The Discourse of Civilization in the Works of Russia’s New

Eurasianists: Lev Gumilev and Alexander Panarin

Frederick Matern
M.A. Candidate
York University - Ryerson Polytechnic University

YCISS Post-Communist Studies Programme Research Paper Series

Paper Number 002
February 2007

The PCSP Research Papers Series publishes research papers on problems of post-communism
written by graduate and undergraduate students at York University.
Introduction
Russia’s cultural and political discourse has long been dominated by the question of its place in
the world: does Russia belong to, or should it aspire to, the values, norms and traditions of
Western civilization, or does it have its own culture, “Asiatic” or otherwise, that sets it apart from
the West and requires an approach to governance that is radically different than the solutions
offered by its Western neighbours? At the time of the collapse of the USSR, the Westernizing
trend seemed to have the upper hand, but more than a decade later, another stance setting Russia
apart from the West has become far more current. This general point of view has lately come to
be known as “Eurasian”, or as I will call it for the sake of clarity, “Eurasianist”; but I wish to
prevent any misconception now by defining the “Eurasianists” to whom I refer. “The
Eurasianists” were a group of Russian intellectuals who formed a school of thought in European
exile during the 1920’s, after the Russian Revolution. While the problem of Russia vis-à-vis the
West goes far back into Russian history, perhaps most famously expressed in the nineteenth
century polemic between the Slavophiles and the Westernizers, the Eurasianist movement was
radically different, partly because of its geopolitical turn (borrowed, evidently, from Western
thinkers like Karl Haushofer and Halford Mackinder), and its cultural positioning of the Russian
space squarely outside the European experience. Until the early twentieth century, Russian
intellectuals saw the Russian nation in an essentially European context, despite disagreements
with the West: they were a European, Slavic, Orthodox Christian nation that had extended its
reach into Asia on a mission civilatrice. The exiles (Prince Nikolai Trubetskoi, Piotr Savitskii,
Piotr Suvchinskii and Georgii Florovskii), who founded the Eurasianist movement, by contrast,
were saying something quite different: “Russian [russkie] people and people of the nations of the
‘Russian [rossiiskii] world’ are neither Europeans, nor Asians… we are not ashamed to admit that
we are Eurasians” (Trubetskoi et. al., 1920: VII)*.

This is significant, because it represents a break with the past in terms of the intellectual basis of
the nation-forming process. It represented something completely new to the Russian intelligentsia
(Riasanovsky, 1967: 52). While they could trace some roots to the Slavophile and Pan-Slav
schools of the nineteenth century, these exiles, in a radical move, expressed the idea of Russia as
a cultural and anthropological space that was not exclusively Slavonic, but also Finno-Ugrian and
indeed Turkic (the term for these two ethno-linguistic influences taken together is ‘Turanian’) in
origin (Trubetskoi, 1920: 100).

The Eurasianist movement sprang from a world that had been turned upside-down. They formed
their ideas in the broader background of the aftermath of the First World War, the devastation of
the Russian Revolution that forced them into exile, and, as Riasanovsky points out, the movement
coincided with the beginning of the end of the colonial era of the European powers (1967: 53).
The Neoeurasianists have come back to relevance during a time of seismic political events,
perhaps less cataclysmic than the events of the early twentieth century, but considering their

1
global scale, no less significant. Now however, the time may be more appropriate for the
advancement of Eurasianist thought. The geopolitical side of Eurasianist thought does seems to fit
well with the times, where geopolitics and the talk of conflict between civilizations is very much
in vogue, most famously in the version of Samuel Huntington (1996). The cultural side may be
more problematic, because Eurasianists are split on this themselves. Many would simply call
themselves conservatives, some are nationalists, but I would suggest that the post-Soviet
Eurasianists who hold some sort of claim to the original Eurasianist doctrine would adhere to a
cultural and normative policy that differs from ethnic nationalism or Orthodox Christian
conservatism in the strictest sense, a sort of spectrum of values that challenge modernity as one
prominent Neoeurasianist, Alexander Panarin, advocates.

Intellectuals, such as the members of what may turn out to be a new Eurasianist intellectual
establishment, are responsible for the “imaginative ideological labour that brings together
disparate cultural elements, selected historical memories, and interpretations of experiences”
(Kennedy and Suny, 1999: 2). The views of intellectuals, in Moscow and St. Petersburg (and
elsewhere) on the role Russia should play, have made, over the centuries, lasting changes
affecting its neighbours in Europe, Asia, and more recently in Africa and the Americas. Russia,
even now, continues to be a major actor on the world stage. Russia has played a forceful role in
Europe for hundreds of years. It experienced a fantastic expansion across northern Asia beginning
in the sixteenth century. As an Empire, it reached deep into the south of Asia in the nineteenth
century. The Russian Empire’s successor, the USSR, was one of the two superpowers that
completely dominated the politics of the entire planet for the second half of the twentieth century.
Through all these changes intellectuals have built ideological structures to support the state, and
sometimes to bring it down. It is inevitable, therefore, that Russian intellectuals such as the new
Eurasianists will play a major role in the 21st Century, even if what the future may bring to the
country is unclear: consolidation of the status quo, renewal and re-expansion, or continued
contraction and/or disintegration. Any one of these outcomes will have a great, far reaching effect
on people in neighbouring countries and across the world.

This paper does not intend to be an exercise in prognosis. Nor will I try to analyse Russia in an
international relations context. Nevertheless, I want to point out that if the Russian thinkers who
have theorized Russia’s place in the world have been labelled “messianic” time and time again in
the Occidental literature, it may be possible to forgive them. Keeping the country’s geographical
and historical circumstances in mind, I will undertake to study what might be considered one of
the most recent branches of Russian intellectual discourse, drawing on the ideas of the
Eurasianists, by intellectuals known in the literature as the “New” Eurasianists or
“Neoeurasianists.” The aim of this paper is to identify what writing is representative of
Neoeurasianist thought, to distinguish Neoeurasianism both from its historical antecedents
(particularly the writers whom I will term the “classical” Eurasianists, or simply “Eurasianists”)

2
and some other modern, nationalist and conservative trends in Russian thought that many
Western writers have frequently confused it with over the last ten years, and, most importantly, to
analyse some of the texts of the Neoeurasianists to attempt to get a fix on what this school of
thought represents, if it can indeed be termed a “school”.

I view the discourse of the Neoeurasianists as part of a broader conversation going on throughout
the world at present, one that challenges universalist attempts to define “culture” and civilization.
I will therefore pay particular attention to places in the New Eurasianists work where this
dialogue of civilizations is played out clearly. For reasons I will explain below, I have chosen two
authors to examine in detail for this work: Lev Gumilev and Aleksandr Panarin. A third author,
Aleksandr Dugin, also considered foundational, will not be looked at in so much detail, since he
is the subject of the main body of literature that already exists on the New Eurasianists.

In this paper, I will briefly review some recent literature on the Eurasianist movement, in order to
define the movement, provide a historical context and trace the link between the Eurasianists of
the 1920’s and 30’s and the post-Soviet Neoeurasianist intellectuals. I will then look at the texts
of the two authors, Gumilev and Panarin, whom I consider foundational thinkers in the
Neoeurasianist world-view. Using the texts of these authors, I will illustrate the two main thrusts
of Neoeurasianist thought: the important geopolitical side and the cultural factors that the
Neoeurasianists highlight that make the movement an ideology. The goal of this paper is to
provide a broad review of the writings of the foundational Neoeurasianists as the groundwork for
a more detailed study.

The State of Occidental Research on the Eurasianists

Before 1992, there was not much literature on Eurasianism outside of Russia. Shlapentokh’s
(1997) history of the classical Eurasianist movement includes a partial literature review of both
the work of the classical Eurasianists and the academic literature covering them. He makes no
mention, however, of work published on Eurasianism by Nicholas V. Riasanovsky (1967 and
1972), which are probably the most detailed reviews in the English language of the rise of the
classical Eurasianist movement. Interest in the subject was very limited and little was written
about it until a fascination with the movement re-emerged in Russia in the era of glasnost’.
Shlapentokh (1997) attributes this to the fact that the largest collection of Eurasianist materials
was located in the Prague Archive, unavailable to Western historians. Désert and Paillard (1994)
point out that Eurasianist ideas were obscure in Russia until 1990-1991, when they began to be
debated in the media and more literature became available to the Russian audience. While
Eurasianism caught on in Russia, the study of the Eurasianists and post-Soviet Russian advocates
of Eurasianism became more common in the Western literature, in Slavic studies, international
relations studies, and geography. Thus it seems that both the opening up of archives and the
diffusion of ideas in the media created an area of interest. What is interesting is that in spite of the

3
large amount of material available, including the writings and archived materials of the
“classical” Eurasianists and the many volumes written by Russian Neoeurasianists, there is still
not a large amount of Western literature, while much of what exists is of a haphazard nature,
characterized by an inability to define who the Eurasianists are and what they actually represent.
This has lead to a conflation of “Eurasianist” with “nationalist”, “red-brown”, “pro-Asian”, “anti-
Western” or “anti-American”, and to the labelling of Gennady Ziuganov (leader of the
Communist Party of the Russian Federation), Vladimir Zhirinovsky (of the famous Liberal
Democratic Party) and ex-Prime Minister Evgenii Primakov (Clover, 1999) as Eurasianists,
which probably dilutes the definition of Eurasianist too much. Some self-professed Eurasianists
may be Anti-Western or nationalist, but by far not all nationalists are Eurasianists. The confusion
is the result of the various meanings of the word Eurasia, and I will devote some time to defining
which ‘Eurasia’ the Eurasianists are referring to a bit later.

Some observers of the phenomenon have also confused Eurasianism with the Slavophile
movement from the nineteenth century. An example of this can be seen in (Hahn, 2002). Smith
(1999:482) also makes a direct link with the Slavophiles. While there is a case that Eurasianism
can regard the Slavophile and Pan-Slav movements as predecessors (Paradowski, 1999: 20), there
are significant differences that make Eurasianism a qualitatively new school of thought. A
convincing explanation of this can be found in Nicholas V. Riasanovsky’s (1967) essay, “The
Emergence of Eurasianism”.

Marlène Laruelle (2000; 2003) is at the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of the breadth of
her erudite determination of whose work can be rightly called “Eurasian”. In (2003) she goes
further than other authors by saying that Lev Gumilev cannot be considered a Eurasianist in the
strictest sense, due to some major epistemological differences that can be seen in comparing his
work with the classical Eurasianists, and also as evidenced in his correspondence with classical
Eurasianist Piotr Savitskii. In contrast, she observes in (2001) that Alexandr Panarin follows the
Eurasianist tradition much more closely. Later we will observe that Panarin owes a debt to
Gumilev, but Laruelle’s distinctions make the line of Eurasianist thought easier to trace.

To sum up the state of non-Russian research on the Neoeurasianists, while many scholars treat the
Eurasianists in passing, usually in the broader context of nationalism or of Russia’s “new Right”,
there are a few authors who have clearly studied the movement in detail. The picture that emerges
is one of a Eurasianist movement that burst on the scene in exile in the 1920’s with a lot of
energy, and then faded in the late 1930’s with geographer Piotr Savitskii remaining the only real
advocate (Shlapentokh, 1997: 148). There was a correspondence, beginning in 1956, between
Savitskii and ethnologist Lev Gumilev, a specialist on the history of the Turkic- and Mongol-
speaking steppe nomads (Laruelle, 2003: 56). Gumilev, in turn, in his work, presented a vision of
Russia that owed a great debt to these same nomads in the formation of the modern Russian state:

4
instead of presenting the usual picture of a mediaeval Russia suffering under the “Tatar-Mongol
Yoke”, Russia becomes a product of the interaction of peoples living in the steppe and forest
zones, and the real barbarians in Russian history were the knights of the Teutonic Order, defeated
by Aleksandr Nevskii. Gumilev remained an unknown figure until the glasnost’ years of
Gorbachev, when his writings became available to a broad public, and the author became a
celebrity just before his death in 1992. Eurasianism took on a new life at this point, no longer in
exile but in Russia itself. There are many different political views among those who, through the
1990’s, could be classed as Eurasianists, but as Laruelle points out, the literature shows three
broad streams in the Russia-based part of the movement. Since the authors studied in the present
paper represent these streams fairly closely, I too will follow a three-stream approach, while
making a minor adjustment to Laruelle’s taxonomy. This way of classifying the Neoeurasianists
is different from the way presented by Tsygankov, which, while acknowledging a wide diversity
of viewpoints, splits the movement into two broad categories: “hard-line” (imperialist, Anti-
Western) and “liberal” (1998: n. 5). This, I feel, is a misleading distinction. Eurasianism, by
definition, challenges the Enlightenment project and the post-industrial phase that it has moved
into.

