Nikolai Trubetskoy – Russia’s Sequential Critic Of Eurocentrism

April 16 marks the 135th anniversary of the birth of Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetskoy, an outstanding linguist and scientist, one of the founders of Eurasianism. He went down in history as one of the pioneers of criticism of Eurocentrism. Although Slavophiles had done something similar before him in their dispute with Westerners, Trubetskoy’s (and the Eurasians’) criticism was deeper and was supported by a positive agenda that affirmed the need for joint nation-building with the Turanian (Turks, Ugro-Finns) peoples based on a common history and closeness of worldviews.

Nikolai Trubetskoy was born in Moscow on April 3, 1890, Old style, (April 16 New style – the change from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar) into the family of the philosopher Sergei Trubetskoy, who in 1905 became the elected rector of Moscow State University. His uncle Evgeny Trubetskoy was no less famous for his works on religious philosophy. And the painter and sculptor Pavel (Paolo) Trubetskoy was their cousin. He is the author of the sculpture of Alexander the Third, which is now located in the courtyard of the Marble Palace in St. Petersburg.

In his youth, Nikolai Trubetskoy chose linguistics as his future profession, showing outstanding language skills, although he was interested in other topics. In particular, his first scientific works were ethnographic studies on the history and traditions of the Caucasus.

As paradoxically as it might seem, his first widely recognized work was the book “Europe and Mankind”, published in Sofia in 1920. In it, he subjected the arrogant position of Romano-Germanic culture and the claimed superiority of this “European race” over all others to reasoned and detailed criticism. Like Nicholai Miklouho-Maclay, who defended the aborigines of Oceania at the departments of European universities, Nikolai Trubetskoy stated that there are no higher and lower races, that there is no division into developed peoples and barbarians, these are only imposed pseudoscientific attitudes for obvious political reasons, one of which was colonization.

The intelligentsia of Europeanized nations must tear off their blindfolds and free themselves from seduction by the Romano-Germanic mentality. They must understand clearly, firmly and irrevocably: that they were being deceived; that European culture is not something absolute, nor is it the culture of all mankind, but merely the creation of a limited and defined ethnic or ethnographic group of nations with a common history; that European culture is necessary only to that particular group of nations who created it; that it is in no way more perfect or “superior” to any other culture created by any other ethnic group… that Europeanization is therefore an unqualified evil for every non-Romano-German nation…” emphasized Trubetskoy in his book.

A year later, the Eurasian movement was created in Sofia, a unique phenomenon among Russian emigration, which offered its own ideological program, radically different from the positions of the monarchists or liberals who also fled from Russia after the October Revolution.

Although Trubetskoy moved to Vienna to work at the university, he continued to regularly write articles on various topical issues, where he constantly returned to criticizing Eurocentrism.

In his article “On True and False Nationalism,” Nikolai Trubetskoy notes that Romano-Germans have an egocentric psychology, which is why they believe that their culture is the highest and most perfect. And this has led to the emergence of a special form of chauvinism and Eurocentrism. In his  another publication, “On Racism,” it was already said in plain text about the problem of German racism based on biological materialism. That said, it was emphasized that there was no justification for such an approach.

This publication cost Prince Trubetskoy his life. In 1938, after the Anschluss (Annexation) of Austria by Germany, the Gestapo raided his home. Hitler’s bloodhounds even took away his scientific manuscripts, which caused Nikolai Sergeyevich to have a heart attack. The hospital treatment did not help – he died on June 15. The world has lost an outstanding scientist who is still far from reaching his full potential.

Another topic that is relevant to this day is Ukrainian separatism, and Trubetskoy devoted his work “On the Ukrainian Problem” to this, where he rightly pointed out that even under Soviet rule in Little Russia there was an influx of “Galician intelligentsia, whose national identity was completely disfigured by centuries of communion with the spirit of Catholicism, as well as Polish slavery and that atmosphere.” provincial-separatist national (or rather, linguistic!) the struggle that was always characteristic of the former Austria-Hungary.” And “Ukrainians are turning into some kind of end in itself and generating an uneconomical and inexpedient waste of national forces,” he noted. Trubetskoy hoped that in the future life in Little Russia would remove “the element of caricature that maniacal fanatics of cultural separatism introduced into this movement,” since the proper development of Ukrainian identity and its true task was “to be a special Ukrainian individuation of all-Russian culture.”

As we can see from the experience of 2004 and 2014, this caricature not only returned, but also triumphed under the leadership of new fanatics fueled by money and political support from the West. Apparently, a hundred years is not enough time to cure the disease of Ukrainian chauvinism, which tried to imitate Romano–German racism and, in some ways, even surpassed it.

Trubetskoy, like his Eurasian colleagues, was well aware that a holistic and integrated approach was needed to solve these problems. “The culture of any nation living in a state way of life must necessarily include political ideas or teachings as one of its elements. Therefore, the call for the creation of a new culture includes, among other things, a call for the development of new political ideologies,” he wrote in the program article “We and others.” And in another work, “On the State System and the Form of Government,” a model of ideocracy is proposed that goes beyond both democracy and aristocracy, characteristic of Europe at that time (one can add to them the oligarchy, which is still invisibly present in the Western system of power). But what or to whom does ideocracy serve then? Nikolai Trubetskoy believed that this was “a collection of peoples inhabiting an economically self-sufficient (autarkic) place of development and connected to each other not by race, but by a common historical destiny, joint work on the creation of the same culture or the same state.” And further: “the idea-ruler of a truly ideocratic state can only be the benefit of the totality of the peoples inhabiting this autarkic special world.”

Without doubt, Trubetskoy primarily spoke about Russia-Eurasia, about the distinctive culture of Russian civilization. And his ideas have not lost their relevance. Both the creation of the Eurasian Economic Union, and the eradication of Nazism through a special military operation on historical Russian lands that have fallen under the corrupting influence of the West (Romano-German culture), and a number of recent Decrees by the President of Russia, and Serbia’s attempts to preserve its independence and sovereignty from aggressive actions by the EU, as recently mentioned by the Deputy Prime Minister of the country Alexandar Vulin, criticizing the policy of Brussels, confirms the correctness of the Eurasianists and the adequacy of their meta-political program.