Eurasianism: A Reaffirmation of Empire

Contemporary Eurasianism is undoubtedly marked by the strong personality of Alexander Dugin (1962). However, Eurasianist thought cannot be reduced to that of the latter (which he does not claim). At the same time, the Eurasianist movement has been able, during the two clearly differentiated phases of its history, to gather original and independent thinkers (and regularly in disagreement), while keeping a very specific intellectual identity.

Pyotr Savitsky: Father of Eurasianism and Theorist of Topogenesis

Eurasianist thought was born in exile at the beginning of the 1920s, at the initiative of certain White Russian intellectuals. Its main theorists were Prince Nicholai Trubetzskoy (1890-1938) and Pyotr Savitsky (1895-1968). The Eurasianist movement gradually broke up during the 1930s, before disappearing after the Second World War: the fairly complex thinking of Eurasianism was probably no longer suited to the simplistic confrontation of ideologies typical of the Cold War. However, Eurasianism experienced a revival in Russia in the 1990s (it was then referred to as neo-Eurasianism), around the personalities of Alexander Dugin and Alexander Panarin (1940-2003). It is not insignificant to note that the two historical phases of Eurasianism reacted each time to a fall: the fall of the “White Empire” of the Romanovs for classical Eurasianism, and the fall of the “Red Empire” of the USSR for neo-Eurasianism. We can thus readily define Eurasianism as a will to rethink the fundamentally imperial identity of Russia, at times when it seemed threatened with dissolution.

Before Eurasianism

If the double birth of Eurasianism is thus linked to precise contexts, the latter was obviously not constituted like Athena already emerging armed from Zeus’ brain. Without falling into the always somewhat vain exercise of “searching for precursors,” it is obvious that Eurasianism is rooted in a typically Russian intellectual soil, inaugurated by the father of Slavophilism, Aleksey Khomyakov (1804-1860). He interpreted history as the confrontation of two principles: the Iranian principle and the Kushite principle. These two principles were conceived as covering all the structural dichotomies of the world. To the Iranian/Kushite opposition thus corresponds the oppositions freedom/determinism, spirituality/ materialism, peasant civilization/industrial civilization, autocracy/plutocracy, Orthodoxy/Catholicism and Protestantism, East/West. Khomyakov thus radically opposed to a Kushite West an Iranian East, to which he integrated Russia. This integration of Russia with the East nourished Khomyakov’s interest in Iran and India (he would go so far as to learn Sanskrit to be able to read in the original the classical works of Hinduism). This conception of a Russia, open to the East but closed to the West, would become a constitutive pillar of Eurasianism.

The work of Constantine Leontiev (1831-1891) can be seen as a link between nineteenth-century slavophilism and twentieth-century Eurasianism. The latter, a veteran of the Crimean War, conceived of “Western progress” as a globalist and aggressive process of standardization of humanity from below. In contrast, he defended a diversity of men and cultures, finding its unity in a common imperial identity. This dialectic of the respect of the human diversity in the unity of the empire, put in opposition with the petty-bourgeois uniformity of the Western State-nation, will find itself in the Eurasianist thought. Thinking that the future of Russia was not in Europe but in Asia, Leontiev invited his compatriots to consider themselves no longer as Slavs, but as “Turanians” (the term “Turanians” designating, in the vocabulary of the time, the Turko-Mongolian peoples of Central Asia). Inaudible for his contemporaries, this renewal of Russian identity proposed by Leontiev will find an echo among Eurasianists.

The Idea of Eurasia

Eurasianist thought is vast and embraces many fields and themes. It is thus impossible to reveal it in its entirety here (we would in any case be hard pressed to give an account of Nicolai Trobetzskoy’s structural linguistic work). However, Eurasianists share a common way of conceiving the Eurasian discourse in itself. Totally anti-constructivist, Eurasianist thought considers that Eurasia pre-exists in its essence. The idea of Eurasia is an Idea, in the Platonic sense of the term, and the purpose of the Eurasianist discourse is therefore not to construct it, but to unveil it. This Eurasian Idea is thus fundamentally revealed in a territory that is neither Europe nor Asia, but a third continent: Eurasia. That the Idea of Eurasia is revealed in the territory of Eurasia may seem a very trivial statement, but it is not. Indeed, it means that, for the Eurasianists, Eurasia is a fact of nature, whose unity and specificity will have to be demonstrated by the geographical sciences. Eurasianism is thus thought of, on the theoretical level, as a scientific demonstration of the Eurasian Idea. Eurasian thought is thus characterized at the same time as a metaphysics and as a science (Trubetzskoy thus spoke of a geosophy of Eurasianism).

