Article published in the «Slavic Review» — 1991 — Vol. 50 — No. 1 (Spring) — pp. 1-17.
Russia's position between Europe and Asia is once again a timely subject. On the most official level, it figures regularly in Mikhail Gorbachev's pronouncements on foreign policy: somberly invoked either in western capitals in order to press his vision of a "common European home" from the Atlantic to the Urals or in the Far East to affirm the Soviet Union's natural identity as an Asian country. At the same time, dissident intellectual circles in the Soviet Union have been expostulating upon the Europe-Russia-Asia juxtaposition for some years and frequently enough arrive at conclusions very different from those of the general secretary.1 In the west, the complex matrix of historical and strategic problems associated with this juxtaposition is receiving new and serious attention.' That the discourse about Russia's particular relation to Occident and Orient has always been and remains at root ideologically conditioned is a point that hardly needs to be made, and the rather ponderous literature devoted to this question has generally analyzed it from this standpoint.' Nevertheless, (he renewed discussion of this issue provides an opportunity to call attention to one important aspect in this discourse that has been consistently underapprecialed, if not entirely neglected: the deep significance of the specifically geographical dimension of the Europe-Russia-Asia juxtaposition to the larger ideological calculation.
