For years, analysts and observers have offered competing views of the 60-year-old ideologue’s true level of influence among Moscow’s political elites. This week, the long-running debate has taken on new intensity after his daughter was killed in a car bomb attack in the Russian capital. Moscow blamed Ukrainian intelligence services for the killing of Dugin’s daughter, Daria Dugina, a claim dismissed as “propaganda” by Kyiv. There is growing speculation that Dugin himself may have been the target of Saturday’s attack, reflecting his prominence as a leading advocate for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
He calls for an imperial Russia
Thirty years after he was born into a high-ranking military family in 1962, Dugin first came to national attention in the early 1990s amid the collapse of the Soviet Union as a contributing writer for the far-right Russian newspaper Den. In a manifesto called “The Great War of the Continents,” serialized by the paper in 1991-1992, he laid out his ultra-nationalist vision of Russia as the leader of a Eurasian empire meant to counter what he saw as decadence. West. By 1997, Dugin’s ideas on so-called Eurasianism had coalesced, and he published Foundations of Geopolitics—a book that would become widely recognized as his most important work and reportedly required reading at the Russian Armed Forces’ senior management college. He called on Russia in the text to rebuild its influence, minus the communist ideology of the Soviet Union, through alliances and annexations, including the seizure of Ukraine, which he claimed had “no geopolitical significance” and “no national exclusivity” as a state. . Susan Smith-Peter, a Russian historian and professor at the City University of New York in the United States, described Dugin’s concepts as “fascist”. “His life’s work was basically to take fascist ideas and modify them for the Russian audience so that he had this Russian veneer,” Smith-Peter told Al Jazeera. “And it has affected people on various levels,” he said.
Supposed influence ‘grossly overstated’
In more recent decades, Dugin has held a number of high-profile positions, including serving as head of Moscow State University’s prestigious Department of Sociology of International Relations between 2009-14 and briefly serving as editor-in-chief at pro-Kremlin Tsargrad TV channel after its launch in 2015. Meanwhile, his hard-line ideas have steadily seeped from the fringes into Russia’s political mainstream as Moscow’s relations with the US and its European allies have sunk to post-Cold War lows under Putin. The Russian president’s own rhetoric on Ukraine has also prompted suggestions from some analysts that he has been directly influenced by Dugin’s work. In a lengthy July 2021 essay titled “On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” Putin said he believed “true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in cooperation with Russia,” echoing Dugin’s skepticism about its claim to an independent state. But other observers reject the idea that Dugin, who in 2014 said he believed Russia should “kill, kill, kill [Ukrainians],” has directly shaped Putin’s decision-making. “Dugin’s real influence on Russian politics has been grossly overstated,” Samuel Ramani, a fellow at the UK-based Institute for Defense and Security Studies, told Al Jazeera. “He has never held an official title within Russia … and he is not that in touch with the current establishment, least of all with Putin,” Ramani said. He noted that Dugin always “wanted to go much further [on foreign policy] than Putin is willing to go,” referring to the former’s calls during Russia’s 2008 war with Georgia to overthrow the country’s government and in 2014 to declare war on Ukraine and annex the country’s eastern regions after the invasion of Moscow and the occupation of the Crimean peninsula. Ramani also pointed to differences between the pair over the current strategy in Ukraine, noting that Dugin had repeatedly called on Russia to introduce general conscription and conscription – moves Moscow has yet to take, while it has yet to formally declare the war.
“A new Russian time is coming”
Dmitry Babich, a Russian political analyst and journalist, was also skeptical of suggestions that Dugin had helped shape the Kremlin’s stance on Ukraine and other foreign policy issues. “In recent years, he [Dugin] he was more or less a harmless cult figure in his own little group,” Babich told Al Jazeera. “He has not influenced politics and it would certainly be wrong to say that he is Putin’s ‘brain’ or the face behind Putin’s policies, all of that is simply not true,” he added. But while debate continues over the extent of Dugin’s influence or irrelevance in Russia’s halls of power, he has continued to push for Moscow to step up its deadly assault on Ukraine. In a Telegram post published before his daughter was killed on Saturday, Dugin called on the Kremlin to prepare Russian society on a total war footing, saying Kyiv and its Western allies showed no sign of conceding defeat in conflict. “The Commander-in-Chief said, ‘We haven’t really started anything yet.’ Now we have to start,” Dugin said, citing Putin’s claim on July 7 that Russia had “generally … [not] started something serious yet” in Ukraine. “Russia…challenged the West as a civilization. So we have to go all the way,” he added. “The powerful forces of history have come into play, the tectonic plates have shifted… A new Russian hour is coming. Mercilessly.”
