📚The TL;DR📝

1. Aleksandr Dugin: Born 1962, former professor and ideologue of “Eurasianism,” alleged to be “Putin’s Brain”

2. Dugin got his political start on the radical right of Soviet dissident politics, before becoming an exponent of “Eurasianism” in the late 1990s, writing a book that advocated that Russia prepare for an apocalyptic war against the United States.

3. Dugin’s penchant for radical, apocalyptic argument won him some political support in Russia and Western fascination, although he became increasingly marginal after 2012

4. Western media and governments identified Dugin as an architect of the invasion of Ukraine; the United States sanctioned him, and Ukrainian intelligence may have attempted to assassinate him.

5. Dugin has never had the influence he purports to have, and his successful effort to win international fascination necessarily means misreading the Putin regime.

📌The Invention of the Dugin Myth📌

In 2014, Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea, sent weapons, funding, and, eventually, troops to separatist rebels in Ukraine, and began to pressure Europe through natural gas exports. Meanwhile, Western journalists and analysts searched for an explanation. How could Putin, once viewed as a moderate, non-ideological reformer, have made such a drastic pivot? 

One explanation wrapped around the bearded and bespectacled figure of Aleksandr Dugin. His appearance, coupled with his mystical and radical beliefs, invited comparisons to Rasputin, the priest-mystic who dominated the Romanov family on the eve of the Russian revolution. Dugin’s prodigious output, philosophical pretensions, and apocalyptic worldview offered a simple and elegant explanation for the new Russian foreign policy.

The interest in Dugin only increased with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. A near-daily stream of articles about Dugin now appears in the English-language press. Glossy magazines have offered him extended profiles; he has sat in debates with prominent Western academics and intellectuals; and anyone seeking to study and understand Putin’s Russia will inevitably come across Dugin and his oeuvre in their course of study. 

This interest, however, elides the real Dugin, a figure who once enjoyed prominence in the confused political landscape of post-Soviet Russia, but who lost much of this influence as the Putin regime asserted itself and found firmer ideological footing than Dugin’s apocalyptic vision. This obsession with Dugin contributes to the fundamental misunderstanding of Putin, his regime, and his goals.

The Nationalist Underground, Nazi-Communism, and New Ideology

Aleksandr Dugin was born in 1962 to Geliy and Galina Dugin. Galina was a doctor, and Geliy was a military intelligence officer, boosting speculation that Aleksandr was in cahoots with the secret services (although Geliy left the family when Aleksandr was three). Dugin had an undistinguished career as a student — he was expelled from Moscow Aviation University and became a janitor. He spent his free time reading widely in philosophy, theology, and history while associating with the far-right underground in Moscow.

The far-right underground was made up of loosely connected circles. Because of how broad it was, it lacked one coherent and specific ideology, but its members flirted with everything from Slavic neopaganism to Nazism. During his time in the far-right underground, Dugin was a radical Germanophile, adopting the pen name Hans Zievers and allegedly converting to Nazi-influenced Satanism (he would later return to the Russian Orthodox Church) In 1988, alongside other members of this underground, he helped found the Nationalist-Patriotic Organization “Pamyat” (English: Memory), which sought to promote Russian nationalism and a restoration of the Tsarist monarchy on the eve of the Soviet Union’s dissolution.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Dugin’s career took off in earnest. He became a writer at the nationalist newspaper Den’ (Day), and in 1993, alongside the former dissident writer Eduard Limonov, he cofounded the National Bolshevik Party. The National Bolsheviks advertised themselves as a synthesis of Nazism and communism–their party flag was the Nazi flag, with a hammer and sickle standing in for the swastika. Their actual platform was incoherent, but they supported the restoration of the Soviet Union, a return to a planned economy, and an invasion of northern Kazakhstan. Both Limonov and Dugin were grandiose personalities, and the party was not big enough for both of them. By 1998, Dugin departed from the party.

He turned his intellectual energy towards “Eurasianism,” an otherwise forgotten ideology which emerged from the White emigre movement in the 1930s. They believed Russia was the natural leader of both Europe and Asia, ideally positioned both geographically and culturally to dominate the region. The Eurasianists begrudgingly accepted the Soviet Union as a political force, hoping that it could eventually be turned from an international communist power into a proper Eurasian state dominated by ethnic Russians. Dugin’s nostalgia for the Soviet Union and strident Russian nationalism followed from their writings.

Dugin quickly found an audience for his resurrected Eurasianism. In 1997, he published Foundations of Geopolitics, a textbook meant to present the intellectual synthesis he had been working towards for the past decade. In the book, Dugin argued that Russia was a “land empire,” inevitably in conflict with the sea-faring Anglo-American civilization, and that the two powers were doomed to apocalyptic conflict. To adequately confront these two powers, Dugin suggested that Russia should annex vast swaths of Central Asia and Eastern Europe, align with France and Germany, and support sympathetic regimes in Africa and the Middle East.

The book was Dugin’s most significant success. It was allegedly adopted by Russia’s General Staff Academy and launched him into minor stardom as a public intellectual. In 2001, he founded the Eurasia Movement, which counted Duma representatives and retired military officers among its members, quickly followed by the Eurasian Youth Union, which offered military training to its young members. Over the next few years, the movement would slowly grow in both membership and influence.

