‘Putin’s Rasputin’ or the ‘fascist prophet’ are the two nicknames that are most often imposed on Alexander Dugin, the political theorist and philosopher born in 1962 in Moscow and that with just turned 60 he appears older because of his long beard.
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However, what most attracts the attention of Dugin is not his physical appearance, but the power he seems to exercise over the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and his closest entourage, alluding to the times of Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin, the Russian mystic who exerted a great influence in the last days of the Romanov dynasty.
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As a political theorist, Dugin’s essays would be nothing more than a work with curious and provocative aspects, a kind of apology for Russian ultranationalism.
But in reality its power is much greater, since he is one of the most read and listened to theorists by the Kremlin, in addition to being one of the most widely read authors by the new American and European far-right groups. This added to the fact that, although he does not have an official position in the Russian Government, he is an influential political and military adviser to Putin.
Alexander Dugin is a character who moved on the fringes of the Russian political class during perestroika and the years of President Boris Yeltsin.
However, it was only in the era of Vladimir Putin that he managed to come closer to power in a more direct way and went from being a theoretical gray author, who barely sold, to being a well-known face due to his regular presence on Russian public television.
The philosopher, says the Impakter portal, has also been well positioned to influence Putin through his relationship as a former adviser to Sergei Naryshkin, a key member of the ruling United Russia party.
Naryshkin was appointed head of Russian foreign intelligence in 2016. Like most powerful men in Russia, Naryshkin has direct ties to Putin since their youth, when they were fellow students in a KGB High School group.
However, Dugin’s influence is not based solely on a friendship with Naryshkin.
Dugin, a prolific writer, established his own presence on radio, television and the Internet with the website geopolitica.ru. He has also created many magazines, a publishing house, Arktogaia, and founded in 1998 the New University project to spread his ideas far and wide.
In 1979, when he was just 17 years old, he began to frequent ultra-nationalist circles critical of both the official policy of the Soviet Union and that of the West.
While he began to study engineering at the Moscow Aviation Institute, Dugin was getting closer and closer to mysticism, esotericism and the readings of theoreticians who were leading authors of Nazism, such as Ernst Jünger. In 2005 he got a doctorate in political science and in 2011 another in sociology.
Dugin was getting closer and closer to mysticism, esotericism and the readings of theoreticians who were leading authors of Nazism, such as Ernst Jünger.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Dugin opposed the democratic regime of Boris Yeltsin. During those first years of democracy in Russia, he devoted more and more time to ultranationalist and ethnicist reading and writing. In those years he approached the Belgian Robert Steuckers, a defender of what he called anti-capitalist European nationalism and very close to the neo-Nazis.
Over the past 30 years, Dugin was responsible for founding the National-Bolshevik Party, the National-Bolshevik Front, and the Eurasia Party. He was an adviser to Guennadi Zelezniov, president of the duma, and to Serguei Narychkine, a member of United Russia, Putin’s party.
In addition, he claims to have a “vision” that allows him to recognize the future and claims to be the creator of what he calls “the fourth theory”, the first three being communism, fascism and liberalism.
The “fourth theory” promotes a multipolar world and not one dominated, as he thinks is now the case, by liberalism.
In this sense, Dugin writes against all the values represented by the liberal West that he detests: democracy, trade, gender equality and human rights in general, assuring, as he tells Putin, that Russia must work so that “the peoples” to get rid of the “liberal elites” and for a Russo-Chinese alliance to confront “the Atlanticist world order”.
“The maximum task is the Finnishization of all of Europe,” says the philosopher, describing a vision of States that maintain their entity, but at the cost of submitting to Russian dictation.
To achieve this, Dugin plots as keys: fomenting division and isolationism in the United States, deepening divisions between the United Kingdom and the nations of the European continent, internal destabilization and the use of disinformation to bring Western Europe under German tutelage and control it with the supply of gas and oil.
His great work, Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia (1997), speaks of the construction of an empire that would be called Eurasia and would be, in practice, a totalitarian political structure controlled from Moscow and in which the European countries would no longer be than colonies at the behest of the Kremlin.
This book, written out of post-Soviet-era resentment of lost glory, is a true textbook in Putin’s circle of power and in the Russian military. A manual of imperialist nationalism.
His theory says that Russia and its surroundings are “the civilization of the earth”, the tellurocracy, an entity that must be ruled with a heavy hand and strict laws. And he contrasts it with “the civilization of the sea”, the thalassocracy, which is North America and Western Europe in its head, and whose countries he considers more likely to have more lax laws and weaker leaders who base their power and influence on their power. maritime and in its mercantile dynamism.
“The maximum task is the Finnishization of all of Europe,” says the philosopher, describing a vision of States that maintain their entity, but at the cost of submitting to Russian dictation.
Dugin is one of the lights of the new European fascist movements for his works and also for his sayings.
In 2011, when the Norwegian neo-Nazi Anders Breivik killed almost 100 young Social Democrats who were holding a congress of their party on the island of Utoya, Dugin – openly anti-Semitic – said: “The more Breivik there are, the better.”
Ukraine, key piece
“Ukraine as an independent state with certain territorial ambitions represents an enormous danger for all of Eurasia (…). Without resolving the Ukrainian problem, it makes no sense to talk about continental politics,” Dugin stated in Foundations of Geopolitics.
‘Putin’s Rasputin’ has become more notorious since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began on February 24 because he exposed the taking of this country as a pillar in his theory.
It is still curious, as David Von Drehle recalled in The Washington Post, that the ex-wife of Richard Spencer, one of the leaders of the American alt-right, is Dugin’s translator.
For now, Putin does not seem to go as far as Dugin in his aspirations to conquer all of Europe.
In his speeches in the days leading up to the attack on Ukraine, the Russian president hinted that his quest is to regain control of the territory of the late 19th century Russian Empire rather than those of the Soviet Union.
In addition, when Putin says “Eurasia”, he uses it to talk about the environment close to the country, not the entire continent.
And a denier of dialogue, Dugin says he feels disappointed in Putin after the Russian president sent negotiators to speak with the Ukrainians, because, like other ultra-nationalists, Dugin says that the invasion of Ukraine “it is only the beginning of the operation. We must go forward, only forward”.
IDAFE MARTIN PEREZ
Correspondent of THE TIME
Brussels
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