Jesse Witkin Schwartz

Russia’s perceived “otherness” from the West played a significant role in the latter’s consolidation, offering a useful conundrum long before the Cold War hardened these distinctions into the “three-world” model. Yet most analyses of this enduring incongruence tend to avoid more than cursory references to the racializing logics often underpinning such assertions, if they engage the topic at all. This project traces several recondite cultural links between Russia and the West at the intersections between political and racial formation by mapping the diffuse prehistories, transnational travels, and long ideological afterlives of the movement known as “Eurasianism.” In part a reappropriation of earlier racial codes assigned to Russia primarily by Western Europe, Eurasianism attempted above all to explain Russia’s singular place in the world at the interstices of Europe and Asia in the wake of the Bolshevik ascent. After that political irruption was then pressed into rhetorical service within the United States to bolster both antiradicalism and racial nativism at once, “America’s Russia” explores how Eurasianist discourses were received and reworked in the pages of popular Anglophone periodicals, mapping the myriad ways writers across the partisan spectrum conflated sociopolitical programs with racializing procedures to buttress their disparate goals.