By Eric Vandenbroeck
At the start of this website I placed the material of an earlier seminar
given it as a title on this website Russia’s
New Map. This included references to Eurasianism, and other strands relevant to a resurgent right
wing in 1990’s Russia, a case study about Russia’s Idea of the West, here and here, plus Alexander Dugin's new
Eurasianism.
Then more recently the British Financial Times and other western media
also started to point to Dugin and his influence on Putin including his custom union.
And while Dugin's influence should not be
overstated, true to Putin’s insistence that Russia cannot be judged in Western
terms, Putin’s new conservatism does not fit U.S. and European definitions. In
fact, the main trait they share is opposition to liberalism. Whereas
conservatives in those parts of the world are fearful of big government and put
the individual first, Russian conservatives advocate for state power and see
individuals as serving that state. They draw on a long tradition of Russian
imperial conservatism and, in particular, Eurasianism. That strain is authoritarian
in essence, traditional, anti-American, and anti-European; it values religion
and public submission. And more significant to today’s headlines, it is
expansionist.
The roots of early form of Eurasianism lie in
Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution, although many of the ideas that it contains have
much longer histories in Russia. After the 1917 October Revolution and the
civil war that followed, two million anti-Bolshevik Russians fled the country.
From Sofia to Berlin and then Paris, some of these exiled Russian intellectuals
worked to create an alternative to the Bolshevik project. One of those
alternatives eventually became the Eurasianist
ideology. Proponents of this idea posited that Russia’s Westernizers and
Bolsheviks were both wrong: Westernizers for believing that Russia was a
(lagging) part of European civilization and calling for democratic development;
Bolsheviks for presuming that the whole country needed restructuring through
class confrontation and a global revolution of the working class. Rather, Eurasianists stressed, Russia was a unique civilization
with its own path and historical mission: To create a different center of power
and culture that would be neither European nor Asian but have traits of both. Eurasianists believed in the eventual downfall of the West
and that it was Russia’s time to be the world’s prime exemplar.
In 1921, the exiled thinkers Georges Florovsky,
Nikolai Trubetzkoy, Petr Savitskii,
and Petr Suvchinsky published a collection of
articles titled Exodus to the East, which marked the official birth of the Eurasianist ideology. The book was centered on the idea
that Russia’s geography is its fate and that there is nothing any ruler can do
to unbind himself from the necessities of securing his lands. Given Russia’s
vastness, they believed, its leaders must think imperially, consuming and
assimilating dangerous populations on every border. Meanwhile, they regarded
any form of democracy, open economy, local governance, or secular freedom as
highly dangerous and unacceptable.
In that sense, Eurasianists considered Peter
the Great -- who tried to Europeanize Russia in the eighteenth century -- an
enemy and a traitor. Instead, they looked with favor on Tatar-Mongol rule,
between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, when Genghis Khan’s empire had
taught Russians crucial lessons about building a strong, centralized state and
pyramid-like system of submission and control.
Eurasianist beliefs gained a strong
following within the politically active part of the emigrant community, or
White Russians, who were eager to promote any alternative to Bolshevism.
However, the philosophy was utterly ignored, and even suppressed in the Soviet
Union, and it practically died with its creators. That is, until the 1990s,
when the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia’s
ideological slate was wiped clean, and next, Putin came to power.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, ultranationalist ideologies were
decidedly out of vogue. Rather, most Russians looked forward to Russia’s
democratization and reintegration with the world. Still, a few hard-core
patriotic elements remained that opposed de-Sovietization and believed -- as
Putin does today -- that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest
geopolitical catastrophe of the century. Among them was the ideologist Alexander Dugin, who was a regular
contributor to the ultranationalist analytic center and newspaper Den’ (later
known as Zavtra). His earliest claim to fame was a
1991 pamphlet, “The War of the Continents,” in which he described an ongoing geopolitical
struggle between the two types of global powers: land powers, or “Eternal
Rome,” which are based on the principles of statehood, communality, idealism,
and the superiority of the common good, and civilizations of the sea, or
“Eternal Carthage,” which are based on individualism, trade, and materialism.
In Dugin’s understanding, “Eternal Carthage,” was
historically embodied by Athenian democracy and the Dutch and British Empires.
