Valdai Club

Russian society, including the expert community, remains undecided about the country’s pivot to the East and its reorientation from the Euro-Atlantic area to eastern Eurasia, something that was announced more than 10 years ago. For many analysts, this is a forced move resulting from Russia being “squeezed” out of Europe.

As part of the Eastern Perspective project, Leonid Bliakher, Head of the Department of Philosophy at the Pacific National University in Khabarovsk, told valdaiclub.com about the premises and limitations of Russia’s “turn to the East.”

Russia and the Great Steppe of Kazakhstan emerge as the site of the “assembly” of the new world. The economic heart of the new world definitely beats in China and India. But the veins through which the blood flows are located in the steppe belt.

One of the key elements defining a great nation is the existence of a clear image of its own and common future. It is looking at this image, like in a mirror, that sets the nation’s movement forward. But so it happened that since the collapse of the Soviet Union Russia has tried to look at “others’ mirrors,” building itself through someone else’s matrix. The concept of Russia’s pivot to the East is not a replacement of the European mirror by the Chinese one, but an attempt to create its own, Russian mirror, the Russian image of a common future.