The Russian soul undeniably has an “Asian stratification.”
—Nikolai Berdiaev
Russians have always known the East. But they only became conscious of Asia as a separate continent when they began to regard themselves as European under Peter the Great. In turning to the West, Peter taught his subjects to think more systematically about the East. Indeed, it was one of the tsar’s more learned men, the polymath Vasilii Tatishchev, who definitively set the continental boundary along the Ural Mountains.1 Peter also launched orientology as an academic discipline in his realm, albeit it partly at Gottfried Leibniz’s suggestion.
Educated Russians never identified themselves more closely with the West than during Catherine the Great’s reign.2 Confident of their European identity, they did not necessarily look to Asia with haughty disdain, for their age happened to coincide with the Enlightenment’s philo-orientalism. However, toward the end of her rule, even Catherine’s enthusiasm for Western ways began to sour when she learned of the Bourbon monarchy’s sanguinary end. The revolutionary turmoil that gripped France and Napoleon’s invasion in 1812 also led many others to question their ties to Europe. As Nikolai Karamzin put it, “Once upon a time we used to call all other Europeans infidels; now we call them brothers. For whom was it easier to conquer Russia—for infidels or for brothers? That is, who was she likely to resist better?”3
The growing influence of German Romanticism in the early decades of the nineteenth century further encouraged speculation about Russia’s place in the world. The discussion was spectacularly launched in 1836 by the publication of Petr Chaadaev’s “First Philosophical Letter” in the journal Teleskop (The Telescope). Written seven years earlier in French and initially privately circulated, the article pessimistically proclaimed that Russia was an orphan among the family of nations, without history or identity: “We are neither of the West nor the East and don’t have the traditions of the one or the other. Placed outside of the times, we have been bypassed by mankind’s universal education.”4 Chaadaev’s “Letter” was a succès de scandale. Aleksandr Herzen later described it as “a shot that rang out in the dark night,” while Nicholas I had its author declared insane.5
Chaadaev’s gloomy assessment initiated the stormy debate between the Westernizers and the Slavophiles in the early nineteenth century. The Westernizers believed that Russia should develop along western European lines toward an order based on rationalism, the rule of law, and the primacy of the individual, while their opponents advocated rejecting Peter the Great’s Occidental turn and returning to what they saw as their nation’s distinctly spiritual and paternalist course.6 If the Slavophiles opposed Western modernity, they did not suggest that Russia was Asian. What they championed was Orthodox, Slavic Europe rather than its Romano-German variant.7
There was one intriguing partial exception. Much as Friedrich von Schlegel had divided the world between Indo-European Aryans and non-Aryans, Aleksei Khomiakov, the most prominent Slavophile, detected a fundamental dichotomy in humankind. One group, the Kushites, were descended from Noah’s disgraced son Ham and had originated in northern Africa. According to Khomiakov, the Kushites embodied submission and nihilism and were in constant struggle with the Iranians, the race that represented freedom and spirituality. As a force of creative vitality, the Iranians had initially established both Greece and Rome. However, Khomiakov argued, successive waves of Kushites had subjected western Europe to their more repressive and heathen order. Only the Slavs had escaped the dominion of the Kushites over the continent.8 In Khomiakov’s conception of history lay the roots of the notion, increasingly popular toward the turn of the twentieth century, that Russians had retained the youthful vigor of their Scythian Oriental ancestors.
