In this article, we present the perspective of American researcher Gordon Hahn on the new Eurasianism in Russia and its relationship with the war in Ukraine, as discussed in his renowned book “Ukraine on the Edge: Russia, the West, and the New Cold War.”
How Did Eurasian Thought Arise?
The author argues that until the late 19th century, Russian civilizational thought was divided between Westernizers and proponents of Slavic unity. Socialists later managed to penetrate the ranks of both groups at the beginning of the 20th century.
Westernizers believed Russia’s fate was tied to that of Europe, arguing that it was unimportant for Russia to be influenced by Russian Orthodoxy, the Mongol yoke, and the late scientific and cultural renaissance in Russian literature, as the destiny of their country lay in its close ties with Europe. These Westernizers asserted that Russia must adopt political, economic, and social institutions modeled after Europe.
On the other hand, supporters of Slavic unity viewed the Russian and Slavic worlds as unique, where Eastern Orthodox spirituality replaced materialism (both capitalism and socialism) and mechanistic rationality, and where spiritual collectivism triumphed over individuality and competition.
When Russian despotism collapsed, and Bolshevik communism began to rise, many Russian intellectual elites were forced to flee to Western Europe, where they rethought major civilizational concepts.
The idea of Slavic unity was dealt a blow by Russia’s defeat in World War I, leading to a new direction in response to this dilemma. Supporters of Slavic unity reconsidered the correctness of their rejection of Western political thought. A broader vision emerged, replacing Slavic unity and imperial Russian despotism, which was Eurasianism—merging Europe and Asia within a single Russia. These Eurasianists rejected the exaggeration of the comprehensive Slavic idea and ethnic Russian nationalism. Among these thinkers were linguist Nikolai Trubetskoy and ethnographer Pyotr Savitsky.
Nikolai Trubetskoy
Trubetskoy’s significant works include “Towards the East” and “Eurasianism: An Experiment in Systematic Interpretation.” He views religion as “the foundation of ideology,” the “creator of culture and its contours.” According to Trubetskoy, Russia is the essence of Eurasia, and Orthodox Christianity is at the heart of Russia; thus, Russian Orthodox Christianity forms the core of the Eurasian project.
Orthodoxy is “the foundation” of the “way of life” in Russia, framing “its specific attitude toward nature and the world,” and is the source of the “idea of transforming the world.” Trubetskoy argues that Orthodoxy is the cornerstone of a broader Eurasian ideology, provided it is adjusted and complemented by religious thought from Asian religions: Islam, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. These religions, particularly Buddhism, are closely connected with the “mystical contemplation” of Orthodoxy, which is quite distinct from Protestant Christianity and even more so from Catholicism.
Trubetskoy was a strong advocate of Slavic unity, or what is known as “Slavophilia,” criticizing Peter the Great’s European-oriented reforms, seeing them as a deviation from the true Eastern Orthodox roots of “Eurasian Russia.” He also views imperial Russia’s shift from its Asian Eurasian fate as stemming from the enmity with Islamic khanates (Kazan, Astrakhan, and Crimea) that arose from the devastating wars waged by Russia against these khanates, which could have historically been strong allies of Russia in its hostile stance against Europe.
In Trubetskoy’s view, this duality of both “Europeanism” and hostility towards the Islamic khanates led to a division among the intellectual currents that crystallized in Russia at the turn of the 20th century, particularly between Western supporters, Slavic advocates, and supporters of the socialist revolution with Western roots.
It could be argued that the Eurasianists were ethnically closer to the ancestors of the Tatars, especially the Bulgars in the Volga basin, who could have shaped a synthesis with this Asian depth. In their view, Russian culture was their “Euro-Asian” culture.
On a psychological level regarding the identity of the individual, Trubetskoy believes that the “psychological makeup,” or the Eurasian national character, contrasts with the European one. It tends toward “awareness of the boundaries of social and political life and its connection to nature,” as this identity carries higher values and a more genuine source of happiness.
He also observes that Eurasian thought is based on the “continental extension” of Eurasia, the “Russian [spirit] expansion,” the awareness of “historic determinism of its established forms,” and “contintental self-definition within its limits.”
According to this vision, the Eurasian construct is rooted in an “indestructible self-confidence” and “an ancient nomadic instinct,” rather than being external forms imported from Europe.
Trubetskoy pays attention to the traditions available among the Turkish and Persian peoples, but he “hates their authoritarian confines.”
