Paul
Goble
Staunton, July 20 – Eurasianism, which has acquired enormous influence in the Kremlin, is
playing “a destructive role” in relation to Russian society and its real
culture and on the political level is rapidly
evolving toward “Russian fascism,” just as Berdyaev, Likhachev, and Solovyev
warned, according to Moscow commentator Maksim Kantor.
In a wide-ranging 5200-word essay on
the Polit.ru portal last week, Kantor notes that Russians find this hard to
recognize this because they believe that since they defeated fascism in World
War II, they are “immune” to it.” But there are good reasons for thinking that “this
is not entirely so” (polit.ru/article/2014/07/18/eurasia/).
As he points out, “fascism is formed
on the basis of revanchism, a longing for empire, the unity of the nation and
the ruler, and the unity of the people achieved by oppressing those who
disagree. But the main thing is out of a mystical mission. Namely, a mystical
mission of the nation, its enigma and its ‘primordial calling’ is the condition
for the rise of fascism.”
All those things are tragically in
evidence in Vladimir Putin’s Russia now. All of them have been prmoted by
Eurasian ideologists who have exploited the envy many Russians feel toward the
West: “Why can they do something and we aren’t allowed?” “America bombs and we want to bomb something
too.”
Opposition
to those desires is described by those who feel them by the term “Russophobia,”
which Kantor suggests, “describes the feelings of ‘a Eurasian’ who suspects
that they aren’t taking him seriously.”
And this envy will remain “forever because the romantic conception of
Eurasianism does not correspond to history.”
“There will not be a battle between
civilizations” in this case, Kantor says, because while “Atlantic civilization
exists … Eurasian civilization does not. There is no such civilization. Russia
exists but Eurasia does not, and neither does Eurasian civilization.” But there
can be a war between those who believe otherwise and those who know better.
And that is precisely the problem
now: the only basis for the existence of a Eurasia is military conquest, Kantor
says, and he says explicitly that while Dugin, Prokhanov and Limonov are
leaders in self-described “Eurasian ‘struggle with fascism,’ … alongside of
them stand Molotov and Ribbentrop.”
The Moscow commentator devotes most
of his article to a discussion of Russia’s alternating view of itself as part
of the West and the West’s liberator to part of the East and the West’s
gendarme, to the ways in which Russian Eurasianism contributed to the rise of
German Eurasianism and Nazism, and to neo-Eurasianism’s sympathetic attention
to the latter.
Kantor’s arguments are especially
suggestive about how the this latest evolution of Russian thinking is a product
of Russian perceptions of being mistreated by the West and how for a long time
Dugin has been drawing on the words of Nazis and fascists and openly praising
those on the extreme right of the political spectrum, something many have
neglected to notice.
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