Key Thinkers of the Radical Right
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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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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