Ideology in the spotlight: Pyotr Savitsky’s Eurasianism
The Russian Revolution of 1917 was not only, and perhaps not even primarily, about changing existing power structures. It was also about resolving Russia’s identity crisis. For centuries, Russia had seesawed between Europe and Asia. The conflict between the two identities was evident as early as in the 14th century when, following the sacking of Kiev by the Mongols, Russia (or Rus’, as it was then known) was split between two polities: Vilna (Lithuania), which represented European Rus’, and Muscovy, which stood for its Mongolian counterpart. Both claimed to be the heart of Rus’ and vied to be its capital. For complex geopolitical reasons, the Byzantine Empire bet on Muscovy, losing Lithuania to Poland and Catholicism, and setting Russia on its eastward course. More than three centuries later, the pendulum swung the other way. Peter the Great “broke the window” to Europe, building a new capital on the banks of the River Neva and undertaking sweeping reforms to turn his country into a European power. He succeeded only in part.
To be properly Europeanized, Russian elites had to be uprooted; their Europeanization came at the price of deracination. Historically, in matters of cultural appropriation, Russia tended to do things by halves. When Kievan Rus’ adopted Eastern Orthodoxy, it forgot to include the language and philosophy of the Greeks. When tsarist Russia, during the reign of Catherine the Great, imported the ideas of the Enlightenment, it left out its critical spirit. Europe had a habit of coming to Russia in parts. This need not have been fatal if Russian elites had been able to use religion as their anchor. In the event, the Church had been tamed in the 18th century. Peter the Great had downsized the Church by subsuming it into the government apparatus, while Catherine the Great further emasculated the Church by shifting the locus of Russian culture from the monastery to the city, shutting down countless monasteries, and destroying the old and highly symbolic architecture of Muscovy (see James Billington’s The Icon and the Axe). As a result, Russian elites were left untethered and rudderless. This spiritual void explains the interest that some in the upper echelons of tsarist Russia displayed for masonic lodges, occultism, and, later, various European ideologies. The position of Russia’s 19th-century Europeanized elites was schizoid: on some days, they danced quadrilles in glittering halls and discussed politics in salons; on other days, they beat their serfs for misdemeanors.
As Russia was a text-centric country and its writers exercised an almost sacerdotal role in Russian culture, the question of Russia’s identity naturally bled into its literature. The great Russian writers had to wrestle with the question of what they were to do with Peter’s window into Europe. The celebrated historian and writer Nikolai Karamzin was the first to clamber through it enthusiastically. His Letters of a Russian Traveller, written after his sojourn in Europe, were more than just reportage for Russian readers who had never seen Western Europe – Yuri Lotman, an eminent 20th-century scholar of Russian culture, credited Karamzin with having Europeanized both Russian literature and Russian readers. A cultural successor of Peter the Great and a major contributor to the development of Russia’s modern literary language, Karamzin was one of the first Russian authors to bring Europe to Russian prose, blazing the trail for others.
In the last paragraph of the first volume of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, one of the greatest 19th-century Russian novels, the narrator famously asks, “Where are you going, Rus’?” The question is not rhetorical – and, given that Gogol wrote the bulk of the first volume of that quintessentially Russian novel in Rome, hardly limited to abstract contemplation of Russia’s historical processes. The question of where Russia was heading – specifically, whether it was heading west to Europe or east to Asia – bedeviled the Russian greats. If Russia wasn’t heading to Europe, they were. Ivan Turgenev spent much of his time in Europe, set some of his prose there, and died in France. Dostoevsky also headed west but, though a creature of European culture, he was profoundly disillusioned by what he saw, and ultimately decided that Russia’s future was Asian. His entire oeuvre was a one-way dialogue with Europe, which he at once admired as his second homeland and detested as the graveyard of his illusions. Writing in The Diary of a Writer shortly before his death, Dostoevsky called Asia Russia’s natural destination and urged Russia to turn east.
