Like Trubetskoy, Savitsky was an aristocrat, though with less blue blood. His family owned the estate of Savshchino in the Chernigov region of Ukraine, which at that time was part of the Russian Empire. They also owned a sugar mill. His father was chairman of the local zemstvo, a type of local council set up in the nineteenth century as an experiment in political reform. While the Trubetskoys were among the top five names in the court aristocracy of the tsar, the Savitskys were simply landed gentry.
Born in 1895, from an early age Petr took a huge interest in geography and soil studies. He attended St Petersburg Polytechnic University, where he fell under the influence of the remarkable professor and political figure Petr Struve, and soon became Struve’s favourite student. After the Bolshevik seizure of power, Struve and Savitsky joined the White forces under General Petr Wrangel, who held the Crimea, and Struve was briefly Wrangel’s foreign minister (with Savitsky as his deputy), until the interim government declared by the White forces collapsed and both Savitsky and his older patron found their way to Sofia.
Struve represented the old establishment, Savitsky the new avant-garde, some of whom had begun to believe that Russia should look forward and not back. The Bolshevik revolution was a fact, and it was ridiculous to claim otherwise – to pretend it had not happened. Savitsky evidently admired some of the achievements of the Bolsheviks: if not their communism, then at least their ability to quickly consolidate power and ‘defend Russia from foreign interference’, as he put it. He wrote this in a letter to his mentor at the end of 1921, initiating a final break between the two, as Savitsky joined Trubetskoy to work on Eurasianism.
His letter was a declaration of a fresh line of thinking within the new generation of younger émigrés. First and foremost, Savitsky said that the Bolshevik revolution represented a turning point in the history of Russia. It must be recognized, and the lessons must be learned: ‘Changing the economic policy of Bolshevism is a condition for the life of Russia. Keeping its political apparatus is the condition for the strength of the country.’ But Struve still felt that Bolshevism had to be condemned as unlawful and accidental,11 and began to suspect Savitsky of being pro-Bolshevik. This led to a bitter schism between them. But by this time Savitsky had met Trubetskoy and had found a small but growing group that shared his views.
In 1920, following Savitsky’s review of Europe and Mankind, Trubetskoy made contact with the reviewer, and joined with Petr Suvchinsky, a musicologist and heir to a Ukrainian sugar fortune, who was friends with Stravinsky and Prokofiev, and most importantly, owned a printing house. Suvchinsky published Europe and Mankind, and with Father Georgy Florovsky, an Orthodox priest, also in Sofia, the four published a stunning new book of essays, entitled Exodus to the East. Part scholarship and part apocalyptica, Exodus was the founding document of the Eurasianist movement, clothing it in the same religious imagery, the same eschatological significance, as the poetry of Blok and the prose of Bely. ‘These are frightening times, terrifying epochs, like apocalyptic visions, times of great realizations of the Mystery, times frightening and blessed’, wrote Suvchinsky in a characteristic passage from Exodus.12
The same distinctly Russian instinct that had brought the Bolsheviks to power – the incredible capacity for destruction and creativity – had been unleashed and would not lie quiet. The task now was to guide this formidable energy in positive directions: ‘Russia in sin and godlessness, Russia in loathsomeness and filth. But Russia in search and struggle, in a bid for a city not of this world’, wrote Savitsky. The civil war had cleansed Russia of the old; purged Russia of its lethargy; brought Russia’s vitality to the surface; and answered the question of who ‘we’ are. According to the jointly written introduction to the book: ‘Russians and those who belong to the peoples of “the Russian world” are neither Europeans nor Asians. Merging with the native element of culture and life which surrounds us, we are not ashamed to declare ourselves Eurasians.’
What emerged from the overly intellectual milieu was an utterly original attitude to the Bolshevik revolution. Every other major émigré party had announced its utter rejection of the revolution, and its desire to turn back the political clock: some to 1861, before the accession to the throne of Nicholas II; some to before February 1917, when Nicholas abdicated; and some to various points between February and October 1917, when Russia was ruled by a liberal (if extremely disorganized) provisional government. The Eurasianists were alone in their neutral attitude towards the revolution, which they saw as a half-finished ‘Eurasian revolution’ against the West. While it was indeed biblical in its savagery and bloodiness, they saw the religious, eschatological echoes of 1917 as a catastrophic culmination of the two-century-long westernizing trend of Russian intellectual history and its simultaneous exculpation.
Exodus was a pseudo-religious blend of reason and myth, steel and sentimentality, and was reminiscent of other totalitarian writings of that decade. The exact purpose of the violence, bloodshed and upheaval was not exactly addressed – instead it had a vague theological meaning. War, revolution and dictatorship were not a means to an end, but rather a transition to a new existential state – an ‘end of days’, to be followed by the reign of God on earth.
The focus on the ‘East’ was an original view. The East envisaged by Trubetskoy and his fellow émigrés was most clearly an expression of the art of Russia’s Silver Age, with its symbolist influences such as Blok, who in 1918 wrote ‘The Scythians’, foretelling a savage conflict between Europe and Russia, presented as the descendants of Inner Asian nomads:
While Russian historiography had mourned the thirteenth-century Mongol invasion as a historical tragedy severing Old Russia from the European and Byzantine culture of which it had formed a part, the Eurasianists celebrated it as a redemptive event in which ‘the Tatars purged and sanctified’ Russia. There was no contradiction in celebrating both Mongol heritage and the Orthodox Church as unique essences of Russian civilization: Bolshevism, like the Golden Horde, was a purge which foreclosed a Western future for Russia and established a separate civilization.
The Eurasianists’ penchant for Mongol-centric history was, for the most part, not a serious ethnographic theory but rather a symbolic rejection of Russia’s Western heritage and an embrace of the native and primitive. It was more an aesthetic element of their utopian theory than a serious attempt to reconcile the steppe cultures with Russian history. Of the original generation of Eurasianists, only historian Georgy Vernadsky, who would later emigrate to the United States and teach at Yale University, gave scholarly legitimacy to some of the more modest claims of the Eurasian movement vis-à-vis the Mongolian inheritance.