Russian Exceptionalism

(The events in Moscow unfolded as I wrote this, it isn’t aimed at the current events except tangentially.)

I finished this review in the New York Review of Books and wanted to share it. It is a long review, but rather fascinating for someone who knows next to nothing about this history, it filled in more than a few blanks for me.

Russian Exceptionalism – Gary Saul Morson – After the fall of the USSR, liberalism, considered foreign, was overwhelmed by various types of nationalism, one of which, Eurasianism, seems to have achieved the status of a semiofficial ideology. February 22, 2024 issue (Regretfully, there are no free links to these reviews I’m aware of.)
The books reviewed were:
Foundations of Eurasianism translated from the Russian and edited by Jafe Arnold and John Stachelski Prav, 2 volumes, 538 pp., $59.98; $47.98 (paper)
The Gumilev Mystique: Biopolitics, Eurasianism, and the Construction of Community in Modern Russia by Mark Bassin Cornell University Press, 380 pp., $125.00; $22.95 (paper)
Osnovy geopolitiki: Geopoliticheskoe budushchee Rossii [Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia] by Aleksandr Dugin Moscow: Arktogeia, 600 pp. (1997)
Eurasian Mission: An Introduction to Neo-Eurasianism by Aleksandr Dugin London: Arktos, 179 pp., $23.95 (paper)
The Fourth Political Theory by Aleksandr Dugin London: Arktos, 211 pp., $29.50 (paper)
Black Wind, White Snow: Russia’s New Nationalism by Charles Clover Yale University Press, 360 pp., $18.00 (paper)

In Russia, two authors achieved a high regard for their take on Eurasianism, Nikolai Trubetskoy with his The Legacy of Genghis Khan (1925) and Nikolai Berdyaev with The Russian Idea (1946) and these books form the basis for Foundations of Eurasianism. Essentially, they argue that Russia is the third and only surviving true Christian church, charged with keeping the flame of freedom for the masses, and that there are linguistic and genetic links to the Golden Horde which are Eurasian. Morson uses terms like absurd and wacko to describe some of the notions found here. Morson writes:

Western liberals, Trubetskoy explained, affirm putatively universal values like human rights, progress, and cosmopolitanism. Viewing people as individuals, they scorn national cultures and consider respect for tradition to be retrograde. The superiority of Western civilization, they presume, lies in its discovery of universals, which are supposedly as free from local prejudice as logic and mathematics. And so Westerners present distinctively European values as objective. Those non-Europeans who accept this claim, as many in Russia and other modernizing cultures have, aspire to become more “civilized” by thoroughly Westernizing, an impossible task necessarily leading to self-contempt.

It is a bit of a road which takes us to Dugin and he takes some of these absurd ideas even further and we actually end up with Dugin’s work being used in the government in Russia. Morson writes:

Dugin’s most influential book, The Foundations of Geopolitics, began as a lecture series at the General Staff Academy and continues to be assigned at military universities. As the historian John Dunlop observed, “There has probably not been another book published in Russia during the post-Communist period which has exerted a comparable influence on Russian military, police, and statist foreign policy elites.” And not just elites: Dugin’s ideas—cited, recycled, adapted, and plagiarized—fill bookstores and saturate mass media. In the late 1990s the Duma formed a geopolitics committee, and Dugin became an adviser to the Duma’s speaker, Gennady Seleznev.

Our dear leader also figures in to this, some of Putin’s lengthy TV discourses cover these themes and when I wrapped up the review, it comes clear what some of the saber rattling and weird objectives of his war in Ukraine.
The books by Clover and Bassin are noted as being good references and backgrounders, while Arnold and Stachelski’s work is more historical.
Dugin’s is more exotic. Morson writes:

During the Yeltsin years, which many called Russia’s “Weimar Era,” the young, bohemian Aleksandr Dugin flirted with occultist and extreme rightist ideas. He seems to have been especially fond of Nazis and adopted the nom de plume Hans Sievers, an allusion to Wolfram Sievers, whom Himmler made director of a group studying the paranormal. Eventually Dugin found his way to Eurasianism, which he synthesized with the work of practitioners of geopolitics from Halford Mackinder on, along with structuralists, postmodernists (Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze), French “traditionalists” (René Guénon and Alain de Benoist), and various Nazis or ex-Nazis, including Julius Evola, Carl Schmitt, and, of course, Martin Heidegger.