakobson, Slavistics and the Eurasian Movement: Two Moments of Opportunity, 1929–1953,” in Roman Jakobson, Teksty, dokumenty, issledovania (Moscow: RGGU, 1999), 334–40. 4. Pierre Bourdieu, L’Ontlogie politique de Martin Heidegger (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1988). 5. Yanni Kotsonis, “Introduction,” in Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices, ed. D. Hoffman and Y. Kotsonis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 3; on Sonderweg interpretations of Russian history, see Ab Imperio 2, no. 1 (2002): 15–101, contributions by Carl E. Schorske, Hans van der Loo, Gunilla-Friederike Budde, Jurgen Kocka, and Manfred Hildermeier. 6. See, for example, Galin Tihanov, “Cultural Emancipation and the Novelistic: Trubetzkoy, Savitsky, Bakhtin,” in Bakhtin and the Nation, ed. B. Brown et al. (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Press, 2000), 47–67. 7. The literature on these imperial contexts is rapidly growing. See a review in “Introduction,” in Empire Speaks Out: Languages of Rationalization and Self-Description in the Russian Empire, ed. I.  Gerasimov et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 3–32; for sociology, see George Steinmetz, ed., Sociology and Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); for an excellent review of anthropology in imperial contexts, see Marina Mogilner, Homo Imperii: Istoriia fizicheskoi antropologii v Rossii (konets XIX–nachalo XX vv.) (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2008). 8. Sériot, Structure et Totalité. 9. Aristide R. Zolberg, “The École Libre at the New School 1941–1946,” Social Research 65, no. 4 (1998): 921. 10. Claude Lévi-Strauss, De près et de loin (Paris: Editions Odile Jacob, 1988), 62–65. 11. Andrew Lass, “Poetry and Reality: Roman O. Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss,” in Artists, Intellectuals and World War II: The Pontigny Encounters at Mount Holyoke College, 1942–1944, ed. Christopher Benfey and Karen Remmler (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), 173–84. 12. Lévi-Strauss, De près et de loin. 13. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “L’Analyse structurale en linguistique et en anthropologie,” Word, no.  1 (1945): 1–22  ; Lévi-Strauss, “Structure et dialectique,” in For Roman Jakobson: Essays on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday (The Hague: Mouton, 1956), 289–94; Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, vol. 2 (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 33–34. The term “atomistic” is one of the key markers used by Eurasianist scholars to describe positivism in opposition to their own “systemic” methods. 14. Lévi-Strauss, De pres et de loin, 62–65. See also Jacques Durand and Jean-Pierre Albert, “Roman Jakobson et Claude Lévi-Strauss: Linguistique et anthropologie structurales,” Caravelle: Cahiers Du Monde Hispanique et Luso-Brésilien 96 (2011): 151–63; Steven Feld, “Remembering Claude Lévi-Strauss,” Journal of Anthropological Research 66, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 1–3. 15. See correspondence between Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss in the MIT Archives, Roman Jakobson Papers, MC 72, box 43, folders 33 and 34. For correspondence between Jakobson and Jacques Lacan see MIT Archives, Roman Jakobson Papers, MC 72, box 43, folder 28. 16. Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits, fonds 28150 (Claude LéviStrauss) (hereafter FLS), f. 1–100, l. 5–6. 17. R. Jakobson to Claude Lévi-Strauss, May 12, 1948. FLS, f. 1–100, l. 1–2. The Russian medieval epic was published as La geste du Prince Igor’: épopée russe du douzième siècle, text établi, traduit et commenté par Henri Grégoire, Roman Jakobson, Marc Szeftel, assistés de J. J. Joffe, Annuaire de

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l’Institut de Philologie et d’Histoire Orientales et Slaves, vol. 8, (1945–1947). On the relationship between Jakobson and Mazon from a perspective critical of Jakobson, see Edward L. Keenan, “Remembering André Mazon,” Revue des études slaves 82, no. 82–1 (2011): 115–21. 18. R. Jakobson to Claude Lévi-Strauss, May 12, 1948. FLS, f. 1–100, l. 1–2. 19. Claude Lévi-Strauss to Roman Jakobson, March 23, and June 22, 1949. FLS, f. 1–100, l. 38–43. 20. The literature on the Prague Linguistic Circle is voluminous. Some of the most important works include Jean Pierre Faye and Léon Robel, Le Cercle de Prague (Paris: Seuil, 1969); F. W. Galan, Historic Structures: The Prague School Project, 1928–1946 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984); Philip A. Luelsdorff, ed., The Prague School of Structural and Functional Linguistics: A Short Introduction (Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 1994). For an especially important work, see Jindrich Toman, The Magic of a Common Language: Jakobson, Mathesius, Trubetzkoy, and the Prague Linguistic Circle (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), which pays attention to the ideological foundations of the linguistic thought of the Prague thinkers. Perhaps the best work outlining these ideological foundations is Boris Gasparov, “The Ideological Principles of Prague School Phonology,” in Language, Poetry and Poetics. The Generation of the 1890s: Jakobson, Trubetzkoy, Majakovskij. Proceedings of the First Roman Jakobson Colloquium, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, October 5–6, 1984, ed. K. Pomorska, E. Chodakowska, H. McLean, and B. Vine (New York: Mouton de Gruyer, 1987), 49–78. Savitskii’s contribution was P. Savickij, “Les problèms de la géographie linguistique du point de vue du géographe,” Travaux du Circle Linguistique de Prague 1 (1929): 145–56. 21. The many works on Roman Jakobson’s life and work include: Elmar Holenstein, Roman Jakobson’s Approach to Language: Phenomenological Structuralism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976); Richard Bradford, Roman Jakobson. Life, Language, Art (New York: Routledge, 1994); A Tribute to Roman Jakobson, 1896–1982 (Cambridge, MA: de Gruyter, 1982); Stephen Rudy, Roman Jakobson, 1896–1982: A Complete Bibliography of His Writings (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1990); and the excellent volume Roman Jakobson: Teksty, Issledovania, Dokumenty (Moscow: RGGU, 1999). 22. On the Lazarev Institute, see A. P. Baziiants, Lazarevskii institut vostochnykh iazykov: istoricheskii ocherk (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Vostochnoi literatury, 1959). 23. G. Vinokur, “Moskovskii Lingvisticheskii Kruzhok,” Nauchnye Izvestiia Akademicheskogo Tsentra Narkomprosa, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1922). 24. V. Ivanov, “Buria nad N’iufaundlendom: Iz vospominanii o Romane Jakobsone,” in Roman Jakobson. Teksty. Vospominaniia, 252. 25. Sometimes this aura of a left-wing intellectual got Jakobson into trouble: in Czechoslovakia, the press ran a campaign in which he was depicted as a Soviet agent, and in the United States he barely escaped an encounter with the McCarthy Commission. In the latter case, Michael Karpovich’s intervention and attesting to Jakobson’s “anti-Communist credentials” saved him. In another instance, Eisenhower’s brief tenure as president of Columbia University while Jakobson worked there seems to have helped him when he was questioned by the FBI. See Stephen Rudy, “Jakobson pri makkartizme,” in Roman Jakobson. Teksty. Vospominaniia, 192–200. 26. B. Jangfeldt, “Roman Jakobson v Shvetsii, 1940–1941,” in Roman Jakobson. Teksty. Vospominaniia, 167–74. 27. Morris Halle, “On the Origins of Distinctive Features,” in Roman Jakobson: What He Taught Us, ed. M. Halle (Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1983), 83. 28. For more on Jakobson’s reaction to this book and Trubetskoi’s explanations, see ch. 3, “In Search of Difference: Eurasia Anti-Colonial.” 29. Nikolaus S. Trubetzkoy and Roman Jakobson, N. S. Trubetzkoy’s Letters and Notes (The Hague: Walter de Gruyter, 1985), 21–22. 30. Ibid., 22.

