Eurasianism §

Eurasianism is the Russian geopolitical doctrine that conceives the post-Soviet space as a distinct civilisational unit, neither Western nor Asian, whose geographic, economic and security architecture should be organised under Moscow's leadership. Its intellectual lineage runs from the 1920s Russian émigré thinkers Nikolai Trubetzkoy and Pyotr Savitsky (Classical Eurasianism) through the late-Soviet historian Lev Gumilev to the post-Soviet ideologue Alexander Dugin's "Neo-Eurasianism", which from the late 1990s recast the doctrine as an explicit project of contesting Atlanticist hegemony.

In Russian state practice Eurasianism has supplied the intellectual vocabulary for a series of post-Soviet integration projects: the Commonwealth of Independent States (1991), the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO, 1992/2002), the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU, 2014). Armenia is a member of all three; Azerbaijan of none. The doctrine therefore frames Russia's regional policy in the South Caucasus as a duty to "protect" and "consolidate" allied states within its civilisational orbit, and provides post-hoc legitimation for the deployment of Russian peacekeepers to Nagorno-Karabakh under the 10 November 2020 trilateral statement.

The Armenian–Russian relationship has been the practical test of Eurasianism's coherence. Russia's failure to invoke CSTO obligations during the 2020 war and during repeated cross-border incursions into Armenia proper after 2021, together with the passive Russian peacekeeping posture during the Lachin blockade and the September 2023 operation, have been read by Yerevan as a fundamental breach of the Eurasianist commitment. Pashinyan has accordingly pursued a slow strategic diversification (suspended CSTO participation in 2024, expanded ties with the EU and France, pivot toward US security assistance), to which Moscow has responded with hostility and tactical pressure.

(sourced opinion: critics (de Waal, Marlene Laruelle) read post-2014 Russian Eurasianism as an instrument of empire-restoration cloaked in civilisational language, designed to recover what is lost rather than to integrate what consents; sympathetic readings emphasise its anti-imperial-Western moment.) The doctrine's Armenian moment may be ending: in the 2023–25 period, the operative Armenian foreign-policy formula is "diversification", a deliberate retreat from the singular Eurasianist anchor.