Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia's New Nationalism

What ideology is driving modern Russian nationalism? Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine this February, this has transformed from an academic musing to an urgent political question. Though carried out with modern weaponry, Russia’s war feels like a throwback to the brutal interstate conquests that brought Europe to collapse in the 19th and 20th centuries. At at time when the whole world has seemingly come to a post-historical agreement on prioritizing commerce and globalization, Vladimir Putin is sending divisions of tanks and troops across foreign borders, promising new wars to expand the borders of what would be in empire in all but name. After the annexation of Crimea back in 2014, Angela Merkel was already warning that the Russian leader was trapped in “old patterns of thinking.” The extent to which she was right is now jarringly clear.

This is not all coming from nowhere, nor merely as a response to the past missteps of the West. Putin is pursuing a specific idea that would exist even without NATO. The Soviet Union in which he was raised was an empire that had a grand ideological mission that gave its citizens a sense of purpose. Since its collapse, the enfeebled Russian state that replaced it has had nothing comparable to fill the void; until now. “Black Wind, White Snow,” by former Financial Times Moscow bureau chief Charles Clover is an analysis post-Communist Russian nationalism, that zeroes in on a vague, obscure idea that has now come to the center of Russia’s new national identity as promoted by its elites: “Eurasianism.” Published in 2017, the book is an intellectual history of this idea and how it crept from the extreme margins of the Soviet Union to become useful to Russia’s post-Communist elites. 

Russia has always been divided between Westernizers (Peter the Great was the paradigmatic example) who saw Russia as a European country, and romantics who held to the idea of Russia as a distinct civilization, a Eurasian one, that had little to do with the West at all. The balance of power between these two ideas has ebbed and flowed over generations. During the Communist Era, when there was a hunger for non-Communist ideas in general, amateur intellectuals like Lev Gumilev imagined a different origin of Russian civilization that would help give meaning to both its past and present. Gumilev laid the foundation for the Eurasian idea, starting his writings about it while a prisoner in the Soviet gulag. He had many eccentric and poorly sourced beliefs about the true origins of Russian history, as well as the unique Russian character and soul. Suffice to say that the impact of intergalactic solar rays on the Russian people do not go unmentioned. More interestingly, Gumilev argued history that the experience of rule by the Mongol Golden Horde was formative in giving Russia its unique character, something that was expressed even in the collectivism of Soviet society. From the Mongols, and other bordering Eurasian peoples, Russian developed deep values of communalism, traditionalism, and “passionarity,” a term that roughly denotes a willingness to take risks and self-sacrifice for a collective. Gumilev invented the word, and it has been cited on more than one occasion by Vladimir Putin himself in speeches to the public. Because Russians are Eurasians, a land-based, conservative people, they are by nature destined to clash with the liberal and cosmopolitan Atlanticists, who have always threatened and hated Russia and by their ineffably nature always will.

Over a century or so, Gumilev’s idea of Eurasianism, which, importantly, contains unique political directives for Russia, has slowly crept from the margins to take on a significant role in modern Russian political discourse. Its most famous exponent today is Aleksandr Dugin, a Russian fascist intellectual who studied under Gumilev and who has published widely on the subject. Dugin is among Russia’s most well-known and influential political exports, and has become something of a traveling activist for the Eurasian idea – building ties with countries like Iran and Serbia that are deemed ethnic or ideological natural allies of a Eurasian Russia. Though he had documented ties with Russia’s security services in the 1990s, the nature of Dugin’s ongoing influence on the Kremlin remains a matter of speculation. Dugin has nonetheless written numerous popular books that have been taught in Russian military academies and have gained an audience on the Western far-right, including “The Foundations of Geopolitics,” and “The Fourth Political Theory.” In addition to scathing attacks on liberalism, these works described Russia as a country with an urgent historical mission to fight liberalism and preserve local cultures that necessitates a clash with the globalizing West. His works have clearly struck a chord with many. This was how Dugin described the response to reading his book by Russian security elites living after the collapse of the Soviet Union:

“It was a kind of psychotherapy for them…Imagine the shock they were feeling: they had always been told the US is our enemy. Suddenly some democrats come to power, and they say, no, the US is our friend. Because there is no ideology. They were all confused. Their job is to aim missiles and they need to be clear…This was once an elite caste, responsible for huge institutes, thousands and thousands of warheads. And suddenly, these democrats come and take away everything from this hugely respected caste. And nobody offers them anything. I come to them and say, ‘America is our enemy, we must aim our missiles at them,’ and they say ‘Yes, that is correct.’ And I explained why.”

