Once considered a fringe movement, ‘Eurasianism’ has been catapulted to the center of the political conversation over the past year, as Western analysts attempt to understand Russia’s motives and objectives in the war in Ukraine. Associated primarily with Russian political philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, Eurasianism sees Russia’s geographic location, history, and tradition as grounds for a political doctrine that seeks to develop a counterweight to both globalist pretensions and Western endeavors. Thus, the Eurasian continent—shaped by unique geographical and cultural characteristics—is seen as a bastion of conservative values; Eurasianists like Dugin thus posit that only Russia can act as a bulwark against Western liberalism and decadence.
It is, admittedly, an unexpected and controversial theory that has many in the West scrambling to make sense of it. Recently, the Danube Institute, a prominent conservative think-tank in Budapest, hosted an event to publicly discuss Eurasianism. Entitled “Eurasianism as a Response to Global Crisis: Dugin’s Political Ideology in Historical and Contemporary Context,” the event brought together several prominent scholars to explore the ideology of Eurasianism—especially its most prominent contemporary spokesman, Dugin—and to consider its impact on politics in Russia today.
On the origins of Eurasianism
Although there were other speakers like Anton Bendarzsevszkij, director of research at the Hungary-based Oeconomus Economic Research Foundation, the main speaker was Dr. Brittany Pheiffer Noble, an expert on modern Russian intellectual history, who traced Eurasianism’s origins back to Russian émigrés in Europe during the 1920s—among them, such prominent figures as Prince Nikolai Trubetzkoy, Pyotr Savitsky, and Roman Jakobson. Those early Eurasianists, she said, resorted to vast amounts of research across an array of fields (such as linguistics, anthropology, philosophy, literature, and history) and developed the theory that Russia represented a unique and separate world civilization—one which, while sharing characteristics with both Europe and Asia, belongs to neither and, in fact, represents a unique synthesis of the two.
While such Eurasianists saw Russia as the center and necessary leader of this Eurasian civilization, they did not see this culture as being limited to Russia alone. Rather, they saw it as extending across vast swathes of Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Siberia—roughly those areas that had comprised the original Russian Empire. Moreover, they viewed this civilization as intractably opposed to the “atheistic, liberal, and materialistic culture” of modern Western Europe, believing that it was Russia’s “duty” to lead Eurasia in such a way as to counterbalance Western supremacy.
The Eurasianists also drew on the work of Sir Halford Mackinder, one of the founders of the discipline that later came to be known as geopolitics, asserting that the key to world power was to control the heartland of the world’s largest land mass, meaning Eastern Europe and Russia. Inspired by Mackinder, the Eurasianists asserted that Russia’s land-based power was perpetually in conflict with the West’s dominance of the seas.
While they were not Communists, many of the early Eurasianists were hopeful that the then-fledgling Soviet Union could be transformed into a Eurasianist superpower. This was not to be, however, as Eurasianism was frowned upon by the Communist Party, and the ideology disappeared from political discourse after the 1930s.
Dr. Noble went on to describe how Eurasianism was later revived in the work of Lev Gumilev, a Russian anthropologist and ethnologist who undertook studies of the Eurasian steppe peoples during the ‘50s and ‘60s. Gumilev came to the conclusion that the various peoples of Eurasia had developed their unique characteristics as a result of their nomadic lifestyles and deep connection to the land, and asserted that, as a result of this, Russians have deep ties to the Mongols and Turkic peoples. Like the earlier Eurasianists, Gumilev believed that Russia has a mission to defend Eurasia from Western decadence and materialism.
Gumilev’s ideas were never accepted by the Soviet authorities, and he did not influence any notable thinkers in the Soviet Union during his lifetime. However, after the collapse of the USSR, a young Russian dissident was to rediscover the work of both Gumilev and the early Eurasianists and apply it to the new age: Aleksandr Dugin.
The origins of Aleksandr Dugin
Dugin was something of a rebel in his youth, once even running afoul of the Soviet authorities. But as his political views developed during the 1980s, he came to see the USSR—as imperfect as it was—as a necessary bulwark against the spread of Western liberalism and political dominance throughout the world.
Once the USSR collapsed, Dugin saw the triumph of what he terms the “Atlanticist West,” centered in the United States and Western Europe. This was accompanied with what he considered Russia’s prostration before—and adoption of—its former enemy’s values under Boris Yeltsin. Dugin considered this an unparalleled geopolitical catastrophe—not only for Russia but for the entire world, given that all those nations which had relied on Soviet support were suddenly entirely at the mercy of American-style liberalism and globalization. (It is worth noting that while Dugin seems to lament the loss of the USSR as a world power, he has never advocated for a return to Communism—most likely since he is a devout adherent of Russian Orthodoxy.)
