AZ i YA by Olzhas Suleimenov in the Context of the Eurasian Discourse

The article discusses the correlation of Olzhas Suleimenov's cultural-historical conception (1975) with the Eurasian ideology of the 1920s-1930s and the influence of this conception on the formation of Neo-Eurasianism in post-Soviet Russia. The authors of the article conclude that, when creating this conception, Suleimenov was unfamiliar with the Eurasian doctrine. In particular, he was unaware of the ideologically biased concept of the Eurasian language union developed in 1931 by Roman Jakobson. Although the Eurasians considered the period of the Mongolian domination during the 13th-15th centuries as the key element in the formation of the "Eurasian nation", Suleimenov, however, credited the pre-Mongolian time as a period of the maximum cultural convergence of ancient Slavs and ancient Turks. He even believed that the Mongolian conquest of Russia provoked the split of the sociocultural unity of the Slavs and the Turks. Works by the Siberian oblastniks of the 19th century and Lev Gumilyov's early works also influenced Suleimenov's ideas to some extent. Suleimenov created his cultural-historical conception in the context of the "Left Renaissance" of the 1950s-1960s. The social and philosophical basis of this Renaissance was humanistic universalism, which considered all humankind as a united planetary community of people equal in rights and moving towards a fair social system and democracy. Therefore, the statement of the long period of Old Slavic and Old Turkic cultures' interpenetration has an essentially different meaning for Su-leimenov and for Eurasians. For the latter, it was an ideological support for the demonstration of the special way of Russian development; for the former, it was an ideological support of the prospects of the development of humankind as a united sociocultural community. The Eurasianism of the 1920s-1930s was an ultra-right, conservative reaction to the victory of the Bolsheviks. Neo-Eurasianism was also an ultra-right, conservative, revanchist reaction to the defeat of the USSR in the Cold War and the country's subsequent disintegration. The sociopolitical context at the turn of the 21st century formed the perception of the book AZ i Ya [AZ and I] that blurred its humanistic and leftist basis. As a result, for a long time, this book was wrongly perceived as being a product and part of the Eurasian intellectual tradition; in fact, it has nothing in common with this tradition. Suleimenov's ideas, meanwhile, significantly influenced the formation of the modern Republic of Kazakhstan's "Eurasian" state ideology. However, this ideology has little in common with classical Eurasianism and with modern Russian Neo-Eurasianism. Indeed, the political course adopted by President Nazarbayev could be termed as political pragmatism, i.e., using the Eurasian rhetoric to integrate Kazakhstan into the global economic and cultural space, a policy that evidently contradicts all Russian versions of Neo-Eurasianism.

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