From Empire to Eurasia: Politics, Scholarship, and Ideology in Russian Eurasianism, 1920s–1930s

245 Pages·2017·1.263 MB·English

by  Sergey Glebov

FROM EMPIRE TO EURASIA

FROM
EMPIRE
TO
EURASIA
POLITICS, SCHOLARSHIP,
AND IDEOLOGY IN RUSSIAN
EURASIANISM, 1920s–1 930s
SERGEY GLEBOV
NIU Press/DeKalb, IL
Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb 60115
© 2017 by Northern Illinois University Press
Printed in the United States of America using acid free paper
First printing in paperback, 2017
ISBN 978-0-87580-781-2
All rights reserved
Cover design by Yuni Dorr
Composed by BookComp, Inc.
26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 1 2 3 4 5
978-0-87580-750-8 (cloth)
978-1-60909-209-2 (e-book)
Part of chapter 5 was previously published as “Space and Structuralism in Russian Eurasianism,” in
Empire De/Centered: New Spatial Histories of Russia and the Soviet Union, ed. Sanna Turoma and
Maxim Waldstein (Farnam: Ashgate, 2013), 31–60, reprinted by permission of the publisher,
copyright © 2013.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Glebov, Sergeĭ, author.
Title: From empire to Eurasia : politics, scholarship and ideology in Russian
Eurasianism, 1920s–1930s / Sergey Glebov.
Description: DeKalb, IL : Northern Illinois University Press, 2017 | Includes bibliographical
references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016015949 (print) | LCCN 2016033384 (ebook) | ISBN
9780875807508 (cloth : alkaline paper) | ISBN 9781609092092 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Eurasian school—History—20th century. | Soviet
Union—Relations—Eurasia. | Eurasia—Relations—Soviet Union. | Learning
and scholarship—Political aspects—Soviet Union—History. |
Ideology—Soviet Union—History. | Russia—History—Philosophy. | Soviet
Union—History—Philosophy. | Soviet Union—Intellectual life—1917–1970.
| Soviet Union—Politics and government—1917–1936.
Classification: LCC DK49 .G55 2017 (print) | LCC DK49 (ebook) | DDC
303.48/2470509042—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016015949
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
INTRODUCTION
Eurasia’s Many Meanings 1
CHAPTER 1: EXILES FROM THE SILVER AGE 9
1. From the Silver Age to Exile 9
2. Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetskoi 13
3. Petr Petrovich Suvchinskii 19
4. Petr Nikolaevich Savitskii 26
5. The Eurasianist Universe: The Others 33
CHAPTER 2: THE MONGOL– BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION
The Eurasianist National Mystique 39
1. “We Are Alien to Debilitating Reflection”:
Eurasianist Generational Rhetoric 42
2. The National Mystique and the Search for Asian Elements:
Fin- de- Siècle Influences 48
3. Revolution as Revelation: Religious Interpretation
of Social Change 58
4. Mongols as Bolsheviks: The Compression of Time 63
5. Phenomenology of Revolution: “The Ruling Selection,” Ideocracy,
and the Future Eurasian State 66
6. Eurasianism and Fascism: A Reconsideration 71
CHAPTER 3: THE ANTICOLONIALIST EMPIRE
N. S. Trubetskoi’s Critique of Evolutionism and Eurocentrism 76
1. Remapping the World: World War I, Russian Revolution,
and Reconfigurations of the Global Map 78
2. Europe in Question: Interwar Kulturpessimismus 81
vi | Contents
3. After the Deluge: Russia as a Colony 83
4. Russia- Eurasia and Its World- Historical Mission:
Leading the Anticolonial Uprising 88
5. “Hypnosis of the Words”: Critique of Eurocentrism
and Evolutionism 91
6. The Debate across Time: Eurasianism as a Critique
of Russian Evolutionism 100
7. The World as a Rainbow: Religious Diversitarianism
and Rebellion against Universalism 102
CHAPTER 4: IN SEARCH OF WHOLENESS
Totalizing Eurasia 111
1. Paradoxes of Eurasian Nationalism 112