Of the three streams I propose, Gumilev, in a significant way, represents what I will call in this
paper the “ethnological stream”. This is a departure from what Laruelle termed “culturaliste et
folkloriste” (2001: 72). For the purposes of this paper, I reserve the idea of a “cultural stream” for
the work of Aleksandr Panarin. There are other authors, many representing diverse ethnic groups
in the Commonwealth of Independent States and in the Russian Federation itself, who fit more
squarely into this category. Gumilev is a source of inspiration for authors in the other two broad
streams of Eurasianism, such as Panarin and Dugin, but for the ethno-nationalist researchers
representing the intellectual class of many different ethnic groups in the post-Soviet space,
Gumilev is particularly inspirational in what might be termed his historical vindication of the
peoples of the Steppe. It comes as no surprise, in this context, that a university in Astana, the new
capital of Kazakhstan, was named after Gumilev.

The stream most commonly represented in the non-Russian literature is what I will call the
“geopolitical stream” represented by Alexandr Dugin, who eventually became the founder of a
Eurasian political movement. He is by far the most controversial of the prominent
Neoeurasianists. Dugin’s activist stance and involvement in the Russian policy community, aside
from his extremist past, have made him a figure of interest for people studying international
relations, for example in Kerr (1995), Shlapentokh (2001) and Tsygankov (1998). Dugin, a
paradoxical figure, has solid ultra-right wing credentials, and a long association with Eduard
Limonov’s Bolshevik Nationalist Party (BNP), an ultra-right fringe party. He later came to
identify himself more firmly with Eurasianism, and even went as far as founding the Eurasia
Party. Throughout the 1990’s Dugin was widely read in Russia, and gained considerable attention

5
among students of Russia in the West (Shlapentokh, 2001: 29). The geopolitical emphasis in
Dugin’s writing has attracted attention to him as a personality, and he has received attention in
the US media (for example, Clover, 1999). Among the more scholarly research on the
Eurasianists, Dugin gets attention from political geographers such as the late Graham Smith
(1999), where Aleksandr Panarin is ignored. Dugin’s attraction to observers of the movement is
not surprising, considering his activity in Russia’s policy community. His intellectual heritage,
however, consists mainly as a compiler of various streams of Eurasianist thought, and as a
popular commentator.

Panarin represents another broad trend in modern Eurasianism, the “cultural stream” as I will call
it, notwithstanding Laruelle’s classification of Panarin, which singles out his defense of the
notion of empire and his advocacy of “étaticité” (2001:73). As Laruelle goes on to point out,
Panarin was involved in an attempt to define an ideology that can be termed “postmodern” (ibid.:
73), as it is meant to withstand what might be called the end game of Modernity. Panarin, as we
shall see, was a political scientist, and advocate of a conservative ideology, but also advocated
Eurasianism on a cultural plane in a way different from the “ethnic Eurasianists,” for example
those who have received support from Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbaev. A teacher of
Political Philosophy at Moscow State University who passed away in late 2003, Panarin had solid
academic credentials, published prolifically, but did not attract much attention outside of Russia. I
will therefore devote particular attention to his work in this paper.

It will also be important for the purposes of this paper to define the idea of “Eurasia”, as it is
understood among the Eurasianists. To begin, I am breaking with the dominant trend in the
literature to translate the noun evraziitsy, as “the Eurasians” when referring to the adherents of the
school of thought, and the adjective evraziiskij as “Eurasian”, instead favouring “the Eurasianists”
and “Eurasianist”, respectively. The reason for this choice is to make a clear distinction between
the normal English meanings of Eurasia and Eurasian, and the school of thought that is concerned
with the Eurasian continent.

As Tsymburskii (2003) points out, the idea of Eurasia stems from the nineteenth century. It
originally referred to the plain extending to the East and West of the Ural mountains. As late as
1915 the Russian geographer V. Semenov-Tian-Shanskii used the term “Russian Eurasia”
(Russkaia Evraziia) to designate the expanse from the Volga to the Enisei Rivers, north to the
Siberian Arctic and south to Turkestan (Tsymburskii, 2003: 26). Soon, however, the idea of
Eurasia was extended to cover the whole continent as we now know it. From the nineteenth
century, the term Eurasian was also used to refer to the offspring of European and Asian parents,
in India for example (ibid). It is for this reason that I propose not to use this word to describe the
adherents of the intellectual movement that began among Russian exiles in the early twentieth
century. Also, if we take the term “Eurasianism” as the name for the movement, as most authors

6
do, then the root appears to be the adjectival noun “Eurasian”. In English, to underscore the fact
that a person adheres to a school of thought or an ideology, we normally remove the suffix “-ism”
from the root and replace it with “-ist”, as in “socialism/socialist” or “formalism/formalist”.

For the Eurasianists, interestingly, the territorial concept of Eurasia appears be closely related to
the “Heartland” concept of Mackinder; despite the fact that the classical Eurasianists never cite
him, the territory they refer to matches the heartland concept closely (ibid.: 27). Savitskii,
specifically, suggests that the division “Europe–Asia” is awkward. In an essay written in 1925, he
maintains that geographically, the Eastern European plain is much closer to the plains of Western
Siberia and Turkistan that to Western Europe. These three, taken together with Eastern Siberia,
Central Asia, Persia, the Caucasus and Asia Minor, form a special world that is different “both
from the countries lying to the West, as well as from the countries, lying to the South-East and
South. If one names the former ‘Europe’ and the latter ‘Asia’, then the world named just now, as
both a middle and intervening world, would be appropriately named ‘Eurasia’” (Savitskii, 1997:
82).

This is the concept that is to be used throughout this study. Unless otherwise noted, Eurasia will
not represent the landmass stretching from Portugal to Singapore, but rather this “middle” space,
representing unity separate from, but at the same time bridging, Europe and Asia.

The Classical Eurasianists

Eurasianism arose during a catastrophic time in Russian history, and takes much of its force from
an attempt to make sense of catastrophe. It is marked, as has been pointed out, by a euphoria
arising from ruin (Désert and Paillard, 1994: 80). For them, the Russian Revolution represented
two outwardly irreconcilable events: a turn away from God, the collapse of a world-view, but also
the possibility of rebirth (Riasanovsky, 1967: 53). For them, the Revolution was not simply a
rebellion comparable to that of Pugachev, for example, but rather it represented a process, “the
self-destruction of Imperial Russia, the death of old Russia… in the birth-pangs of a new Russia,
a new individualization of Eurasia” (Savitskii, 1997: 52). As Savitskii went on to say, it was the
result of a fundamental rejection of European culture by the Russian people, on whom it had been
forced since the time of Peter the Great. In that sense, they welcomed the Revolution, as an
opportunity for Russia-Eurasia (Rossiia-Evraziia) to break away from Europe.

The Eurasianists’ evaluation of the Bolshevik approach to spirituality and culture was much more
critical. “We have no words, other than words of horror and loathing, to characterize the
inhumanity and vileness of Bolshevism” (Trubetskoi, et. al., 1920: p. VI). These intellectuals
found the idea of culture and spirituality as superstructure offensive. Indeed, for them, the
Bolsheviks represented the worst of Western ideology, the importation of a soulless Western idea
onto Russian soil.

7
The Eurasianists shared a rejection of Europe with some nineteenth century Russian thinkers,
such as the Slavophiles and Danilievskii. As Riasanovsky (1967) points out, attempts to find the
roots of Eurasianism in these streams of thought have limits. The Slavophiles saw the State as a
necessary evil, while the Eurasianists believed in a strong State. Danilevskii may have been closer
to Eurasianist thinking, but the Eurasianists put more emphasis on culture. The Eurasianists
differed from both of these earlier movements in the very idea of Eurasia, and the ethnic mix of
peoples, not only Slavic peoples, that went into the creation of Russia. Trubetskoi sees Pan-
Slavism as a “false nationalism”, a mere aping of nineteenth century Pan-Germanism (Trubetskoi,
1920: 84). Russian culture was the result of a process of the interaction of the cultures of the
Byzantine “South”, the Tatar-Mongol “East” and the European “West”, each taking a leading role
during various points in Russia’s history (Savitskii, 1997: 83).

The Eurasianist idea of culture is significant for this study. According to Trubetskoi, the
statements which best capture highest calling of a human being are “know thyself” and “to thine
own self be true”. Peoples know themselves through their folk-culture, which ultimately is a
reflection of their spiritual being. This is the true source of culture, because happiness comes not
from material culture, but from harmony in all aspects of spirituality (Trubetskoi, 1920: 78).
National culture takes on a central role in the expression of the individual, and an individual who
“is true to his own self” will be a shining example of a national culture. Peoples whose national
characteristics are similar will have similar cultures. A universal human culture is impossible,
however, because, taking into account “the motley plurality of national characters and
psychological types, such a ‘universal culture’ would lead either to the satisfaction of purely
material demands while totally ignoring spiritual needs, or would impose a way of life, deriving
solely from the national character of one ethnic group, on all peoples.” (ibid.) For Trubetskoi, on
a political level this means a rejection of European-style nationalism for smaller ethnic groups,
because this sort of nationalism does not represent a deepened self-knowledge, but the parroting
of the European modernity. For the same reason, Trubetskoi felt that the original ideas of the
early Slavophiles, which were at the outset closer to what he termed the “true” nationalism of
“know thyself”, were corrupted later into the forms of “false” nationalism that he described,
resembling too much the nationalisms of Western Europe.

Starting from this idea of culture, the Eurasianists made a definitive break with Russian
intellectual history, where, since the time of Peter the Great, Russia was always identified with
the Western, Christian world. As Riasanovsky points out, “even those Russians who went against
the current and rose in opposition to the West, for example, the Slavophiles, the upholders of
Official Nationality… or… arch-conservatives, formulated their conflict with the West as
essentially a fraternal conflict” (1967: 63). Eurasianists, by contrast, believed in a Russia that,
while having obviously been influenced by the West, was, since its birth in the ninth century, and

8
particularly after the Tatar-Mongol period in the Middle Ages, a world apart, sharing a cultural
space with the Finno-Ugrian and Turkic peoples.

The Eurasianist idea of culture, combined with the Eurasianist political geography, was translated
over the course of many works into a programmatic political philosophy. One noteworthy
example is the Eurasianist’s idea of the economy, which was neither communist nor capitalist.
Their vision of a Eurasian economic system was one of private enterprise, based on the idea of
the khozain, rather than the model of the western capitalist. The word khozain can be translated to
English as “owner”, “master”, “administrator”, “boss”, “host”, or “landlord”, depending on
context. The Eurasianists made a distinction between the khozain and the entrepreneur;
specifically, the khozain had a moral, almost spiritual relationship with his domain, while the
capitalist entrepreneur did not (Voeikov, 2003: 104). The Eurasians essentially advocated a
different concept of property. The ultimate “owner” of all property had always been, in the
Russian-Eurasian tradition, the state; the khozain could not be considered the owner. In the ideal
Eurasian state, the khozain’s authority could be seen as similar to the owner, but conditionally:
there was a moral obligation on the part of the khozain to be a dobriy, or “good” khozain
(Savitskii, 1974: 74). The role of the state was to intervene in the case of an abdication of the
khozain’s moral responsibility. The Eurasianists’ ideal concerning property was one of
stewardship rather than ownership, one that was fundamentally different than the inalienable right
to property that had grown out of the Western philosophical notion of individuality.
On the geopolitical side of Eurasianist thought, there were also arguments to support increased
state activism in industry. The Eurasianists felt that the competitive system of capitalism had
arisen partly as a result of the West’s relationship to the Ocean, and oceanic trading. Land-locked
Eurasia, by contrast, deeply rooted in the Continent, created barriers to competition, and thus
favoured monopolies (Voeikov, 2003: 107).

A picture emerges of what the Russian-Eurasian state advocated by the Eurasianists of the 1920’s
might have looked like. Similar in territory to the USSR of the time, it would have been governed
by a central authority, but would have also allowed a certain amount of cultural autonomy to its
member peoples. It would have displayed a mixed economic system, similar perhaps the system
that began to form under Lenin’s NEP. Religion would be encouraged, along with traditional
culture. Russian Orthodoxy, itself being influenced by Finno-Ugrian and Slavonic pagan
tradition, would have a special place as an indigenous “Eurasian” religion, but it would not be
exclusive. Vague shades of this idea were seen in Stalin’s quasi-rehabilitation of nationalism and
the Orthodox religion during the Second World War. This vision, suppressed during the Soviet
years, was resurrected as the Soviet system began to collapse.

