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‘Russia’s most effective spokesperson in the U.S.’ Alexander Dugin has peddled his mystical, anti-liberal philosophy for decades. Why is his profile growing now?

Source: Meduza

Russian far-right ideologue Alexander Dugin has been promoting his ultranationalist vision of the “Russian world” for more than 30 years. While he’s far from being “Putin’s brain,” as Western media is fond of calling him, he wields a level of influence in Russia today that would have been hard to imagine when he got his start. In recent years, with the rise of the global far right, he’s gained an international profile as well, appearing on CNN and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s interview show. This summer, he co-organized a conference in Moscow featuring Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, American conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and Elon Musk’s father as speakers. To understand Dugin’s standing within the Putin administration, his reach in the West, and the parallels between his ideas and those of similar figures in the U.S., Meduza spoke to historian Mark J. Sedgwick. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

— People have a wide range of ideas about who Alexander Dugin is. In your opinion, what is he all about?

— He’s about many things, of course. My view — and I know not everybody agrees with it — is that he started off as a traditionalist and he still is one. Because although he’s developed his thought and included other things over the years, he’s still fundamentally faithful to the earliest positions that he expressed, which were his reading of [20th century French philosopher René] Guénon’s notion of traditionalism.

— For people not familiar with Guénon’s traditionalism, what are the essential things to know, especially in the context of Dugin?

There are two absolutely essential ideas in traditionalism. One is that there is such a thing as what Guénon called the “primordial tradition” — a revelation from the earliest ages of humanity. This is why it’s called “traditionalism”: not in the sense of being old-fashioned, but in the sense of being based on — and trying to reconstruct — the “primordial tradition.”

The [other] central idea here is that we can divide what we call religion or spirituality or mysticism into two parts. There’s an esoteric part, which is common to all human systems and goes back to the beginning of humanity. And then there’s an exoteric part, which is what one needs if they go to a church, or a mosque, or a temple, and which is clearly and obviously different. But that doesn’t matter, because even though the exoteric is separate, the esoteric, according to traditionalism, is common. 

This idea has been around for a long time. What makes traditionalism special is that it combines it with fundamental critique of modernity. And what’s the problem with modernity? It’s lost touch with the “primordial tradition.” Therefore, instead of caring about important things, it cares about unimportant ones, like technological development, or illusions, such as the idea of human equality, which (from the traditionalists perspective) just isn’t true, or the idea of democracy, which doesn’t really exist.

— And Dugin is selling a take on traditionalism that paints Russian Orthodoxy as the one culture that is the closest to the “primordial tradition”?

— That’s right. This is the most important modification he made to traditionalist theory, because it proposed that tradition could be found in the East, and in Hinduism and Islam. By “the East,” Guénon meant “the Orient” — the Far East and what we now call the Middle East. But of course, what Dugin means by “the East” is Russian civilization. And, indeed, he argued in one of his earliest books that Russian Orthodoxy represents the “primordial tradition.”

— Dugin’s idea plays very well with the West’s exoticized, Orientalist view of Russia. 

— You can argue that Guénon follows the pattern of thinking about the Middle East and the Arab world that [Edward] Said wrote about in Orientalism, but just turns it around. For example, Said criticized Europeans for thinking of the East as unchanging, and Guénon says, “But it’s great! The East is unchanging!” Said criticized Europeans for thinking that the Middle East was irrational, and Guénon says, “It’s amazing! The Middle East does not have this ‘rationality’ problem!” 

I am not sure to what extent this can be applied to Russia, because Said didn’t really look at Russia. But certainly, the further away one gets from home, the more people tend to orientalize places. 

— What would be your assessment of Alexander Dugin’s role in Russian politics today? On the one hand, there are articles calling him “Putin’s brain,” and on the other hand, there are Russian scholars who say he doesn’t matter at all.

— I think the truth is in between. Originally, the West — mostly journalists — liked the headlines [calling Dugin] “Putin’s Brain” and “Putin’s Rasputin.” Who can resist that? It is completely untrue, but it sounds very good. 

