The Great Eastern Question: Development of the Pro-Eurasian Worldview of Ismail Gasprinsky at the Beginning of the ХХ Сentury

Вестник Российского университета дружбы народов. Серия: История России, 2024

Full text Open access: Gold Metadata (CSL-JSON)
DOI 10.22363/2312-8674-2024-23-3-358-369
Data confidence 70 medium
How this score is calculated

It is built from checkable properties of the record itself: whether the article has a DOI, how many independent sources confirmed its data, whether the required fields are filled in, and how recent the latest confirmation is. Disagreement between sources and a missing identifier lower it. A value of 80 or above means the record was published without further checking; 60 to 79 means it is published at reduced confidence, with a manual check advisable. A record verified by an editor by hand is never pushed below 90 by a recalculation. This scores our data about the article, not the article itself.

Abstract

The article reconstructs the views of the Russian Turkic-Muslim figure and educator Ismail Gasprinsky in 1908-1914. It examines the direction in which I. Gasprinsky's views evolved in relation to a conceptual Russian-Eastern Agreement due to a continued aggravation of domestic and regional international problems at the beginning of the twentieth century. Based on the journalism of the Terdzhiman newspaper, it is revealed that Gasprinsky continued to expand his views to the “Great Eastern Question” during the period and develop the concept of the Eastern Agreement, taking into account the central position of both Russia and Turkey, as well as the Slavs and Turkic peoples in general. However, by the beginning of the twentieth century, the Eastern Question had transformed from Slavic-Turkish issue to Slavic-German one. According to Gasprinsky, the solution was to create a Slavic-Turkic “dam” against the “wave” of Germanism. At the new stage, he did not retreat from his central ideas and continued to remain a supporter of Russian-Muslim cooperation. The author concludes that Gasprinsky's worldview was largely pro-Eurasian in content, and the concept of an eastern agreement had developed by the beginning of the ХХ century to the level of a possible diplomatic breakthrough and had become a significant contribution to early Eurasian social thought and to the intellectual development of Russia and the Turkic world as a whole.