Every other major émigré party had announced its utter rejection of the revolution, and its desire to turn back the political clock: some to 1861, before the accession to the throne of Nicholas II; some to before February 1917, when Nicholas abdicated; and some to various points between February and October 1917, when Russia was ruled by a liberal (if extremely disorganized) provisional government. The Eurasianists were alone in their neutral attitude towards the revolution, which they saw as a half-finished ‘Eurasian revolution’ against the West. While it was indeed biblical in its savagery and bloodiness, they saw the religious, eschatological echoes of 1917 as a catastrophic culmination of the two-century-long westernizing trend of Russian intellectual history and its simultaneous exculpation.

Ω Ω Ω

While Russian historiography had mourned the thirteenth-century Mongol invasion as a historical tragedy severing Old Russia from the European and Byzantine culture of which it had formed a part, the Eurasianists celebrated it as a redemptive event in which ‘the Tatars purged and sanctified’ Russia. There was no contradiction in celebrating both Mongol heritage and the Orthodox Church as unique essences of Russian civilization: Bolshevism, like the Golden Horde, was a purge which foreclosed a Western future for Russia and established a separate civilization.

—Charles Clover, Black Wind, White Snow, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 52.