Key Thinkers of the Radical Right

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Key Thinkers of the Radical Right Page 28

by Mark Sedgwick (ed)


  Geopolitical Future ( Osnovy geopolitiki: Geopoliticheskoe budushchee Rossii).4

  Commissioned by General Igor Rodionov, minister of defense in 1996– 97,

  and first published in 1997, the book had been reissued four times by 2000

  and enjoyed a large readership in Russian academic and political circles.

  Foundations of Geopolitics became Dugin’s calling- card for reaching out to

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  Alexander Dugin and Eurasianism

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  military circles and the establishment more broadly. Thanks to its success,

  he was invited to teach at the Military Academy of the General Staff of the

  Armed Forces of the Russian Federation and became advisor for geopolit-

  ical affairs to Gennadii Seleznev, then chair of the Duma and a member of

  the Communist Party.5 Through his book, Dugin also influenced the two

  main anti- Yeltsinian political figures of that time, Communist Party of the

  Russian Federation leader Gennadii Zyuganov and Vladimir Zhirinovskii,

  whose cultivated imperialist eccentricities made him one of the most fa-

  mous farcical and caricatured media products to come out of post- Soviet

  Russia.6 Since then, the popularity of Dugin’s book has declined some-

  what, but it is still considered a major— if contested— reference for the

  contemporary Russian school of geopolitics.

  In the 2000s, Dugin underwent a first “crossing of the desert” with the

  disappointing performance of his small Eurasian Party in 2001, followed

  by the very moderate success of the International Eurasianist Movement

  (IEM), launched in 2003. The IEM was quite effective in bringing to-

  gether pro- Eurasianist figures abroad, especially in Turkey;7 it achieved a

  lesser degree of success in the post- Soviet republics and among some of

  Russia’s Muslim leaders.8 However, the IEM failed to unite the Russian

  political establishment; it appealed only to lower- level figures, mostly re-

  tired ambassadors and mid- level civil servants. The IEM’s low member-

  ship testified to Dugin’s inability to secure public support within state

  structures and mainstream political institutions.

  It was only in 2008 that Dugin succeeded in penetrating an established

  institution— Moscow State University (MSU)— with the support of the

  scandal- plagued dean of the Sociology Department, Vladimir Dobrenkov,

  a Soviet- style philosopher and proponent of a nationalist agenda.9 Dugin

  created the Center for Conservative Research within the Sociology

  Department, though he never received tenure and taught there only as an

  adjunct. The Center’s declared objective was to counter the growing suc-

  cess of liberal universities, namely the Higher School of Economics, and

  reinforce the reputation of MSU as a bastion of conservatism by “devel-

  oping and establishing a conservative ideology in Russia” and educating

  the next generation of “scholarly cadres.”10

  Dugin reached a new peak of success between 2012 and early 2014,

  when the Kremlin opened the door for all conservative ideologues to ap-

  pear more visibly on state- controlled media. The government’s first ob-

  jective was to drown out the liberal opposition that emerged during the

  anti- Putin protests of 2011– 12, and then to legitimize its position on the

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  Ukrainian crisis, the annexation of Crimea, and the Donbas insurgency.

  Dugin rapidly became one of the main proponents of Novorossiya— the

  notion that eastern Ukraine’s destiny is to (re)join Russia.11 This time,

  his success was even more brief: too radical in celebrating a nationalist

  “Russian Spring” that vehemently criticized the Putin regime for refusing

  to organize a “national revolution,” Dugin lost both his access to main-

  stream media and his status at MSU. Officially, it was his violent— even if

  maybe metaphorical— call to “kill, kill, kill” Ukrainian nationalists12 that

  led him to lose his position at the university.

  As this brief history illustrates, Dugin has been unable to secure

  himself a position within the Kremlin’s institutions: he has never been

  a member even of the Civic Chamber, coopted by the authorities, and

  it was only in 2014 that one of his protégés, Valerii Korovin, was able

  to get himself elected to it. Since 2015, Dugin has been undertaking a

  second “crossing of the desert,” with support coming almost exclusively

  from the Orthodox business mogul Konstantin Malofeev. Thus far,

  Dugin has been thwarted in his aspiration to become the “gray cardinal”

  of the regime. Contrary to the claims of many Western commentators,

  Dugin is not a member of the Kremlin’s inner ideological circles. He is

  an external figure who can be used or rejected as needed but remains

  more “out” than “in.”

  Work and Thought

  Dugin is a complex theorist. He is a chameleon thinker, and can adapt

  his discourse to different publics, speaking as a convinced proponent

  of Russian statehood and great power before an audience of Russian

  civil servants or senior military leaders while calling for unlimited vi-

  olence against the current political order when he communicates with

  countercultural groups. He is very much a bricoleur, creatively using

  what is currently fashionable to elaborate a (pseudo- )philosophical

  metanarrative that is quite unique in its syncretism, even eclecticism.