This naturalistic conception of Eurasia explains why the delimitations of the latter have never been the object of a clear consensus among Eurasianists, without them regarding this state of affairs as a real problem. Indeed, being defined by geographical and not historical-political criteria, Eurasia is not delimited by borders in the strict sense of the term, but rather by peripheral zones, by boundaries. Globally, Eurasia corresponds to the territory of the former USSR. In the East, Mongolia and possibly Tibet are generally added to it. Dugin excludes the Kuril Islands, which he proposes to return to Japan. The problem of the eastern limits of Eurasia has never really worried Eurasianists, insofar as they think of an opening of Eurasia to Asia, and see in the Asian countries natural allies in the face of Western hegemony (Alexander Panarin, who was a professor of political philosophy at Moscow State University, thus theorized the construction of a Sino-Eurasian alliance against the American “new world order”).

The problem of the Western limits of Eurasia is quite different, and has been of great concern to Eurasians (which is explained by their conception of a Eurasia closed to the West). The Eurasian territory is also based on that of the former USSR, excluding the Baltic States and the enclave of Kaliningrad, and with the addition of Bessarabia for some. Ukraine is considered Eurasian, but suffers from a very ambiguous status. As a western boundary of Eurasia, and because of its historical links with Poland, Ukraine is seen as having been largely influenced by the West (to such an extent that Eurasianists called the westernization of Russia in the Petersburg period “Ukrainization”). As a result, Eurasianists always considered that an independent Ukraine detached from Russia could not be anything other than a Trojan horse of the West in Eurasian unity.

The Concept of Topogenesis

Alexander Dugin describes this basically continental Eurasian space as “tellurocratic,” characterized by a traditional and socialist spirit, and opposes it to a “thalassocratic” Atlantic space, modern and capitalist (an opposition that we already find, mutatis mutandis, in The Peloponnesian War, where Thucydides opposes a “tellurocratic” and aristocratic Sparta to a “thalassocratic” and democratic Athens). The geographical opposition between a continental Eurasian space and a maritime Atlantic space is thus coupled with a civilizational opposition. Eurasian thought holds that civilization is conditioned (and not determined) by place. This is what Pyotr Savitsky proposed to call “topogenesis” (and which he considered a scientific concept): A specific geographical space conditions a specific civilization. To the Eurasian space thus corresponds a Eurasian civilization.

In the eyes of Eurasianists, religion is at the foundation of any civilization. The Eurasian civilization is thus for them fundamentally Orthodox. Atheism, deism, Catholicism, or Protestantism are seen as Western elements, foreign, and even opposed to Eurasian civilization. Thus, with a few exceptions, all Eurasianists are explicitly Orthodox. However, without questioning the sincerity of the personal faith of the Eurasianists, some criticized the ensuing notion that Russian Christianity thus does not seem to be based on a supernatural revelation, but simply as an expression of the Eurasian topogenesis; Father Georges Florovsky distanced himself from the movement for this reason, seeing in it a naturalistic reduction of the Christian mystery. Nevertheless, Eurasianists always remained conscious that not all Eurasians are Orthodox, and stressed that Russian Orthodoxy, while keeping its central role, can recognize, esteem, and fraternize with other Eurasian religious expressions. Thus, in the inter-war period, the Jewish Eurasianist Yakov Bromberg defended the existence of a specifically Eurasian Jewishness through the Khazar experience. More recently, Dorji-Lama, a spiritual leader of the Kalmyk Buddhists, joined Alexander Dugin’s Eurasianist organization.

