Russian Eurasianism has various origins, the earliest of which is the work of the nineteenth-century philosopher Konstantin Nikolayevich Leontyev, who articulated ancient convictions of “Russian particularism.” It was found also in Russian émigré writers of the 1920s, who drew most importantly on the classic theorist of Geopolitics, the pioneering British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder*. Mackinder’s thesis of a fundamental division between the “Eurasian heartland” and the Atlantic world was developed in his book, Democratic Ideals and Reality, published at the time of the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. The intention of Mackinder, a Unionist [Conservative] member of Parliament and a staunch Imperialist, was to convince the Atlantic powers (Britain and America) of the need to intervene to ensure a balance between the two Eurasian powers, Russia and Germany. Ironically, his work attracted less attention in the Atlantic world than in the Eurasian world.
– Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (2004), p. 226
* Mackinder was a key figure in the establishment of geography as a respectable academic discipline in Britain, the first reader in geography at the University of Oxford (in 1887), and later the first director of the London School of Economics and Political Science (in 1904).