The article analyzes critical assessments of the concept of Russia- Eurasia in modern Western literature. The author especially focuses on Marléne Laruelle’s Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire, Alexander Etkind’s Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience and Bruno Maçães’s The Dawn of Eurasia: On the Trail of the New World Order. The author shows that some common shortcomings of these studies are determined by certain principles of the Western intellectual tradition. Thus, M. Laruelle seeks to portray the doctrine of the Eurasians as a heap of contradictions, but her strategy itself reflects the specific positivist rationality of the West, which, due to the adherence to the idea of subject/object opposition, divides the world and universalizes conflicts. This approach that is not wholly alien to Eurasian thinkers accounts for many of the Eurasian movement’s limitations and failures. The theoretical potential of the key concepts of Eurasianism, i. e. “place-development”, “everyday profession of faith”, “demotia” etc., remained unclear. The author offers a new approach to Eurasian thoughts based on the principle of (self)transformation of reality, which leads to the mutual transfiguration of humankind and the world. The afore said limitations of the Western methodology of history are inherent in the book by A. Etkind, who considers the history of Russia from the perspective of the socalled internal colonization. Following J. Habermas, the author defines it as an innovation of modernity, which “falls into the world of life from outside … and force it to assimilate”. The article reveals the inconsistency of this “colonialist” view of the Russian history and indicates the possibilities and real historical phenomena that allow seeing in the history of Russia not so much the colonization of the Russian world by Western “innovations” as meeting points, free “compatibility” of colonization and an alternative worldview, called “countercolonization”. This can be a basis of the global and prospective Euro-Asian world system, which includes Russia. B. Maçães’s book already admits an optimistic scenario of the integration of Eurasia and the West.

This article focuses on the nature of the historical process within the broad geopolitical context of the so-called Greater Eurasia. The starting point of the research is the category of “silence” as a key phenomenon in Russian and Asian history, examined in its cultural, political, and psychological dimensions. Silence manifests in various forms, starting from the hesychia in the Orthodox tradition and extending to various forms of deceptive communication, bragging, jesting, the show-off culture, and others. This concept is explored in the context of two global cognitive approaches: one based on the principle of the identity of things to themselves, and the other based on the principle of their inequality to themselves, the self-difference of all being, a deviation from oneself, where reality is seen as becoming, the transition of things into something other, and consequently, the limit of existence. The first principle formed the foundation of Western intellectual tradition, while the second dominated the spiritual traditions of Asia. The principle of self-difference implies relations of free companionship, synergy, the dynamic centration of global forces, and affirms universal similarity, the mutual penetration of opposites, where things embrace and contain each other, such that all being and the entire world seem to be preserved within themselves, becoming their own secret. Here, the singular merges with the individual, and the centripetal movement, or involution, the return to the origin of existence, turns out to be the condition for inexhaustible diversity and the hidden, perpetual continuity of life. This cognitive approach ensures great creative potential and spiritual discipline in personal and social life, through which moments of life experience are transmuted into a repertoire of typified and stylized forms of cultural practice. In this way, the timeless body of tradition is created, and the restoration of the fullness of being for all things (apocatastasis) becomes possible. Historically, the uncertainty of the structural foundations of tradition and the oblivion of the symbolic dimension of experience led to their gradual replacement by the logic of the sameness of things, characteristic of the Modern era. However, the principle of self-difference has resurfaced in the contemporary “postmodern” situation, characterized by the erosion of ideology, with history becoming a process of revealing within the depths of individual experience the perspective of a global humanity in the limitless diversity of its manifestations.