Georgy Vladimirovich Vernadsky (1887-1973) was a Russian emigre historian and one of the leading scholars of the interwar Eurasianist movement. The son of the scientist Vladimir Vernadsky, he left Russia during the Civil War, taught in Prague in the early 1920s, and in 1927 joined the faculty of Yale University, where he spent the rest of his career and became one of the most influential historians of Russia in the United States.

Vernadsky gave Eurasianism its historical framework, arguing that Russia’s development was shaped by the steppe and by the legacy of the Mongol empire, and that Russia formed a distinct Eurasian civilization separate from Europe. His multivolume A History of Russia (with Michael Karpovich) carried these ideas into Western academic scholarship. Vernadsky’s interpretation of the Mongol period and of Russia as a Eurasian state has been revived by post-Soviet neo-Eurasianists, including Lev Gumilev’s followers and Alexander Dugin, which is why he appears in genealogies of contemporary Russian geopolitical ideology.

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.