Between Europe and Asia

The Origins, Theories, and Legacies of Russian Eurasianism

Mark Bassin, Sergey Glebov, Marlene Laruelle, Mark Bassin, Sergey Glebov, Marlene Laruelle

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780822980919
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

Between Europe and Asia analyzes the origins and development of Eurasianism, an intellectual movement that proclaimed the existence of Eurasia, a separate civilization coinciding with the former Russian Empire. The essays in the volume explore the historical roots, the heyday of the movement in the 1920s, and the afterlife of the movement in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. The first study to offer a multifaceted account of Eurasianism in the twentieth century and to touch on the movement's intellectual entanglements with history, politics, literature, or geography, this book also explores Eurasianism's influences beyond Russia.
The Eurasianists blended their search for a primordial essence of Russian culture with radicalism of Europe's interwar period. In reaction to the devastation and dislocation of the wars and revolutions, they celebrated the Orthodox Church and the Asian connections of Russian culture, while rejecting Western individualism and democracy. The movement sought to articulate a non-European, non-Western modernity, and to underscore Russia's role in the colonial world. As the authors demonstrate, Eurasianism was akin to many fascist movements in interwar Europe, and became one of the sources of the rhetoric of nationalist mobilization in Vladimir Putin's Russia. This book presents the rich history of the concept of Eurasianism, and how it developed over time to achieve its present form.

1

A REVOLUTIONARY AND THE EMPIRE

Alexander Herzen and Russian Discourse on Asia

Olga Maiorova

RUSSIAN educated society, a product of Peter the Great’s Westernizing reforms, learned to look at the East through European eyes. From the eighteenth century onward, Russian philosophers, poets, and painters borrowed Western stereotypes of the East, embracing both ends of their evaluative spectrum—a fascination with the exotic Orient and a condemnation of what was conventionally labeled as Asiatic despotism, stagnation, and backwardness. Though the European vision of the East was widely accepted by Russians, they could not feel completely comfortable with the Western discourse of superiority over Asia, knowing that for Europe Russia itself belonged to the Orient. The eastward expansion of the Romanov Empire also provoked complex responses to the question of what Asia meant for Russia—responses that sometimes deviated from Western stereotypes. When imperial explorers, bureaucrats, and educators came into direct contact with Bashkirs, Kazakhs, and Turkmen, the standard European notion of the “civilizing mission” began to strike them as problematic: whereas Russian state institutions, high culture, and modern technologies were undoubtedly seen as superior to those of Asia, the ordinary Russian people, as many observed, displayed deep affinities with their eastern neighbors and were themselves not “civilized” enough.¹ As a result, many writers—scholars in particular—had serious reservations about framing the indigenous peoples of the empire’s Asian periphery as a colonial “other.”²

Despite these challenges, however, the mainstream of Russia’s intellectual discourse, as most scholars concur, functioned within the framework of Western Orientalism—with occasional deviations—until the turn of the twentieth century when, under the influence of two late nineteenth-century religious philosophers, Konstantin Leont’ev and especially Vladimir Solov’ev, a more ambivalent vision of the East took shape and found striking expression in literature. The most prominent symbolist and futurist poets (Alexander Blok, Andrei Bely, and Velimir Klebnikov after them) began to cherish Russia’s unique, if traumatic, ties with its Asian neighbors as a source of the nation’s true identity and future glory, and the fulfillment of its historical mission.³ This article seeks to show, however, that well-articulated efforts to depart from the Western paradigm can be discerned in Russian intellectual discourse much earlier. It traces this alternative perspective back to the middle of the nineteenth century, when Alexander Herzen, a revolutionary émigré and an overwhelmingly popular political essayist in his day, issued his scathing criticism of European civilization and began to dismantle the conventional East–West binary in order to elaborate a non-European—or rather anti-European—discourse on the Orient and to recast Russian self-definition with regard to Asia.

