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A Failed Alliance: The Eurasianist Movement and the German Conservative Revolution in the Early 1930s
This chapter examines the personal and ideological contacts between members of the Russian émigré Eurasianist movement and representatives of the so-called “Conservative Revolution” in late Weimar Germany. Throughout the 1920s both movements professed similarly strong anti-Western and anti-democratic ideas. Yet, so far it has been little known that these groups and their members also had actual organizational contacts and direct personal interactions. Introducing new archival evidence from the Eurasianists’ personal papers, this chapter reveals that in the early 1930 Eurasianists indeed strove to forge a strategic alliance with several German rightist movements, such as “Gegner” (led by Harro Schulze-Boysen), “Die Tat” (led by Hans Zehrer), “Schwarze Front” (led by Otto Strasser) and “Widerstandsbewegung” (led by Ernst Niekisch). The Eurasianist A.P. Antipov met representatives of these groups in early February 1932, when he officially represented the Eurasianist movement at the “European Youth Congress” in Frankfurt organized by the French non-conformist Alexandre Marc and his group “Plans.” Following this event, some German “conservative revolutionaries,” in particular Schulze-Boysen, intensified their contacts and exchanged letters and programmatic statements with individual Eurasianists. By then, the Eurasianists had become part of an international, pan-European network of non-conformist groups in search of a “Third Way” between capitalism and socialism, between “left” and “right.”
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