But it is especially to Islam that the Eurasianists opened up, underlining the precocity with which the Russian empire was equipped with a representative institution of the Muslims of Russia (the great Muftiate of Russia was created by the empress Catherine II in 1788), and not forgetting that 40% of the citizens of the ex-USSR were Muslims. They held the existence of a specifically Eurasian Islam, Turkic, and influenced by Sufism and Shiism (Wahhabi Islam is on the other hand absolutely rejected as non-Eurasian, and being totally subservient to hated America). Dugin, mobilizing a conceptuality drawn from his reading of René Guénon, affirmed that Turkic Islam and Russian Orthodoxy are both linked in their essence to the “Primordial Tradition” (as well as all the authentically traditional religions) coming from “Hyperborea,” which he situates in Siberia (this conception is not foreign to Russian mythology; indeed, in the fourteenth century the archbishop Basil of Novgorod affirmed the existence of a secret terrestrial paradise in Siberia, which obviously refers to the biblical myth of the Garden of Eden and is very reminiscent of the Buddhist myth of Shamballah). Muslim personalities thus drew closer to Eurasianism: Talgat Tadzhuddin, former grand mufti of Russia, joined Dugin’s Eurasianist movement; and especially Nursultan Nazarbayev, former president of Kazakhstan and promoter of a specifically Turkic Eurasianism, distinct from the properly Russian Eurasianism (and to whom Dugin devoted a dithyrambic book).

As we can see, topogenesis is neither a determinism nor a universalism; it conditions and adapts that which exists. The various religions and cultures of Eurasia keep their particular identity, while showing common civilizational traits, making them all converge in the Eurasian unity, understood as a community, both natural and mystical, of destiny. The concept of topogenesis is thus a nodal point of Eurasian thought, where a dialectic of the one and the many is woven, founding an imperial affirmation of identity that respects (but also embraces) the particular identities of Eurasian peoples. it should also be noted that this strictly organicist conception leaves no room for individual choice—a Mormon Tatar who loves the country cannot be anything but a dangerous anomaly from a Eurasian perspective).

A Differentialist Critique of Western Universalism

This notion of topogenesis is also the basis of the Eurasian critique of Western universalism. The latter is understood as postulating the existence of a unique human civilization, the different cultures being only the expression of this unique civilization at different historical stages of advancement, obviously leading to the Western model, seen as the most advanced and most desirable historical stage of humanity (Eurasianists note that white supremacism is finally only a naturalized form of this universalism). Western civilization is thus seen as the goal of all humanity, and its model of development as the unique direction of history. Alexander Panarin considers that this superiority complex of the West comes from the obvious power of its industrial and consumerist model, while underlining that the contemporary ecological crisis undeniably demonstrates its harmful character.

To this historicist universalism of the West, justifying its political hegemony as well as the cultural westernization of the world, Eurasianists resolutely oppose a “geographist” differentialism. In their eyes, the Western model is absolutely not universal. As we have already said, each geographical space corresponds for Eurasianists to a given civilization, the Western model therefore legitimately and exclusively corresponds to the Western geographical space. Eurasianism thus defends an incommensurability and an equality of civilizations between them, which must each be respected in their specificity. The inexpiable fault of the West is thus to have believed itself superior to the rest of the world, granting itself the right to invade it “for its own good,” scorning thereby the irrefutable right of each people to remain itself and to develop according to its own internal logic; that is to say to remain faithful to its own topogenesis. The Eurasianists thus always presented themselves as anti-colonialists and Third Worldists (and this already in the 1920s; that is to say at a time when this was not yet fashionable). In France, Aleksander Dugin came closer to the New Right led by Alain de Benoist, which also carried a differentialist critique of Western universalism, while Aleksander Panarin, for his part, came closer to certain researchers from postcolonial studies. The latter affirmed in this respect that the providential mission of Eurasia is to take the lead in the revolt of the Third World against Western hegemony.