  He is a prolific author, with about thirty monographs and textbooks,

  as well as the founder of numerous websites: evrazia.org as a news

  portal on Eurasia, evrazia.info for the IEM, evrazia.tv for podcasts of

  events, arcto.ru for the philosophical and religious aspects of his doc-

  trine, Rossia3.ru for the Eurasian Union of Youth, eurasianaffairs.net for

  publications in English, and so on.

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  Inspirations

  Dugin’s thinking is articulated around five ideological traditions. His first

  inspiration comes from the völkisch occultism of Wirth and the Ahnenerbe

  (Research Community for Ancestral Heritage, an SS- sponsored research

  institute, which Wirth cofounded but was then excluded from),13 with

  references to Aryanism, Hyperborea, Thule, and conspiracy theories. One

  of his attempts to anchor this in the Russian context was to dissociate

  “Fascism” as the historical enemy of Russia— which makes almost full con-

  sensus in today’s Russian society, still deeply shaped by the memory of the

  Second World War— from some ideological elements from Nazi Germany

  and other Far Right regimes. For instance, he rehabilitates the Russophile

  tradition of National Socialism by identifying several pro- Russian forces

  in Nazi Germany, which he labels a “Eurasian order” in order to show that

  they share similar geopolitical perceptions with Russian Eurasianism.

  The second tradition Dugin refers to is Traditionalism, inspired by

  René Guénon and— to an even greater degree— by Julius Evola, with

  whom he shares the vision of a new world to emerge from the ruins of the

  previous one.14 Dugin’s third doctrinal reference is rooted in t
he German

  Conservative Revolution of the 1920s and ’30s: he admires the National

  Bolshevik Ernst Niekisch as well as all authors linked to the German

  Geopolitik at the turn of the twentieth century, such as Karl Haushofer.

  He also refers regularly, but to a lesser extent, to Ernst Jünger, and Carl

  Schmitt. Over the past decade, he has become a fervent proponent of

  Martin Heidegger, in whom he had been interested since his youth, and

  contributed to his rehabilitation in Russia. Like the German philosopher,

  Dugin references Dostoyevsky; he also echoes Heidegger’s view of the

  United States as the ultimate expression of Western culture and of Russia

  as the new dawn that will soon emerge.15

  Dugin also borrows from the French European New Right, a reframing

  of radical Right theories under the influence of some leftist doctrines that

  incorporates anticapitalist rhetoric as well as regionalist and ecological

  stances.16 He has developed complex but long- lasting relations with Alain

  de Benoist in France, Claudio Mutti in Italy, and— to a lesser extent—

  with several other identitarian or National Bolshevik groups in France,

  Belgium, Germany, and Central European countries, as well as in the

  United States.17

  Last but not least, a fifth component of Dugin’s Weltanschauung can

  be found in classical Russian Eurasianism from the interwar period,

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  constructed around the notion of Russia as the pivot of a specific civi-

  lization, Eurasia. Eurasianism states that Russia has an imperial nature

  by essence, based on its continental identity and the need to interact

  with, and control the steppic world, and that a form of religious autoc-

  racy constitutes its primordial political system.18 Also present, though to a

  lesser degree, are some nineteenth- century conservative Russian thinkers,

  such as Konstantin Leontiev and Nikolai Danilevskii, and even more

  marginal allusions to Soviet cultural figures or representatives of leftist

  doctrines. Russia- centric references are clearly peripheral for Dugin, with

  the sole exception of Eurasianism and Orthodoxy— in particular, the Old

  Believer Church (born from schism with a reformed Orthodox Church in

  the seventeenth century); of which he is a member.19

  Key concepts

  A tremendously prolific and eclectic thinker, Dugin has been playing with

  multiple concepts and doctrinal traditions. Two sets of concepts appear in

  his work.

  The first one includes geopolitics and the notion of Eurasia. Dugin

  affirms that the regeneration of the Russian nation will be realized by the

  total— and totalitarian— transformation of the Russian state on the inter-

  national scene. The birth of a new mankind is therefore intimately linked

  not to a biological and cultural entity, that is, the nation (as in classic Nazi

  and Fascist doctrines), but to a state, Russia, and a civilization, Eurasia.

  This explains why radically revisionist transformational geopolitics re-

  mains at the core of Dugin’s worldview, an integral part of its philosoph-

  ical arsenal: Eurasian geopolitics is seen as the concrete implementation

  of a revolutionary solution for post- Soviet Russia.20 Dugin is convinced

  that Europe’s “tellurocracies” (continental powers), particularly Germany,

  should cooperate with Russia to defeat the “thalassocratic” (maritime)

  world exemplified by the British Empire and now the United States.21 He

  sees Geopolitik as simultaneously a holistic and totalitarian science and as

  a Weltanschauung: “Geopolitics is a vision of the world. It is therefore better

  to compare it not to sciences, but to systems of sciences. It is situated on

  the same level as Marxism, liberalism, etc., i.e. systems of interpretation

  of society and history.”22

  The second set of concepts belongs to the Conservative Revolution.

