Customer Reviews

Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire (Woodrow Wilson Center Press)

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The present book is, perhaps, Laruelle's most important contribution among her many recent publications as she combines here deep knowledge of the precursors, representatives and followers of classical Eurasianism with an excellent understanding of post-Soviet politics and thought. The book first discusses the issue of whether Eurasianism is marginal or a mainstream phenomenon. It then deals with the early Eurasianists of the 1920s and 1930s before devoting special chapters to Lev Gumilev, Aleksandr Panarin and Aleksandr Dugin. Two further chapters deal with non-Russian neo-Eurasianism in Russia, Kazakhstan and Turkey. The conclusions interpret the evolution of Eurasianist ideas from hermeneutic and comparative viewpoints. This book will probably acquire the status of seminal reading with Russian nationalism studies. It displays the author's enormous factual knowledge and her firm grip of the peculiarities of current Russian discourse. I found every page of this monograph worth reading, and can recommend it whole-heartedly as a reliable and engaging introduction to the complicated issue of Eurasianist nationalism. Last but not least, it should be mentioned that the book is a translation from French and that it has greatly benefited from having Mischa Gabowitsch as its translator. As this text expresses well, Gabowitsch is not only a native-like speaker of both French and English, but himself a researcher of Russian nationalism with an exceptionally profound understanding of the substance of the Laruelle's argument.
It is only against the back-ground of such expressive enthusiasm that I dare to make one critical remark concerning this and some previous interpretations of the Dugin phenomenon by Laruelle. Aleksandr Dugin is the currently most relevant representative of "neo-Eurasianism" among the various political thinkers and actors introduced by Laruelle here. He seems to have more or less far-reaching ties within both the Russian political elite, including the Presidential Administration, and civil society, not the least academia. In light of the increasing presence of Dugin in Russian public life, Laruelle might have been less determined when, for instance, at one point asserting that his ideas "cannot be equated with fascism if that is understood to designate the contemporary racist exreme right - a designation that is moreover, historically and conceptually incorrect" (p. 132). Here Laruelle enters a decades-long international debate about the nature of generic fascism, and, if one acknowledges the usefulness of that concept, the way it should be defined and interpreted. Laruelle seems neither familiar with that literature nor particularly interested in the, partly, heated debates around the issue of Dugin's fascism of students like Leonid Luks, Alexander Yanov, Stephen D. Shenfield, Alan Ingram, John B. Dunlop, Roger D. Griffin, Walter Laqueur, A. James Gregor, Anton Shekhovtsov or myself. Thus, it would have been preferable if she had either avoided the topic, or presented the relevant comparativists' arguments for and against a classification of Dugin as a fascist. With almost no reference to relevant explorations of generic fascism and without any discussion of its previous applications to Russia, Laruelle's various statements on that topic look empty, and are, at points, self-contradictory.