Foundations of Eurasianism translated from the Russian and edited by Jafe Arnold and John Stachelski.
Prav, 2 volumes,
538 pp., $59.98; $47.98 (paper)
The Gumilev Mystique: Biopolitics, Eurasianism, and the Construction of Community in Modern Russia
by Mark Bassin.
Cornell University Press,
380 pp., $125.00; $22.95 (paper)
Osnovy geopolitiki: Geopoliticheskoe budushchee Rossii [Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia]
by Aleksandr Dugin.
Moscow: Arktogeia, 600 pp. (1997)
Eurasian Mission: An Introduction to Neo-Eurasianism
by Aleksandr Dugin.
London: Arktos, 179 pp., $23.95 (paper)
The Fourth Political Theory
by Aleksandr Dugin.
London: Arktos, 211 pp., $29.50 (paper)
Black Wind, White Snow: Russia’s New Nationalism
by Charles Clover.
Yale University Press, 360 pp., $18.00 (paper)
When Russian troops seized Crimea in 2014, German chancellor Angela Merkel, reporting on her conversation with Vladimir Putin, told President Obama that the Russian president seemed to dwell “in another world.” In a sense she was right: Russians and Westerners see the world quite differently, and our failure to understand Russia’s perspective made its actions seem surprising in 2014 and still more so when it invaded Ukraine in 2022.
How do Russians think about what their country is doing in Ukraine? If we are to grasp why so many have supported the attack on Georgia in 2008, the seizure of Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014, and the present war, we need to recognize that their fundamental assumptions differ from ours. Americans, for example, typically take for granted that the state exists to promote the welfare of its citizens, but Russians often believe the opposite. After all, individuals come and go, but Russia remains. And Russia is not just a nation; it is also an idea.
The “Russian idea,” throughout its many changes, has typically been messianic. It explains the world and gives life purpose; it shapes domestic and foreign policy and, more importantly, gives Russians a sense of their “Russianness”—which includes the ability to save the world. In his famous book The Russian Idea (1946), the philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev argued that Bolshevism owes as much to Russian messianism as to Marx. Medieval Russians, he and many others emphasize, often considered themselves the only true Christians. The Byzantines had, at the Council of Florence in 1439, recognized the pope to secure Western aid against the Turks, thereby betraying the Orthodox faith, which is supposedly why they succumbed to the Ottomans in 1453. From that point on, Moscow, the capital of the only independent Orthodox country until the nineteenth century, became the “Third Rome,” the heir to both Rome and Byzantium as the seat of Christendom. Russians were destined to save the world because, as the monk Philotheus explained, “a fourth Rome there will not be.”
Bolshevism inherited this messianic spirit. The Soviet Union would liberate the workers of the world and create the final utopia. It took Stalin to fuse Marxist internationalism with traditional Russian pride: internationalism would be the work of Russia, the savior nation. Stalin drew on a tradition of Russianness defined as a sort of supernationality. Every nation), Dostoevsky concluded, Russians “may have a greater capacity than other nations to embrace the idea of the universal fellowship of humans, of brotherly love.” As proof, he adduces the Spaniards and Englishmen portrayed in Pushkin’s poems, who, he imagines, differ not a whit from actual Spaniards and Englishmen. I am reminded of the witticism that the linguist Roman Jakobson could speak Russian fluently in six languages.
