The so-called Eurasianists were post-revolutionary Russian émigrés who viewed the Bolshevik revolution as a realization of the western ideas assimilated by a deluded radical intelligentsia. They began, during the 1920s, to imagine former Russian imperial space as a new geographic, ethnographic, cultural, and linguistic whole where another dominion led by Russia might be established. This new entity would follow a non-European path of development, seeking alternatives to both capitalism and communism, shunning liberal democracy, and restoring Orthodox spirituality.

The Eurasianists had affinities with contributors to the pre-revolutionary Landmarks (Vekhi) group but were also critical of them, in spite of their shared reservations about the Russian radical tradition. This attitude to the older generation, Sergey Glebov argues in this authoritative and stimulating study, no doubt had something to do with the Eurasianists’ conviction that only members of their own generation, born in the 1890s, had the resolve necessary to bridge the gap between the intelligentsia and the popular masses. Eurasianism also had roots in the literary, artistic, and philosophical achievements of the Silver Age of Russian culture. It was in the political, economic, and social upheaval that followed the First World War, the October Revolution, and the Russian Civil War, however, that this new form of Russian nationalism came into being. Nor does Glebov overlook the international political and cultural context: Eurasianism can be firmly placed, he contends, “on the spectrum of Fascist movements in Europe” (74).

The central figure in the Eurasianist movement was Nikolai Trubetskoi, a member of an ancient aristocratic clan and the son of Sergei, a leading religious philosopher and participant in early twentieth-century liberal politics. The geographer Petr Savitskii and the cultural entrepreneur Petr Suvchinskii also played prominent roles. Around them gathered many other émigré intellectuals who contributed to the movement or were fellow-travelers for a while, including the linguist who led the so-called Prague Circle, Roman Jakobson, the literary historian Dmitrii Sviatopolk-Mirskii (known in the west as D.S. Mirsky), and the historian George Vernadskii. The movement's leaders, however, were scattered and vulnerable to the machinations of the Soviet secret services. In any case, tensions within the Eurasianist camp (not least, over the question of whether it should be co-opted as a pro-Bolshevik force) brought about the disintegration of Eurasianism as a movement in 1928.

In his first chapter, Glebov offers a useful overview of the careers of the three leading Eurasianists. In Chapter 2, he examines various ways in which Eurasianism turned the attention of those interested in Russian identity away from the west and towards the east. Russia came to be re-imagined as the heir of the empires of the nomads of the steppes, and the religious revival and creativity to which the Mongol yoke was supposed to have given rise was celebrated. In Chapter 3, Glebov deals with the Eurasianists’ rejection of the notion of the superiority of European civilization and with their reinvention of the Russian Empire as a country which had itself been colonized by European powers. This experience, it was hoped, would enable “Eurasia” to assume leadership of the whole European colonial world. In Chapter 4, he considers his subjects’ conception of Eurasia as an entity shaped by geographical factors such as climate and physical conditions and by a political culture shared by diverse peoples who were presumed to be prepared to subject themselves to “ideocracy” (the rule of a single powerful idea). Finally, in Chapter 5, he explores the Eurasianists’ belief that their scholarship followed a distinctive Russian tradition which was teleological and holistic. Although it was born of Russian conditions, Eurasianism eventually played a part, moreover, in shaping an influential international school of academic thought, namely structuralism. The intermediary in this development was Jakobson, whose linguistic views had been formed in discussions with Trubetskoi and Savitskii two or three decades before his collaboration with French intellectuals, especially Claude Lévi-Strauss, in the 1940s and 50s. Jakobson had set out to demonstrate that languages spoken on Eurasian territory developed phonological similarities (notably, monotony and the correlation of soft and hard consonants) which crossed the boundaries of linguistic families.

From Empire to Eurasia has a few minor presentational flaws, including some instances of awkwardness in the use of English and the absence of a consolidated bibliography (but the endnotes are rich in bibliographical information). It is a valuable work, however, offering a thoughtful, well-contextualized, and well-organized account of a relatively unexplored variant of Russian nationalism, which, despite the Eurasianists’ belief that Russia's destiny was distinctive, was in fact deeply rooted in the European modernity they abhorred.