Lev Platonovich Karsavin (1882-1952) was a Russian historian of medieval Western religion and a religious philosopher. In 1922 the Bolshevik government expelled him from Soviet Russia along with other prominent intellectuals on the so-called philosophers’ ships. In emigration he became a leading theorist of the Eurasianist movement in the late 1920s, contributing its theory of the state as a “symphonic personality” and associating with the left-leaning Clamart group around the newspaper Evraziia, which drew closer to Soviet positions and contributed to the movement’s split.

In 1928 Karsavin took a professorship at the University of Kaunas in Lithuania and remained there after the Soviet annexation. Soviet authorities arrested him in 1949, and he died in 1952 in a Gulag camp at Abez in the Komi region. His career illustrates both the intellectual roots of Eurasianism and the way Soviet intelligence penetrated and exploited the emigre Eurasianist movement in the 1920s.

Sources

• Glebov, Sergey. From Empire to Eurasia: Politics, Scholarship, and Ideology in Russian Eurasianism, 1920s-1930s. Northern Illinois University Press, 2017.
• Laruelle, Marlene. Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire. Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.

Summary entry. A fuller, document-based profile is in preparation.