Abstract

The article analyzes critical assessments of the concept of Russia- Eurasia in modern Western literature. The author especially focuses on Marléne Laruelle’s Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire, Alexander Etkind’s Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience and Bruno Maçães’s The Dawn of Eurasia: On the Trail of the New World Order. The author shows that some common shortcomings of these studies are determined by certain principles of the Western intellectual tradition. Thus, M. Laruelle seeks to portray the doctrine of the Eurasians as a heap of contradictions, but her strategy itself reflects the specific positivist rationality of the West, which, due to the adherence to the idea of subject/object opposition, divides the world and universalizes conflicts. This approach that is not wholly alien to Eurasian thinkers accounts for many of the Eurasian movement’s limitations and failures. The theoretical potential of the key concepts of Eurasianism, i. e. “place-development”, “everyday profession of faith”, “demotia” etc., remained unclear. The author offers a new approach to Eurasian thoughts based on the principle of (self)transformation of reality, which leads to the mutual transfiguration of humankind and the world. The afore said limitations of the Western methodology of history are inherent in the book by A. Etkind, who considers the history of Russia from the perspective of the socalled internal colonization. Following J. Habermas, the author defines it as an innovation of modernity, which “falls into the world of life from outside … and force it to assimilate”. The article reveals the inconsistency of this “colonialist” view of the Russian history and indicates the possibilities and real historical phenomena that allow seeing in the history of Russia not so much the colonization of the Russian world by Western “innovations” as meeting points, free “compatibility” of colonization and an alternative worldview, called “countercolonization”. This can be a basis of the global and prospective Euro-Asian world system, which includes Russia. B. Maçães’s book already admits an optimistic scenario of the integration of Eurasia and the West.