Geopolitics, Eurasianism and Russian Foreign Policy Under Putin

Although the oriseo of geopolitics and Eurasianism to discursive prominence within the Russian post-Soviet foreign policy discourse has been widely discussed in the literature, their relegation to the margin of the said discourse a decade later has passed largely unnoticed. Only a few attempts to account for this fall from grace exist, and their proponents agree that Eurasianism had become a spent force in Russian politics by the time of President Putin's ascendancy to power because it failed to sustain a coherent foreign policy, particularly following Russia's failure to restore its pre-eminence in the post-Soviet space. On the level of practical geopolitical reasoning, therefore, Eurasianism is reduced to geopolitics, i.e. the politics of spheres of influence and hegemonic spatial control, while Eurasian identity construction is dismissed as unconvincing, strategic and self-serving. However, this article attempts to provide an alternative explanation for the decline of Eurasianism under Putin - the one that focuses on the attempt within post-revolutionary and post-Soviet Eurasianism to theorise both a unique identity and a credible ideology, i.e., what Eurasianists themselves termed oideocracyo. Therefore, a classification of Russian geopolitical thinking is provided according to the different ways in which the intellectual legacy of classical Eurasianism is being invoked and appropriated. Both 'traditionalist' and 'modernist' geopoliticians invoke Russia's Eurasian identity in order to answer the practical question 'how?' - how Russia should preserve its territorial integrity and enhance its international standing. Proponents of 'civilisational' geopolitics, on the contrary, employ the ideational resources of classical Eurasianism in order to answer the question 'what?': what is Russia in the post-Cold War world. It is argued that the answer to this latter question - given that two possible attempts to apply Eurasian ideocracy to post-Soviet conditions have developed - is a necessary step to answering the question owhy?o: why Eurasianism has been effectively sidelined under Putin turning into a metaphorical dog that did not bark.