Between Europe & Asia ─ The Origins, Theories, and Legacies of Russian Eurasianism

Between Europe and Asia analyzes the origins and development of Eurasianism, an intellectual movement that proclaimed the existence of Eurasia, a separate civilization coinciding with the former Russian Empire. The essays in the volume explore the historical roots, the heyday of the movement in the 1920s, and the afterlife of the movement in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. The first study to offer a multifaceted account of Eurasianism in the twentieth century and to touch on the movement's intellectual entanglements with history, politics, literature, or geography, this book also explores Eurasianism's influences beyond Russia.
The Eurasianists blended their search for a primordial essence of Russian culture with radicalism of Europe's interwar period. In reaction to the devastation and dislocation of the wars and revolutions, they celebrated the Orthodox Church and the Asian connections of Russian culture, while rejecting Western individualism and democracy. The movement sought to articulate a non-European, non-Western modernity, and to underscore Russia's role in the colonial world. As the authors demonstrate, Eurasianism was akin to many fascist movements in interwar Europe, and became one of the sources of the rhetoric of nationalist mobilization in Vladimir Putin's Russia. This book presents the rich history of the concept of Eurasianism, and how it developed over time to achieve its present form.

Mark Bassin is research professor of the history of ideas in the Center for Baltic and East European Studies at Sodertorn University, Stockholm. He is the author ofImperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East, 1840-1865 and co-editedSoviet and Post-Soviet Identities and Space, Place, and Power in Modern Russia: Essays in the New Spatial History.
Sergey Glebov is assistant professor of Russian history at Smith College and Amherst College. Glebov is the founding editor ofAb Imperio: Studies in Nationalism and New Imperial History in the Post-Soviet Space.
Marlene Laruelle is director of the Central Asia Program and a research professor of international affairs at the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (IERES), Elliott School of International Affairs at The George Washington University. She is the author of Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire, In the Name of the Nation: Nationalism and Politics in Contemporary Russia, andRussia’s Strategies in the Arctic and the Future of the Far North.