Founders of Eurasianism Opposed Imperialism, Supported Democracy and Favored Federalism, Vakhitov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 7 – Aleksandr Dugin has so monopolized the understanding of Russians today about Eurasianism that few know that the original Eurasianists of the 1920s were opponents of fascism and imperialism, supported democracy against autocracy, and favored federalism as the best way to organize a multi-national state, Rustem Vakhitov says.

            The Ufa-based scholar and committed Eurasianist, who writes the Red Eurasia telegram channel, says that it is important to rescue Eurasianism from Duginism, which he describes as a pastiche of occultism and German geopolitics that has little to do with what the original Eurasianists were about (milliard.tatar/news/cto-takoe-evraziistvo-razbiraem-stereotipy-3389).

            Vakhitov surveys the works of Savitsky and Trubetskoy and the programmatic documents of the Eurasianists of pre-World War II period and points out that these intellectual leaders opposed a reurn to the tsarist empire and supported state power only to the point that it would help the peoples take control of their own lives rather than being run by others.

“Today’s ‘fighters with colonialism, who so easily accuse Eurasianism in all the deathly sins often do not suspect that the founder of Eurasianism, Nikolay Trubetskoy, was the author of one of the classic anti-colonial manifestos, Europe and Humanity, written long before Said and Fanon, in 1920,” the Ufa scholar and activist says.

In that book, he continues, “Trubetskoy showed that European culture was in no way superior to any other culture of the world, including the cultures of the peoples of Africa and Australia and that the Europeans did not have any rational basis for assuming they had the right to rule over other peoples.”

It is thus no surprise that Russian nationalists do not like Eurasianism. “Eurasians call upon Russians to reconsider their own civilization identification, to recognize that Russians aren’t Europeans and that they have eastern and Asiatic roots both in culture and in genetics,” Vakhitov continues.

“Russian nationalists are all Eurocentric in their views, which is especially comic if one considers the attitude of real Europeans to Russians;” and therefore Russian nationalists look down on everyone else and are furious at any, including the Eurasianists, who insist that they are no better and no worse than any other people.