Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin (; born 7 January 1962) is a Russian political philosopher who is the leading theorist of Russian neo-Eurasianism.
Born into a military intelligence family, Dugin was an anti-communist dissident during the 1980s, and joined the far-right Pamyat organization. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, he co-founded the National Bolshevik Party, which espoused National Bolshevism, with Eduard Limonov in 1993 before leaving in 1998. In 1997, Dugin published his most well-known work, Foundations of Geopolitics, in which he called on Russia to rebuild its influence through alliances and conquest in order to challenge a purported rival Atlanticist empire led by the United States.Shekhovtsov, Anton (2018). Russia and the Western Far Right: Tango Noir, Abingdon, Routledge, p. 43. Dugin founded the Eurasia Party in 2002, and continued to develop his ideology in books including The Fourth Political Theory (2009). His views have been characterized as far-right and fascist.Multiple sources: In a 1999 interview for the Polish magazine Fronda, Dugin explains: "In Russian Orthodox christianity a person is a part of the Church, part of the collective organism, just like a leg. So how can a person be responsible for himself? Can a leg be responsible for itself? Here is where the idea of state, total state originates from. Also because of this, Russians, since they are Orthodox, can be the true fascists, unlike artificial Italian fascists: of Gentile type or their Hegelians. The true Hegelianism is Ivan Peresvetov – the man who in 16th century invented the oprichnina for Ivan the Terrible. He was the true creator of Russian fascism. He created the idea that state is everything and an individual is nothing."
He has rejected liberal democracy and Marxism advocating a "conservative revolution" against Enlightenment ideas in Russia and has drawn on the writings of René Guénon, Julius Evola, Carl Schmitt, and Martin Heidegger.
Dugin was an early advisor to Gennadiy Seleznyov and later Sergey Naryshkin. He served as head of the Department of Sociology of International Relations at Moscow State University from 2009 to 2014, when he lost his post due to backlash after he called for the death of pro-Maidan Ukrainians. Since 2023, he has served as the director of the at the Russian State University for the Humanities.
Dugin is a strong supporter of President Vladimir Putin. Although he has no official ties to the Kremlin, he is often referred to in foreign media as "Putin's brain";Multiple sources:
others say that his influence has been greatly exaggerated. Dugin vocally supported the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea and the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. His daughter, Darya, was assassinated in a car bombing on 20 August 2022. The assassination is widely believed to have been conducted by Ukraine, though the exact relation of the assassins to the Ukrainian government is undetermined.
Early life and education Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin was born on 7 January 1962, in Moscow, into the family of a colonel-general in the GRU, a Soviet military intelligence agency, and candidate of law, Geliy Aleksandrovich Dugin, and his wife Galina, a doctor and candidate of medicine. His father left the family when he was three, but ensured that they had a good standard of living, and helped Dugin out of trouble with the authorities on occasion. He was transferred to the customs service due to his son's behaviour in 1983.
In 1979, Aleksandr entered the Moscow Aviation Institute. He was expelled without a degree either because of low academic achievement, dissident activities or both. Afterwards, he began working as a street cleaner. He used a forged reader's card to access the Lenin Library and continue studying. However, other sources claim he instead started working in a KGB archive, where he had access to banned literature on Masonry, fascism, and paganism.
In 1980, Dugin joined the "Yuzhinsky circle", an avant-garde dissident group which dabbled in Satanism, esoteric Nazism and other forms of the occult. The Yuzhinsky circle gained a reputation for Satanism, for séances, a devotion to all things esoteric – mysticism, hypnotism, Ouija boards, Sufism, trances, pentagrams and so forth. In the group, he was known for his embrace of Nazism which he attributes to a rebellion against his Soviet upbringing, as opposed to genuine sympathy for Hitler. He adopted an alter ego with the name of "Hans Sievers", a reference to Wolfram Sievers, a Nazi researcher of the paranormal. Under the pseudonym, transcribed as Hans Zievers in Cyrillic, he recorded a musical album in 1981-1984.
Studying by himself, he learned to speak Italian, German, French, English, and Spanish. He was influenced by René Guénon and by the Traditionalist School. In the Lenin Library, he discovered the writings of Julius Evola, whose book Pagan Imperialism he translated into Russian.
