I. The Foundations of Eurasianism
Russians were never conquered by Mongols but by clever Petrine propaganda.
There is no term that is more misused in the geopolitical discourse than the concept of “Eurasianism”. This is almost entirely the fault of one man: Alexander Dugin. He took the ideas of the Eurasianists and basically used them as a kind of aesthetic to cloak his own personal ambitions and PR efforts in. No one understands what Eurasianism means and this is because Dugin has intentionally made it as vague and convoluted as possible, so that people can fill in the blanks themselves to suit their own tastes. This is because Dugin is a post-modernist, who believes that Truth as a concept does not exist. There is only power and the ability that it exerts on people to make them think a certain way using propaganda, coercion or bribery.
I’ve covered this before:
The Politics of Postmodernity in Russia ... and Not Only
I’ve found that most people struggle to understand words. As a writer, you can never assume that a reader understands a key term that is central to your analysis. If you do, it will become clear sooner rather than later that you assumed too much too quickly. I encounter this problem whenever I write about metaphysics. I simplify what I am writing about …
As a result, Eurasianism now means whatever is most profitable for it to mean in the eyes of the beholder.
For some people it means India rising up to become a superpower by 2030 and defeat the Anal-Saxon Empire of Soros. To others it means basically Russia economically developing Siberia and Central Asia and trading with China instead of relying on the EU. Still, to others, it is some sort of sinister conspiracy theory to make the West gayer and more Communist than it already is, but with added borsht and shuba.
Let’s file these misconceptions under “neo-Eurasianism” going forward and simply ignore them. Today, I’d rather focus on what actual Eurasianism was, its successor school of thought and what it contributed to our understanding of politics, culture and, most importantly of all, Identity.
Also: Eurasianism is a vast topic. Mostly, it’s actually just the attempt to piece back together the true history of Russia pre-Peter the Great and the Romanovs. There is a political theory component to it, true, but I will only briefly mention it today. Instead, I will focus on the core claims of the Eurasianism revisionist school as it relates to Russian history, culture and identity.
Savitsky’s Eurasian Land Power Behemoth
The land vs sea power thing is not an original Dugin idea.
A Russian thinker articulated it much, much earlier than Dugin did and the Germans were writing about the concept of history being a never-ending struggle between The Leviathon (sea power) and The Behemoth (land power) around the same time as well — see Schmitt. Yes, the original Eurasianist, from whom we got the term, was Petr Savitsky, and he was a pretty interesting character in his own right with a superior physiognomy to Dugin by far:
Petr fled Russia when the Bolsheviks took power and, later, when the Reds took Prague, they arrested him and sent him off to freeze and starve in the camps for 10 years. So, the idea that Eurasianism is some Bolshevik-approved/created conspiracy falls flat on its face when you know that one little fact, doesn’t it? And yet, the anti-Russian shills love to point hysterically at Dugin’s “neo-Eurasianism” as proof of Putin’s intentions to invade and exterminate EUrope. I see it promoted all over Twitter by spiteful Indians, Mexicans, Finns and other Baltic bog-people.
This claim presupposes the following:
That Dugin has any pull or influence in the Kremlin at all
That Putin is a neo-Soviet irredentist and not actually a Langley lackey
That Eurasianism is an anti-European, pro-Mongolian ideology
That it was invented by the KGB to conquer Europe post-USSR collapse
When you ask for proof of these presuppositions, you simply get called bad names, sadly.
Anyway.
Savitsky considered the Prussianist project to be the true enemy of the Russian people. Here, he and I are in total agreement, although I came to the conclusion from a totally different perspective. I was simply tracing the development of the Original Evil i.e., Spartanism and realized that it had reached its apogee in pre-Revolution Europe in Prussia. Savitsky, like myself, traced the problem of Prussianism to the Crusader knights of the Baltic. In contrast, Dugin seems to take inspiration from their model, by the way and seeks to impose it on Eurasianism thereby perverting the entire concept at its very core.
Very subversive.
What is more, the Eurasianists rightly point out that Peter the Great imported psychotic Prussians to rule over the Russian people for centuries as a permanent class of xenocrat overlords. This led to the conditions in which many groups within Russia were agitating for revolution against the Romanovs, not just the Orthodox Church and the Jewish Bund, who end up being the prime instigators of the Revolution. One of the reasons why the peasants refused to fight for the Whites was because they saw them as German interlopers and they thought that the Reds might actually deliver on peasant self-determination. In most cases, the peasants either self-organized their own movements for national liberation or they sat the civil war out.
Remember: thanks to Peter’s “neo-Junker” reforms, Russians were reduced to a state of absolute slavery/serfdom. Paradoxically, Peter the Great is taught as a great “Liberalizer” who freed Russia from its despotic past under asiatic-mongol domination when it was he who was the xenocrat interloper reducing the Russians to despotism!
This, to many Russians’ mind is what “Liberalism” means — Peter the Great + Boris Yeltsin, essentially.
Thus, the story of Nevsky allying with the Tartar tribes to defeat the German sado-sexuals and their army of enslaved Balt-helots is seen as a very proud moment of national unity and Eurasian power defeating Westernism by the Eurasianists. However, most modern Eurasianists express extreme skepticism about the event.
See Fomenko:
They believe that the Nevsky character was created out of Pagan heroes to justify the growing Church domination of Slavic lands that came centuries later:
More on Fomenko in a bit though.
There is a lot more that can be said about Savitsky and it ties over neatly into what Lev Gumilev was saying about Eurasianism as well. Coincidentally, the two thinkers met in the gulags in Kazakhstan and/or exchanged letters while they were both imprisoned there!
What’s that? Another Eurasianist thinker being imprisoned by the Reds?
This also gets into the idea of Turanism, which Gumilev pioneered, and which the Kazakh government has, in subsequent years, twisted and deformed for their own political use as their national ideology. Let’s table Turanism for now though — we have enough on our plate for today.
Basically, the original thesis of Eurasianism was that steppe-culture and the steppe-tribes who developed it played a huge influence on Russian (and German) culture and identity formation. That’s basically it. If you remember nothing else from this series, try to wrap your head around the idea that Eurasianism was simply the Russian flavor of the “Aryanism” that we got from the Germans. Basically, both schools were trying to study the ur-culture of steppe-warriors that burst out onto the world, conquered it, and then the legacy that they left in the lands that were settled by them, like Russia. Both schools were also trying to lay claim to its legacy, which led to wars — but more on that in Part II.
Today, we are focusing on only one topic: who these so-called “Eurasians” are.