Mark Bassin

Marlene Laruelle

Sergey Glebov

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.

The Origins, Theories, and Legacies of Russian Eurasianism

Between Europe and Asia

Gonzalo Pozo

This collection explores Eurasianism and its interactions with and effects on political discourses, identity debates, and popular culture.

Identity, Popular Culture and Russia's Foreign Policy

The Politics of Eurasianism

Mikhail Suslov

This book discusses the return of geopolitical ideas and doctrines to the post-Soviet space with special focus on the new phenomenon of digital geopolitics, which is an overarching term for different political practices including dissemination of geopolitical ideas online, using the internet by political figures and diplomats for legitimation and outreach activity, and viral spread of geopolitical memes. Different chapters explore the new possibilities and threats associated with this digitalization of geopolitical knowledge and practice. Our authors consider new spatial sensibilities and new identities of global as well as local Selves, the emergence of which is facilitated by the internet. They explore recent reconfigurations of the traditional imperial conundrum of center versus periphery. Developing Manuel Castells’ argument that social activism in the digital era is organized around cultural values, the essays discuss new geopolitical ideologies which aim to reinforce Russia’s spiritual sovereignty as a unique civilization, while at the same time seeking to rebrand Russia as a greater soft power by utilizing the Russian-speaking diaspora or employing traditionalist rhetoric. Great Power imagery, enemy-making, and visual mappings of Russia’s future territorial expansion are traditional means for the manipulation of imperial pleasures and geopolitical fears. In the age of new media, however, this is being done with greater subtlety by mobilizing the grassroots, contracting private information channels, and de-politicizing geopolitics. Given the political events of recent years, it is logical that the Ukrainian crisis should provide the thematic backdrop for most of the authors.

Russian Geopolitics in the Age of New Media

Eurasia 2.0

Exploring the creation, transformation, and imagination of Russian space as a lens through which to understand Russia's development over the centuries, this volume makes an important contribution to Russian studies and the new spatial history. It considers aspects of the relationship between place and power in Russia from the local level to the national and from the eighteenth century through the present. Essays include: Melissa K. Stockdale, What is a Fatherland? Changing Notions of Duty, Rights and Belonging in Russia; Mark Bassin, Nationhood, Natural Regions, Mestorazvitie: Environmental Discourses in Classic Eurasianism; John Randolph, Russian Route: The Politics of the Petersburg-Moscow Road, 1700-1800; Richard Stites, On the Dance Floor: Royal Power, Class, and Nationality in Servile Russia; Patricia Herlihy, Ab Oriente ad Ultimum Oriente: Eugen Scuyler, Russia and Central Asia; Robert Argenbright, Soviet Agitational Vehicles: Colonization from Place to Place; Christopher Ely, Street Space and Political Culture under Alexander II; Sergei Zhuk, Unmaking the Sacred Landscape of Orthodox Russia: Religious Pluralism, Identity Crisis, and Religious Politics on the Ukrainian Borderlands of the late Russian Empire; Cathy A. Frierson, Filling in the Map for Vologda's Post-Soviet Identity; and Lisa A, Kirschenbaum, Place, Memory and the Politics of Identity: Historical Buildings and Street Names in Leningrad-St. Petersburg.

Essays in the New Spatial History

Space, Place, and Power in Modern Russia

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the Russian empire made a dramatic advance on the Pacific by annexing the vast regions of the Amur and Ussuri rivers. Although this remote realm was a virtual terra incognita for the Russian educated public, the acquisition of an 'Asian Mississippi' attracted great attention nonetheless, even stirring the dreams of Russia's most outstanding visionaries. Within a decade of its acquisition, however, the dreams were gone and the Amur region largely abandoned and forgotten. In an innovative examination of Russia's perceptions of the new territories in the Far East, Mark Bassin sets the Amur enigma squarely in the context of the Zeitgeist in Russia at the time. Imperial Visions demonstrates the fundamental importance of geographical imagination in the mentalité of imperial Russia. This 1999 work offers a truly novel perspective on the complex and ambivalent ideological relationship between Russian nationalism, geographical identity and imperial expansion.

Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East, 1840–1865

Imperial Visions

In The Gumilev Mystique, Mark Bassin investigates the complex structure of Lev Gumilev's theories, revealing how they reflected and helped shape a variety of academic as well as political and social discourses in the USSR, and he traces how his authority has grown yet greater across the former Soviet Union.

Mark Bassin

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