Chaadaev, as he subsequently elaborated in his “Apology of a Madman,” stood firmly in the Westernizers’ camp: “We live in Europe’s East, but this fact does not make us Eastern.” His aversion for the Orient was clear. “In the East, docile minds that submitted to tradition spent themselves slavishly obeying some sacred principle and in the end … fell into a deep slumber, entirely ignorant of their destiny.”9 Chaadaev’s negative characterization of Asia as mired in stagnant somnolence reflected a profound transformation from the Enlightenment’s Sinophilia to the disparaging European views of China at the turn of the nineteenth century. Beginning with Johann Gottfried Herder’s contemptuous dismissal of the empire as “an embalmed mummy, wrapped in silk, and painted with hieroglyphics,” Romantic thinkers saw the Middle Kingdom as despotic, and immobile, its people nothing but ants utterly devoid of free will or imagination.10
Kitaishchina now acquired a strongly pejorative sense in the Russian vocabulary. If in Catherine’s day the noun evoked a playfully exotic China, during the nineteenth century it became associated with antediluvian tyranny, shameless corruption, and utter immobility. Azia also began to have negative connotations, much like “Asiatic” in English. Vladimir Dal’s dictionary of the Russian language included such definitions as “rude, uneducated person” for the noun Aziat (Asian) and “savage, crude” for aziatskii (Asian).11 And aziatchina similarly came to signify the continent’s defects. In Anton Chekhov’s play The Cherry Orchard, the haughty student Trofimov dismissed Russia as “nothing but filth, vulgarity, aziatchina.”12
Westernizers often invoked Asia as a warning or even a metaphor for tsarist reaction in their polemics. To the progressive literary critic Vissarion Belinskii, the word kitaizaism (“Chinaism”) was synonymous with reaction and despotism, and he readily used it as an epithet for Nicholas I’s autocracy.13 Indeed, Belinksii had nothing but contempt for the Orient. He provided a detailed exposition of his views in a lengthy review of some books about Peter the Great and his father, Tsar Alexis; his underlying theme was to praise the former’s effort to turn Russia westward. Echoing Hegel’s view that China and India lay outside of history, the critic remarked, “Asia was the cradle of the human race and up to now has remained its crib; its offspring grew up, but they are all still there; they acquired strength, but they still have to walk in leading strings.”14
According to Belinskii, only the Asian’s ability to think and talk separated him from animals, and his intellect was primitive at best: “Is something good or is it bad, reasonable or unreasonable—such questions do not enter into his head; they are far too weighty, too indigestible for his brain.” Even were he to be endowed with a more sophisticated mind, the Oriental’s fatalism rendered him utterly inert: “Why is everything the way it is, and not otherwise, and should it be thus rather than another way,—he has never asked himself such things. Things have been like this for a long time, and they are so with everyone. It is Allah’s will!”15
Like many of his generation, Belinkskii did not trouble himself too much to distinguish between the East’s different nations. Even when he did, none were flattered by the comparison. Thus “the Turk is indifferent when his ruler’s displeasure causes him to be impaled or hanged.” Meanwhile, China’s government, “devoid of movement, represents itself as some petrified ancestor.” Belinskii never doubted in the West’s superiority: “Asia is the land of so-called natural immediacy, Europe is the land of consciousness; Asia—the land of contemplation, Europe—of will and intellect.”16
Early nineteenth-century poets such as Pushkin and Lermontov did not necessarily share such disdain for the Orient. Influenced by Lord Byron’s Romantic verse, their rhymes often portrayed a more colorful and attractive East. While its inhabitants might be violent savages ruled by cruel despots, their archaic culture had the virtue of being as yet uncontaminated by modernity’s artifice and mediocrity. Indeed, Pushkin and his contemporaries had a deep respect for Asian civilization. He was hardly disparaging the Islamic world when he penned his Imitations of the Koran. Nevertheless, the bard also used Asia metaphorically to comment about affairs closer to home. In “The Giaours [Infidels] Now Praise Istanbul,” a poem of 1830 that lampooned those who opposed Western modernity, Pushkin sarcastically praised the Janissaries who had rebelled some twenty years earlier against the Westernizing reforms of the Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II.17
If the Slavophiles did not look to Asia as a model to be emulated, there were some Russians who did. According to the Slavist Olga Maiorova, one of the first was a diplomat posted to Istanbul, Vladimir Titov.18 Like a number of his colleagues at the foreign ministry, Titov was also active in St. Petersburg’s literary life. A member of Prince Vladimir Odoevskii’s proto-Slavophile secret society of Liubomudry (the Lovers of Wisdom), he wrote the prince a remarkable letter upon his arrival to the Turkish capital in 1836.19 “Looking back at Italy and Germany, I became much more of a Turk and an Asian,” Titov announced. As he explained, the East had three advantages over the West: its strong religious convictions, its paternal government, and its more sensual pleasures (kaif). These were all impossible for Europeans to achieve because of their feudal traditions and the Catholic Church. Fortunately, “in Russia we did not have these two syndromes, nor their … consequences; nevertheless, we suffered from another ailment—imitating Europeans.” Titov did not want to put the blame for this entirely on Peter the Great’s shoulders. “However,” he proclaimed, “it is time for us to return to our own ways and those of the East.”
