# Eurasianism The geopolitical ideology positioning [[Russia]] as the heartland of a distinct Eurasian civilization — neither Western nor Eastern, neither European nor Asian, but a third civilizational pole with its own historical destiny, cultural logic, and geopolitical mission. In its contemporary political form, Eurasianism provides the intellectual architecture for Russian anti-Westernism, the rejection of [[Liberalism]] as a universal value system, and the assertion that the post-Cold War liberal international order is not the end of history but a temporary Anglo-Saxon hegemony that must be dismantled and replaced with a multipolar civilizational order. The ideology has passed through three distinct phases: classical Eurasianism (1920s–1930s émigré intellectuals), Lev Gumilev's neo-Eurasianism (1960s–1990s ethnos theory), and [[Alexander Dugin]]'s political Eurasianism (1990s–present), which synthesized the earlier strands with European Traditionalist philosophy and classical geopolitics into the framework expressed in [[Foundations of Geopolitics]] (1997) and *The Fourth Political Theory* (2009). Dugin's version is the one that matters operationally: it has been taught at the Russian General Staff Academy, circulates within the Russian security establishment, and provides the conceptual vocabulary for contemporary Russian foreign policy assertiveness. ## Classical Eurasianism (1920s–1930s) ### Origins Eurasianism emerged among Russian émigré intellectuals in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, crystallizing around the 1921 manifesto *Iskhod k Vostoku* (*Exodus to the East: Forebodings and Events*), published in Sofia by four principal authors: linguist Nikolai Trubetzkoy, economist-geographer Petr Savitsky, musicologist Petr Suvchinsky, and theologian Georgy Florovsky. The founding question was diagnostic: *why did the Russian Empire collapse?* The Eurasianists' answer broke with both the Westernizers (who blamed insufficient modernization) and the [[Slavophile]] tradition (which blamed the abandonment of Slavic-Orthodox authenticity). Instead, they argued that Russia had never been a European state at all — that the attempt to Westernize, from Peter the Great onward, was a civilizational misrecognition that deformed Russian society and made revolution inevitable. Russia's authentic identity was *Eurasian*: a symphonic civilization fusing Orthodox Christian, Turkic, and Mongol elements, shaped by the steppe geography of the continental interior. ### Core claims **Geographic determinism.** Savitsky's concept of *mestorazvitie* ("place-development") held that Russia's identity was inseparable from its continental geography — the vast Eurasian steppe stretching from the Carpathians to the Pacific, characterized by flat terrain, extreme climate, and the absence of natural maritime outlets. This geography produced a distinctive civilization: communal rather than individualist, land-based rather than maritime, oriented toward internal cohesion rather than colonial expansion overseas. **Anti-Eurocentrism.** Trubetzkoy's linguistic and cultural analysis — particularly his 1927 essay "Europe and Mankind" — argued that European civilization's claim to universality was itself a form of cultural imperialism. European standards of "progress," "civilization," and "development" were not neutral criteria but instruments of domination that measured all cultures against a European template. Eurasianism rejected this template and insisted on the *equal validity* of non-European civilizational paths — a claim that resonates directly with contemporary anti-liberal and decolonial discourse. **Cultural pluralism under Russian leadership.** The Eurasianists envisioned a continental civilization in which multiple ethnic and religious traditions coexisted under a unifying Russian-led state ideology — what they called the *symphonic personality* of Eurasia. This was explicitly not ethnic Russian nationalism: the Eurasianists embraced the Turkic and Mongol heritage that [[Pan-Slavism]] had rejected, and framed the Mongol Empire's legacy (the "Tatar yoke") not as a catastrophe but as a formative experience that gave Russia its continental character. ### Decline Classical Eurasianism splintered in the 1930s over the question of Soviet Russia. Some Eurasianists (the "left Eurasianists") argued that the Bolsheviks, despite their ideology, were performing the historical function of building a Eurasian state. Others rejected any accommodation with communism. Soviet intelligence infiltrated the movement, further fragmenting it. By World War II, organized Eurasianism had effectively dissolved — but its core ideas persisted underground and resurfaced in the post-Soviet period. ## Lev Gumilev's Neo-Eurasianism (1960s–1992) ### Ethnogenesis and passionarity Lev Gumilev (1912–1992) — son of the poets Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilev, himself imprisoned in the Gulag for fourteen years — developed a theory of *ethnogenesis* that bridged classical Eurasianism with pseudo-biological civilizational thinking. His key innovations: **Ethnos as biological entity.** Gumilev defined the *ethnos* (ethnic group) not as a cultural or political construct but as a biological entity embedded in its natural environment, with a life cycle analogous to a living organism — birth, flowering, decline, death. Each ethnos has its own behavioral pattern (*stereotip povedeniya*) determined by its relationship to its landscape. **Passionarity.