Lev Gumilev: Ethnogenesis and Passionarity

Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev (1912-1992) was the son of two of Russia’s most famous poets,

9
Nikolai Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova. After a long life scarred by tragedy and an academic
career held back by arrests and forced labour in the “GULAG Archipelago”, Gumilev’s ideas
found a wide audience beginning in the 1980’s and widespread fame at the very end of his life.
Since his passing in 1992, his influence has continued to grow, mainly in Russia and the states of
the former Soviet Union, particularly in Central Asia. Recently, in Astana, the capital of
Kazakhstan, a new university has been named after him. In the popular press, his books,
originally printed on a small scale, have become, in a sense, objects of Russian mass-culture, and
have been reprinted several times with great success. Harder-to-find works are now freely
available in Russian on the “Gumilevica” web site (http://gumilevica .kulichki.net) in full-text. A
search of the most complete Gumilev bibliography available (Karamullina, 1990, containing over
250 entries) and an internet search of, among other sources, the Library of Congress, revealed the
following: despite his immense recent popularity and influence in Russia and the CIS, and the
critical response by the Slavic studies community outside of the former Soviet Union, very few of
his works have appeared in languages other than Russian. In 1965, his paper “Les fluctuations du
niveau de la Mer Caspienne” appeared in Cahiers du Monde Russe et Sovietique (Vol. 6, No. 3).
Later in the 1960’s, a few English translations of articles appeared in the American digest Soviet
Geography. Only two of his major works have been translated to English: Ethnogenesis and the
Biosphere (Moscow: Progress, 1990) and Searches for an Imaginary Kingdom: The Legend of the
Kingdom of Prester John, translated by R.E.F. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1987).

Gumilev’s relative obscurity outside the Russian-speaking world is a problem because terms
introduced by Gumilev have had a profound effect on the academic, social and political discourse
in the Russian language. This increases the level of complexity in engaging in a dialogue with
Russia’s social science community. Also, as we will see below, Gumilevian terms are of
particular importance to the Neoeurasianists. We will therefore spend some effort in explaining
the major vectors of Gumilev’s work.

A detailed biography of Lev Gumilev was written by Sergei Lavrov (2001), providing a good
deal of insight into personalities and events that contributed to his academic legacy. Gumilev was
born in Tsarskoe Selo, near St. Petersburg, but spent most of his childhood at Bezhetsk, which is
located in Tver’ Region, between Moscow and St. Petersburg. His father, the poet Nikolai
Gumilev, a monarchist, was arrested and murdered when Lev was only 8 years old. Lev was
brought up mainly by his grandmother, Anna Gumileva. He joined his mother, the poetess Anna
Akhmatova, and her third husband, Nikolai Punin, in what by then was Leningrad in 1929 to
continue his education, first as an assistant on geological expeditions, then as a student at the
Faculty of History at Leningrad State University. During the 1930’s as a student, he participated
in some archeological expeditions, most notably to the Khazar archeological site at Sarkel (on the
Don river). He found a chilly reception in the Punin household, but that turned out to be only the

10
beginning of his troubles. The NKVD arrested him briefly in 1933 and again in 1935, along with
his stepfather Punin. Akhmatova went to Moscow to petition Stalin to release her husband and
son, which happened shortly afterward. After his release, he moved out of his stepfather’s
household, and spent the next few years sleeping on a bearskin rug in one room with a friend
named Axel. In 1938, before completing his degree, Gumilev was arrested again with two other
students, and was, fantastically, implicated in a plot to commit a terrorist attack on Leningrad
Communist Party leader Andrei Zhdanov. At this point he was beyond help. He was shipped off
to work on the White Sea Canal in 1938, where conditions were brutal and he nearly died. He was
apparently saved by a bureaucratic procedure: early in 1939 he was sent back to a prison in
Leningrad while his case was re-examined. The result was a five-year sentence to another
GULAG camp, this time in the far north of Siberia, at Norilsk.

His term at Norilsk came to an end at the climax of the Second World War. He was released from
the GULAG to go to the front, and thus participated in the capture of Berlin. On returning to
Leningrad, he was able to finish his undergraduate exams and move on to graduate studies in
Oriental Studies, but this time of relative calm ended quickly, as his mother fell out of favour in
1946 during the Leningrad Affair. He had enough time to participate in more archaeological
expeditions, and defend his graduate thesis in 1949. Soon after he was arrested again, and sent
back to the camps, where he remained until 1956, during the period of de-Stalinization in the
USSR. He was able, this time, to begin work on his histories of the people of Central Asia
towards the end of his term in Siberia. Shortly after his release he began a correspondence with
Piotr Savitsky, by recommendation of a colleague who had been imprisoned together with the
founder of the Eurasianist movement. Within a few years Gumilev began to publish prolifically,
first with a few articles at the end of the 1950’s, then in 1960 with the first book of his “Steppe
Trilogy”, Khunnu, referring to The Hunnu Empire, or empire of the Huns, who ruled over a vast
area of Central and East Asia from the third century B.C. to the first Century A.D. He continued
to publish his history of the Steppe with Otkrytie Khazarii (The Discovery of Khazaria) in 1966;
Drevnye Tiurki (The Ancient Turkic Peoples) in 1967; Poiski Vymyshlennogo Tsarstva (Searches
for an Imaginary Kingdom), a book dealing with the Mongol Empire, in 1970; and followed this
work with Khunny v Kitae (The Huns in China, 1974). During the 60’s and 70’s his ideas about
the ethnos, ethnogenesis, and passionarity (a Gumilev neologism) took their final form, and were
synthesized in a book explaining his theory, while drawing on his encyclopaedic knowledge of
world history: Etnogenez I Biosfera Zemli (Ethnogenesis and the Earth’s Biosphere, 1979;
translated into English as Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere, 1990). His view on the origins of the
Russian state, a view based on the theory outlined in Ethnogenesis, was published in Drevniaia
Rus’ I Velikaia Step’ (Ancient Rus’ and the Great Steppe, 1989) and in a more popular form,
published after his death, in Ot Rusi do Rossii (From Rus’ to Russia [Rossiia], 1992). By the time
Gumilev passed away, he was a celebrity in the Russian-speaking world.

11
To begin the discussion of Gumilev’s ideas, it is important to start with a sense of his
methodological approach. His epistemology is one that deliberately breaches the barrier between
the natural sciences and the humanities. Gumilev’s approach to the study of the history of human
civilization fits into the hierarchy of the sciences that Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer both
described in the nineteenth century (White, 1969: 56), beginning with the physical sciences and
encompassing the biological and social sciences, including cultural anthropology. Gumilev’s
objects of study were the collective groups of human beings that have clung together throughout
human history, bound by common cultural traits and by those traits identifying themselves as
being different from others. His major historical works cover the “life spans” of the empires
formed by the nomadic peoples of the Eurasian Steppe and states related to them: the Huns, the
Kaghanate of the ancient Turkic tribes, the Mongol Empire, Kievan Rus’, the Khazar Kaghanate,
Muscovy, and the Russian Empire. These accounts of the rise and fall of empires take into
account interactions with other cultures from the fringes of the European and Asian continents.

The theory of history that Gumilev formulates is driven by two major ideas. The first is that of the
ethnos as a fundamental structure in human history, essentially biological in nature, although
unique to the human species. The other is the driving force of passionarity, the innate drive in
human culture to expand, create, and replicate itself, which is, in Gumilev’s view, the effect of a
surplus of biochemical energy in individual human beings that allows for self-sacrifice for the
sake of an ideal. Passionarity works against the basic instinct for self-preservation. These two
words, along with their derivatives, whose roots are familiar, are Gumilevian terms with specific
meanings, which I will explain as I examine each idea in more detail.

Gumilev shares, in a broad sense, a mission with Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee and Karl
Jaspers: a search for a logic or a law governing the development of world history, albeit taking his
cues in this project from the somewhat neglected point of view of the Steppe nomads. Gumilev
cites the works of these three authors in his œuvre, but does not to consider them sources so much
as historians who have made similar observations, but incorrect conclusions about the reasons for
the development of history. Gumilev differs from these historians in his starting point: the
articulation of a basic unit of human cultural association, using the Greek word ethnos; and a
process, deriving from interaction with the natural environment and carried through a medium of
individual human beings organized in such an association, ethnogenesis. This is a more
naturalistic approach than the ones used by most previous students of history. Spengler saw, as
the key to understanding world history, “a number of mighty Cultures”, each with “its own idea,
its own passions, its own life, will and feeling, its own death” (1934: 21). Jaspers chose as a focus
the few “Great Civilizations” that formed about 5000 BC, underwent, separately but
synchronously, a transformation during an “Axial Period” several hundred years BC, resulting
eventually in a single human civilization (1965: 24). Toynbee identified 21 societies in world
history, of which five, the Western, Orthodox Christian, Islamic, Hindu and Far Eastern societies,

12
exist to this day (1939: 51). By contrast, Gumilev’s entities, while on the surface, at times,
resembling Toynbee’s societies, or Spengler’s “mighty Cultures”, take on a more concrete,
natural appearance. Gumilev, however, sees the difficulty faced by these historians as one of
method.

Gumilev’s major works read like detective novels, and for good reason. The general method of
reasoning used by historians, he writes, and in general the chasm between the natural sciences
and the human sciences, originated with the Scholastic philosophers of the Middle Ages, and their
inductive method of citation (primarily the Bible and the works of Aristotle), favoured over the
observation of natural phenomena (Gumilev, 2001: 15). A major problem is the reliability of
sources, which tend, in Gumilev’s view, to add to confusion, and represent a limiting factor on
the usefulness of inductive reasoning. By contrast, the sciences dealing with natural history seem
to have overcome this problem by adopting a deductive method, one that can and should be used
to study history. Using this deductive reasoning as his guide, Gumilev establishes the need for a
new science: Ethnology. Not to be confused with the sociological research method of
ethnography, the term as it has come to be accepted in Russia is also slightly different than the
ethnology, or cultural anthropology, as it is normally defined throughout the world. As Gumilev
defines it, and as it was adopted by the Geographic Society of the Soviet Union, ethnology is the
science dealing with three interrelated problems: ethnogenesis, ethno-geographic classification
and the association of ethnos and Landschaft (Gumilev, 2003: 373). The idea of this science is to
look at the evidence of all available sources, including ancient textual material, but only after it
has been rigorously screened against other sources of information. Where necessary, gaps will be
filled in based on existing available knowledge. “As the paleontologist recreates the look of a
dinosaur with two or three bones; as the meteorologist, having data from two or three weather
stations, makes a forecast… so the historian, using the ethnological method, can describe the
process of the rise and fall of a great or small empire, principality or free city-state” (ibid.: 375).

The world of human beings, according to Gumilev, comprises many ethnoi. The starting point of
a definition of an ethnos is when a people (which could be a nation, or a union of clans or tribes),
after living together for a long period of time, are of the idea that “their way of life, manners,
customs, tastes, outlook and social relationships, i.e. all that which today is called ‘the
behavioural stereotype’” (idem 2001: 21), is the only possible and correct one. Gumilev
recognizes, however, that this definition has to be made more precise, and in Ethnogenesis he
eliminates a series of false definitions. Even though, for Gumilev, the idea of “nation” lies outside
of his discourse, the nation being only one of many possible manifestations of the ethnos, he
makes an attempt to pre-empt the objections that we normally see in literature about nations and
nationalism. The problem is essentially the same. As Eric Hobsbawm asserts, “there is no way of
telling the observer how to distinguish a nation from other entities a priori, as we can tell him or
her how to recognize a mouse or a lizard” (1990: 5). By placing the idea of ethnos in naturalistic

13
framework, Gumilev removes it from the hierarchy of “clan-tribe-people-nation” (Gumilev 2001:
78). Language, race, customs, material culture and ideology cannot be seen as absolute
determining factors in the identification of an ethnos. The “behavioural stereotypes” mentioned
earlier are changeable (ibid.: 93). He concludes that an ethnos can be regarded as a dynamic
system of people, the products of their activities, traditions, the geographical environment,
surrounding ethnoi and “also certain dominant tendencies in the system’s development” (ibid.:
100). This is not quite the same thing as the concept of ethnie used by Anthony Smith, which is
essentially a pre-national political structure “with no sense of membership with citizenship rights
for the majority of the population, and little organic solidarity in the economic sphere” (Smith,
1971: 190). For Gumilev’s ethnos, economic and citizenship rights are not a factor – members of
an ethnos may enfranchised titular citizens of a nation-state, peasants living on a manor, or steppe
nomads. It makes no difference: they still are part of an ethnos, which is to say, part of a natural
system. It is not for a ruling class to recognize someone as part of an ethnos; rather, each
individual carries the sense of belonging to an ethnos, every time they are confronted with an
‘other’. Thus the concepts ‘ethnos’ and ‘ethnie’ should not be confused.

