Reception
Dugin’s greatest success in reaching a genuinely broad audience in Russia
dates back to the mid- 1990s, with his Foundations of Geopolitics. He played
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a critical role in promoting geopolitics and conferring on it academic re-
spectability in the Russian university system, as well as in offering the
broader public a geopolitical vision of Russia’s natural and legitimate great
power status. Yet his other doctrines remain largely untouched by this
success and have influenced only a small group of supporters, mostly in
countercultural circles. This outreach is primarily done by websites, as
well as by the so- called New University— launched in 1998 on Dugin’s
initiative— which diffuses Traditionalist ideas through classes with former
Yuzhinsky Circle disciples and their intellectual descendants.
If Dugin was a trendy author in Russia in the second half of the
1990s, he has progressively lost his appeal. With only thirty- six thousand
followers in 2017, his Twitter account is dramatically underfollowed for
a figure who claims to be an ideological agenda- setter. Through his mul-
tiple websites and the publication of textbooks prominently displayed in
bookstores, he still retains some influence among Russian students and
intellectual groups interested in geopolitics, conspiracy theories, and al-
ternative history— domains that flourish in Russia, especially in provin-
cial cities. But in terms of shaping the newspeak of the Putin regime, he
has been bypassed by many other ideological producers, who offer less
esoteric doctrines more in tune with the needs of the presidential admin-
istration. Dugin plays a relatively modest role even in Prokhanov’s latest
attempt to shape the Kremlin’s language: the Izborsky Club, launched in
2012.29
Between 2008 and 2014, Dugin focused on producing textbooks— a
commercially profitable market— and devoted much of his energy to
structuring a so- called “conservative curriculum” which could be integrated
into university programs. It offered students traditional courses (geopol-
itics and social sciences, international relations, introduction to structur-
alism, sociology of Russian society, introduction to religious studies, and
introduction to philosophy), as well as less conventional disciplines (so-
ciology of the imagination, sociology of geopolitical processes, deep soci-
ology, ethnosociology, and postphilosophy).30
Contrary to the belief of those Western commentators who view him
as “Putin’s guru,” Dugin has little direct access to the highest echelons
of the presidential administration; he is not part of the Kremlin’s main
institutions, nor of their socializing mechanisms. Available public sources
do not document direct contacts between Dugin and the presidential ad-
ministration. Putin and Dugin reportedly met a few months after the
former’s accession to power,31 and Dugin was also a part of the entourage
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that accompanied Putin on his visit to Mount Athos, the Orthodox
Christian holy site in Greece, in May 2016, but we have no detailed in-
formation on Dugin’s supposed personal connections with the Kremlin’s
“gray cardinals,” nor with the president or deputy president of the pres-
idential administration— figures such as Alexander Voloshin, Vladislav
Surkov, and Viacheslav Volodin. Surkov, in particular, is known to harbor
personal hatred for Dugin’s esoteric imperialism.
Dugin can, however, rely on some go- betweens, and there are several
identifiable niches connecting him to certain segments of the Kremlin’s
kaleidoscope. As a member of the branch of the Old Believer faith that
has been reintegrated into the Moscow Patriarchate, Dugin has been able
to cultivate close relations with some political circles within the Russian
Orthodox Church. His personal connection with the Orthodox businessman
Konstantin Malofeev secure him both status and revenues. Through the
Yuzhinsky Circle, which has hosted numerous countercultural figures,
Dugin has also been in contact with many media personalities: musicians,
artists, and journalists. To this day, he retains the support of two major fig-
ures on Russia’s media landscape: Mikhail Leontiev, long regarded as one
of Putin’s preferred television presenters, and now press officer of the oil
giant Rosneft, and Ivan Demidov, the founder of the Orthodox television
channel Spas, which has given Dugin a regular televisual platform.
Over the past thirty years, Dugin can point to just two periods of suc-
cess. The first one came in the second half of the 1990s, when his in-
fluence among military circles reached its peak, thanks to his decision
to move away from the countercultural National Bolshevik Party and re-
connect with Alexander Prokhanov and his networks in the military and
the security services. Dugin was thus able to teach at the Academy of the
General Staff, as well as work as a consultant for some Duma committees.
His greatest achievement was probably becoming Seleznyev’s advisor in
1998, since it was the only time that he was part of policymaking. But his
success was short- lived: in the early 2000s, Dugin found himself in deep
opposition to Putin, then perceived as a liberal and pro- Western statesman,
and felt himself sidelined by the groundswell of support for Putin and the
latter’s ability to recapture patriotic feelings and the nationalist narrative.
He gained new visibility from 2008 to 2014, after having penetrated the
Moscow State University, and reached the peak of his media influence
in 2012– 14, during Putin’s third mandate “conservative turn.” Soon after-
ward, he once again lost any solid institutional status and outreach ability
due to his excessively radical positioning during the Ukrainian crisis.
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Dugin’s reception outside Russia
Paradoxically, Dugin has had more success abroad than in Russia. His
ability to speak several European languages, to translate and be translated,
contributes to this visibility.32 One of the first Russian figures to build
bridges with the European radical Right, Dugin has, since the early 1990s,
been able to rely on a large network of supporters in France and Italy
for Western Europe, in Greece and Hungary for Central Europe and the
Balkans, as well as in the United States among the so- called Alt Right.
In France and Belgium, Alain de Benoist familiarized Dugin with New
Right doctrine. The Belgian Robert Steuckers, another GRECE alumnus,
proved to be an even greater influence on Dugin, introducing him to works
by the major authors of German geopolitics, such as Karl Haushofer, as
well as to contemporary conspiracy theories about US world domination.
Steuckers was also the one to rally Dugin behind National Bolshevism
and to connect it to the European Liberation Front, originally founded
by Francis Parker Yockey and Otto Strasser and reanimated i
n the early
1990s by movements such as Nouvelle Resistance, with figures like
Christian Bouchet in France and José Antonio Llopart in Spain. Dugin
also drew inspiration from meeting Jean Thiriart, a fervent supporter
of a unified Euro- Soviet space, who at that time led a small National-
European Community Party ( Parti communautaire national- européen). In
Italy, his friend Claudio Mutti has inspired several pro- Russian and pro-
Islam movements, and launched several Eurasianist initiatives loosely
connected to Lega Nord.
In the 2000s, Dugin consolidated new support in Hungary, especially
among the radical Right party Jobbik (Right Choice), and in Greece, with
links both with the radical Left party SYRIZA (Coalition of the Radical
Left) and with the radical Right party Golden Dawn (Chrysí Avgí), sharing
the same combination of Orthodoxy and völkisch occultism as his own.
Dugin has also reached out beyond Europe. In the United States, he de-
veloped contacts with members of the Alt Right movement. Several white-
supremacist activists such as Preston Wiginton, Matthew Heimbach, and
the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, all interviewed him or invited him for
Skype conferences: being on the US sanctions list following the Donbas in-
surgence, Dugin cannot travel to the United States. In 2011, he established
contacts with Brazil, including an online debate with the journalist and
Traditionalist thinker Olavo de Carvalho, a disciple of René Guénon and
Frithjof Schuon, who is close to some Islamist movement, and currently
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in exile in the United States. Dugin traveled to Brazil in early 2013, visiting
several universities, where he met with Heidegger- focused circles and was
introduced to the thought of Vicente Ferreira da Silva.
Conclusion
Dugin remains the main introducer, translator, mediator, and aggregator
of radical Right theories in post- Soviet Russia. In the three decades since
perestroika, he has been able— both literally (he reads the main European
languages, and speaks excellent French and English and good German)
and intellectually translate a broad literature in order to nativize it and
adapt it to the Russian context. Dugin should be read not only as an ide-
ological bricoleur but an intellectual chameleon. He adapts his doctrinal
stock to the current fashions of the time, giving, at first glance, the impres-
sion that he regularly changes his mind. But this bricolage is motivated,
above all, by his unceasing drive to court a new readership, as well as by
the need to secure niches in the publishing market.
Dugin’s unfailing loyalty to European doctrines makes him unique in
contemporary Russia. He has approached this rich intellectual domain
with different lenses: first the esoteric one (Guénon and Evola), which he
mastered during his dissident years with the Yuzhinsky Circle, followed
by the geopolitical lens (European New Right and Haushofer-
style
German Geopolitik), and, most recently, the philosophical one, which has
Heidegger as its iconic figure. Guénon’s Traditionalism and Orthodox-
themed religious prose are used as metaphysical arguments to justify the
choice of a religious, revolutionary autocracy as Russia’s national ideology.
The framing of Eurasianism allows Dugin to instrumentalize a term that
has familiarity and prestige among the Russian public and thus associate a
Russophile and “clean hands” radical Right doctrine with Russia’s future.
Dugin epitomizes the space created in contemporary Russia for ideo-
logical entrepreneurship. He is the only figure to have selected European
radical Right doctrinal traditions as his product for ideological mar-
keting, and his success in Russia has been limited. His efforts to influ-
ence Russia’s broader geopolitical narrative have prospered, but his work
to introduce doctrinal content inspired by the European radical Right has
not. The ideological contexts in which he has flourished have been the
ones where he has acted as a chameleon, claiming to be in tune with
the rest of society— Russia’s great power status and leading role in its
Eurasian “near abroad,” Soviet- style patriotism, and reference to Europe
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and conservative values as Russia’s own identity. Meanwhile, he has failed
to anchor new ideological toolkits— be they völkisch occultism, Guénon’s
and Evola’s Traditionalism, or the German Conservative Revolution— in
Russian public opinion or in the minds of Kremlin decision makers.
