Authors

Discussion

Eurasianism, emerged among Russian emigres after the revolution of 1917. The main ideas of the movement were surprisingly anti-occidental as for a group, which found a shelter in the West. The founders proclaimed the idea of Russia as Eurasia, a socio-geographical entity between Europe and (Southeast) Asia. The original intuitions were continued by L.Gumilev’s ethnology in the Soviet period and then creatively transformed by Neo-Eurasianists, such as A.Panarin, A.Dugin or V.Korovin. The ideas of Eurasianism after 1991 acquired a geopolitical valor added to the traditional anti-westernism. Dugin describes the new era as a time, in which the traditionalistic force of the Continent (tellurocracy) was overbalanced by the progressive Atlantism, the power of the Sea, which destroys ideological commitments and tries to subordinate the rest of the world to liberal individualism. One of the symptoms representing this tendency, according to Korovin, is the promotion of Ukraine, an anti-Russian project, created for solely destructive, anti-Eurasian purposes. Dugin’s idea of turning “the Rest Against the West” is reflected in the state's Foreign Policy Concepts and its Realpolitik. The official Foreign Policy Concepts gradually extend Russia’s assertiveness and the understanding of NATO as the main threat to its security. These assumptions led to the fait accompli policy resulting in the annexation of Crimea and the invasion in 2022.