The unconscious substrates of language, in other words, showed a natural order of things, natural boundaries to cultures which best demonstrated the inner logic they were seeking to prove. The existence of ‘language unions’ rationalized in theoretical terms a spatial principle of identity rather than a temporal one, the former based on common geography, and the latter on a common historical origin. The inhabitants of these zones of converging culture should be recognized for their ‘symphonic personality’, as Trubetskoy put it – the various attributes of the individual converged with the environment to create natural wholes which were expressed in the total personalities of their members. Russia and Eastern Slavs were distinguished from their Western, Catholic and Protestant counterparts by the ‘Turanian element’, according to Trubetskoy – a fossil of the Mongol yoke.
The Eurasianists took seriously the idea that natural linguistic boundaries – isoglosses – denoted a sort of unconscious sovereignty. A cultural system that lay outside such a border could not be claimed; Poland, for example, could not ever be considered a natural part of the Eurasian conglomerate, and thus the multiple attempts to include it in the Russian Empire were inevitably doomed to failure, according to Trubetskoy, who wrote frequently about the hazards of ignoring the natural watersheds of human civilization.
The Eurasianists’ structural theories distanced Russia from being considered a ‘Slavic’ country, as it had been in the nineteenth-century writings of a host of intellectuals who had co-opted the term as their own – the Slavophiles and the Pan-Slavists, such as Danilevsky. Due to a common tendency of development, ‘Eurasia’ had been decisively and scientifically proven to be a singular unit strictly divided by natural cultural boundaries from the Western Slavs and the ‘Romano Germans’. ‘Slavdom’, however, was an outmoded product of the nineteenth century’s obsession with origins and family trees. ‘The question of limits and boundaries is thus posed right away as the key issue’, according to linguist Patrick Seriot, who has exhaustively researched the Eurasianists’ claims. ‘Eurasianism is above all an enterprise aimed at reconfiguring frontiers, a deconstruction of entities declared false (the Slavs) to the profit of other supposed to be more real [e.g. Eurasia] because they are organic.’13 However, he made the point that when it came to portraying the West, Trubetskoy had double standards. He was painstaking when it came to teasing out extremely subtle similarities and gradations in Eurasian cultures, while he tended to see ‘Romano Germanic’ civilization as an undifferentiated totality, and offered very little justification for this view.
These natural cultural boundaries buttressed the argument for the common political identity of Eurasia and put into practice the fundamental axiom: the cause of all geopolitical misfortune that had befallen the Russian Empire was the non-recognition of the frontiers of natural systems. The data adduced by the Eurasianists nourished their certainty that while the Bolshevik revolution was doomed, the territory of the Russian Empire, reborn in the Soviet Union, was destined to remain whole. However, in the first collision between the Soviet state and its Eurasian alternative, a clear winner emerged very rapidly.
The deep state
Starting in February 1925, strange, out-of-context words – ‘oil’, ‘Argentina’, ‘machinists’, ‘musicians’ – began to appear in Trubetskoy’s correspondence with other Eurasianists. ‘I am angry’, Trubetskoy declared in a July letter to Suvchinsky. ‘I am angry because the brochure was sent to the manufacturers despite the fact that I specifically asked for that not to happen and for it only to be sent to Argentina.’14
The group had begun writing in code. ‘Manufacturers’ meant the Russian émigré community in Europe, while ‘Argentina’ meant Russia. ‘Oil’ stood for Eurasianism, while Trubetskoy was henceforth referred to as ‘Yokhelson’. The secure communications, such as they were, signalled a departure for the previously apolitical group of scholars, who evidently had decided on the cipher as they began to dip their toes into the world of clandestine organizing. It had become obvious to the ivory tower academics that in order to become a serious political movement, they would have to engage in politics. And thus began a new phase in the Eurasianists’ self-declared mission, entering the through-the-looking-glass world of émigré intrigue, watched at every turn by various Western secret services and the Soviet equivalent (the OGPU or Cheka) – the shadowy competition which provided some of the most lurid stories of espionage and intrigue of the twentieth century. It was a world in which virtually no one was who they said they were, where many made their living as informers for various secret services, and where operatives worked for multiple masters. The only way to succeed was to stay one step ahead of the fleet-footed game of betrayal and double-cross. It was to prove the Eurasianists’ undoing.
It had all started sometime in 1922, soon after publication of Exodus, when Trubetskoy was approached by a group of White Army officers who expressed an interest in joining the movement. A number of new faces had joined that year, mostly scholars who had been taken with the arguments of Exodus or the reputations of its authors.
Although Father Florovsky soon left the group, from 1922 it was joined by a number of like-minded Russian intellectuals, including Vasily Nikitin, an orientalist and former Russian consul in Persia, and Lev Karsavin, a historian, Petr Bitsilli, a medieval historian from Odessa, and Count Dmitry Svyatopolk-Mirsky, a son of a former minister of internal affairs, who later taught at the London School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Georgy Vernadsky, a historian and son of Vladimir Vernadsky, one of the most eminent natural scientists of Imperial Russia, also joined and would later go on to teach history at Yale University.
In contrast to these new participants, the officers were obviously no in-tellectuals, but Trubetskoy saw their interest as an opportunity to recruit a cadre of men who could take care of the political work that he believed needed to be started – to link the underground of anti-Bolshevik groups and liaise with other émigré movements, dominated by White officers, to gather even more recruits. They were just the sort of people who would become the raw material for all the political movements of the interwar period in Europe: young, rootless war veterans looking for a place to belong.
One of these men was Petr Arapov. He was a relative of General Wrangel, for whom Savitsky had worked, under Struve. In his mid-twenties, Arapov was the epitome of a Russian officer: well mannered, of ‘exceptional appearance’, fluent in four languages according to Savitsky, and with a commanding presence.15 While he could not hope to compete with the academics in their theoretical pursuits, he was nonetheless worldly in ways they were not. They recognized that each needed something the other had: for Arapov, this was probably a purpose to which he could devote his talents; for the intellectuals, it was the realization that they were thinkers in search of doers. As Trubetskoy put it to Suvchinsky: ‘Their goal is not self-reliance, rather they seek to put themselves under our authority. I think we should accept this offer… judging by everything, they see us as an authority, and sincerely wish to become proper Eurasians and help us in our work.’16