Is Vladimir Putin a Eurasianist or a Slavophile?
The Neo-Eurasianist thinker Alexander Dugin has often been described as “Putin’s brain,”[i] as observers find his themes in Putin’s speeches. But what even is “Eurasianism” in relation to the present geopolitical situation? Eurasia has fascinated modern Western theorists. The American policy-maker Brzezinski claimed that “Eurasia is … the chessboard on which the struggle for global primacy continues to be played”[ii] and pointed out that both Stalin and Hitler saw Eurasia as the center of the world.
Eurasianism
Originally, Eurasianism did not have clearly nationalist intentions. Eurasianism emerged in 1921 and was based on the observations of a “dying West” and a “rising East.” Its chief representatives are the linguist Nicolas S. Trubetzkoy, the geographer Petr Nikolaevitch Savitzky, the theologian Georgy V. Florovsky, the musicologist Pëtr P. Suvchinsky, and the legal scholar Nicolai N. Alekseev. Scholarly Eurasianism developed from Slavophilism and purged the latter of imperialist connotations.
In 2000, Dugin re-founded the Eurasian Movement,[iii] launching his journal Elementy, which agitates against globalization, Islamism, and democracy (because, to him, in democracy the people do not govern) and praises national-bolshevism. Dugin’s tendency is anti-enlightenment, spartan, pessimistic, and populist with much use of “sacred sciences” such as alchemy, astrology, and sacred geography.
For the original Eurasianists, the state organization had at its center a “symphonic personality.” Russia-Eurasia represented a nonegoistic, communal consciousness. In spite of their generally conservative background, it is possible to see in the Eurasianist writings an “early post-modernist strain” (Fyodor Girenok)[iv] because their idea to identify Eurasia as a localized culture pushes the conventional opposition of East versus West towards theories of cultural conversion or transculturalism. The democratic and decentralized “third way” that left-wing Eurasianists like Dimitry Sviatopolk-Mirskii suggested, aims at overcoming Russian nationalism and emphasizes the supra-national character of Eurasianism. We find echoes of modern postcolonial theories, for instance of Homi K. Bhabha’s elaborations on “the overlap and displacement of domains of difference — the intersubjective and collective experience of nationness, [where] community interest, or cultural value are negotiated.” For Bhabha, the most interesting contemporary questions about “communities” are those that ask how “subjects [are] formed ‘in-between,’ or in excess of the sum of the ‘parts’ of difference . . .”[v] Eurasianism discusses the same questions.
Eurasianist geographer Savitzky suggested we understand Russia as a “symposium of people” (sobor narodov): “The political unity of this vast territory is a result not only of the efforts of just Russian people but of many peoples of Eurasia.”[vi] “Eurasian culture” would not simply be the sum of different single cultures, but these cultures would “converge” into a symphonic reunion. There would be a large quantity of “local patriotisms” sustained by a weak, all-Russian patriotism of the elite. Of course, everything depends here on how weak or strong this Russian patriotism is supposed to be, but there are distinctly progressive ideas about the organization of a multicultural state based on the thought of the liberal economist Pëtr Struve.[vii] Trubetzkoy suggests that “the first duty of every non-Romano-Germanic nation is to overcome every trace of ego-centricity in itself”[viii] and to subsequently “combine the nationalism of every individual people of Eurasia … with Pan-Eurasian nationalism, or Eurasianism” (p. 66). Everything depends on whether “cooperation” means partnership or leadership.
Eurasianists denied the superiority of European (“Romano-Germanic”) culture and revealed the hypocritical nature of universalism, humanism, progress, as well as the depersonalized character of democracy. Trubetzkoy rejected cosmopolitanism, which he identified with chauvinism. Formal internationalism or socialism were seen as mere prolongations of egocentric nationalism. Instead of falling back on “easy” solutions such as socialism, Eurasianists attempted to fundamentally rethink the meaning of national self-determination. They developed a spatio-temporal approach that avoids cultural essentialism, were basically anti-messianic, and tended towards “conversionist” theories of culture. National individuality was not egocentric but determined by a communality that ought always be defined in a supra-individual and supra-national fashion. In extreme cases there was “autarky” (pravitel’nitsa), but even this was supposed to be compatible with supra-national perspectives.