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31. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, February 15, 1926, in Sergei Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom: istoriia v dokumentakh (Moscow: Novoe Izdatel’stvo, 2009), 376. 32. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, n.d. (Fall 1927), in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 503. 33. Ibid. According to archival evidence, Jakobson became interested in religion in the early 1930s and was baptized in 1936. 34. P. N. Savitskii to R. O. Jakobson, August 7, 1930. MIT Archives, MC 72, box 119, folder 95. 35. R. Jakobson and K. Pomorska, Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), 35. 36. MIT Archives, MC 72, box 28, f. 103. Po povodu knigi N. S. Trubetskogo “Evropa i Chelovechestvo” (manuscript). 37. N. S. Trubetzkoy’s Letters and Notes, 300. 38. For an argument about the “nationalization” of science in the context of World War I, which focuses on the activities of Vladimir Vernadskii, see Alexei Kojevnikov, “The Great War, the Russian Civil War, and the Invention of Big Science,” Science in Context 15, no. 2 (2002): 239–75; D.  A.  Aleksandrov, “Pochemu sovetskie uchenye perestali pechatat’sia za rubezhom: stanovlenie samodostatochnosti i izolirovannosti otechestvennoi nauki, 1914–1940,” Voprosy istorii estestvoznania i tekhniki, no. 3 (1996): 3–24. 39. P. N. Savitskii, Geograficheskie osobennosti Rossii-Evrazii, part 1 (Prague: Evraziiskoe knigoizdatel’stvo, 1927), 9–20. 40. Ibid., 21–28. 41. Quoted in ibid., 28. 42. Publication of Savitskii’s work revealed serious tensions in the Eurasianist circles. Petr Suvchinskii, in control of the Eurasianist funds, refused to provide financing for the publication and Trubetskoi was forced to intervene. The debacle illustrated the growing rift between the Parisian cultural and political Eurasianism with its increasingly pro-Soviet space and the scholarly wing of Trubetskoi and Savitskii. 43. N. S. Trubetzkoy’s Letters and Notes, 227 (emphasis added). 44. Roman Jakobson, “Über die heutigen Voraussetzungen der russischen Slavistik,” Slavische Rundschau 1 (1929): 629–46, hereafter quoted from the Russian translation by N. Avtonomova, Roman Jakobson, “O sovremennykh perspektivakh russkoi slavistiki,” in Roman Jakobson, Teksty, Issledovania, Dokumenty (Moscow: RGGU, 1999), 21–33. 45. Ibid., 22. 46. Ibid., 23. 47. This is probably a reference to the theory of Kulturzyklen developed by the Austrian scholar Wilhelm Schmidt. See W. Schmidt, “Die Moderne Ethnologie,” Anthropos, Bd. 1 (1906): 134–63; Schmidt, “Die Kulturhistorische Methode in der Ethnologie,” Anthropos, Bd. 6 (1911): 1010–36; and W. Schmidt and W. Koppers, Völker und Kulturen: Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft der Völker (Regensburg: J. Habbel Verlag, 1924). 48. Apart from Savitskii, Jakobson listed the geographer Tanfil’ev, the ethnographer Zelenin, and the linguists Bubrikh, Selishchev, and Georgievsky. He was to quote all these scholars in his work on the Eurasian union of languages. Roman Jakobson, “O sovremennykh perspektivakh russkoi slavistiki,” in Jakobson, Teksty, Issledovania, Dokumenty, 23. 49. Ibid. 50. This particular line is very interesting and important as it points to Jakobson’s awareness of the danger of objectifying the structure and his awareness of the problem of ontologizing the structure. 51. Jakobson, “O sovremennykh perspektivakh russkoi slavistiki,” 24–25. It should be noted that in the article Jakobson also wrote about the formalists as representatives of the new structuralist paradigm that privileges acquired characteristics over genetic ones. He also demanded that Slavic cultures be studied in the light of the new paradigm focusing on their convergence and divergence and

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not on their genetic affinities. On Jakobson’s article in the context of different scholarly and ideological contexts, see Avtonomova and Gasparov, “Jakobson, Slavistics and the Eurasian Movement,” 334–40. 52. Yu. Tynianov, Poetika. Istoriia literatury. Kino (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), 282–83. For a study of the episode, see A. Galushkin, “ ‘I tak, stavshi na kostiakh, budem trubit’ sbor’: K istorii nesostoiavshegosia vozrozhdeniia OPOJAZa v 1928–1930 godakh,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 44 (2000), http://magazines.russ.ru/nlo/2000/44/galush.html (accessed May 1, 2015). 53. P. N. Savitskii to R. O. Jakobson, August 7, 1930. MIT Archives, MC 72, box 119, folder 95. 54. The first Eurasianist collection was titled Exodus to the East. Forebodings and Achievements. Affirmations of the Eurasianists. 55. N. S. Trubetskoi, “Vavilonskaia bashnia i smeshenie iazykov,” Evraziiskii Vremennik 3 (1923): 116–17. For a discussion of the diversitarian interpretation of Trubetskoi as linked to his anticolonialism, see chapter 3 in this book. 56. Trubetskoi’s footnote: “A clear example of a language union in Europe is presented by the Balkan languages, such as Bulgarian, Romanian, Albanian, and the modern Greek: although they belong to completely different branches of the Indo-European family, they nevertheless are united with each other by an entire range of common features and detailed coincidences in the sphere of grammatical construction.” 57. N. S. Trubetskoi, “Vavilonskaia bashnia,” 116–17. 58. R. Jakobson, K kharakteristike evraziiskogo iazykovogo soiuza (Paris: Izdanie evraziitsev, 1931), 5. 59. Ibid. 60. Savitskii’s work was published as Savickij, “Les problems de la geographie linguistique.” 61. Jakobson, K kharakteristike, 6. 62. Ibid., 6. 63. Ibid., 7. 64. Ibid., 8. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid., 9. 67. Ibid., 15. 68. Ibid. 17. 69. Ibid., 16–17. 70. Ibid., 24. 71. Ibid., 27. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid., 29. 74. Ibid., 30. 75. Ibid., 31. 76. Ibid., 36. 77. Ibid., 37. 78. Ibid., 38. 79. Ibid., 42. 80. Ibid., 48. 81. Ibid., 49. 82. Ibid., 46. 83. Jakobson and Pomorska, Dialogues, 85. 84. Ibid., 84. 85. Ibid., 88. 86. Ibid. 87. Ibid., 89. 88. R. Jakobson, “Sur la theorie des afinities phonologique entre les langues,” in N. S. Troubetzkoy, Principes de phonologie (Paris: C. Kliencksiek , 1949), 351–66.

