Michal Racyn's The Transformation of Eurasianism in Soviet Intellectual Milieu, 1950s-1991: Blurring the Lines and Establishing Artificial Continuity fills the gap in the intellectual genealogy of Eurasianism between the Classical Eurasianism pf N. S. Trubetskoj, P. N. Savitskij, and George Vernadsky and others of the period between World War I and World War II, and the Neo-Eurasianism that arose after the fall of Communism in 1991 of A. Dugin and others by examining the 1950s-1980s theories of L. N. Gumilev and V. V. Kozhinov, who Racyn labels “Trans-Eurasianists.” Racyn's scrupulous analysis of Trans-Eurasian publications and archival evidence from St. Petersburg, Prague and New York, mostly correspondence between the surviving Classical Eurasianists and the Trans-Eurasianists, definitively proves that the Trans-Eurasianists departed from Classical Eurasianism and their self-serving self-identification as Eurasianists is to a significant degree fictional. Racyn's conclusion sheds new light on Neo-Eurasianism, whose advocates imitate their Trans-Eurasianist predecessors in proclaiming a fictitious continuity between themselves and Classical Eurasianism.

Charles J. Halperin, Independent scholar

This book contributes to widening our knowledge about the complex and nonlinear transformation of Eurasianism – a political idea that has not lost its relevance in Putin's Russia today.

Wolfgang Mueller, Professor of Russian History, University of Vienna, Austria