Some have called him “Putin’s theoretician”. Others have nicknamed him “Putin’s Rasputin”, in reference to Nicolas II’s adviser. At 60, the brilliant intellectual Alexander Dougin can in any case be considered one of the most dangerous philosophers in the world. But for thirty years, this prolific author and lecturer has championed anti-liberal, anti-Western and anti-modern thought. And he, in large part, shaped the ideological matrix and the Weltanschauung (“worldview”) of the Russian military, the Moscow political elite and indirectly influenced by Vladimir Putin himself.
However, if we are not careful, the world of tomorrow could very well resemble the one he has been describing for three decades. With, as a result, a definitive break with the West, this “cemetery of toxic waste” with “depraved morals” embodied, according to him, by the LGBTQ movement. “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.
Alexandre Douguine, in 2014, during a meeting in support of the separatist region of Donbass.
Alexander Vilf/Sputnik/AFP
It was then that Dougin rediscovered eurasism, a marginal current of thought in vogue among Russian emigration in the 1920s. According to 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, 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 Dougin 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. Advisor 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.
The ideas of this polyglot 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.
Be that as it may, the logorrhea of the polyglot Douguine – he speaks nine languages including French and English perfectly – goes beyond 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 has long been 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.