It would be difficult to find any real cynicism in the ‘scribblers’ detailed in this book, all of whom, like Gumilev, suffered tremendously for their efforts. The personal histories of the authors profiled in this book show how ideas can hijack people, not the reverse. In addition there is another objection to regarding nationalism as only a manipulation, because if it were so, it would be fairly simple to manipulate out of existence. But it is not. Nations are wispy, flighty, arbitrary things until they, with astonishing rapidity, become hardened facts, incapable of retraction. They take on a permanence that is hard to explain. Where nationalism takes root, in other words, it stays.
Today, politicians may reach for nationalism in a moment of crisis, in an effort to distract attention, or to mobilize or consolidate power. Many find that in doing so they lose control of it, empowering radical forces best left undisturbed. From then on, nationalism is ‘wagging the dog’ – when it takes root, statesmen have to behave according to its logic. This book argues that something akin to that happened to nationalism in Russia last century: invented by ‘passionaries’ (to use Gumilev’s term) who mostly suffered for their efforts, it spread virally in the USSR, despite all efforts by the Soviet authorities to stamp it out. While its proponents went to the gulag, into exile or worse, their views came to be adopted, or co-opted, by the regime: first under Stalin, in an effort to harness nationalism to win the Second World War, and then under Khrushchev, who co-opted nationalists as a counterbalance to hardline orthodox Stalinists; then the Stalinists and the nationalists joined forces in the 1970s under Brezhnev, in the era of ‘politics by culture’.7 Finally ascendant, nationalism tore the Soviet Union apart in 1991, and in 1993 it again was defeated by a hegemonic ideological competitor – Liberal Democracy – in the streets of Moscow amid the military confrontation between Yeltsin and the Supreme Soviet (as parliament was called). But once again nationalism leapt from the vanquished to the victors, infiltrating the Yeltsin regime until it came to power under Putin. Now it has surged into Georgia, eastern and southern Ukraine and threatens other conquests in the service of Russia as ‘Eurasia’. While nationalists were repressed and defeated at every turn, nationalism emerged victorious.
That nationalism is ubiquitous in modern societies is beyond question. But there is no rule as to how it manifests itself, no law to predict which of any number of competing nationalisms will settle in a given country. There are roughly 8,000 unique languages in the world, and roughly 200 countries. Add to this maybe an equal number of irredentist nationalist movements which have not yet achieved their dream of statehood, and it is clear that only a very few nations so conceived ever become political movements. This is the phenomenon referred to by Gellner as nations that ‘failed to bark’; he was trying to explain how some nations get chosen for either historical greatness or for martyrdom, and why some get ignored. It is a problem to which no one has yet found a consistent formula. This speaks to the inherently creative and contingent way in which nationalism appears.
Further to this argument there is the opposite problem – the thoroughly fictitious nations which did ‘bark’: in other words, political movements expressing the shared desire for a common statehood of peoples who do not share a nation in any sense, who have virtually nothing in common and who are likely unaware of what is being pursued in their name. One of these is Eurasianism, the subject of this book. It is an audacious attempt to stitch together a unitary political entity out of a mythical steppe tribe ancestry and a great profusion of linguistic, cultural and anthropological data.
As serious scholarship, Eurasianists’ scholarly arguments are barely credible and are best understood as a sort of metaphor. One useful comparison for Eurasianism is Serbian novelist Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars, a surreal hypertext published in 1984 and devoted to a fictional account of the eponymous Central Asian tribe, which disappeared in the ninth century. Pavić, a Serbian nationalist, had actually written an allegory about Serbian nationalism: the Khazars were the Serbs, a lost tribe on the frontiers of Europe, maligned and misunderstood, with a foot in both the West and the East, the victims of acute cultural schizophrenia. In the same way, the Eurasianist ideas described in these pages is best understood not as real ethnographic or political theories, but as ciphers for a lost Russia, which most likely never existed; a metaphor for a national tragedy; and the precursor to a long, agonizing and bloody reckoning with the same demons as their Serbian cousins.
It is somehow appropriate that ‘Eurasianism’ – the version of Russian nationalism which concerns us – was originally an apocalyptic vision, authored by the survivors of the most violent half-decade ever recorded at the time. Eurasianism should be viewed in the context of the other ideological innovations of the interwar period in Europe, most of which turned out to be very bad: at no other time in history have ideas more violently altered or ended the lives of more people on earth than in the 1920s and 1930s.
Following the Bolshevik revolution and in the wake of the Russian Civil War, which had made them exiles, a group of two dozen Russian scholars – historians, linguists, composers, writers and even a priest – gathered in the capitals of Europe. They had seen Europe, the home of the Enlightenment and the envy of their generation, consumed by trenches and gas and slaughter on an industrial scale. The arrival of advanced European social theories in their relatively backward country brought further slaughter and the largest human refugee crisis in history. Their pet theory was born out of a collective questioning of the very value of civilization and progress. Paradoxically, this group found hope in all the carnage, seeing in the Bolshevik revolution something uniquely Russian.
‘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 Petr Savitsky, one of the four original founders of the movement, in the group’s founding document entitled Exodus to the East.8 It was, in fact, trauma disguised as serious scholarly work and symbolized the soul-searching of the 1920s. They argued that their native Russia, rather than being a branch of the rationalistic West, was the descendant of the Mongol Horde – a legacy that the Bolshevik revolution, with all its savagery, seemed to confirm. They saw in the revolution some promise of a future – a shedding of slavish Western conformity and the rebirth of authentic Russianness, a Bibical event, a cataclysm that brings earthly beatitude.
The melding of the Bolshevik revolution with religious themes is something that was common to many intellectuals of the time. Many of them seemed to suffer from a version of Stockholm syndrome: identifying with the goals of the Bolshevik revolution, while being its awestruck victims. The greatest poem of the era, ‘The Twelve’, written in 1918 by Alexander Blok, reflects this urge to suffuse communism with Christianity. In the poem, 12 Red Guards patrolling Petrograd through the ‘Black night, white snow’ see a ghostly figure ahead of them:
The Eurasianists’ ideas were not serious scientific theories but rather (like the poem) an analogy – an aesthetic attempt to reconcile Red Russia and White Russia. They saw in communism a transient version of Christianity which, when united with the Orthodox faith, leading the Red Guards through the snow, would be fit to govern a vast empire.