Petr Nikolaevich Savitsky (Пётр Николаевич Савицкий, 1895-1968) was a Russian émigré geographer and economist and, with Nikolai Trubetzkoy, a principal founder of Eurasianism. A co-author of the 1921 manifesto Exodus to the East, he developed the movement’s geographic theory, arguing that the territory of the Russian Empire formed a natural, self-contained world (“Russia-Eurasia”) with its own “place-development” (mestorazvitie). He lived in Prague from the early 1920s, taught there, and worked closely with the linguists of the Prague circle, including Roman Jakobson.

When the Red Army took Prague in 1945, Savitsky was arrested by Soviet counterintelligence and sentenced to the Gulag. Released in 1956, he returned to Prague, where he corresponded with the historian Lev Gumilev, a key link between classical Eurasianism and its post-Soviet revival. His geopolitical concepts were later taken up by Aleksandr Dugin and other neo-Eurasianists close to Russian state circles.

Sources

• 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.