Dugin’s first attempt at rekindling what he saw as the ‘true’ Russian spirit was his collaboration with the National Bolshevik Party, which was founded in 1993 and led by the punk writer and former Soviet dissident Eduard Limonov. National Bolshevism was an offbeat attempt to fuse elements of Stalinism with those of radical nationalism, a heady cocktail that combined the punk-rock spirit, pranksterism, and avant-garde artistic aesthetics. The party was ultimately banned in 2007 (although some Russian artists and intellectuals have continued to identify as National Bolsheviks to the present day).
In time, Dugin came to find National Bolshevism too limiting and eventually left the party in 1998. In 2002, he founded his own ‘Eurasia Movement,’ which presented itself as a political party—but which Dr. Noble said has probably never had a membership of more than a few hundred people. Dugin’s new brand of Eurasianism, which he terms ‘Neo-Eurasianism,’ propagates similar geopolitical views as the earlier Eurasianists, but he has been much more strident in advocating aggressive actions by Russia to restore what he believes to be Russia’s rightful place as the guardian and protector of the region.
The Fourth Political Theory
Dugin has combined his brand of Eurasianism with a political doctrine that he terms the “Fourth Political Theory,” a new ideology that draws on aspects of the first three global ideologies—liberalism, communism, and fascism—but seeks to transcend them all. The Fourth Political Theory pursues a new type of society in which all people are free to live according to their own particular set of traditional values—while resisting the purely materialistic and nihilistic values being exported by the West. In fact, Dugin has encouraged other illiberal powers (such as China and Iran) and the populist parties of both the Left and Right in Europe to join Russia in this effort—and has even acted at various times as unofficial Kremlin ambassador to many of these countries, movements, and groups.
Dugin’s Eurasia Movement was initially hostile to Vladimir Putin when he assumed the presidency in 2000, believing that he would merely continue Yeltsin’s efforts to liberalize and Westernize Russia. But once it became clear that Putin’s agenda was similar to their own, Dugin and his movement became staunch—though not always uncritical—supporters. It is also the case that official Kremlin policy, whether consciously or not, has indeed gradually drifted ever closer to Dugin’s positions on many issues over the years.
In fact, Putin has frequently echoed Dugin’s Eurasianist views in public statements, beginning with his infamous Munich speech of 2007. Additionally, it is worth noting that both Putin and Dugin are members of the high-level think tank the Valdai Discussion Club, a Moscow-based think-tank and intellectual forum, so there can be no question that Putin is aware of Dugin’s ideas—though there are questions regarding his influence during the current war in Ukraine.
But the fact remains that, since Ukraine’s Maidan revolution in 2014, Dugin has been one of the most radical voices calling for Russia to use military force to put an end to the pro-Western and anti-Russian trends that were becoming prominent in that country. He even called for Russian tanks to go “all the way,” shortly after the pro-Russian regime of Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown. Such violent rhetoric, particularly towards Ukraine, has obviously made him a target for assassination—and in a car bomb attack on August 20, 2022, meant for him, he lost his daughter, Daria Dugina, a journalist who was also an exponent of her father’s ideology.
Does the West really understand Dugin?
Still, according to Noble, the Western media tends to exaggerate Dugin’s importance—perhaps due to the fact that he’s more accessible than other Russian thinkers. She argued, instead, that Dugin’s influence within Russia is largely restricted to countercultural fringe circles, noting that his network is closely interconnected with Moscow’s avant-garde literary and artistic scene.
Although Noble’s overview of Dugin’s principal ideas was quite thorough, she left out several key elements that are crucial for a complete understanding of his worldview. For instance, as other scholars have argued, it is impossible to understand the background of Dugin’s political ideas without investigating his long-time personal and political affiliation with the French ‘Nouvelle Droite’ school and its preeminent thinker, Alain de Benoist, or his relationship with the Belgian geopolitical theorist Jean Thiriart. The influence of both permeates Dugin’s thought at the deepest level—most clearly in terms of the complete rejection of American hegemony and the universalization of liberal values, as well as in the desire to see the nation-state supplanted by pluralistic geopolitical blocs.
Similarly, it is difficult to fully understand Dugin without reference to Martin Heidegger. Dugin himself claims Heidegger’s concept of Dasein—or the state of human being—as the basis of the Fourth Political Theory. He also finds some commonalities with the metaphysical doctrines of the so-called Traditionalist school of religious thought, particularly as exposited by René Guénon.
Without knowing the basics of such philosophical movements, Dugin’s own notions of what politics, religion, and tradition are—as well as the basis for his rejection of all values that claim to be universal—cannot be fully understood. So, whatever the outcome of the current war may be, one thing is certain: understanding the ideas of Aleksandr Dugin may, in fact, be one of the best ways to understand the transformations currently underway in Russia.
Did Aleksandr Dugin’s Neo-Eurasianism Inspire Russia’s War in Ukraine?