It is important to note that Gumilev sees the ethnos as a system, in other words, not a sum of
human units, but a complex of interrelationships between humans. The ethnos is not a genetic
trait, even though the need to form ethnoi is, for Gumilev, a biological constant. The ethnos is an
arbitrary unit, somewhat like a meter or a litre. The largest human system is humanity as a whole,
or the anthroposphere, one of the layers enveloping the Earth, like the lithosphere, the
hydrosphere, or the biosphere. The next largest unit is the superethnos, or a group of ethnoi,
which appear at the same time in the same region and are similar to each other. The superethnoi
look very much like Toynbee’s societies, but Gumilev would claim that they are different, since
they are based on an internal process of ethnogenesis. They are the result of a period of
expansion. Ethnoi themselves are divided into subethnoi, which cannot exist outside the context
of an ethnos.

For Gumilev, these identities – sub-ethnic, ethnic, super-ethnic – are relative, not in any way
absolute, but at the same time, they are real, and every human being is born into one. An ethnos is
not a “socio-historical category”, since societies can change from feudal to capitalist, for
example, but ethnoi remain (ibid.: 47). Language, territory, heredity, ideology and culture are not
determining factors either. In modern Western Europe, ethnoi generally fit into the boundaries of
nation-states, which are a historically new phenomenon, and not at all eternal, as Hobsbawm
(1990), Anderson (1981) and many others have theorized. Gumilev recognizes this, and points
out that the concept of the State itself is variable in different parts of the world and throughout
history, so that the Chinese idea of go does not “correspond to the English state or the French
état, or even the Latin imperium or respublicæ. Equally distant in content are the Iranian shakhr
or the… term horde” (Gumilev, 2001: 62).

14
This would all seem to indicate that the idea of ethnos has no bearing on reality, but Gumilev has
already affirmed that an ethnos is a biological concept. He points out that the problem in defining
the ethnos arises when it is defined as a ‘state’ of human life, as opposed to a ‘process’. Matter
has different states: solid, liquid, gaseous, plasma. A change of state in nature is a change from
one stable energy level to another. A living organism, then, might be thought of as having two
states, alive and dead, but since a dead organism by definition is no longer really an organism, it
makes little sense to talk of a change of state. Rather, a living organism is a constant process,
from birth through maturity and aging to death. Gumilev’s argument continues that to understand
processes, especially evolutionary ones, a hierarchical taxonomy is needed, similar to the ones
invented Linnæus and Darwin. This model is necessitated by the evolutionary nature of living
processes. When an organism dies, it reverts to a ‘state’; the same is true for an ethnos, the
remains of which can be studied at an archaeological dig, for example. The idea of ‘state’ is
useful when speaking of technology, the means of production; one can also talk about social
states, such as class. One can change one’s social ‘state’ through the expenditure of energy. It is
not possible to change one’s ethnos in the same way. Therefore, ethnos must be regarded as a
process (ibid.: 70).

Thus, for Gumilev, an ethnos is relatively stable, but certainly not static. The ethnos is a process,
and as such is in a state of constant development. Ethnoi are, in a sense, born; they grow, mature,
decay and fade away. The question still remains, however, of what exactly is growing? When
Spengler asks “what form will the down-curve assume?” (1934: 424), Gumilev wonders what
exactly is the “down-curve” supposed to follow?

To explain Gumilev’s thinking on this point, it is important to return to his idea that ethnoi arise
naturally among humans, but do not imply some kind of racial differentiation: “it is not in
people’s bodies, but in their deeds and relationships” (Gumilev, 2001: 146). Here he would be in
agreement with Hobsbawm, who, when speaking of ethnicity, stated that what was important in
the unity of an ethnic group is “not blood but belief” (Hobsbawm, 1990: 65). Where Hobsbawm
and Gumilev would disagree is on the conclusion coming from this point. For Hobsbawm, ethnic
identity, like the nation, is a social construction. For Gumilev, on the contrary, ethnogenesis is not
simply social in nature. There is a relationship between the ethnos and the Landschaft – meaning
the physical geography of a place – where ethnogenesis takes place. In fact, according to
Gumilev, ethnogenesis takes place only where there is a conjunction of two or more kinds of
Landschaft (Gumilev, 2001: 254). Moreover, another basic requirement of ethnogenesis is the
presence of two or more ethnoi in contact (ibid.: 147). In short, according to Gumilev, an ethnos
is a process that arises from a combination of other ethnoi meeting at a juncture of two or more
geographic settings.

15
In the Occidental literature on Gumilev and the Eurasianists, there are very few attempts to try to
understand this aspect of Gumilev’s theory. The notable exception is Laruelle, and I am forced to
disagree with some of the conclusions she arrives at. For Laruelle, Gumilev’s thinking involves a
rigid physical determinism, of which geography is the first factor, setting him far apart from the
original Eurasianists, particularly Savitskii. She claims Gumilev’s preference for the term
Landschaft, and eschewal of Savitskii’s term “mestorazvitie” (meaning literally “place of
development” and being coined by Savitskii to resonate with the geological term mestorozhdenie,
which refers to a mineralogical deposit), to support this view: “si le premier terme illustre un
déterminisme absolu et la dépendance de l’homme envers la nature, le second met principalement
en lumière l’interaction entre milieu naturel et développement historique, les tendances
communes existant entre un territoire et le peuple ou l’État qui s’y développe” (2000: 173 fn.).

In fact, judging by Gumilev’s endnotes in Ethnogenesis, the term Landschaft seems to have
undergone some changes in the Soviet literature, since he quotes S.V. Kalesnik in defining it as a
portion of the Earth’s surface, “qualitatively different from other portions, bordered by natural
boundaries and representing an integrated and mutually determined regular aggregate of objects
and phenomena, typically expressed over a significant space and indissolubly connected in all
ways with the Landschaft layer” (2001: 189). Gumilev immediately proposes using “Savitskii’s
apt term – mestorazvitie” – to express this long definition (ibid.). This serves as a clue that the
rhetoric of the natural sciences that Gumilev employs does not necessarily equal a hard
determinism.

Laruelle sees Gumilev’s determinism as a rigid, physical one, where human history is an effect of
natural, physical laws set in motion. This implies an almost mechanistic view of the universe,
which is not the best characterization of Gumilev’s naturalist approach to human history. For
example, Gumilev takes inspiration from the work of Vladimir Vernadskii on the biosphere,
which is not “just a film of ‘living matter’ on the surface of the Earth”, but a “constantly changing
aggregate of organisms, connected to each other by, and subject to, the evolutionary process in
the course of geological time” (Gumilev, 2001: 326). The difference between living and non-
living matter is explained partly by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that the
entropy of any isolated system increases with time, which is to say that matter moves from an
ordered state to a disordered state. This loss of orderliness is uneven, however, and systems that
are not isolated, in other words, that interact with their surrounding environment, can reverse
entropy in themselves while speeding up the process of entropy around them. According to some
modern interpretations, living things represent just such a process (Dennett, 1996: 69). Ordinary
matter on the closed system of planet Earth is subject to the growth of entropy, while living
matter ‘exchanges’, as it were, entropy with the surrounding environment, in the form of energy,
the “biochemical energy of the living matter of the biosphere” (Gumilev, 2001: 327). When
Gumilev speaks of ethnogenesis being governed by natural laws, it is this “reverse entropy” that

16
he is speaking of, the same principle that applies to biological processes.

If an ethnos is a process, however, then ethnogenesis is a change of state, and that means,
following Gumilev’s thinking, that it requires an injection of energy, perhaps not immediately
noticeable, similar to the hidden thermal energy in a material change of state from solid to liquid
to gas. Drawing from Vernadskii’s principle of biochemical energy, Gumilev concludes that it is
this energy that stimulates all ethnogeneses (ibid.: 277). An ethnos, left on its own, will find a
state of equilibrium with its natural surroundings and other ethnoi, resisting change; in a word,
homeostasis. An impulse is needed to move an ethnos to change its environment, whether by
migration or by the effort required to change a landscape to make it arable. This impulse, for
Gumilev, is the single invariable factor in the creation of ethnoi. It is indicated by an impulse that
runs counter to the instinct of self-preservation, or the preservation of one’s offspring. Individuals
who demonstrate this quality “carry out… deeds that upset the inertia of tradition and initiate new
ethnoi” (ibid.: 265).

Because this indicator manifests itself on the individual level, but on a scale that seems, according
to his observations, to happen simultaneously in different parts of the world in a way that affects
whole populations, Gumilev attributes it to genetic mutations. He introduces a new term to the
Russian language, passionarnost’, from the Latin word passĭo, which means “suffering”, and is
the root of the English word “passion”, which has taken on new meanings (except, generally, in
the context of the Passion of Christ). The term was translated inaptly in the (journal) U.S. journal
Soviet Geography as “drive”, and that is the word used in the single English-language version of
Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere. It would have made more sense, however, to create a new
English word, to keep in line with Gumilev’s thinking. Laruelle wisely translates the abstract
noun as passionarité (2000: 174), and I will use the appropriate anglicized form: “passionarity”,
from which, the adjective and adjectival noun “passionary” (passionarnii).

Passionarity is a very controversial and, it is safe to say at this point, a scientifically unfounded
concept. It is necessary to pay close attention to it, however, since it is a term central to
Gumilevian thinking, and has become fairly widespread in Russian social discourse. Essentially,
it represents an overabundance of biochemical energy, and it manifests itself in individuals who
are willing to “do deeds”, heedless of the instinct of self-preservation. Passionarity is thus the
force that moves history; moreover, it is a force of nature. Gumilev allows that the actual form of
the acts carried out by the passionary individual are dictated by the social and political situation,
which he leaves outside of the natural science of ethnology. The presence of passionarity in the
individual is, however, a physiological difference involving heightened activity. Since, as
Gumilev deduces, passionarity comes in bursts, or “passionary impulses”, that affect whole
populations, passionarity must be the effect of genetic mutation. This mutation, it must be noted,
is not necessarily a good thing from the passionary individual’s point of view, since it leads to

17
behaviour that can often lead to early death (2001: 329). Even during a phase where passionarity
is high, the number of true passionaries in a given population is still very small. Passionarity is,
however, contagious, according to Gumilev. Since it is a form of biochemical energy, there can
be said to be “passionary fields” where higher numbers of passionaries live in a given population.
This allows “subpassionary” individuals, as Gumilev calls them, to takes risks similar to
passionaries, and to participate in their exploits (ibid.: 282).

The level of passionarity does not remain constant in an ethnos once it has burst out in a
passionary impulse. Gumilev’s concept involves a series of phases, which correspond to the life
cycle of the ethnos. The initial passionary impulse forms the ethnos by, in a sense, “welding”
disparate subethnoi together in a given place and time, in a given geographic setting. The typical
life span of an ethnos is approximately 1500 years, unless cut short by, for example, conquest by
another ethnos. (idem, 2002c: 14). This life span is characterized by a sharp rise in passionarity in
its first three hundred years or so, at which point a climax is reached. By this point, the ethnos
will often have expanded, absorbing other ethnoi and forming a superethnos. At this point the
passionarity in the system begins to burn itself out, beginning a slow breakdown that typically
lasts about the same amount of time as the rise in passionarity. This is a time of monument
building in the art and culture of a superethnos, the diffusion of passionarity being spent in a
cultural crystallization. Represented in linear graphic form (for example, idem, 2001: 349), with
the x-axis representing time (from zero to 1500 years) and the y-axis representing passionarity,
the cycle Gumilev describes peaks sharply just after 300 years, and then tapers off unevenly over
the remaining 900 years or so. The last few hundred years of this slow falling-off of passionarity
are characterized by decadence, but also by technological development (ibid.: 451) which is
needed to replace the dynamic energy of ethnic expansion.

