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In the last decades of tsarist rule, in addition to debating all the above-mentioned subjects, a trend towards collapsing the boundaries between East and West was noticeable, based on the profound questioning of Eurocentric visions of the world that was to be fully expressed by the Eurasianist movement of the 1920s.
According to this view, western governments fully appreciated the fact that 'knowledge is power', something the tsarist government consistently refused to under- stand.70 While in the 1870s a leading Russian orientalist scholar with liberal political views could assert that among the peoples of Central Asia and India comparisons between Russia and Britain 'always turn out to be unfavourable to Britain',71 by the beginning of the twentieth century, in the context of the growing domestic criticism of Russia's imperial policies, a veteran imperial administrator in Central Asia argued that '[t]hose [Central Asians] who had visited western Europe spoke ... about the grandeur and good order of European cities, about the prosperity and high cultural levels of the countries they had seen; about how much Russia, while being larger, but relatively poor and little cultured, was in fact lagging behind'.72 In turn, whereas the British had managed fully to transform their colonies in North America and Australia into Europe, both politically and culturally, Russians, because of their cultural backwardness, had not achieved the same level of success even in Siberia, argued Iadrintsev, a leader of the Siberian regionalist movement (oblastnichestvo).73
Westernisers often invoked Asia as a warning or even a metaphor for tsarist reaction in their polemics.
One of the more prominent advocates for a tsarist mission on the continent in the wake of the Crimean debacle was Pogodin.
As an element of tsarist foreign policy, Asianism did not survive defeat during the war with Japan in 1905.
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