Darya, the daughter of Russian ultra-nationalist Alexander Dugin, died in a car explosion near Moscow. Alexander Dugin is repeatedly referred to by the media as a whisperer or as Putin’s “brain”. Andreas Umland explains who Alexander Dugin is and what he thinks.
SRF: Alexander Dugin is considered an ultra-nationalist. How can its ideology be outlined?
Andreas Umland: In short: This is a Russian version of fascism. Dugin also borrows from Western fascist thinkers from Italy and Germany and has created his own neo-fascist ideology, which he sometimes calls Fourth Theory, sometimes Neo-Eurasism, sometimes Traditionalism. He is a genuine Russian fascist.
What does this neo-Eurasian ideology look like?
It’s elusive because Dugin is a kind of postmodernist thinker who proposes different world designs depending on the situation and the audience. But mostly it is about the end of the liberal order, the western order, and the re-creation of a post-modern, post-liberal civilization that is hierarchical, collectivist, illiberal and would represent a whole new world.
Which Russia does he have in mind and what does this mean for Ukraine?
Ukraine has featured prominently in Dugin’s writing since the 1990s. In his most important work, The Basics of Geopolitics, he outlined what we have been observing for the past six months: namely, a conquest of the Ukrainian territories to the east and south along the Black Sea coast and their incorporation into the Russian Empire.
Legend:
Alexander Dugin giving a speech in 2014.
Reuters | Moscow News Agency
And for him – similar to Putin – Ukraine is a kind of anti-Russia, a lost child of Russian civilization that needs to be brought back home and cleaned up. Specifically, he is already drafting the idea that the Ukrainian state cannot continue to exist.
In particular, the entire Ukrainian Black Sea region must come under Russian control, be it through affiliation, annexation to the Russian Federation or the creation of a new pseudo-state of Novorossiya, Novorossiya. This is something he has remarkably been preaching for a quarter of a century now. And now this is actually finding its way into the official speeches of Russian state officials, to whom Dugin has a considerable distance. He is not part of the Russian state.
Dugin is not an official adviser to the Kremlin.
In the Western media, Dugin is often portrayed as “Putin’s brain”. How big is his influence really?
Dugin’s influence is difficult to measure because, if he exerts any influence on the Kremlin at all, he does so only indirectly. It is not known that he ever met Putin. And its activity is mainly in the media field. With books, lectures and various publications, he has been flooding the Russian media landscape and academic life with these alternative theories of history and visions of the future for three decades now. It is very difficult to determine what repercussions this has on thinking in the Kremlin.
Dugin is a particularly prominent speaker of anti-Western discourse in Russia, but by no means the only one.
What is the role of Dugin and his daughter in the Russian public?
Dugin and his followers are only part of the anti-Western discourse in Russia. Dugin is a particularly distinguished speaker, but far from the only one. And he’s a warmonger, of course. For 30 years he has wanted this war that is taking place now and has prepared it with his rhetoric in public, in academia, in intellectual discourse, in bookstores. However, he is not a spokesman for the Kremlin, nor is he a direct ideologue for the Kremlin.
The interviewer was Ben Huwyler.