2. In Search of Cultural Wholeness: From Slavdom to Turan 117
3. Eurasia’s Ukrainian Challenge 122
4. Geographical Pivot: Eurasia as a Geographical System 126
5. Eurasia as a Chronotope: In Search of Non- Eurocentric History 135
CHAPTER 5: THE STRUCTURES OF EURASIA
Trubetskoi, Savitskii, Jakobson, and the Making of Structuralism 148
1. A Forgotten Source 148
2. Lévi- Strauss and Jakobson 150
3. “Not Entirely Ours:” Roman Jakobson and the Eurasianists 152
4. In Search of Russian Science 157
5. The Empire of Language: Space and the Study of Structures 162
6. The Political Ontology of Eurasian Structures:
Goal, Convergence, Evolution, Religion 169
EPILOGUE
Eurasianism as a Movement 175
Notes 189
Index 231
Acknowledgments
This project evolved over many years and I owe a debt of gratitude to many col-
leagues. Seymour Becker provided a welcoming yet intellectually challenging
guidance of my doctoral work at Rutgers, and many scholars there helped me
shape my understanding of Eurasianism in its European context. I am particu-
larly grateful to Donald Kelley and Ziva Galili for their thoughtful input. Mark
von Hagen and Richard Wortman led an amazing seminar on imperial Russia at
Columbia, which provided a background for this study and informed my views
of imperial history. Numerous other friends and colleagues shared with me their
immense knowledge of Russian history and culture. I am forever grateful to Alla
Zeide, David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Mark Bassin, Marlene Laruelle,
Olga Maiorova, Michael Gordin, Willard Sunderland, Harsha Ram, Lazar Fleish-
man, Ilya Vinkovetsky, Martin Beiswenger, Vera Tolz, Galin Tikhanov, Charles
Halperin, Alexander Antoshchenko, Patrick Seriot, Sanna Turoma, Michael
Kunichika, Serguei Oushakine, and many others.
My colleagues— Slavists and historians at Smith, Amherst, and the Five
College consortium provided me with intellectual community and support. I
thank Vera Shevzov, Stanley Rabinowitz, Polina Barskova, Cathy Ciepiela, Boris
Wolfson, Dale Peterson, Bill and Jane Taubman, Stephen Jones, Audrey Altstadt,
as well as Richard Lim, Jennifer Guglielmo, Darcy Burkle, Ernest Benz, Nadya
Sbaiti, Jeffrey Ahlman, Joshua Birk, and Elizabeth Pryor Stordeur at Smith and
Catherine Epstein, Frank Couvares, Trent Maxey, Ted Mellillo, Monica Ringer,
Klara Moricz, and Adi Gordon at Amherst for intellectual companionship and
many conversations about history. I owe a special debt to late Marc Raeff, whose
ideas and comments on the earlier version of this book proved to be exceptionally
helpful and whose intellectual generosity is unmatched. A number of wonderful
connoisseurs of the archives of the Russian emigration— Edward Kasinec, Tanya
Chebotarev, and Gabriel Superfin above all— helped me navigate the archipelago
of Russia Abroad.
My greatest debt of gratitude is to my colleagues and friends in Ab Imperio. My
understanding of Russian imperial history and of Eurasianism is shaped by our
viii | ACknowledgments
common work and by many hours of discussions with Ilya Gerasimov, Marina
Mogilner, Alexander Semyonov, and Alexander Kaplunovsky. I especially thank
Ilya for his insights and critique, and Marina, who read this book and offered very
valuable comments. Sasha Semyonov’s extraordinary knowledge of historiogra-
phy and ability to complicate any narrative was truly inspirational.
Finally, I want to thank Amy Farranto at the Northern Illinois Press for making
the pre- publication process as smooth and efficient as possible, and Therese Mal-
hame for helping me make this text comprehensible.
All these friends and colleagues made this project better. Needless to say, all the
faults of this book are my own.
