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Marlène Laruelle has produced a detailed survey of the "neo-Eurasianist" school of thought in post-Soviet Russia, building on her two earlier books, which traced the roots of today's Eurasianism to thinkers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In her new book, Laruelle meticulously examines three diverse strands of neo-Eurasianism in Russia--the first associated with the ethnologist Lev Gumilev (who died in 1992), the second associated with Aleksandr Panarin (who died in 2002), and the third linked with Aleksandr Dugin, who, unlike Gumilev and Panarin, has played a direct part in the political arena--and then discusses non-Russian forms of Eurasianism, including versions espoused in Tatarstan and some other Islamic regions of Russia as well as versions that have gained currency in Kazakhstan and Turkey.
Russian Eurasianism, lucidly translated from the French by Mischa Gabowitsch, features an initial chapter briefly recapitulating the discussion in Laruelle's first book on the birth of Eurasianism in the Russian émigré community in the 1920s and 1930s. Three long chapters on the writings of Gumilev, Panarin, and Dugin follow, as well as two additional chapters on the Islamic and Turkocentric forms of neo-Eurasianism. An introduction and a concluding chapter round out the book.
Laruelle's painstaking analyses of the major neo-Eurasianist writers constitute the heart of the book and are rich and illuminating. The different factions of neo-Eurasianism are so divergent--and are so often mutually antagonistic--that lumping them all under a single broad rubric may seem artificial. But in this respect, neo-Eurasianism is little different from other broad schools such as Marxism, realism, and institutionalism, all of which encompass widely divergent (and, in some cases, mutually incompatible) strands.
Even though the disparate types of neo-Eurasianism often seem to have very little in common, Laruelle argues that they...