You’ve probably heard of Aleksandr Dugin, the Russian fascist intellectual whose daughter Daria Dugina was car-bombed last week. Dugin is a fascinating person. I first came across him on Iranian national television, while he was visiting Iran. His book, Foundations of Geopolitics, was a best-seller in the 1990s and left a mark in Russia. I recommend you to read the book because it’s incredibly silly, but that its silliness was appealing is very telling.
The short version of Dugin is that he’s Steve Bannon on steroids—or a Steve Bannon that is liberated from the shackles of a liberal society that he’s talking to. For the longer version, fasten your seatbelts.
Foundations of Geopolitics, published in 1997, envisions a Russia-dominated world in which Western Europe is under the sphere of influence of Germany supported by France, in cooperation with Russia. The Middle East is under the sphere of influence of Iran, in cooperation with Russia. Parts of Asia is under the influence of Japan, in cooperation with and itself under the influence of Russia. And the rest of Eurasia is dominated by Russia, which is actively seeking to encourage separatism and boil tensions in the United States and China. The United Kingdom, being an island and not very large, can easily be cut off from the world. I don’t know what’s more ridiculous, that Russians wanted a strong Germany in the 1990s or that, in retrospect having watched the German foreign policy of the past decades, that they thought the Germans would sign up for it. Or that Dugin and his followers believed that Russia had the capacity of doing any of these, especially in the 1990s and without predicting the rise of the price of oil in the next decade that has financed everything Russia has done since.
But all of these are secondary to the most important project: Reincorporating Ukraine. Without Ukraine, it is not that there is no Russian empire. Without Ukraine, there is no Russia. Russia, as Putin said in justification for his war, was born out of Kyiv—which makes one wonder, then, shouldn’t Russia be reincorporated into Ukraine? An independent Ukraine is an existential crisis to Russia but internally because it is the national crisis of identity for Russianism. These are what Putin and Dugin have said on the record.
In 1997, the Russians were pretty much missing the glorious and prosperous days of the Soviet Union. It was that bad. The economic policies, more or less imposed by the United States under the advice of Jeffrey Sachs1 and his shock therapy, had deteriorated the welfare in Russia that didn’t exists to begin with. But, while life was tough for the average Russian, it was far more miserable for the security people—or those who had been a part of the security apparatus during the Soviet Union.