18 - Eurasianism: affirming the person in an “era of faith”

Summary

Eurasianism, an intellectual movement among Russian émigrés in central and western Europe during the 1920s and 1930s, is not usually associated with the defense of human dignity or with concern for the person (lichnost′). On the contrary, critics of the movement have compared its precepts to authoritarianism, fascism, or even totalitarianism. The focus of scholarly attention has hitherto been on Eurasianism's abstract speculations that geographically, culturally, and historically Russia was a country sui generis, neither a part of Europe, nor of Asia, but a self-contained “continent” in between and a synthesis of both – Eurasia. Rather than examining the Eurasianists' conceptualization of the individual person, many historians of the movement have studied its bold historiosophical declarations and “geopolitical” statements, often instrumentalized as justifications of Russian neo-imperialist intentions. Other scholars have scrutinized Eurasianist efforts to solve imperial Russia's nationality problem by inventing a “supra-national” Eurasian nationalism that would encompass all the country's nationalities, transcending traditional Russian ethnic nationalism. In view of the movement's sweeping generalizations about historical developments over the longue durée and its interest in large political and national collectives and geographical units, it is not surprising that scholars have neglected the attention that Eurasianists gave to the individual and its defense.

Yet concern for the “person,” understood as a divine creation “in the image and likeness of God,” was at the very center of Eurasianism. This concern was a direct consequence of the movement's profound religiosity and its effort to create a new Russian ideology on the basis of Orthodoxy.