It was Alexandre Douguine, ultranationalist, who was targeted: his daughter Daria lost her life in an attack on August 20
No doubt Daria Douguina did not have time to suffer. Her father, for his part, fell into a tragedy: it was most probably for him that the 400 grams of TNT were intended, placed under the driver’s seat of the 4×4, which killed the 29-year-old young woman. Alexandre Douguine, an ultranationalist ideologist close to power, found himself at the scene of the tragedy just minutes after the explosion. The sexagenarian with the false airs of Rasputin had spent the end of the afternoon in the company of his daughter, a pretty blonde with a porcelain face, in the western suburbs of Moscow, on the occasion of a festival organized by the movement of Russian extreme right.
Read also: Death of Daria Douguina: “A despicable crime” for Vladimir Putin
After having taken part in a conference entitled “Tradition and history”, of which Douguine was the guest of honour, the two decided, around 9.30 p.m., to go to the capital. At the last minute, the father chose to take another car, leaving his daughter alone behind the wheel of his Toyota Land Cruiser SUV. A few kilometers from the Pushkin Museum-Reserve in Zakharovo, which they had just left, the vehicle suddenly turned into a ball of fire.
The perpetrators of the attack did not completely miss their target. The doctrinal fusion between the father and the daughter had become such, these last years, that if Alexandre Douguine had to perish on August 20, Daria would undoubtedly have taken up the ideological torch. A graduate of the philosophy faculty of Lomonosov University in Moscow and briefly passed by that of Bordeaux-Montaigne, the young woman had been walking in the footsteps of her father for years. Francophone like him, she shares the same ideological references, starting with the cherished philosophers of the Hitler regime Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger, borrowing from the latter the key concept of “Dasein” to name the electronic music group (“Dasein May Refuse” ) that she had ridden as a teenager. Daria Douguina managed the functioning of the neo-eurasist movement founded by her progenitor, an anti-liberal geopolitical current of thought making the world a place of confrontation between civilizations and Russia the home of continental nationalism and conservatism. She spread in the talk shows of the pro-Kremlin media and Russian ultranationalists the theses of her dad.
The despair of a father: Alexandre Douguine, helpless, a few meters from the car where his daughter burned, on August 20.
© DR
This is how, since the start of the war in Ukraine on February 24, the Dugins have been calling in chorus in these media and on the Russian Internet to crush Ukraine. Alexander continued to decline his famous statement from 2014, at the time of the annexation of Crimea: “I think we should kill, kill, kill [les Ukrainiens], there can be no further discussion. Daria, she described the massacres of civilians in Boutcha, northwest of kyiv, by the soldiery of her country as “staged with the corpses of people presented as victims of Russian aggression”. She had gone to the martyr city of Mariupol to converse there on the philosophical meaning of the spaces that Russia is in the process of conquering at the cost of tens of thousands of deaths.
Under the pseudo-philosophical veneer of the Dougins, there is the detestation of Western democracy
Beneath the philosophical veneer of Alexandre Douguine and his daughter, there is in reality a pseudo-intellectual tinkering, “an ideological hodgepodge whose common point is the detestation of anything that closely or remotely resembles Western democracy, explains the philosopher Michel Eltchaninoff, author of the book “In the head of Vladimir Poutine”. Dougin was one of those who, in the 1990s, resuscitated the eurasist current born seventy years earlier within the Russian emigration from Europe, which proclaimed the existence of a geographical unit fundamentally different from the world Romano-Germanic. He claims that Russian civilization has the means to oppose, by violence if necessary, what he considers to be the decadence of the liberal world. »
Alexandre Douguine is one of those people to whom we lend too much. He is described as a philosopher, while this son of a general in the GRU (the Soviet and then Russian military intelligence service) received a mediocre higher education, replaced by a hasty adhesion to nationalist groups. Like the Youjinsky Circle of the writer Yuri Mamleïev (thinker of “Eternal Russia”), the group of the fascistic author Yevgueni Golovin, or the National-Bolshevik Party founded with another writer, Edouard Limonov… In 2008, appointed professor and director of the Center for Conservative Studies at Moscow State University, Dougin finally entered university. However, he was fired in 2014, by decision of the then rector, after his public call to “kill” all those who commit atrocities against Russian partisans in Ukraine.
The next day, investigators examine the debris after the explosion, 40 kilometers southwest of Moscow.
© AFP
At the end of the 2000s, he became famous abroad, establishing himself as a quasi-guru of the Western far right and a figurehead of the global conservative movement. It is in this context that he seduces the French nationalist fringe, in particular the philosopher and essayist Alain de Benoist or the Le Pen family. They see in Alexandre Douguine a man capable of formulating a critique of the liberal-democratic and individualist world, most often letting himself be blinded to the subject of the contradictions of which he is the bearer, he who claims to be a social fascism while being a adversary of so-called Ukrainian Nazism, a theme essentially forged by Kremlin propaganda to justify its territorial claims. The man is taken seriously in France, including by his ideological opponents, Bernard-Henri Lévy agreeing to debate with him at a symposium in the Netherlands in 2019.
Too much is attributed to him, too, as to his power in Russia. Many Western media describe him as “close to Putin” or “Kremlin ideologue”. “He has never physically met Putin”, assures the editorial staff of the online media Meduza, citing sources close to the Russian presidential administration. “He is not familiar with the Kremlin, but his ideas are close to the Kremlin, explains political consultant Konstantin Kalachev. When the regime needs its ideas, it is made to believe that it has influence… which serves Dougin’s interests.”
Who had an interest in assassinating him?
According to Meduza, he does not even have influence over the “old Chekists” and hawks of the Putin regime like Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev. These are, of course, also anti-Western, but they do not seem to believe in his “eurasist” nonsense. In this context, high-ranking officers of the FSB (ex-KGB) would communicate with him, according to Meduza. Dugin is an expert at maneuvering within the layers of the Russian deep state. He is supported, particularly financially, by the “Orthodox oligarch” Konstantin Malofeïev, known for having organized the irruption of the Russian small groups which, at the beginning of 2014, created the separatist movement of Donbass.
Who had an interest in assassinating him? Moscow was quick to point the finger at Ukraine. Two days after the murder, the FSB said it had identified its author: a 43-year-old Ukrainian woman, allegedly a veteran of the Azov battalion, who then fled to Estonia with her 12-year-old daughter. kyiv immediately denied. On the spot, few believe in this thesis drawn in no time and full of inconsistencies. Many remain perplexed but fear that the attempt to remove this political actor who does not bother anyone in Russia is the harbinger, and the pretext, of a new turn of the screw of the regime. Opposition journalist Julia Latynina tweets: “I don’t know who committed the murder of the daughter of Alexander Dugin, a marginal but prominent fascist who moved around without bodyguards. But I believe it will be followed by the Great Terror, like after Fanny Kaplan’s assassination attempt on Lenin or the assassination of Kirov.” The first was a Ukrainian Jewish dissident; the second, a Bolshevik politician whose elimination led to the great purges.