Between Europe and Asiaanalyzes the origins and development of Eurasianism, an intellectual movement that proclaimed the existence of Eurasia, a separate civilization coinciding with the former ...Russian Empire. The essays in the volume explore the historical roots, the heyday of the movement in the 1920s, and the afterlife of the movement in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. The first study to offer a multifaceted account of Eurasianism in the twentieth century and to touch on the movement's intellectual entanglements with history, politics, literature, or geography, this book also explores Eurasianism's influences beyond Russia.The Eurasianists blended their search for a primordial essence of Russian culture with radicalism of Europe's interwar period. In reaction to the devastation and dislocation of the wars and revolutions, they celebrated the Orthodox Church and the Asian connections of Russian culture, while rejecting Western individualism and democracy. The movement sought to articulate a non-European, non-Western modernity, and to underscore Russia's role in the colonial world. As the authors demonstrate, Eurasianism was akin to many fascist movements in interwar Europe, and became one of the sources of the rhetoric of nationalist mobilization in Vladimir Putin's Russia. This book presents the rich history of the concept of Eurasianism, and how it developed over time to achieve its present form.
As in all post‐Soviet states, the Russian intelligentsia has been preoccupied with the construction of a new national identity since the beginning of the 1990s. Although the place of Orthodox ...religion in Russia is well documented, the subject of neo‐paganism and its consequent assertion of an Aryan identity for Russians remains little known. Yet specialists observing the political and intellectual life of contemporary Russia have begun to notice that the development of references to ‘Slavic paganism’ and to Russia's ‘Aryan’ origin can be found in the public speeches of some politicians and intellectual figures. This article will attempt, in its first section, to depict the historical depth of these movements by examining the existence of neo‐pagan and/or Aryan referents in Soviet culture, and focusing on how these discourses developed in different spheres of post‐Soviet Russian society, such as those of religion, historiography, and politics.
The assumption that Russia's foreign policy is "nationalist," advanced as the main explanation to understand the Ukrainian crisis of 2014, needs to be questioned. First it is almost impossible to ...identify a "nationalist school" that would have shaped Russia's foreign policy decisions. Only one nationalist storyline has gone from being marginal in the early 1990s to becoming part of state policy in the 2000s, namely that of compatriots, under the argument of "Russia as a divided nation." This is the only case where we can trace the influence of a nationalist group with clearly identifiable figures and lobbying structures; however, the nationalist content has been neutralized in the process of cooptation by state organs. This article argues that even in the context of the Ukrainian crisis of 2014, which has partly changed previously established interactions between nationalism and Russia's foreign policy, Russia may use a nationalist post hoc explanation but does not advance a nationalist agenda.
Russia's historical policy towards the centenary of 1917 was composed of several parallel strategies: diminishing the meaning of the event to avoid the head of state and other government figures ...having to take a stance; outsourcing commemorative events, with no pre-planned grand design; developing a reconciliatory narrative of the 'Whites' and the 'Reds'; and allowing other actors to promote a plurality of contradictory readings of the events. Yet the space left by the state's refusal to commemorate 1917 has been taken over by the Church, which, as today's most active engineer of Russia's historical policy, promoted a very clear pro-Tsarist narrative best embodied by the multimedia historical park 'Russia-my history' (Rossiya-moya istoriya).
This article argues that interpreting Russia's conservatism exclusively as a top-down phenomenon has obscured the possibility that there might exist a grassroots conservatism founded on very ...different bases than the state narrative, and which predates the state's embrace of conservatism. It thus takes a fine-grained view of Russians' conservative values by looking at (1) the existence since the 1990s of a situational conservatism that preceded the state's "conservative turn"; (2) the fact that conservative attitudes are shared by almost all post-socialist countries; (3) the rise of moral conservatism and its limits; (4) attitudes toward the Church, which encapsulate the gap between discourse and practice; and (5) the polarisation of Russian society into conservative and non-conservative constituencies.
In Is Russia Fascist? , Marlene Laruelle argues that the
charge of "fascism" has become a strategic narrative of the current
world order. Vladimir Putin's regime has increasingly been accused
of ...embracing fascism, supposedly evidenced by Russia's annexation
of Crimea, its historical revisionism, attacks on liberal
democratic values, and its support for far-right movements in
Europe. But at the same time Russia has branded itself as the
world's preeminent antifascist power because of its sacrifices
during the Second World War while it has also emphasized how
opponents to the Soviet Union in Central and Eastern Europe
collaborated with Nazi Germany.
Laruelle closely analyzes accusations of fascism toward Russia,
soberly assessing both their origins and their accuracy. By
labeling ideological opponents as fascist, regardless of their
actual values or actions, geopolitical rivals are able to frame
their own vision of the world and claim the moral high ground.
Through a detailed examination of the Russian domestic scene and
the Kremlin's foreign policy rationales, Laruelle disentangles the
foundation for, meaning, and validity of accusations of fascism in
and around Russia. Is Russia Fascist? shows that the
efforts to label opponents as fascist is ultimately an attempt to
determine the role of Russia in Europe's future.
Writing Is Russia Fascist? was a difficult intellectual exercise, as it feels counterintuitive to spend years working on a concept, only to refute its validity. Yet it eventually brought more than I ...envisioned, helping me conceptualize the notion of illiberalism as a more accurate term for capturing the pre-war Russian regime’s ideological nature. Another important take I got from writing this book has been the centrality of memory wars for the whole of Europe, and the need to analyze Russia while looking in the mirror at “our” (read “Western”) own ambivalent, multi-voiced, memories of the 20th century. I am therefore grateful to the reviewers for their interest in the book and for bringing forward so many new arguments to the discussion.
Since the start of the 1990s, Central Asia has been the main purveyor of migrants in the post-Soviet space. These massive migrations impact issues of governance; patterns of social adaptation; ...individual and collective identity transformations; and gender relation in Central Asia.
Launched at the end of 2012, the Izborsky Club stands as a symbol of the ideological hardening of Vladimir Putin's third presidential mandate. This paper argues that for the first time, a large group ...of self‐identified nationalists or anti‐liberals has united under a single structure with the objective of influencing the authorities. The Club confirms the progressive structuring of a field of “think tanks” in Russia whose function is to occupy different ideological niches and offer a range of “products” that the authorities can sample, make official, or reject. This paper first explores the context of emergence of the Club, and maps its main figures, and their connections to higher decision‐making circles. Second, it investigates how the Club encapsulate its main ideological precepts–a reconciliation between Red and White, the imperial debate, and the economic aspect of Russian Great‐Powerness. Third, it briefly debates the successes and failures of the Club's positioning in Russia's contemporary ideological landscape.
The European Union in a Reconnecting Eurasia examines the full scope of EU interests in the South Caucasus and Central Asia and analyzes the broad outlines of EU engagement over the coming years.
