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Andrzej Nowak Geopolitics, War and Metamorphoses of Empire

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Andrzej Nowak Geopolitics, War and Metamorphoses of Empire Andrzej Nowak Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History Polish Academy of Sciences Geopolitics, War and Metamorphoses of Empire (1895–1921): Petr Savitskii and the Birth of Eurasianism 1. Between the Specter of Collapse and the Hope of Expansion – the Russian Empire between Europe and Asia (1895–1914) When does the First World War begin? From the shots of the Serbian assassin, taking the life of the successor to the Austro-Hungarian throne? From the decision of Kaiser Wilhelm II and the political-military elite of the German Empire, to risk a great confl ict with Russia and France? From the announce- ment of mobilization by Russia? From the British Government’s decision not to leave German aggression towards neutral Belgium unanswered? One can delve into an entire library of studies (again rapidly expanding due to the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the Great War) devoted to attempts to answer these questions. Tied to them, the famous Schuldfrage – the question of responsibility for the war and the hecatomb that it entailed – obviously has a wider dimension than just the personal, concerning the decisions of individual politicians, German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian and British. Is the arms race the culprit or perhaps the “logic” of alliances, geopolitics, nationalism or imperialism?1 We will not seek the guilty here. Instead I would like to extend the perspec- tive of the analysis of the Great War a bit, looking for the intellectual, political and cultural clues foreshadowing its outbreak in the two decades preceding 1 Of the newer, relevant voices in this debate, see, among others: A. Mombauer, Th e Origins of the First World War: Controversies and Consensus, London, 2002; J.G.C. Röhl, Wilhelm II. Into the Abyss and Exile, 1900–1941, Cambridge, 2014, pp. 814–1107 (a renewal of the thesis of German guilt); S. McMeekin, Th e Russian Origins of the First World War, Cambridge, MA, 2011 (a radical thesis about Russian imperialism being mainly responsible for the outbreak of the First World War); C. Clark, Th e Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, London, 2012 (a similar thesis, but in a much milder form); D. Lieven, Towards the Flame: Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia, London, 2015 (a defense of imperial Russia against such an accusation – instead an indication of the main “culprit” in the phenomenon of intensifying ethno-nationalisms). http://rcin.org.pl 56 Andrzej Nowak it that have not been adequately revealed so far. At the same time, I would like to refl ect on its consequences, which reveal themselves (to this day) in the ideologies emerging from the shadow of this war. We will look at these issues from the point of view of the experiences of Russia and Eastern Europe, the tensions in this area arising between nationalisms (“national projects”) and the rapidly changing structure of the Russian Empire in this period. It is precisely between nationalism and Russian imperialism, considered in the geopolitical context, that a special view of these experiences and changes is found, that could provide an answer to the question of how Russia was to survive the crisis of war and revolution, rediscovering anew its justifi cation as an empire. Th is vision, again exceptionally popular today in Russia and known as the ideology of Eurasianism, we would like to follow here in statu nascendi – in an attempt to recreate the historical framework for the formation of the geopolitical thought of Petr Nikolaevich Savitskii, the main (next to Nikolai Trubetskoi) “constructor” of this ideology. Why Savitskii? Although Eurasianism enjoys great interest as an ideology, among researchers, especially in recent years,2 the co-creator of its “canon” has not yet been the subject of an exhaustive monograph – although several attempts have been made.3 However, the intellectual biography of the pioneer 2 Of the most important Polish monographs on the subject of Eurasianism: R. Bäcker, Międzywojenny eurazjatyzm. Od intelektualnej kontrakulturacji do totalitaryzmu?, Łódź, 1999; I. Massaka, Eurazjatyzm. Z dziejów rosyjskiego misjonizmu, Wrocław, 2001; discussion of the state of research in world historiography: S. Glebov, “Wither Eurasia? History of Ideas in an Imperial Situation”, Ab Imperio, 2008, no. 2, pp. 345–376; see also, among others: M. Laruelle, L’idéologie eurasiste russe ou comment penser l’empire, Paris, 1999; S. Wiederkehr, Die Eur- asische Bewegung. Wissenschaft und Politiuk in der russischen Emigration der Zwischenkriegszeit und im postsowietischen Russland, Köln, 2007; Russia between East and West. Scholarly Debates on Eurasianism, ed. D. Shlapentokh, Leiden, 2007 (here, among others, relevant articles by S. Wiederkehr, R. Paradowski, R. Bä cker); С. Глебов, Евразийство между империей и модер- ном, Москва, 2010; Empire de/Centered: New Spatial Histories of Russia and the Soviet Union, ed. by S. Turoma, M. Waldstein, London, 2013 (here, among others, an interesting interpreta- tions of S. Glebov, I. Torbakov, M. Laruelle); Th e Politics of Eurasianism. Identity, Popular Culture and Russia’s Foreign Policy, ed. by M. Bassin, G. Pozo, London and Lanham 2017. 