Throughout the 1990s, Dugin stood at the forefront of radical opposition to the Russian government. In 1994, he created the National Bolshevik Party in cooperation with the controversial author Eduard Limonov.¹⁹ At the same time, he improved his relations with sympathizers outside of Russia. He met frequently with leaders of the European New Right, such as Thiriart, de Benoist, the Flemish nationalist Robert Steukers, and others. He even arranged their participation in a roundtable discussion in Moscow in 1992. That same year, he met with Christian Bouchet, head of the French headquarters of the occult society Ordo Templi Orientis (“Order of the Temple of the East”), whose past leaders include the infamous “magician” Aleister Crowley.²⁰

Dugin’s political hopes, however, were soon dashed. In 1995, he ran for a seat in parliament as a representative for St. Petersburg and received less than 1 percent of the vote. Besides the fleeting publicity it received for various minor acts of political hooliganism, such as throwing food in the faces of hated politicians, the National Bolshevik Party failed to gain public recognition. In 1996, Dugin and Limonov had a falling out. Two years later, Dugin and his handful of followers left the party altogether. His public career was at its nadir, but he did not give up. The future would soon prove this to have been a wise decision.

 

Dugin’s failures as a politician throughout the 1990s led him to reevaluate some of his choices. He came to realize that his oppositional stance had led him to an impasse. His associations with esoteric, anti-Christian traditions and the European New Right had gained him nothing and left him devoid of any significant power or influence. As a result, when he distanced himself from the National Bolshevik Party, he also made an ideological readjustment. Although he did not abandon his radical ideas, he began to express views more acceptable to the establishment. In 1997, for example, this former friend of the Satanists suddenly reemerged as a devout Russian Orthodox Christian. In the same year, he published The Foundations of Geopolitics: Russia’s Geopolitical Future, Thinking Spatially in which he presented the fundamental concepts of Eurasianism, which later became the cornerstone of his ideology and public activities.²¹

Dugin’s concept of Eurasia, it must be noted, is not his original creation. It was first contrived by a group of Russian exiles in Europe in the 1920s. Its founding father was Prince Nikolai Trubetskoy, who abandoned Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution and settled in the Bulgarian capital Sofia, which had a large population of “White” Russian exiles. In his book Europe and Mankind, published in 1920, Trubetskoy described Russia as an indispensable part of Eurasia.²² He held that Russia was a distinct entity, not only ethnically, but also religiously, morally, and politically. It was founded on the combined legacy of the Mongolian Empire and the Byzantine religious tradition, which had been assimilated by the Slavic race. Europe, on the other hand, was the cradle of Roman-Germanic culture. This civilization, said Trubetskoy, had undergone a comprehensive process of secularization and had now adopted a post-Christian value system that placed individualism, egoism, competition, materialism, and technological advancement over all other values. A destructive hubris, marked by subservience to material rather than spiritual values, gave European civilization a coarse and aggressive streak that manifested itself in, among other things, its determination to impose its ways on the entire world. Trubetskoy saw the dissemination of Western culture in the name of supposedly “universal” ideals as a spiritual epidemic that threatened both Russia and humanity as a whole. The Romanov dynasty, he claimed, had collapsed because it was a “westernizing” regime, in thrall to European ways. The two revolutions of 1917, argued the prince, were eruptions of the true, primordial Russia: the Eurasian “Muscovite Kingdom” which had risen up against the Europeanized “St. Petersburg Empire.”

Trubetskoy and other exiles established the first Eurasian Movement, which preached a unique political vision: Russia’s destiny, they believed, depended on the country’s restoration as a Eurasian nation.²³ In the post-Bolshevik future, a new ruling elite would arise, based on a series of ideocratic values such as the return to Russian Orthodox religion, pan-Eurasian nationalism, collective responsibility, asceticism, and strong discipline. The Russian nation would then reconstitute itself in accordance with a system of government uniquely adapted to Eurasia—a Demotic regime (unlike the cursed democratic system) in which semi-autonomous community councils would govern under the unquestionable authority of the ruling elite. The Eurasianists believed that this was the only way Russia could regain its soul and resist the aggressive colonialism of Roman-Germanic culture.

The movement Trubetskoy established began to die as early as the 1930s, and its fate was sealed in 1938 with the death of the exiled prince. The concept of Eurasia, however, survived. In the 1980s, it was revived by Russian historian Lev Nikolayevich Gumilev, the son of renowned poets Nikolay Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova.

Like many of the thinkers already mentioned, Gumilev believed that nations are living organisms made up of individuals who share a blood relationship, a collective history, and a single fate. These organisms—which ought to be called “ethnoses” rather than “nations”—are born, mature, reproduce, fight for their existence, grow old, and die. Gumilev estimated that the entire process takes, on average, about 1,200 years. Every ethnos, he thought, is endowed with “passionarity,” an inner energy or source of vitality whose levels rise and fall in accordance with the developmental stage of the collective organism. When the ethnos’ “passionarity” is at its height, it causes revolutions, carves out new ideas and ingenious new technologies, and chooses a path of conquest and imperial glory. When its “passionarity” is at a low, however, it becomes mired in atrophy, passivity, and decadence.

