From Empire to Eurasia

Politics, Scholarship, and Ideology in Russian Eurasianism, 1920s–1930s

Sergey Glebov

• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781609092092
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Russische Geschichte

The Eurasianist movement was launched in the 1920s by a group of young Russian émigrés who had recently emerged from years of fighting and destruction. Drawing on the cultural fermentation of Russian modernism in the arts and literature, as well as in politics and scholarship, the movement sought to reimagine the former imperial space in the wake of Europe's Great War. The Eurasianists argued that as an heir to the nomadic empires of the steppes, Russia should follow a non-European path of development. In the context of rising Nazi and Soviet powers, the Eurasianists rejected liberal democracy and sought alternatives to Communism and capitalism. Deeply connected to the Russian cultural and scholarly milieus, Eurasianism played a role in the articulation of the structuralist paradigm in interwar Europe. However, the movement was not as homogenous as its name may suggest. Its founders 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. In this first English language history of the Eurasianist movement based on extensive archival research, Sergey Glebov offers a historically grounded critique of the concept of Eurasia by interrogating the context in which it was first used to describe the former Russian Empire. This definitive study will appeal to students and scholars of Russian and European history and culture.

CHAPTER 1

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 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

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 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.

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 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 “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...