Aleksandr Dugin.
Photo: Kirill KUDRYAVTSEV / AFP
Once considered a fringe movement, ‘Eurasianism’ has been catapulted to the center of the political conversation over the past year, as Western analysts attempt to understand Russia’s motives and objectives in the war in Ukraine. Associated primarily with Russian political philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, Eurasianism sees Russia’s geographic location, history, and tradition as grounds for a political doctrine that seeks to develop a counterweight to both globalist pretensions and Western endeavors. Thus, the Eurasian continent—shaped by unique geographical and cultural characteristics—is seen as a bastion of conservative values; Eurasianists like Dugin thus posit that only Russia can act as a bulwark against Western liberalism and decadence.
It is, admittedly, an unexpected and controversial theory that has many in the West scrambling to make sense of it. Recently, the Danube Institute, a prominent conservative think-tank in Budapest, hosted an event to publicly discuss Eurasianism. Entitled “Eurasianism as a Response to Global Crisis: Dugin’s Political Ideology in Historical and Contemporary Context,” the event brought together several prominent scholars to explore the ideology of Eurasianism—especially its most prominent contemporary spokesman, Dugin—and to consider its impact on politics in Russia today.
On the origins of Eurasianism
Although there were other speakers like Anton Bendarzsevszkij, director of research at the Hungary-based Oeconomus Economic Research Foundation, the main speaker was Dr. Brittany Pheiffer Noble, an expert on modern Russian intellectual history, who traced Eurasianism’s origins back to Russian émigrés in Europe during the 1920s—among them, such prominent figures as Prince Nikolai Trubetzkoy, Pyotr Savitsky, and Roman Jakobson. Those early Eurasianists, she said, resorted to vast amounts of research across an array of fields (such as linguistics, anthropology, philosophy, literature, and history) and developed the theory that Russia represented a unique and separate world civilization—one which, while sharing characteristics with both Europe and Asia, belongs to neither and, in fact, represents a unique synthesis of the two.
While such Eurasianists saw Russia as the center and necessary leader of this Eurasian civilization, they did not see this culture as being limited to Russia alone. Rather, they saw it as extending across vast swathes of Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Siberia—roughly those areas that had comprised the original Russian Empire. Moreover, they viewed this civilization as intractably opposed to the “atheistic, liberal, and materialistic culture” of modern Western Europe, believing that it was Russia’s “duty” to lead Eurasia in such a way as to counterbalance Western supremacy.
The Eurasianists also drew on the work of Sir Halford Mackinder, one of the founders of the discipline that later came to be known as geopolitics, asserting that the key to world power was to control the heartland of the world’s largest land mass, meaning Eastern Europe and Russia. Inspired by Mackinder, the Eurasianists asserted that Russia’s land-based power was perpetually in conflict with the West’s dominance of the seas.
While they were not Communists, many of the early Eurasianists were hopeful that the then-fledgling Soviet Union could be transformed into a Eurasianist superpower. This was not to be, however, as Eurasianism was frowned upon by the Communist Party, and the ideology disappeared from political discourse after the 1930s.
Dr. Noble went on to describe how Eurasianism was later revived in the work of Lev Gumilev, a Russian anthropologist and ethnologist who undertook studies of the Eurasian steppe peoples during the ‘50s and ‘60s. Gumilev came to the conclusion that the various peoples of Eurasia had developed their unique characteristics as a result of their nomadic lifestyles and deep connection to the land, and asserted that, as a result of this, Russians have deep ties to the Mongols and Turkic peoples. Like the earlier Eurasianists, Gumilev believed that Russia has a mission to defend Eurasia from Western decadence and materialism.
Gumilev’s ideas were never accepted by the Soviet authorities, and he did not influence any notable thinkers in the Soviet Union during his lifetime. However, after the collapse of the USSR, a young Russian dissident was to rediscover the work of both Gumilev and the early Eurasianists and apply it to the new age: Aleksandr Dugin.
The origins of Aleksandr Dugin
Dugin was something of a rebel in his youth, once even running afoul of the Soviet authorities. But as his political views developed during the 1980s, he came to see the USSR—as imperfect as it was—as a necessary bulwark against the spread of Western liberalism and political dominance throughout the world.
Once the USSR collapsed, Dugin saw the triumph of what he terms the “Atlanticist West,” centered in the United States and Western Europe. This was accompanied with what he considered Russia’s prostration before—and adoption of—its former enemy’s values under Boris Yeltsin. Dugin considered this an unparalleled geopolitical catastrophe—not only for Russia but for the entire world, given that all those nations which had relied on Soviet support were suddenly entirely at the mercy of American-style liberalism and globalization. (It is worth noting that while Dugin seems to lament the loss of the USSR as a world power, he has never advocated for a return to Communism—most likely since he is a devout adherent of Russian Orthodoxy.)