The question of Russia’s identity also pervades the works of Leo Tolstoy, who, along with Dostoevsky, was one of the twin gods of Russian literature. Tolstoy’s characters tend to be corrupted by civilization and, however reductive it might be to equate civilization with Europe, the Russian civilization that Tolstoy targeted was European. A careful reading of War and Peace reveals that characters who speak French are portrayed less sympathetically than those who speak Russian; the two characters who represent the Russian soul – Kutuzov and Karataev – have Russian names and embody the Russian muzhik; they are contrasted with the Europeanized salon creatures who are essentially strangers in their native realm. Katyusha Maslova, the heroine of Tolstoy’s novel Resurrection, is brought up by two noblewomen. One of them wants to turn Maslova into a lady; she dresses the girl up and teaches her to read. The other noblewoman thinks Maslova should be a maid; she treats Maslova with strictness and beats her when she is in a bad mood. “From these two influences,” the narrator writes, “the girl grew up into a half-maid and half-lady” (here and elsewhere, all translations are mine). Maslova can be seen as a metaphor for Russia: half-European and half-Asian.
The right questions were asked, but Gogol’s question never received a definitive response. The chasm between Russia’s Europeanized ruling caste and its subjects continued to widen. By the time revolution broke out, the last Russian tsar – Nicholas II – was of Germanic stock and had virtually no Russian blood in him. The First World War, during which tsarist Russia fought against Germany, was a confrontation between monarchs who were ethnic kinsmen and in fact distant relatives. The masses felt like they were being run by foreigners, and the Russian Revolution was a revolt against Europeanization. The Bolsheviks knew what they were doing when they moved the Russian capital back to Moscow. The former imperial capital of Saint Petersburg had been rechristened – as Petrograd during the war and as Leningrad after the Revolution.
The political upheaval and ensuing civil war caused a mass exodus of those faithful to the ancien régime. The trauma induced by the loss of their homeland and their subsequent displacement forced these so-called first-wave – “White” – émigrés to make sense of their experience. Émigrés willing to engage in soul-searching had to confront the demons of Russian history and question underlying assumptions about their identity. While the Stravinskys and Nabokovs of the Russian diaspora felt completely at home in Europe and identified themselves with it, others reached very different conclusions. One of those who turned against Europe was the geographer and thinker Pyotr Savitsky. Born in Chernigov (then tsarist Russia, now Ukraine) in 1895, the bright Savitsky was a promising economics student when the guns started firing in 1914. While studying economics during the war, he also did a stint in the diplomatic service and, following the Bolshevik Revolution, served as an official in the “White governments” of the anti-Bolshevik forces. Shaken by Russia’s defeat in the First World War and the ensuing disintegration of the Russian Empire, Savitsky – who, as the offspring of a noble family, had had to defend his parents’ estate against the Bolsheviks – started looking east. His imperialism-friendly views, propounded in various pieces he’d published during the war, evolved into a starkly anti-European ideology. Acknowledging that the reaction to Russia’s Europeanization was one of the reasons for the Russian Revolution, Savitsky – along with Nikolai Trubetskoi and several other émigrés – formulated an anti-Western, illiberal, geographically driven ideology that claimed to offer an alternative to both liberalism and Bolshevism. This ideology became known as Eurasianism.
Anti-Westernism in Russian thought: Nikolai Danilevsky and Konstantin Leontiev
Savitsky, of course, was not the first thinker to propose that Russia’s destiny was not bound up with Europe. He had important antecedents and, at the risk of some oversimplification, we can triangulate his ideological lineage by connecting him with two major 19th-century Russian thinkers. The first is Nikolai Danilevsky, a natural scientist and one of the founders of the Slavophile movement. He is best known for his 1869 book Russia and Europe. Anticipating some of Spengler’s theories concerning the evolution of civilizations, Danilevsky argued that Russian civilization was distinct from the European one. Europe was an arbitrary construct; the continent known as Europe simply happened to be the westernmost part of Asia. What made Europe European was its Romano-German identity – itself a product of the Latin world and the Holy Roman Empire – and its own brand of Christianity (Roman Catholic and Protestant). Russia had received its Christianity from Byzantium, had lived apart from the Holy Roman Empire, and had slept its way through the Renaissance. The Petrine experiment was therefore an error. Russia’s mission was to be the leader of Slav civilization. Although Danilevsky railed against what he considered European exceptionalism, his own program had chauvinistic and bellicose overtones. He wanted Russia to seize Constantinople from the Turks, and he believed that Russia ought to bring into its fold all non-Germanic peoples who lived on Austro-Hungarian territory, including those who were not Slavs.