3 В.Ю. Быстрюков, В поисках Евразии: общественно-политическая и научная деятельность П.Н. Савицкого в годы эмиграции (1920–1938 гг.), Самара, 2007; the newer Russian literature on the subject is competently discussed by А.М. Матвеева, Геополитическая концепция истории России П.Н. Савицкого, Москва, 2016; see also: S. Glebov, “A Life with Imperial Dreams: Petr Nikolaevich Savitsky, Eurasianism, and the Invention of Structuralist Geography”, Ab Imperio, 2005, no. 3, pp. 299–329; fundamental bibliographic work was carried out by M. Beisswenger (whom I sincerely thank here for making available this rare publication): http://rcin.org.pl Petr Savitskii and the Birth of Eurasianism 57 of Eurasianism is not the only thing interesting to us here. We want to show a fragment, from the birth of Savitskii in 1895, to 1921, when he formu- lates a fully mature vision of the new Russian imperial ideology as a specifi c point of focus for various phenomena and events from the political, social and cultural planes in Russia and Eastern Europe. In his vision, the center is the Great War and the great transformations connected with it on the political and mental maps of the twentieth century. Whether this point has been well chosen, it will be possible to judge after reading the following text. Petr Savitskii, was born on 15 May (O.S. 3 May) 1895 in Chernigov (today’s Chernihiv, Ukraine). His parents came from the Little Russian noble families of this region. His mother was Uliana Andreevna née Khodot (her maternal grandfather was Mikhail Dolinskii); his father was Nikolai Petrovich, a marshal of nobility of the Krolevetskii uiezd [district] of the Chernigov Governorate, then later (from 1906) chairman of the Zemskaia uprava [administrative board of Zemstvo – a local self-government] of that governorate, and from 1915 a member of the State Council. Th e family took pride in their Cossack traditions, in which there was a place for both a coat of arms, allegedly bestowed by the Polish king in the fi fteenth century, for bravery shown in battle against the Turks, and the remembrances of Colonel Savitskii, who as a “bunchuk comrade” (khorunzhii) participated in the expedition of Peter the Great to Persia in 1717.4 Th e little homeland, in which the co-creator of Eurasianism was fi rmly rooted, was Chernigov province – a Rus’ territory, at the junction of today’s borders of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. Th e Cossack heritage had been rooted there since the fi fteenth century, on the borderland between the political (and cultural) infl uences of Moscow/Russia and Lithuania/the Polish-Lithu- anian Commonwealth. Ultimately, Chernigov was handed over to Russia by the Commonwealth as part of the Truce of Andrusovo (1667). Interesting data about this land, and, above all, its inhabitants, at the time of Savitskii’s birth, was obtained thanks to information from the fi rst general census of the population of the Russian Empire from 1897; specifi cally on the Petr Nikolaevich Savitskii (1895–1968): A Bibliography of his Published Works, Prague, 2008; cf. id., “Metaphysics of the Economy: Th e Religious and Economic Foundations of P.N. Savitskii’s Eurasianism”, in: Between Europe & Asia: Th e Origins, Th eories, and Legacies of Russian Eura- sianism, ed. by M. Bassin, S. Glebov, M. Laruelle, Pittsburgh, 2015, pp. 97–112; this author is preparing a complete academic biography of Savitskii, based partly on his doctoral thesis, defended in 2009 at the University of Notre Dame in Illinois. 4 А.Н. Кренке [sister of P.N. Savitskii], Воспоминания, Москва, 2010, pp. 8–9. В.Ю. Быстрюков, op. cit., pp. 18–23. http://rcin.org.pl 58 Andrzej Nowak territory of the Chernigov Governorate (52,000 km2), where 2.3 million people resided at that time. Of these, 496,000 declared Russian (Great Russian) as their native language, while more than three times as many inhabitants (1.53 million) indicated – the “Little Russian” (Malorossiiskii) language, meaning Ukrain- ian. Belarusian was given as the native language of 151,000 residents of the governorate, “Jewish” – 113,000, Polish – 3,300. Putting the proportions into percentages: in the governorate, which could easily be regarded as an element of the stable center of the Russian character of the Empire, two-thirds of the population described their language not as Russian but as “Little Russian”. Th e Russians, or in any case the Russians in the narrower, “linguistic” sense of the word, here constituted scarcely a quarter of the total population. And on the scale of the entire empire? Th e census showed that at the beginning of 1897, Tsar Nicholas II had 125.6 million subjects. However, only 55.5 million of them used Russian as their native language, 22.4 million – “Little Russian”, 5.9 million – Belarusian.
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