Russia's Mind Games: Alexander Dugin and Russia's War of Ideas

Alexander Dugin is the intellectual who has Vladimir Putin’s back in the emerging ideological conflict between Russia and the West. At home, Putin uses him to create a nationalist, anti-liberal voting bloc, while abroad Dugin is the lynchpin of numerous irregular networks of anti-liberal political resistance and sabotage. No individual better represents the tactics of the current Russian regime.

Since the late 1990s, Dugin has organized his views into a geostrategic ideology and a complex political metaphysics known respectively as Neo-Eurasianism and Fourth Political Theory. The former posits an ongoing archetypal clash between land and maritime civilizations and holds that there is a struggle between, on the one hand, harmonious, land-based societies organized around history and tradition and, on the other, inherently liberal, “Atlanticist” “empires of the sea,” whose capitalistic drive abhors and undermines tradition.

Finally, synthesizing national and foreign policy, Dugin provides Putin with a Eurasian master narrative of Russia’s history—encircled and subordinated by Western liberalism—that provides a rationale and an imperative for expanding territorially at the expense of his neighbors.

Dugin’s ideology already resonates with both high intellectuals and the conspiratorial fringe. His ideas seem tailor-made to exploit continuing economic stagnation, distrust of EU bureaucracy, anxiety at the continuing influx of immigrants, and, crucially, the anxiety of those immigrants themselves, who fear the assault on their traditions that comes as a part of their resettlement in the West.

In a notorious incident on his social network page, he posted the fabricated story of a Russian-speaking boy allegedly crucified in Ukraine by pro-Western militants and released a video in which he declared that the time had come to retaliate and “kill, kill, kill.” Flashing his academic credentials, he added soberly, “I say this to you as a professor.”

Dugin interprets the entire Soviet era not in terms of Marxism-Leninism, but of Eurasianism against the “civilization of the Sea,” and declares Joseph Stalin to have been a hero of Eurasianist ideology. - James Heiser

A review of Dugin's "Last War on War Island"

I have read Dugin’s books and there is no doubt that he wants the destruction of the west. I strongly suggest that you read “The 4th Political Theory” and “Eurasian Mission” if you haven’t read them already. There is no doubt that he believes that we are in the end of days and that he will help usher in the Eurasian Empire. Putin was an early student of Dugin and this theory. I am not sure if he still has that kind of influence over Putin, but Putin has not veered from that plan. The annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Eastern Europe were the first step and ultimately he intends on confronting NATO and causing the breakup of Europe and the West.

Of Dugin? Nope, I'm a Polish citizen since last year and I fear the beast to the east

The entire Eurasian idea is well-known in Polish nationalist circles

My thoughts on this:

Moscow considers itself as a child of not just Byzantium (where it took Orthodoxy and also Caesaropapism) and Kievan Rus (purely in terms of prestige and the rule fo an oligarchy) but also see's itself as the successor state to the great Khans of Mongolia
Yes, the Russian ideology now sees the Mongol rule as more an alliance against the West and sees themselves as a continuation
Ethnically the Muscowites are a mix of Slavs with Finno-Ugric types and with Tatar-Mongol-Turkic folks
Politically they have been the successors of the Khans - despots
Under Ivan IV they took on the dual "tasks" of:
1. Gathering of the Rus - reconquering Rus lands from the Polish-Lithuanians and from the Turco-Mongols
2. Gathering of the Orthodox
To the latter they merged the "Gathering of the Slavs" - this idea failed and they have given it up after two attempts at digesting Poles (each time the Poles gave the Russkis a bad case of indigestion) and the way that Romanians and Bulgarians today are not pro-Russia (thanks to their experience under the USSR's empire)
They are eurasian and see themselves as this central state, but closer to Mongolia than to the West
I support Putin's ambitions to the south (towards Turkey and Syria) for two reasons:
1. It protects ancient Christians
2. It keeps the Russian eagle's eyes firmly away from us

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