Why The Russian World Is Borderless

Reading "Foundations of Eurasionism," Volume I. Prav Publishing, 2020.

The Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) has led the militarization of Russian society at every level. The priesthood trains children in fieldcraft, convinces balky conscripts to fight, and “takes the ideas generated by state ideology and imbues them with sacred meaning,” according to Archpriest Andrei Kordochkin.

Speaking to the lower house of the Duma in January, Kordochkin explained that in the official view of the ROC, “war is not a tragedy but the highest expression of the human spirit. If, for our grandparents, war was a horror they never wanted to recall, now, within this rhetoric, war is seen as the ultimate purpose of human existence.”

Metropolitan Kiril has endorsed the occupation of Crimea as a “spiritual restoration” of the Russian World, or Russkiy Mir, and says that wars are won “not by the strength of weapons, but by the strength of spirit.”

If that sounds like theocratic fascism, it’s because the ROC has enthusiastically served as a key instrument of Vladimir Putin’s totalitarian transformation of wartime Russia. “At least 27 military units have been named after Orthodox saints, including the Seraphim of Sarov Battalion, named for one of Russia’s most revered religious figures,” the Moscow Times notes.

As Dmitry Adamski explained in his 2019 book on the rise of the Russian “nuclear priesthood,” Seraphim of Sarov has been the single most prominent icon used by the ROC to promote their own political and military influence since the end of the Cold War. He is the patron saint of the Russian nuclear state and a pile of bones that the ROC maintains as a dubious relic in Moscow to symbolize the revival of Russia’s divinely-appointed imperial glory.

The war in Ukraine is a sacred mission of this latter-day crusade.

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Rise Of The Russian Nuclear Priesthood

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Bridging the space between politics and the church, we find philosophy establishing the terrifying new top-down unity of Russia, where the whole of society and the economy are now enlisted in a permanent state of war. Aleksandr Dugin, reputedly the favorite philosopher of Vladimir Putin, is of course the most famous Russian philosopher in the west.

But Dugin is hardly original, as his theses are built on the work of previous generations. To better understand the animating power of Russian philosophers, and how Russia got to this place, I read Foundations of Eurasianism Vol. I, an annotated collection of translated writings by the philosophers who inspired Dugin.

The names of these long-dead writers — Nikolai Trubetzkoy, Petr Savitsky, Georges Florovsky, Petr Suvchinsky — are almost unknown in the West. It is a historical irony that they were all part of the White Russian, i.e. anti-Bolshevik, diaspora in Europe after the First World War, during the ensuing civil war in Russia.

Like many immigrants to the West, these writers reacted negatively to their new surroundings as they formulated their ideas of what it meant to be Russian, and what Russia meant in the world.

“Noteworthy in these first discourses of Eurasianism was the allusion to a connection between ‘Eurasia’ and mankind in contrast to Europe as Romano-Germanic civilization which, being on the periphery of geographical Eurasia, had established the principles of inequality between peoples, political hegemony, and cultural racism,” Leonid Savin explains in his introduction.

Despite their White origins, these ideas easily mapped onto western leftist narratives of power from the 1930s. Eurasianism has always imagined Russia, its homeland, as something Slavic positioned between Europe and Asia that is independent of the philosophical roots of both western and eastern traditions.

Because it has its own philosophy and history, Russia has its own rules, and does not have to respect rules invented by Europeans or Americans operating on western principles of political philosophy. Coming from Russians, the words “decolonization” and “settler-colonialism” are therefore not a critique of western capitalism. They are a deconstruction of the existing world order to create a Russian world-state.

Eurasianism is ambitious. It wants to rule the world.

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How To Cultivate A Strategy

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In the West, most criticisms laid against post-Cold War globalization (“globalists”) argue that economic borderlessness produces free flows of human and financial capital across national boundaries, inspiring political backlash.

On the left, the solution has been to simply ignore, if necessary suppress, the backlash, and regulate capital more closely. To the political right, generally, border controls are good and capital controls are bad.

