At the same time, the new century brought a revival of interest in a set of ideas that was avowedly supranational, and yet also profoundly nationalistic. ‘Eurasianism’ – the notion that Eurasia is home to a civilization distinct from its European, Asian or North American counterparts, with Russia at its core – has a long pedigree, dating back to the nineteenth century.{3} But it emerged in its most developed form in the 1920s among a group of Russian émigré intellectuals who, having fled the revolutionary turmoil of 1917, came to see the USSR as the heir to the tradition of Great Russian statehood, rather than as its destroyer. The Soviet Union was simply the new name for a space in which a distinctive fusion of European and Asiatic peoples and cultures would flourish. The Eurasianists included figures such as the linguists Nikolai Trubetskoi and Roman Jakobson, the geographer Pyotr Savitsky, the literary critic D. S. Mirsky, the historian George Vernadsky and others. Overall, they could be described as radical conservatives: they rejected the White exiles’ nostalgia for the tsarist system, and were opposed to the crude ethnic chauvinism of the pan-Slavists.
Many of Eurasianism’s original advocates, having reconciled themselves to the new regime and returned, perished at its hands in the 1930s. Thereafter the flame was kept alive as the preoccupation of a dissident fringe. Its leading proponent was the ethno-historian Lev Gumilev, son of the poets Nikolai Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova.{4} His extensive writings gave Eurasianism a new, biological twist: Eurasia was not so much a spatial as an ethno-racial entity, in which several distinct ethnoi lived harmoniously under the rule of a Russian superethnos. The latter was fated to clash, however, with the cosmopolitan universalism of the West. Gumilev’s ideas gave a pseudo-scientific veneer to a Soviet counter-cultural version of race-thinking, repackaging crude prejudices as high-minded doctrine by wrapping them in nebulous terminology of his own devising. Many were drawn to his work because it seemed to square the circle of national and ethnic questions in the USSR: there were supposedly enduring, essential differences between the peoples of the former Russian empire, and yet there was a paradoxical unity in their separateness – and that unity was apparently the benign side effect of Russian dominance. The USSR was simply the latest form taken by a biologically determined destiny.
Amid the disorientations of perestroika and especially during the 1990s, Gumilev’s ideas gained a huge audience. They seemed to offer a non-Communist justification for Russia’s continued sway over its periphery, implicitly allowing readers to see the loss of empire as a temporary bump on a path foreordained as much by genetics as by geopolitics. Long after Gumilev’s death in 1992, his books continued to be issued in enormous print-runs. By some measures, he could be classed as the most influential intellectual of the post-Soviet era, implanting in several million readers a set of deterministic, essentialist ideas about ethnicity and history.
Yet the version of Eurasianism that has come increasingly to the fore in the twenty-first century is a slightly different complex of ideas. Often dubbed ‘neo-Eurasianism’, it shares some features with its predecessors: like the original Eurasianists, its adherents focus on Eurasia as a unit, seeing it as fundamentally opposed to the West along a number of axes; they also share Gumilev’s belief in the distinctive, essentialized characteristics of ethno-national groups. But unlike its precursors, neo-Eurasianism is concerned above all with the contemporary struggle against Western-led globalization, which is imposing a homogenizing liberal cosmopolitanism on the world. Indeed, in terms of its real intellectual lineage this new strand of thinking ironically owes less to Russians than it does to Western reactionary thinkers of the twentieth century: interwar theorists of geopolitics such as Carl Schmitt, figures from the French New Right such as Alain de Benoist, and pundits like Samuel Huntington, with his idea that the new century would be shaped by a ‘clash of civilizations’.
Neo-Eurasianism’s most energetic promoter has been Aleksandr Dugin, who became perhaps the emblematic Russian public intellectual of the 2010s: part media-friendly expert on geopolitics, part bearded Dostoevskian mystagogue.{5} His career is in its own way a chronicle of Russian nationalism’s development. The son of a military intelligence officer, Dugin was closely involved in the birth of the Russian far right in the 1980s and early 1990s, including the anti-Semitic organization ‘Pamyat’ (Memory) and the National Bolshevik Party. At the same time, he produced assorted ramblings on esoteric philosophy, in which he paid tribute to the Nazis’ obsession with the occult. Up to the mid-1990s, few besides cranks were interested in these ideas. But the deep unpopularity of Yeltsin’s liberal reforms, and the continuing humiliation of Russia’s loss of status on the world stage, opened a way into the mainstream for nationalist themes. Dugin, too, worked his way into the corridors of power, becoming adviser to Duma speaker Gennady Seleznev and writing a primer on the Foundations of Geopolitics (1997) that was well received by the Russian military.
In the new century, Dugin expanded his reach and readership, producing several documentaries and publishing dozens of books with sonorous titles such as The Fourth Political Theory (2009) and In Search of the Dark Logos (2013). He became an increasingly frequent presence on Russia’s TV screens, wheeled out to comment on the deeper reasons for the incompatibility between Russia and the West. With the Ukraine crisis, Dugin shot to international prominence, identified by many Western analysts as the geopolitical brains behind the annexation of Crimea and the most influential voice urging Putin to go still further. In July 2014 he called on the president to step up Russian intervention in eastern Ukraine – Dugin made a point of calling it ‘Novorossiia’ – in order to ‘save Russia’s moral authority’.{6} This merging of geopolitical designs with quasi-religious language was typical. Fittingly, in 2015, Dugin became chief editor of ‘Tsargrad’, a TV station funded by the Orthodox Christian oligarch Konstantin Malofeev and set up to wage an Orthodox information jihad against Western liberalism.
Dugin’s thinking has all along been an eclectic, thoroughly postmodern mix, but the core of it is geopolitical, deploying various warmed-over concepts to explain Russia’s inevitable confrontation with the West. From British geographer Halford Mackinder he picked up the idea of Eurasia as a ‘world-island’, a zone with Russia at its heart that served as ‘the geographical pivot of history’. From Carl Schmitt he adopted a binary opposition between land powers and sea powers (‘tellurocracies’ and ‘thalassocracies’), which would always ultimately set Russia against the West. These constructs not only offered an alternative to the Westernizing stance of the Yeltsin and early Putin governments, they also made Russia’s continued dominance of the countries surrounding it a matter of geographical and historical necessity. What might have been mere imperial nostalgia was reformatted as deep strategic thinking. Moreover, Dugin seemed to provide an explanation for the frustrations and ultimate failure of the Westernizing policy, and a higher purpose for the independent course Russia would now have to plot. Freed of the delusion that it might join the liberal West, the country could now pursue its Eurasian destiny.