Russia’s war against Ukraine is entering its fifth year. More than a year after his inauguration, Donald Trump has been unable to impose the peace he dreamed of. The amateurism of the U.S. president’s special envoys and the distortion of geopolitical issues caused by the Trump administration’s wheeling and dealing and nepotism are not the only factors at play. An interpretation of realpolitik, based on the axiom of interest, prevents us from understanding the worldview that underlies Russia’s grand strategy, which is aimed at reconstituting a large Eurasian space.
For a long time, we wanted to believe that the Kremlin leader and his entourage were akin to a mafia gang, driven solely by greed: their desire for power could be reduced to wheeling and dealing and personal enrichment. In a way, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, busy haggling with Kirill Dmitriev, illustrate this illusion. Beyond the kleptocratic dimension of the regime, the Kremlin’s ambitions are broader: the main motive of Vladimir Putin and his siloviki is the geopolitical domination of the former Soviet space, not from a neo-communist perspective but from that of a ‘Russia-Eurasia’ at the forefront of opposition to the West. This geopolitical program is underpinned by Eurasianism, which has deep and still-vibrant roots.
At the origin of globalizing geopolitical representations, Eurasianism constitutes a worldview centered on the idea of Russia’s specific identity and mission, in opposition to the West. This worldview is rooted in the long history of Muscovy, a vassal principality of the Mongol Empire for two and a half centuries and the original nucleus of what became a vast Eurasian empire. We need to bear in mind that the Cossacks crossed the Urals and reached the Sea of Okhotsk long before Peter the Great (who reigned from 1682 to 1725) forced open the gates of Europe. Subsequently, Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War (1853-1856) brought this expansion to a halt. The Russian Empire therefore redeployed its energies toward the Caucasus and Asia, conquering Western Turkestan (Central Asia) and Outer Manchuria (now the Russian Far East). The port of Vladivostok (‘Master of the East’) was founded in 1860.
The Russian Empire then experienced the ‘temptation of the East1’: soldiers, scholars, and diplomats on missions in this distant ‘Russian East’ fueled the imperial imagination. They inspired and reformulated the Russian Idea, which already affirmed the historical and cultural originality and therefore the unique destiny of this immense Eurasian empire, presented as a synthesis and transcendence of the dialectic between East and West. Thus, the ‘great Russian century,’ considered a golden age in literary, intellectual, and cultural terms, was marked by a quest for identity that led to the East. Russian imperialism in Asia had as its ideological corollary ‘Asianism,’ or ‘Asiaticism,’ that is, the proclamation of Russia’s Asian identity. In his Diary of a Writer (1873-1881), Fyodor Dostoevsky echoes this sentiment: “The Russian is not only a European, but also an Asian. What is more, there may be more hope for us in Asia than in Europe. What is more, Asia may be our main outlet in our future destiny.”
In truth, this Eastern impulse predates the Mongol legacy, which left such a mark on the history of the Russian Empire, which was largely that of Asian despotism. As early as the 18th Century, the discovery of Scythian gold and a form of civilization far older than that of the Slavs, namely the culture of the kurgans2, raised the following question: are Russians Eastern Europeans or Western Asians? Peter the Great’s modernization program, which sought to borrow the tools of power from the West, lost its force and obviousness. Moreover, the Russian Empire failed to make up for its historical backwardness, which was soon amplified by the industrial revolution of the Western European nations.
In the 19th Century, the ‘Eastern doctrinaires’ of Pan-Slavism, notably Nikolai Danilevsky (1822-1875) and Konstantin Leontiev (1831-1891), saw Russia as a ‘middle world,’ a superior synthesis between East and West. As an heir to Slavophilism, Danilevsky was more motivated by practical applications in the field of power than by the religious speculations and rural romanticism of the first generation. The author of Russia and Europe (1871), he advocated the union of all Slavs under Russian leadership in order to counterbalance Western domination. According to the ‘law of historical economy’ he developed, Russia was a reservoir of vital forces that would prevail over Western nations worn down by history. This ‘tribal and ethnographic energy,’ the disciplined enthusiasm of the Tsar’s subjects, and their osmosis with their leaders would pave the way for Russian expansionism.