Eurasia as Ideocracy

Panarin’s Eurasian messianism undeniably reproduced certain “tics” of Russian nationalism. It is an observation that can be extended to the whole of Eurasianist thought, which grants Orthodox “Holy Russia” the role of the “spearhead” of Eurasia. Eurasianists, however, have always denied being reactionary. In the 1920s, they strongly criticized White Russians who stubbornly remained monarchists, and instead claimed to be “futurists” (and even “cosmists” for the most left-wing). If they rejected the Marxist ideology, they saw in the Soviet experience an important step in the process of political incarnation of the Eurasian Idea. For the Eurasianists, the Russian people, Orthodox and theophore, were providentially elected to carry out this process, i.e., to make the Eurasian empire come true. The latter, political incarnation of the Eurasian Idea, is thus understood by Eurasianist thought as an ideocracy, aristocratic and authoritarian regime, of religious and socialist essence, expressing the Eurasian organicity.

The Eurasianists trace the history of the constitution of the Eurasian ideocracy, through a historical meta-narrative breaking with traditional Russian historiography. Indeed, the Rus’ of Kiev is thus seen as denying its usual founding role. Only Saint Vladimir of Kiev (958-1015), for his historical choice of Byzantine Christianity, and Saint Alexander Nevsky (1220-1263) are preserved. The latter, confronted in the East by the Mongols, and in the West by the Teutonic Knights (launched in the famous Baltic, or Northern Crusades), chose to recognize the suzerainty of Batu Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, and to oppose the Teutonic Knights—thus making the choice of Eurasia against the West (the Eurasianists also contrasted Saint Alexander Nevsky with another Russian prince, Daniel of Galicia, who made the opposite choice, and whom they condemned to hell-fire for that; one finds here the dual character of Ukraine in Eurasianist thought)—because it is indeed the Mongolian empire which is seen as the matrix of the Eurasian ideocracy. The Eurasianist historiography, in an original way, thus rehabilitated Genghis Khan and the Genghisids. Lev Gumilev (1912-1992) pointed out the Christian dimension of the Mongol empire, including among its high aristocracy (the mother of Kublai Khan, emperor of China and grandson of Genghis Khan, was a Church of the East Christian princess). While traditional Russian historiography sees in the affirmation of Muscovy a founding struggle for national liberation against the Mongols, Eurasian historiography sees in Moscow the heir to the Mongol empire. The providential mission of the Russian people is therefore to bring to its historical completion the work that the Mongolian people started: the constitution of the Eurasian ideocratic empire.

It is difficult to assess the influence of Eurasianism on contemporary Russian politics. Those who have made Dugin into an eminence grise of the Kremlin, or even into a Eurasianist of President Putin, have probably greatly exaggerated. However, it would be wrong to underestimate the capacity of Eurasianist thought, with its mystical, political and scientific roots, to infuse some of its ideas into the state ideologies of the countries of the former USSR (as the examples of Russia, Kazakhstan and, to a lesser extent, Kyrgyzstan demonstrate).

Grégoire Quevreux currently teaches philosophy at the Institut Protestant de Théologie de Paris, and is completing a doctoral thesis on process theology under the direction of Professor Cyrille Michon. This article appears through the kind courtesy of PHILITT.

Featured: “The Road in the Rye,” by Grigoriy Myasoyedov; painted in 1881.

Russian Cosmism: A Union of Spirit and Science?

The term “Russian cosmism” does not designate a school of thought that structured by theses, institutions or a precise program. Rather, the cosmists constitute a nebulous group of Russian authors of the 19th and 20th centuries, who have in common the idea of a union of the spirit and science, through utopian and grandiose visions. Two of them have particularly marked Russian history, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Nikolai Fyodorov.

On October 4, 1957, radio amateurs all over the world, for the first time, received a signal from space. It wasn’t aliens on the loose, but Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite in history, put into orbit by the Russians. This undeniable success of Soviet technoscience was of course also presented as a triumph of dialectical materialism. It was however forgetting in passing all that the Soviet aerospace owed to a man with conceptions very far from Marxism-Leninism— Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.

Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) spent most of his life in Russia, in the remote region of Kaluga (he was nicknamed “the eccentric of Kaluga”). It is there, in a small and modest wooden house, that he laid the theoretical and technical foundations of aerospace. Today, all historians of science (even American) recognize Tsiolkovsky as the one who laid the scientific foundations of space travel. He also wrote several science-fiction novels, with the avowed aim of making the new generations desire to go into space. Among his readers were Valentin Glouchko (who, along with Sergei Korolev, became a pillar of the Soviet space program), as well as Yuri Gagarin, the first man to go into space.

