Unquestionably, the ultimate purpose of Dugin’s proposed annexations and alliances is war. He portrays America as an “absolute enemy,” a contagious disease. For Dugin, the “clash of civilizations” is not merely a cultural and spiritual confrontation but a Manichaean war between the forces of light and the forces of darkness; a struggle which will also be waged on the battlefield. If Russia is to fulfill its divine mission, it cannot avoid this conflict. On the contrary, it must embrace it. The rising Eurasian juggernaut must decisively defeat the emaciated Atlantic giant, and demand for itself its rightful place at the top of the new order:

The publication of The Foundations of Geopolitics in 1997 was received with great interest, and brought Dugin to the attention of powerful figures in the Russian government. He wisely befriended the oligarch Aleksandr Taranzev, who recommended him to the military general staff. His anti-American doctrine, calling for the restoration of Russian imperialism, naturally appealed to the frustrated generals, who had despaired of Yeltsin and his sycophancy toward the West. Dugin’s book was incorporated into the curriculum of the Russian military academy and became required reading for the next generation of officers. One year later, Dugin was appointed senior political adviser to Gennadiy Seleznyov, a former member of the Communist Party and chairman of the Russian parliament, who headed the Center for Geopolitical Analysis, a think tank dedicated to policy recommendations on internal security matters. By the time Seleznyov’s power began to wane in early 2001, Dugin had already gained a reputation he could only have dreamt of a few years earlier.

The radical intellectual’s stature reached new heights with the appointment of Vladimir Putin to the Russian presidency. Slowly but surely, Dugin succeeded in ingratiating himself with the new president’s inner circle. He forged strong ties with a hawkish, security-oriented clique of insiders, mostly composed of ex-members of the military and the security services. First and foremost among them was Igor Sechin, a former KGB official who has served as Putin’s closest adviser for the past fifteen years and is now deputy prime minister. Other members of this powerful faction include Security Council secretary and former head of the FSB Nikolai Patrushev; former deputy prime minister and Security Council member Sergei Ivanov; and Boris Gryzlov, the speaker of the lower house of parliament and chairman of Putin’s ruling United Russia party.

Encouraged by the Putinists, Dugin took the next step in his flourishing public career. In April 2001, he created the Evraziia (“Eurasia”) Movement. A year later, it became a political party, and in November it became the International Eurasian Movement.³⁵ Unlike other groups Dugin had been involved with, this was anything but a marginal organization. High-level officials were members of its steering committee, such as Aleksandr Sokolov, Russia’s former minister of culture and communication; Aleksandr Torchin, deputy speaker of the upper house of the Russian parliament; Aslambek Aslakhanov, former candidate for the Chechen presidency, Putin’s adviser on the Caucasus region, and now a member of the Duma; Talgat Tajuddin, the Russian mufti; Igor Panarin, dean of the foreign affairs department at the Diplomatic Academy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Lieutenant General Nikolai Klokotov, head of the strategy department at the Russian General Staff Academy; and Mikhail Leontyev, a popular reporter who is reputed to be Putin’s favorite journalist.

In order to gain acceptance into the prime minister’s inner circle, Dugin has ceased to advocate the decentralization of political power, a position he held during his days with the New Right. Instead, he has turned to glorifying the idea of the great leader. During the founding session of his movement, Dugin announced that the Putin regime embodied the triumph of the Eurasian spirit: “We support the president in a total and radical manner,” he said. “Therefore we are a total and radical center.”³⁶ Toward the end of Putin’s second term, when the question of his successor became a topic of public discussion, Dugin announced: “Putin is in everything, Putin is everything, Putin is absolute, Putin is irreplaceable.”³⁷ It seems that the once-oppositional thinker has no problem glorifying the prime minister in terms taken directly from the vocabulary of totalitarianism. An unmistakably fascist tone is also present in Dugin’s manifesto of the Eurasian Youth Movement:

