An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Igor Torbakov (IASH-SSPS Research Fellow, 2024)
Eurasianism: Imagining Russia as the “Anti-Imperial Empire”
My research at IASH has been focused on Russian historical experience and its interpretations within the context of the debates on postcoloniality. At a Work-in-Progress seminar, I am going to present a first draft of the chapter that analyzes Eurasianism -- a school of thought that emerged within the intellectual milieu of Russian émigrés in Europe in the early 1920s – that played a crucial role in shaping a tradition of imagining Russia (a colonial power itself) as a “colony” of the West. This imaginary, driven by a desire for recognition, sets local episteme against the hegemonic “European”/“Western” discourse. The Eurasianists, following into the footsteps of the Slavophiles of the 1840s-50s, advanced some core ideas of postcolonial theory. They vigorously attacked “egocentric” European chauvinism, called on non-Western intelligentsia to repudiate “evaluative judgement” of different cultures, and argued, 50 years before Edward Said, that colonial power is linked with (and encoded in) disciplinary knowledge. Yet the Eurasianist vision has also contained a not very subtle imperialist agenda: it reimagined the Russian empire as an organic geopolitical, ethnographic, cultural, and linguistic entity -- “Eurasia” -- precisely with an eye to preserving the empire’s territorial integrity.
Studying Eurasianist “anticolonial” discourse is no mere antiquarian enterprise. In the present-day confrontation with the West, Kremlin ideologues are drawing heavily on the Eurasianist intellectual legacy as Putin’s Russia is faced again with a painfully familiar old question: how to become a full-blown subject of modernity and yet avoid finding itself in a situation of political and/or discursive dependence on the “Euro-Atlantic world” that claims monopoly on modernity? The solution of this dilemma appears to be found in a vision of a “multipolar” world without hegemon – a “pluriverse” consisting of self-contained civilizations, each with its own “episteme” or (as Russian thinkers would term it) “national cultural code.”
Please join in-person, or click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/81857401179
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