He claims that the Russian Eurasian symphony (organic unity) and collective spirituality (with its superior ethnic dominance) constitute the foundation for “true unity” in Eurasia, contrasting with the illusion of European unity.
Trubetskoy finds precedents for Eurasian unity in the Mongolian Empire of Genghis Khan, which imposed the “historical task” of politically unifying Eurasia, laying the groundwork for a political system. From his perspective, Moscow inherited this task and the Mongols’ “cultural-political legacy.”
In the imperial system after Peter the Great, the “Eurasian Russian idea” was left dormant and deformed. In his writings, while the Soviet communist experience was gaining momentum, Trubetskoy believed that “Eurasian Russia” would survive the “criminal experiments” conducted by Peter the Great and various “radical Europeans” who succeeded in ruling the country.
Ultimately, Trubetskoy highlighted the same division that had plagued Russian thought since Peter the Great, advocating a political system for Eurasia based on original soviets, describing it as the only option for establishing a democratic federal system to definitively block the return and renewal of the monarchy. Unfortunately, the Soviet implementation of the authoritarian Bolshevik system destroyed this recommendation.
Pyotr Savitsky
The author of our text considers Pyotr Savitsky to be the most advanced thinker in early Eurasianism. Savitsky, an ethnographer, believed that Eurasia possesses an organic unity created by the interactions between the imperatives of the steppe terrain and the cultural and civilizational inputs from all its ethnic groups—the Russians, Mongols, Bulgars (ancestors of the Tatars), and other Turkic peoples.
On the ideological front, it was intended that a Eurasian ideology based on Russian Orthodoxy would replace Marxism-Leninism, with the Communist Party dictatorship replacing the Eurasian party dictatorship.
Savitsky proposed establishing an association for the peoples of Eurasia, ensuring that each ethnic group had representation proportionate to its “cultural capacity.” Savitsky’s vision contained elements of discrimination and inclusivity, but he presented it as an alternative to communism and fascism.
In 1945, the Red Army captured Savitsky in Prague, sending him to a labor camp, where he met the young historian Lev Gumilyov, the son of famous Petersburg poets Nikolai Gumilyov and Anna Akhmatova. Gumilyov became Savitsky’s disciple, and both were rehabilitated in 1956 as part of Nikita Khrushchev’s policies to undo Stalinism.
Savitsky returned to Prague, where he died in 1968. Gumilyov took the baton of Eurasianism from Savitsky, promoting the idea among certain Soviet elites who welcomed it in prestigious positions within the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee, the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the General Staff.
During the period of perestroika, Gumilyov’s works were revived among the public, with large quantities of his books and complete works printed, a significant portion of which became available in Russian libraries.
Lev Gumilyov
Gumilyov applied detailed knowledge of the history and ethnography of Eurasia to study it as an integrated entity or civilization, promoting the Eurasian idea.
For Gumilyov, it is neither place nor time nor geography that primarily drives the course of history.
Gumilyov believes geography and natural landscapes were highly significant in shaping this identity.
Historically, the stable urbanization of Europe stands in sharp contrast to the nomadic identity of Eurasia characterized by a wandering culture determined by life on the steppes.
However, the most pivotal idea for Gumilyov is what he calls “ethnic groups” or “nations.” He states:
“[History] is created within the framework of ethnic groups (‘nations’ or ‘races’) that interact with each other, not only through conscious calculation; but through a sense of integration; an unconscious feeling of mutual empathy and commonalities among people, determining the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ and the division between ‘us’ and ‘the others.’”
Gumilyov added many ideas to his ethnographic thesis through mystical writings on the concepts of “mental space,” and “races,” or ethnic groups as vital cosmic entities, representing the seeds of thought that we would later recognize in the ideas of Alexander Dugin.
Gumilyov posits that each ethnic group is a living entity that undergoes a human-like life cycle, peaking in mid-life in a surge of creative energy—“passion.”
In the peak period of a nation, passion is the “engine” of cultural formation. Gumilyov believes that this nation’s “leadership” is embodied in its “ethnic traditions” derived from its ethnic character and material culture, which evolved in response to the space occupied by that specific nation.
For Gumilyov, the idea of Eurasia as a distinct civilization is partly founded on the notion that ethnic groups with similar cultural traits can form a super-ethnic group, thereby rising to the level of “civilization.”