The point about Dugin and Russian politics is that over the course of his career, the center of Russian politics has moved. When he started off in the Yeltsin years, his theories were far from the mainstream. But since then, the mainstream has moved towards his ideas in many ways, which is one of the reasons he’s becoming more important or more popular.

At one point, it was fairly safe to assume that Putin had no idea who Dugin was. However, it was also safe to assume that somebody in the Kremlin did know who he was and approved of him, because he got lots of time in the public space.

Putin certainly knows who Dugin is now. But some of the Western arguments suggesting that Putin is following Dugin’s worldview make no sense. Putin is a practical politician; he has his own brain, his own reasons for doing things, and his own view of the world. But the point is that what we can see of his view of the world fits quite neatly nowadays with Dugin’s.

— What do you think has caused such a gap between the Western journalists paying so much attention to Dugin and the Russian journalists saying that he doesn’t matter at all?

Western journalists want an explanation that does not suggest that the West did anything wrong or made any mistakes. I am not a political scientist, but I think it takes two to have a row. And on the other side, Russian journalists don’t need that sort of explanation. They may sometimes even borrow some of Dugin’s ideas to explain what’s going on and the stance of the West and America [towards Russia]. Although these ideas are so commonplace nowadays that we can’t say definitively whether they’re borrowing them from Dugin specifically.

— By “ideas” do you mean critiques of liberalism?

— Yes, but most importantly critiques of modernity, especially Western modernity and therefore Western civilization. After adjusting the definition of “East” and adjusting esotericism to fit Russian circumstances, the next thing Dugin did was bring in the geopolitical perspective. He says, modernity is West, tradition is East, which therefore creates an apocalyptic, civilization conflict between East and West.

One of the most important ideas today is that our assumption that after the fall of the Soviet Union everybody was going to live happily together was never true, because there was an inevitable conflict between East and West.

— What do you think Dugin gets from the Russian state, and what does the state get from Dugin?

— Dugin gets a platform, and he gets support. He had it before, he lost it after his “Kill, kill, kill” speech, and now he has it again. And also, he presumably gets some money. This recent Tsargrad Institute conference must have cost a lot, and he wasn’t the one paying for it. Though what he didn’t get was effective protection from the Russian security services.

What does the Russian state get from him? For a long time, it got the fact that he was supporting far-right parties in Europe. It was Russian policy for some time to support the European far right. The Russian state was arranging loans to [Marine] Le Pen in France and other far-right politicians in other countries. So Dugin’s influence abroad fit nicely with that strategy. I think the Russian state is still getting that out of Dugin. He’s also an effective spokesman, and the Trump people seem to like him. He’s probably Russia’s most effective spokesperson in the United States at this moment. 

— The Western far right believes it’s fighting for Western civilization, while Dugin believes he’s fighting for Russian civilization. So how do they find common ground? 

— You point at a very important paradox. And this is becoming more and more true in the current situation, where a certain conflict is going on between Russia and the West. To make sense of it, one has to go back to the earliest stage of their shared thought, because what they share is the fundamental traditionalist critique of modernity. If I’m an American on the far right, it doesn’t make sense for me to say, “Oh, I’m a patriotic American, therefore I love Putin.” But if I say, “I’m a patriotic American, I love and value tradition, I detest modernity, and who is standing up for tradition at present? Putin!” — then it works logically. 

— Is this why Dugin seems to have so much in common with influential radical right-wing figures in the U.S., such as Steve Bannon and Curtis Yarvin?

— I think people in those circles have all read the same things. There is a canon, right? Everybody has read it. So there are going to be certain [shared] influences. I have not actually gone through either of those guys’ ideas and said, “Hmm, where does this come from?” So I can’t be very specific in my answer to that. But there’s a network, there’s a world where everybody is reading each other. And there are mutual influences. Young Dugin went to Paris and met Alain de Benoist. Different versions of rightist ideologies everywhere all have something in common. But the socio-political circumstances to which they are responding are quite different. America under Biden was not really Russia under Yeltsin. You can draw certain parallels, but these are different places and different circumstances.