Illegal Eurasia: Причины несостоятельности евразийской юриспруденции

The article discusses a little-studied aspect of the history of the Russian émigré Eurasianist movement of the 1920s and 1930s: namely, an attempt to develop holistic “Eurasianist” jurisprudence. The task proved to be much more complex than merely applying Eurasianist ideology to the field of law, as the latter was not a single phenomenon, and had different institutional and especially conceptual dimensions. Eurasianists themselves differed in their approaches to law. These distinctions were based on metalegal grounds, whether in phenomenological sources of the works of Nikolai Alekseev, who argued for legal individualism, or alleinheit theory in the writings of Leo Karsavin, or positivist theory informing the approach by Nikolai Dunaev. Based on Eurasianists’ published works and unpublished archival materials, this article argues for the fundamentally contradictory legal views by members of the Eurasianist movement. These contradictions suggest that it was impossible to create a particular “Eurasianist” legal theory on the basis of their writings.