Eurasianism and europeanization in Russia in the early XXth century: “Russian orientalism” and Eurasian antiorientalism

The article considers “Russian Orientalism” – the discovery of “the inner East” and the image of Russia as a multinational state in the early XXth century. This trend found its reflection in the development of ethnography and in the emergence of the national-liberalist ideology of P. Struve. Researchers associate Russian Orientalism with greater Europeanization of the upper classes of the empire in this period. The author suggests that ironically this phenomenon gave birth to its dialectical opposite – Eurasian antiorientalism.