Dugin in Washington

Alexander Dugin

"In principle, Eurasia and our space, the heartland Russia, remain the staging area of a new anti-bourgeois, anti-American revolution," says Aleksandr Dugin who spoke this week in Washington. A soft-spoken man, Dugin wore a black shirt and black suit, with a priestly-beard of an old Solzhenitsyn. Like Aleksandr Isievich, Dugin is also a graphomaniac with a bit of a cult following. Many clutched his two kilo Osnovny Geopolitiki (Fundamentals of Geopolitics) like Bibles as he spoke of his philosophy of Eurasianism.

In the late 1970s, he worked in the top-secret archives of the Soviet intelligence service. In 1988, he joined the nationalist Pamyat group and later helped to write the political platform for the newly resuscitated CPRF under the leadership of Ziuganov, more nationalist than Marxist. Consistently glorifying both Tsarist and Stalinism Russia, his journal Elementy revealed Dugin's admiration for Himmler. In 1994, he and ally Eduard Limonov lead a new group— the National Bolshevik Front and became the party leader. But Aleksandr Gelevich is not simply a ignorant right-wing demagogue. He supposedly speaks fluently nine languages, including (ironically) English. Trained as a philosopher, Dugin is recrafting Marxism-Leninism “political science” into the chaotic post-Soviet political sphere. He split with Limonov, left the NBP, and created the Eurasia Party in 2002. Approaching Vladimir Putin for financial support, the Eurasia Party is believed by many to be a “virtual party” of the Kremlin (see A. Wilson, 2005). According to Dugin, his party has now gone into opposition against Putin in the past few months, and it seems that Dugin will attempt to run for the presidency in 2008 to help undermine “Project Putin."

Alexandr Dugin's lecture on Eurasianism at Johns Hopkins University

"In principle, Eurasia and our space, the heartland Russia, remain the staging area of a new anti-bourgeois, anti-American revolution," says Aleksandr Dugin who spoke this week in Washington. A soft-spoken man, Dugin wore a black shirt and black suit, with a priestly-beard of an old Solzhenitsyn. Like Aleksandr Isievich, Dugin is also a graphomaniac with a bit of a cult following. Many clutched his two kilo Osnovny Geopolitiki (Fundamentals of Geopolitics) like Bibles as he spoke of his philosophy of Eurasianism.In the late 1970s, he worked in the top-secret archives of the Soviet intelligence service. In 1988, he joined the nationalist Pamyat group and later helped to write the political platform for the newly resuscitated CPRF under the leadership of Ziuganov, more nationalist than Marxist.

 

The magic disillusion of a Nationalist Intellectual (1995)

Alexander Dugin

I consider myself a Conservative Revolutioneer and National-Bolshevik. That is not exactly Fascism, or to say it more clearly, exactly not fascism. There were several periods during the history of fascist movements, and these periods were quite different from one another not only politically, but also philosophically and ideologically. In early Italian Fascism (which I happen to like, and I don't hesitate saying this aloud) there were many Avantgardist fronts - in social and economic spheres (Syndicalism, trade unions), in art (D'Annunzio, Marinetti, Papini, etc.), in right-wing Hegelianism that created the ideology of the Absolute State (Gentile), within esoterical seeking and Traditionalism (Evola, Reghini), and, finally, in the very Fascist way, where nihilism and anarchism ("direct action, romanticism, exotica") coexisted with the conservative ideals of nation, ethics, hierarchy, and military values. However, after the Mussolini-vatican pact and the re-established monarchy it all became rather dull, bureaucratic and uninteresting. For a while in 1943-5 the spirit of this left-wing republican Fascism resurfaced in the Salo republic (after the Conservatives betrayed Mussolini to the Americans), but that was something else.

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