Having taken control of the print and broadcast media, Putin and his supporters have turned to a new and larger target: the Internet. In early 2008, Duma member Konstantin Rykov of Putin’s United Russia party called for the creation of a sovereign Russian internet network in order to properly educate the country’s youth in a patriotic spirit.⁵¹ And indeed, the new minister of communications, Igor Schegolev, declared last October that the creation of a Russian internet “that is protected from destructive external influences” was already underway.⁵²

Along with the de-democratization of Russia, Putin’s economic policies have also largely echoed Dugin’s vision. Russia’s economy is centralized again: All of its important sectors—the arms industry, energy producers, and the corporations exploiting natural resources—are in the hands of government officials or their trusted associates. The oligarchs who have come out against Putin, such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky, former owner of the energy giant Yukos, have been crushed.⁵³ Dugin himself has justified such actions through his claim that the traditional social hierarchy always subjects the merchants to the rule of the warrior class.⁵⁴ For its part, the Russian public has not objected to the new economic order. The rise in oil and natural gas prices and the end of the Chechen wars have granted Russia a measure of prosperity and stability it lacked in the past.

But the cause of Dugin’s renewed patriotic and spiritual confidence is mainly the foreign and security policies enacted by the current Russian regime. Since Putin replaced Yeltsin as president, Moscow has abandoned the desire to integrate with the West, and adopted an unambiguously hawkish position. Between 2000 and 2007, Russia’s security budget has grown more than fourfold.⁵⁵ Plans are now in place for a comprehensive modernization of the military at a total cost of five trillion rubles, which will include the acquisition of intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear submarines, and aircraft carriers.⁵⁶ All the while, Russia is doing its best to intimidate its pro-Western neighbors, and has proven the seriousness of its intentions by invading Georgia. Its declarations concerning the Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic states are even more aggressive than its old Cold War rhetoric. Kremlin spokesmen do not hesitate to raise the possibility of nuclear war in order to alert the arrogant West that Judgment Day, which appeared to have been delayed with the fall of the communist bloc, may still be right around the corner. Russia’s decisions to renounce the CFE treaty, which limits the deployment of armed forces in the area between the Atlantic Ocean and the Urals, and to reinstitute long-range strategic bomber flights around the world, give the belligerent statements of its leaders a disturbing gravity.⁵⁷

It seems, in short, that Russia under Putinism has enthusiastically embraced the Eurasian vision. Putin himself publicly announced as much in an article he published toward the end of 2000, entitled “Russia Has Always Identified Itself as a Eurasian Country.”⁵⁸ Putin also mentioned Gumilev in a speech he gave at a university in Kazakhstan that year:

Eurasian ideas—developed by Gumilev and his disciple Dugin—are essential to any understanding of Moscow’s intentions in the international arena. Russia’s hostility toward the United States, its efforts to increase its influence in Europe (and particularly in Germany), its ties with Iran, and its attempts to regain its standing in the Middle East all demonstrate a determined effort by policymakers in the Kremlin to create an anti-American alliance—or an anti-Atlantic alliance, as Dugin would put it—in which Russia will play the leading role.⁶⁰

The Russian collective memory is also being fundamentally revised in line with the Eurasian vision. After years of rejecting its Soviet past, Russia is now overwhelmed with nostalgia for communist imperialism. This is clearly evident in Putin’s public statements. In April 2005, he stated in his annual address to the Russian nation, “the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century.”⁶¹ The course of action implied in Putin’s words has already achieved concrete expression in the realm of education. New Russian history and social science textbooks teach an old-new historical narrative in which Stalin was a glorious leader; the wide-scale purges he conducted in the 1930s were necessary for “invigorating the ranks”; hardliner Leonid Brezhnev, general secretary from 1964 to 1982, ensured the Soviet Union’s stability and prosperity, which was the “model of an ideal society in the eyes of millions around the world”; Gorbachev and Yeltsin brought destruction to the once-mighty superpower; and Putin, not surprisingly, is responsible for every advancement in Russian society since 2000.⁶²

Aleksandr Dugin has every reason to feel profoundly satisfied. Before his very eyes, the ideology which he developed under the names “Traditionalism,” “National Bolshevism,” and “Eurasianism” is becoming the official line of the Russian government. He is quite justified in proclaiming, “Putin is becoming more and more like Dugin.” This once-obscure intellectual is now the chief philosopher of the “radical center.” And while the glorious Russian nation is marching to his tune, we would be wise to recall the words of Isaiah Berlin—a thinker who was Dugin’s opposite in almost every way—who warned us that ideas “nurtured in the stillness of a professor’s study” could destroy a civilization.⁶³

 

Yigal Liverant is a translator and M.A. candidate at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University.