Aleksandr Dugin

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Aleksandr Dugin

Aleksandr Gel'yevich Dugin (Russian: Александр Гельевич Дугин) (born January 7, 1962) is a Russian political activist and ideological demogogue of the contemporary Russian school of geopolitics often known as "neo-Eurasianism". He is sometimes described as a "notorious apologist of fascism" ^[1]

Dugin comes from a military family. His father was a high-ranking officer of the Soviet military intelligence; his mother is a doctor. In 1979 he entered the Moscow Aviation Institute, but never graduated. His father helped him to get a job in KGB archives, where he found eventually what he was really interested in - forbidden for the general Soviet population works on fascism, eurasianism, world religions and mysticism.

Dugin worked as a journalist, before becoming involved in politics just before the fall of communism. In 1988 he and his friend Geidar Dzhemal joined the nationalist and anti-Semitic group Pamyat. He helped to write the political programme for the newly refounded Communist Party of the Russian Federation under the leadership of Gennady Zyuganov, producing a document that was more nationalist in tone than Marxist.

Dugin soon began publishing his own journal Elementy which initially began by praising Franco-Belgian Jean-François Thiriart, supporter of a Europe "from Dublin to Vladivostok". He also sought an alliance with Alain de Benoist although the Frenchman was discouraged by Dugin's vehement Russian nationalism. Consistently glorifying both Tsarist and Stalinist Russia, Elementy also revealed Dugin's admiration for Heinrich Himmler and Julius Evola, to name but two. He also collaborated with the weekly journal Dyen (The Day), a bastion of Russian anti-Semitism directed by Alexander Prokhanov. Convinced that National Bolshevism needed its own political movement Dugin talked his close ally Eduard Limonov into leading a new group and so the National Bolshevik Front was born in 1994. Dugin then became a prominent member of National Bolshevik Party, but he soon entered in contrast with Limonov and left the NBP to approaching first Yevgenii Primakhov, then Vladimir Putin.

The Eurasia Party, later Eurasia Movement, founded by Dugin in 2002, is said by some observers to enjoy financial and organizational support from Vladimir Putin's presidential office. The Eurasia Party claims support by some military circles and by leaders of the Muslim, Orthodox Christian, Buddhist, and Jewish faiths in Russia, and the party hopes to play a key role in attempts to resolve the Chechen problem, with the objective of setting the stage for Dugin's dream of a Russian strategic alliance with European and Middle Eastern states, primarily Iran. Dugin's ideas, particularly those on "a Turkic-Slavic alliance in the Eurasian sphere" have recently become popular among certain nationalistic circles in Turkey.

One of the basic ideas that underpin his theories is that Moscow, Berlin, and Paris form a "natural" geopolitical axis, because a line or axis from Moscow to Berlin will pass through the vicinity of Paris if extended). Dugin's theories foresee an eternal world conflict between land and sea, and hence, Dugin believes, the U.S. and Russia. He says, "In principle, Eurasia and our space, the heartland Russia, remain the staging area of a new anti-bourgeois, anti-American revolution." According to his 1997 book, The Basics of Geopolitics, "The new Eurasian empire will be constructed on the fundamental principle of the common enemy: the rejection of Atlanticism, strategic control of the USA, and the refusal to allow liberal values to dominate us. This common civilisational impulse will be the basis of a political and strategic union."

Very important in his theories are the influences of Halford John Mackinder and Carl Schmitt, with their ideas of world's history as a continuous struggle between Land (tradition, religion, collectivism) and Sea (progressism, atheism, individualism). Scholars have claimed that he borrowed a few ideas from the Traditionalist School, although his political activism and his far-right agenda are totally at odds with the Perennialist perspective.

Currently Dugin exhibits a healthy respect for Judaism. He is, however, ardently anti-Zionist, regarding Zionism as detrimental to the Russian geopolitical interests. He views Israel as a "strategic base for [the] militant Atlantism" promoted by the US and Britain, but is said to be on good terms with the Russian-Israeli extreme right figures Avigdor Eskin and Avraham Shmulevich.

He has criticized the "Euro-Atlantic" involvement in the Ukrainian presidential election as a scheme to create a "cordon sanitaire" around Russia, much like the British attempted after the first world war. He has criticized Putin for the "loss" of Ukraine, and accused his Eurasianism of being "empty". In 2005, he announced the creation of an anti-Orange youth front to fight similar threats to Russia. In 2007 he was prohibited entering Ukraine for 5 years for his anti-Ukrainian activities.

[edit] Dugin's works

Pop-kultura i znaki vremeni, Amphora (2005), ISBN
Absoliutnaia rodina, Arktogeia-tsentr (1999), ISBN
Tampliery proletariata: natsional-bol'shevizm i initsiatsiia, Arktogeia (1997), ISBN
Osnovy geopolitiki: geopoliticheskoe budushchee Rossii, Arktogeia (1997), ISBN [1]
Metafizika blagoi vesti: Pravoslavnyi ezoterizm, Arktogeia (1996), ISBN
Misterii Evrazii, Arktogeia (1996), ISBN
Konservativnaia revoliutsiia, Arktogeia (1994), ISBN