Az „eurázsiai” történeti paradigma
The ‘Eurasian’ historical paradigm

Summary/Abstract: The ‘Eurasian’ world view was an anti-bolshevik conservative utopia born among the young generations of the Russian intelligentsia that emigrated from Soviet-Russia after 1917. Its proponents proudly claimed to be the renovators of the traditions of the nineteenthcentury ‘Russian Idea.’ Their crisis labelled them as the ‘Slavophiles of the age futurism.’ The ‘Eurasians’ dismissed the unified regularities and one-directional nature of the historical process. They held the simultaneous existence of indigenous civilizations. Of the ‘Eurasian’ historians only George Vernadsky left behind a complete ‘Eurasian’ oeuvre. His views took final shape under the intellectual influence of linguist-cultural theorist Nikolai Trubetskoy and geographer-economist Piotr Savitsky.[...] ’ The history of the Russian people is a process of the endeavour fully to integrate the Eurasian ‘place of development,’ driven by the compulsion to accommodate. According to Vernadsky, understanding the fatal problems of his country is furthered by the correct assessment of the Tartar heritage. On the one hand, ‘Pax Mongolica’ nipped in the bud democratic development and militarized the society. The price of survival was autocracy and the adoption of the institution of serfdom. On the other hand, tolerating the Orthodox Church contributed to the preservation of national identity, and ensured a stable home territory for defence against the Catholic popes. A natural and enduring alliance was forged between the eastern Slavs and the Asian ethnic groups belonging to one empire. The survival of their shared civilization was endangered mainly from the West even afterwards. The importation of European ideas, which was started with the reign of Peter I, was completed through the bolshevik seizure of power. The majority of the emigrant Russian intellectuals sharply set themselves against the ‘Eurasians.’ The Soviet culturo-political establishment denounced them for their anti-Marxist stance. Lev Gumilev is often categorized as one of the late ‘Eurasians,’ because he dismissed the view that positioned the nomadic peoples as primitive and he named the Mongolic period of the Russian past ‘fertile symbiosis.’ His views, at the same time, are the products of an autonomous system of thought. At the centre of his theory evolving on the borderline of the natural and social sciences was the concept of ‘passionarnost’ (Drive), moving the ethnic history of peoples. According to Gumilev, the Russian-dominated ‘Eurasian’empire, emerging from the fifteenth century, became the counterpoint of the neighbouring ‘superethnic units’ (the European, Chinese and the Muslim world). The civilization-based approach is extraordinarily popular in today’s Russian historiography. The renaissance of the ‘Eurasian’ idea, indeed, greatly contributed to the development of this phenomenon.

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