This describes, in effect, what one might call (using a metaphor from the more well-established
natural sciences) Gumilev’s ‘climatology’ of the ethnosphere. He reached this point after a great
deal of observation of the ethnic history of the Eurasian steppe. In his later works, Gumilev uses
these concepts to explain the processes that led to the formation of Russia, particularly in
Drevniaia Rus’ i Velikaia Step’ and Ot Rusi do Rossii. In these works, to continue the metaphor,
Gumilev studies ethnic ‘meteorology’ in more detail. Not surprisingly, his conclusions are
different from those of other historians. Here, the Eurasian steppe was the stage on which the
meeting of several different ethnic systems in the seventh to tenth centuries A.D. led to the
creation of Kievan Rus’.

Some important concepts, theorized in Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere, are examined in more
detail in these later works. According to Gumilev, they have to do with contacts between
superethnoi, so in a sense, they have a bearing on the Samuel Huntington’s (1996) work on the
‘clash of civilizations’. It is worth noting that in some superficial ways, Gumilev’s cultural map

18
of the world is the most similar of all the Eurasianists to Huntington’s. Huntington draws on
recent research on civilizations, as well as the cultures identified by Toynbee, Spengler and
Fernand Braudel (1996: 43, 325 fn). Gumilev draws on a similar tradition in framing his view of
the present state of world civilization, and there are some interesting parallels between his
conclusions and Huntington’s, but Gumilev’s ethnology is very different from the method used
by the American political scientist. If Huntington sees a world where civilizations ‘clash’,
conflicting on the plane of cultural values, Gumilev sees ethnoi and superethnoi interacting in a
way similar to storm systems or other natural phenomena. Ethnoi can live together in a state of
symbiosis, where two or more ethnoi exist side by side in a region, or xenia*, a symbiotic state
where an ethnos leads a peaceful but separate existence inside the territory of another ethnos.
When members of two different superethnoi combine in one society, however, what forms is a
brittle, but dangerous, system called a chimera†.

Gumilev is able to cite many instances of chimeræ in world history, but his classic example is
also the most controversial one, dealing with the history of the Khazar Kaghanate in the second
half of the First Millennium A.D. Gumilev was a student of the Soviet archaeologist Mikhail I.
Artamonov, who is recognized as perhaps the foremost author on the history of the Khazars
(Christian, 2002: 7), and whom Gumilev himself accompanied early in his career to the
archaeological excavation at Sarkel, one of the Khazars’ main settlements (Lavrov, 2001). The
Khazars were a steppe people living to the north and west of the Caspian Sea, who formed out of
several Turkic tribes, the western remnants of the Turkic empire that had stretched across the
Eurasian steppe; but later, evidently in the ninth century, converted to Judaism.

Jews had originally appeared in the lands north of the Caucasus, the territory of the Khazars, in
the sixth century, after the Sassanid Persian rulers had expelled them for supporting Mazdakitism
(Christian, 2002: 11). The Mazdakites, or the followers of the cult established by Mazdak in
primarily Zoroastrian Persia at the end of the fifth century, were an example of what Gumilev
calls an antisystem. Gumilev, as we have mentioned earlier, considers ethnoi to be systems. A
system has a ‘positive’ relationship with the world when people consider themselves a part of
nature, and a system where the world and worldliness is seen a source of suffering, where “the
world is rejected as the source of evil”, is negative, or an antisystem (Gumilev, 2002a: 268). In
the case of Mazdak and his followers in fifth century Persia, this apparently meant a redistribution
of all property during a reign of terror. The Jewish community in Persia, according to Gumilev,
was split by this turn of events: Jews who were “Orthodox and talmudic found the Mazdakites
abhorrent, while those who were free-thinking and cabbalist found them sympathetic” (ibid.: 120)
. Thus the former fled to take refuge in Byzantium while the Mazdakites were in control, while
the latter remained in Persia until forced to flee by the final defeat of Mazdak in 529. It was this
group that ended up in the Khazar lands of the North Caucasus in the sixth century, living a
pastoral life side by side with the Khazars. Later, during the Arab invasion of the eighth century,

19
the two ethnoi were able to form a state of symbiosis, and resist the expansion of the Omayyad
Caliphate (ibid.: 66). In the ensuing period, the contact between these two ethnoi –
representatives, in fact, of what Gumilev terms two superethnoi, Western Eurasian and Judaic –
became closer, but the two remained distinct.

Gumilev insists that there was no “conversion” of the Turkic Khazars to Judaism. Rather, Jewish
women married into the Khazar nobility. Eventually, a class of influential Khazars developed
whose social status was inferred by paternal lineage, and who were Jewish by their maternal
lineage. They did not, however, cling to their Jewish heritage, according to Gumilev, until the
beginning of the ninth century, when a Khazar kaghan invited rabbinical scholars to entrench
Judaic customs among the ruling class that was descended from both Jewish and Khazar
parentage (ibid.: 144). Thus a system formed from the two superethnoi, which Gumilev qualified
as a chimera, inherently unstable and self-destructive. By way of contrast, the co-existence of the
East Slavs and the Varangians who together formed Kievan Rus’ in the ninth and tenth centuries,
eventually crushing the Khazar Kaghanate, did not lead to a chimera. This was not due, in
Gumilev’s words, to any “noble qualities” of these peoples, but simply the fact that the
Varangians did not constitute an ethnos; instead, they were “free atoms” comprised not only of
Scandinavian warriors, but also Balts, some Slavs and Finns. These people would later become
incorporated into the Slavic ethnos of the Rus’ (ibid.: 228). It should be pointed out that the
Jewish-Khazar chimera is not the only example that Gumilev recognizes. Among others, he refers
to the Livonian state of the Teutonic Order in the thirteenth century (idem, 2001: 322).

The idea that non-Slavic peoples were instrumental in the formation of Kievan Rus’ was
controversial in Soviet times, and the work of Artamonov was suppressed (Christian, 2000: 7).
Therefore Gumilev’s interpretation of the origin of the Russian state was bound to be
controversial from the point of view of Soviet historiography. The fact that he assigns the label of
“terrible chimera” to history’s only Jewish state outside the Holy Land is also, certainly, the
source of controversy. His rhetoric, at times, certainly seems anti-Semitic, which has affected the
diffusion of his ideas (ibid.: 22).

In what way, then, is Gumilev’s work so important for Eurasianism? Gumilev’s affiliation to the
‘classical’ Eurasianists is open to debate. Notwithstanding some of my objections to Laruelle’s
conclusions regarding the Gumilevian discourse, she does make a persuasive case that Gumilev’s
approach is fundamentally different from the original Eurasianists. Certainly the key Gumilevian
concepts that I have taken pains in outlining here – ethnogenesis, passionarity, the “science” of
ethnology – were unknown to the classical Eurasianists, because they were invented by Gumilev
late in the twentieth century (Laurelle, 2003: 56). Laruelle, however, does not seem to notice that
the way he defines one of his central concepts, the ethnos, is essentially cultural, referring as it
does to “behavioural stereotypes”. This, and his grouping of ethnoi into superethnoi, recalls

20
Trubetskoi’s idea of culture quoted earlier in this paper. Nonetheless, considering his favouring of
the natural sciences over the humanities, and his stated distrust of philological approaches to
unravelling the history of ethnoi, Gumilev’s epistemology can be considered radically different
from that of most of the members of the classical Eurasianist school, and from the other serious
Neoeurasianist, Aleksandr Panarin.

Gumilev’s relationship to Eurasianism can be expressed in two ways: first, the impact of the
vocabulary of his discourse on the modern wave of Eurasianists. Writers like Dugin, among many
others, have used Gumilevian language in the course of their analyses. Panarin uses the term
“passionarity”, although “contrary to Gumilev, we do not relegate human passionarity to a
natural-determinist factor. Man is, foremost, a spiritual creature, receiving energy from culture”
(Panarin, et al. 1996: 360). Despite this, Panarin goes on to speak of Russian “cosmism”, drawing
on the same concept, expressed by V Vernadskii, of civilization’s relationship to the natural
universe as Gumilev did, and describing relationships to nature similar to Gumilev’s ‘systems’
and ‘antisystems’ (idem: 388).

Secondly, Gumilev speaks to Eurasianists in his detailed ethnology of the peoples and cultures of
the Eurasian steppe: the Huns, the Turkic peoples, Khazars, the spread of Nestorianism in Central
Asia. The research that Gumilev did in the earlier part of his career, without having read many of
the works of the classical Eurasianists, nevertheless supported the ideas of Trubetskoi and
Savitskii concerning the mixed Slavonic-Turanian origins of Russia. Indeed, by classing Russia
as “the Eurasian superethnos”, he was placing it as the fourth incarnation of the great pan-
Eurasian imperative that built the Hun, Turkic and Mongol Empires before it. In the sense that
Gumilev saw Russia as belonging to a superethnos (read civilization) that was neither Western-
Christian, nor uniquely Asian in origin, made him a central figure among the new Eurasianists.
Like the classical Eurasianists, he suggested that it was important that the individual ethnoi in
Eurasia to remain true to their own cultures, and traditions, as history demonstrated: “when each
people (narod) retained the right to be itself, united Eurasia successfully withstood the onslaught
of Western Europe, and China, and the Moslems. Unfortunately, in the twentieth century we
abandoned this sensible and traditional (for our country) policy in favour of European principles”
(Gumilev, 2002c: 292). For Gumilev, the need for a different approach to development in Eurasia
is expressed by his idea that the Eurasian superethnos is 500 years younger than the West-
European superethnos, at a different stage of ethnogenesis, and with a different level of
passionarity. This holds out comfort for Eurasianists, particularly for the stream that Laurelle
identified as “euro-asiatism” (Laruelle, 2003: 62) or the ethnological movement in Eurasianism
mentioned earlier, which is involved in creating a scholarly basis for the national identities of the
primarily Turkic-speaking peoples of Russia and Central Asia.

I agree with Laruelle that, in retrospect, Gumilev should not be considered the last of the

21
‘classical’ Eurasianists, in spite of the article where Gumilev appears to claim this himself
(Gumilev, 1990). It should be noted, however, that in 1990, there was no Neoeurasianist
movement to speak of, or at least it was in its infancy and not widely known, so in a sense, at the
time, his claim was not so outlandish despite his basic differences with Savitskii, Trubetskoi and
the other classical Eurasianists. “‘I met and had conversations with Savitskii, and corresponded
with G. Vernadskii. I am basically in agreement with the fundamental historic and
methodological conclusions of the Eurasianists’” (quoted in Lavrov, 2002: 295). As for his
specific view of Russian history, Gumilev’s concept of a superethnos formed by a meeting of
Slavonic and Mongol-Turkic elements echoes a strong theme among the classical Eurasianists,
even if the methodology used to arrive at that conclusion was different.

As Gumilev mentioned himself, the thrust of his work as it pertains to history is best formulated
as an attempt to systematize the study of the ethnosphere the way meteorology does for the
atmosphere or plate tectonics does for the study of the lithosphere. Since it reaches into the realm
of the humanities, the criticism levelled against his work often targets his epistemology (for
example, Laruelle, 2000), or the ‘dilettantism’ that his approach requires, reaching out to
disciplines that he clearly does not have a firm grasp on, for example in the biochemistry and
cosmic links in his theory of passionarity (Koreniako, 2000). It is not very difficult to find
inconsistencies Gumilev’s work; after all, he was forced to spend much of his early career
working his own, and yet he showed considerable audacity in trying to create a new science, in
fact, practically a new world-view. Clearly it would be impossible for one man to be able to forge
such a different approach to history in a way that is completely factually and logically
“waterproof”: there are simply too many facts, and too many unfamiliar disciplines to be able to
cleanly unite into one whole. Does this invalidate his entire œuvre? I would suggest, rather, that
studying Gumilev might provide some interesting approaches to theorizing nationalism or the
“clash of civilizations” in general. In relation to the topic of this paper, Gumilevian terminology
has become central to the discourse of Neoeurasianism, even if some Neoeurasianists are not in
complete agreement with him.

Aleksandr Panarin: Eurasia After Modernity

Aleksandr Sergeevich Panarin (1940-2003) was a teacher of philosophy at Moscow State
University until his death. His career was linked closely with the Department of Philosophy at
MSU, where he obtained his undergraduate and graduate degrees in the late 60’s and early 70’s.
He was unable to fully realize his potential until 1992, when he became a full professor of
philosophy at his alma mater. As an author, he was particularly prolific in the last 10 years,
publishing many articles and a number of books, none of which have been translated into English,
but several of which have won major prizes in Russia, including the A. Solzhenitsyn Award for
Revansh Istorii [The Revanche of History] and Iskushenie Globalizmom [The Temptation of
Globalism]. During this period he was a regular contributor to influential periodicals such as

22
Znamia [Banner], Nash Sovremennik [Our Contemporary] and Literaturnaia Gazeta [Literary
Gazette], and scientific journals such as Voprosy Filosofii [Problems of Philosophy]. At the time
of his death, it could be said that he was only just reaching his peak of popularity.

