Motherland in the Philosophy of Eurasianism

Abstract

The article is dedicated to one of the basic ideas of the philosophic movement of Eurasianism - the idea of the Motherland. Unlike the other philosophical trends of the first wave of emigration, Eurasians were the only ones who understood the Fatherland not speculatively, but geographically. Eurasians could be called the first political scientists of the Russian philosophical tradition: they tried to predict the political situation in the abandoned Russia in order to build a new state on the ruins of Bolshevism in the future. They formed the concept of the Motherland from four components: a historically formed territory, power for possession of the territory, religion (Orthodoxy), and culture (common for the entire middle Eurasia, which was yet to be created on the basis of Russian culture). The author of the article insists on the fact that the idea of a common culture was reduced to declarations and was not developed by the participants in the movement. Besides, the theme of culture exposes some structural contradictions in the Eurasian theory (it contradicts the anti-colonial pathos of some works and looks retrograde against the background of innovative political forecasts). Eurasians’ religious themes were also poorly developed, some participants in the movement even ignored the subject. Detailed historical, economic, and national issues did not remove the general “narrowness” of the theory: the Motherland was uniquely defined only as mestorazvitie [local development] (P.N. Savitsky’s term), which created a contradiction Eurasians did not feel: in the domestic policy, in modern terms, they were globalists who insisted on the victory of the centripetal forces in the “Ocean of Eurasia”; in the foreign policy, they were anti-globalists who seriously believed that a closed (but large) economic system is more efficient than a global one. This contradiction brings us to the main semantic gap of the Eurasian theory: all the creators of this doctrine refused to understand that, for the “middle lands” of Eurasia, Russian culture and the Russian language, in one way or another, represented the language and culture of the colonialists. They simply did not see this significant problem, looking at Eurasia with Russian eyes and insisting that the Russian people in Eurasia were then “the first among equals”. In addition, the concept of mestorazvitie created a negative assessment for all who had dropped out of their own “local development”. Emigration, thus, became the periphery of the Russian and Eurasian idea, meaningless from the point of view of the processes taking place in the Motherland. For this reason, in the author’s opinion, Eurasianism was doomed to an early decline: the ideas of Eurasianism lost their vitality as soon as the emigration realized (in the late 1920s - early 1930s) that there was no way back to Russia. The author declares no conflicts of interests.