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89. R. Jakobson, “O teorii fonologicheskikh iazykovykh souiuzov mezhdu iazykami,” in R. Iakobson, Izbrannye raboty (Moscow: Progress, 1985), 92–115. 90. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. N. Savitskii, n.d. 1935. BAR, George Vernadsky Papers, box 8, folder “Petr Nikolaevich Savitskii 1935.” The article in question is P. N. Savitskii, “ ‘Pod’em’ i ‘depressia’ v drevnerusskoi istorii,” Evraziiskaia khronika 9 (1935): 65–100. 91. N. S. Trubetskoi to V. A. Guchkova-Suvchinskaia (later Traill), not dated (after 1925). BNF DdM. Not catalogued. Antoine Meillet (1866–1936), a student of F. de Saussure and an outstanding linguist, was often seen by the Eurasianists as their opponent. It is remarkable that both Trubetskoi and Jakobson paid respects to Meillet publicly, while in private correspondence they often pointed out the backwardness and outdated views of the student of de Saussure and the main representative of the neogrammarians, whom they considered incapable of grasping new ideas in scholarship. 92. Jakobson, K kharakteristike, 3. 93. Ibid. 94. Ibid. 95. For an overview of this reception, see Alexander Vucinich, Darwin in Russian Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); also Daniel P. Todds, Darwin without Malthus: The Struggle for Existence in Russian Evolutionary Thought (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 1989); for the role of evolutionary ethnography in the making of the Soviet nationalities policies, see Francine Hirsch, The Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). 96. L. S. Berg, Ocherki po istorii russkikh geograficheskikh otkrytii (Moscow: Izd-vo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1946); Berg, Natural Regions of the U.S.S.R. (New York: Macmillan, 1950). 97. Serio, Struktura i tselostnost’, 202. 98. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii. March 5, 1926, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 377. 99. N. S. Trubetskoi, “Mysli ob indo-evropeiskoi probleme,” Voprosy iazykoznaniia, no. 1 (1958): 65–77. 100. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1936), 293–94. 101. The Russian term tselesoobraznost’ has no equivalent in English. It was a calque from the German Zwaeckmaessigkeit and Zielstrebigkeit, the latter one of Jakobson’s favorite terms. L. S. Berg, “Nomogenez, ili Evoliutsiia na osnove zakonomernostei,” in L. S. Berg, Trudy po teorii evoliutsii, 1922– 1930 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1977), 99. Berg’s work was first published as Nomogenez, ili Evoliutsiia na osnove zakonomernostei. Trudy Geograficheskogo Instituta, vol. 1 (Petrograd, 1922). Remarkably, in 1926 an English edition was published: Leo S. Berg, Nomogenesis or Evolution Determined by Law (London: Constable, 1926). 102. P. N. Savitskii to R. O. Jakobson, August 9, 1930. MIT Archives, MC 72, box 119, folder 119. 103. Ibid. 104. P. Sériot, Structure et Totalite; for a discussion of this problem from a historical perspective, see S. Glebov, “Whither Eurasia: History of Ideas in Imperial Situation,” Ab Imperio 8, no. 2 (2008): 345–76. 105. P. N. Savitskii, “Introduction,” in Tridtsatye Gody. Utverzhdeniia evraziitsev (Prague: Izdanie evraziitsev, 1931), 2–3. 106. N. S. Trubetskoi, Istoriia. Kul’tura. Iazyk (Moscow: Progress, 1995), 580–81. 107. See a curiously belligerent discussion of this influence in James Drake, “The Naming Disease,” TLS, no. 4979 (September 4, 1998): 14. 108. Gasparov, “The Ideological Principles of Prague School Phonology,” 72. 109. Ibid. 110. Ibid., 75.

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Notes to Epilogue 1. G. V. Florovskii, “Pis’mo P. B. Struve o evraziistve,” Russkaia mysl’, no. 1–2 (1922): 269. 2. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, February 12, 1923, in Sergei Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom: istoriia v dokumentakh (Moscow: Novoe Izdatel’stvo, 2009), 215. 3. Ibid. 4. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, September 27, 1922, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 196. 5. P. P. Suvchinskii was one of the directors of the publishing house. The president was Ruschu Georgievich Mollov, a Bulgarian who made a career in the Russian imperial service (he became governor of the Poltava guberniia) and was a leader of the Russian émigré organization in Sofia. The main shareholders were Suvchinskii and Nikolai Sergeevich Zhekulin, who prior to 1917 was the editor in chief of the journal Letopis’ in Kiev. This publishing house brought out books by Alexander Blok with Suvchinskii’s foreword, and also printed H. G. Wells’s book Russia in the Shadow with Trubetskoi’s anticolonialist introduction. It published Trubetskoi’s “Europe and Mankind” and the first collection of articles—the Eurasianists’ first manifesto—“Exodus to the East.” The issue of the financial success of the Russian/Bulgarian House remains mute. Trubetskoi wrote to Roman Jakobson that his first books were quickly sold out and that he was considered a profitable writer with the publishers. N. S. Troubetzkoy Letters and Notes, 16. Savitskii also told his parents that the first Eurasianist collection sold quickly, despite the fact that “the book was boring and impossible to read from the beginning to the end.” P. N. Savitskii to his family, August 11, 1921. GARF, f. R-5783, op. 2, d. 326, l. 46. On the other hand, in 1925 Trubetskoi still wrote to Suvchinskii, who was already in Paris, about the remainder of the print of “Europe and Mankind” in the store of the publishing house in Sofia. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, January 15, 1925, in S. Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdi imperiei i modernom, 287. 6. Gelikon belonged to A. G. Vishniak, who established the business in Moscow in 1918. The books carried the designation “Berlin–Moscow.” The house published émigré authors and those who remained in Soviet Russia. Among its authors were Marina Tsvetaeva and Ilya Ehrenburg. 7. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, September 27, 1922, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdi imperiei i modernom, 197–98. 8. Ibid., 198. 9. On Urquhart, see K. H. Kennedy, The Mining Tsar: The Life and Times of Leslie Urquhart (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1986). 10. P. S. Arapov to P. P. Suvchinskii, July 9, 1923, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdi imperiei i modernom, 578. In 1922, Meller also offered to use his friendship with the American writer and artist Henry Clews Jr., son of the famous American financier, to obtain funds for the Eurasianists. Although an American collection of articles was planned, it was never realized; nevertheless, it appears that Meller received at least some funds from Clews. 11. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, January 17, 1924, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 256. 12. G. S. Smith, D. S. Mirsky: A Russian-English Life, 1890–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) and on Spalding specifically, 141. Smith mistakenly dates Spalding’s donation to 1922 or 1923. On the English connections of the Eurasianists, see G. Smith, ed., The Letters of D. S. Mirsky to P. P. Suvchinskii, 1922–1931 (Birmingham: Department of Russian Language and Literature, University of Birmingham, 1995); Olga Kaznina, Russkie v Anglii. Russkaia emigratsiia v kontekste russkoangliiskikh kul’turnykh sviazei (Moscow: Nasledie, 1997), 119–54. 13. P. S. Arapov to P. P. Suvchinskii, October 19, 1924, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 610. 14. Smith, D. S. Mirsky, 275. 15. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, October 15, 1923, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 234.

