Journal of Eurasian Studies

The term Eurasia is a contentious and illusive one and there is no consensus or agreement among authors on its meanings, implications and ramifications. President Nursultan Nazarbayev of the Republic of Kazakhstan introduced and developed his own vision, policies, perceptions and values of Eurasianism which he has been propagating and practicing on a continuous and consistent basis. In fact, the concept of Eurasianism and Eurasian policies have turned into state ideologies which are reflected in domestic, regional and foreign policies as well as in the foundation of the recent regional integration process. The purpose of the article is: to study and review the genesis of the old, popular as well as contemporary schools and thoughts of Eurasianism, their underlying goals, objectives and purposes in order to locate and understand Kazakhstan's views and concepts of Eurasianism in a broad historical and comparative perspectives; to review and critically analyze how President Nazarbayev's visions and policies of Eurasianism are reflected in the country's domestic, regional and foreign policies and what are their implications.

This article presents the author's approach to the study of cultural landscape genesis. Historical and geographical reconstruction of Urals and Siberia served as the empirical basis of the study. A hypothesis that highlights some of the basic morphological components of the cultural landscape on the scale of a given region is set forth based on that reconstruction. Communications and cultural values have been classified as the primary morphological components. The article compares the cultural landscape's communicative structure and two main forms of communication. The first form includes land communication routes and regional settlement patterns, which establish a kind of communicative framework for the cultural landscape of the region. The second form is the circle of social and cultural interactions that directly or indirectly affect the economic development and life activities of regional communities. Each of these forms of communication reflects a certain pattern of cultural values that is specific to a given form of economic development in a geographical region or to a particular historical era. Using this approach, the article studies the spatial organization of the cultural landscape of the Urals and Siberia in an attempt to explain the cultural diversity of various parts of present-day Russia.