Konstantin Leontiev lived an obscure but colorful life that was torn between the sensualism of Athens and the asceticism of Jerusalem. A military doctor and later a diplomatic official in the Ottoman Empire, he finished his days as a monk at one of Russia’s most famous monasteries. Although Leontiev originally set out to be a writer and was able to produce some fine prose, his posthumous reputation rests largely on his ideas, expounded in his signature text Byzantinism and Slavdom. Foreshadowing both Spengler and Nietzsche, Leontiev compared civilizations to organisms that reached their peaks when they were at their most complex. Echoing Alexis de Tocqueville – who, in his study of American democracy, found that aristocratic societies were much better at creating beautiful art than democratic ones – Leontiev argued that great civilizations and societies were those that were highly stratified, while societies that held equality and human happiness to be the ultimate ideals were only capable of producing ugliness. He was, however, less an ideologue than an aesthete. His ideas were radically elitist, but they also presupposed heterogeneity and, therefore, diversity. While he shared Danilevsky’s animosity towards modern Europe with its emphasis on liberalism, equality, and parliamentarianism – principles he considered ugly, boring, and indicative of a society in decline – he had no time for ideologies that linked soil with blood. He conceived of Russia not as a Slav civilization but a Byzantine one. He believed in incense, church bells, and proskynesis, not ethnic tribalism. Entirely unmoved by starry-eyed visions of pan-Slavic unity, he disliked certain Slavic peoples such as Bulgarians and, unlike the Slavophiles, did not care for their emancipation from the Turkish yoke. He preferred to see them as Ottoman subjects rather than sovereign nations that could easily succumb to European liberalism. While accusations that Leontiev was a proto-fascist seem like an exercise in retrofitting – unlike Danilevsky et al, he repudiated ethnonationalism – his ideas made few provisions for those meant to be sacrificed on the altar of the heterogeneity that Leontiev thought was essential for civilizational splendor.
Eurasianism: geography is fate
If Danilevsky provided Russia’s civilizational autonomy with a biological foundation and Leontiev gave it its aesthetic one, in Savitsky’s thought Russia’s identity was geographically inspired. [My reference for this piece is Russian Eurasia in Past and Present (Russkaja Evrazija v proshlom i buduschem), a carelessly edited 2023 anthology of Savitsky’s texts put out by a Russian publishing house called Rodina – “motherland” in Russia. One would expect a more deferential treatment of the Russian language from such a patriotically minded publisher – the book is riddled with typos.] Savitsky repudiates Danilevsky’s dichotomy of Russia and Europe. Since part of Russian territory is considered to be in Europe geographically, such a dichotomy is an obvious malapropism. In his manifesto “Eurasianism,” Savitsky reimagines the geographic consensus. The so-called Old World is composed not of two continents (Europe and Asia), but three: Europe, Asia, and Eurasia. Europe proper is what is commonly held to be Western Europe; Asia includes India, China, and the rest of East and Southeast Asia. But there is a huge landmass whose topographic and climatic dimensions make it a continent unto itself. Stretching from the Carpathian Mountains across the steppes towards the Urals and Siberia, and then beyond all the way to the Far East, this continent is Eurasia. Very roughly it corresponds to the borders of present-day Russia, though – crucially, given the current situation – it also encompasses Ukraine and Belarus. For Savitsky, there is no such thing as Eastern Europe, which is merely western Eurasia. The title of Danilevsky’s book ought to have been not Russia and Europe but Eurasia and Europe.