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16. For example, Malevich’s financial report for 1927; see GARF, f. R-5783, op.2, d. 445, l. 181–182. 17. Henry Norman Spalding to P. P. Suvchinskii, April 12, 1928. BNF DdM, Rés. Vm. Dos. 91 (77). 18. Ibid. 19. Smith, D. S. Mirsky, 141. 20. Russia in Russurrection: A Summary of the View and of the Aims of a New Party in Russia. By an English Europasian (London, 1928). The authorship is attributed on the basis of H. N. Spalding to P.P. Suvchinskii, February 10, 1928. BNF DdM, Rés. Vm. Dos. 91 (77). 21. Ibid. 22. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, June 1, 1928, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 528–29. 23. P. S. Arapov to P. P. Suvchinskii, November 1, 1924, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 612. 24. P. N. Savitskii to P. S. Arapov, October 23–24, 1924. GARF, f. R-5783, op. 2, d. 333, l. 10–12. 25. Finansovyi otchet P. N. Malevskogo-Malevicha for 1927. GARF, f. R-5783, op. 2, d. 445, l. 181–82. 26. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, November 11, 1928, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 547. 27. List of the Parisian Eurasianist Club membership, 1926. BNF DdM. Not catalogued. 28. “Iz dokladnoi zapiski pomoshchnika nachal’nika KRO OGPU V. A. Styrne nachal’niku KRO OGPU A. Kh. Artuzovu o kontrrazvedovatel’nykh operatsiakh ‘Iaroslavets’ i ‘Trest,’” in Politicheskaia istoriia rossiiskoi emigratsii, 1920–1940 gg.: Dokumenty i materialy, vol. 7 (Moscow: Tri T, 1999), 445. 29. On Trest, see a witness’s memoirs: Serge Woiciechowski, Trest. Vospominaniia i dokumenty (London, ON: Zaria, 1974); a well-documented study traces the influenc of Trest on the émigré press: Lazar’ Fleishman, Iz istorii zhurnalistiki russkogo zarubezh’ia, vol. 1: V tiskakh provokatsii: Operatsia “Trest” i russkaia zarubezhnaia pechat’ (Moscow: NLO, 2003). There is also a Soviet “documentary novel” Mertvaia Zyb’ (Moscow: Litizdat, 1965) by Lev Nikulin, who, apparently, had access to classified Soviet materials. 30. Trubetskoi wrote to Suvchinskii, “this is absolutely not what we need, and if they are all like that, let them go to hell.” N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, June 7, 1924, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 277–78. 31. “Postanovlenie ianvarskogo soveshchania Soveta Evraziistva,” December 1925. GARF, f. R-5783, op. 2, d. 445, l. 67. 32. “Iz dokladnoi zapiski.” 33. GARF, f. R-5783, op. 2, d. 445, l. 46–55. 34. P. S. Arapov to P. P. Suvchinskii, April 19, 1924, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 584. 35. M. A. Robinson and A. P. Petrovskii, “N. N. Durnovo i N. S. Trubetskoi: Problema evraziistva v kontekste ‘dela slavistov’ (po materialam OGPU-NKVD),” Slavianovedenie, no. 4 (1994): 68–82. 36. For his report on the voyage to the USSR and his work there, see GARF, f. R-5783, op. 2, d. 448, l. 36. 37. Kopetskii later became one of the leading teachers of Russian language in Czechoslovakia and published several textbooks of Russian. 38. S. Woiciechowski, Trest, 29. 39. “Evraziistvo (formulirovka 1927 goda),” in Evraziiskaia khronika 9 (1927): 3–14. 40. L. P. Karsavin to G. L. Piatakov, November 18, 1927. BNF DdM. Not catalogued. 41. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, June 4, 1928, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 530–32.

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42. See Maxim Gorky’s letters to Suvchinskii (the first letter dated January 24, 1927). BNF DdM, Rés. Vm. Dos. 92 (19). 43. Their visas were arranged by Giuseppe Ungaretti. Suvchinskii established contact with Giuseppe Ungaretti in 1927. See Ungaretti’s letters to Suvchinskii in BNF DdM, Rés. Vm. Dos. (6). The correspondence concerned possible reviews of the Eurasianist publications by Ungaretti and his assistance with Italian visas for Suvchinskii and Sviatopolk-Mirskii. 44. “Pis’ma Gor’kogo Stalinu,” Novyi mir 9 (1997): 46–50. 45. P. S. Arapov to P. P. Suvchinskii, May 29, 1929. BNF DdM. Not catalogued. 46. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, October 22, 1928, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 540–43. 47. Ibid. 48. N. S. Trubetskoi, “Ideocracy and Proletariat,” Evrazia, no. 1 (1928): 1–2. 49. Personal relationships added to the story: S. Ia. Efron was the husband of the great poet Marina Tsvetaeva, and K. V. Rodzevich her onetime lover, who subsequently married Mariia Sergeevna Bulgakova, the daughter of Father Sergii Bulgakov, one of the Eurasianist critics of the older generation of religious thinkers. 50. See K. I. Chkheidze to P. N. Savitskii, September 6, 1928. GARF, f. R-5783, op. 2, d. 449, l. 152, and N. A. Dunaev’s report on his work in Paris. GARF, f. R-5783, op. 2, d. 449, l. 49. 51. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, November 1928, n.d. (dated by context), in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 545. 52. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, March 10, 1928, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 522. 53. P. P. Suvchinskii, “Revoliutsia i vlast’,” Evraziia, no. 8 (1929): 2–3. 54. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, November 2, 1928, in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 547. 55. N. S. Trubetskoi to P. P. Suvchinskii, November 27–28, 1928 in Glebov, Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom, 548–50. 56. Letter of N. S. Trubetskoi, in Evraziia, no. 8 (1929): 1. 57. “Memorandum of January 17, 1929,” in BAR, George Vernadsky Papers, box 3, folder “Evraziistvo.” 58. Protokol zasedaniia Soveta Evraziistva, January 17, 1929. BAR, George Vernadsky Papers, box 3, folder “Evraziistvo.” 59. Henry N. Spalding to P. P. Suvchinskii, November 22, 1929. BNF DdM, Rés. Vm. Dos. 91 (77). 60. Ibid. 61. K. A. Chkheidze to G. V. Vernadskii, n.d. BAR, George Vernadsky Papers, box 1, folder “Konstantin Aleksandrovich Chkheidze,” 1925–1937. 62. Two major publications sponsored by Savitskii were Tridtsatye Gody (Paris: Evraziiskoe knigoizdatel’stvo, 1931) and Novaia epokha: ideokratiia, politika, ekonomika (Narva: Izdanie evraziitsev, 1933). In the 1930s, a periodical Evraziiskie tetradi (Eurasianist notebooks) was also published, but remained insignificant. 63. Sviatoslav Sviatoslavovich Malevskii-Malevich (1905–1973), a younger cousin of P.  N.  Malevskii-Malevich, was an artist and publicist. He moved to Belgium in 1926. After World War II, he briefly served as the first secretary of the Belgian Embassy to USSR. In 1972 he published a strange book in which he argued for the alliance of the West and the USSR against the future power of China. While his ideas did not fit in with the overall Eurasianist conception, the text displays a heavy influence of Eurasianist rhetoric. See S. S. Malevskii-Malevich, SSSR segodnia i zavtra (Paris: n.p., 1972).

