The Woodrow Wilson Center Press

"This book is a tour de force not merely because of the depth of the scholarship and the skill of the argument but also because Laruelle unveils a subject crucial to understanding today's Russia but never given proper due. Eurasianism, a much-bandied-about label meant to bundle together Russian nationalisms that set the country off from and usually against the West, in fact has a long and remarkably dense intellectual history stretching back to the 1920s (and with antecedents in the nineteenth century). Laruelle unpacks a maze of exceedingly obscure ideas and links that, notwithstanding their often crosscutting and even contradictory nature, frame a deep emotional base justifying the notion that Russia is primordially distinct from both Europe and Asia—eternal and spiritually superior. Even the most serious student of contemporary Russia will get from this book a vastly deeper sense of what makes Russian intellectual life, for all of its vexed affinity with the West, fundamentally different."—Foreign Affairs

"The importance of this work lies in the remarkable, even extraordinary, research effort that underpins its writing. The work's best features are the breadth of its coverage and the trenchancy of its analysis."—John B. Dunlop, Hoover Institution

"This book is an impressive achievement—wide-ranging yet sensitive to context and careful to bring together the many varieties of Eurasianism that have emerged over the 20th century. Laruelle makes us see why and how the idea of empire continues to appeal in post-Soviet space."—Willard Sunderland, University of Cincinnati