In order to make Tsiolkovsky a hero as a “brilliant scientist from the people” (a monument to his glory was erected in Moscow), Soviet propaganda had to make many aspects of his thought totally taboo—especially since for Tsiolkovsky space travel was not a goal in itself, but a means to the service of a project even more disproportionate—the perfection of humanity.

A Universe Full of Angels

Tsiolkovsky thought that God had created a universe in which all matter is also spirit (to be exact, Tsiolkovsky affirmed that he did not believe in God, but in a perfectly good, omniscient and omnipotent supreme being, who had created the world; which makes one think of the well-known joke of the Hellenists: it was not Homer who wrote the Iliad, but someone who had the same name as him). This conception (which he qualifies as panpsychist) means that the matter present everywhere in the universe is endowed in itself with a spiritual force, with a form of consciousness which makes it evolve towards higher and higher forms: mineral, vegetable, animal, human, then…

Tsiolkovsky believed that to spread in space was the only way for humanity to ensure in a certain way its survival, to avoid an extinction of the human species in the event of terrestrial catastrophe (a position that certain very media-oriented scientists today share). But he added that man could only spread in space if he took in hand his own evolution and radically modified his own body, in order to adapt to extraterrestrial conditions (a concept that contemporary science fiction calls panthropy). To emancipate oneself from the Earth, implied for Tsiolkovsky, to emancipate oneself also from our animality (sexuality, mortality, need to eat and drink). Eventually, human beings would spread in the whole universe, and become “etheric” beings, magnificent and immortal (this transformation implying moreover the elimination of all the terrestrial life forms not reaching these standards of perfection).

In the eyes of the “eccentric of Kaluga,” this transformation into “etheric” beings had already been accomplished by extraterrestrials. By exploring space, humanity would end up meeting these extraterrestrial “angels,” living on heavenly planets. While waiting for this day, these “angelic” beings maintain the Earth, a planet that is not very evolved at the moment, in a sort of galactic quarantine. But they try nevertheless to communicate with us, to guide us, despite the gap that separates us. Tsiolkovsky himself said that he had communicated with these “space angels” (in the 1970s, some people reused Tsiolkovsky’s theories to imagine a Russian version of the “ancient astronauts theory,” according to which the ancient religions were inspired by visits from extraterrestrials).

Tsiolkovsky never really received an academic education. He was in all respects a self-taught man. This made his scientific work all the more impressive. But when he arrived in Moscow at the age of 16, he took advantage of the reading advice of an obscure librarian, and then quickly joined the group of young students that this librarian gathered around him. This man, who took the young Tsiolkovsky under his wing, was named Nicolai Fedorov.

The Resurrection of the Dead

If Tsiolkovski is the most recognized cosmist on the scientific level, Nicolas Fedorov (1829-1903) is the first of them. Totally unknown during his lifetime, he generally shared his thoughts only with a selected circle of companions. Two of his disciples published his writings after his death in a single book: The Philosophy of the Common Work. Unlike Tsiolkovsky, Fedorov always saw himself as a faithful member of the Orthodox Church. In his eyes, humanity had an important and active eschatological role to play in the completion of the creation initiated by God. He thus conceived his thinking as Christianity, but Christianity in a radically reinterpreted sense. Christ had shown the way by resurrecting at Easter: Christianity was thus to be the religion of the resurrection of the dead, of the resurrection of the dead by properly human, scientific and technical means.