Though Herzen’s effort to reconceptualize the East came at the conclusion of his career, it nonetheless deserves close study, given his profound contribution to the formation of the intelligentsia’s mentality.⁴ If any one person could be said to have set the agenda for Russian mid-nineteenth-century intellectual discourse, it was Herzen. A great writer and author of a classic auto-biography, a key contributor to the philosophical discussions of the 1840s, an early Russian socialist, and passionate advocate of political freedom, Herzen took it as his mission to undermine the regime. In the 1850s and 1860s he flooded all literate Russia—from the Winter Palace to the provincial secondary schools—with subversive writings and periodicals (published in his Free Russian Press operating abroad). As I hope to demonstrate, Herzen’s shifting vision of Asia offers an insight into the complex dynamic of Russia’s perception of its eastern neighbors—a dynamic that developed in response to the basic ambiguity of the empire–nation nexus in Russia, a country with fluid boundaries between metropolis and colonies and an often murky understanding of how the titular people differed from the subject ones. Herzen contributed substantially to the revision of Eurocentric approaches to both Russia and the East—a revision that would find its most radical implementation much later, in the Eurasianist movement.

Reconsidering the West–East Dichotomy

By the time Herzen emerged on the literary scene, two major modes of depicting the East were already well-established in Russia. From the reign of Catherine the Great well into the nineteenth century, satirists juxtaposed the Russian regime with that of China or Persia in order to attack Russian despotism and reveal the shortcomings of their own country. They were of course familiar with Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721) and with the tradition built on this work by the generations of European writers who painted satirical portraits of their societies by likening them to Asia. As for the second mode of perceiving the Orient, it was also during Catherine’s reign—and a direct result of her personal taste—that Moscow and Petersburg aristocrats began to share Enlightenment Europe’s passion for the exotic and admiration of the Orient as a picturesque and diverting realm. In the nineteenth century, Russia’s fascination with the Orient increased with the beginning of its acquisitions in the Caucasus and, most important, with the ascent of Romantic poetry, which fed this mood by offering a vision of the East as a locus of creative imagination, emotional generosity, wisdom, heroism, and even freedom. It was the Europe-wide Romantic engagement with “primitive cultures” that prompted some Russian writers to go so far as to convert their homeland’s links with Asia into an asset for Russia’s own identity.⁵

In the 1830s and the 1840s, as the Russian philosophy of history was taking shape, Russia’s proximity to the East became grist for speculations about its future. Russian thinkers now perceived its location between Europe and Asia as a manifestation of their nation’s unique destiny or tragic fate. It was Petr Chaadaev who opened his first “Philosophical Letter” (written in 1829–1831, and published in 1836) with a spatial metaphor of Russia cast in negative terms: “We are neither of the West nor of the East.” Chaadaev designed this maxim to underscore one of his main points: Russia’s long centuries of interaction with its eastern neighbors—particularly the pernicious Mongol yoke (of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries)—had proved fatal to the country’s progress and led to its disappearance from world history.⁶ Chaadaev’s bitter conclusions provoked intellectual responses throughout the nineteenth century.

In refuting his ideas, the Westernizers took Russia’s European identity for granted and glorified Peter the Great for transforming Russia into a modern European state. Vissarion Belinsky, the most prominent literary critic of the day, claimed that Peter’s reforms made it possible for the nation to revive and evolve, since Peter had restored Russia’s natural ties with Europe, which had been forcibly cut off by the Mongol invaders.⁷ The Westernizers envisioned Russia more fully joining with Europe in its progressive developments. To emphatically demarcate Russia from Asia, they embraced the Western notion of the Orient as Europe’s “other”—a realm of despotism, stagnation, indolence, religious fanaticism, and stifled individuality. Hegel’s philosophy of history—to which the Westernizers passionately adhered—informed this vision of the East. Meanwhile the Slavophiles—determined opponents of the Westernizers—fostered anti-European sentiments and defined Russian national identity by tracing its roots to pre-Petrine political institutions, Byzantine Orthodoxy, and Slavic indigenous culture. Despite their paramount disagreements with the Westernizers, the Slavophiles embraced the same conventional assumption of Russia’s superiority over the East and carefully avoided identifying their country as part of the Orient. Articulated in the 1840s, the Westernizers’ and Slavophiles’ views by no means exhausted the range of visions of Russia and renderings of the Russia–Asia nexus, which emerged in later years. Yet the Westernizer–Slavophile controversy played a formative role in shaping the major subsequent paradigms of Russian national self-perception. Almost all thinkers divided along the lines of this dichotomy, although only a handful of them subscribed to the classical versions of these schemes as articulated in the 1840s. Scholars, journalists, bureaucrats, and political figures who were ideologically closer to Westernism tended to consider Russia an agent of European civilization vis-à-vis the Orient and viewed their country’s past as that of an outpost of Christianity defending the West from the destructive Asiatic hordes.⁸ Those who instead shared some Slavophile assumptions envisioned Russia as a unique nation destined to spread its own civilization and thus naturally to absorb all non-Slavic nationalities of the empire.⁹ As profoundly as these constructs differed, they nonetheless concurred in positioning Russia as superior to and different from the Orient, even while acknowledging that Russians had internalized some distinctively Oriental features.¹⁰