While more ambivalent about Asia, Herzen came to share some of Titov’s sympathies. As a student at Moscow University in the early 1830s of wealthy albeit illegitimate birth, Herzen initially moved in radical circles that subscribed to the various German philosophies and French utopian socialist ideas then in vogue. Like his Western-oriented contemporaries, the young intelligent largely shared Belinskii’s negative view of the East as the epitome of stagnation and tyranny. Thus he saw the Orient as a metaphor for Nicholaevan autocracy.
When Herzen inherited a handsome bequest from his father in 1846, he seized the opportunity to leave the repressive political climate at home and resettle in Paris. Firmly committed to his Westernizing, socialist ideals, the émigré greeted the revolution of 1848 with gleeful enthusiasm. When the upheavals failed to sweep away the old order and Europe returned to its traditional ways, however, Herzen broke with the Westernizers and began to look closer to home, to Russia’s peasant communes, as his ideal society.20
In the context of his evolving political ideas, for Herzen Asia came to acquire both a positive and a negative meaning. If, before his exile, Russian politics had been synonymous with Oriental despotism, he now detected similarities between eastern Europe and East Asia. Chaadaev and Belinskii had always evoked immobile China as Europe’s antithesis. But in the wake of the events of 1848, Herzen saw the latter’s bourgeois philistinism and passivity as the Occidental incarnation of kitaishchina.21 Turning the West-ernizers on their heads, he invoked a favorite metaphor for the crippling conformity of Confucianism to deride Peter the Great’s reforms: “the Chinese shoes of German make, which Russia has been forced to wear for a hundred and fifty years, have inflicted many painful corns.” The damage was not permanent, Herzen added, “since whenever [Russia] has had a chance of stretching out its limbs it has exuded a fresh young energy.”22
This “fresh young energy” came from another Orient. Echoing Khomiakov’s division of the world into a repressive and a free component, Herzen also saw the East as the source of rejuvenating vigor; not the stagnant Asia of the Chinese but its nomadic interior, the Turanian Asia of the Scythians and the Mongols. This was the élan vital that kept Russia young. In fact, the Mongol yoke had been a blessing, since it had saved his nation from such invidious Western institutions as feudalism and the Catholic Church.23 Rather than being offended by traditional European references to his compatriots as barbarians and Tatars, Herzen reveled in such epithets. In a letter to the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, he described himself as “a barbarian … [both] by birth and by conviction.” “Being a veritable Scythian,” he added, “I delight in seeing the old world meet its doom.”24
Many Russians saw their army’s defeat in the Crimea in 1855 against a coalition led by Britain and France as a summons for renewed modernization according to the Western model. Considering their nation to be European, they believed that it had to become more like its Occidental neighbors. The prevailing sentiment that such a course was vital to national survival enabled the new tsar, Alexander II, to introduce sweeping reforms that helped reshape the civic order along more Western lines. But for others, St. Petersburg’s steady decline among Europe’s great powers during the nineteenth century’s second half made Asia all the more appealing. Lieutenant General Ivan Blaramberg spoke for many when he proclaimed, “Russia’s future does not lie in Europe: It must look to the East.”25 Some turned to the Orient as an arena for martial glory. Checked in the Near East by the Crimean War and again at the Congress of Berlin two decades later, they saw expansion into central Asia and the Far East as a tonic for their empire’s wounded pride. A smaller but nonetheless influential group began to argue that Russia’s destiny lay in the East because it was essentially more Asian than European.