Nicolai Fedorov

For Fedorov, death is either a disintegration, i.e., a dissolution in multiplicity, or a fusion, i.e., a dissolution in unity (he considered the Holy Trinity, the unique God at the same time one and multiple, as the archetype of immortality). However, he also considered that disintegration and fusion are natural forces. Wherever he looked, he saw in the natural world only the reign of death. Fedorov insisted on the national and typically Russian character of this way of looking at nature. The romantic conception of nature was a fantasy of the urban bourgeois and “soil-less.” The muzhik, on the other hand, knew that the taiga does not offer any gifts, and that survival is always conquered over murderous nature. By taking control of natural forces through scientific and technical means, humanity would be able to defeat death itself and resurrect all its ancestors. At this point, all human beings who have ever lived must be resurrected. For Fedorov, this is an absolute moral duty, a matter of filial piety towards those who have gone before us, and thanks to whom we exist. We must give life back to those who gave it to us. Reproduction, sexuality, death, suffering, eating, drinking, all these natural things will disappear when the living and the dead are regenerated in new and immortal bodies, having little to do with our present animal body (this rejection of the “animal body” of man is common to many cosmists). This regenerated and invulnerable mankind, and also very numerous, will be able to spread into space, to settle on other planets, and to make the universe a paradise (Fedorov envisaged that the planet Earth itself could become an immense spaceship, thanks to the control of cosmic forces). Such was the communal work envisaged by Fedorov.

The philosopher Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900) noted, with a certain irony, that Fedorov’s project was not a plan for the next thousand years, but rather a plan for the next ten thousand years. But if Fedorov suspected that his contemporaries would never take his ideas seriously, he had no doubt about their long-term feasibility. He believed that many peoples were dispersing and wasting their creative energies on war, democracy and capitalism. The realization of the common work required that mankind channel its forces and unite under an autocratic regime. This was, for Fedorov, the messianic vocation of the imperial throne of Holy Russia. The tsar, God’s chosen monarch, was to unite all countries and peoples under his rule for the eschatological fulfillment of the common work.

The Desert will Become a Garden Again

A few years before his death, Fedorov was invited by one of his disciples to visit the Pamir Mountains. This extremely desolate region made a strong impression on him. He saw in the Pamir a symbol of both Mount Meru (the sacred center of the world in Hinduism) and the Garden of Eden (for Fedorov, all religions derived from the same sophia perennis—the cult of the ancestors), a land of origin of the Indo-Europeans, transformed into a desert by the ignorance and barbarism of men. The first task of the common work was therefore to turn the Pamir into a garden, to make life blossom again where death reigned, just as, by dispersing into space, regenerated humanity would fill a universe, hitherto filled with death, with life. This revived Pamir, the triumph of life and science over death and ignorance, was to become the center of a united world dedicated to the realization of the common work under the leadership of the tsar.

After having reviewed the thought of the two most important cosmists in history, a question naturally arises—what to make of this improbable muddle of ideas that are at least astonishing, if not frankly bizarre, and sometimes even a little unhealthy? Tsiolkovsky and Fedorov were certainly “sweet dreamers,” but they were certainly not “lunatics.” As an aerospace pioneer, Tsiolkovsky is undoubtedly one of the most important scientists of the 20th century. Fedorov, on the other hand, impressed some of the greatest minds of the Russian Silver Age: Tsiolkovsky, of course, but also Dostoyevsky, Soloviev, Tolstoy, Florensky, Vernadsky, Bulgakov, Berdiaev. However, among all these eminent scientists, philosophers and novelists, none of them really took up the strange philosophy of Fedorov’s common work.

As we have already said, “cosmism” is not a school of thought, and there is no such thing as “Fedorovism.” What these brilliant minds admired in Fedorov was not a system of thought or specific theses, but rather this will to rethink human progress in general, and scientific progress in particular, in a spiritual framework. Fedorov believed that science without spirituality and spirituality without science would both lead humanity to catastrophe. His philosophy of the common work, once brought back to its fundamental intuition, can thus be understood as a utopian vision aiming at avoiding the announced catastrophe. This is what, in Fedorov (as well as in the other cosmists), struck his contemporaries, and continues to be striking today—this vision of a union of spirit and science, in a creative and utopian act of synthesis, giving its legitimacy and its place to human activity, genius and progress, in the eschatological realization of the divine transfiguration of the cosmos. The cosmists were certainly very strange thinkers, but they have undoubtedly more to say to us than the transhumanists and the fundamentalists who swarm us today.

Grégoire Quevreux currently teaches philosophy at the Institut Protestant de Théologie de Paris, and is completing a doctoral thesis on process theology under the direction of Professor Cyrille Michon. This article appears through the kind courtesy of PHILITT.

Featured: “Captured asteroid,” by Andrey Sokolov; postcard, 1965.