Now, it is represented by the United States. “Eternal Rome” is embodied by
Russia. For Dugin, the conflict between the two will
last until one is destroyed completely -- no type of political regime and no
amount of trade can stop that. In order for the “good” (Russia) to eventually
defeat the “bad” (United States), he wrote, a conservative revolution must take
place.
His ideas of conservative revolution are adapted from German interwar
thinkers who promoted the destruction of the individualistic liberal order and
the commercial culture of industrial and urban civilization in favor of a new
order based on conservative values such as the submission of individual needs
and desires to the needs of the many, a state-organized economy, and
traditional values for society based on a quasi-religious view of the world.
For Dugin, the prime example of a conservative
revolution was the radical, Nazi-sponsored north Italian Social Republic of Salò (1943–45). Indeed, Dugin
continuously returned to what he saw as the virtues of Nazi practices and
voiced appreciation for the SS and Herman Wirth’s occult Ahnenerbe
group. In particular, Dugin praised the orthodox
conservative-revolutionary projects that the SS and Ahnenerbe
developed for postwar Europe, in which they envisioned a new, unified Europe
regulated by a feudal system of ethnically separated regions that would serve
as vassals to the German suzerain. It is worth noting that, among other
projects, the Ahnenerbe was responsible for all the
experiments on humans in the Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps.
Between 1993 and 1998, Dugin joined the
Russian nationalist legend Eduard Limonov in creating
the now banned National-Bolshevik Movement (later the National-Bolshevik Party,
or NBP), where he became the chief ideologist of a strange synthesis of
socialism and ultra-right ideology. By the late 1990s, he was recognized as the
intellectual leader of Russia’s entire ultra-right movement. He had his own
publishing house, Arktogeya (“Northern Country”),
several slick Web sites, a series of newspapers and magazines, and published
The Foundation of Geopolitics, an immediate best seller that was particularly
popular with the military.
Dugin’s introduction to the political
mainstream came in 1999, when he became an adviser to the Russian
parliamentarian Gennadii Seleznev, one of Russia’s
most conservative politicians, a two-time chairman of the Russian parliament, a
member of the Communist Party, and a founder of the Party of Russia’s Rebirth.
That same year, with the help of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of Russia’s
nationalist and very misnamed Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, Dugin became the chairman of the geopolitical section of
the Duma’s Advisory Council on National Security.
But his inclusion in politics did not necessarily translate to wider
appeal among the politics of the elite. For that, Dugin
had to transform his ideology into something else -- something uniquely
Russian. Namely, he dropped the most outrageous, esoteric, and radical elements
of his ideology, including his mysticism, and drew instead on the classical Eurasianism of Trubetzkoy and Savitskii. He set to work creating the International
Eurasian Movement, a group that would come to involve academics, politicians,
parliamentarians, journalists, and intellectuals from Russia, its neighbors,
and the West.
Like the classical Eurasianists of the 1920s
and 1930s, Dugin’s ideology is anti-Western,
anti-liberal, totalitarian, ideocratic, and socially traditional. Its
nationalism is not Slavic-oriented (although Russians have a special mission to
unite and lead) but also applies to the other nations of Eurasia. And it labels
rationalism as Western and thus promotes a mystical, spiritual, emotional, and
messianic worldview.
But Dugin’s neo-Eurasianism
differs significantly from previous Eurasianist
thought. First, Dugin conceives of Eurasia as being
much larger than his predecessors ever did. For example, whereas Savitskii believed that the Russian-Eurasian state should
stretch from the Great Wall of China in the east to the Carpathian Mountains to
the west, Dugin believes that the Eurasian state must
incorporate all of the former Soviet states, members of the socialist block,
and perhaps even establish a protectorate over all EU members. In the east, Dugin proposes to go as far as incorporating Manchuria,
Xinxiang, Tibet, and Mongolia. He even proposes eventually turning southwest
toward the Indian Ocean.
In order to include Europe in Eurasia, Dugin
had to rework the enemy. In classical Eurasianist
thought, the enemy was the Romano-Germanic Europe. In Dugin’s
version, the enemy is the United States. As he writes: “The USA is a
chimerical, anti-organic, transplanted culture which does not have sacral state
traditions and cultural soil, but, nevertheless, tries to force upon the other
continents its anti-ethnic, anti-traditional [and] “babylonic”
model.” Classical Eurasianists, by contrast, favored
the United States and even considered it to be a model, especially praising its
economic nationalism, the Monroe Doctrine, and its non-membership in the League
of Nations.
