Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy (Николай Сергеевич Трубецкой, 1890-1938) was a Russian émigré linguist and one of the founders of the Eurasianist movement. After the Russian Civil War he settled in Sofia and then Vienna, where he held the chair of Slavic philology from 1922. With Roman Jakobson he was a leading member of the Prague Linguistic Circle, and his Grundzüge der Phonologie (Principles of Phonology, published posthumously in 1939) is a founding text of structural linguistics.

Trubetzkoy’s political essay Europe and Mankind (Sofia, 1920) attacked Romano-Germanic cultural dominance, and in 1921 he co-authored the collection Exodus to the East with Petr Savitsky, Petr Suvchinsky, and Georges Florovsky, the manifesto of classical Eurasianism. The movement argued that Russia-Eurasia was a distinct civilization, neither European nor Asian. After the Anschluss in 1938 he was interrogated by the Gestapo and died in Vienna that June. His ideas were revived in the late Soviet and post-Soviet period by Lev Gumilev and Aleksandr Dugin and feed directly into contemporary Russian neo-Eurasianist doctrine.

Sources

• Toman, Jindřich. The Magic of a Common Language: Jakobson, Mathesius, Trubetzkoy, and the Prague Linguistic Circle. MIT Press, 1995.
• Laruelle, Marlene. Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire. Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2008.
• Glebov, Sergey. From Empire to Eurasia: Politics, Scholarship, and Ideology in Russian Eurasianism, 1920s-1930s. Northern Illinois University Press, 2017.

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