Under certain circumstances, according to Gumilev’s theory, ethnoses can join together in order to create a larger and more powerful entity. This is how the Russian “super-ethnos” was created from a synthesis of Slavic, Mongol, Tatar, Finno-Ugric, and other smaller ethnic groups. The marriage between the nomads of the steppes and the forest dwellers, the pagan Turkic tribes and the orthodox Christians, gave rise to a new nation that was greater than the sum of its parts: a relatively young (only 500 years old) and vital Eurasian power with an ethnic and cultural uniqueness that set it apart from its eastern and southern neighbors.²⁴ This super-ethnos had nothing in common (it was not “complementary,” in Gumilev’s words) with the European super-ethnos, which was conceived almost a thousand years earlier. Europe, according to Gumilev, had come to the end of its life cycle, but it aspired and still aspires to absorb the Russian super-ethnos into itself. Gumilev believed that this would be devastating to the younger and more vital Russia, which must fight for its right to make its own mark on the world. Indeed, like Trubetskoy, Gumilev continuously warned against the destructive influence of the old and rotting West on the Russian culture he regarded as essentially of the East.

Gumilev also warned against the Jews. Indeed, his antisemitism was overt and unmistakable. The Jewish people, he claimed, is an ancient ethnos that lost its homeland and has since been surviving as a parasite, feeding off its host nations. As a result, the Jews are not “complementary” with other ethnoses, and are also incompatible with their ecological surroundings, because they live without a land. In a similar fashion, Gumilev attacked America, which he believed was infected with Jewishness, thus rendering it a parasitic power that sustained itself only by looting the resources of other ethnoses.²⁵

In the eyes of his academic peers, Gumilev’s ideas were embarrassing, and they were largely silenced. For the most part, scholars dismissed his theories as baseless speculations—an amalgam of exaggerated observations based on insufficient and occasionally imaginary data.²⁶ In 1988, however, Gumilev’s reputation underwent an unexpected reversal. The death throes of the communist bloc were accompanied by a renaissance in pseudo-scientific nationalist theories. The views of the controversial historian suddenly became popular.

Gumilev did not live long enough to enjoy his newfound fame. He died in 1992, and was quickly replaced by his intellectual successor: Aleksandr Dugin. Combining Gumilev’s ideas with various other geopolitical theories, Dugin describes Russia as a rising Eurasian power that originated in a fusion of the Turkic and Slavic cultures.²⁷ Russian identity, he argues, stems from a combination of Northern-Nordic and Eastern elements, a marriage between the authoritarian characteristics of the “white men” and the esoteric heritage of the “yellow men.” His positive view of this merger, however, sets him apart from other Russian nationalists, who tend to be extremely xenophobic. While Dugin often uses the terminology of race theory and the rhetoric of blut und boden (“blood and soil”), he nevertheless shuns biological interpretations of these terms and explicitly rejects antisemitism.²⁸ As he explains it, the identities of which he speaks are essentially cultural, and the nationalism he advocates—if one can even call it nationalism—is not rooted in blind loyalty to any one ethnic group, but to a state that is made up of a variety of such groups.

Dugin also differs from Gumilev in his choice of enemies. In his view, it is not Europe but “Atlantica,” the Anglo-Saxon alliance led by the United States, which opposes Russia and seeks its demise. He believes that this confrontation is rooted in a natural rivalry between the two powers: Eurasian Russia is a land-based society (tellurocratic in Dugin’s terminology), as opposed to Anglo-Saxon Atlantica, which is a sea-based empire (thalassocratic).²⁹ Dugin, following in the footsteps of other geopolitical theorists, claims that the ongoing struggle between continental and maritime civilizations is the driving force, the engine, of world history.³⁰ According to Dugin, land-based empires are inclined to respect cultural differences and variety, whereas sea-based powers aspire to control their surroundings through imposing political, economic, and cultural homogeneity upon them. Atlanticism, Dugin asserts, seeks to subject the entire world to the American model, which it believes to be the greatest achievement of mankind. Dugin, however, sees it as all that is loathsome and contemptible:

In order to block Atlantica’s cancerous influence from spreading, claims Dugin, Russia must reassert its dominance and power. Accordingly, his vision of Russia’s rightful place on the Eurasian continent is unmistakably imperialist. Not only does he seek to rebuild the old Soviet empire, he also advocates the annexation of areas that never belonged to it in the past, including the Balkans, Tibet, and Mongolia. Moreover, he advocates a network of strategic alliances with powerful neighbors. Unlike his predecessors in the Eurasian movement, he sees continental Europe as a potential ally—especially Germany, the object of his genuine admiration. Looking east, he identifies Japan as a bulwark against the growing power of China, which he views as Russia’s chief rival for dominance of Eurasia. To the south, Dugin looks mainly to Iran. He has high praise for the Shi’ia theocracy, which has bravely resisted the Americans, and supports its plans to obtain nuclear weapons.³² He even identifies Israel as a potential member of the Eurasian coalition—alongside the Arab countries—provided it severs its ties with its American patron.³³