In Soviet times, Eurasianism was reduced to an expansionist idea that became popular among the KGB (Dugin is the son of a KGB officer), the Red Army, and Alpha troops.[ix] For Dugin, Russians, who are a fresh and young ethnos, have the potential to consolidate the super-ethnos of Russia-Eurasia.[x] One should mention Lev Gumilev (1912–1990), who recognized himself as a follower of Trubetzkoy and Savitzky, and produced a more sophisticated version of Neo-Eurasianism, trying to establish Slavic and Turkic elements as the foundations of Eurasian identity. He depicted Russia as a synthetic civilization. However, during the Cold War, Gumilev supported Greater Russian imperialism and integrated influences from fascism (Kullberg: 3). Ironically, these far-right ideologies collide with those of the post-Soviet Eastern European Right, which praises “the notion that the end of Soviet rule is to be seen as the process of reattachment to Europe after years of being ‘almost swallowed by Eurasia.’”[xi]
Putin opted for leadership instead of cooperation and shifted Russian identity from civic to ethnic. After 1991, the multi-ethnic ‘Soviet people’ identity was replaced by an equally complex and multi-faceted ‘Russian’ (rossiiskii) civic identity. Putin challenged this model and began focusing on the ethno-cultural core of this identity, which is ‘Russianness’ (russkost).[xii]
Slavophiles
When Dugin’s Great-Russianism claims to be “Eurasian,” it uses the geographical model of Eurasia but harks back to much older Slavophile theories. Is Putin a Slavophile? The Slavophiles were a group of intellectuals who defined the values of Russian civilization as independent from Western-European culture.[xiii] Slavophiles strongly opposed “universal uniform law, universal equality, universal life, universal justice, and universal prosperity.”[xiv] A main contribution of the Slavophiles is their division of mankind into cultures, in which they precede Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee. Later, they developed these themes into a version of imperial “Pan-Russianism.” After a war with Turkey (in the mid-1870s) their ideologies became clearly racist.
Initially, Russian ideas on “communality” (sobornost’) were justified by referring to cultural differences between the Slavic and the Germanic “race.” Germans would have a penchant for limiting personal freedom by means of authority. While Germanic peoples need laws, Slavs manage “to limit the personal freedom of each member of the society through the moral authority of the unanimous will of all of its members.”[xv] In the end, though freedom and unanimity could have been seen as the essence of Slavic life when seen through sobornost’, the political, and religious conditions of Russia pushed sobornost’ towards authoritarian models. Sobornost’ could be depicted as a sanctified original peasant commune (obshchina).
Slavophilism manifested itself as a pan-Slavic movement, which can lead to misunderstandings. Pan-Slavism has two incarnations, depending on whether it is used in Russia or in Slavic countries other than Russia. There is a “Russian” way of being Pan-Slavic, which mainly stands for the unification of all Slavic people under leadership of the Russian tsar and for the independence of the Balkan Slavs from Ottoman rule; non-Russian Pan-Slavism does not recognize the leading role for Russia. This particularism generated by the Slavophiles made a later unification of all Pan-Slavists impossible.
The Russian emphasis on the traditions of the Russian peasantry as well as on Orthodox themes were unacceptable for non-Russian Pan-Slavs. Russian Pan-Slavism appeared as too romantic, nationalist, or reactionary, while non-Russian Pan-Slavism insisted on the modern character of Slavic nations and required recognition of their nations as European. Non-Russian Pan-Slavism drew much on Johann Gottfried von Herder’s book Geschichte der slavischen Sprache und Literatur nach allen Mundarten (1826), which already suggested that Ukrainians are a distinct people. During the Slavic Congress in Prague in 1848, Ukrainians demanded national recognition and political rights, which was unprecedented.
Philosopher Gustav Shpet could still write in 1922 that “Slavophile problems are the only original problems of Russian philosophy.”[xvi] The present cultural clash between Russia and Ukraine is reminiscent of the clash between Slavophiles and non-Russian Pan-Slavists. There is a Slavophile concept of the “chosen people”[xvii] that affirms that “God placed Rus’ higher than any other state and that the center of world history had shifted to Russia.”[xviii]
For Slavophile and Pan-Slavist Danilevsky, who promoted imperialistic expansion as part of Russian national interest, war with the West remained inevitable.[xix] Vladimir Putin’s messianic cultural critique of the West has less to do with Eurasianism than with a Slavophile “locally minded particularism”[xx] attempting to establish Russia as a superior culture. Depicting Putin’s present civilizational project as Eurasianism is a red herring.
