Project information
Transformation of Eurasianism in the context of US Cold War Slavic Studies (COLD-WAR-EURASIA)

Eurasianism is an ideological and political movement that emerged in interwar Europe in the 1920s among Russian émigrés who left their country after the WWI and Bolshevik revolution. In the broader context of Russian intellectual thought, Eurasianism represents one of the most visible and important ideological movements that underwent a series of transformations during the 20th century and, especially since the early 1990s, has regularly resonated in Russian foreign policy and academic research. Until now, research on Eurasianism mostly focused on two main topics: interwar Eurasianism of the 1920s and 1930s and post-Soviet neo-Eurasianism of the 1990s. Although the research on both topics produced significant findings, the Cold War period remained without sought-after academic attention.

In the current project, I aim to fill the blind spot in the study of Eurasianism by involving advanced digital analysis of unpublished archival documents from Prague, Saint Petersburg, and New York related to the development of Eurasianism in the US Cold War academia. Specifically, I will focus on Russian historian G. V. Vernadsky – one of the prominent members of the interwar Eurasianist movement who emigrated to the US in the late 1920s and pioneered Slavic studies at Yale. Throughout his outstanding academic career, Vernadsky remained in contact with numerous Russian emigrants, including Eurasianists N. S. Trubetzkoy and P. N. Savitsky and Soviet scholars, namely historian and ethnologist L. N. Gumilev, who became involved with Eurasianism in the late 1950s.

In a broader context, the project will help to understand the transformation of Eurasianist concepts within the field of Russian, Eurasian, and Slavic Studies, and will comment on the roots of exploitation of Eurasianist concepts in contemporary Russian anti-Western propaganda. The main output of the project will be the first-ever monograph focused on the development of Eurasianism in the US Cold War Slavic Studies.