Loyalist Russian thinkers in search of an isolationist framework Back in the 1920s, the classic Eurasianist Pavel Savitsky argued that continentality (that is, location characterized by extremely long distances from littorals) doomed Eurasian countries to eternal poverty, simply because transportation over land had always been more expensive than shipping by sea. What follows from this observation is that a continental country has to prioritize its domestic and intraregional trade over trading internationally, which is naturally disadvantageous for it. Two experts of the Valdai discussion club, Yaroslav Lisovolik and Viacheslav Sutyrin, refer to Savitsky’s analysis in their report, which proposes a certain degree of economic
autarky. Savitsky’s ideas also reverberate in the call for “selective autarky” pushed by
Sergei Karaganov, an intellectual whose ideas all too often echo in Putin’s speeches. The whole project of the Eurasian Economic Union seems to be at least partially based on the Russian and German geopolitical tradition of taking a positive view on an autarkic
Grossraum.
Former Duma deputy Mikhail Yuriev (1959-2019) propagated a cultural ideology of isolationism. In his utopian novel
The Third Empire (2006), Russia’s geopolitical victories end with the division of the world into five state-civilizations. He emphasized that these new states were so vast, self-sufficient and different from one another that their peoples nurtured neither interest in, nor warm feelings for their neighbors: the principle “I don’t care about you, you don’t care about me” was established as the foundation of international relations. These ideas found fertile soil in the political writings of Boris Mezhuev. He has recently advanced the idea that Russia has to learn how to feel “
civilizational indifference” to the West. Elsewhere he insists on the need to develop a “
philosophy of indifference“ that would demonstrate “the less integration, the better relations.”
The geopolitical line in isolationist arguments was developed primarily by political theorist Vadim Tsymbursky (1957-2009), who came up with the concept of the “abduction of Europe” in Russian history. In his view, Russia’s mimetic desire to become European inescapably translated into a policy of intervening in European affairs and dominating them, which in turn led to an anti-Russian consolidation of Europe and a boomerang effect in which Europe marched on the East, pressing Russia out. After a short period of engagement with Asia, Russia starts a new cycle of “
abducting Europe” by moving westward. Tsymbursky saw the post-Soviet period of geographical shrinking as an advantage and a historical chance, when Russia could escape this vicious cycle and reinvent itself as an “island,” bordered by seas and non-Russian but also not fully European nations to its West. His theory sounded in unison with Solzhenitsyn’s
call to Soviet leaders to stop the disastrous practice of overstretching Russia’s capabilities and resources globally and concentrate on cultivating Russia’s own lands, especially Siberia. More recently, the retired ideologist of Putinism Vladislav Surkov pursued Tsymbursky’s ideas in his prominent article “
The Loneliness of the Half-Breed” (2018), in which he argued that after centuries of being enthralled with all things Western, Russia has to become self-aware about its uniqueness: it is neither East, nor West, but a special animal, “charismatic, talented, beautiful and lonely.”