** The driving force of ethnogenesis is *passionarnost* ("passionarity") — a burst of vital energy, possibly triggered by cosmic radiation, that produces a generation of driven, self-sacrificing individuals who forge a new ethnic community. The *passionary* phase is the period of intense creativity and expansion; it is followed by inertia, decline, and eventual dissolution. Civilizations do not decay because of bad policy but because their passionary energy is exhausted. **Eurasian complementarity.** Gumilev argued that Russians and the Turkic-Mongol peoples of the steppe had achieved a *positive complementarity* — a symbiotic relationship that made Eurasian civilization viable — while Russians and Western Europeans exhibited *negative complementarity*, meaning that cultural contact between them was mutually destructive. This pseudo-scientific framework gave the Eurasianist rejection of the West a biological veneer. ### Significance Gumilev's work was enormously popular in late Soviet and early post-Soviet Russia, providing a non-Marxist vocabulary for Russian civilizational exceptionalism. His ideas were controversial — criticized by professional historians and ethnologists as pseudo-science, and noted for antisemitic undertones (Gumilev treated Jews as a "parasitic" ethnos with negative complementarity to all host civilizations). But his influence on the subsequent generation of Eurasianist thinkers, especially [[Alexander Dugin]], was decisive: Dugin adopted Gumilev's framework of civilizations as living organisms with cosmic destinies and integrated it into his own geopolitical synthesis. ## Alexander Dugin's Political Eurasianism (1990s–present) ### Intellectual synthesis Dugin's achievement — or construction — was to fuse classical Eurasianism's geographic-civilizational claims, Gumilev's ethnos theory, and three additional intellectual traditions into a comprehensive anti-liberal political philosophy: **Classical geopolitics.** Halford Mackinder's [[Heartland Theory]] — whoever controls the Eurasian landmass controls the world — became Dugin's strategic spine. The fundamental geopolitical law, in Dugin's framework, is the eternal conflict between *tellurocracy* (land-based civilizations: Russia, Germany, Iran) and *thalassocracy* (sea-based civilizations: the United States, Britain, the maritime Anglo-Saxon world). Tellurocracy is associated with tradition, hierarchy, community, and spiritual depth; thalassocracy with commerce, individualism, rootlessness, and cultural dissolution. **[[Carl Schmitt]]'s political theory.** Schmitt's concepts of the *Großraum* (large civilizational space), the friend-enemy distinction as the essence of the political, and the critique of liberal universalism as a mask for Anglo-Saxon imperial interests provided Dugin with his jurisprudential framework. From Schmitt, Dugin took the conviction that [[Liberalism]] is not a neutral universal but the ideology of a specific civilization — the Atlantic-maritime one — and that its global imposition is an act of civilizational warfare. **European [[Traditionalism]].** [[René Guénon]]'s and [[Julius Evola]]'s critique of modernity as spiritual decline — the "crisis of the modern world" — gave Dugin his metaphysical register. The conflict between Eurasia and [[Atlanticism]] is not merely geopolitical but *spiritual*: liberal modernity is the final stage of civilizational decay, and Russia's Eurasian mission is to resist it on behalf of sacred tradition. This eschatological framing is what distinguishes Dugin from conventional geopolitical analysts and connects him to the broader [[Traditionalism]] current that also influences elements of the Western far right. ### Foundations of Geopolitics (1997) Dugin's magnum opus — documented in detail in the vault's [[Foundations of Geopolitics]] page — translated the Eurasianist framework into a concrete strategic program. The book was adopted as a textbook at the Russian General Staff Academy and has been described as the most influential political text published in post-Soviet Russia. Its prescriptions — destabilize the United States through internal divisions, separate the UK from Europe, absorb Ukraine into the Russian sphere, cultivate a Moscow-Tehran axis — have tracked actual Russian foreign policy with an accuracy that ranges from suggestive to uncanny. The book's central binary — [[Atlanticism]] (liberal, maritime, individualist) vs. Eurasianism (traditional, continental, communal) — is the operational form of the Eurasianist ideology. It converts a civilizational self-conception into a strategic program, and a philosophical tradition into a military-intelligence framework. ### The Fourth Political Theory (2009) Dugin's attempt to systematize Eurasianism as a comprehensive post-ideological philosophy, positioning it as the "fourth political theory" beyond liberalism (first), communism (second), and fascism (third). Drawing on [[Martin Heidegger]]'s concept of *Dasein* (Being-there) as the political subject — replacing the liberal individual, the communist class, and the fascist race — Dugin proposed a politics rooted in civilizational identity and spiritual tradition rather than any of modernity's three failed frameworks. The Fourth Political Theory is the vehicle through which Eurasianism has been exported beyond Russia. It provides a philosophical lingua franca for the international anti-liberal network connecting Russian nationalists, European identitarians, and elements of the American right — not because all these movements accept Dugin's specific Russocentric conclusions but because the framework's *anti-liberal structure* is adaptable to local contexts. ## Core claims in summary **Civilizational distinctiveness.