From Empire to Eurasia by Glebov Sergey;

Author:Glebov, Sergey; [Glebov, Sergey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University Press

4. GEOGRAPHICAL PIVOT: EURASIA AS A GEOGRAPHICAL SYSTEM

The backbone of Eurasianist theory was constituted by the geographical description of Eurasia as a specific world, determined by territoriality, climate, and physical conditions. The authorship of Eurasianist geography clearly belongs to Petr Nikolaevich Savitskii, an extraordinarily erudite and productive scholar of political economy and geosciences and Eurasianism’s tireless propagator and chronicler.72 It is hard to overestimate Savitskii’s role in Eurasianism and in elaborating its ideological postulates. It was Savitskii who began using the very term “Eurasia” to designate “the Russian world” as distinct from Alexander von Humboldt’s usage of “Eurasia” as the Old World: in his 1930 letter to Jakobson, Savitskii insisted that he came up with the idea of Eurasia in 1918; in a 1920 letter to his family from Paris, written well before the Eurasianists met in Sofia, Savitskii mentions his “Eurasianist” mood.73

As a matter of fact, Savitskii briefly formulated in writing his geocultural conception of Eurasia as a separate world as early as 1921, before the publication of the first Eurasianist collection of articles came out. Trubetskoi recalled that “Eurasianism was born from the debates and objections” to his book Europe and Mankind.74 Savitskii’s publication, a review of the book, was part of these discussions.75 For Savitskii, Trubetskoi’s opposition between “Europe” and “Mankind” in general was an empty premise and “propaganda of weakness.” He was particularly critical of Trubetskoi’s proposition that European sciences are of no use to colonial peoples. Savitskii suggested, instead, that strong will and technological strength are essential to the projected liberation and that the strength of states is measured by their military capacities, which heavily depend on modern sciences. Perhaps, Savitskii argued, Trubetskoi is right and, spiritually, an Australian aborigine is in no sense inferior to a European. But if we measure the strength of a boomerang against the strength of a rifle, spirituality is of no use.76 Later, Ksenia Florovskaia, G. V. Florovskii’s sister and an active Eurasianist, repeated Savitskii’s point and argued that the Eurasianists “recognize and accept those great achievements in the realm of technology made by the West, but cannot agree with the attitude toward these technological achievements by the West European mind . . . characterized by spiritual poverty.”77 The task was thus to spiritualize technology and sciences and put them on proper, religious foundations. In this idea of finding metaphysical and spiritual foundations for modern sciences the Eurasianist paralleled the “paradox of reactionary modernism” of their German counterparts.78

In Savitskii’s case, an important element of his invention of Eurasia was derived from the tradition of Naturphilosophie. Unlike Trubetskoi, whose intellectual roots were in the philosophical and literary milieu of Moscow, or Suvchinskii, who came from the artistic environment of St. Petersburg, Savitskii was a scholar of political economy and geography by background. If Trubetskoi and Suvchinskii referenced the philosopher Vladimir Solov’ev or the poet Alexander Blok, Savitskii cited as his intellectual heroes the chemist D. I. Mendeleev, the geoscientist V. I. Vernadskii, the student of soils V. V. Dokuchaev, and Russia’s most prominent scholar of forests, G.

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