Little effort has been made so far to understand Panarin’s œuvre in the Occidental literature on
the Neoeurasianists, with the exception of an analysis by Marlène Laruelle (2001). Tsygankov
(1998) mentions Panarin briefly in a footnote as an example of a “liberal” Eurasianist, because of
his “respect for democracy and human rights”, as opposed to the “hard-line”, “anti-Western”
Eurasianists, among whom Aleksandr Dugin is the most visible example. In fact, Panarin’s
message, similar to many in the anti-globalization movement of recent years, is very clear: the
West, in its current form, is not the source of “respect for democracy and human rights” for the
rest of the world, but rather the source of oppression, the dismemberment of the former Soviet
space of Eurasia into sovereign states organized on nationalist lines, each with a dependant,
western-oriented elite and a population thrown back from the industrialized second world to a
third-world source of natural resources and cheap labour. Russia and Eurasia’s best chance,
therefore, is to become a centre of global resistance. The means to this end is through a cultural
rebirth. In the case of Russia, this means a return to Orthodox values.

Panarin’s thought is laid out in a large number of books, where many ideas are carried over from
one volume to the next. For the purposes of grasping the direction of Panarin’s thinking, I will
concentrate on a selection of several books: Rossiia v Tsivilizationnom Protsesse [Russia in the
Civilizational Process], published in 1995; Reformy i Kontrreformy v Rossii [Reforms and
Counter-Reforms in Russia], a work co-authored with V. V. Il’in and A. S. Akhiezer in 1997;
Rossiia v Tsiklakh Mirovoi Istorii [Russia in the Cycles of World History] published in 1999;
from the same year, Global’noe Politicheskoe Prognozirovanie v Usloviiakh Strategicheskoi
Nestabil’nosti [Global Political Forecasting in Conditions of Strategic Instability]; in his larger
work, Politologia [‘Politology’, i.e. political science] (2002), much of Global’noe Politicheskoe
Prognozirovanie is reprinted as Part II, but Part I deals with questions of method. Finally, I will
refer to his last major work, Pravoslavnaia Tsivilizatsiia v Global’nom Mire [Orthodox
Civilization in a Global World], published in 2002.

Panarin’s work has several dimensions. In its broadest sense, it is an attempt to create a home-
grown method of political science, different from Western, particularly American, models that are
now standard in Post-Soviet Russia. He qualifies the goal of political science as “the study of the
nature of state power, as well as the patterns and procedures of its various applications in various
social and socio-cultural (civilizational) systems” (Panarin 2002a: 12). Another important
dimension is his geopolitical view, comprising an eternal, epic struggle between Land and Sea for
supremacy. Finally, there is his cultural analysis, which on the one hand is profoundly Orthodox
Christian, while on the other hand is pan-Eurasian, particularly in the context of the westernizing

23
power of globalization.

Panarin takes what could be termed a “dualist” view of world history. One outward form of this
dualism is history’s apparent “bi-hemisphericity”, the age-old division of “East” vs. “West”. This
is an idea that he draws from Karl Jaspers: “Ever since Herotodus, men have been aware of the
antithesis of East and West as an eternal antithesis that is forever reappearing in fresh shapes”
(Jaspers: 1965: 67). In addition, Panarin regards himself as a historicist. For him, the analytical
method in political science that grew out of American sociology “fits neatly with the current
liberal paradigm of ‘the End of History’, the eternal consolidation of the Modern paradigm that
was achieved in the West” (Panarin. 2002a: 14). For him, “socio-cultural inversion”, a
continuation of history in the Hegelian sense, is a matter of when, not if. Thus Panarin presents
himself as an opponent of two kinds of bias: the Western universalizing bias of space, predicting
the advent of a global civilization, and, more particularly, the universalizing bias of time, in the
notion of the “end of history”.

For Panarin, these dualisms are the sign of a fundamental philosophical phenomenon, the quarrel
between nominalism and idealism. He suggests that there is a cosmological foundation for this
dichotomy, which could just as easily be illustrated by the symbols of Ying and Yang, which
leads to the suggestion that there is a cyclical pattern of ascendance of these two fundamental
principles, which likely has an anti-entropic significance in the socio-cultural dynamic of human
history. The current cycle of Modernity, the ascendancy of the West, is marked also by the
ascendancy of nominalism: “neither the market economy nor political democracy are possible
with the weakening of the nominalist principle” (Panarin, 1999a: 21). By “democracy’, Panarin
means Western-style, representative democracy. This model of society is an outgrowth of
nominalism, specifically the Lockean idea of the “natural state” of Man, but it is confronted with
many paradoxes, which have come into particularly sharp relief during the post-Soviet period of
Russian history, where people have been “liberated”, in the sense that now they have a
representative democracy. Panarin highlights the difference between this form of democracy and
participatory democracy: “the retreat of the state in Russia in fact lead to a certain (quite limited)
minimal amount of democracy in the political sphere at the price of a further retreat of democracy
in the social sphere” (2002a, 75).

Another paradox faced by the nominalist path is that its presumption that growth and progress can
continue forward indefinitely has been confronted with the reality of the limited amount of
resources on this planet. The progressive impulse leads to two problems. First, it tends to
universalize and rationalize human culture, leading to a loss of diversity. Second, there are the
“limits to growth” that the Club of Rome warned about. This means that Western civilization,
“the golden billion”, in order to keep its progressive lifestyle going, must place ever-increasing
limits on the rest of the world’s people (1999b: 64).

24
Continuing from his dualist perspective, Panarin’s theory of history takes a turn from Arnold
Toynbee. The cyclical nature of the development of civilization can be expressed in terms of
challenge and response. For Panarin, the challenge posed by Western civilization, specifically the
United States, reaches far beyond Russia, and is in fact a challenge to the rest of the world.
Panarin sees the US in an attempt to “end history”, that is, crystallize the balance of world power
by creating a unipolar world, or more correctly the production of a world that has never yet
existed. The programmatic, technical means to this end is the dismantling of the world’s large,
multi-ethnic states, such as Russia, India and China, under the guise of ethnic sovereignty. At this
point, “the whole experience of world political history is witness to the fact that a response
would, sooner or later, always be found, and thus history never became a monologue of an eternal
victor” (1999b, 19).

Panarin’s dualism can be seen in the geopolitical side of his thought. Russia, for Panarin,
represents what he calls a “civilization”. His conception of this is influenced by Toynbee, but
more by Trubetskoi and the classical Eurasianists. Toynbee rates religion too highly as a factor
leading to the formation of civilizations, according to Panarin. This interpretation has led to an
idea where, “with the light hand of S. Huntington and his adepts, confessional fanaticism and
ethnocentrism are held up as the mobilization of the civilizational consciousness” (Panarin, et. al.,
1996: 224). Furthermore, “in the myth of the ‘clash of civilizations’, the geopolitical interests of
the West are, doubtlessly, at play. In feeding the myth of a clash of civilizations, specifically
Christian and Muslim, certain circles are counting on the break-up of Russia along the watershed
of its Slavic and Turkic constituent parts” (ibid.: 225).

In fact, Panarin’s geopolitical view of Eurasia stems from an idea similar to that of the classical
Eurasianists. According to this, the Slavic and Turanian (Turkic, Finnic, etc.) elements of the
Eurasian steppe formed a symbiotic relationship at the beginning of the modern Russian state,
where the settled Slavonic side in a sense “tamed” the wild, barbaric instincts of the steppe
nomads. The process of “westernization” in Russia is one where the Slavic element withdraws
from the Turanian side, which would conceivably lead to a rift, in all likelihood catastrophic. This
is in contrast to the much more typical view that Russia’s experience with the steppe nomads of
the Tatar-Mongol Empire lead to a tradition of “Oriental despotism” that remains to this day:
The West, separated from Russia after 1917, brings its identity into line in such a
way in order to attribute the totalitarian syndrome to the East. Our “Westernizers”
believed that, initiating a campaign of masochistic auto-flagellation on a national
scale. Meanwhile, modern analysis indicates that the Soviet totalitarian model
arose completely from the Enlightenment (1999a: 37).

Essentially, Panarin is describing an Orientalism that has been applied now to Russia. It could

25
have easily been Panarin writing that
…the Orientalist now tries to see the Orient as an imitation West which, according
to Bernard Lewis, “is prepared to come to terms with the West.” If in the meantime
the Arabs, the Muslims, or the Third or Fourth Worlds go unexpected ways after
all, we will not be surprised to have an Orientalist tell us that this testifies to the
incorrigibility of Orientals and therefore proves that they are not to be trusted (Said,
1979: 321).

The difference here is that Panarin is really addressing the “Orientalists” within Russian society,
in other words, the Westernizing elite.

If splitting Eurasia along religious lines is dangerous, Panarin is unequivocal about the splitting
up of Eurasia on ethno-nationalist lines. He sees a double-standard: while the West encourages
ethnic separatism not just in Eurasia but throughout the rest of the world, it discourages ethno-
nationalist separatism within its own ranks. He notes that “the post-totalitarian ethno-
sovereignties are not at all democratic. Their ideology is aggressive, low-brow nationalism,
leading far back compared to the ‘Soviet empire’, away from the ideals of the Enlightenment.”
(1999b: 237).

Laruelle interprets the use of the term “civilization” in Panarin’s discourse to suggest that Panarin
“shares with Huntington the idea that the notion of civilization has an absolute explicative value”
for the post-bipolar world, and that this definition supposes a polycentric view of the world
(Laruelle, 2001: 71). A careful re-reading of Panarin would seem to refute those two points.
Certainly, the idea of civilization does come into play in his thought, drawing some energy from
the writing of Toynbee, for example. His idea of Russian civilization, as we have seen, reminds
us of the Eurasianist concept of the interaction between the Slavic and Turanian worlds. In fact, it
is also very reminiscent of Gumilev’s “Eurasian superethnos”. This idea is outwardly similar to
the civilizations of Toynbee and Huntington, yet it does not give religion central role in the
formation of civilizations. On the other hand, for Panarin, Orthodoxy plays a central role in the
“Eurasian civilization”. In fact, he sees Orthodoxy providing a moral energy to a broader
engagement against Western universalism in a struggle that is not multi-polar, but bipolar. He
does indeed speak of a “pluralism of civilizations” but it is in the context of a resistance of
various cultures against the space-compressing force of post-modern Western civilization
(Panarin, et. al., 1996: 369). Laruelle brings this point up to demonstrate that the Neoeurasianists
take a disingenuous comfort in the notion that in a multi-civilizational world, Russia will be
assured a warm seat. Perhaps they do, but I would say, rather, that in Panarin’s Neoeurasianism,
the ideal is the preservation of Russian culture as such, along with other world cultures.

Another major factor in Panarin’s geopolitics is the dichotomy of Land and Sea, Continent and

26
Ocean, which transcends the geopolitical notion of civilizations. This idea comes from
Mackinder, and is very important among the classical Eurasianists. It is also important to Carl
Schmitt, where Panarin picks up on two key metaphors: the Ship, symbolizing movement, as the
basis of the maritime way of life, opposed to which the House, as the symbol of the land-based
way of life, represents tranquility. The Sea way of life is also represented by piracy, the
expropriation of wealth, while the Land is characterized by sedentary pastoralism. This
fundamental dualism fits well with Panarin’s conception of the world history, and also is a good
fit with his historicist outlook. Translated into the present, we are faced with the symbolic
Maritime way of life taken to an extreme, in the guise of global capitalism:
Today we are dealing with the global piracy of a maritime civilization, exacting, on
the one hand, a growing tribute from the entire surrounding global space by means
of such new mechanisms as the institutional banking economy, from which there is
no defence by means of the usual procedures of state protectionism and self-
defence; and splitting up, on the other hand, the bedrock of the former continental
monoliths, enabling it to set apart the Rimland, its familiar oceanic edge. (1999a:
128)

Using another dualistic geopolitical metaphor, Panarin goes on to describe this as the triumph of
the geographic horizontal over the vertical. He does not mince words in describing the current
state of affairs. The forces of the Sea, or the West, led by the US, are leading a direct attack on
the former Soviet Eurasian space or “Second World”, in a process designed to divide it and add it
to the Third World. “The whole former Second World is in the grip of a process of de-
industrialization that is clearly imposed and encouraged from outside. De-industrialization is a
forcible separation from progress” (2002b: 331). Panarin paints a bleak picture of the implications
of this: Russia has to stop pretending that it is not under attack, and realize that the Fourth World
War has already begun, soon after the end of what he calls the Third World War, in other words,
the Cold War. The situation is masked, because Russia has fallen back so far without any kind of
resistance, but since her very existence is at stake, along with other large Eurasian states, who
need to be neutralized in order for the West to gain control over Eurasia, “we have the right to
speak of the beginning of a new World War” (idem, 1999b: 227). For Panarin, because of Russia-
Eurasia’s strategic place on the Continent, the resistance of what he terms the “Maritime
horizontal”, using a geopolitical bloc of the “Continental vertical” has implications reaching far
beyond Eurasia. His sense of historicism, on the other hand, gives him faith that a response will
be found.