Notions of an Oriental manifest destiny were hardly new to Russians. In his poem of 1848, “Russian Geography,” the poet and diplomat Fedor Tiutchev proclaimed its borders as stretching
From the Nile to the Neva,
From the Elbe to China,
From the Volga to the Euphrates,
From the Ganges to the Danube …26
One of the more prominent advocates for a tsarist mission on the continent in the wake of the Crimean debacle was the Moscow University professor Mikhail Pogodin. In addition to occupying the chair in Russian history, Pogodin also published a journal, Moskvitanin (The Muscovite), which he used as a platform for his conservative nationalism. Shortly after the war, he published a summons to imperial expansion farther east: “Leaving Europe alone, in expectation of more favorable circumstances, we must turn our entire attention to Asia, which we have almost entirely left out of our considerations although it is precisely Asia that is predestined for us.” Like Tiutchev, the professor saw few limits for Russia’s ambitions on the continent: “to us belongs … half of Asia, China, Japan, Tibet, Bokhara, Khiva, Kokand [and] Persia.”27 Pogodin did not consider his nation’s imperial ambitions to be in a different league from those of the other European powers. Convinced of the superiority of “Japheth’s tribe,” the white race descended from Noah’s son according to biblical tradition, he believed that its rightful destiny was to rule over “the tribes of Shem and Ham.” Thus he sympathized with the British during the Indian Mutiny of 1857–58.28
St. Petersburg’s diplomatic humiliation at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, after another Turkish war, only reinforced enthusiasm for Asian conquest. Much like the other colonial powers during the age of high imperialism, many Russians were convinced of a special mission that justified their territorial expansion. Writing from Xinjiang in 1877, the explorer Nikolai Przheval’skii reported that “the local population constantly cursed their own government and expressed their desire to become Russian subjects. Rumors of how we brought order to Kokand and Ili spread far. The savage Asiatic clearly understands that Russian power is the guarantee for prosperity.”29
The most august proponent of such views was Nicholas II. In 1903 his war minister, General Aleksei Kuropatkin, confided to his diary, “Our sovereign has grandiose plans in his head: to absorb Manchuria into Russia, to begin the annexation of Korea. He also dreams of taking Tibet under his orb. He wants to rule Persia, to seize both the Bosporus and the Dardanelles.”30 These sentiments would become less popular after Japan launched its attack on the tsar’s naval base of Port Arthur on the Pacific Ocean a year later.
The nineteenth century saw a growing interest among Russians in their Asian past. Earlier, when Catherine the Great had penned her “Notes about Russian History,” she wrote about the Scythians, among the first people known to have lived on Russian territory.31 Her description was so positive that one scholar has recently suggested the empress might have been the first to claim the nomadic nation’s ancestry for her adoptive homeland.32 From the start, one of the driving forces of the academic discipline of orientology had been studying the Eastern elements of Russian history. At first the scholars who pursued such interests were German—like Catherine herself. However, by the nineteenth century’s second half, native Russian orientologists increasingly also became intrigued by the question. They included such prominent scholars as Vasilii Grigor’ev, Nikolai Veselovskii, and Baron Viktor Rosen.33 Meanwhile, the spectacular finds of intricate gold artifacts, which blended entirely alien Oriental styles with classical Greek motifs, at Scythian kurgans along the empire’s southern periphery further encouraged many Russians to think about their Inner Asian ancestry, whether real or imagined.34
To be sure, prerevolutionary historians tended not to dwell on Russia’s links with the East. There were some exceptions. In the early 1800s Karamzin wrote that “Moscow owes its greatness to the Khans.”35 What he meant was that the Muscovite princes had adopted their autocratic regimentation of society—the strong centralized rule that had enabled Russia to achieve its preeminence—from the political tradition of the Mongols. Nevertheless, most nineteenth-century historians were distinctly uncomfortable with the idea that any good had come from the Mongol yoke. Ideas about the positive influence of these Inner Asian conquerors were very much on the margins of the historiographical mainstream in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
One influential figure who did see significant ties to the East in his nation’s heritage was Vladimir Stasov. Historian, archaeologist, librarian, art critic, and tireless champion of the national school of Russian music, Stasov scandalized many of his compatriots when he suggested in a series of articles in 1868 that the beloved byliny were nothing more than “emasculated” imitations of tales that had originated in India and Persia. “Our bogatyrs merely convey various myths, legends and fairy tales of the ancient East,” he concluded.36 Stasov, as he dutifully acknowledged, derived the basic thesis about the Oriental foundations of European epics from such scholars as the German Sanskritist Theodor Benfey. What distinguished the byliny, however, was that they were much closer to the originals than the Iliad, the Nibelungenlied, or even the Kalevala.
