II. Eurasianism As a Reaction to Pan-Turkism Stephan Wiederkehr Translated by Barbara Keller and Ellen Simer
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Eurasianism as a Reaction to Pan-Turkism • 39 II. Eurasianism as a Reaction to Pan-Turkism Stephan Wiederkehr Translated by Barbara Keller and Ellen Simer In his 1925 booklet “Nasledie Chingiskhana: Vzgliad na russkuiu istoriiu ne s Zapada, a s Vostoka” (The Legacy of Genghis Khan: A Perspective on Russian History Not from the West but from the East), Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetskoi criticized the Imperial government’s policy of forcible Russification in the following words: as they merged with the Russian tribe, the Russified Turanians imparted their own characteristics to the Russian people and introduced them into the Russian national psychology, so that together with the Russification of the Turanians there occurred a simultaneous Turanianization of the Russians. From the organic merger of these two elements there arose a new, unique entity, the national Russian type, which is in essence not pure Slavic but Slavo-Turanian. The Russian tribe was created not through the forcible Russification of “indigenous peoples,” but through the fraternization of Russians with those peoples. Artificial, government-inspired Russification was a product of complete ignorance of the historical essence of Russia- Eurasia, the result of forgetting the spirit of her national traditions. Consequently, this seemingly nationalistic policy did great damage to Russia’s historical interests. (1925b: 248) In the same year he published an essay entitled “O turanskom elemente v russkoi kul’tur” (“On the Turanian Element in Russian Culture”), in which he wrote: Drawing the conclusions of all that has been said about the role of the Turanian ethnopsychological traits in the Russian national character it can be said that altogether this role has been positive....We are rightfully proud of our Turanian ancestors no less than of our Slavic ancestors and we are obliged to gratitude to both of them. The consciousness of not only belonging to the Aryan but also to the Turanian psychological type is indispensable for any Russian striving to personal and national self- knowledge. (1925a: 375) Why did a leader of the Eurasian movement take such a positive attitude toward Turan and Turanians? And what does this have to do with the official policy toward non-Russian nationalities in the Russian Empire and, let me add, in the Soviet Union? 40 • Stephan Wiederkehr The explanation that I should like to offer is that Eurasianism can be understood as a reaction to Pan-Turanian and Pan-Turkic ideas, which in the first quarter of the twentieth century were discussed in Russia as well as in Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire. After spreading among the Turkic Muslims of Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century, Pan-Turkism was perceived as a danger to the territorial integrity of Russia both by politicians and in public debate. In the aftermath of World War I, when Eurasianism arose, the multinational Habsburg and Ottoman Empires had collapsed and the Russian Empire was likely to fall apart into its national constituents as well. At the same time, supra- national ideologies such as Czechoslovakism and Yugoslavism had led to the formation of states. In these circumstances, I argue, the Eurasians consciously constructed an ideology intended to safeguard the territorial integrity of the multinational Russian Empire despite its takeover by the Bolsheviks, thereby integrating its Turkic population by redefining the term Turan to fit their own aims. In this sense—as an ideology intended to undermine potential secession demands of Russia’s Turks—I consider Eurasianism a reaction to Pan-Turkism. With this new interpretation, I do not intend to question either rec- ognized work on the intellectual roots of Eurasianism or the argument of Patrick Sériot, who relates the emergence of Eurasianism to the emer- gence of structuralism in linguistics (see Böss 1961; Riasanovsky 1967; Luks 1986; Hagemeister 1989: 417–57; Alevras 1996; Vandalkovskaia 1997; Laruelle 1999; Wiederkehr 2000. See also the exhaustive bibliog- raphy O Evrazii i evraziitsakh (1997: 73–91); Sériot (1999. I intend rather to add an aspect that has been largely overlooked until now (see Urchanova 1995; Laruelle 1999: 294; Doronchenkov 2001: 138). Modern research makes an analytical distinction between Pan-Turkism and Pan-Turanianism. The former refers to the idea of the unification of all peoples of Turkic origin; the latter refers to the unification of Turkic peoples w ith the Finno-Ugric peoples, for whom a common ancient homeland in “Turan” is ascribed. This Urheimat of Turan is to be found in an imprecisely defined region of the Central Asian steppe (Landau 1995: 1f ).1 The logical consequence of both ideologies was the ultimate disintegration of the Russian Empire due to the secession of its Turkic (and possibly Finno-Ugric) peoples, and their uniting with the Turkic peoples of the Ottoman Empire to form one state. Pan-Turanianism in the modern sense of the word has not achieved any political significance, 1 On the etymology and geographical and political use of the term Turan, see Minorsky (1934); Yalçinkaya (1997: 431–33). In the nineteenth century some linguists presumed a Turanian language family, a position Minorsky (954) already called outdated..