Attempted hit on ‘Putin’s brain’ Alexander Dugin points to enemies within

The attempted assassination of Alexander Dugin suggests the existence of a capable underground Russian opposition. It will enrage Putin and inflame his paranoia.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, flanked by Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, right, in a naval parade in St. Petersburg in July. Picture: AFP

The attempted assassination of the arch Russian ideologue and mystic philosopher Alexander Dugin, which resulted in the death of his daughter Darya, suggests the existence of an underground opposition in Russia more capable of striking important targets than anyone had previously imagined.

Dugin is a bizarre figure, the preacher of a philosophy both mad and hateful and yet with enough resonance to modern reality and to Russian history that it seems to inform Vladimir Putin’s outlook.

But it’s hard to imagine why anyone would want to kill him, as he is not an important figure in the day-to-day running of the Kremlin.

There are, logically, three possibilities.

Russian ideologue Alexander Dugin attends a farewell ceremony for his daughter Daria Dugina, who was killed in a car bomb explosion. Picture: AFP

The first is, as the Russians themselves claim, that the Ukrainian state or its supporters did it. Dugin is an ultra-ultra-ultra nationalist who believes Ukraine has no independent existence. So Ukrainians don’t like him. But the Russian idea that a Ukrainian spy took her 12-year-old daughter to Moscow and consciously tracked Dugin’s daughter, planted the bomb, then escaped, but all the details of her mission were captured on security cam and unravelled by the authorities, is implausible.

The Ukrainians have much higher priority targets, they don’t attack civilians, the risk to them of exposure would be enormous, the benefits almost zero.

Moscow often promotes narratives on espionage and assassinations which are completely ridiculous, denying involvement in the attempt on the Skripals in the UK, for example. Putin’s view of truth is truly Orwellian. The Russian state wants to be believed but it doesn’t try to convince anyone by rational argument. Rather it demands belief in the realities it creates in deference to power.

Investigators work on the site of a car bomb that killed Daria Dugina outside Moscow. Picture: AFP

The second possibility is the Russian security forces conducted the bombing to provide a pretext for a radical escalation. That sort of thing has been done in the past by Russian intelligence agencies. But Dugin is a fanatical supporter of Putin and his most egregious foreign adventures. It seems inconceivable that the Russian state would seek to kill him.

The only remaining possibility is that the murder attempt was mounted by enemies of Dugin’s within Russia. It cannot be absolutely ruled out that this was some purely private dispute, but given Dugin’s symbolic status as a regime ideologue, albeit of a very extreme kind, it’s more likely the strike against him was political and held its own symbolism. If that is true, it will enrage Putin and inflame his highly developed paranoia. This could well result in escalation of the war, which Washington apparently expects as it has advised its citizens to leave Ukraine.

Dugin’s ideology is almost breathtakingly mad, and yet it not only resonates with Putin, it has a solid following in the far right in Western societies. Until the war on Ukraine, and even since then, there is a variety of demented Western right winger who thinks Putin’s funding of the Russian Orthodox church, his abuse of Western decadence and his macho posturing make him, in some unfathomable fashion, a champion of Western values.

This view is of course nuts.

A destroyed Russian tank in Mariupol. Picture: AFP

Dugin’s writings are full of hatred of the West. Although not conventionally religious, he subscribes to an extreme interpretation of Orthodox Christianity which holds Catholicism and Protestantism in deep contempt and claims that only Russian faith is authentic.

He espouses both Traditionalism, which holds that all modernity is evil and human truth is found only in certain instinctual and primordial values and customs, and Eurasianism, which believes that Russia’s divine destiny is to rule over an empire stretching from western Europe deep into Asia.

Dugin once openly espoused Nazism, and like many Nazis has a deep involvement with the occult. He believes Russia’s guardian angel is at war with the evil guardian angel of the West. He glorifies violence and believes that individuals do not have rights, but “peoples”, as in the Russian people, have rights.

His attempted assassination is the most intriguing and mysterious element so far of the brutality which Moscow has inflicted on the world over the past six months of its war with Ukraine.