Kevin Coogan <kevinc952 at yahoo.com> has alot about Gumilev and his influence, as well as Harold Mackinder, in his study of Francis Parker Yockey.
I've never done more than flip through it a few times but, Brzezinski's, "The Grand Chessboard, " should have material too. And, a book by someone you dislike, Walter Laqueur, "The Black Hundreds, " has material on Eurasianism.
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/leninist-international/1999- March/003381.html L-I: Re: Geostrategy for Eurasia and Eurasianism III Mark Jones leninist- international Tue, 02 Mar 1999 14:41:23 +0000
http://www.cc.jyu.fi/~aphamala/pe/issue4/duginism.htm
>From Neo-Eurasianism to National Paranoia: Renaissance of Geopolitics
in Russia by Anssi Kullberg, May 2001
...Dugin and the Return of Eurasianism
In autumn 2000 the attraction of Vladimir Putin towards Eurasianist thinking was shown in his search for ideological basis for the direction of rising Russian imperialism from the thoughts of the well-known Russian nationalist and dissident, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Now Putin is getting much more dangerous schools of Eurasianist thought behind his back. The Russian ultra-nationalist and geopolitician Aleksandr Dugin founded on 21st April the "Eurasianist Movement", which advocates an empire of all Eurasia, dominated by Russia. Dugin is considered as Greater-Russian and passionate agitator of crusader mentality against "Islamic threat". Dugin has also attacked against the Baltic countries, Poland, Turkey and other frontier nations around Russia. He has strong contacts to Western European extreme right, among others, to the French Front National and Belgian Vlaams Blok. The Synergon network of European extreme right that spreads hatred against the United States, Turkey, Israel as well as the moderate Muslims of the Balkans and Caucasus, and defends Russian and Serbian policies, openly admires Dugin and translates his texts into European languages.
Dugin is not constructing the new applicant ideology for "Russian mission" alone. A pro-Moscow Islamic mufti Farid Salman praised Dugin's movement and stated that "Eurasianism represents a suitable answer against the supporters of Satanic Wahhabism, who have penetrated Russia". "Wahhabism" is a myth created by KGB, and used widely in Soviet and later Russian propaganda to brand any Islamic opposition movement. In fact, Wahhabism is a puritan Sunnite school, which enjoys the official religious status in Saudi Arabia. It is absolutely against the moderate Sufi traditions of Islam, represented for example by Chechens and Albanians.
The fanatic anti-American Dugin expectedly admires Putin, and demands "total support" for the leader of Russia, the empire designed to dominate Eurasia. Dugin's movement has been completed with loyalist nomenclature representatives of various faiths, including the foreign affairs secretary of the Patriarchate, Vsevolod Chaplin, an Islamic mufti Talgut Tadzhuddin, a Jewish rabbi Avram Shmulevich, and a Buddhist leader Did-Khabalam. Following the Soviet tradition, loyalist religious leaders usually share background in the KGB. The goals of the Eurasianist movement are to rise Russia into Eurasian hegemony and to unite the different religions of Eurasia against the "great Satan", the United States. The Western European Synergon network, which unites anti-American rightist powers, supports the Eurasianists. The Synergon's leader Robert Steuckers recently gave an interview in support for Dugin in a Georgian newspaper "Free Eurasia".
Eurasianism, influencing in Russia in the czarist times already, always carried nationalist character, and had as its cornerstones fanatic hatred against the West, originally especially the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and emphasis on Greater Russian imperialism. Originally, the Eurasianists demanded Russia's complete divorce from the "corrupted" Europe, and redirecting herself towards Eurasia. The great names of Eurasianism included Count Nikolai Trubetskoi (1890-1938) who was active in the 1920s. His followers were the economic geographicist Pyotr Savitsky (1895-1965), the jurist and philologist Nikolai Alekseyev (1879-1964), the religious philosopher, cultural historian and medievalist Lev Karsavin (1882-1952) and the well-known historian Georgy Vernadsky (1887-1973). During the Cold War, in the 1960s, the leading star of Eurasianism was the historian Lev Gumilyov, who supported Greater Russian imperialism, gained strange influences from fascism, and created singular epoch theories of the rise, expansion and fall of great nations.
In the Soviet times, Eurasianism was especially popular among KGB, the Red Army, and Alpha troops. Dugin is himself son of a KGB officer, besides being an historian. In the 1980s he appeared as a fanatic anti-Semitist who demanded the expelling of all Jews from Russia. In the 1990s he, together with Eduard Limonov and their network, translated and spread the texts of German and Italian fascists in Russia. At the same time, they spread their own texts and Russian geopolitics to the West through the networks of the "new right", including Synergon. Nowadays, Dugin acts as an advisor to the communist leader Gennady Seleznyov and is spreading propaganda against Turkey and Caucasian nations.