Dugin’s first attempt at rekindling what he saw as the ‘true’ Russian spirit was his collaboration with the National Bolshevik Party, which was founded in 1993 and led by the punk writer and former Soviet dissident Eduard Limonov. National Bolshevism was an offbeat attempt to fuse elements of Stalinism with those of radical nationalism, a heady cocktail that combined the punk-rock spirit, pranksterism, and avant-garde artistic aesthetics. The party was ultimately banned in 2007 (although some Russian artists and intellectuals have continued to identify as National Bolsheviks to the present day).
In time, Dugin came to find National Bolshevism too limiting and eventually left the party in 1998. In 2002, he founded his own ‘Eurasia Movement,’ which presented itself as a political party—but which Dr. Noble said has probably never had a membership of more than a few hundred people. Dugin’s new brand of Eurasianism, which he terms ‘Neo-Eurasianism,’ propagates similar geopolitical views as the earlier Eurasianists, but he has been much more strident in advocating aggressive actions by Russia to restore what he believes to be Russia’s rightful place as the guardian and protector of the region.
The Fourth Political Theory
Dugin has combined his brand of Eurasianism with a political doctrine that he terms the “Fourth Political Theory,” a new ideology that draws on aspects of the first three global ideologies—liberalism, communism, and fascism—but seeks to transcend them all. The Fourth Political Theory pursues a new type of society in which all people are free to live according to their own particular set of traditional values—while resisting the purely materialistic and nihilistic values being exported by the West. In fact, Dugin has encouraged other illiberal powers (such as China and Iran) and the populist parties of both the Left and Right in Europe to join Russia in this effort—and has even acted at various times as unofficial Kremlin ambassador to many of these countries, movements, and groups.
Dugin’s Eurasia Movement was initially hostile to Vladimir Putin when he assumed the presidency in 2000, believing that he would merely continue Yeltsin’s efforts to liberalize and Westernize Russia. But once it became clear that Putin’s agenda was similar to their own, Dugin and his movement became staunch—though not always uncritical—supporters. It is also the case that official Kremlin policy, whether consciously or not, has indeed gradually drifted ever closer to Dugin’s positions on many issues over the years.
In fact, Putin has frequently echoed Dugin’s Eurasianist views in public statements, beginning with his infamous Munich speech of 2007. Additionally, it is worth noting that both Putin and Dugin are members of the high-level think tank the Valdai Discussion Club, a Moscow-based think-tank and intellectual forum, so there can be no question that Putin is aware of Dugin’s ideas—though there are questions regarding his influence during the current war in Ukraine.
But the fact remains that, since Ukraine’s Maidan revolution in 2014, Dugin has been one of the most radical voices calling for Russia to use military force to put an end to the pro-Western and anti-Russian trends that were becoming prominent in that country. He even called for Russian tanks to go “all the way,” shortly after the pro-Russian regime of Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown. Such violent rhetoric, particularly towards Ukraine, has obviously made him a target for assassination—and in a car bomb attack on August 20, 2022, meant for him, he lost his daughter, Daria Dugina, a journalist who was also an exponent of her father’s ideology.
Does the West really understand Dugin?
Still, according to Noble, the Western media tends to exaggerate Dugin’s importance—perhaps due to the fact that he’s more accessible than other Russian thinkers. She argued, instead, that Dugin’s influence within Russia is largely restricted to countercultural fringe circles, noting that his network is closely interconnected with Moscow’s avant-garde literary and artistic scene.
Although Noble’s overview of Dugin’s principal ideas was quite thorough, she left out several key elements that are crucial for a complete understanding of his worldview. For instance, as other scholars have argued, it is impossible to understand the background of Dugin’s political ideas without investigating his long-time personal and political affiliation with the French ‘Nouvelle Droite’ school and its preeminent thinker, Alain de Benoist, or his relationship with the Belgian geopolitical theorist Jean Thiriart. The influence of both permeates Dugin’s thought at the deepest level—most clearly in terms of the complete rejection of American hegemony and the universalization of liberal values, as well as in the desire to see the nation-state supplanted by pluralistic geopolitical blocs.
Similarly, it is difficult to fully understand Dugin without reference to Martin Heidegger. Dugin himself claims Heidegger’s concept of Dasein—or the state of human being—as the basis of the Fourth Political Theory. He also finds some commonalities with the metaphysical doctrines of the so-called Traditionalist school of religious thought, particularly as exposited by René Guénon.
Without knowing the basics of such philosophical movements, Dugin’s own notions of what politics, religion, and tradition are—as well as the basis for his rejection of all values that claim to be universal—cannot be fully understood. So, whatever the outcome of the current war may be, one thing is certain: understanding the ideas of Aleksandr Dugin may, in fact, be one of the best ways to understand the transformations currently underway in Russia.
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