State Ideology, Science, and Pseudoscience in Russia: Between the Cosmos and the Earth

This book recounts the entangled stories of three distinctly Russian movementsstate ideology, Russian cosmism, and Eurasianismfrom their inception at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century until now. Despite harboring pseudoscientific and mystical ideas specific to Russia, all three movements were propagated by their followers as universal sciences, and all three vied for scientific supremacy and universal acceptance. Suppressed by the Bolsheviks and their state ideology as unscientific in the 1920s, Russian cosmism and Eurasianism led an esoteric underground existence during the Soviet period and re-emerged in the dying years of the Soviet Union, seeking not only to reclaim their scientific status but also to potentially fill the perplexing vacuum left by the ensuing demise of Soviet state ideology. This study relates the post-Soviet search for a new state ideology, or new National Idea, at the federal and regional levels, based on the Kremlins projects and the case of the ethnic Republic of Kalmykia in south-west Russia.