From Empire to Eurasia: Politics, Scholarship, and Ideology in Russian Eurasianism, 1920s–1930s by Sergey Glebov (review)

Sergey Glebov offers the reader a brilliant account of one of the most fascinating intellectual movements in the Russian emigration. The Eurasian thinkers were young exiles who, at the beginning of the 1920s, argued that the former Russian Empire constituted a third continent – "Eurasia" – between Europe and Asia and that Western institutions such as parliamentarian democracy and capitalism were inadequate for this continent. Glebov analyzes Eurasianism based on more archival sources than anyone before and persuasively places the thinking of the Eurasianists in the struggles of modernity in late imperial Russia and Europe. He argues that Eurasianism was an "imperial phenomenon" not only in the sense of an ideology of restoring the empire but "the product of the imperial situation, of the unevenness and heterogeneity of the social and cultural space of imperial Russia, in which the conspicuous absence of bourgeois institutions coexisted with the rising critique of the philistine bourgeois order by intellectuals, and the aristocratic and religious rejection of the universal aspirations of modernity combined with a critique of Eurocentrism and cultural colonialism" (P. 6). In contrast to earlier research, he stresses the heterogeneity of Eurasianism and the fact that the contradicting interpretations and ideas of its leaders overlapped only for a short time in the 1920s. It is this period of a basic consensus among various currents within Eurasianism that Glebov examines. The revival of Eurasianism in post-Soviet Russia is beyond the scope of his study.

In the first chapter "Exiles from the Silver Age," Glebov sketches the biographies of the Eurasianists' leading troika and other important participants in the Eurasian movement. He stresses the backgrounds of Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetskoi (1890–1938), Petr Petrovich Suvchinskii (1892–1985), and Petr Nikolaevich Savitskii (1895–1968) in Russian Silver Age culture and the diversity of their origin. The Trubetskois belonged to the highest echelons of Moscow's aristocracy. At the same time, some of them were eminent philosophers with established academic positions and networks. Nikolai Trubetskoi's father, Sergei, was the first elected rector of Moscow University and instrumental in the liberal movement in the late Russian Empire. Suvchinskii's father was a successful businessman in the oil sector. The family of Russified Polish-Ukrainian nobles lived in St. Petersburg and had an estate near Kiev. Savitskii originated from the section of the Ukrainian gentry that was loyal to the imperial state and the Russian language. His father was active in the Zemstvo movement and became a member of the State Council in 1906. The three later Eurasianists had also opted for diverse educational and career paths. Trubetskoi published his first scholarly article in Etnograficheskoe obozrenie at the age of fifteen, studied linguistics in Moscow, and was well on the way to a brilliant academic career when the Bolsheviks took power. Suvchinskii was educated at the famous Tenishev School in St. Petersburg, took early music lessons with famous teachers, and in 1915 became the coeditor of one of Russia's leading music journals, which marked the beginning of his activity as a cultural entrepreneur. Savitskii studied economics with Petr Berngardovich Struve at the Petrograd Polytechnic Institute. After graduating in 1916 he entered the diplomatic corps and became secretary to the Russian commercial mission in Norway. Therefore, the personal backgrounds of the three principal figures of Eurasianism may actually be more diverse than previous research suggested. They did, however, belong to the privileged rich and well-educated elite of the Russian Empire, as did all the other key Eurasianists. What they also shared was the common experience of biographical rupture by the triple catastrophe of World War I, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the Civil War, which eventually forced them into exile.

That said, in the second chapter, "The Mongol-Bolshevik Revolution," Glebov argues that rather than autocracy, the Eurasianist generational rhetoric attacked the still weak bourgeois society and the radical...