Celebrity, American-Style

2008 was a busy year for Dugin. He was appointed Professor of Sociology at Moscow State University. He became one of the loudest public advocates of Russia’s invasion of Georgia, calling on the Russian government to fully annex the country. He also published the Fourth Political Theory. Rising from the base grounds of geopolitics, he instead argued for a transcendent political system based on the Heideggerian idea of “dasein” (English: existence), which would meld and supersede liberalism, communism, and fascism. In 2012, Michael Millerman translated the book into English, providing the first substantive window into Dugin’s worldview for non-specialists.

Despite these strides, Dugin remained relatively unknown outside of Russia, aside from minor academic interest in his influence over the Kremlin. But when Putin annexed Crimea and backed pro-Russian rebels in the Donbass in 2014, Western commentators, grasping for a unified theory of Putin’s nationalist turn, latched onto the shadowy figure of Dugin, who could apparently provide a satisfying explanation for all of Putin’s various foreign policy and military maneuvers.  In March 2014, Foreign Affairs published an extended profile of “Putin’s Brain,” the first piece in an emerging cottage industry around Dugin. 

Dugin himself relished the attention. He was happy to sit for interviews with sympathetic and unsympathetic Western outlets, and Donald Trump’s election in 2016 only added to his star power. Trump’s political advisor, Steve Bannon, was alleged to be a devotee of Dugin’s ideas, a fact that both Bannon and Dugin coyly acknowledged. Dugin went as far as to sit for a debate with the French liberal activist Bernard Henri-Levy in 2019. Millerman would become his closest Western collaborator, translating some of his other minor philosophical works, although Foundations of Geopolitics remained untouched despite being his most influential work. 

But as Dugin’s ideas gained purchase outside of Russia, this apparent mastermind was losing his lustre in his own country. In the wake of a 2014 rant that apparently demanded a genocide of Ukrainians, Dugin lost his academic position at Moscow State University. His political allies in the Kremlin and the Duma became increasingly marginal, either retiring or fading into obscurity. 

Moreover, Dugin was not particularly influential with Putin or with the younger radicals who launched the war in the Donbass. Putin’s most significant ideological influence is his advisor Vladislav Surkov, who formulated “sovereign democracy” to justify Putin’s leadership. Surkov argued that Russian democracy required a strong leader to protect it from international meddling. The younger radicals preferred more historically-inflected nationalists like Dmitry Galkovsky or Dugin’s old friend Limonov, who preferred to cite historical examples rather than esoteric Heideggerian concepts. 

The Architect of the Invasion of Ukraine?

As the war in the Donbass settled into a stalemate, Dugin became less compelling to Western analysts. Although Dugin continued to avail himself to Western interviewers and approved further translations of his work, he faded into the background as Western interest in Russia waned. 

Nevertheless, when Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Dugin returned to the spotlight. Putin’s rambling speech on the eve of the invasion, as well as his long article “On the Historical Unity of Ukraine and Russia,” provided further grist for the idea that Dugin was directing the ideological levers of the regime. The stream of articles about Dugin picked up again, unanimously concluding that Dugin was among the most significant ideological influences on Putin’s foreign policy. 

Western governments quickly decided that Dugin was among the authors of the War in Ukraine. In March 2022, the State Department sanctioned Dugin and his Eurasian Youth Movement in one of the first rounds of sanctions against individual Russians after the war began. A few months later, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) planted a bomb in an SUV owned by Dugin, which killed his daughter Darya, a prominent nationalist journalist in her own right. Shortly afterwards, his political allies suggested that the bomb was really intended to kill him. But despite American and Ukrainian interest, there is little to indicate that he has regained political influence in Russia. He still lacks an official political title, and although he received a new academic appointment at the Russian State University for the Humanities, it is far less prestigious than his original MGU professorship.

🌎Why It Matters🌎

Aleksandr Dugin has enjoyed an extraordinary career as a self-promoter. When his career as a public intellectual and activist began in the early 1990s, he seemed doomed to marginalization, obsessed with radical ideas and alienated from the Russian mainstream. Nevertheless, he managed to garner favor with segments of the Russian elite and, critically, broadcast these connections to gain further prominence.

But when figures who aligned themselves with Dugin found themselves marginalized by the Putin administration’s quest for a loyal, unflinching state apparatus, Dugin managed to pull off a second transformation: becoming a minor intellectual celebrity in the West. He aggressively marketed himself to a Western audience as a Russian prophet-intellectual and basked in the natural conclusion this audience drew: that he was supremely influential within the Russian state apparatus.

Unfortunately, Dugin’s public relations victory limits Western understanding of both the Russian state and society. Misunderstanding Putin’s ideological influences means misunderstanding the past decade of aggressive Russian foreign policy. Believing that Dugin is Putin’s Rasputin, pulling shadowy strings behind the Kremlin’s curtain, means accepting Dugin’s own misguided framing: the West and Russia are locked in a death struggle that can only end with the total defeat of one society or the other. Maybe the stakes are not so high.