As a confirmed Westernizer, in the beginning of his career Herzen fully accepted the emphatically negative image of the East. For him, as for other Westernizers of the 1840s, it was always the East that epitomized backwardness and stifled individuality. Although Herzen never tired of underscoring the Asian component of Russia’s self, in the 1840s he used these affinities with the East, first and foremost, as a satirical weapon. Romantic overtones are obvious in Herzen’s writings, but he remained aloof from the attempts at internalizing the East made by Pushkin in his Romantic period and by myriad Romantic poets after him.

Yet, after Herzen emigrated to Western Europe, his entire intellectual agenda and his understanding of the West–East dichotomy underwent profound changes. As for his political views, he moved from hope for the coming victory of socialism in Europe to disappointment at the revolutionary potential of the most developed states—France and England in particular—which in his eyes had previously incarnated “progress.” This disillusionment began as he watched the abortive revolutionary wave of 1848 across Europe. In the years to come, Herzen became increasingly frustrated with the West that had survived the crash and lived through the reactionary backlash that followed. Europe, he claimed, had traded liberal values for the pursuit of material wealth and bourgeois comfort. He observed with horror that the French preferred a strong centralized state and interventionist government to a republic. For him, this development not only posed a corrosive threat to society but, most important, revealed Europe’s incurable sickness, inherent in its history and institutions. In Herzen’s eyes, Western societies did not pass the test of fidelity to the revolutionary ideals they had themselves produced.¹¹

As his political views shifted, their theoretical underpinnings also evolved. He moved from faith in the universal “progress” of all humanity—a Westernist belief based on Hegel’s philosophy—to questioning the perception of history as a linear advance of all nations toward a single goal. Moreover, by the end of his late period, Herzen expressed deep doubts about the very notion of progress.¹² As a consequence of this shift, the deterioration of Europe (which he never tired of predicting) could be seen in a positive light—no longer the end of the world, it occasioned the birth and triumph of other civilizations. Now Herzen pinned his hopes on the Russians. He declared the peasant commune to be the natural kernel of socialism, an authentic institution of Slavic society that would allow Russia to implement a unique historical mission. Thanks to its inherently self-governing structure, the commune, he believed, had the potential to evolve organically into an institution that would combine social justice and economic success. With its innate predisposition toward socialism, Russia would be able to transform itself and ultimately the rest of the world by developing this new social order. Idealization of the peasant commune colored Herzen’s late views with certain elements of the very Slavophilism he had struggled against in the 1840s.

This shift in Herzen’s mind-set is well studied, and I do not intend to dwell upon it here. What has thus far eluded scholars, however, is another critically important development that unfolded simultaneously: with his radical reevaluation of the West and the ascent of his belief in Russian socialism, the conventional construct of Asia took on a striking ambiguity in Herzen’s writings and he began increasingly, if inconsistently, to question the customary divide between East and West.