[i] The Wikipedia entry “Alexander Dugin” puts this forward in the first sentence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Dugin#:~:text=Considered%20by%20some%20in%20the,he%20refers%20to%20as%20Novorossiya.
[ii] Zbigniev Brzezinsky, The Grand Chessboard — American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives. New York: Basic Books, 1997, p. 31.
[iii] Dugin’s main books are Mysteries of Eurasia (1991), Hyperborean Theory (1992), Conspirology (1992). Some of Dugin’s most important texts as well as the program of the neo-Eurasian Movement is contained in the journals and magazines Milyi Angel, Elementy and the newspaper, Den’ (since 1993 Zavtra).
[iv] Girenok quoted from Alexander Antoshchenko, ‘‘On Eurasia and the Eurasians: Studies on Eurasianism in Current Russian Historiography’’ (2000) http://www.karelia.ru/psu/chairs/PreRev/bibleng.rtf.
[v] Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994, p. 2.
[vi] Pëtr Savitzky, Kontinent Evrasia. Moscow: Agraf, 1995, p. 424.
[vii] See Sergei Glebov, “Science, Culture, and Empire: Eurasianism as a Modern Movement” in Slavic & East European Information Resources 4:4, p. 16.
[viii] Nicolai S. Trubetzkoy, The Legacy of Gengis Khan and Other Essays on Russian Identity. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publication, 1991, p. 151.
[ix] Anssi Kullberg, “From Neo-Eurasianism to National Paranoia: Renaissance of Geopolitics in Russia” in The Eurasian Politician 4, August May 2001, p. 4.
[x] Galya Andreyeva Krasteva: “The Criticism towards the West and the Future of Russia-Eurasia” in The Eurasian Politician, July 2003, p. 4.
[xi] Roger Griffin: “Europe for the Europeans: Fascist Myths of the New World Order” 1922–1992 on www.alphalink.com.au.
[xii] See Helge Blakkisrud, “Blurring the Boundary between Civic and Ethnic: The Kremlin’s New Approach to National Identity under Putin’s Third Term” in Pål Kolstø and Helge Blakkisrud (eds,), The New Russian Nationalism: Imperialism, Ethnicity and Authoritarianism 2000–2015. Edinburgh University Press, 2016, pp. 249–274.
[xiii] Among the most prominent representatives are Ivan Kireevsky (1806–1856), Alexei Khomiakov (1804–1860), Ivan Aksakov (1817–1860), Konstantin Aksakov (1817–1860), and Iurii Samarin (1817–1886). Nikolay Yakovlevich Danilevsky (1822–1885).
[xiv] Peter K. Christoff, An Introduction to 19th Century Russian Slavophilism. A Study in Ideas, Vol. 1: A. S. Xomiakov. ‘S-Gravenhage: Mouton, 1961, p. 280.
[xv] Alexander Hilferding, Sobranie sochinenii Vol IV Istoriia baltiiskikh slavian, St Petersburg 1874, 68–69. Quoted in Boro-Petrovich 1956, p. 82.
[xvi] Shpet, Ocherk razvitiia russkoi filosofi [Outline of the Development of Russian Philosophy], Petrograd 1922, p. 37
[xvii] Michael Boro-Petrovich: The Emergence of Russian Pan-Slavism 1856–1870, New York: Columbia University Press, 1956, p. 46.
[xviii] Barabanov, E.V. “Russian Philosophy and the Crisis of Identity,” Russian Studies in Philosophy (1992): 31:2, pp. 24–51, p. 30.
[xix] Nicolai Danilevsky. Rossija i Evropa [Russia and Europe], Moscow: Kniga, 1867, pp. 65–66.
[xx] 18. Pierre (Petr) Suvchinsky: ‘L’Eurasisme’ in Eric Humberclaude: (Re)lire Souvtchinski, Paris: La Bresse, 1990, p. 66.
