Sunday, October 15, 2017

Marlene Laruelle ― Aleksandr Dugin: A Russian Version of the European Radical Right?


In studying contemporary Russian Eurasianism—both as  a doctrine and as  a political movement—one constantly comes across Aleksandr Dugin.


(The Wilson Center) One  of the main reasons that he is relevant to any such study is the quasi-monopoly he exercises over a certain part of  the  current  Russian  ideological spectrum.

This spectrum includes a plethora of right-wing groupuscules that produce an enormous number of books and an impressive quantity of low-circulation newspapers, but are not readily distinguishable from each other and display little theoretical consistency or sophistication. Dugin is the only major theoretician among this Russian radical right. He is simultaneously on the fringe and at the center of the Russian nationalist phenomenon. He provides theoretical inspiration to many currents and disseminates precepts that can be recycled at different levels. Above all he is striving to cover every niche on the current ideological  marketplace. He  proceeds  from  the assumption that  Russian  society and  Russia’s political establishment are in search of a new ideology: he therefore owes it to himself to exercise his influence over all the ideological options and their possible formulations.

Beyond the doctrinal qualities that make him stand out among the spectrum of Russian nationalism, Dugin is noteworthy for his frenzied and prolific output of publications beginning in the early 1990s. He has published over a dozen books, either original texts or thematically rearranged articles initially printed in various journals or newspapers. He has also edited several journals: Elementy (9 issues between 1992 and 1998), Milyi Angel (4 issues between 1991 and 1999), Evraziiskoe vtorzhenie (published  as an irregular supplement to the weekly Zavtra, with six special issues in  2000), and Evraziiskoe obozrenie  (11  issues from  2001  to  2004).1   In 1997, he wrote and presented a weekly one-hour radio broadcast, Finis Mundi, which was prohibited after he commented favorably on the early  20th-century  terrorist  Boris  Savinkov.2