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Long before Putin announced his Eurasian policy, Eurasian thought had represented a specific Russian proposal to dominate and transform Europe. This important intellectual tendency had arisen in the 1920s as a response to the earlier Russian disagreement between “slavophiles” and “westernizers.” The westernizers of the nineteenth century believed that history was unitary, and that the path to progress was singular. For them, Russia’s problem was backwardness, and so reform or revolution was needed to push Russia to a modern European future. The slavophiles believed that progress was illusory and that Russia was endowed with a particular genius. Orthodox Christianity and popular mysticism, they maintained, expressed a depth of spirit unknown in the West. The slavophiles imagined that Russian history had begun with a Christian conversion in Kyiv a thousand years before. Ilyin began as a westernizer and ended as a slavophile, a trajectory that was very common.
The first Eurasianists were exiled Russian scholars of the 1920s, contemporaries of Ilyin, who rejected both the slavophile and the westernizer attitudes. They agreed with the slavophiles that the West was decadent, but denied the slavophile myth of Christian continuity with ancient Kyiv. The Eurasianists saw no meaningful connection between the ancient Rus of Volodymyr/Valdemar and modern Russia. They focused instead on the Mongols, who had easily defeated the remnants of Rus in the early 1240s. In their vision, the happy conventions of Mongol rule allowed for the foundation of a new city, Moscow, in an environment safe from European corruptions such as the classical heritage of Greece and Rome, the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment. Modern Russia’s destiny was to turn Europe into Mongolia.
The Eurasianists of the 1920s soon scattered, and some of them renounced their earlier views. They had one gifted acolyte within the Soviet Union: Lev Gumilev (1912–1992). Gumilev was born to an extraordinary family, and lived one of the most tragically and garishly Soviet lives imaginable. Lev’s parents were the poets Nikolai Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova. When Lev was nine years old, his father was executed by the Cheka; his mother then wrote one of the most famous poems in modern Russia, which included the verse: “it loves, it loves droplets of blood, the Russian land.” With such parents, Lev had difficulty submerging himself into his university studies in the 1930s; he was observed closely by the secret police and denounced by his colleagues. In 1938, during the Great Terror, he was sentenced to five years in the Gulag, to a camp at Norilsk. This inspired his mother’s famous Requiem, in which Anna referred to Lev as “my son, my horror.” In 1949, Gumilev was once again sentenced to the Gulag, this time to ten years near Karaganda. After Stalin’s death in 1953 he was released, but the years in the Gulag left their mark. Gumilev saw the inspirational possibilities in repression, and believed that the basic biological truths of life were revealed in extreme settings.
Writing as an academic in the Soviet Union of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Gumilev revived the Eurasian tradition. He agreed with his teachers that Mongolia was the source of Russian character and its shelter from Western decadence. Like the émigré scholars of the 1920s, he portrayed Eurasia as a proud heartland that extended from the Pacific Ocean to a meaningless and sick European peninsula at the western extreme.
Whereas the original Eurasians had been serious scholars with disciplinary training in the universities of the Russian Empire, Gumilev was a typical Soviet autodidact, an enthusiastic amateur in several fields. To define the boundary between Eurasia and Europe, for example, he relied upon climate. He used the average January temperature to draw a line that ran through Germany. On one side was Eurasia and on the other Europe. It just so happened that, when Gumilev made this argument, East Germany was under Soviet domination and West Germany was not.
Gumilev’s contribution to Eurasianism was his theory of ethnogenesis: an explanation of how nations arise. It began from a specific understanding of astrophysics and human biology. Gumilev maintained that human sociability was generated by cosmic rays. Some human organisms were more capable than others of absorbing space energy and retransmitting it to others. These special leaders, in possession of the “passionarity” Putin mentioned in his 2012 speech, were the founders of ethnic groups. According to Gumilev, the genesis of each nation could therefore be traced to a burst of cosmic energy, which began a cycle that lasted for more than a thousand years. The cosmic rays that enlivened Western nations had been emitted in the distant past, and so the West was dead. The Russian nation arose from cosmic emissions on September 13, 1380, and was therefore young and vibrant.
Gumilev also added a specific form of antisemitism to the Eurasian tradition, one that enabled Russians to blame their own failings on the Jews and the West at the same time. The relevant concept was that of the “chimera,” or false nation. Healthy nations such as the Russian, warned Gumilev, must beware “chimerical” groups that draw life not from cosmic rays but from other groups. He meant the Jews. For Gumilev, the history of Rus did not show that Russia was ancient, but it did show that Jews were an eternal threat. Gumilev claimed that in medieval Rus it was the Jews who had traded slaves, establishing themselves as a “military-commercial octopus.” These Jews, according to Gumilev, were agents of a permanently hostile Western civilization that sought to weaken and defame Rus. He also claimed that Rus had to pay tribute to Jews in blood. Gumilev therefore advanced three basic elements of modern antisemitism: the Jew as the soulless trader, the Jew as the drinker of Christian blood, and the Jew as the agent of an alien civilization.
Despite his years in the Gulag, Gumilev came to identify himself with the Soviet Union as his Russian homeland. He made friends and taught students, and his influence even after his death in 1992 was considerable. The economist Sergei Glazyev, who advised Yeltsin and Putin, referred to Gumilev and used his concepts. Glazyev spoke of an economic union with state planning “based on the philosophy of Eurasianism.” Gumilev was friendly with the philosopher Yuri Borodai and his son Alexander. The younger Borodai dreamed of the “armed passionary,” people who would be “catalyzers of powerful movements” that would liberate “the entire territory of Eurasia.”
As president, Vladimir Putin would not only cite Gumilev on the Eurasian project, but he would appoint Sergei Glazyev his advisor on Eurasia. Not long after, Alexander Borodai would take an important part in the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
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To speak of “Eurasia” in the Russia of the 2010s was to refer to two distinct currents of thought that overlapped at two points: the corruption of the West and the evil of the Jews. The Eurasianism of the 2010s was a rough mixture of a Russian tradition developed by Gumilev with Nazi ideas mediated by the younger Russian fascist Alexander Dugin (b. 1962). Dugin was not a follower of the original Eurasianists nor a student of Gumilev. He simply used the terms “Eurasia” and “Eurasianism” to make Nazi ideas sound more Russian. Dugin, born half a century after Gumilev, was an anti-establishment kid of the Soviet 1970s and 1980s, playing his guitar and singing about killing millions of people in ovens. His life’s work was to bring fascism to Russia.
As the Soviet Union came to an end, Dugin traveled to western Europe to find intellectual allies. Even as Europe integrated, there were marginal thinkers of the far Right who preserved Nazi ideas, celebrated national purity, and decried economic, political, and legal cooperation as part of some global conspiracy. These were Dugin’s interlocutors. An early influence was Miguel Serrano, author of Hitler: The Last Avatar, who claimed that the Aryan race owed its superiority to its extraterrestrial origins. Dugin, like Gumilev, found Ilyin’s Russian redeemer by seeking beyond earth. If the leader must arrive untainted by events, he must come from somewhere beyond history. Ilyin resolved the issue by presenting a redeemer who emerged from fiction in a poof of erotic mysticism. The mature Gumilev and the young Dugin looked to the stars.