In his most realistic works, Gumilyov sought to demonstrate the Russian people’s capacity for cultural and ethnic interaction and networking with other ethnic groups in Eurasia as the primary element of the “ethnic formation” of Eurasian civilization.
Gumilyov believes that Russians brought the Orthodox doctrine from Byzantium in the Mediterranean to the natural valleys of Eurasia, where the river systems flow through European Russia and Siberia. Moscow also reached a stage of creative passion in the 13th to 15th centuries, characterized by Russia’s strategy of “land gathering” since the time of Ivan III in the late 15th and early 16th centuries.
He views Moscow’s westward, southward, and eastward expansion from the 16th to the 20th centuries as evidence of its intense enthusiasm and creative passion.
Gumilyov acknowledges that Muscovite Russia borrowed the religious traditions of Eastern Orthodoxy from Kievan Russia, which is the fundamental tradition of Russian Eurasian civilization that allowed Russia to have “a voice in the history of Eurasia.”
However, like Trubetskoy, he found that the source of Eurasian Russia lies in Moscow, not Kievan Rus; thus, Moscow did not continue the traditions of Kievan Rus as Novgorod did previously, but rather destroyed Kievan traditions represented by the popular assembly (veche), freedom, as well as the internal struggle among princes.
Instead, Muscovite Russia replaced these traditions with behavioral rules borrowed from the Mongols, notably: a strict system of discipline, ethnic tolerance, and deep religiosity.
These three Mongolic traits—according to Gumilyov—are the distinctive civilizational characteristics of Eurasia. At the same time, Gumilyov affirmed that every “ethnic group” in Eurasia—Russians, Mongols, Tatars, and other Turkic nationalities, among others—”left a strong impact on the overall course of ethnic formation of the super-ethnic group.”
Gumilyov went on to argue that there are three civilizations that continued to “resist,” or influence Russia and Eurasia: “Catholic Europe in the west, China in the far east, and the Islamic world in the south.”
Gumilyov believed that the map of Russia in the Eurasian phase could not encompass all the vast historical maps of these represented civilizations; it could only include late imperial Russia and nearly the Soviet Union, and it was incapable of uniting the heart of the country with its periphery from China to Central Europe, as the peoples of Eurasia developed a unique “political culture” and “vision of development paths and goals.” They “built a joint state based on the principle of prioritizing each nation’s rights to a lifestyle defined by itself.”
In the 20th century, the Soviet leadership rejected Gumilyov’s vision of Eurasianism, allowing European principles to lead while attempting to homogenize all. Consequently, Gumilyov rejected the integration of Russia into the West. While he acknowledged that studying and borrowing some elements from foreign and European practices was healthy, he concluded that “the price of integrating Russia into Western Europe would, in any case, entail a complete rejection of original traditions and subsequent assimilation.”
Eurasian Thought Post-Soviet Union Collapse
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Eurasian thought experienced a cautious revival reflected in the re-publication of works by Trubetskoy and other Eurasianists. These publications had begun in the final years of perestroika, and some of these ideas seem to have infiltrated certain corridors of Russian power.
In repeating the experiences of the early Eurasianists in the 19th and 20th centuries, new Eurasianists in the 21st century responded to the challenge of Russia’s failure to cope with the West and “Westernizers.”
Both Panarin and Dugin are prime examples of contemporary new Eurasian thought. These geostrategists appear to have been influenced by Mackinder and other proponents of Eurasian civilizational ideologies, reflecting the role of geography as a foundational base and infrastructure.
The Eurasian civilizational perspective serves as a crucial intermediary variable between the structural cause of geography on the one hand and ideology and policy-making on the other, just as Samuel Huntington’s civilizational approach succeeded in linking geography and Mackinder’s geopolitical analysis with Western ideology and politics.
Today, in the 21st century, by delving into the works of Savitsky, Trubetskoy, and Gumilyov, new followers of Eurasianism are attempting to reframe and promote a Russian-centric alternative to the Western civilizational model in the post-Cold War era.
The Western model is clearly based on three pillars:
- Neoliberal economy,
- Open information society,
- Political and military interference outside the Atlantic community of democracies.
However, the glaring truth is that there is an ideological deficiency and lack of substance in what the new Eurasianists are proposing as an alternative to this Western model.
Despite this ideological deficit, the geographic aspirations of the new Eurasianists have broadened beyond what was anticipated by the pioneers of the original Eurasian movement.
Alexander Panarin
Panarin explicitly asserts that the West “has not only rejected Russia from the (European house); it also attempted to prevent it and isolate it within the post-Soviet space using anti-Russian sentiments.”
