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Turanian Civilization as a New Russian Perspective
Eurasianism is a socio-political movement in Russia that emerged 100 years ago, in the early 20th century. It states that Russia does not belong to the “European” or “Asian” categories, but to the geopolitical concept of Eurasia, which is dominated by the idea of the “Russian world”.
This ideology emerged after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia as a form of resistance to Westernization, defending the “cultural superiority” of the East over the West and defining Eurasia in geographical terms common to peoples of Russian-Turkic heritage.
Classical Eurasianism was based on the anti-Western ideas of the most prominent Russian émigré scholars, such as Nikolai Trubetskoy, Lev Karsavin, Georgy Vernadsky, and Georgy Florovsky.
It was an original way to get rid of the sense of national humiliation felt by the intelligentsia after the Revolution of 1917. Eurasianism offered a new concept of Russian history and Russian future, in which the collapse of Western values did not look like a national catastrophe at all. The emergence and development of Eurasianist views was initially possible only outside the USSR, in émigré circles.
Since the 1920s, Eurasianists have viewed Russian history through the prism of the creation of the Russian state, which for several centuries was dominated by…