** Russia is not a failed or backward version of Europe but the core of a distinct Eurasian civilization with its own valid historical trajectory, cultural logic, and political form. **Tellurocracy vs. thalassocracy.** World history is structured by the conflict between land-based and sea-based civilizations. Russia leads the tellurocratic bloc; the Anglo-Saxon world leads the thalassocratic one. This conflict is permanent and existential. **Multipolarity.** The liberal international order — American hegemony institutionalized through [[NATO]], the EU, the WTO, and the human rights regime — is not universal but a temporary expression of thalassocratic dominance. It must be replaced by a multipolar system in which each [[Civilizational State]] governs according to its own tradition. **Rejection of liberal universalism.** Human rights, democratic governance, individual liberty, and market economics are not universal values but the cultural products of a specific (Atlantic-Western) civilization. Their global imposition is civilizational warfare disguised as progress. **Russia's mission.** Russia is called — by geography, history, and spiritual destiny — to lead the resistance against liberal-Atlantic hegemony and to anchor the Eurasian civilizational pole in the emerging multipolar order. ## Right-wing-KB relevance Eurasianism matters for this vault because it is the intellectual engine connecting several apparently separate phenomena documented across the knowledge base: **The strategic logic of Russian operations.** [[Active Measures]], [[Hybrid Warfare]], the [[Internet Research Agency]]'s social media campaigns, the cultivation of European far-right parties, the [[Foundations of Geopolitics]] prescription to destabilize America through internal divisions — all of these operational programs are expressions of the Eurasianist strategic framework. Understanding Eurasianism is understanding *why* Russia does what it does, not just *what* it does. **The [[Global New Right Network]] connection.** Dugin's Eurasianism provides the intellectual bridge between Russian anti-liberalism and the Western far right. [[Steve Bannon]] published Dugin's books in the United States. Dugin described himself as Bannon's "ideological soul mate." The [[National Conservatism]] conferences and CPAC International circuit circulate ideas that are structurally Eurasianist — multipolar civilizational order, rejection of liberal universalism, sovereignty against international institutions — even when participants have never read Dugin. The Fourth Political Theory is the philosophical framework that makes the Bannon-Dugin overlap possible: both reject liberalism, both think in civilizational categories, both frame their project as spiritual warfare against modernity. The critical difference — Bannon sees America as Western civilization's champion while Dugin sees America as civilization's destroyer — is a productive tension within the network, not a dealbreaker. **[[Civilizational State]] rhetoric.** The contemporary vogue for "civilizational state" language — Russia, China, India, Turkey, and Hungary all deploying the concept — draws directly on the Eurasianist claim that the nation-state model is a Western imposition and that authentic political forms are civilizational. When [[Viktor Orbán]] presents Hungary as a defender of Christian civilization against liberal Brussels, or when Chinese intellectuals invoke *tianxia* (all-under-heaven) as an alternative to Westphalian sovereignty, they are operating in the conceptual space that Eurasianism opened — even when they are not conscious of the lineage. **The [[Traditionalism]] convergence.** Eurasianism's reliance on [[René Guénon]] and [[Julius Evola]] connects it to the broader Traditionalist current that also influences elements of the American and European right — from [[Steve Bannon]]'s Dignitatis Humanae Institute project to the European [[Identitarian Movement]]'s invocation of sacred tradition against secular modernity. The Traditionalist thread is the philosophical wiring through which Russian Eurasianism and Western far-right movements recognize each other as allies against the common enemy of liberal modernity. ## See Also - [[Alexander Dugin]] — principal contemporary ideologist - [[Foundations of Geopolitics]] — the strategic program - [[Russian Cosmism]] — adjacent civilizational-philosophy tradition - [[Traditionalism]] — the metaphysical substrate - [[Heartland Theory]] — the geopolitical foundation - [[Atlanticism]] — the declared enemy - [[Civilizational State]] — the preferred political form - [[Russkii Mir]] — the demographic-cultural companion concept - [[Post-Soviet States]] — the "near abroad" the doctrine claims, country by country - [[Derzhava]] — the great-power identity claim beneath Eurasianist assertiveness - [[Pan-Slavism]] — the 19th-century predecessor Eurasianism explicitly rejected and transcended - [[Slavophile]] — the intellectual ancestor - [[Sovereign Democracy]] — the domestic governance framework - [[Steve Bannon]] — the American bridge figure - [[Global New Right Network]] — the transnational infrastructure - [[Dark Enlightenment]] — structural affinities in the Anglophone world - [[Identitarian Movement]] — European far-right network with Traditionalist connections - [[Authoritarianism Lexicon]] — alphabetical MOC - [[Russian Political Lexicon]] — cross-cutting navigation for Russian political vocabulary