Index

Abyssinia, 83 Adas, Michael, 81 Afanas’ev, Iakov Nikitich, 218 Africa, 41, 78–80, 88, 144 Akcura (Akchurin), Yusuf, 80 Akhmatova, Anna Andreevna, 23, 188 Alekhin, Vasilii Vasil’evich, 133 Alekseev, Nikolai Nikolaevich, 32, 36, 69–71, 102, 187 Alexander Yaroslavich (Nevskii), Prince, 143 America, 96 Anderson, Benedict, 112 Andreev, Nikolai Efremovich, 32 Anuchin, Dmitrii Nikolaevich, 170 Arabia, 140 Arapov, Petr Semenovich, 25, 31, 34–35, 112–113, 145, 151, 161, 176–184, 187, 197, 207 Arctic Ocean, 132 Arendt, Hannah, 74 Arsen’ev, Nikolai Sergeevich, 35, 179 Artamonov, Iurii Aleksandrovich, 67, 176, 181–182 Artuzov (Frautchi), Artur Khristianovich, 180 Asaf ’ev, Boris Vladimirovich (Igor Glebov), 21–23 Asia, 4–7, 9–10, 41, 49, 52–54, 56–57, 71, 78–80, 88, 128–130, 138, 141, 144, 164 Astrakhan, 100 Athens, 143 Australia, 96, 130 Austria, 18, 183 Babel, Isaak Emmanuilovich, 36 Baer, Karl von, 100, 170, 171 Baku, 194 Baku, 80 Bal’mont, Konstantin Dmitrievich, 20 Balkans, 78, 144, 165, 167

Baltics, 132 Batu Khan (Batyi), 136 Batum, 29 Baudelaire, Charles, 151 Beisswenger, Martin, 70 Belgium, 37, 78, 81, 230 Bely, Andrey, 202 Berchtesgaden, 154 Berdiaev, Nikolai Aleksandrovich, 14, 33, 36, 45–46, 61–62, 74, 82 Berg, Lev Semenovich, 170–171 Bergson, Henri-Louis, 72 Berlin, 25, 47, 177, 228 Berlin, Isaiah, 32 Bessarabia, 84 Betts, Raymond, 81 Bitsilli, Petr Mikhailovich, 35, 40, 139–141, 197, 221 Black Sea, 132, 144, 165 Blok, Alexander, 7, 20, 43, 49, 53–57, 127, 154, 203 Blumenfeld, Feliks Mikhailovich, 20, 21 Boas, Franz, 167 Bogatyrev, Petr Grigor’evich, 17, 161 Bogdanov, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich, 200 Bosporus, 18, 30, 134 Boulez, Pierre, 22, 25 Bourdieu, Pierre, 149 Brazil, 151 Briusov, Valerii Iakovlevich, 53 Brno, 153, 155 Bromberg, Iakov Abramovich, 161 Brugmann, Karl, 17 Brussels, 177, 187 Bubrikh, Dmitrii Vladimirovich, 225 Bukhara, 85 Bulgakov, Sergei Nikolaevich, 28, 33–34, 45–46, 48, 70, 109, 201, 230 Bulgakova (Rodzevich), Mariia Sergeevna, 230

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Bulgaria, 18, 33, 36, 118, 153 Bunakov-Fondaminskii, Ilya Isidorovich, 154 Byzantium, 86, 105, 121 Calabria, 55 Cambodia, 85 Cassirer, Ernst, 153 Caucasus, 37, 80, 101, 102, 134–135, 179, 194 Caucasus, North, 16, 102 Central Asia, 80, 138 Central Europe, 117, 153 Ceylon, 179 Chavannes, Édouard, 53 Chernigov, 26, 27, 29, 122 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai Gavrilovich, 199 China, 53, 82, 140–142, 144–145, 177, 230 Chingis Khan, 39, 40, 63, 64, 66, 142, 175 Chkheidze, Konstantin Aleksandrovich, 37, 161, 184, 186 Christiania (Norway), 28 Clamart, 186 Clews, Henry Jr, 228 Collar, Peter, 78 Copenhagen, 167 Copernicus, Nikolaus, 91 Coudenhove-Kalergi, Richard, 78, 208 Craft, Robert, 21, 25 Crimea, 24, 29–30, 35, 37, 143, 222 Czechoslovakia, 31, 32, 79, 126, 153, 182, 224 Daniil Romanovich, Prince of Galich, 143 Danilevskii, Nikolai Iakovlevich, 82, 100, 105, 129, 170–171 Darwin, Charles, 72, 100, 170 Deng Xiaoping, 81 Denikin, Anton Ivanovich, 196 Denmark, 153 Derrida, Jacques, 22 Derzhanovskii, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 22 Diaghilev, Sergei Pavlovich, 20–22 Dnepr river, 63 Dokuchaev, Vasilii Vasil’evich, 128, 131–132, 157–158, 160, 170 Don region, 18, 138 Doroshenko, Dmitrii Ivanovich, 125–126 Dostoevsky, Fedor Mikhailovich, 23, 46, 52, 59, 72, 82, 170, 197, 210 Dugin, Aleksandr Gelievich, 8 Duguit, Leon, 71 Duhamel, Georges, 82, 89 Dukel’skii, Vladimir ALeksandrovich (Vernon Duke), 21–22