Besides an excuse for post-Soviet security elites to maintain their caste power, what does “Eurasianism” actually mean? The answer is not really clear. You could summarize it as the belief that Russia is a civilization that promotes traditional values inspired largely by Orthodox Christianity, that it has its own unique historical experiences, that it is anti-liberal, that it is always under threat by the West, and that it is linked historically to neighboring peoples over whom modern Russia needs to expand its political control. With those rough guidelines, much can be justified. In modern Russia, the fight against global capitalism that gave mission to the Soviet Union has been replaced with a new fight against global liberalism. The ability of Russia to prosecute this war on the same scale as the Soviets did is greatly reduced. As Putin is now showing in Ukraine, however, there is the will to try. 

One of the strangest quirks of Eurasianism, an idea that holds that Russians are naturally a unique people embodying the undying spirit of the Mongol Horde, is that no one seems to fully believe in it. It’s most prominent proponents even seem to view it in an instrumental and ironic way. Dugin openly muses in his writings about ideology being a means of manipulating the masses to achieve material ends, with the actual content of the ideology being of limited importance. It’s a view shared by many elites in Russia. This cynical view of ideology makes sense for a generation of men who were raised with the official state hypocrisy of the Soviet Union and are comfortable operating in an environment where everyone merely pretends to believe in what they say. This is a stark contrast with liberal Europe and the United States where sincere belief in the ideology of liberalism as a universal capital-T truth is widespread.

Clover’s book, published in 2017, began to be written well over a decade earlier purely as an academic exercise to understand where Eurasianism came from. But in his own words it was after the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea that the project started to take on a darker, more urgent character. I have noticed that a new issue of the book is scheduled to be released later this year in light of the even more shocking war now raging across eastern Ukraine, an event that seems to vindicate his thesis about Eurasian expansionism further. What I took away from his intellectual genealogy of Eurasianism was not that it’s a serious idea, but that Russian elites had felt deeply humiliated and disoriented by the collapse of the Soviet Union and needed an ideology that could give them a new sense of mission. They are now in the midst of reclaiming the imperial sphere of influence once claimed by the Soviet Union – a mission justified and rationalized in the writings of men like Gumilev and Dugin – and are doing so by any means necessary and at any cost. Dugin seemed to predict in his books both the 2014 war in Crimea and present one in eastern Ukraine with eerie specificity. His writings predict more Russian conquests still. The idea that Putin’s wars will end if and when Ukraine is conquered seems laughable. They’re only getting started.

The U.S. has mishandled aspects of its relationship with Russia by failing to respect it as an equal. Regardless of how it happened though, the Russian state today is completely radicalized. The prospect of ramped up defense spending by the U.S. does not please me at all. But after coming to a deeper understanding of what is driving Russian expansionism against its neighbors, I feel like it’s probably prudent to give the Ukrainian government as many billions of dollars of advanced arms as necessary to help grind the Russian war machine to a halt and perhaps dissuade it from launching more wars still. Putin and those around him are operating with an entirely different map of the world, an alternate reality of a Russian-centered empire spanning across Asia and Europe, which they are now trying to bring into existence with brute force. While most countries have accepted an End of History focus on globalization and trade, Russians are re-enchanting the world. Fantastical as it is, Eurasianism is a useful tool to help pursue this aim. And like any other fantasy, it can only really be stopped by harsh confrontation with reality. Orwell described this apparently timeless dynamic best, and I’ll let him conclude:

"We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield."