Until recently an obscure concept in the humanities and social sciences, the term “Eurasianism” has considerable political and intellectual prominence today. With Vladimir Putin’s 2011 announcement of his plan to create a new international organization to be labeled “Eurasian,” and the official launch of the “Eurasian Economic Union” (EEU), by Russia, Kazakhstan, and Belarus, on January 1^st, 2015, the question of what “Eurasianism” refers to has become more than an academic one. Kyrgyzstan, by its free will, and Armenia, after some Russian pressure, have now also entered the EEU while several countries around the globe are negotiating, with Moscow, the creation of free trade zones with the Russia-dominated Union. Ukraine, on the other hand, has consistently refused to identify itself as “Eurasian,” and had decided instead to sign a far-reaching Association Agreement with the European Union in 2014. The finalization, initialing, and imminent conclusion of this large treaty was one of those developments that Russia used as a pretext to annex Crimea and start a “hybrid war” against rump-Ukraine in the Donets Basin, thereby unsettling Europe’s post-war security order. Numerous Russian nationalist intellectuals as well as some Western observers would not hesitate to interpret this entire conflict as one between “the West” and “Eurasia.”

Against such background, the appearance of this collected volume, edited by three of the most accomplished experts on Eurasianism, can only be welcomed. The collection focuses on what is often called “classical Eurasianism,” i.e. a little-known Russian inter-war émigré intellectual movement, rather than on Alexander Dugin & Co.’s notorious so-called “neo-Eurasian” movement of the post-Soviet period. To fully appreciate the novelty and value of these papers, one needs some previous knowledge of 19^th- and 20^th-century Russian socio-political thought. The volume deals with selected aspects of the emergence, in the 1920s and 1930s, of the Eurasianists’ key idea that there is a third continent between Europe and Asia called “Eurasia”—a conceptualization that diverges from the geological meaning of the term. Some of the chapters also deal with precursors and successors of “classical Eurasinism” from the mid-19^th to the early 21^st centuries. Yet, they do not elaborate, with the partial exception of Mark Bassin’s investigation into Lev Gumilev’s thought, much on Eurasianism today.

Each of the assembled papers makes a valuable contribution by itself and will encounter only little (if any) substantial criticism among experts. Olga Maiorova detects in Alexander Herzen’s writings a number of assumptions previewing later core ideas of the Eurasianists. Vera Tolz elaborates on the relationship between the Eurasianists and Russia’s liberal scholarship in the late imperial period. Sergey Glebov contextualizes the appearance of—what could be classified as—the founding text of classical Eurasiansim: Nikolai Trubetskoi’s treatise, Europe and Mankind. Marlene Laruelle interprets classical Eurasianism as a geographical ideology. Stefan Wiederkehr demonstrates why and how classical Eurasianism was a manifestation of, what Karl Popper called, “historicism.” Martin Beisswenger outlines, in his in-depth interpretation of Petr Savitskii’s writings, reasons for paying attention not only to Savitskii’s geographical scholarship, but also to his religious and economic views. Igor Tobarkov traces the fascinating intellectual biography of George Vernadsky—the (in the West perhaps) best-known temporary Eurasianist who served as Professor of Russian History at Yale University in 1946–1956. Harsha Ram introduces the futurist Eurasianism of Roman Jakobson and Velimir Khlebnikov. Hama Yukiko describes how Eurasianist ideas were received in inter-war Japan. Mark Bassin outlines the emergence of Gumilev’s neo-Eurasian interpretation of Russian history as an antithesis to traditional Russian nationalist historiography, and its following integration into mainstream Russian nationalism, in a peculiar synthesis of ethno-centrism and pan-nationalism. Such an encompassing approach from Herzen to Gumilev, makes this volume a fascinating read. With its discussions of the emergence and evolution of Eurasianism, this collection makes an excellent accompanying volume to previous survey-monographs on Eurasianism by Wiederkehr (in German) and Laruelle (in English).

A few years ago, this reviewer would have simply stopped here and wholeheartedly recommended this book for specialist reading, graduate teaching on modern Russian history, as well as advanced seminars on international political geography and European social thought. Yet, as Eurasianism has recently transmuted from a marginal anti-European Russian intellectual fashion into a post-Soviet right-wing extremist ideology, as it seems to have become a component of the Kremlin’s official doctrine, and as it also has come to play a certain role in the intellectual life of other former Soviet republics, one critical remark is due. Given the peculiar political context of Putin’s third presidential period, some buyers of a book with such a title may read it with more appetite than this collection manages to satisfy. To be sure, Laruelle addresses some of the questions about the relation between the classical and neo-Eurasianists in her brief, but informative Postface on the “paradoxical legacy of Eurasianism in contemporary Eurasia.” Yet, her essay is too short to answer in depth various naturally-arising questions about the relative impact of classical Eurasianism, Gumilev’s crypto-racist ideas, and Duginite neo-Eurasian fascism on current mainstream Russian attitudes towards the West, non-EU Central-Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Is the active use of the terms “Eurasian” and “Eurasianism” by many Russian public figures merely a play with words? Or does it reflect a noteworthy role of Eurasian texts or of political agendas that claim to be Eurasianist in the formation of certain decision makers’ world-views? How can Eurasianist presumptions be reconciled with another important nationalist ideology directing current Russian foreign policies, the so-called “Russian world”? To put it in a simplistic counter-factual: Would Russia’s policies today be different without the emergence of Eurasianism, the writings of Gumilev, and the rise of Dugin? This question is as such unanswerable, yet many readers, with an interest in current Russian affairs, would expect some discussion of the above issues.

Although this reader would have preferred one or two more substantive contributions addressing questions related to current affairs Bassin, Glebov, and Laruelle are to be congratulated for assembling such a high-quality collection. The volume constitutes an important contribution to the history of modern Russian political thought, and can help political scientists better understand some historic sources of the recent dramatic events in Eastern Europe.