According to Dugin, it is the duty of Russia to destroy the West. He thinks that the "ocean powers" Great Britain and U.S. represent "evil" in the universe. For Russian geopoliticians it has always been characteristics to adopt the ideas of Western geopoliticians, but to mirror them into opposite. This has also been Dugin's method. He has adopted the classical geopolitical theories of Mackinder, Mahan, Ratzel, Haushofer and even the Nazi geopolitician Carl Schmidt. (sic.) (Just checked out a study of Schmitt, "A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought, " by Jan-Werner Muller, the chapter on Schmitt's influence on the German and Italian New Left are quite interesting.M.P.)
According to Dugin and his European supporters, Eurasia must be organised in Russian leadership into a continental geopolitical power, which shall reach hegemony and global dominance, and thereby overcome the Anglo-Saxon "evil". Russia can gain "military, ideological and geoeconomical hegemony", "geopolitical dominance", which is directed against the United States, by subjecting all Eurasia under Moscow's power. This must happen "in union with Europe". To achieve these goals, "Russia must take control over all strategic transport routes from East to West and from North to South". According to Victor Yasmann, Putin has stated identical ideas.
Eurasianism has been transformed, for example in its relationship to religious questions (first fanatically Christian, then atheist, then presenting itself as multi-confessional), ideological questions (first czarist, then communist, now Russian nationalist), and its relationship to Europe (first fanatically anti-European, while now seeking European-Russian alliance against America). However, it has maintained certain characteristiques all the way: 1) Imperialism and expansionism. 2) Seeing Russia in the leading role. 3) Unconditional antagonism and conflict in regard to the "West", which is seen as the absolute enemy. 4) Tendency to Messianic thinking. According to Dugin, "in the conflict between Eurasia and the West there is no peaceful solution it can only end in the victory of one and destruction of the other".
According to Dugin's own words, his goal is not to rise into leadership in the empire, but only to aim at "ideological power" " making his own Eurasianist visions the state ideology of the Kremlin. Putin has adopted frighteningly positive attitude at Dugin's ideas, and Dugin's network has reached a lot of popularity also elsewhere among the nomenclatura of former Soviet Union. An example has been the Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has openly praised Eurasianism. In the new capital of Kazakhstan, Astana (former Aqmola), the "Eurasian University" has been named after Lev Gumilyov, and when Putin recently visited Kazakhstan, the walls of the university were decorated with Dugin's slogans.
In December 2000, the Kazakhstani ambassador in Moscow, Tair Mansurov, wrote in Moscow News about Nazarbayev's intentions to advocate "multipolar world" â€" that is, world order where Russia and China would rise to challenge the U.S. supremacy as rival superpowers. Like traditionally, Eurasianism again mirrors the West: Nazarbayev's initiatives include for example "Eurasian Union" and "Eurasian Economic Community", founded in Astana in October 2000. The OSCE process is in turn imitated by creation of an "Asian Conference of Co-operation, Friendship and Mutual Aid".
http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/6535-3.cfm RUSSIAN NATIONALISM 3. EURASIANISM: DUGIN'S NEW PROGRAM SOURCE. Programma i ustav politicheskoi partii "Evraziia" [Program and Statutes of the Political Party "Eurasia"] (Moscow: "Arktogeia-Tsentr," 2002). http://www.cdi.org/russia/215-14.cfm #14 The Russia Journal July 12-18, 2002 The rebirth of Eurasianism By GORDON M. HAHN
James Billington, "Russia in Search of Itself, " amazon.com>...A.S. Panarin, head of the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, whom Billington calls "one of the most sophisticated of the Eurasianists," suggests that Russia has a mission to resist the "irresponsible consumer hedonism and comprador modernism" of the West. Eurasianism attracts both sober thinkers and those who consider intelligence an impediment to fantasy. The latter find Stalin a great hero, his purges being described by Oleg Platonov, "the most prolific of reactionary nationalists," as "the first step toward the salvation of Russia from Jewish Bolshevism." (A widely-reported poll conducted on the eve of the 2004 presidential elections found that 45 percent of Russians thought Stalin had played a positive role in the country's history, while 42 percent held the opposite view.) Mixing eschatology and science fiction, many extremists view America as the evil empire, going so far as to suggest that the planes that destroyed the World Trade towers were "swallows of the Apocalypse." Billington allots too much space to such colorful lunacies, although he does make the serious point that "Eurasianism may well be the last gasp of a depleted intelligentsia seeking to cobble together an ideology that could revive Russian power and give themselves a central role in its exercise." -- Michael Pugliese, Western Left Social Imperialist...in no mood to argue w/Slavophile Chris about Dugin or this stuff.