He downplays this rejection, stating: “However, this European rejection of Russia is not a concern, as the primary creative success of Russian civilization (Russkaya) lies in its ability to form large ethnic syntheses, which was its response to the challenge posed by the expanse of the steppe plains.”
In this way, Panarin and those who adopt his thoughts envision, in a more coherent manner than their predecessors, a Jesuit or Christ-like (missionary) Russian destiny in forming a great ethnicity or civilization that encompasses not just the heart of Eurasia but perhaps its periphery extending from Southeast Asia to the Islamic south and to Central Europe.
According to Panarin and his followers, Russia must first seek to “reintegrate the post-Soviet space based on a new formative idea.” His comprehensive model for civilizational diversity seems designed to counteract the homogenizing globalization dominated by the West and the “barbarism manifested in what is called the ‘clash of civilizations.'”
For Panarin, Russia is capable of becoming a major modernization force for the East while simultaneously being a source of reform for the West’s decay.
According to this approach, the European and Slavic cultural roots of Eurasia make it the logical bridge through which a more spiritual and sustainable form of global development can be synthesized in the less developed regions of Eurasia, offering an alternative to the global environmental catastrophe that Panarin predicts, which may arise from U.S. dominance in the world. In other words, like the leading Russian thinkers of the past, such as Fyodor Dostoevsky and Vladimir Solovyov, Panarin believes that Russia can save the world through new Eurasianism.
This more expansive quasi-global new Eurasianism is marked by highly ambitious aspirations, devoid of material or spiritual limitations.
Panarin questions the ultimate direction that Slavic and Eastern European countries will take, suggesting that after being caught between Germany and Russia, they are destined, at best, to remain second-tier nations in the West. He explicitly states this with regard to the Slavic countries in these areas.
It is assumed that the Slavic countries and regions of Eastern and Central Europe “are objectively interested in the existence of a Russian geopolitical alternative. Under a strong Russia, the status of Slavic countries in Central Europe would, anyway, be higher and more accepted than under a weak Russia.”
However, Panarin’s analysis implies that Russia today holds secondary importance for Slavic countries compared to their aspirations to become fully European. In this latter context, Russia becomes relevant only as leverage that they can use to strengthen their positions within the European Union and NATO and the West generally.
The best that Russia can hope for is to establish a union among Slavic peoples that brings them one step closer to Europe and its institutions. Yet, this will not resolve the issues of Slavian detachment from Russia or the transformation of Eastern and Central Europe into a geopolitical buffer zone between it and the boundaries of the new Eurasian project.
On the ideological level, new Eurasianists affirm, like their Eurasian predecessors and their contemporary Huntington followers, the central role that religion plays in forming civilization. The new Eurasianists emphasize traditional religions, particularly the unique kinship between Russian Orthodox civilization and mysticism in other major religions in Eurasia—Islam, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Hinduism.
According to Panarin, the Christ-like role of Russia is summarized in “proposing a new, powerful, and dynamic synthesis to the peoples of Eurasia” based on two pillars: “popular conservatism” and “civilizational diversity.”
The fundamental principle of Russian Eurasian “popular conservatism” is “socio-cultural preservation,” aimed at maintaining the traditional cultures of Eurasia and the world, religious mysticism, and ethnic and civilizational diversity and pluralism, in the face of Western-globalization and cultural homogenization.
Russia can make a leap past the advanced industrial phase to a higher development stage based on clean technology. Eurasia and the world would be led toward a new post-industrial, environmentally cultural world, multi-civilizational in nature, rejecting “anti-culture technology,” consumerism, and the homogenization characterized by the spirit-less American worldview that threatens nature and national cultures.
Panarin and those in his school believe that the West has over-relied on the rationality of material and social sciences (especially free market economics), technology, and technocracy.
Alexander Dugin
Dugin, in support of Panarin, predicts a catastrophic confrontation between good and evil: between the “commercial, individualistic, materialistic, and globalist worldview” of the Atlanticists and the “spiritual, ideological, collective, authoritative, hierarchical, and traditional” vision of Eurasian Russia.
In his article published in 2014 titled “Eurasia in the Network War,” Dugin provides a comprehensive list of cultural oppositions dividing Eurasia and the West in terms of Mackinder’s concepts: “We either stand on the side of land civilization or on the side of ocean civilization. The land represents tradition and faith (in the perspective of ethnic Russians—Orthodox Christianity), the empire, the people, the sacred, history, family, morals. The ocean signifies modernization, commerce, technology, liberal democracy, capitalism, parliamentarianism, individualism, materialism, and gender politics.