In her analysis of Panarin’s version of Neoeurasianism, Laruelle makes note of a valorization, a

rehabilitation of barbarism. The Eurasianists, she states, had paradoxically revived the image of
the barbarian, the nomad without culture, as the only way to revive decadent societies. She goes
on to cite Panarin, stating that his

27
 néoeurasisme poursuit ce culte du barbare en appelant au renversement des
habituels critères de valeur. “La barbarie totale n’est pas le produit d’un héritage
archaïque, mais le résultat des expériences ‘post-civilizationelles’ de dépasser à
tout prix les contradictions et tensions immanentes à tout état civilizationnel.”
(Laruelle, 2001: 79)

The quote comes from Rossiia v Tsivilizationnom Protsesse (Panarin, 1995: 19), and it is
mistranslated into French. Panarin is speaking of “totalitarnoe varvarstvo” – totalitarian barbarity
– in the context of French philosopher Jacques Ellul’s discourse on the way Western civilization,
in its rush towards a technological utopia, has betrayed its fundamental values, such as ‘freedom’
and ‘individualism’. Panarin, here, is reasoning that many of Russia’s terrible experiences of the
twentieth century were the result of a Western utopian, technological ideology being taken to its
logical conclusion. He is trying to discredit the Orientalist idea of “oriental despotism” as a major
factor in Russia’s totalitarian heritage.

Rather than rehabilitating a “cult of the barbarian”, Panarin curiously begins the book we have
just quoted in a spirited defence of the original victories of the Enlightenment, in the form of an
examination of Ellul’s work, Le Trahison de l’Occident (2003, originally published in 1975).
Reading Laruelle’s review of Panarin’s thought, this would seem rather paradoxical; after all,
Ellul is a fierce critic of the perceived “barbarism” of the modern age, and in the book Panarin
quotes, he exhorts the unique role the West has played in human history. This brings us to another
important aspect of Panarin’s Eurasianism. Modernity is not, it itself, a bad thing; but a sustained
attack on the value system of one’s own civilization can lead the way to horrors down the road.
That is why he takes up Ellul’s defence of the Occident. In Le Trahison de l’Occident, Ellul
examines what he considers a fundamental paradox in the unfolding of Western thought during
the twentieth century, the flowering of a cultural relativism, that can be based only on the notion
that reason is a “natural quality” of human beings. Ellul says that on the contrary, reason, and the
beneficial aspects of Western culture are not a “natural state” at all, but the product of many
centuries of cultural refinement. Reason is fragile, and must be treated with care, for fear of
losing those qualities while heading down a utopian path toward a totalitarian future, which is
what any earthly utopia represents, particularly in its technocratic incarnation.

Regarding this position of “over-confidence” in relation to one’s own civilization, Panarin writes
that Russia had an experience with the same phenomenon. To her critics, “Tsarist Russia seemed
in its time both ‘the prison of nations’ and an unshakeable monstrosity… later, after her death, her
critics had to admit that [the GULAG] was a real ‘prison of nations’” (Panarin, 1995: 15).

Panarin shares with Ellul a fundamentally Christian philosophy, and like Ellul, he brings his
beliefs to bear in a critique of what Ellul had called (in its English translation) “the technological

28
society”. Panarin is less deterministic than Ellul, in the sense that where Ellul believes that where
the technological world is concerned “it is vanity to pretend it can be checked or guided” (Ellul,
1964: 428), Panarin counters that a challenge of a universalist society will invariably be met by a
response. Where Ellul gives up, Panarin sees a way out. Fredric Jameson spoke of the challenge
that Panarin refers to as “the cultural logic of late capitalism”, which falls in line with Marxist
theory. Panarin would likely agree with Jameson on the diagnosis, but not on the response. For
Panarin, the response is to be found in the Orthodox Christian world view. He notes that the
“phenomenology of the Orthodox Christian spirit” has a certain quality that can be compared to
Marx’s “surplus value”, which the worker adds to bourgeois society. Were it not for the added
value, the system would fall apart. The difference between the Orthodox spirit and surplus value
is that the sacrifice of the worker is mandatory, while the sacrifice of “the Orthodox spirit is
always voluntary, spontaneous, and only in this way can it truly be creative” (Panarin, 2002b:
409).

In Pravoslavnaia Tsivilizatsiia v Global’nom Mire, Panarin examines the alternatives to a global

monoculture. In the world of modern civilizations, China, the Muslim world, and Orthodoxy can
all offer different responses. He suggests that Orthodox spirituality can be the foundation of a
post-industrial Eurasian alternative, where creativity is valued over consumerism. He proposes to
support the cultural, creative people, “not of this world”, who are most susceptible to the social
Darwinism of the “new, aggressive Paganism” of global capitalism. These people would be the
strength of a post-industrial economy founded in Orthodox spirituality. An ascetic, culture-based,
as opposed to a consumer-based, world economy would be more able to withstand the physical
challenges of the twenty-first century.

In conclusion, I would note here that Panarin’s view is global, in the sense that it demands a set of
relationships to space and time that are fundamentally different from the trajectory of post-
modern capitalism and the currently-forming global economy. In reading Panarin, we see a quest
to find a viable alternative to the world structure that is now in the process of forming. Panarin is
in search of a sustainable way of existing for all of humanity, firmly – sometimes shrilly –
rejecting the Western civilizational path, with its technological society and usurious economic
model, thus attributing a messianic function, for all humanity, to his Eurasianism. At the same
time, he is rooted in a cultural conservatism, reminiscent of Ellul, which valorizes conservative
Western values just as it holds up Orthodox, Islamic and Buddhist values. This brings to mind a
point that Hardt and Negri make about fundamentalisms as postmodernist theory (2000: 149).
What Panarin is seeking is an alternative postmodernity, taking geopolitical factors as a starting
point, just as the classical Eurasianists were interested in an alternative modernity.

Conclusion: Neoeurasianism, History and Politics

The question that is left after reading these fundamental Neoeurasianist authors is how do their

29
ideas reflect on the discourse of Russia’s developmental path in the current climate? Certainly,
they have not gone unnoticed, and they are being regarded more and more seriously by many in
Russia right now. They are popular among those who are called, and call themselves,
“conservatives” in Russia, and this is significant, because much can be understood about Russia’s
cultural status quo by examining who the “conservatives” are.

Eurasianism, as an intellectual movement, belonged to a specific time and place: the 1920’s and
30’s, in émigré circles outside the USSR. Eurasianism as a geopolitical stance has come to
acquire a much broader definition. Now, it seems, just about any Russian politician who holds the
West in suspicion, or protests against NATO expansion, must be a Eurasianist. The reason for this
is that Russian nationalism is often hard to pin down, due to Russia’s imperial heritage and
motley, multi-ethnic makeup. Eurasianism, in the sense of an ideology that draws strength from
Russia and Central Asia’s multi-confessional, multi-ethnic nature, in a way that offers an
alternative to the industrial (or more recently post-industrial) West, is a rarity in Russian politics.
I am less inclined than others, for example, to describe Zhirinovsky as a Eurasianist, as Graham
Smith essentially does (1999: 485). A desire to dominate Eurasia does not a Eurasianist make, as
I hope the preceding pages have made clear. Since the mid-1990’s Gennady Zyuganov’s
Communist Party of the Russian Federation has often played the role of a Eurasianist force, partly
due to its broad, multi-ethnic appeal, partly due to its rehabilitation of religion.

A problem with Eurasianism is that its principal authors leave a bit of room for interpretation, and
this tends to encourage more the more xenophobic of Russia’s political forces in the search for a
right-wing ideology that will work in Russia’s specific circumstances. Thus Paradowski points
out that a Gumilev-inspired Eurasianism can either lead to some interesting political solutions, or,
quite the opposite, be used to promote a traditional anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic doctrine (1999:
27).

Aleksandr Dugin, as the main face of Neoeurasianism and the founder of the Eurasia Party, has
made an interesting journey. A prolific writer, he was able to draw attention to the Eurasianist
idea through the 1990’s to the present. His greatest service to those interested in the Eurasianist
world-view, and in geopolitical thought in general, is to distribute, freely, Eurasianist anthologies
that he has compiled, along with his own writings, over the Internet. He is a paradoxical figure,
whose political journey began in his youth, flirting with neo-fascist and anti-Semitic
organizations, later moving to the National Bolshevik Party of Eduard Limonov, and then to the
eventual creation of his own party, adhering more closely to Eurasianist principles (for a detailed
biography, see Yasmann, 2003). When the Eurasia Party was formed, one of its central principles
was a policy of support for President Putin. In fact, Eurasianist influences can be seen in different
parties in the Russian Duma, in the military, and other parts of Russia’s political society. It is in
fact Eurasianism, in a general sense, that seems to sum up the broad mood of Russian

30
conservatism, better than ethnic nationalism. It appears as if Dugin, during the course of his
political career, came to the realization that as a nationalist, in the narrow ethnic Russian or Slavic
sense, he would always remain an outsider. It appears that his move toward Eurasianism was
based on his assessment of the popular conservative mood.

I believe that Dugin, and Neoeurasianism in general, may represent the beginning of a normalized
conservative stand in Russia and perhaps beyond, into Central Asia. In recent Russian politics, we
have seen a very popular president who satisfies many voters who would lean towards a
Eurasianist-style conservatism, and also those who favour continued economic reforms while
maintaining a strong state. The pro-presidential, United Russia party dominates the State Duma.
The Kremlin seems to have effectively neutralized the Communist opposition, which was
perennially strong throughout the 90’s, perhaps by sloughing off the “Eurasia”-minded voters
over to the Rodina (Motherland) Party, which served its purpose by taking a large number of
votes away from the Communists (see, for example, Khamraiev and Bulavinov, 2004). Right
now, the Eurasianist mindset in Russian politics under the current President seems to be
expressed by what one might call “Putin’s Loyal Opposition”. By that, I mean really loyal: the
Eurasianists seem to support most of the President’s moves, but will criticize Westernizing
policies in the government, the same government that was formed by the President.

Slowly, perhaps with the help of the classical Eurasianist philosophy along with the works of
Gumilev and Panarin, a new “conservatism” will awake in Russia, more clearly defined along
Eurasianist lines. My feeling is that in a more developed state, the Russian political spectrum will
not display the traditional Western European “left/right”, where social conservatism often
coincides with economic liberalism. Rather, we may see a formalization of a political view which
is not ethnically exclusive, where social conservatism and an economic concept similar to the one
expressed by the Eurasianists combine into an institutional conservatism.

It is clear that the works of these authors need to be studied in more detail, along with those of the
original Eurasianists. A very worthwhile project would be the translation of some of the key
works of Gumilev and Panarin, in order to enable the possibility of wider discussion and debate,
since their works could be of scholarly interest to those outside Russian area studies. This would
have the advantage of making the discourse that has become current in political, sociological and
ethnographic debate in Russia more accessible to English-speaking observers.

31
BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Classical (Trubetskoi, Savitskii) and the New (Gumilev, Panarin, Dugin) Eurasianists.
Dugin, Alexander (1965 -):

1994. Konservativnaia Revoliutsia [The conservative revolution]. Moscow: Arctogeia

2000. Osnovy Evraziistva [The foundations of Eurasianism]. Moscow: Arctogeia.

2003a. “Rossiia kak demokraticheskaia imperia” [Russia as a democratic empire] in Izvestia, May
28, 2003.

