Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 7 – Eurasianism by
definition is diverse because it argues that Russia to one degree or another has
roots in both Europe and Asia, with some of its advocates stressing one and
others the other. But few ever went as far in stressing the Asian nature of Russia
as Erendzhen Khara-Davan whose ideas are now being discussed in Moscow.
Born in 1883, Khara-Davan was a
Kalmyk national democrat and enlightenment figure. In 1920, he emigrated along
with the Russian White Army and settled in Yugoslavia where he earned his
living as a doctor and wrote articles and books stressing the Asian nature of
Russia and Eurasianism (ttolk.ru/?p=23435).
As Pavel Pryanikov points out in his
blog today, Khara-Davan “occupied the extreme Asian position in the Eurasian
movement among the White emigration. He
was certain that before Peter I, Moscovia and Russia had nothing in common with
Europe but were part of Asia” and that the Mongol horde created Muscovy and
Russian centralization” for its convenience.
According to the Kalmyk
theoretician, Pryanikov says, “the Horde created Russia,” a step that he saw as
historical progress. Had that not happened, Khara-Davan argued, “the
pro-Russian principalities would have been swallowed up in a Western Polish-Lithuanian
Rus and no Russian statehood or nation would have formed.”
If Khara-Davan is
remembered at all today, it is less for his Eurasianist ideas than for his
support of Hitler and his proposal at the end of the 1930s to resettle the
Kalmyks, other North Caucasians and the Cossacks in the emigration in northern
Mexico where they could create “a steppe autonomy” and block “American
expansion to the south.”
Nothing came of
that, and Khara-Davan’s cooperation with the Germans did not last long – he died
in 1942 – but his ideas, according to Pryanikov deserve to be remembered
because of their originality and their capacity to generate debate about Russia’s
origins and also Russia’s future.
As presented in
his most important book, “Chingiz Khan. The Great Conquerer” (Belgrad, 1928, 320
pages, available at e-reading.club/bookreader.php/150726/Hara-Davan_-_Chingishan._Velikiii_zavoevatel'.html),
Khara-Davan’s ideas are striking if far from convincing in all respects.
According to the Kalmyk
Eurasianist, Russia’s “uniqueness” resides in the fact that it did not have
social strata like European feudalism until the 16th century and
that its cities, rather than having a special status that allowed them to
develop differently than the countryside, were “bases of agrarian colonization.”
Thus, Khara-Davan
argued, “there was no feudalism in Kievan Rus’” and in Russian areas
subsequently, the veche in which so many Russians even today place their faith
was in fact “an anachronism” because it did not have regular meetings or form
continuing representative organs.
“The feudalization of Rus took place in the Mongol
period,” the Kalmyk Eurasianist said. “It involved primarily the Moscow
principality which transferred from the Horde into the service of the prince
many Tatars who brought with them a special eastern feudalism, based on the
Turkic instate of tarkhanism” which is perhaps best translated as state
service.
Tarkhans
served the khan and everything they had and all of their status was dependent
on him, Khara-Davan wrote. As a result, “Eastern feudalism did not carry within
itself the democratic institutions” that Polish-Lithuanian feudalism did in the
case of Western Rus with all the subsequent consequences that entailed.
Indeed,
Khara-Davan said, “the Horde was a more progressive society than the Muscovite”
since even under the Chingizides, the power of the khan was limited by the
kurultay and later by the Islamic clergy, developments which did not extend to
Muscovy which preserved the older model of society and governance.
“The organization of Russia which was the result of the
Mongol yoke was undertaken by the Asian conquerors of course not for the good
of the Russian people and not for the elevation of the Moscow grand
principality but for the Mongols’ own interests and the convenience of administering
a large conquered territory.”
Instead
of the usual practice of promoting control by a policy of “divide and rule,”
the Mongols imposed a single center of control, something that Muscovite rulers
often followed in the future just as they accepted from the Mongols three key
features of Muscovite statehood: autocracy (the khanate), centralism, and
serfdom.
According to
Khara-Davan, the Mongols did establish “something like an administrative
hierarchy which prepared the ground for the establishment of a centralized
state. And the Russian people, as the single ethnos on a defined
historical-geographic space, thus owes its origins to Mongol rule.”
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