In his book “The Eurasian Way as a National Idea,” Dugin postulates the Christ-like role of Russia, articulating, “In the future, Russia alone will be capable of becoming the main pole, the bastion of planetary resistance, and the gathering point for all the world’s forces that insist on their own course, exaggerating their national and international and historical egoism.”
In his book “Secrets of Eurasia,” Dugin asserts that there once existed an island closer to the polar paradise (Hyperborea), from which a pure Aryan race, the ancestors of Russians, migrated to the Arctic. That is, Russian thinkers advocating the new Eurasianism predict the emergence of a new traditional spirituality connecting with nature and God, which will, according to Hegel’s terms, be the new antithesis to the thesis of technological globalization, leading to a new civilization and a new level of civilization.
However, despite the repeated emphasis in Eurasian discourse on the equality of the peoples of Eurasia and their cultures, Russia remains, in the eyes of many Eurasianists today, “the first among equals,” possessing what Dostoevsky referred to as the “universality of Russia” rooted in cultural kinship and the capacity for partnership with other civilizations, along with the benefits and advantages such partnerships entail.
New Eurasianists in the Kremlin
This book posits that new Eurasian ideas are evident in the public statements of Russian officials; for instance, in August 2015, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reiterated Panarin’s ideas about the need to resist apparent Western efforts to impose a homogeneous set of international and social standards under the title of democracy. Lavrov states in this regard:
“We see attempts to artificially maintain Western dominance, even by pressing other countries and using sanctions, even military force, in violation of international law and the UN Charter. This adds an element of chaos to international relations and turns entire regions and states into pockets of terrorism and violent extremism, along with many other negative phenomena that we sadly observe occurring across most of the Middle East and North Africa.”
Despite the “new cold war” stemming from the Ukraine crisis, Lavrov echoed Putin’s remarks about the potential role of the Eurasian Economic Union as an economic and trade bridge between the Asia-Pacific region and the EU, expressing:
“The Eurasian Economic Union has the potential to become a connecting link between integration processes in the Asia-Pacific region and what our colleagues are working on in Europe to the west of the Eurasian Economic Union.”
This statement clearly reflects that the new Eurasianism adopted by Putin is a practical economic tendency, unrelated to the traditional neo-Eurasian idealism, mysticism, or imperialism.
Conclusion and Implications
The book concludes that Russian emphasis on multipolarity as the emerging “democratic” structure for the international system was first established in its initial phase with the appointment of Yevgeny Primakov as Russian Foreign Minister in the late 1990s, long before Vladimir Putin took office. Thus, it is difficult to separate multipolarity and new Eurasianism from Putin’s worldview and that of other senior officials regarding foreign policy.
Similarly, there is no significant geographical separation between ideas such as “the post-Soviet space,” the former Soviet Union, etc., and the geographical Eurasia. It should be noted that years before Putin’s rise to power, efforts to economically and/or politically unify the post-Soviet/Eurasian geographic space had preceded him, including the Commonwealth of Independent States (1991), the Collective Security Treaty Organization (1992), and the Eurasian Union, which Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev proposed for the first time in 1994.
In summary, Putin is seen as a proponent of moderate new Eurasian visions, with a focus on the role of Turkic peoples in uniting Eurasia in alliance with Russia, even founding the state-run Lev Gumilyov University in Almaty in the 1990s.
Putin’s speeches and writings do not reflect a systematic or clear Eurasian thought, nor has he ever used the term “Eurasianism.” He occasionally refers to some fundamental elements of new Eurasianism, such as the significance of Christian Orthodoxy in Russian culture, the geographical notion of Eurasia, and even the Eurasian civilization. However, these do not rise to the level of new Eurasian thought; these elements were present and were largely hypothetical positions emerging with the collapse of communism and the post-Soviet transition from Western democracy and free market practices following failures in Russian internal reforms and Russian-Western relations.
The book’s author, Gordon Hahn, emphasizes that the solution to the conflict between Russia and the West lies in formulating a “common approach” at the grassroots level, although the challenge is that this approach must firstly derive from within the existing regional structures—the EU, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and others—followed by dialogue among them. Through these very “integrative stones,” a more stable global economy can be shaped.
