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Электронное приложение к журналу «
Международная жизнь
»
Authors: Mikhail Titarenko, Academician, Russian Academy of Sciences
Vladimir Petrovsky, Chief Research Associate, Institute of Far Eastern Studies, Russian Academy of
Sciences, Doctor of Science (Political Science)
Mikhail Leontievich Titarenko died in February 2016.
This article is his last contribution to our journal.
RUSSIA'S STRATEGIC TURN to the East has
revived the academic and social-political discussion
about our country's Eurasian self-determination
and an adequate understanding of its Eurasian
identity. It seems, however, that we have not yet
grasped the true philosophical, geoeco-nomic and
geopolitical significance of Russian Eurasianism;
we should arrive at its comprehensive understanding and formulate its definition.
The current actualization of Russia's Eurasianism prompts going back to its historical and philo-
sophical background that, in its turn, makes it necessary to supply this concept with detailed
commentaries, within reasonable limits, on its meaning.
This article deals with the essence and meaning of new Eurasianism that surfaced in the ideo-
logical and political discussions after the Soviet Union's disintegration amid the efforts to for-
mulate a national idea very much needed to consolidate and inspire sovereign Russia challenged
by an uncompromising cultural and civilizational expansion of the West. This expansion diluted,
to a great extent, the cultural-civilizational self-identity of the Russian and other peoples of the
Russian Federation that became apolitical and spiritually depressed; the ideas of local separatism,
regionalism and isolationism were gaining momentum while ethnic tension and disagreements
were becoming more and more obvious.
The idea of new Eurasianism supplied Russia with the key to the geopolitical and also spiritual-
humanistic self-identity of the Russian nation and the spiritual secret of Russian civilization.
The critics of the concept of Eurasianism as a paradigm of the development of Russia (who
belong to the camp of Europeists) spare no effort to discredit it by their references to the
Eurasianism of the post-World War I period (the 1920s-1930s) that was obviously an anti-West-
ern movement. It should be said that the anti-Western vector was caused by the specifics of the
time.
In the philosophical context, new Eurasianism has created a planetary field in which each culture,
first, specifies its place in relation to other countries; second, discovers in a new way its own tra-
ditions that invigorate consciousness and self-identification; third, very much in line with its own
nature, it acquires its own way of existence and development; fourth, together with other cultures
it is involved in building up an intellectual vocabulary of mankind; fifth, all cultures acquire unity
that suppresses the possibility of cultural conflicts, achieves symphony and initiates a constructive
Russia's Neo-Eurasian Identity