The Discourse of Civilization in the Works of Russia’s New Eurasianists: Lev Gumilev and Alexander Panarin

This paper does not intend to be an exercise in prognosis. Nor will I try to analyse Russia in an international relations context. Nevertheless, I want to point out that if the Russian thinkers who have theorized Russia’s place in the world have been labelled “messianic” time and time again in the Occidental literature, it may be possible to forgive them. Keeping the country’s geographical and historical circumstances in mind, I will undertake to study what might be considered one of the most recent branches of Russian intellectual discourse, drawing on the ideas of the Eurasianists, by intellectuals known in the literature as the “New” Eurasianists or “Neoeurasianists.” The aim of this paper is to identify what writing is representative of Neoeurasianist thought, to distinguish Neoeurasianism both from its historical antecedents (particularly the writers whom I will term the “classical” Eurasianists, or simply “Eurasianists”) and some other modern, nationalist and conservative trends in Russian thought that many Western writers have frequently confused it with over the last ten years, and, most importantly, to analyse some of the texts of the Neoeurasianists to attempt to get a fix on what this school of thought represents, if it can indeed be termed a “school”.