Suvchinsky (leading the left wing of Eurasianism) and Savitsky (who held the right) had already begun to clash in 1925. The latter was bitterly opposed to communism and atheism, and was distrustful of the Soviets. Savitsky insisted that Eurasian orthodoxy could not be sacrificed for a temporary accommodation with Stalin. Meanwhile Trubetskoy, once the most enthusiastic and energetic of the group, gradually withdrew, demoralized, and pursued his academic research, which was at last bearing fruit.
The schism took place amid a shift in the tectonic plates of Soviet ideology. As Stalin consolidated his power as general secretary of the Communist Party, his lieutenants were slowly realizing how little appeal the pantheon of Marxism held as a tool for inspiring and mobilizing the population. Of the official heroes of the Soviet Union, several were either foreign (Marx, Engels, Marat) or unfamiliar (Frunze, Kotovsky) or both (Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht).30
Instead of national heroes, great battles and a shared history, Soviet commissars taught of social forces and stages of economic development. The early attempts to make stirring propaganda out of this mixture were laughable. The Communist Party hierarchs, realizing they needed propaganda that would work, quietly began looking for ideological alternatives to communist orthodoxy in order to mobilize the masses. Soviet nationalities policies also took account of self-determination, however fictitious – ethnic groups were assigned national or autonomous status, with parliaments and governments; national languages were recognized and customs celebrated, all within the artificial bubble of Communist Party rule.
Stalin gradually began to rehabilitate symbols and personalities of the Russian national past, and combined this with the modern tools of mass culture, particularly the cinema. The ‘National Bolshevism’ of Stalin began to look very much like the political programme of Eurasianism. There is no evidence that Stalin actually was influenced at all by Eurasianist writings; however, the fact that these émigré intellectual trends sprang up at more or less the same time as the very phenomenon they had predicted indicates that the Soviets and the émigrés were, in a sense, drinking from the same well.
Stalin’s decisive swerve to the right in turn fed the arguments of Suvchinsky and several other left-leaning Eurasianists, who increasingly doubted that supporting Eurasianism was actually a meaningful alternative to embracing the new USSR, and who began making increasingly strident appeals for rapprochement with the Soviets. To them, the changes wrought by Stalin were proof of their fundamental argument, proof of the reality of the Eurasian revolution against the West. Arapov even wrote to Suvchinsky: ‘Isn’t it better for us to leave Stalin to do calmly what we like so much in his activities?’31
The correspondence of the left-wing Eurasianists during this period was full of praise for Stalin’s reforms; and with each step towards National Bolshevism taken by Stalin, the resolve of the Eurasianist Party to supplant the Soviet regime weakened. In 1927, Suvchinsky even opened negotiations with the Soviet representative in France, though it was unclear with what objective. That same year, Suvchinsky contacted the author Maxim Gorky, a personal friend of Stalin’s, then living in Italy, with a proposal to work for the Soviet cause, saying that his group of Eurasianists supported three-quarters of the Soviet ideology. Gorky wrote to Stalin in support of the proposal, but Stalin appears to have shown no interest.
The right wing of the party, led by Savitsky, grew increasingly impatient at what it saw as freelancing by the left-wingers in Paris (though it is not clear if they even knew of the extent of the contacts between the left Eurasianists and the Soviet government). But they began to disagree profoundly on everything from Marxian economics to aesthetics, as the Paris branch of Eurasianism swung around to take a more orthodox Marxian view. For a time, in 1927 and 1928, both sides sought to obstruct publications by the other.
With the growing polarization of Eurasianism, Trubetskoy began to lose interest in the movement, and his influence over the squabbling circle of academics, former officers and undercover OGPU agents began to wane. He realized that the collapse of Soviet power, which he foretold, was not imminent: ‘We are working not in the present moment, but in the far future.’ By 1927, Trubetskoy was already frustrated by the movement, as evidenced in a letter to Suvchinsky: ‘When people accuse us of having no systems, only a mechanical mixture of heterogeneous, disconnected ideas, which people can pick and choose from as they like, this accusation is justified.’32
Trubetskoy by this point was demoralized and exhausted. He wrote to Suvchinsky in March 1928:
In my case, Eurasianism only prevents me from realizing my talent. If you just knew what a heavy burden on my consciousness is this ballast of Eurasianist obligations, if you knew how much it intervenes with my scholarly work… Eurasianism is a heavy cross for me, and without any compensation. Please understand that deep in my soul I hate it and I cannot avoid hating it. Eurasianism broke me, it did not allow me to be who I should have and could have been. It would be my greatest joy to drop it, to leave it, and to forget about it altogether….33
That October, he first raised in a letter to Suvchinsky the prospect of a ‘divorce’, leaving the Paris left wing free to pursue contacts with the Soviets, and the Prague-based right wing to continue with the orthodox Eurasianism. The conflict was further stoked by the Paris branch’s efforts to put out a newspaper, Evraziya, which had an obvious pro-Soviet bent. In the eighth edition of the Evraziya newspaper, Trubetskoy published a letter in which he formally resigned.
That was to be the end of the movement. In January 1929, Savitsky met Suvchinsky and Lev Karsavin, a Suvchinsky ally, in which Savitsky described the editorial line of the newspaper as ‘unacceptable and contradictory to the notion of moral principle’. Karsavin and Suvchinsky took this as a personal insult. The newspaper collapsed soon after, and the break-up was complete. Savitsky tried to re-energize the Prague-based Eurasianist movement off and on during the early 1930s, but to little avail.
‘We hit the mark’
Following his ‘Eurasianism broke me’ tirade directed at Suvchinsky in the spring of 1928, a deflated Trubetskoy began to return his focus to linguistics and phonology, and to take up once again his scholarly collaboration with Jakobson and the Prague Circle. The Eurasianists, fragmented and defeated, went their separate ways.
In 1929, Trubetskoy and Jakobson published a series of papers which won them accolades, with Jakobson inventing the term ‘linguistic structuralism’ to describe their theories. Trubetskoy’s attack on the late Shakhmatov, while never published, had driven him and Jakobson to some of the greatest linguistic breakthroughs of the twentieth century. Their theories would also be precursors to the great twentieth-century academic clash between history and ‘structure’. This latter became the greatest scholarly fad of the latter half of the twentieth century, flourishing in European universities, and popularized by the late Claude Lévi-Strauss.34 It sought the explanation for all manner of things – from history to anthropology to psychoanalysis – in universal and timeless laws of unconscious structure that were first apparent to the linguists.