Central to Savitsky’s conception of Eurasia is mestorazvitie. Best translated as “geographic disposition,” mestorazvitie is essentially the relationship between land and its inhabitants, and it has a defining effect on the development of a civilization. The geographic disposition of Russia-Eurasia (Savitsky regards these terms as synonyms) contributed to the formation of a unique civilization that incorporated both ancient nomadic powers and the kind of sedentary lifestyle particular to European civilization. Russia therefore combines both the sedentary and settled ways of life. The Russian is as much a farmer as a horseback rider. Unlike the “peripheral” world of Europe, Russia was a “middle kingdom” like China. Savitsky’s geographic determinism leads him to reinterpret Russian history. Challenging the mainstream view that Mongol rule was not a happy time for Rus’, he dismisses the idealization of pre-Mongol Kiev Rus’ as a fallacy and cliché. He argues that Kiev Rus’ was inherently unstable, a state of affairs that made it an inevitable target of foreign domination. It was to Russia’s benefit that the ones who came to dominate were the Mongols. Only the nomadic Mongols could have appreciated the vast expanse of Eurasia. Their sense of the spatial and their lack of religious dogmatism allowed Russia to preserve its spirit and forge its piety. Little wonder, says Savitsky, that in the 14th-century contest between Lithuanian Rus’ and Muscovy, it was the latter that won: as a satrapy of the Golden Horde, Muscovy was the proper expression of Russia-Eurasia. Savitsky bluntly states: “Without the Tatarship [tatarschina] there would have been no Russia.”
The corollary of all this is that there would have been a Russia without Europe, and in fact it would have been a better one. Russia, according to Savitsky, has no business in Europe, where it is nothing more than a poor relation relegated to the worst room in the house, if not the backyard. Europe’s geographic makeup – on the edge of Eurasia, pushed out against the sea, with easy year-round access to deep waters – makes its Romano-German civilization wholly foreign to Russia-Eurasia, a land-based civilization with a harsh climate, limited access to hyperborean bodies of water, and a heritage that is a blend of Byzantium and Mongol nomads. Europe can only enter it by means of artificial insemination. Though Savitsky fought on the other side of the barricades during the Bolshevik Revolution, he acknowledges that the Bolshevik Revolution was a way to expel a non-native element that had not been acquired organically. In an article called “Europe and Eurasia,” Savitsky writes that Bolshevism, however revolting and barbaric, doubtlessly contained “elements of a protest of some non-Romano-German world against the Romano-German cultural and other such hegemony.” Expressing a trope all too familiar to modern observers of Russia, Russia must follow its own special path. Its role is to act as a centripetal force within the confines of the Old World. Only by performing this role will Russia be able to fulfil its destiny, which is to remove all contradictions and tensions between East and West. How this removal is to be achieved is not clear.
Eurasianism does not just see Europe as an alien civilization but a hostile one. Russia’s Eurasian geography and its nomadic history have made ethnic and religious tolerance a possibility and perhaps even a necessity in Russia. Europe’s peripheral situation and its sedentary development, on the other hand, do not allow it to absorb and accommodate a multiplicity of ethnic groups and religions. According to Eurasianists, this leads to exceptionalism and a propensity to regard non-Europeans as inferior. The story of Lithuanian Rus’ was a case in point: its alliance with Poland sapped its spirit and eventually led to its demise. Eurasianism, Savitsky says in his manifesto, is staunchly opposed to Eurocentrism. One finds in Savitsky’s texts early criticism of Western colonialism (though of Russia’s own internal colonization, there is not a word). Trubetskoi, Savitsky’s fellow Eurasianist mentioned earlier, went so far as to write a pamphlet in which he called for all non-European peoples to rise up against European hegemony. While Savitsky thought the idea of the entire humanity taking on Europe was too utopian (the Rodina anthology includes a piece that polemizes with Trubetskoi’s text), he believed Russia-Eurasia and Eurasia-adjacent nations could form a block to resist their common antagonist. As with its manifest destiny (removing the opposition between East and West), how exactly this ought to be done is never explained. There is more than a hint of mysticism in Savitsky’s texts. He seems to believe that, owing to the nomadic aspect of its spirit, Russians-Eurasians possess a kind of dynamism that unleashes people’s creative powers. While the word “passionarians” had not yet been put in circulation by Lev Gumilev, this is more or less what Savitsky has in mind, and the correspondence he enjoyed with Gumilev in his later years is hardly a coincidence.