From the early 1850s on, Herzen began attributing to Europe—not without dismay, but with his characteristic intellectual intrepidity—the same derogatory features that were conventionally assigned to Asia. France, for instance, traded “all human rights” for the chance to exercise sovereign authority over other peoples. France had thus, in Herzen’s opinion, betrayed the principles of liberty and stood ready to become a colonial power of the Oriental type: it could easily settle, he claimed, into “the beautiful, martial channel of Persian life” (krasivoe voennoe ruslo persidskoi zhizni). Herzen admitted that France, of course, differed from Asian empires in that it made use of modern technologies—the telegraph, steamships, and railroads. But France did so, he maintained, only to more effectively shackle “other peoples to the fortunes of its centralized despotism.”¹³ Herzen assigned some Oriental features to England, as well. British contemporary society made all too clear, he observed, how “the oppressive hand of custom stifles development.” And because England was driven only by custom and the hunger for personal gain, it “could easily turn into another China” (emphasis added).¹⁴ The growing tyranny of bourgeois values and the complete stifling of individuality, Herzen declared, left no room for personal freedom in Europe and served to explain why modern France and England had failed to uphold the ideals of liberty for which they once had struggled. To drive the argument home, he concluded his observations with an implicit comparison of the most developed countries of Europe with “Chinese anthills” and “swarms.”¹⁵

One can find such diatribes against the West scattered throughout Herzen’s works during his émigré period. All of the above quotations, however, are taken from one short essay that Herzen published in 1859 in immediate and enthusiastic response to John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty” (1859). Neither a review nor a polemical article, the essay—as it would seem at first glance—was designed with the modest goal of acquainting the Russian public with the ideas of a widely acclaimed English thinker whose views Herzen partially shared.¹⁶ As we will see, however, Herzen’s ambition went beyond mere popularization: the essay promotes his own ideological agenda and epitomizes the core ambiguities of Herzen’s new perspective on the West–East issue. And this is why he attached such importance to his response to Mill, not only publishing it in periodicals (the article appeared first in an 1859 issue of The Pole Star) but also including the entire text in his memoir My Past and Thoughts—a maneuver motivated by the desire to capture the broadest possible audience.

One of Mill’s central arguments is that “the general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind.”¹⁷ Though common everywhere, this tendency, Mill’s argument goes, is more dangerous in modern Europe than elsewhere: now in Europe, he states, as government control over the individual gradually wanes, the tyranny of popular opinion grows exponentially and the public is “more disposed than at most former periods to prescribe general rules of conduct and endeavor to make every one conform to the approved standard.”¹⁸ In Mill’s picture of how public opinion works to suppress originality and how popular sovereignty limits individual sovereignty, Herzen recognized a confirmation of his own critique of bourgeois Europe. The Russian émigré was particularly thrilled by Mill’s attacks on British society’s predisposition to conformity and intolerance of geniuses and eccentrics.

Though the two thinkers partially converged in their judgments, there was a profound contrariety between their overall mental outlooks—a contrariety that Herzen did his best to smooth over. He needed an ally in his criticism of Europe and, as Aileen Kelly astutely observes, the Russian writer deliberately placed his ideas under the protection of Mill as “a European nanny,” in order to sound more convincing to Russians who tended to value Western thinkers above their own.¹⁹ A closer examination of both texts shows, however, that Herzen transformed Mill’s criticism of Western democracies into a gloomy prophesy of bourgeois Europe’s demise, with a pessimistic tone far exceeding that of Mill. While Mill believes that “the yoke of conformity” and the tyranny of mediocrity are not inherent traits of European democracies and can be overcome, Herzen renders them the very essence of Western civilization. Moreover, as Herzen emphasizes, the “ruling class” profits from the present state of things, which in turn poses a profound obstacle to revolutionary movements—herein lies the “tragic inevitability” of Europe’s decline.²⁰ The difference between the two thinkers emerges most sharply when parallels with Asia unfold. Herzen borrowed the phrase “[Europe] will tend to become another China” from Mill,²¹ but—paradoxically—used it to call Mill’s point into question. In Mill’s words, “the whole East” has been backward for a t...