Friend of Marion Maréchal-Le Pen and, more generally, close to the French extreme right, Daria Douguina [en Russie, les patronymes sont féminisés et prennent un A final] died in an attack in Moscow on Saturday evening. He was probably targeting his father, the ideologue and philosopher Alexander Dougin, whom some have nicknamed, a little abusively, “Putin’s Rasputin”, in reference to Nicolas II’s adviser. Champion of anti-liberal, anti-Western and anti-modern thought, the latter, who has been targeted by American sanctions since 2014, has largely shaped the ideological matrix and the Weltanschauung (“worldview”) of the Russian military, the Moscow political elite and indirectly influenced Vladimir Putin himself.
The daughter of the Russian ideologue close to the Kremlin was killed on Saturday evening in the explosion of her car in the Moscow region. Daria Douguina, journalist and political scientist was driving a Toyota Land Cruiser when it exploded before catching fire, on a highway near the village of Bolchiye Viaziomy, about forty kilometers from Moscow. No one knows, at this stage, who is behind the attack. No track is excluded, including that of Russian opponents to the war, or a settling of scores within the Russian extreme right, or even manipulation aimed at mobilizing Russian opinion behind my cause of the war.
The Kremlin however hastened to affirm that the Ukrainian track – Ukrainians infiltrated into Russia? – was the most probable. “If the Ukrainian track is confirmed by the competent authorities, it will be a state terrorism policy of the kyiv regime,” said Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for Russian diplomacy, in a telegram. For his part, Mykhailo Podoliak, adviser to the Ukrainian president, denied any Ukrainian involvement in the attack. “Ukraine probably had nothing to do with the explosion, because we are not a criminal state,” Podoliak said in a televised appearance.
Alexander Dougin, in Moscow in 2014, during a meeting in support of the separatist region of Donbass.
Alexey Kudenko/Sputnik/AFP
This Monday, the Russian security services (FSB) accused the Ukrainian “special services” of having killed Dougin’s daughter. The “murder of Daria Dugina was prepared and committed by Ukrainian special services”, the FSB said in a statement quoted by Russian agencies. According to the same source, the person who trapped Daria Douguina’s car then fled to Estonia. If this version is correct, it means that Russia is permeable to the penetration of Ukrainian special services into its territory. This is not good news for Moscow.
“We, the Dugins, are on the path of truth in the fight against globalism”
In any case, Daria Douguina, 29, probably died instead of her father who should have been at the wheel of the car bomb. Anyway, the young woman was not only a “daughter of”. She was an activist herself. Impregnated with the ideas of her father, she was recently invited on Russian television to promote the “special operation” which translates on the ground into the massacre of civilians, the bombing of innocent children and the torture of prisoners.
She has also appeared in recent months on Turkish, Pakistani, Chinese and Indian television channels. A journalist and political analyst, according to the press release from Russian investigators, she intensely supported Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. Like her father, she was sanctioned by the British and American authorities for “disinformation” on line. Recently, she went to the still smoking ruins of the Azovstal factory, in Mariupol, to celebrate the Russian victory over the Ukrainian “Nazis”.
In a recent interview with a far-right French site, she declared herself proud to be among those sanctioned by the West: “I have the honor of being in the same boat as my father. The fact that we being under sanctions from the United States, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom is also a symbol that we Dugins are on the path of truth in the fight against globalism. So I would say it’s an honor to be born into such a family.”
His father has been advocating for three decades the creation of a new world order in which Russia would be the pivot. With, at the end of the day, a definitive break with the West, this “cemetery of toxic waste” with “depraved morals” embodied, according to him, by the LGBTQ movement (dixit Alexandre Douguine). “The modern West, where the Rothschilds, Soros, Bill Gates and Zuckerberg triumph, is the most disgusting phenomenon in the history of the world. The sooner and more completely Russia is cut off from it, the sooner it will return to its roots”, writes this prophet of resentment who develops an ideology called “eurasism” advocating the rebirth of Russia.
But where does Dougin come from? After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russians began to search for a new ideological matrix to replace communism. Under Boris Yeltsin, a reflection committee was formed to think about it, but it came to nothing. At a time of triumphant liberalism, the young Alexandre Douguine was convinced that he was not witnessing “the end of history”, as Francis Fukuyama asserts, but on the contrary the “clash of civilizations”, announced by Samuel Huntington. It remains to define what Russian civilization is.