In other works, most notably his Russian Folk Ornament of 1872, Stasov likewise stressed the similarities between Russian and Asian cultures.37 Despite the storm of controversy it initially aroused, “On the Origins of Russian Byliny” earned the author a Demidov Prize and eventually gained many adherents, as did his related ideas.38 The prominent French architectural historian Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc based his book about Russian art on the notion, as he put it, that “Russia has been one of the laboratories where the arts, having come from throughout all of Asia, have been joined to create an intermediary form between the Oriental and Occidental worlds.”39
Stasov was a man of relatively progressive views. Although fervently patriotic, his approach to Russia’s cultural past tended to be scholarly. But there were others who looked to the East with more partisan motives. Just as Russian liberals saw western Europe’s constitutional democracies as their political ideal, some conservatives advocated greater kinship with Asian autocracy. One of the most unusual proponents of the latter group was the mystical reactionary Konstantin Leont’ev. As with Titov some three decades earlier, diplomatic service in the Ottoman Empire awoke in Leont’ev a passion for the Orient. The attraction was primarily aesthetic at first. He explained in a letter to a friend, “Only the life of Constantinople … only this multifaceted existence could satisfy my intolerably refined tastes.”40 Leont’ev’s postings as a consul in various Balkan cities in the 1860s were not overly taxing. Along with the pursuit of earthier pleasures, he devoted his considerable leisure to writing. Typical of his creations at the time was The Egyptian Dove, a semiautobiographical novel whose decadent sensibilities recall Joris-Karl Huysmans’ Against Nature.41
A spiritual crisis in the early 1870s led to a profound change of heart. Resigning from the foreign ministry, Leont’ev went on a lengthy retreat at the Orthodox monastic republic of Mt. Athos. Eventually returning to Russia, he lived mostly on his estate until the final years of his life, when he was tonsured as a monk in the venerable Optina Pustina monastery. Leont’ev’s credo was straightforward: “More Oriental mysticism and less European enlightened reason.”42 In an age when many Russians subscribed to pan-Slavism, a doctrine that advocated uniting all of eastern Europe’s Slavs under the tsar’s scepter, he argued for a different course. For one thing, his nation had little in common with its many of its Slavic cousins, who had already been deeply contaminated by Europe’s poisonous liberalism: “The very character of the Russian people has very strong and important traits, which are more similar to those of Turks, Tatars and other Asian nations, or perhaps no one at all, than the Southern and Western Slavs. We are more indolent, fatalistic, much more submissive to our ruler, more dissolute, good-natured, insanely brave, unstable, and so much more inclined to religious mysticism than the Serbs, Bulgarians, Czechs and Croats.”43
Leont’ev believed that, rather than joining with its purported Slavic brethren, Russia’s true destiny lay in restoring the Byzantine ideal of an empire that combined East and West, although its firmly autocratic political order would be distinctly more Oriental. After all, he cautioned, “no Polish rising, no Pugachev revolt can bring more harm to Russia than a most orderly and legal democratic constitution.”44 With its capital in Tsargrad (Constantinople) rather than at St. Petersburg, the greater Russia he envisioned “would be more cultured, that is, more true to itself; it would be less rational and less utilitarian, that is, less revolutionary.”45 This new realm might well incorporate the other Slavs, but it would also join with it many Asian peoples including Turks, Indians, and Tibetans, thereby preserving its fundamentally Eastern character.
The turn of the twentieth century was a time of even greater unease among many Russians about their relationship with the West. Outwardly, especially in the great cities, it seemed that the empire was becoming increasingly more European. Railroads, factories, telegraphs, and mass-circulation newspapers all heralded the coming of a new age. This Occidentalization was troubling, not just in the way it challenged the old order, but also because it seemed to emphasize Russia’s inferiority to such modern industrial rivals as Great Britain and Germany. Yet if Russia looked to the West from a position of relative weakness, it could still face the East with confidence and strength.
As the nineteenth century drew to a close, Russia’s new tsar, Nicholas II, became increasingly preoccupied with his empire’s frontier on the Pacific. In the early 1890s his father, Alexander III, had already decreed that a railway be built across Siberia to link St. Petersburg with his distant Far Eastern territories. By the decade’s end, Nicholas’s diplomats had negotiated a secret treaty of alliance with China, in addition to a leasehold and extensive economic privileges in Manchuria. As the twentieth century dawned, it appeared to many Russians that the empire’s destiny lay in Asia. Echoing Leont’ev, some influential political writers known as the vostochniki (Asianists) even began to argue that Russia was fundamentally Eastern rather than Western in character.
