The Mongol Empire in modern Russian imperial projects: fantastic fiction, publicism, folk history

The role of the great Mongolian Empire in the formation of the Russian Empire was studied in the 1920s by the Eurasianists and Lev Gumilev, and from the early 1990s - by the Neo-Eurasianists. During the crisis and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the historical facts ceded to the poetic rhetoric and the need for a new gathering of lost territories. One of the first who responded to the challenge was a Siberian Eurasian poet V. Beryazev. The return of Genghis Khan in his lyrics and poems is determined primarily by the moral imperatives of justice and statehood, ethos of allegiance and loyalty. The Russian fantasy fiction of the late 1990s formed a narrative of the return of Empire in an alternate past or near future. The Chinese Empire becomes the strongest rival of the Mongolian, as for example, in the cycle of novels The Eurasian Symphony by V. Rybakov and I. Alimov, in which China and Mongolia unite with Russia into a single state named Ordus. In The White Raven by P. Krusanov, Russia is represented as a Eurasian nomadic Empire, starting war with China which attempts to annex Mongolia. In The Engineer's Town by V. Otroshenko, Russian and Mongolian empires coexist in the present, in parallel time-worlds within the single Eurasian space of southern steppes and fragments of the cumbersome Russian Empire of the nineteenth century. From time to time both empires encounter in the steppe or approach each other too close. This phantasmagorial writing should be viewed rather in the tradition of satirical grotesque and absurdism of Russian authorities in literature. The pseudo-historical The Empire by G.V. Nosovsky and A.T. Fomenko as well as journalism of one of the leaders of modern mass-literature A. Bushkov ("Russia that did not exist: Riddles, versions, hypothesis", "Genghis Khan. The Unknown Asia") deny the historical existence of either the Mongols or the Mongol Empire, which become part of the historical Muscovy. The level of development of the Mongol Empire is incorrectly compared to modern Mongolia. The authors widely use quasi-etymological studies that allow russifica-tion of Mongolian names and toponyms.

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