2003b. “KPRF i Evraziistvo” [The CPRF and Eurasianism].

http://www.kprf.ru/dugin/ideas/19532.shtml (April 20, 2004)

2004. Filospfia Politiki [The philosophy of politics]. Moscow: Arctogeia

Gumilev, Lev N (1912-1992):

1990. “Istoriko-Filosofskie Sochinenie Kniazia N.S. Trubetskogo (Zametki Poslednego

Evraziitsa” [The historical-philosophic works of Prince N.S. Trubetskoi (notes of the last
Eurasianist)]. http://gumilevica.kulichki.net/articles/Article46.htm (April 4, 2004)

1994. Khunny v Kitae [The Huns in China]. St. Petersburg: Abris.

2000 “Skazhu Vam po sekretu, chto esli Rossiia budet spasena, to tol’ko kak evrziiskaia
derzhava” [I’ll tell you in secret, that if Russia is to be saved, it will only be as a Eurasian power]
in Osnovy Evraziistva. A. Dugin, ed. Moscow: Arctogea. 479-482.

2001. Etnogenez I Biosfera Zemli [Ethnogenesis and the Earth’s Biosphere]. Moscow:
Izdatel’stvo ACT.

2002a. Drevniaia Rus’ I Velikaia Step’ [Ancient Rus’ and the Great Steppe]. Moscow:
Izdatel’stvo ACT.

2002b. Drevnie Tiurki [The Ancient Turkic Peoples]. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo ACT.

2002c Ot Rusi do Rossii [From Rus’ to Russia]. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo ACT.

32
2003 Poiski Vymyshlennogo Gosudarstva: Legenda o “gosudarstve Presvitera Ioanna”
[Searches for an Imaginary Kingdom: the legend of the kingdom of Prester John]. Moscow:
Izdatel’stvo ACT.

Panarin, Aleksandr S. (1940-2003):

1995. Rossiia v tsivalizationnom protsesse: mezhdu antlantismom i evraziistvom. [Russia in the

civilizational process: between atlanticism and Eurasianism], Moscow: Rossiiskaia Akademia
Nauk.

1999a. Rossiia v tsiklakh mirovoi istorii [Russia in the cycles of world history]. Moscow:
Izdatel’stvo Moskovogo Universiteta.

1999b. Global’noe politicheskoe prognozirovanie v usloviah strategicheskoi nestabil’nosti.

[Global political prognostication in circumstances of strategic instability]. Moscow: Editorial
URSS.

2002a. Politologia. [Politology] Moscow: Gardariki.

2002b. Pravoslavnaia tsivilizatsia v global’nom mire. [Orthodox Civilization in a Global World.

Moscow: Algoritm.

2003. “Postmoderizm i Globalizatsiia: proekt osvobozhdeniia ot sotsial’nykh i natsional’nykh

obstoiatel’stv” [Postmodernism and globalization: Liberating the owners from their social and
national obligations] in Voprosy Filosofii [Problems of Philosophy] (6): 16-36.

Panarin, Aleksandr S. and V. V. Il’in

1994. Filosofiia Politiki [The philosophy of politics]. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Moskovskogo

Universiteta.

Panarin, Aleksandr S., V. V. Il’in and A.S. Akhiezer:

1996. Reformy I Kontrreformy v Rossii [Reforms and counter-reforms in Russia].

Trubetskoi, Nikolai and P. Savitski, et al.

1921. Iskhod k Vostoku [Exodus to the East]. Sofia: Tipografia “Balkan”.

33
Savitskii, Piotr

1997. Kontinent Evrazii [The continent of Eurasia]. Ed. Aleksandr Dugin. Moscow: Agraf.

34
Other Works Consulted

Anderson, Benedict. 1993. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. New York: Verso.

Biriukov, Sergei. 2001. “Evraziistvo kak variant rossiiskoi gosudarstvennoi strategii [Eurasianism
as a variant of a Russian state strategy]” in Russkii Zhurnal (www.russ.ru).
http://www.russ.ru/politics/20011127-bir.html and http://www.russ.ru/politics/20011203-bir.html
(March 15, 2004).

Braudel, Fernand. 1995. A History of Civilizations. Trans. Richard Mayne. New York: Penguin
Books.

Chernyshev, S.1995. “Tsivilizatsia protiv istorii: Aleksandr Sergeevich Panarin [Civilization

versus history: Alexandr Sergeevich Panarin]” in Inoe: Khrestomatia Novogo Rossijskogo
Samosoznanie [The Other: A Reader on the New Russian Consciousness].
http://www.russ.ru/antolog/inoe/panar_o.htm (March 15, 2004).

Christian, David. 2002. “The Kaghanate of the Rus’: Non-Slavic Sources of Russian Statehood”
in Challenging Traditional Views of Russian History, ed. Stephen G. Wheatcroft. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan. 3–26.

Clover, Charles. 1999. “Dreams of a Eurasian Heartland” Foreign Affairs 78 (2) 9–13.

Dennett, Daniel. 1996. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Désert, Myriam and Denis Paillard. 1994. “Les Eurasiens revisités.” Revue des Études Slaves 66
(1): 73-86.

Ellul, Jacques. 2003. Trahison De l’Occident. Pau, France: Princi Negue.

. 1964. The Technological Society. Trans. John Wilkinson. New York: Vintage Books.

Hahn, Gordon. 2002. “The rebirth of Eurasianism” in The Russian Journal (www.trj.com).
http://www.cdi.org/russia/215-14.cfm (March 15, 2004).

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Hobsbawm, Eric. 1990. Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality.

35
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Humphrey, Caroline. 2002. “ ‘Eurasia’, ideology and the political imagination in provincial
Russia.” In Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia, ed. C. M. Hann. New
York: Routledge.
Huntington, Samuel P. 1997. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order.
New York: Touchstone-Simon and Shuster.

Innis, Harold A. 1986. Empire and Communications. Victoria: Press Porcépic.

Jaspers, Karl. 1965. The Origin and Goal of History. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Karimullina, A.G. 1990. Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev: Bibliograficheskii Ukazatel’ [Lev

Nikolaevich Gumilev: Bibliography]. Kazan’: Respublikanskaia Nauchnaia Biblioteka im. Lenina
Tatarskaia SSR. Accessed, in a version updated by O.G. Novikova, on the web at
http://gumilevica.kulichki.net/matter/Article15.htm (March 21, 2004).

Kennedy, Michael D. and Ronald G. Suny. 1999. “Introduction.” In Intellectuals and the
Articulation of the Nation, ed. Ronald G. Suny and Michael D. Kennedy. Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press.

Kerr, David. 1995. “The New Eurasianism: The rise of geopolitics in Russia’s foreign policy.”
Europe-Asia Studies 47 (6). 977–988.

Khamraiev Viktor and I. Bulavinov. 2004. “Operatsiia ‘Rodina’ zavershena” [Operation

“Motherland” accomplished. Kommersant Vlast’ (№5, Feb. 09, 2004).

Khazanov, Anatoly M. 2002. “Contemporary Russian nationalism between East and West.”
Eurozine. http://www.eurozine.com/article/2002-03-08-khazanov-en.html. (March 24, 2004).

Kondakov, Igor V. 2000. Kul’tura Rossii: Uchebnoe posobie [The Culture of Russia: a textbook].
Moscow: Knizhny Dom Universitet.

Koreniako, Vladimir. 2000. “Etnonationalizm, kvaziistoriografiia i akademicheskaia nauka

[Ethnonationalism, quasi-historiography and academic science” in Real’nost’ Etnicheskih Mifov
[The Reality of Ethnic Myths], ed. Aleksei Malashenko and Martha Brill Olcott. Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace. http://www.carnegie.ru/ru/pubs/books/volume/36535.htm
(March 21, 2004).

36
Laruelle, Marlène. 2000. “Lev Nikolaevič Gumilev (1912-1992): biologisme et eurasisme dans la
pensée russe.” Revue des Études Slaves 72 (1-2). 163–189.

. 2001. “Le néo-eurasisme russe. L’empire après l’empire?” Cahiers du Monde Russe 42
(1). 71–94.

. 2003. “Histoire d’une usurpation intellectuelle: Gumilev, «le dernier des eurasistes»?
(analyse des oppositions entre L. N. Gumilev et P. N. Savickij)” in Eurasia: People and Myths,
ed. Sergei Panarin. Moscow: Natalis Press. 50–64

Lavrov, Sergei Borisovich. 2002. “Zaveschanie velikogo evraziitsa [Testament of a great

Eurasianist] in Lev Gumilev, Ot Rusi do Rossii [From Rus’ to Russia]. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo
ACT. 294–303.

. 2001. Lev Gumilev: Sud’ba i idei [Lev Gumilev: Destiny and Ideas]. Moscow: Svarog &
Co. Accessed on the Web at http://gumilevica.kulichki.net/LSB/lsb1.html (April 4, 2004).

Morozov, Viacheslav. 2004. “In search of Europe. Russian political discourse and the outside
world”. Eurozine. http://www.eurozine.com/pdf/2004-02-18-morozov-en.pdf. (March 24, 2004)

Paradowski, Ryszard. 1999. “The Eurasian Idea and Leo Gumilev's Scientific Ideology.”
Canadian Slavonic Papers 41 (1). 19-32.

Popper, Karl. 2002. The Poverty of Historicism. London: Routledge.

Riasanovsky, Nicholas V. 1972. “Asia Through Russian Eyes.” In Russia and Asia. Ed. Wayne
Vucinich. Stanford Ca: Hoover Institution Press.

. 1965. Russia and the West in the Teaching of the Slavophiles: a Study of Romantic
Ideology. Gloucester, Mass: Harvard University Press.

. 1967. “The Emergence of Eurasia.” California Slavic Studies, 4: 39–72.

Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.

Shevtsova, Lilia. 2003. Putin’s Russia. Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace.

Schlapentokh, Dmitry V. 1997. “Eurasianism: Past and Present.” Communist and Post-

37
Communist Studies 30 (2) 129–151.

. 2001. “Russian Nationalism Today: The Views of Alexander Dugin.” Contemporary

Review 279 (July, 2001) 29–37.

Ščipanskaja, Nina. 2003. “V poiskah ekvivalentnosi [In search of equivalency]”. Paper presented
at a seminar, Oct. 17th, 2003, at the University of Prešov, Slovakia.
http://www.pulib.sk/elpub/FF/Guzi1/scipanskaja.pdf (March 24, 2004).

Slezkine, Yuri. 1999. “N. Ia Marr and the National Origins of Soviet Ethnogenesis.” In
Intellectuals and the Articulation of the Nation, ed. Ronald G. Suny and Michael D. Kennedy.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 211–256.

Smith, Anthony D. 1971. Theories of Nationalism. London: Duckworth.

Smith, Graham. 1999. “The masks of Proteus: Russia, geopolitical shift and the new
Eurasianism.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 24 (4). 481–494.

Spengler, Oswald. 1934. The Decline of the West. Complete in One Volume. Trans. Charles
Francis Atkinson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Storchak, Vladimir. 2004. “Pravoslavnaia Evraziia: Russkii individualism protiv zapadnogo

universalizma” [Orthodox Eurasia: Russian individualism versus Western universalism] in
Nezavisimaia Gazeta (№ 7, 07-04-2004). http://religion.ng.ru/people/2004-04-07/6_eurasia.html.
(April 25, 2004).

Toynbee, Arnold J. 1939. A Study of History. Volume 1. London: Oxford University Press.

Trenin, Dmitri. 2002. The End of Eurasia: Russia on the Border Between Geopolitics and
Globalization. Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Tsygankov, Andrei P. 1998. “Hard-Line Eurasianism and Russia’s Contending Geopolitical

Perspectives.” East European Quarterly 32 (3). 315–334.

Tsymburskii, Vadim. 2003. “Two Eurasias: Homonymy as a key to early Eurasianism.” In

Eurasia: People and Myths, ed. Sergei Panarin. Moscow: Natalis Press. 22–49.

Voeikov, M. 2003. “Evraziiskaia “teoria khoziaistvovaniia” kak sostavnaia chast’ rossiiskoi

ekonomicheskoi shkoly [The Eurasianist “theory of management” as a component of the Russian

38
economic school]. Voprosy Ekonomiki 2003 (12). 95–110.

Yasmann, Victor. 2003 “Aleksandr Dugin: Eurasia party founder and chief ideologue of the
Russian geopolitical school” RFE/RL Russian Federation Votes 2003-04
http://www.rferl.org/specials/russianelection/bio/dugin.asp (April 4, 2004).

Literaturnaia Gazeta. 2003. “Myslitel’ Russkogo Sklada” [A thinker in the Russian tradition].
Obituary in Literaturnaia Gazeta [Literary Gazette], (№40, 2003)
http://www.lgz.ru/archives/html_arch/lg402003/Polosy/art2_4.htm (April 20th, 2004).

39