  Contrary to classic conservatism, which calls for slow, gradual changes,

  or immobilism, the Conservative Revolution wants to counter liberalism

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  by a new kind of revolution that would push forward conservative values.

  It thus combines conservative worldviews with revolutionary means, and

  in many aspects prefigures and parallels the Nazi and Fascist regimes.

  Dugin advanced his own version of Conservative Revolution in his 2009

  book, The Fourth Political Theory ( Chetvertaia politicheskaia teoriia), which

  he presented as a new, critical stage for his political thought. In it, he

  stated that he had definitively renounced what he calls the second and

  third political theories (communism and nationalism/ fascism; the first

  theory is liberalism). He considers that liberalism is, in many aspects, a

  totalitarian ideology because of its absolute normative character, and he

  proposes on the contrary to celebrate— in a very Herderian way— the di-

  versity of civilizations and their primordial incommensurability.

  The fourth political theory, he wrote, proposes a complete break with

  the first three because it no longer seeks to accommodate modernity but

  denies it in its entirety. In spite of these declarations of novelty, Dugin

  limits himself to reproducing the definition of Arthur Moeller van den

  Bruck: “Conservatives who have preceded us have sought to stop the

  revolution; we must take the lead.”23 Dugin recognizes for instance that

  the drama of the fourth political theory is that “it was hidden behind the

  third (Nazism and Fascism). Its tragedy is to have been overshadowed his-

  torically by the third, and being allied with it, given the impossibility of

  conducting an ideological war on three fronts [against liberalism, commu-

  nism and nationalism/ Fascism].”24

  Around this dual core of geopolitics/

  Eurasia and Conservative

  Revolution, Dugin has deployed several other concepts. Inspired by

  Jünger and Evola, he cultivates the cult of war as a unique regenerative

  tool to destroy the old world and create a new one. His apocalyptic vision

  has been particularly acute since the start of the Ukrainian crisis, which

  he sees as the final war between the West and Russia and the only way

  for a new Russia to be reborn from its liberal ashes. He nurtures several

  ancient myths from the völkisch and Evolian repertoire, including that of

  Hyperborea/ Thule, with its Aryan undertones, as well as the notion of

  an ancient caste of warriors that will reemerge and take the lead of the

  new world.25 He also celebrates more specifically Russian figures such

  as Baron von Ungern- Sternberg, a White lieutenant- general who con-

  verted to Buddhism. Ungern- Sternberg committed bloody mass atrocities

  during the Russian Civil War, and hoped to re- create a Genghis- khanid

  empire in Siberia. He embodies Dugin’s call for empire and the realiza-

  tion of Russia’s Eurasian destiny in Asia, as well as his metaphysics of war.

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  Dugin calls for a regenerated Europe, detached from any US influ-

  ence, proud of its ancient identity, and of
which Russia would be an inte-

  gral part. He remains ambiguous on his relationship to race. He denies

  classic racism and white supremacists theories, but, inspired by Evola,

  he advocates “spiritual racism,” and considers that races are the soul of

  peoples, endowing them with innate qualities that reveal certain philo-

  sophical principles. He further visualizes a Europe unified in the defense

  of so- called “traditional values.” For instance, in 2012, defending the new

  antigay law in Russia, Dugin declared that Russia “is not a liberal country,

  nor does it pretend to be such,” and thus it refuses “to apply liberal ide-

  ology in the form of obligatory laws, against normalization and juridical

  legitimization of what is considered a moral and psychological perver-

  sion.”26 Unsurprisingly, given his illiberal positioning, Dugin was one of

  the most vocal supporters of Donald Trump during the 2016 election cam-

  paign in the US, going so far as to call on him to launch a “Nuremberg of

  liberalism.”27

  However, unlike many figures of the US and European New Right,

  Dugin is not an Islamophobe: he believes that Shi’a Islam is a natural ally

  of Russia/ Eurasia— it belongs to the Indo- European tradition— and that

  some revolutionary aspects of Sunni Islam can be compatible with the

  principles of the fourth political theory. Yet he shares many of the New

  Right’s ambiguities toward the Jewish world. He sees in Israel a successful

  example of a Conservative Revolution that he admires, but condemns vir-

  ulently the “subversive forces” of Judaism and Freemasonry. The 2014

  Ukrainian crisis rejuvenated his anti- Semitic language: on Western rad-

  ical Right websites, Dugin condemned “cosmopolitan financial elites”

  and Ukrainian “Jewish oligarchs.” He extends support to a certain

  intellectualized white nationalism but refuses concrete violence: “When

  white nationalists reaffirm Tradition and the ancient culture of European

  peoples, they are right. But when they attack immigrants, Muslims, or

  the nationalists of other countries . . . or when they defend the United

  States, Atlanticism, liberalism or modernity, or when they consider the

  white race as being the highest and other races as inferior, I disagree with

  them completely.”28

 

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