It was then that Dougin rediscovered eurasism, a marginal current of thought in vogue among the Russian emigration of the 1920s. According to the eurasists, Russia is defined first by its vastness which forces it to think in an imperial way. and to subjugate hostile frontier populations.
For them, the Russians must be anti-Western. In their eyes, Peter the Great is also a traitor because he Europeanized the country by founding Saint Petersburg. In their imagination, the eurasists – who oppose the Russian “Westernists” – see themselves rather as the heirs of the Mongol Genghis Khan, founder of a strong, centralized and vertical central state. And they do not hesitate to say that the Middle Ages have more nobility than the Renaissance!
Throughout the 1990s, this philosophy garnered little echo and Alexander Dougin became the traveling companion of the red-brown agitator Edouard Limonov to found the National-Bolshevik Party. Then their paths diverge. Limonov publishes novels and – later – opposes Putin, while Dugin founds a school of geopolitics and stands out with his most famous work: Fundamentals of geopolitics (1997).
Edouard Limonov (1943-2020) to whom Emmanuel Carrère devoted a book, was the traveling companion of Alexandre Douguine, co-founder with him of the National-Bolshevik Party
Axel Gylden
In Moscow, “Douguinian” ideas are infusing, especially among the siloviki, as the “strong men” who lead the army, espionage and the police are called. Adviser to the very conservative MP Gennady Zelenev in 1999, Dougin is also that of Sergei Naryshkin, who will become the head of Putin’s presidential administration in 2008, then the head of foreign intelligence (since 2016). The latter, like all the elite of the Kremlin, continues to drink from the Eurasian source which advocates the unity of the Orthodox and that of the Slavs.
From the advent of Putin, the ideology of Dougin gains in popularity. The man played an important role until the annexation of Crimea in 2014, which he advocated from the beginning of the 2000s, but he was then partly discredited for not having been able to anticipate the capacity for resistance of the Ukrainians. Today, he is not an “advisor to the prince”, as are the ex-boss of the FSB Nikolai Patrushev, Tikhon, patriarch of Moscow and “confessor” of the master of the Kremlin, or even the man of affairs Konstantin Malofeev, sometimes nicknamed “the Orthodox oligarch”. “Dougine is very visible and very media-friendly. But he is not close to Putin. He is part of an ideological nebula”, nuance Marie Dumoulin, researcher at the European Council for International Relations.
Ideas that seduce even the Brazilian Jair Bolsonaro
In 2014, eurasism finds its political translation with the creation of the Eurasian Economic Union (Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan), which aims to be one of the poles of a multipolar world, where the rebirth of the Russian Orthodox empire must set an example for other empires: Chinese, Turkish, Persian Arab, Indian, Latin American, African. Unfortunately for Putin, the launch of this common market with great fanfare is overshadowed by the events in Ukraine where pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych is driven from power by the streets.
The logorrhea of the polyglot Douguine – he speaks nine languages including French and English perfectly – crosses borders and reaches many horizons. It seduces even Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro: also hostile to the Biden administration, he went to Moscow a few days before the outbreak of war in Ukraine. As for the French extreme right, it is fascinated by the philosopher. The “New Right” essayist Alain de Benoist is a longtime friend and Alain Soral prefaced one of his books. As for Eric Zemmour, he seems to be reciting the doxa of the ideologue when he talks about the non-existence of a Ukrainian state.
“Ukraine as a project is and can only be anti-Russian, otherwise why have an independent state?” asserts the “Rasputin”, for whom kyiv’s submission to Moscow is a moral imperative because Russia has right to his living space. “I am not inclined to demonize Ukraine, because this part of the Eastern Slavs, which is called the Little Russians, has historically proven its complete inability to build a state. They do not know how to do it. So they choose clowns and Nazis instead of professional politicians. They organize cruelty when it is necessary to show humanity and gentleness, “he wrote cynically on his Geopolitik site, a few days before the Russian bombs s fall on this people that he and Putin consider inferior: the Ukrainians.