Dugin’s infatuation with Putin has tempered somewhat in recent years. Occasionally, he has gone so far as to publicly criticize the prime minister, mainly for surrounding himself with pro-Western advisers and for not following a sufficiently tough policy against the United States and its Eurasian allies, such as the Ukraine, the Baltic states, and Georgia.³⁹ The recent crisis in the Caucasus, however, seems to have revived the philosopher’s faith in the Russian leader. As expected, Dugin’s stance on the Georgia crisis was extremely militant from the outset. In an August 8, 2008 interview with the Echo Moskvy radio station, he claimed that Georgia was committing genocide in the separatist region of South Ossetia and that it was incumbent on Russia to respond with military force.⁴⁰ At a protest two days later outside the Ministry of Defense, activists and leaders of the Eurasian Movement shouted slogans like “Tanks to Tbilisi!” and “Glory to Russia! Glory to the empire!”⁴¹ On August 18, by which time it was clear that the Georgians had been defeated, Dugin demanded the establishment of military rule in Georgia. Since the cessation of hostilities, he has repeatedly called for Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s head, in order to try him in an international court for crimes against humanity.⁴² Dugin’s support for the Russian leadership has grown only stronger as its policies have become more aggressive: In a September 4, 2008 interview with the Los Angeles Times, he explained that “Putin and Medvedev have passed the irreversible point. They have shown that the will and the decision to put the words into practice are in fact irreversible. So my support to Putin and Medvedev is now absolute.” For the benefit of anyone who may have forgotten what the future holds for Russia, Dugin made sure to remind them: “It is very far from the end. It is only the beginning of a real, and maybe very serious, and very dangerous for all of the sides, confrontation between us and Americans.”⁴³

 

Aleksandr Dugin, who was recently appointed head of the Center for Conservative Studies at Moscow State University, is not the Russian regime’s official ideologue.⁴⁴ His positions are too complex, his style too abrasive, and his character too rebellious and independent. His influence is nonetheless immense. The worldview he advocates has become part of mainstream thinking, both in the Russian political establishment and among the general public. Dugin himself is not shy about his accomplishments:

This is not idle boasting. Today’s Russia is indeed moving closer and closer to Dugin’s vision. The current regime’s authoritarian disposition, centralized economy, and increasingly imperialist foreign policy can only reinforce the radical thinker’s hopes that his homeland is marching steadily toward the realization of its historic destiny.

Dugin can also be satisfied with the successful reversal of democratization in Russia, which so frustrated him during the 1990s. Under Putin’s domestic policies, Russia has shed most of the characteristics of a “free society.” Since 2005, the NGO Freedom House, which annually publishes rankings of states according to their level of democracy and freedom, has labeled the Russian Federation “not free,” and ranked it below Yemen, Djibouti, and Uganda. It has done so for obvious reasons; Putin and his deputies do not hesitate to take extreme measures against any active domestic opposition.⁴⁶ This has included everything from obstructing rival political parties to hounding politicians and activists who have angered the Kremlin or never particularly endeared themselves to it.⁴⁷ Due to these tactics and the enormous popularity he enjoys, Putin has no real parliamentary opposition. Gennady Zyuganov’s Communist party and Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia together account for a mere 20 percent of the Duma, and are not viewed by anyone as a tangible threat to the powers that be.

The regime retains the full support of the judicial branch as well. The popular expression “Basmanny justice”—named after the Basmanny District in Moscow—refers to the court’s overt bias toward the prosecutor general’s office, which receives its orders from above.⁴⁸ The judiciary’s deference to the government is widely recognized, but very few have the courage to speak about it in public. One of them is Yelena Valyavina, a senior judge in the Federal Arbitration Court, who stated publicly that she was pressured by the Kremlin during a court testimony she gave in June 2008 and told outright that she would lose her job if she acted against state interests.⁴⁹ Other judges are less eager to show such public courage, and prefer to act as an executive arm of Putin’s inner circle.

The Russian media has also seen better days. After years of intoxicating liberty, it has been reincorporated into the state. International organizations of journalists have publicly declared that Russia is one of the countries with the least freedom of the press in the world.⁵⁰ Indeed, the Russian government is unscrupulous in its efforts to tighten its grip on the media. It has taken control of major television stations, closed opposition newspapers by applying economic and judicial pressure, and arrested “recalcitrant” journalists on fabricated charges. This, however, is not the worst of it. During Putin’s term in office 133 journalists have been murdered in highly suspicious circumstances. The most famous of them were Pavel Klebnikov and the human rights activist Anna Politkovskaya.