Sergey Glebov. From Empire to Eurasia

From Empire to Eurasia: Politics, Scholarship, and Ideology in Russian Eurasianism, 1920s–1930s is a deeply learned book that offers an intellectual history of the Eurasianist movement at its origins in the 1920s—the peak of its founders’ productivity, and the period during which a bare sort of consensus existed among them. On the basis of exhaustive documentation from archives in Russia, Western Europe, and the United States, Sergey Glebov traces the emergence of this consensus: on the wholeness of Eurasia as a geographical and cultural unit; on its opposition to a hypocritical and crisis-ridden Europe; and on an antidemocratic politics suffused with Orthodox spirituality as the way out of the crisis of war and revolution. At the same time, he carefully tracks the incipient fault lines that shattered the movement when thought threatened to give way to practical action. The book’s chief interpretive contribution is to situate this consensus, and indeed the particular concerns of the early Eurasianists, in what Glebov terms the “imperial situation . . . the unevenness and heterogeneity of the social and cultural space of imperial Russia” (6).

Ancient history · Archaeology · Empire · Historiography · Ideology · Opposition (politics) · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies