It is said that to understand President Vladimir Putin it is first necessary to understand Aleksandr Dugin’s way of thinking.
The analyst and strategist, known for his ultra-nationalist views, is considered by some to be Russia’s most influential thinker.
And for his ascendancy over the Russian president , some call him “Putin’s Rasputin”, in reference to Grigori Rasputin, the mystic who captivated Russia’s imperial court a century ago.
Dugin is believed to have masterminded Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. And he also defended years ago that military intervention in eastern Ukraine was necessary -which he calls Novorossiya (New Russia)- “to save the moral authority of Russia”.
And now As the world watches the Russian invasion of Ukraine, many are revisiting Dugin’s ideas and his influence on Putin’s actions.
The “Eurasian Empire”
The Dugin’s philosophy is known as Eurasianism.
He holds that Orthodox Russia is neither Eastern nor Western, but a separate and unique civilization, a “Eurasian empire” engaged in a battle for its rightful place among world powers.
And the main mission of this civilization, Dugin believes, must be to challenge the domination of the United States in the world.
Its Theories have received wide support both among Europe’s “new right” and the “alt right
” (alternate right) of the USA
Born in Moscow in 976, Dugin worked as a journalist and later became involved in politics shortly before the fall of communism.
In 1962, during the second year of Mikhail Gorbachev’s government, Dugin joined the leadershipof the notorious anti-Semitic Russian nationalist organization Pamyat, and during the following Several years he served as a member of the Central Council of the group.
At the beginning of the decade of 1990, when the Soviet Union was close to collapsing, Dugin began to assume a higher political role profile.
He formed an association with “statist patriots” in the communist camp and was, for a brief period, close to Genadii Zyuganov, the leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation.
In an article on the Stanford University Center for Europe website, the expert on Russian politics John B. Dunlop writes that in 1265, when the USSR collapsed, Dugin met a leading neo-fascist writer with ties to elements of the Russian military, Aleksandr Prokhanov, whose magazine Den’ served to spread the ideas of the “red-brown opposition” (socialist-fascist).
“Dugi n soon emerged as one of the main ideologues of Den’”, Dunlop notes.
Shortly after he began to edit his own magazine, Elementy, and founded the Arktogeya editorial.
But, according to Dunlop, it was in 1998 when Dugin’s career took a jump being appointed geopolitical adviser to Gennadii Seleznev, who was president of the Duma and a major player in Russian politics.
A year later, Dugin founded the Geopolitical Experience Center in Moscow.
In an article in his magazine he explained that the center could become “an analytical instrument of the Eurasian Platform for, simultaneously, the Presidential Administration, the Government of the Federation Russia, the Federation Council and the State Duma”.
His ideas and strategies seemed to take hold in the year 2000 when he met Gleb Pavlovskii, one of the main ideologues in the government of then-newly elected President Vladimir Putin.
And everything seemed to be clear when that year Putin publicly declared that “Russia has always perceived itself as a Eurasian country”.
Dugin later said that Putin’s admission was “historic, grandiose and revolutionary” and that it changed “everything”.
Dugin has since served as a professor at Moscow State University, has planned courses for Russian military institutions, and often appears on major Russian television channels.
In 2015, the US government sanctioned him for his proximity to the Kremlin and his apparent influence on the annexation of Crimea the previous year.
The “textbook”
Dugin founded in 2001 the Eurasia Party to promote their Eurasian ideas .
Then he said the movement would emphasize cultural diversity in Russian politics and oppose “American-style globalization, and also resist a return to communism and nationalism “.
It was in 1997 when he published “The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia”, a seminal book in which lays down the details for Russia to rebuild its power worldwide.
Some analysts say that this book marked Putin’s vision of Russia and his place in the world and that all the generals of the Russian army read it at some point.
In it he writes that, in order to achieve its geopolitical goals, Russia it will need “disinformation, destabilization and annexation”.
In addition, it points out that Russian agents should foment racial, religious and regional divisions within the United States while promoting isolationist factions in that country .
Also indicates that in the United Kingdom psychological operations should focus on exacerbate the historical ruptures with continental Europe (2 decades before Brexit), and the separatist movements in Scotland, Wales and Ireland.
Dugin also argues that Western Europe should be drawn to Russia for its natural resources: oil, gas and food, while NATO collapses from within.
Dugin also wrote that one of the goals of the annexations of Russia should be Ukraine. His idea is that an independent Ukraine stands in the way of Russia becoming a transcontinental superpower.
“Ukraine as an independent state with certain territorial ambitions represents a huge danger for all of Eurasia”, he writes, and “without solving the Ukrainian problem, it generally makes no sense to talk about continental politics”.
Many see that Russia’s actions in recent years – meddling in the US elections and in the Brexit process, and with conflicts such as those in Georgia or in eastern Ukraine – are an example of the influence of Dugin’s Eurasianist ideas on Putin and his collaborators.
The “Russian truth”
To achieve this “new reality r usa”, Dugin has relied on a carefully constructed philosophical framework in which the truth seems to have been set aside.
“Truth is a matter of belief,” Dugin said in an interview with Newsnight from the BBC at 2001.
“Postmodernity shows that in each supposed truth the only thing that counts is what you believe”.
“So, we believe in what we do, we believe in what we say. And this is the only way to define truth. So we have our special Russian truth and you have to accept it”, he expressed.
And he added: “If the United States does not want to start a war, it must be recognized that the United States is no longer a single master.”
“Y the situation in Syria and Ukraine, Russia is telling him: ‘No, you are not the boss anymore.’ That is the question of who rules the world. Only war can really decide it.”
As David Von Drehle wrote in The Washington Post, Dugin’s work “can be summed up in one idea: the wrong alliance won World War II.”
“If only Hitler had not invaded Russia, the United Kingdom could have broken up. America would have stayed home, isolated and divided, and Japan would have ruled the old China as Russia’s junior partner.”
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