One of the more prominent advocates of Asianism was Prince Esper Esperovich Ukhtomskii, a newspaper publisher and poet. Close to Nicholas II—the prince had accompanied Nicholas on his 1890–91 Oriental grand tour when he was still the tsarevich—Ukhtomskii exercised considerable influence during the earlier years of the emperor’s reign. On the pages of his daily, Sankt-Peterburskiia Vedomosti (The Saint-Petersburg Gazette), Ukhtomskii tirelessly advocated the Asianist cause.46
Even more than Leont’ev, the prince was convinced about Russia’s kinship with Asia: “The West is but dimly reflected in our intellectual life. The depths below the surface have their being in an atmosphere of deeply Oriental views and beliefs.”47 Like Asians, Russians relied more on faith than on reason, Ukhtomskii explained: “We feel our spiritual and political isolation from the Romano-Germanic countries overburdened by a too-exacting civilization. For us … [as] for Asia, the basis of life is religious belief.”48 At the same time, both Russians and Asians were repelled by materialism. But above all, the two were bound by a yearning for a ruler’s firm, paternal hand: “The East believes no less than we do … [in] the most precious of our national traditions—autocracy. Without it, Asia would be incapable of sincere liking for Russia and of painless identification with her.”49
Asianism lost its appeal among policy makers in St. Petersburg after the catastrophic war with Japan. Meanwhile, Ivanov-Razumnik’s Scythians, the Silver Age poets who also detected an affinity with the East, succumbed to tight Bolshevik controls on literature in the early 1920s. In emigration, many of these beliefs were revived by the Eurasianists (Evraziitsi), but with one important difference. Rather than stressing Russia’s Oriental nature, the Eurasianists argued that their nation was a world unto itself: neither Asian nor European, but rather combining elements of both. Nevertheless, many of the Eurasianists’ core beliefs—such as their rejection of materialism, their advocacy of autocracy, and their stress on spirituality—explicitly rejected the West.50
Based in Prague, the Eurasianist movement emerged in 1921 with the publication of a collection of essays, Exodus to the East.51 Among the collaborators were a linguist, Prince Nikolai Trubetskoi; a geographer, Petr Savitskii; a music critic, Petr Suvchinskii; and the theologian Georges Florovsky. A year later, George Vernadsky, a promising young historian who had just landed a job in the Czech capital, joined them. Vernadsky boasted a distinguished academic provenance. His father, Vladimir, had been a leading professor of mineralogy, and Vernadsky fils had attended the two leading Russian history departments, at Moscow and St. Petersburg universities, and also studied in Berlin and Freiburg. After five years in Prague, Vernadsky left Europe for America in 1927 to take up a newly established position in Russian history at Yale University.
Vernadsky wrote his most polemical Eurasianist works, Characteristics of Russian History and A Preliminary History of Eurasia, early in his career.52 His focus was the great Eurasian steppe, the vast prairie that stretches from Mongolia to Ukraine. As he explained in these books, because of its flat topography, the steppe was repeatedly the meeting place for European and Asian peoples. The nomads who periodically swept westward from the depths of Inner Asia, such as the Scythians, the Huns, and the Mongols, had intermarried with the more sedentary East Slavs. In a subsequent work he explained, “Each of these invasions brought new cultural patterns and each, when it retreated years or centuries later, left its imprint indelibly on the land that was to become Russia.”53
Muscovite and tsarist conquest completed what Vernadsky called the “millennial historical symbiosis” of the Slavs and the steppe nomads. According to the Eurasianists, together the Russians, Finns, Turks, Mongols, and all the other nations that were spawned from the Inner Asian steppes had blended into a “superethnos,” a people they called “Turanian.” Eurasia’s peoples, the Turanian superethnos, had many characteristics in common, including related blood types and languages, but the most significant was a shared consciousness of the need for strong, autocratic government. All of Eurasia’s most successful rulers, from the Scythians to the Romanov tsars, had governed with a firm hand. According to Vernadsky, “The organization of the Eurasian state, because of its enormous size, is very much along military lines.”54 Furthermore, along with an instinctive yearning for strong rule, Eurasia’s peoples were also united by a deep spirituality.55
In his later New Haven years, Vernadsky moderated some of his Eurasianist ideas. Although he continued to stress the importance of the steppe in Russian history, his biographer Charles Halperin points out that his “immigration to the United States … purged [his] Eurasianism of its authoritarian, chauvinist, collectivist, and elitist aspects.”56 For many Russians today, however, it is not the mild-mannered Ivy League incarnation of George Vernadsky that intrigues them, but the youthful firebrand of Prague in the 1920s.