Only some aspects of the French and European New Right have been
integrated into Moscow’s narrative— namely, the need for a unified
and continental Europe that integrates Russia but excludes the United
States— but these ideas are drawn not from the New Right itself but from
more mainstream populist parties (which explains the Kremlin’s willing-
ness to co- opt them). Abroad, in contrast, Dugin is interacting closely
with New and Alt Right groups and their leaders, reaching out to a large
number of European and American movements.
Notes
1. Aleksandr Dugin, Tampliery proletariata: Natsional-
bol’shevizm i initsiatsiia
(Moscow: Arktogeia, 1997), http:// www.e- reading.club/ chapter.php/ 85175/ 5/
Dugin_ - _ Tamplery_ Proletariata.html.
2. Marlene Laruelle, “The Iuzhinsky Circle: Far- Right Metaphysics in the Soviet
Underground and Its Legacy Today,” Russian Review 75, no. 4 (2015): 563– 580.
3. Fabrizio Fenghi, “Making Post- Soviet Counterpublics: The Aesthetics of Limonka
and the National- Bolshevik Party,” Nationalities Papers 45, no. 2 (2017): 182– 205.
4. On Dugin’s book, see John B. Dunlop, “Aleksandr Dugin’s ‘Neo- Eurasian’
Textbook and Dmitrii Trenin’s Ambivalent Response,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies
25, no. 1– 2 (2001): 91– 127.
5. For further details on Dugin’s connections with military circles, see Dunlop,
“Dugin’s ‘Neo- Eurasian’ Textbook,” 94 and 102.
6. Andreas Umland, “Aleksandr Dugin’s Transformation from a Lunatic Fringe
Figure into a Mainstream Political Publicist, 1980– 1998: A Case Study in the
Rise of Late and Post- Soviet Russian Fascism,” Journal of Eurasian Studies 1
(2010): 144– 152.
7. See Vügar İmanbeyli, “Failed Exodus: Dugin’s Networks in Turkey,” in Eurasianism
and European Far Right: Reshaping the Europe- Russia Relationship, ed. Marlene
Laruelle (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2015), 145– 174.
8. Aslambek Aslakhanov, then- advisor to the Russian president; Eduard Kokoity,
president of the self- proclaimed Republic of South Ossetia; and Talgat Tadzhuddin,
chairman of the Central Spiritual Board of Muslims.
9. Vadim Rossman, “Moscow State University’s Department of Sociology and the
Climate of Opinion in Post- Soviet Russia,” in Eurasianism and European Far
Right: Reshaping the Europe- Russia Relationship, ed. Marlene Laruelle (Lanham,
MD: Lexington, 2015), 55– 76.
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10. “Razvitie i stanovlenie konservativnoi ideologii v Rossii s oporoi na nauchnye
kadry,” Center for Conservative Research, http:// konservatizm.org/ about.xhtml.
11. Marlene Laruelle, “The Three Colors of Novorossiya, or the Russian Nationalist
Mythmaking of the Ukrainian Crisis,” Post- Soviet Affairs 32, no. 1 (2015): 55– 74.
12. The video in which Dugin made this call is available at www.youtube.com/
watch?v=R_ 63IswcVnA.
13. Michael H. Kater, Das “Ahnenerbe” der SS 1935– 1945: Ein Beitrag zur Kulturpolitik
des Dritten Reiches (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2006).
14. Andreas Umland and Anton Shekhovtsov, “Is Dugin a Traditionalist? ‘Neo-
Eurasianism’ and Perennial Philosophy,” Russian Review 68 (October 2009): 662–
678. See also Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the
Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2004), as well as Andreas Umland, “Classification, Julius Evola and the
Nature of Dugin’s Ideology,” Erwägen, Wissen, Ethik 16, no. 4 (2005): 566– 569.
15.
See Aleksandr Dugin, Martin Khaidegger: filosofiia drugogo nachala
(Moscow: Akademicheskii proekt, 2010); Aleksandr Dugin, Martin
Khaidegger: vozmozhnost’ russkoi filosofii (Moscow: Akademicheskii proekt, 2011).
On Dugin’s Heideggerianism, see Jeff Love and Michael Meng, “Heidegger and
Post- Colonial Fascism,” Nationalities Papers 45, no. 2 (2017): 307– 320.
16. See Peter H. Merkel and Leonard Weinberg, eds., The Revival of Right Wing
Extremism in the Nineties (London: Frank Cass, 1997).
17. More details in Anton Shekhovtsov, Russia and the Western Far Right: Tango Noir.
Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right (London: Routledge, 2017).
18. Anton Shekhovtsov, “Aleksandr Dugin’s New Eurasianism: The New Right à
la russe,” Religion Compass 3– 4: (2009): 697– 716; Marlene Laruelle, Russian
Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Press/
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
19. Dugin joined the Old Believer Church in 1999. He presents the Russian schism
of the seventeenth century as the archetype of Traditionalist thought, born of
rejection of the secularization of Orthodoxy, which he dates to around the same
Key Thinkers of the Radical Right Page 29