While I am writing from the viewpoint of an American, and greatly over-simplifying this picture of ‘western’ reactions to globalization, it will serve to compare with Eurasianism.

To the Eurasianists, all borders are an effete western invention. Russkiy Mir is defined by borderlessness, a total disrespect for cartographical limitations and the sacredness of treaties that would confine the Russian state. All Russian economic activity outside of Russia is ideally intended to expand the borders of Russia. Eurasianist Russia is happy to incorporate all peoples, economies, societies, and national causes unto itself.

Rejecting the very concept of nation-states, Nikolai Alekseev wrote that “Eurasianism wants to overcome the West not from without, but from within, the very spirit of the West which has since become the Eurasian man’s proper own.” Rather than end colonialism, the Russkiy Mir colonizes everything.

This is what Putin’s Russia tried to do before 2022. All the capital in western banks and courtship of western politicians was supposed to be the infrastructure of Russia’s rise to global power. Alekseev:

Proceeding from this, the task of Eurasianism becomes not only national, but universal: the Russian people must overcome the Western in themselves and through themselves overcome Western man, who has spread his culture across the whole world. This universality sharply distinguishes Eurasianism from fascism, national socialism and other currents which are nationalist doctrines that do not set themselves any universal goals.

A critic of Marx, who was after all a westerner, Alekseev nevertheless argued for “an Orthodox rule of law” in “a state of stabilized public opinion” — a new and better dictactorship of the proletariat, something like Putin’s current state of ‘managed democracy,’ that was to include the major insitutions of religious power. This “state-world” was to be multinational, meaning Soviet.

Lev Nikolaevich Gumilov, who was subject to imprisonment and humiliation under Stalin’s regime, developed this idea in his work on the “Great Steppe” as a place where physical and human geography produce harmonious unity of purpose, or “passionarity.” Metropolitan Kirill uses this word today. He defines it as “the capacity of the ethnos for historical exploit, sacrifice, self-development, a quest to go beyond narrow national being.”

Eurasianism is Russian globalization. Unlike western globalization, which frets over the cost in blood to maintain its own existence, the ROC regards the blood-price of meatwave attacks as holy sacrifices to the project of Russkiy Mir (lit. “Russian World”). The bloodier, the better, for as the Z-patriots are fond of repeating, “Russia has no borders.”

Human rights are another invention of the liberal west that Eurasianists could do without. Western societies have “replaced organic unity with the abstract concept of the sum of individual atoms,” Savitsky complained.

As he revived Eurasianist philosophy in the 1990s, Dugin called for a global transition from individual human rights to “rights of peoples” or “rights of communities.” Global identity politics are to replace western globalization and its emphasis on individual, consumerized choice.

“The new Eurasianism embodies the eternal Russian will towards a universal ideal, towards the realization of a lofty salvational mission to affirm the ideals of Good and Justice,” Dugin declared. The new global identity politics would include “organic democracy” that supports the Russian project of a federalized Eurasian landmass.

Eurasianism inspires disrespect for the laws of land warfare. When Russians capture Ukrainians in combat, the prisoners have no individual or collective rights at all, because Ukraine has no right to exist, either. This policy of shooting prisoners appears to be official, a top-down Kremlin priority that complements the frequent targeting of hospitals, public gatherings, and civilian energy infrastructure in Ukraine. The massacres at Bucha are a feature of 21st century Eurasianism, not a bug.

Nor are the politics of “left” and “right” interesting to Eurasianists. In his 1920 pamphlet “Europe and Mankind,” Trubetzkoy identified the two modes of western politics as “cosmopolitanism” and “chauvinism,” with ethnic sentiment in the latter being the primary difference.

“Any nationalism is, at it were, a synthesis” of these two elements, he wrote. Making free use of undefined terms such as “national psychology” and generalizing every state west of Poland as “Romano-Germanic,” Trubetzkoy is less an analyst of the West than a reactionary chauvinist himself. Russians had never developed a native nationalism before the First World War.