Dunaev, Nikolai Aleksandrovich, 184 Durnovo, Nikolai Nikolaevich, 17, 182 Eastern Europe, 105, 164 Efron, Sergei Iakovlevich, 36–37, 184, 187, 198, 230 Egypt, 85, 140 Ehrenburg, Ilya Grigor’evich, 108, 152, 228 Eisenhower, Dwight, 224 Ekaterinodar, 29 Elisavetgrad, 33 England, 129, 186 Ern, Vladimir Frantsevich, 45 Esenin, Sergei Aleksandrovich, 57, 154 Eurafrica, 78 Europe, 2–6, 9–10, 25, 29–30, 44, 48–49, 51–52, 56–57, 68–69, 73–74, 77, 79, 81–84, 86, 88, 92–96, 99–100, 101, 105, 119, 121, 126–130, 132, 135–136, 138, 140–141, 144, 148–149, 151, 158–159, 164, 167, 180, 183, 188, 208, 222 Evian, 183 Evtuhov, Catherine, 5 Fedorov, Nikolai Fedorovich, 59–60, 170, 186 Florovskaia (Simonova), Kseniia Ivanovna, 34 Florovskaia, Kseniia Vasil’evna, 89, 113, 127 Florovskii, Georgii Vasil’evich (Georges Florovsky), 9, 12, 25, 33–34, 61, 175, 196, 197 France, 32, 78, 81, 129, 136, 183 Frank, Semen Liudvigovich, 36 Galicia, 125 Gallipoli, 35 Gasparov, Boris Mikhailovich, 173 Gasparov, Mikhail Leonovich, 53 Gaulles, Charles de, 150 Gediminas, Prince of Lithuania, 12 Georgievskii, Lev Aleksandrovich, 225 Germany, 17, 69, 78, 82, 105 Gessen, Sergei Iosifovich, 40–41, 73, 74 Gippius, Vladimir Vasil’evich, 19–20, 23 Gippius, Zinaida Nikolaevna, 19 Gobineau, Joseph Arthur de, 72 Godunov, Boris, 20 Gogol, Nikolai Vasil’evich, 27, 46, 54, 126 Golitsyn, Vladimir Emmanuilovich, 177 Golitsyna, Ekaterina Vladimirovna, 177 Gorky, Maxim, 43, 183, 230 Gorodetskii, Sergei Mitrofanovich, 23 Great Britain, 10, 26, 78, 81, 210 Greece, 140

I nd eX

Griffin, Roger, 42 Guchkov, Aleksandr Ivanovich, 20, 26 Guchkova (Suvchinskaia, Traill) Vera Aleksandrovna, 20, 26, 169 Gul’kevich, Konstantin Nikolaevich, 28–29, 196 Gumilev, Lev Nikolaevich, 8, 187–188 Gumilev, Nikolai Stepanovich, 188 Gurko, Vasilii Iosifovich, 213 Gyidel, Ernest, 122 Habsburg Empire, 74, 78, 152 Hayem, Henri, 71 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 37, 88, 137, 151 Heidegger, Martin, 37, 185 Herzen, Aleksandr Ivanovich, 49 Hesse, Herman, 82 Hitler, Adolph, 73, 154 Ho Chi Minh, 81 Hoetzsch, Otto, 103 Humboldt, Alexander von, 127 Hungary, 79, 137, 143 Hus, Jan, 119, 166 Iakovlev, Nikolai Feofanovich, 17 Iakushev, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich, 180 Iberian Peninsula, 79 Il’in, Ivan Aleksandrovich, 36 Il’in, Vladimir Nikolaevich, 36 India, 81, 83, 85, 101, 140–141, 167, 178 Inge, William, 82 Iokhelson, Vladimir Il’ich, 17 Iran (Persia), 36, 112, 140–141, 145, 210 Iraq, 81 Irkutsk, 80 Isakova, Elena Vladimirovna, 35, 177 Istanbul (Constantinople), 15, 18, 24, 29–30, 105 Italy, 3, 70, 73, 79 Iudina, Mariia Veniaminovna, 22 Iusupov, Feliks Feliksovich, 34 Ivanov, Aleksandr Andreevich, 46 Ivanov, Vsevolod Viacheslavovich, 135 Ivanov-Razumnik, Razumnik Vasil’evich, 57, 203 Jakobson, Roman Osipovich, 8, 13, 16–18, 22, 26, 32–33, 36, 49, 66, 91–92, 102–103, 112, 121, 127, 146, 148–167, 169–170, 172–173, 180, 187, 192–193, 197, 213, 216, 223–228 Jakobson, Sergei Osipovich, 103, 213

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Japan, 82, 177 Jerusalem, 52 Karadzic, Vuk, 118 Karamzin, Nikolai Mikhailovich, 49, 136, 139 Karpovich, Mikhail Mikhailovich (Michael), 219, 224 Karsavin, Lev Platonovich, 26, 36, 40, 47, 59, 67–69, 179–180, 183–184, 186, 198, 201, 207 Karsavina, Tamara Platonovna, 198 Kartashev, Anton Vladimirovich, 30, 36, 84, 197 Katkov, Mikhail Nikiforovich, 41 Kazakhstan, 189 Kazan, 17 Keller, Boris Aleksandrovich, 133 Kerenskii, Aleksandr Fedorovich, 48 Keyserling, Hermann von, 82, 209 Khara-Davan (Khara-Davaev), Erenzhen, 36, 161 Kharkov, 29 Khlebnikov, Velimir, 152, 153 Kiev, 24, 29, 63, 122–123, 228 Kislovodsk, 16, 18, 194 Kistiakovskii, Bogdan Aleksandrovich, 122 Kizevetter, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich, 119, 135, 143, 222 Klepinin, Nikolai Andreevich, 187, 198 Kliuchevskii, Vasilii Osipovich, 135, 137–139, 143, 145 Kliuev, Nikolai ALekseevich, 57 Kochanska, Sofia, 195 Kojeve, Alexandre, 37, 151 Kondakov, Nikodim Petrovich, 140, 197 Kopetskii, Leontii Vasil’evich, 182 Kostomarov, Nikolai Ivanovich, 27 Kotsiubinskii, Mikhail Mikhailovich, 27 Koussevitzky, Serge (Kusevitskii, Sergei Aleksandrovich), 22 Kovalevskii, Maksim Maksimovich, 7, 101–102 Koyré, Alexandre, 150 Kozelkov, Nikolai Evgen’evich (Shubin), 67, 205 Krasiński, Zygmunt, 176 Kristeva, Julia, 22 Kruchenykh, Aleksei Eliseevich, 152 Kuban, 29 Kutepov, Aleksandr Pavlovich, 176, 181 Kuznetsov, Stefan Kirovich, 17 Kyshtym, 177

234

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In d eX

Lacan, Jacques, 148, 151, 223 Lamanskii, Vladimir Ivanovich, 129 Langovoi (Denisov), Aleksandr Alekseevich, 67, 181–182 Langovoi, Aleksei Petrovich, 181 Latin America, 79 Lazarevskii, Aleksandr Matveevich, 27 Le Bon, Chales-Marie Gustave, 72 Leipzig, 17 Lenin, Vladimir Il’ich, 47, 56, 78–80, 84, 90, 161, 200, 210–211 Leningrad, 179, 182 Leont’ev, Konstantin Nikolaevich, 44, 104–105, 112–113, 170 Leskien, August, 17 Lévi-Strauss , Claude, 8, 148, 150–151, 158, 193, 223 Liberman, Anatol, 16 Lieven, Andrei Aleksandrovich, 11–12, 18, 25, 30, 48 Lindner, Bruno, 17 Litauer, Emiliia Emmanuilovna, 37, 184–185, 198 Lithuania, Grand Duchy of, 13, 137, 145 Liu Shaoqi, 81 London, 25, 81, 177 Lourie, Artur Sergeevich (Artur Vincent), 22, 24, 36, 184, 195 Lovejoy, Arthur, 104, 171 Lubno, 122 Lunacharskii, Anatolii Vladimirovich, 24 Mackinder, Halford John, 133 Maeztu, Ramiro de, 79 Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 28, 141 Maiakovskii, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 24, 152, 155 Malevskaia-Malevich (Shakhovskaia), Zinaida Alekseevna, 37 Malevskii-Malevich, Petr Nikolaevich, 35, 37, 128, 146, 151, 177–180, 182, 184, 187, 219, 229- 230 Malevskii-Malevich, Sviatoslav Sviatoslavovich, 37, 178, 187, 230 Malia, Martin, 43 Manchuria, 51, 103 Mandel’shtam, Osip Emil’evich, 19, 20 Mannheim, Karl, 199 Marx, Karl, 70 Masson, Gérard, 25 Matsuzato, Kimitaka, 213