Eurasianism is inherently statist. While allowing that Western-style democracy might be workable in European countries, Savitsky is adamant that such a political system is not suitable for export, least of all to Russia-Eurasia (another trope familiar to modern observers). By its nature, the Eurasian world is hard-wired for maximum government intervention in all spheres of life. “They [Eurasianists] see in it [etatism] the backbone of Russian history,” proclaims Savitsky’s manifesto. But the Eurasian fondness for big government is qualified. Instead of the Bolshevik model of government intervention – a “mechanical etatism” that wants to nationalize all spheres of life – Savitsky proposes a “dialectical etatism,” which recognizes that government intervention must be circumscribed and be free of coercion. Eurasianism envisions a society that is “built on ideocratic foundations and is endowed with constitutional rights.” Savitsky calls such a system “state capital” (gosudarstvennyj aktiv). State capital recognizes the existence of opposing interests (hence its “dialectics”), and regulates society by taking into account the evolving needs and wants of its people. Savitsky calls such a system “demotic.”
The demotic system will serve the interests of an “economically armed” Eurasian state. Savitsky spurns both capitalism and communism, the two competing economic models in the 1920s, proposing a “third way.” Savitsky writes at length about the khozyain (literally, “master”), yet another notion with mystical overtones. The khozyain is juxtaposed against the capitalist entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs only concern themselves with profits, and the economic model dominated by the entrepreneur is exploitative and destructive (here, too, Savitsky manages to weave geography into his argument – capitalistic exploitation is somehow practiced by “peripheral” states). On the other hand, the communist solution is no solution either: to appoint the state as khozyain is to deny individuals the spiritual link they have with means of production. A khozyain is neither an entrepreneur nor a soulless state; a paternalistic figure, he can be thought of as an entrepreneur with a soul. “In the khozyain’s relations with other people, there is, aside from the material and rational aspect, also an immaterial, an irrational one.” A khozyain understands that man does not live by bread alone, and profitability is only one of the factors in his decision-making. The khozyain is destined to play an important role in the Eurasian economy. Savitsky points out that, unlike certain Western states, Russia does not have easy access to the seas and can never become a maritime power. Its size, however, makes it well placed to attain autarky and compete with the maritime powers: “The economy of Russia-Eurasia constitutes, from the standpoint of development, a unique intracontinental world.”
Born in émigré circles in the intellectual cauldron of the 1920s, Eurasianism did not suffer from a shortage of adherents, attracting some of the brightest minds in Russian émigré circles. But it never took off – at least not where, as far as its architects were concerned, it would make the desired impact. It could never win the hearts and minds of those in the Russian diaspora who found its mysticism and geographic fatalism unappealing, and who identified with Europe. More crucially, with its rejection of the Bolshevik economic model, it could not make inroads in the fledgling Soviet state. Although Savitsky would continue to promote the Eurasianist cause until the end of his life, the movement faced a number of crises in the late 1920s. Aside from ideological schisms, the Eurasianist movement was infiltrated and compromised by Soviet agents, and it never recovered from the blow. Gradually, despite Savitsky’s activism, Eurasianism faded into history books and then into oblivion.
Until recently.
Where are you going, Rus’?
When the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, the question of Russian identity became urgent again. The ideology that had defined Russia for much of the 20th century had become discredited, and Russia had lost territories it had considered to be its own. While some in the West considered history to have reached its end, a new history was beginning in Russia. Russia’s identity crisis had reasserted itself, and Eurasianism was rediscovered by certain ideologues looking to answer Gogol’s eternal question. Perhaps the most prominent among these neo-Eurasianists is Alexander Dugin, who, drawing on Eurasianist ideas, posits Russia as a tellurocracy (a land-based power) and its antagonists – notably, the US – as thalassocracies (maritime powers). Dugin, of course, supposedly serves as Putin’s Svengali, a reputation that fails to persuade. He is almost cartoonishly hidebound, and some of his ideas (he has questioned the masculinity of beardless men, called for the incarceration of surfers in ghettos, and voiced his support for political repressions) seem to make him little more than an anachronism in a modern, globalized world. But times of instability are propitious for extremist voices, and although the Russian president himself does not strike one as particularly ideological, he does need ideocratic currency to buy popular support when he does things like invade neighboring countries. In fact, Putin’s own transformation from a Soviet KGB apparatchik to a self-styled leader of the Russian Orthodox world is a telling illustration of the paroxysms and convulsions of Russia’s floating identity.