Trubetzkoy critiques the Europe of 1920, shattered by war, as “egocentric” in its presumption that European culture was the height of human civilization. Indeed, Trubetzkoy is practically postmodernist in his deconstruction of words and phrases that were common to the discourse of 19th century European imperialism as well as its Victorian moral critics: “mankind,” “universal-humanity,” “evolutionary ladder,” “stages of development,” “primitive,” “barbarism.”

A nobleman with the title of Prince, Trubetzkoy concludes that “there is only one true confrontation” in the world, that it is taking place “between the Romano-Germanics and all the other peoples of the world, between Europe and Mankind.” He was a Russian angry at Europe.

At the time Trubetzkoy wrote these words, Russia was still bleeding in a civil war that he blamed on the West. Russian “culture” had collapsed from western influence. Western powers, including the United States, had only just recently left parts of Russia they had occupied in support of the failing Whites against the Bolsheviks. It is fair to read pain and humiliation into Trubetzkoy’s rejection of ‘western’ anything.

Anything, except for the factories and motor vehicles and railroads and weapons and sundry military technologies invented by Europeans. Responding to Trubetzkoy, Savitsky notes this glaring exception for the means of war. He calls Prince Trubetzkoy’s intellectual constructs “closer in character to the preaching of cultural weakness because the author ignores the significance of power as a driving factor in cultural and national life.”

Bolshevism has at least the virtue of holding power in Russia, which Savistsky holds synonymous with Eurasia, for the borders of Eurasia are the ever-expanding borders of the Russian state.

To achieve the emancipation of nations from the “European yoke” and substitute a Russian one, Russia/Eurasia must create a “conscious and unconscious” “effective and creative ‘egocentrism’ of Eurasia, one which would rally forces and raise them up toward a sacrificial feat.”

In their 1921 pamphlet “Preminitions and Fulfillments: The Affirmations of the Eurasians,” Nikolai Trubetzkoy, Petr Savitsky, Georges Florovsky, and Petr Suvchinsky united in calling for “the rejection of socialism and the affirmation of the Church.”

Desperate to defeat the German invasion of 1941, Stalin ended the suppression of the ROC and enlisted its priesthood in the Great Patriotic War. With the end of the Soviet Union and the grand socialist experiment, the ROC became even more essential to the vertical system of power in Putin’s Russia.

Writing in “The Strength of the Weak,” Petr Suvchinsky minimized the role of Bolshevism in Russian revival, declaring that it was “the historical predestination of the entire Russian people” to “restore the glory” of Russia. In his “Pivot to the East,” also published in 1921, Suvchinsky repeated his prediction that the ROC would ultimately replace communism as the animating spiritual force of Russian greatness.

Reading this collection of the early writings of Eurasianism, it is striking how many of their arguments derive from the inland geography of Russia and a complete faith that the Orthodox church would eventually supplant communism.

They envisioned a role for other religious establishments to be incorporated into the Russian state, and indeed today Muslim and Buddhist religious organizations act as similar cultural engines of state Eurasianism.

These two inevitabilities — that Russia’s economy would never be an oceanic economy, and that the state would turn to religion as the glue for the social fabric of the Russian superstate — appear to be vindicated by history, or at least by Vladimir Putin.

Eurasianism has a superficial appeal in the West, both on the left through its critique of chauvinism and on the right through its critique of cosmopolitanism. However, the fundamental tenets of Eurasianism are incompatible with individual human rights or a world of secure borders. They instead work very well for justifying an endless state of war with the West, starting in Ukraine, which is not allowed to exist in the Russkiy Mir.

Eurasianism cannot accept a Slavic state that is not Russian. The Russian Orthodox Church cannot accept the autocephaly (independence) of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Ukrainians wanted to be part of Europe instead of Russkiy Mir, to be Ukraine instead of Eurasia. These are all unpardonable sins.