Mazon, Andre, 151, 224 Meillet, Antoine, 169, 227 Meller-Zakomel’skii, Aleksandr Vladimirovich, 35, 108, 142, 176–177, 228 Meller-Zakomel’skii, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 176 Mendeleev, Dmitrii Ivanovich, 127–128, 217 Merzhkovskii, Dmitrii Sergeevich, 53 Messina, 55 Miaskovskii, Nikolai Iakovlevich, 21–23 Mickiewicz, Adam, 176 Mikhailovskii, Georgii Nikolaevich, 196 Miliukov, Pavel Nikolaevich, 135 Miller, Vsevolod Fedorovich, 16, 17, 102, 152 Mirkine-Guetzevitch, Boris, 150 Mitsiuk, Oleh, 126 Modzalevskii, Vadim L’vovich, 27 Moeller van den Bruck, Arthur, 82, 210 Mogilner, Marina, 101 Mollov, Ruschu Georgievich, 24, 196, 228 Mongolia, 165 Montesquieu, 41 Mordovia, 32, 128 Morocco, 85 Morozov, Georgii Fedorovich, 128, 131 Moscow, 3, 13, 15–17, 27, 63, 80, 118, 123, 125, 127, 137, 143, 152, 179, 181–182, 228 Mosse, George Lachmann, 72 Mukalov, Grigorii Nikolaevich, 182 Muret, Maurice, 89 Mussolini, Benito, 70, 73 Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 19 Nansen, Fritjof, 28 Narli estate, 30, 196 Nazarbaev, Nursultan Abishevich, 189 Nekrasov, Nikolai Alekseevich, 43 Netherlands (Holland), 81, 129 Neuhaus, Heinrich (Neigauz, Genrikh Gustavovich), 20, 22 New York, 150 Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia, 14 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 72, 104 Nikitin, Vasilii Petrovich, 8, 36, 77, 112, 184–185, 187, 198 Nikolai Nikolaevich (Romanov), Grand Duke, 35, 176 Nikon, Patriarch of Moscow, 123 Norway, 28, 153 Novocherkassk, 18

I nd eX

Odessa, 29, 33, 36, 165, 222 Orwell, George, 82 Ostrogorskii, Aleksandr Iakovlevich, 19 Ottoman Empire, 78, 80, 105 Panunzio, Sergio, 71 Paperno, Irina Aronovna, 60, 199 Pares, Bernard, 36, 178 Paris, 25, 29–30, 81, 84, 117, 127, 154, 161, 177, 180–181, 184, 186, 213 Pasmanik, Daniil Samoilovich, 108 Pasternak, Boris Leonidovich, 22, 36, 152, 155 Pavlov, Ivan Petrovich, 33 Pearson, Karl, 133 Peter the Great, 3, 86, 123, 125 Petliura, Simon Vasil’evich, 29 Petrograd, 24, 56, 195 Piatakov, Georgii Leonidovich, 183 Pilniak, Boris Andreevich, 135 Platonov, Sergei Fedorovich, 142, 220 Plekhanov, Georgii Valentinovich, 200 Pobedonostsev, Konstantin Petrovich, 104 Pokrovskii Mikhail Mikhailovich, 16 Pokrovskii, Mikhail Nikolaevich, 139, 146 Poland, 12, 79, 132, 137, 143, 176 Poley, Jared, 78 Poltava, 29, 228 Pomorska, Krystyna, 167 Popova, Anna Dmitrievna, 26 Portugal, 129 Porzhezinskii, Viktor Karlovich (Jan Wiktor Porzeziński), 16 Prague, 5, 17, 31–32, 67, 134, 143, 151, 153– 155, 160, 176, 180, 182, 184, 186, 187, 205 Presniakov, Aleksandr Evgen’evich, 63 Prince Islands, 18 Prokofiev, Sergei Sergeevich, 21–23, 25, 195 Pugachev, Emel’ian, 92 Pulkovo, 130 Pushkarev, Sergei Germanovich, 36, 222 Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich, 20, 49 Putin, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 189 Qing Empire, 51 Raeff, Marc, 34 Ram, Harsha, 49, 51, 52, 72 Rasputin, Grigorii Efimovich, 34, 197 Ratzel, Friedrich, 131, 159 Razin, Stepan, 92 Remizov, Aleksei Mikhailovich, 8, 20, 36, 195

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Riasanovsky, Nicholas, 103–104, 203 Rimsky-Korsakov, Andrei Nikolaevich, 21, 22 Rodzevich, Konstantin Boleslavovich, 37, 184, 230 Romania, 84 Romanitskii, A. G. 184 Rome, 140 Rosen, Viktor Romanovich, 208 Rostov, 18, 29, 194 Rostovtzeff, Michael, 146 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 41 Russian Empire, 1–2, 5, 12, 37–38, 42, 79–80, 111–113, 122–123, 125, 129, 136, 145–146, 165, 218 Said, Edward, 80 Samarin, Iurii Fedorovich, 206 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 227 Savinkov, Boris Viktorovich, 83, 209 Savitskaia (Simonova), Vera Ivanovna, 34 Savitskii, Nikolai Petrpvich, 45 Savitskii, Petr Nikolaevich, 4, 8, 10–11, 13, 15, 17–18, 24–32, 34, 37, 46–48, 67, 70–71, 83, 89, 102, 112, 116, 119, 122, 126–134, 141– 144, 146, 148, 151, 153, 155–159, 161, 167, 169, 171–172, 176, 178–187, 192, 195–196, 201, 207–208, 216–218, 222, 225, 228 Scandinavia, 132 Schlömer, Friedrich, 103 Schorske, Carl Emil, 74 Schuschnigg, Kurt, 154 Seifullina, Lidiia Nikolaevna, 135 Selishchev, Afanasii Matveevich, 225 Semyonov, Alexander, 28 Serbia, 118 Sériot, Patrick, 148, 150, 171 Shakhmatov, Aleksei Aleksandrovich, 17 Shchapov, Afanasii Prokop’evich, 138–139, 141, 220 Shestov, Lev Isaakovich, 36 Shimano, Saburo, 103, 213 Shishmanov, Ivan, 15 Shklovsky, Viktor Borisovich, 156 Shneerson, Grigorii Mikhailovich, 20–21 Shteinberg, Maksimilian Oseevich, 22 Siam, 85 Siberia, 80, 124, 129, 133, 138, 143, 179 Siloti, Aleksandr Il’ich, 20, 26, 195 Siloti, Mariia Il’inichna, 20 Skopje, 139, 221 Skoropadskii, Pavel Petrovich, 125