Even at their peak, the Eurasianists never attracted more than a small following among other émigrés. More prominent Russian intellectuals abroad, such as the distinguished liberal historian Pavel Miliukov, strongly disagreed with the movement’s anti-Western bias.57 However, the ideology has enjoyed a renaissance in the years following the collapse of Communist rule. Its resurgence in the 1990s was closely linked to a profound disenchantment with the West among many Russians. The Canadian writer and statesman Michael Ignatieff observed that the dispute over whether Russia is European had once again emerged with a vengeance: “Since Pushkin, Russian intellectuals have argued bitterly about whether Russia is or is not part of European civilization. Slavophiles versus Westernisers, Dostoyevsky versus Tolstoy—the argument goes to the very heart of Russian self-definition. For one side, the Europe of markets, parliamentary democracy, and individual rights represented Russia’s only hope of escaping Asiatic backwardness and the madhouse of Slavic nationalism; for the other, Europe’s capitalism represented the soulless, gimcrack, heartless individualism that the Russian soul should flee, as from the devil himself.”58 Yet, despite Ignatieff ’s implication, it was not Slavophilism that had enjoyed a rebirth as much as Eurasianism. Several collections of Eurasianist essays have been issued in large printings. Meanwhile, the works of the Lev Gumilev, a Brezhnevera dissident with strong Eurasianist leanings, are everywhere, and translations of Vernadsky’s A History of Russia (first published by Yale University Press in 1929) are also now available in Russian bookshops.59
Eurasianism has found a strong following among both friends and opponents of the current regime, including Communists and others who would restore Russia to its former Soviet glory. As John Dunlop, an American scholar who has long studied Russian nationalism, noted: “The resurrection of a formerly obscure émigré ideology in the 1990s should, upon reflection, cause little surprise. With the effective demise of Marxism-Leninism as a ‘glue’ for holding the Soviet Union together, ‘empire savers’ were forced to cast about for substitutes.”60
One well-known cultural figure influenced by Eurasianism is the patriotic film director and sometime presidential candidate, Nikita Mikhailkov. In an interview in December 1991, Mikhailkov thundered against “the [Russian] government’s illusory notion that our state is based on the European political model.” He went on to proclaim: “We are not Europe’s backyard; we are Asia’s front door.”61 Mikhailkov’s film, Close to Eden, shot in 1992, is a clear expression of Eurasianism. It depicts the friendship of a wandering Russian truck driver and a Mongolian nomad who meet on the steppe. The encroaching capitalist materialism of the modern world (here in the guise of an Americanized Chinese city) is portrayed as impure and alien.
On the Russian right, the best-known neo-Eurasianists are Aleksandr Prokhanov and Pavel Dugin, editors, respectively, of the tabloid Zavtra (Tomorrow) and the journal Elementy (Elements). More curious is the warm response Eurasianism has found among post-Soviet Communists. Gennadii Ziuganov, the chair of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, speaks and writes glowingly about the movement: “From its beginning, Eurasianism was the creative response of the Russian national consciousness to the Russian Revolution.”62 Yet in the confusing politics of the post-Soviet era, this rehabilitation of an émigré intellectual current from the 1920s by Muscovite Communists seven decades later makes perfect sense. The Russian political scientist Andrei Novikov has observed that “today people are studying the [Eurasianist geopolitical philosophy] of Lev Gumilev … just as diligently as formerly they read Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. Marxist historical determinism has been transformed into another kind of determinism, the national-geopolitical variant.”63
In 1997 Ziuganov published his strongest statement on Eurasianist ideas in The Geography of Victory. Written in the style of a textbook on geopolitics, the tract predictably attacks American primacy in global affairs. Like Leont’ev and Prince Ukhtomskii, Ziuganov urges his compatriots to reject the Occident in favor of its Oriental nature. “To an important extent, Russia belongs to the East,” he proclaims. He also finds much to admire in Confucian values. Echoing a hoary claim of tsarist propaganda, he argues that Russians have traditionally had much more pacific dealings with their neighbors in Asia than with Europeans. In a rare reference to his own party’s former leaders, he adds: “In Soviet times the traditional ‘turn to the East’ … received a renewed impulse. It was precisely among the peoples of the Orient that Soviet Russia found allies in its struggle against Western oppression and blackmail.” Today, Ziuganov believes, Russians must cement their ties with Asia because “Russia and China are inexorably joined in a single historical destiny.”64
There is no simple answer to Dostoyevsky’s question of what Asia is to Russia. Much more familiar with the East than other Europeans, Russians have invariably seen the Orient in a multiplicity of hues. Whether foe or friend, danger or destiny, other or self, or, as Vladimir Solov’ev put it, “of Xerxes or of Christ,”65 their perceptions of Asia have defied easy characterization. As in the West, for the Russian imagination the Orient has been the source of both dreams and nightmares, but greater intimacy with its people has fashioned a unique symbiosis of fantasy and reality.
