The imperialist ideologue driving Putin’s brain

WHAT is going on in the Kremlin? What is Russian President Vladimir Putin thinking? Why are hundreds of trained Russian military personnel and sophisticated weapons in eastern Ukraine?

Russia’s aggressive posture reflects the resurrection of the imperialism previously associated with the Soviet Union and Tsarist Russia, driven by a cadre of Russian ultranationalists advocating a “Eurasian Heartland” dominating the world.

At the centre of this vital strategic issue is the doctrine of neo-Eurasianism and its high priest, Aleksandr Dugin. A prolific author, prominent media commentator and professor of sociology at Moscow State University, Dugin exercises a “quasi-monopoly” over nationalist thought in Russia, according to Marlène Laruelle in Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire (2008), operating on “the assumption that Russian society and Russia’s political establishment are in search of a new ideology”, which it is his mission to provide.

Dugin is “Putin’s Brain”, according to Anton Barbashin and Hannah Thoburn in a recent Foreign Affairs article, while Robert Zubin concludes in National Review Online that “Dugin is the mad philosopher who is redesigning the brains of much of the Russian government and public, filling their minds with a new hate-ridden totalitarian ideology whose consequences can only be catastrophic in the extreme, not only for Russia, but for the entire human race”.

Dugin comes from a military family and has strong support within the security and military apparatuses. He is an outspoken advocate of the Russian insurgents operating within Ukraine, and his recent demands that Ukrainians must be “killed, killed, killed” only increased his notoriety in Russia, as did his promotion of the horrific allegation, featured on Russia’s Channel One on July 12, 2014, that Ukrainians “took a child, 3 years old, a little boy … wearing little briefs and a T-shirt and … nailed him, like Jesus, to the bulletin board”.

The role of such propaganda is explored by Dugin himself in The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia (1997), written in conjunction with leading military and security officials and used in military colleges in Russia. Reflecting Dugin’s rejection of liberal, democratic, and capitalist “Atlanticism” it depicts Russia as “the staging area of a new anti-bourgeois, anti-American revolution” in a battle for global domination. Dugin’s world-view is dualistic, seeing the world as a battleground between the “Atlanticist New World Order” led by America, and the “New Eurasian Order”, led by Russia.

Recognising the limitations of traditional military action, Dugin describes how Russia should use its oil, gas, and other natural resources to intimidate other countries. More ominously, he advocates a program of ideological warfare, disinformation, demoralisation, destabilisation, subversion, and insurgency, with special forces, sponsored militias, and other covert services in the vanguard. This type of warfare discards recognised conventions and targets civil society. Unhindered by those conventions it ­produces atrocities like the destruction of flight MH17.

Dugin provides theoretical guidance for this new strategy in The Fourth Political Theory (2012). A synthesis of anti-liberal and anti-capitalist political ideologies, it includes elements of communism and fascism, augmented with ideas from radical environmentalism and “integral trad­itionalism”, a spiritualised form of neo-fascism. This theoretical concoction is designed to have the widest possible appeal, as Dugin seeks the mobilisation of the peoples of Eurasia led by Russia, including the former Soviet republics, Germany, Central and Eastern Europe, Turkey, and Iran.

Under Dugin’s influence, fear of Atlanticism now pervades the Russian defence establishment.

According to the Eurasia Review: “The Russian security elites appear to be formulating a new Russian security and foreign ­policy doctrine”, based on “the necessity for the Russian/Eurasian civilisation to counteract ­aggression from the Atlantic civilisation led by the US”.

This struggle is actually apocalyptic, according to James Heiser in his book on Dugin, The American Empire Should Be Destroyed (2012). He writes: “Dugin’s intended goal, his telos, is the End of the World”. And according to Dugin in his book, The End of the World (1997), this is the divine destiny of Russia: “through the Russian people will be realised the last thought of God, the thought of the End of the World … Death is the way to immortality”. The rise of this Messianic ideology reflects Russia’s failure to seize the opportunities provided by the disintegration of the Soviet Union. A liberal democracy didn’t eventuate and this left Russia without a national identity or sense of destiny, just a growing conviction that the once superpower colossus had been cheated by the West. This prompted a resurgence of statist imperialism, writes Marcel Van Herpen in Putin’s Wars: The Rise of Russia’s New Imperialism (2014): “in Russia empire building and despotism have always tended to go hand in hand”, and after a period of “empire fatigue” in post-­Soviet Russia, the ascension of Putin marked the resumption of this ­imperialist tendency.

In this context, neo-Eurasianism serves as the legitimating ideology of the new regime. It may be that Western sanctions will force Putin to dissociate himself from its more extreme demands. Alternatively, he may find himself trapped by the radical forces he cultivated during his ascension to power, which might lead Russia along the path towards catastrophe.

Mervyn F Bendle writes on terrorism and extremist ideologies.