Considered a kind of ‘Russian Nietzsche,’ Konstantin Leontiev is the author of Byzantinism and the Slavic World (1875) and The Average European, Ideal and Tool of Universal Destruction (a text written between 1872 and 1884, published in 1912). A precursor to Oswald Spengler, he developed a naturalistic theory of the three ages of civilization (original simplicity, apogee and flourishing complexity, decline and confusion), according to which Russia was in the ascendant phase of its history. In contrast, he prophesied the advent of a federal Europe, breaking with the ideal and sublime forms of the past, which would constitute an existential threat to Russia. Subsequently, both authors turned their attention to the depths of Asia and the civilizations of the East.
Eurasianism itself took shape in White émigré circles after the Bolshevik coup and the establishment of Soviet Russia. Geographer Peter Savitsky, historian George Vernadsky, and linguist Nikolai Trubetskoy, the author of the Eurasian Manifesto (1921), were the main representatives of this school of thought. A key figure in this movement, Troubetskoy (1890-1938) expounded his theories in works with telling titles (see Russia-Eurasia and The Illustrious Legacy of Genghis Khan). Although he published his manifesto in Sofia, once the center of Eurasianist thought, the main publishing house was located in Berlin, which allowed for occasional collaborations with German geographer Karl Haushofer (1869-1946), a representative of geopolitik and an early proponent of a German-Soviet pact that he wanted to extend to Japan (a Eurasian axis linking Berlin, Moscow, and Tokyo).
According to Troubetskoy, the Russian world constitutes a continent in itself, located east of Europe and north of Asia. This vast geographical area, which coherently unites different language families, is the basis for a form of harmony in diversity. While he posited the Romano-Germanic world as Russia’s existential enemy, Troubetskoy praised Genghis Khan and the Mongols. Subsequently, the ‘Eurasianists’ became divided over the interpretation of Stalinism. Broadly speaking, the question is whether Stalin is, or is not, an instrument of God destined to regenerate Russia, which had been corrupted by Westernism since the reign of Peter the Great. The historical situation did not open up any concrete political opportunities for the theorists of Eurasianism, but their ideas remain.
After the Great Patriotic War, the historian and ethnographer Lev Gumilev (1912-1992), an intellectual link between pre-war Eurasianism and post-Soviet neo-Eurasianism, ensured the perpetuation of this system of ideas. Arrested during the Stalin era, he was released in 1956 and gave lectures and conferences at the Research Institute of Leningrad University. However, he was never admitted to the Academy of Sciences and his works were banned from publication for a long time. Gumilev is the author of reference works in contemporary Russia, such as Medieval Russia and the Great Steppe and The Rhythms of Eurasia. He revives the idea of a Russian ethnic, cultural, and spiritual identity in close symbiosis with the Asian peoples of the steppes. His ethno-genetic theories are strongly influenced by naturalism, and he seeks to explain the succession of historical events through fluctuations in the biochemical energy released by natural environments. His intellectual influence is significant, extending to the writing of school textbooks, and Vladimir Putin quotes him in his speeches. During the 1990s, Gumilev’s theories provided the intellectual basis for a simplified form of Eurasianism, known as ‘neo-Eurasianism,’ which would influence Moscow’s circles of power.
In fact, philosopher Alexander Panarin (1940-2003) was the originator of a line of thinking that was more theoretical than ideological. He drew on the science of civilizations, known as ‘culturology,’ and on histories of time (Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, Fernand Braudel) to identify the specific characteristics of Russia-Eurasia. Panarin adopted Samuel P. Huntington’s paradigm on the clash of civilizations (The Clash of Civilizations); he developed a cultural relativism according to which different human groups cannot be classified and ranked due to the lack of a universal reference point (Western universalism would be nothing more than the pathological projection of particularism). However, he takes up the thesis of Russia’s messianism and its specific role in the Eurasian space: Russia is destined to lead a ‘post-modern’ world imbued with new values (a sense of community, a return to religion and asceticism, ecological awareness). Panarin identifies lines of continuity between tsarism, the communist period, and post-Soviet Russia to develop the notion of ‘Great Tradition.’ He rehabilitates the idea of Empire as the only political form suited to the Eurasian whole. Ultimately, ‘culturology’ reveals itself to be a doctrine of combat against the West. Russia’s archaism is supposed to give it superiority in the post-modern world, within the framework of a new East-West bipolarity.