By the same token, Russian orientologists did not reduce the object of their inquiry to some uniform, Saidian other. Their views varied widely, but on the whole, neither fear nor contempt dominated the academy. Some professors were utterly convinced of their cultural superiority and regarded the East with disdain. Many sympathized with tsarist ambitions in Asia. But most respected the nations they studied and even found them appealing. The fact that they were chinovniki (government employees) was of little import. Indeed, even more than elsewhere, Russian scholarship about Asia was intimately linked to the state. The continent’s languages were taught at universities to train officials who could serve the autocracy in administering its Eastern territories and acquire new ones. Yet, like academics elsewhere, their curiosity was not necessarily motivated by raison d’état. Such attitudes were well described by Jean-Jacques Waardenburg in his book about European perceptions of Islam: “Understanding is more than knowing; it is even something else…. When [such understanding] involves a foreign, human phenomenon, the summons to knowing can only be answered when the scholar exhibits some esteem for this phenomenon: Perhaps this is because he recognizes that it is human…. Understanding something presupposes having an open mind, a mind that can adapt to the question being studied.”66
The most intriguing element of Russian thinking about Asia is the sense among many of a shared heritage. Not a few noble lineages took pride in their Tartar bloodlines, and the population more generally has been less anxious about intermarriage among races than other Europeans. If there were not many Russians who looked back nostalgically to two and a half centuries of submission to the Golden Horde, the Mongol yoke also left a legacy whose effects still remain a source of lively controversy. Meanwhile, ever since the Cossack Ermak and his heirs conquered Siberia in the late sixteenth century, the bulk of Russia’s landmass has lain within the Asian continent. While his outlook was distinctly Occidental, even Lenin understood that “Russia is geographically, economically and historically related both to Europe and Asia.”67
The advocates of Russia’s Oriental character have always been in a minority. However, their ideas have survived, and now, after the fall of the Soviet Union, they can be found among the most prominent political movements in the Russian Federation. Profoundly uneasy about a “new world order” dominated by the West’s premier power, it is easy for nationalist Russians to believe that their country shares something with Asia as they reject the intrusive, materialist West, with its World Bank hotshots, fast food, pornography, and unruly parliaments. The “Asian values” of autocracy, order, and paternalism seem much more appealing to those nostalgic for a mighty Russia. Rightist opposition parties—old-line Communists, new-line fascists, and extremist nationalists—often claim a racial affinity to the East. Even senior Kremlin officials occasionally invoke an Asian identity. One of Boris Yeltsin’s foreign ministers, Igor Ivanov, reminded his compatriots: “Russia has been, is, and will be an Asian power.”68 Under Vladimir Putin and Dmitrii Medvedev, the Kremlin is also occasionally given to such posturing while ostentatiously trying to build anti-Western coalitions with Asian powers.
Russian musings about Asia often reflect considerations about national identity. If the nineteenth-century debate between the Slavophiles and the Westernizers received more attention, the East has played a similar role in Russia’s ongoing quest to understand its true place in the world. Ultimately these discussions about affinities with the Occident and the Orient are part of the same dialogue. And when the West’s allure diminishes, the East often grows more enticing.