Another crucial point of difference is his attitude toward fascism and
Nazi Germany. Even before World War II, classical Eurasianists
opposed fascism and stood against racial anti-Semitism. Dugin
has lauded the state of Israel for hewing to the principles of conservativism
but has also spoken of a connection between Zionism and Nazism and implied that
Jews only deserved their statehood because of the Holocaust. He also divides
Jews into “bad” and “good.” The good are orthodox and live in Israel; the bad
live outside of Israel and try to assimilate. Of course, these days, those are
views to which he rarely alludes in public.
Since the early 2000s, Dugin’s ideas have only
gained in popularity. Their rise mirrors Putin’s own transition from apparent
democrat to authoritarian. In fact, Putin’s conservative turn has given Dugin a perfect chance to “help out” the Russian leader
with proper historical, geopolitical, and cultural explanations for his
policies. Recognizing how attractive Dugin’s ideas
are to some Russians, Putin has seized on some of them to further his own
goals.
Although Dugin has criticized Putin from time
to time for his economic liberalism and cooperation with the West, he has
generally been the president’s steadfast ally. In 2002, he created the Eurasia
Party, which was welcomed by many in Putin’s administration. The Kremlin has
long tolerated, and even encouraged, the creation of such smaller allied
political parties, which give Russian voters the sense that they actually do
live in a democracy. Dugin’s party, for example,
provides an outlet for those with chauvinistic and nationalist leanings, even
as the party remains controlled by the Kremlin. At the same time, Dugin built strong ties with Sergei Glazyev,
who is a co-leader of the patriotic political bloc Rodina and currently Putin’s
adviser on Eurasian integration. In 2003, Dugin tried
to become a parliamentary deputy along with the Rodina bloc but failed.
Although his electoral foray was a bust, some voters’ positive reception
to his anti-Western projects encouraged Dugin to
forge ahead with the Eurasianist movement. After the
shock of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004, he created the Eurasianist Youth Union, which promotes patriotic and
anti-Western education. It has 47 coordination offices throughout Russia and nine
in countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States, Poland, and Turkey. Its
reach far exceeds that of any existing democratic-oriented movement.
In 2008, Dugin was made a professor at
Russia’s top university, Moscow State University, and the head of the national
sociological organization Center for Conservative Studies. He also appears
regularly on all of Russia’s leading TV channels, commenting on both domestic
and foreign issues. His profile has only increased since the pro-democracy
protests of the winter of 2011–12 and Putin’s move around the same time to
build a Eurasian Union. His outsized presence in Russian public life is a sign
of Putin’s approval; Russian media, particularly television, is controlled
almost entirely by the Kremlin. If the Kremlin disapproves of (or not longer has a use for) a particular personality, it will
remove him or her from the airwaves.
Dugin and other like-minded
thinkers have wholeheartedly endorsed the Russian government’s action in
Ukraine, calling on him to go further and take the east and south of Ukraine,
which, he writes, “welcomes Russia, waits for it,
pleads for Russia to come.” The Russian people agree. Putin’s approval ratings
have climbed over the past month, and 65 percent of Russians believe that
Crimea and eastern regions of Ukraine are “essentially Russian territory” and
that “Russia is right to use military force for the defense of the population.”
Dugin, then, has proven to be an asset to Putin. He
has popularized the president’s position on such issues as limits on personal
freedom, a traditional understanding of family, intolerance of homosexuality,
and the centrality of Orthodox Christianity to Russia’s rebirth as a great
power. But his greatest creation is neo-Eurasianism.
Dugin’s ideology has influenced a
whole generation of conservative and radical activists and politicians, who, if
given the chance, would fight to adapt its core principles as state policy.
Considering the shabby state of Russian democracy, and the country’s continued
move away from Western ideas and ideals, one might argue that the chances of
seeing neo-Eurasianism conquer new ground are
increasing. Although Dugin’s form of it is highly
theoretical and deeply mystical, it is proving to be a strong contender for the
role of Russia’s chief ideology. Whether Putin can control it as he has
controlled so many others is a question that may determine his longevity.
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