Alexander Dugin, 64, is the chief ideologue of a neo-Eurasianism tinged with occultism and national Bolshevism. For a time, he saw himself as the heir to the Belgian national revolutionary Jean Thiriart (1922-1992). Together with Eduard Limonov (1943-2020), Dugin was also the founder of a short-lived National Bolshevik Party (1992). While his reputation as the Kremlin’s ‘Rasputin’ is greatly exaggerated, he is very active in the media, publishes extensively, and maintains an ideological network beyond Russia’s borders, in Europe, Turkey, and Central Asia. He exerts real influence over some segments of the political spectrum. Dugin frames his ideological struggle as a fight to the death between a great Eurasian empire and the American-centered ‘new world order,’ which he subsequently describes as satanic. The ‘old believer,’ who recognizes the authority of the Moscow Patriarchate, interprets this struggle, which has been explicit and open since Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, as a great eschatological battle (the sons of light against the forces of darkness).
After the breakup of the USSR, a renewed and simplified Eurasianism thus served as a ‘formula’ to fill the ideological void created by the collapse of Marxism-Leninism. Along the way, it absorbs some ideas and concepts from classical geopolitics (that of the early 20th Century), including the geopolitical opposition between land and sea, taken to a metaphysical level, and the heartland/rimland dualism3: as the continental pivot of universal history, the Russian-Siberian heartlandis destined to dominate the Eurasian landmass and to satellite the rimland, i.e., the peripheral belt of territories surrounding it, from Europe to the Korean peninsula, via the Middle East.
Consciously or subconsciously, this vision of geopolitical issues underpins the doctrine of the ‘near abroad’ articulated in 1992 in the Tashkent Treaty. This treaty established the CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organization) and Russia’s long effort to establish a Eurasian economic community. Eurasianism also gives meaning and substance to Primakov’s diplomacy of the 1990s, which led to a Sino-Russian ‘strategic partnership,’ the structuring axis of the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization). In all respects, Putin’s grand project of a Eurasian Union, launched on January 1st, 2015, is an extension of Eurasianist theories on the unification of the Eurasian space around Russia. We should bear in mind that it was Ukraine’s refusal to join this project that convinced the Kremlin leader to abandon his attempt at absorption, preferring instead war and invasion (2014). Together with Xi Jinping, he is positioning Sino-Russian Eurasia as the future master of the world, to the detriment of the West.
Conclusion
The Eurasianist framework seems essential to understanding the historical, cultural, and geopolitical foundations of Russia’s grand strategy. It is important to grasp that Eurasianism is not simply an intellectual doctrine whispered into Putin’s ear by this or that ideologue. It is a worldview that recapitulates, condenses, and synthesizes Russia’s long history, exercise of power, and Eurasian geography. All other things being equal, we could draw a parallel with what Montesquieu called the ‘general spirit’ of a nation, or its ‘universal soul’ (the customs, mentalities, and common character of a nation).This worldview shapes Russia-Eurasia’s perception of its international environment and conditions its grand strategy, both in terms of its goals and its means. It is not the petty games of so-called realpolitik, and even less the quantified expectations of ‘American oligarchs’ who think they are Machiavelli, that will thwart the Kremlin’s strategic hopes. It will take a geopolitical shock, caused by an external defeat and/or an internal rupture. Even then, such a phenomenon would only postpone the ambitions of an Eastern despotism devoted to the cult of power (Derjavnost). Let us be aware of this. The restoration and preservation of Europe’s eastern borders are and will remain tasks worthy of Sisyphus.
Associate professor of history and geography and researcher at the French Institute of Geopolitics (University of Paris VIII). Author of several books, he works within the Thomas More Institute on geopolitical and defense issues in Europe. His research areas cover the Baltic-Black Sea region, post-Soviet Eurasia, and the Mediterranean.
Footnotes
- See Lorraine de Meaux, La Russie et la tentation de l’Orient (Russia and the Temptation of the East), Le Grand Livre du Mois, 2020.
- A kurgan is a burial mound. The Indo-European kurgan civilization covered the Pontic and Eurasian steppes from the end of the Neolithic (Chalcolithic) period to the Bronze Age, from the 4th to the 1st millennia BC.
- British geographer Halford MacKinder (1861-1947) originated the concept of ‘heartland,’ the continental heartland that must be prevented from possessing and controlling the large peninsulas of the Old World, the ‘inner crescent’ later named ‘rimland’ by Dutch-American Nicholas Spykman (1893-1943).