Savitsky’s Eurasianism appears to have succumbed to Nietzsche syndrome: an ideology that, while not itself extreme, is somehow hijacked by the fringe. While it is unfair to hold thinkers responsible for the way posterity manhandles their ideas, one wonders if there isn’t something in the ideology itself that makes it susceptible to a hijacking. Eurasianism emerged in Europe’s interwar years, when it was all too easy to come down with spiritual pneumonia. Fascism emerged at the same time, and although Savitsky’s emphasis on ethnic tolerance and diversity as hallmarks of Eurasianism opposes the xenophobia and chauvinism of fascist discourse, there are areas where the two ideologies overlap. Both ideologies are offered as a third way between liberalism and socialism, and as a synthesis of past and present (Savitsky characterizes Eurasianism as a system that integrates tradition and revolution). Savitsky opposes parliamentarism, advocates maximum government interference in all spheres of life, and maintains that the greatest vocation of any individual is to serve a common goal – all classic tenets of fascism. Savitsky’s corporatist vision of the economy, with its paternalistic partnership between state and khozyain, will also fit well into any fascist paradigm.
Eurasianism postulates a universal mission for Russia-Eurasia – a problem for those neighbors that find themselves pulled into Eurasia’s orbit against their will. Savitsky acknowledges that nations liberated from European colonialism might end up being subjugated by Russia-Eurasia, admitting with philosophical detachment that “life is cruel.” Nevertheless, he assures his readers that, unlike Romano-German imperialists, Eurasia easily lends itself to a brotherhood of nations. Yet a few pages later, he writes that European exceptionalism can only be countered with Eurasian exceptionalism. Exceptionalism is exceptionalism, and Savitsky’s casual hyphenation of Russia and Ukraine, in light of current events, makes his odes to a Eurasian brotherhood even less convincing. Savitsky is not shy about using geography to buttress claims of Russian uniqueness – he asks whether the wide range of temperatures recorded in Russia-Eurasia can’t also be observed in the spiritual range of Russians, who supposedly run the gamut between spiritual darkness and a loftiness that is unknown to the temperate Europeans. This is the kind of romanticization of the Russian soul that one finds in the novels of Dostoevsky but not always in Russian history. Alan Walker’s memoir of Liszt opens with an unforgettable description of Russian peasants – men and women – dancing and singing around soldiers from Napoleon’s retreating army while they bash their brains out with large sticks. One hesitates to condemn the peasants, whose country had been invaded by the French; nevertheless, let’s admit that this is quite far from Tolstoy’s Karataev.
The vehemence with which Russia’s anti-Westerners in general and Eurasianists in particular insisted on Russia’s non-Europeanness is a bit like the lady that doth protest too much. Formed by European culture, philosophy, and critical spirit, they used European instruments to dismantle their Europeanness. This is not the place to weigh in on whether they were right about the Russian identity, though I note that Thomas Mann once expressed doubt that Germany was Western Europe and Witold Gombrowicz questioned the Europeanness of the Polish people. But Savitsky’s own life suggests that the relationship between Europe and Savitsky’s Eurasia was more complicated than he believed: Europe was not always the bogeyman of the Eurasianist imagination, and Eurasia was just as capable of crushing its people as it was of unleashing their creative powers. After the Second World War, he was arrested by Soviet authorities and sent to a labor camp in Mordovia. While not on the edges of the Soviet empire, it was a long way from Prague, where Savitsky had lived for years. He was likely transported to the camp by train – a journey that ought to have suggested the spatial vastness of Eurasia was not always benign. Released in the 1950s, the Eurasianist ideologue chose to return to Prague, one of Europe’s most European cities. In the 1960s, Savitsky was arrested by authorities in Czechoslovakia for having written subversive poems about life in the labor camp. He was eventually freed as a result of intervention by Western intellectuals, and so the Eurasianist opponent of the democratic West found himself defended by men such as Bertrand Russell and Isaiah Berlin. He died in Prague in 1968, the year when Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia and Savitsky’s Eurasia made its latest attempt to subjugate a European land. Tragic irony, one is inclined to conclude, is often history’s reply to ideological constructions.