Mark Bassin (Incoming Fellow 2024-25)

Baltic Sea Professor of the History of Ideas, Center for Baltic and East European Studies, Södertörn
University. Director of Research, Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Uppsala University

During his time as Fellow, Professor Bassin will work on parts of a more comprehensive project
examining the intellectual and political history of Russian Eurasianism from 1920 to the present –
“Between Post-Colonialism and Decolonization: A Political and Intellectual History of Russian Eur-
asianism”. At SCAS, he will focus specifically on a) how Western civilizational discourses in the
20th-century informed and helped to shape successive reconstructions of Russian Eurasianism;
and b) the ideological dynamics of Putinism’s reconceptualization of Eurasia, with particular regard
to the war against Ukraine and the promotion of a Russia-China partnership.

Eurasianism was originally formulated by a group of émigré Russian intellectuals who fled the Bolshevik
revolution and sought to develop a new, post-revolutionary vision of their homeland. Rejecting Russia’s
Westernization and the associated belief that the country formed a geographical part of Europe, they
maintained that Russia occupied a geographical space entirely of its own, a third continent called Eurasia.
Russia was re-imagined as a multi-ethnic Schicksalsgemeinschaft, comprised of Slavic, Turkic, Finno-
Ugrian and other peoples and historically opposed to the European West. From the beginning, Eurasianist
ideology wrestled with a fundamental paradox inherent in Russia's post-revolutionary order. Although it
welcomed the end of the Romanov dynasty and the collapse of a Russo-centric colonial empire, the
Eurasianists pointedly refused to accept the logical geopolitical consequence that post-imperial Russia
should break up territorially, to enable the colonized peoples to pursue self-determination as sovereign
nation-states. The paradox proved unresolvable. It persisted after the decline of the original Eurasianist
movement in the late 1930s, and periodically gave rise to new iterations of Eurasianism, first in the 1960s
and again in the late 1980s. After 1991, Eurasianism was resurrected on a grand scale as a civilizational
vision capable of reversing the geopolitical fragmentation of the USSR. Eventually, it was embraced
by the Putin regime, which beginning in 2011 enthusiastically promoted the creation of an “Eurasian
Economic Union” that could reconnect the post-Soviet states within a single political structure. The
Eurasianist inspiration behind Russia’s military interventions in former Soviet republics and regions –
Chechnya, Georgia, and most recently Ukraine – is unmistakable.