Aleksandr Dugin

Aleksandr Gelevich Dugin (Russian: Александр Гельевич Дугин) (1962 - ) is a Russian scholar, political activist, and founder of the contemporary Russian school of geopolitics often known as "Eurasianism". He is often seen to be an advocate of National Bolshevism.

Dugin was born 7 January 1962 in Moscow. His family had a military tradition, and his father is a high-ranking officer of the Soviet military intelligence; his mother is a doctor. Very early the young Dugin showed great intellectual skills and a predisposition towards foreign languages: indeed he actually speaks fluently nine languages. In the late 1970s he entered the Moscow Aviation Institute, but he soon left it for a job in the top-secret archives of one of the Soviet intelligence service, where he could study the papers of first Eurasianists.

Dugin worked as a journalist before becoming involved in politics just before the fall of communism. In 1988 he and his friend Geidar Dzhemal joinde the nationalist Pamyat group. 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 Aleksandr 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, founded by Dugin on the eve of George W. Bush's visit to Russia at the end of May 2002, is said by some observers to enjoy financial and organizational support from Vladimir Putin's presidential office. The Eurasia Party also is supported by some military circles and by the 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 US 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 Mackinder and Carl Schmitt, with thier ideas of world's history as a continuous struggle between Land (tradition, religion, collectivism) and Sea (progressism, atheism, individualism).

Dugin does have a healthy respect for Judaism. He is, however, anti-Zionist, which he regards as standing in contradiction to basic Talmudic principles. He also views Israel as a "strategic base for [the] militant Atlantism" promoted by the US and Britain.

The last winter 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 also criticized Putin for the "loss" of Ukraine, and accused his Eurasianism of be "empty". Now he has a transnational NGO called International Eurasianist Movement.

Dugin's works

• Absoliutnaia rodina, Arktogeia-tsentr (1999), ISBN 5818600033
• Tampliery proletariata: natsional-bol´shevizm i initsiatsiia, Arktogeia (1997), ISBN 5859280173
• Osnovy geopolitiki: geopoliticheskoe budushchee Rossii, Arktogeia (1997), ISBN 5859280181
• Metafizika blagoi vesti: Pravoslavnyi ezoterizm, Arktogeia (1996), ISBN 5859280165
• Misterii Evrazii, Arktogeia (1996), ISBN 5859280157
• Konservativnaia revoliutsiia, Arktogeia (1994), ISBN 5859280130

References

• International Eurasianist Movement
• English version of Arctogaia
• Eurasia Movement (UK)
• Article in the Financial Times about Dugin
• Eurasian Website
• Italian "Eurasia, rivista di studi geopolitici"