236

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In d eX

Słowacki, Juliusz, 176 Slutskii, Evgenii Evgenievich, 133 Smith, Gerald, 178 Socrates, 92 Sofia (capital of Bulgaria), 9, 15, 18–19, 24, 29–30, 37, 48–49, 84, 91, 105, 127, 139, 176, 195–196, 221, 228 Solov’ev, Sergei Mikhailovich, 135, 137–139, 145 Solov’ev, Vladimir Sergeevich, 13–14, 46, 50–52, 59–60, 104, 127, 170, 199, 202 Sorrento, 183 South Africa, 177 South Hadley, Massachusetts, 150 Soviet Russia, 2, 47, 65–66, 68, 77–78, 84, 90, 153, 155, 175–176, 179, 183 Soviet Union, 1, 5, 26, 32, 34–35, 63, 66, 70–80, 102, 113–114, 145–147, 153, 161, 165, 170, 175, 179, 181–182, 187, 194, 221, 229–230 Spain, 129 Spalding, Henry Norman, 35, 112, 161, 177–181, 186–187, 228 Spann, Othmar, 69, 71 Spengler, Oswald, 82 St Petersburg, 13, 19, 27, 124, 127, 133 Stalin, Iosif Vissarionovich, 3, 78–80, 139, 183, 187, 221 Stepun, Fedor Avgustovich, 48, 73, 206–207 Sternhell, Zeev, 72 Strakhov, Nikolai Nikolaevich, 170 Stravinsky, Igor, 8, 21–22, 25, 36 Struve, Petr Berngardovich, 12, 24, 27–31, 33, 45–48, 70, 72, 128, 175, 196, 200, 218 Styrne, Vladimir Andreevich, 180, 182 Sultan-Galiev, Mir-Said, 80 Sumner Maine, Henry, 7, 101 Suvchinskaia (Karsavina), Marianna L’vovna, 26 Suvchinskii, Kornilii Evtikhievich, 19 Suvchinskii, Petr Petrovich, 4–5, 8, 10–13, 17, 19–27, 30–32, 35–37, 43, 46–49, 57, 60–62, 66–67, 69–70, 89, 106, 108, 119, 122, 127, 134, 140–141, 143–144, 146, 151, 153, 155, 159, 161, 170, 176–187, 191, 195–198, 201, 207, 216, 219, 225, 228–230 Sviatopolk-Mirskii, Dmitrii Petrovich (D. S. Mirsky), 4–5, 25, 36, 45, 66, 89, 111, 145–146, 154, 179, 183–185, 187, 191, 197, 207, 230

Sweden, 28, 153 Syria, 81 Szymanowski, Karol, 20 Tan-Bogoraz, Vladimir Germanovich, 15 Tanfil’ev, Gavriil Ivanovich, 157, 225 Tarde, Gabriele de, 97, 101 Tashkent, 80 Tenishev, Viacheslav Nikolaevich, 19 Terskaia oblast, 18 Tiflis, 194 Tikhonov, Nikolai Semenovich, 135 Tiutchev, Fedor Ivanovich, 49 Tkhorovka estate, 19–20, 122 Tolz, Vera, 140, 208 Tomsk, 17 Torbakov, Igor, 122 Tovstoles, Grigorii Nikolaevich, 37 Traill, Robert, 26 Transcaucasia, 165 Treadgold, Donald, 32 Trubetskaia (Obolenskaia), Praskov’ia Vladimirovna, 13 Trubetskoi, Evgenii Nikolaevich, 16, 45, 200, 202 Trubetskoi, Grigorii Nikolaevich, 46, 47, 201 Trubetskoi, Nikolai Sergeevich, 5, 7–19, 21, 24–25, 27, 30–33, 37, 39, 44–47, 49, 61, 63–67, 69–71, 76–77, 82–86, 88–100, 102–109, 111–121, 123–127, 129, 134, 139–144, 146, 148–149, 151–159, 161–163, 167, 169–170, 172, 175–187, 192–194, 197, 200–202, 206–208, 210–211, 213, 216–217, 219, 222, 224–225, 227–229 Trubetskoi, Petr Nikolaevich, 14, 18 Trubetskoi, Sergei Evgen’evich, 44, 200 Trubetskoi, Sergei Nikolaevich, 13–15, 45 Tsvetaeva, Marina Ivanovna, 20, 25, 36, 228, 230 Turin, 156 Turkestan, 147, 179 Turkey, 78–79 Tynianov, Iurii Nikolaevich, 160 Ukraine, 12, 19, 26, 29, 37, 63, 118, 122–125, 179, 216 Ungaretti, Giuseppe, 22, 230 United States, 8, 33, 84, 103, 122, 142–143, 146, 150–151, 153, 157, 196, 219, 222, 224 Uppelin’sh, Otto Eduardovich (Kasatkin), 66

I nd eX

Ural Mountains, 129–130 Urquhart, Leslie, 35, 177 Uzkoe estate, 14, 202 Valéry, Paul, 82, 89 Validov, Akhmet Zeki Togan, 80 Vavilov, Ivan Savvich, 170 Veisberg, Iuliia Lazarevna, 22 Vernadskii, Georgii Vladimirovich (George Vernadsky), 8, 29, 31–32, 36, 112, 122, 143–147, 161, 179, 186–187, 197, 205, 222 Vernadskii, Vladimir Ivanovich, 36, 45, 122, 128, 205 Versailles, 38, 44, 81 Vienna, 18, 154, 176, 178, 180, 183, 185, 206–208 Vinogradskii, Iurii Stepanovich, 27 Vipper, Robert Iur’evich, 16, 143 Vishniak, Abram Grigor’evich, 177, 228 Voitsekhovskii, Sergei L’vovich, 182 Volga region, 17, 64, 134–135, 138 Voloshin, Maksimilian Aleksandrovich, 154 Vrubel, Mikhail Aleksandrovich, 46

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Vsevolod Iur’evich (the Big Nest), Grand Prince of Vladimir, 137 Wagner, Richard, 72 Wahl, Jean, 150 Walicki, Andrzej, 105 Warsaw, 181, 182 Weber, Max, 72 Wells, Herbert George, 84, 228 Wilson, Woodrow, 79, 113 Windisch, Ernst, 17 Witte, Sergei Iul’evich, 27 Wrangel, Petr Nikolaevich, 25, 29–30, 35, 143 196 Yalta, 18 Yugoslavia, 78 Zaitsov, Arsenii Aleksandrovich, 35, 181 Zelenin, Dmitrii Konstantinovich, 225 Zenkovskii, Vasilii Vasil’evich, 122 Zhabotinsky, Vladimir (Zeev), 200 Zhekulin, Nikolai Sergeevich, 24, 48, 196, 228 Zhirmunskii, Viktor Maksimovich, 19

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