When Russian troops seized Crimea in 2014, German chancellor Angela Merkel, reporting on her conversation with Vladimir Putin, told President Obama that the Russian president seemed to dwell “in another world.” In a sense she was right: Russians and Westerners see the world quite differently, and our failure to understand Russia’s perspective made its actions seem surprising in 2014 and still more so when it invaded Ukraine in 2022.
How do Russians think about what their country is doing in Ukraine? If we are to grasp why so many have supported the attack on Georgia in 2008, the seizure of Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014, and the present war, we need to recognize that their fundamental assumptions differ from ours. Americans, for example, typically take for granted that the state exists to promote the welfare of its citizens, but Russians often believe the opposite. After all, individuals come and go, but Russia remains. And Russia is not just a nation; it is also an idea.
The “Russian idea,” throughout its many changes, has typically been messianic. It explains the world and gives life purpose; it shapes domestic and foreign policy and, more importantly, gives Russians a sense of their “Russianness”—which includes the ability to save the world. In his famous book The Russian Idea (1946), the philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev argued that Bolshevism owes as much to Russian messianism as to Marx. Medieval Russians, he and many others emphasize, often considered themselves the only true Christians. The Byzantines had, at the Council of Florence in 1439, recognized the pope to secure Western aid against the Turks, thereby betraying the Orthodox faith, which is supposedly why they succumbed to the Ottomans in 1453. From that point on, Moscow, the capital of the only independent Orthodox country until the nineteenth century, became the “Third Rome,” the heir to both Rome and Byzantium as the seat of Christendom. Russians were destined to save the world because, as the monk Philotheus explained, “a fourth Rome there will not be.”
Bolshevism inherited this messianic spirit. The Soviet Union would liberate the workers of the world and create the final utopia. It took Stalin to fuse Marxist internationalism with traditional Russian pride: internationalism would be the work of Russia, the savior nation. Stalin drew on a tradition of Russianness defined as a sort of super-nationality. Every nation manifests a special quality, but Russia, as Dostoevsky argued, displays the unique ability to absorb and perfectly express the qualities of all others. Because of this “receptivity” (ozyvchivost’), Dostoevsky concluded, Russians “may have a greater capacity than other nations to embrace the idea of the universal fellowship of humans, of brotherly love.” As proof, he adduces the Spaniards and Englishmen portrayed in Pushkin’s poems, who, he imagines, differ not a whit from actual Spaniards and Englishmen. I am reminded of the witticism that the linguist Roman Jakobson could speak Russian fluently in six languages.
After the fall of the USSR, ideologies competed to replace communism. Liberalism, considered foreign, was overwhelmed by various types of nationalism, one of which, Eurasianism, seems to have achieved the status of a semiofficial ideology. Putin uses Eurasianist phrases, the army’s general staff academy assigns a Eurasianist textbook, and popular culture has embraced its ideas and vocabulary. The better to build an empire, Eurasianism, like Stalinism, carries the banner of anti-imperialism, claiming to unite the world under Russian leadership in order to liberate it from Western cultural colonialism. It could be no other way. As Aleksandr Dugin, the movement’s current leader, explained, “Outside of empire, Russians lose their identity and disappear as a nation.”
Eurasianism began a little over a century ago. Unlike most of its rivals today, it has engaged some truly creative minds. Russian intellectual history, in fact, offers several movements in which powerful thinkers arrive at absurd and often repulsive conclusions. To understand them is to grasp how intelligent people anywhere can accept preposterous beliefs and claim “scientific” certainty for ideas counter to the very spirit of science.
Finding themselves in exile after the revolution and civil war, a group of Russian intellectuals, mostly from the nobility, regarded recent events as a catastrophe unrivaled in history. They experienced profound alienation from both their homeland and the European world in which they found themselves. In his essay “Two Worlds,” Pyotr Savitsky, the movement’s first leader, observed, “Russian exiles are like immigrants ‘from another world,’ like inhabitants of other planets.” Like earlier Russian émigrés, they found a home in the ideology they created.
“Two Worlds” is included in Foundations of Eurasianism, a collection of important texts from the movement, many of which appear in English for the first time. The Bolshevik coup, Savitsky and his fellow émigrés reasoned, simply accelerated the disastrous policy of Westernization pursued by Romanov tsars since Peter the Great. Russia must at last realize that it does not belong to European civilization. It belongs instead to the entirely separate world of “Eurasia.” Culturally, historically, and psychologically, Russians are a steppe people who resemble the Turkic and Mongolian (or “Turanian”) peoples of Central Asia. Far from being a calamity, the Mongol conquest of Russia (roughly 1240–1480) constituted a blessing precisely because it isolated Russia from Europe. It was in this period that the modern Russian character was formed, as a synthesis of the Slavic and the Turanian.
Absolutism, the only rule suitable for steppe peoples dispersed over a vast territory, came to Russia from Genghis Khan and his successors. When the Mongol Empire disintegrated, Russia became its heir. “And hovering over all Russia is the shade of the great Genghis Khan,” wrote the Eurasianist Nikolai Trubetskoy in The Legacy of Genghis Khan (1925). “Whether Russia wants it or not, she remains forever the guardian of this legacy.”
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The book that catalyzed the Eurasianist movement, Trubetskoy’s Europe and Mankind (1920)—selected excerpts of which appear in the first volume of Foundations of Eurasianism—maintains “the equivalence and qualitative incommensurability of all cultures and all peoples of the globe…. There are no higher and lower cultures, there are only similar and dissimilar.” European arguments to the contrary are but “a means of deceiving people and justifying the imperialistic and colonial policies…of the ‘great powers’”—that is, all the great powers but Russia.
Remarkably enough, Trubetskoy’s relativism leads him to the conclusion that because cultures are equal, Europeans, who suppose otherwise, are worse than all others. All are equal, but some are less equal than others. The non-Western world must therefore unite against Europeans, because for relativists “the consequences of Europeanization” are “an absolute evil.” All countries must recognize that “there is only one true confrontation: that between the Romano-Germanics and all other peoples of the world, between Europe and Mankind.”
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