Between Europe and Asia: The Origins, Theories, and Legacies of Russian Eurasianism eds. by Mark Bassin et al. (review)

Historiographically, the Eurasianist movement has punched well above the weight its modest numbers and tumultuous origins would suggest. This outsized impact suggests the novelty and broad interest of the movement’s tenets. A congeries of ideas centered around the notion that Eurasia was, on one hand, a distinct world-historical space separate from Europe and Asia, and on the other, analogous with the boundaries of the late (and, for the Eurasianists, lamented) Russian Empire, Eurasianism attracted diverse adherents. Emerging from the “continuum of crisis” that world war, revolution, and civil war comprised, it suggested a potential reconstitution of the political space of the Russian Empire, a multivalent critique of Europe and Eurocentrism, and a spiritual means of healing the traumas Russia had recently suffered.¹ Today, the movement’s concern with Russia as an imperial, multiethnic space strongly parallels trends in the historiography of the Russian Empire,² while the complexity and range of Eurasianists’ interventions has offered ample fodder for intellectual historians. The Eurasianist George Vernadsky’s long stint as a professor of Russian history at Yale offered a platform for interpretations of Russia’s distant past that remain influential, setting the stage for new conceptions of Eurasia’s multiethnic history.³ In short, because of its wide-ranging connections and complex intellectual and political legacy, Eurasianism cannot but capture scholars’ imaginations.

It is precisely the volume of existing literature on Eurasianism, the variety of discrete approaches to a diverse movement, that inspires this collection of essays. A collective study brought together under a single rubric, the editors posit, can more fully elucidate the movement’s complexity than a single-author monograph. The overarching editorial goal is to go beyond the intellectual history of Eurasianism and investigate its “externalities”: its origins, broadly considered; the social contexts of Eurasianist ideas; and the transformations of Eurasianist ideology through time and space. The goals of such collective and interdisciplinary study, though only “scratch[ing] the surface of the phenomenal role of Eurasianism and Eurasianists in twentieth-century intellectual history” (P. 5), are to describe it in unprecedented depth.

The volume, consisting of ten chapters and a postface, can be divided into four sections. The first, featuring contributions by Olga Maiorova and Vera Tolz, explores the deeper intellectual roots of Eurasianist thought. Maiorova seeks precedents for the Eurasianists’ critique of Eurocentrism in the late writings of Alexander Herzen. The point of departure for these works was Herzen’s well-known disenchantment with the West after the failure of the revolutions of 1848. Such disenchantment, though, did not necessarily prefigure the new, more ambiguous representation of Asia that emerged in some of Herzen’s post-1848 works. Rather, polemicizing with John Stuart Mill, Herzen “undermined Mill’s vision of the West–East dichotomy” (P. 19), presenting an organicist vision of world history in which all societies, East or West, experienced parallel processes of growth and decline. Such a rethinking of the hierarchy of civilizations led Herzen to speculation on that great Eurasianist shibboleth, the role of the Mongols in Russian history. It was the Tatar yoke, Herzen concluded, that at great cost tore Russia away from the doomed West “and hence from an untimely death” (P. 23). More than that, though, the Tatar yoke, and subsequent expansion of the empire of the Romanovs, had created an opportunity: the empire as a dynamic symbiosis of Russians and “Asiatics,” all subjugated by the Romanov regime, and prepared to build something new within that space after the inevitable collapse of the Romanovs. Hence Herzen’s views of Europe, as Maiorova shows, led him not simply to a critique of Eurocentrism but also established precedents for the apologia of imperialism characteristic of Eurasian thought. Tolz finds precursors of Eurasianism in the work of Russian Orientologists during the second Oriental renaissance, during which, in...