INTRODUCTION
Eurasia’s Many Meanings
The collapse of the Soviet Union laid bare the familiar but misleading Western
conflation of “Soviet” and “Russian.” In the great reconfiguration of the cultural
and geopolitical imageries of the late twentieth century, “Eurasia” emerged as the
most successful contender to become the new geocultural concept embracing all
or some of the “post- Soviet space.” On the one hand, “Eurasia” underwrites vari-
ous Russian and non- Russian projects for integration of that space in an econom-
ic or political union.1 A radical neo- Fascist movement in Russia propagates war
and expansion in the name of Eurasia and commands a very impressive media
presence.2 On the other hand, scholars all over the world are rebranding former
“Soviet and Russian studies” programs, centers, and associations as “Eurasian” to
reflect a move away from the Russian- centric narratives of the past.3 In former
Russian studies and beyond, “Eurasia” is often used to bring to light connections
and entanglements across national boundaries and traditional disciplines alike
and to emphasize the global context of historical processes.4 In Russian studies,
scholars saw a kind of “Eurasian” manifestation in a range of historical and cul-
tural phenomena, taking “Eurasia” as a term for Russia’s engagement with the
“East,” or as a symptom of uneasiness and ruptures in discourses on its multifac-
eted identity.5
This new currency of the concept of Eurasia invites critique through a study
of its origins and the historical contexts in which it operated. This book offers a
first step in this direction by exploring the history in the 1920s and 1930s of the
Eurasianist movement, which first appropriated the term “Eurasia” to describe the
former Russian Empire. Launched by a group of young émigrés who had recently
emerged from the years of fighting and destruction, the Eurasianist movement
elaborated a complex and multifaceted language, in which it sought to reimagine
the former imperial space in the wake of Europe’s Great War and in the aftermath
of the collapse of continental imperial formations.
2 | IntRodUCtIon
The new movement sought to endow Eurasia, understood largely as coinciding
with the former Russian Empire, with cultural, historical, geographic, and ethno-
graphic content—b ut the movement was not nearly as homogeneous as its name
may suggest.6 The founders of Eurasianism disagreed on a range of issues, and
argued bitterly about what weight should be accorded to one or another idea in
their overall conception of Eurasia. The movement’s leaders had socialized in dif-
ferent milieus in late imperial Russia, and brought diverse intellectual strategies and
backgrounds to the common project of inventing Eurasia. Some stressed its alleged
spatial unity, others looked for signs of the ethnographic or linguistic wholeness of
its populations, and still others imagined Eurasia as a space of modernist creativity
in arts or as a locus and object of radically new scholarship. Perhaps the best way to
describe the movement’s heterogeneity is to understand it as something that gave
many meanings to Eurasia. These meanings overlapped in contradictory ways, and
in the decade of the 1920s this overlap enabled a basic consensus among Eurasian-
ism’s various streams, which allowed the movement to coalesce.
Above all, the Eurasianist leaders agreed on the crucial importance of Ortho-
dox Christianity to Russian identity. Moreover, they saw the Russian Revolution
as a climactic event, which, in realizing the ambitions of the radical Russian
intelligentsia to destroy the old order and build a new one, confirmed the eternal
truths of the church by revealing the horrors of Socialism. The Eurasianists saw
modern European society— and for them the Russian Revolution was a disaster in
part inflicted by European ideologies all too readily absorbed by the Russian intel-
ligentsia— as a crisis- stricken world whose main ills were individualism, absence
of spirituality, and belief in universal progress. In opposition to the decaying yet
predatory Europe, Eurasianist thinkers suggested the Russian world of everyday
life confession of faith (bytovoe ispovednichestvo) and a society permeated by the
spirit of Orthodoxy. Drawing on the prerevolutionary interest of the educated
classes in idealism and religion, the Eurasianist thinkers thus reflected a pan-
European turn to metaphysics and idealism that sought to ground human experi-
ences in the spiritual sphere. However, they cast their project of Orthodox utopia
as a national reinvigoration in the midst of European catastrophe.7
In the minds of the Eurasianist thinkers, this importance of Orthodoxy was
tied to the fates of Russia- Eurasia after the Revolution. The Eurasianists expected
that in the aftermath of the Russian revolutionary catastrophe a new class of peo-
ple would emerge from under the Bolshevik “yoke.” Observing from a distance
the rise of the New Economic Policy in Soviet Russia, the Eurasianists were sure
that the Bolshevik Party’s retreat from ideology proved that many in Soviet Russia
accepted the Bolsheviks’ state-b uilding instincts but rejected their Communist
ideology.8 The task of the Eurasianists, thus, was to offer a non-M arxist, spiri-
tual ideology, which would help this new type of people to shed off European