Career and political views Early activism
In the 1980s, Dugin was a dissident In Russian: and an anti-communist. In Russian: Dugin worked as a journalist before becoming involved in politics just before the fall of communism. In 1988, he and his friend Geydar Dzhemal were involved in the ultranationalist and antisemitic group Pamyat ("Memory"). For a brief period at the beginning of the 1990s he was close to Gennady Zyuganov, leader of the newly formed Communist Party of the Russian Federation, and probably had a role in formulating its nationalist communist ideology. In 1993 he co-founded, together with Eduard Limonov, the National Bolshevik Party, whose nationalistic interpretation of Bolshevism was based on the ideas of Ernst Niekisch. He left the party in 1998 following disputes with Limonov.
Publishing career Dugin published Foundations of Geopolitics in 1997. The book was published in multiple editions, and is used in university courses on geopolitics, reportedly including the Academy of the General Staff of the Russian military. It alarmed political scientists in the US, and is sometimes referenced by them as being "Russia's Manifest Destiny". In 1997, his article, "Fascism – Borderless and Red", described "national capitalism" as pre-empting the development of a "genuine, true, radically revolutionary and consistent, fascist fascism" in Russia. He believes that it was "by no means the racist and chauvinist aspects of National Socialism that determined the nature of its ideology. The excesses of this ideology in Germany are a matter exclusively of the Germans... while Russian fascism is a combination of natural national conservatism with a passionate desire for true changes." The "Waffen-SS and especially the scientific sector of this organization, Ahnenerbe," was "an intellectual oasis in the framework of the National Socialist regime", according to him.Dugin soon began publishing his own journal entitled Elementy, which initially began by praising Franco-Belgian Jean-François Thiriart, belatedly a supporter of a "Euro-Soviet empire which would stretch from Dublin to Vladivostok and would also need to expand to the south, since it require(s) a port on the Indian Ocean." Consistently glorifying both Tsarist and Stalinist Soviet Russia, Elementy also indicated his admiration for Julius Evola. Dugin also collaborated with the weekly journal Den (The Day), previously directed by Alexander Prokhanov. In the journal he obtained the last interview of the Belgian Nazi collaborator Leon Degrelle six months before his death.
Ideology
Dugin was strongly influenced by the Romanian-French writer Jean Parvulesco. He disapproves of liberalism and the West, particularly US hegemony. He asserts: "We are on the side of Stalin and the Soviet Union". He describes himself as being a conservative: "We, conservatives, want a strong, solid state, want order and healthy family, positive values, the reinforcing of the importance of religion and the Church in society". He adds: "We want patriotic radio, TV, patriotic experts, patriotic clubs. We want the media that expresses national interests".
According to political scientist Marlène Laruelle, the thinking of Dugin, main manufacturer of a fascism à-la-russe, could be described as a series of concentric circles, with far-right ideologies underpinned by different political and philosophical traditions (Esoteric Nazism, Traditionalism/Perennialism, the German Conservative Revolution and the European New Right) at its backbone.
Dugin adapts Martin Heidegger's notion of Dasein (Existence) and transforms it into a geo–philosophical concept. According to Dugin, the forces of liberal and capitalist Western civilization represent what the ancient Greeks called ὕβρις (hubris), "the essential form of titanism" (the anti-ideal form), which opposes Heaven ("the ideal form—in terms of space, time, being"). In other words, the West would summarize "the revolt of the Earth against Heaven". To what he calls the West's "atomizing" universalism, Dugin contrasts an apophatic universalism, expressed in the political idea of "empire". Values of democracy, human rights and individualism are considered by him not to be universal but uniquely Western.
In 2019, Dugin engaged in a debate with French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy on the theme of what has been called "the crisis of capitalism" and the insurrection of nationalist populisms.
Eurasianism, and views on geopolitics
Dugin has theorized the foundation of a "Euro-Asian empire" capable of fighting the US-led Western world. In this regard, he was the organizer and the first leader of the ultranationalist National Bolshevik Party from 1993 to 1998 (along with Eduard Limonov) and, subsequently, of the National Bolshevik Front and of the Eurasia Party, which then became a non-governmental association. Dugin's Eurasitic ideology therefore aims at the unification of all Russian-speaking peoples in a single country. His views have been characterised as fascist by critics.
In the early 1990s, Dugin's work at the National Bolshevik Front included research into the roots of national movements and the activities of supporting esoteric groups in the first half of the 20th century. Partnering with Christian Bouchet,The Ordo Templi Orientis Phenomenon. "Mega Therion and his books in the Russian tradition". . Ordo Templi Orientis. Russia a then-member of the French branch of Ordo Templi Orientis, and building on Nationalist and migratory-integrative interest groups in Asia and Europe, they contribute in bringing international politics closer to Russia's Eurasian geopolitical concept.