Few people feel what is happening today more acutely than Alexander Dugin. Few people have been more deeply immersed in the events in Ukraine all these eight years. Some follow him, defending the Russian idea, others consider him almost the incarnation of evil. But no one is indifferent to his ideas.

In a large interview for the Federal News Agency (FAN) philosopher and ideologist of the Russian world Alexander Dugin told what he thinks about the special operation of the Russian Armed Forces in Ukraine, how the population differs from the people and what must be done to be considered winners.

The unipolar world is coming to an end

- There is a feeling that something new is coming, a new world. And a start has been made by the special operation in Ukraine. But what kind of world is this, and what place does Russia have in it?

- Indeed, now there is a change in the world order. But not the one that emerged after World War II, not the Yalta peace, but the unipolar world that emerged in '91 after the collapse of the bipolar model that emerged after 1945.

In '91, there was a revision of the results of the war - the transition from a bipolar world to a unipolar world, globalist one. And Russia lost its sovereignty and legally agreed to this, surrendering to the West. A defeatist regime came to power, a globalist dictatorship was established.

Unipolar world existed until the arrival of Vladimir Putin, who in 2000 began to move to revise the results of 1991. Now we cannot claim to be the second pole, so for Russia to be independent and sovereign we need to build a multipolar world, where besides us and the West there will be other poles independent of us and the West - as we see now in China.

The special military operation doesn't start the transition to a multipolar world - it completes it. It is the last stage. The first attempts to start moving toward a multipolar world began when Putin with [ex-Chancellor of Germany Gerhard] Schröder and [ex-President of France Jacques] Chirac tried to resist Anglo-Saxon aggression in Iraq. Then there was the famous Munich speech by the Russian president in 2007. In 2008, there was a clash with the pro-Western Georgian dictator Mikhail Saakashvili, then there was the Maidan and our reaction - reunification with Crimea and support for Donbass. And then today is the finale. The special operation is the border. Now the transition from a unipolar world to a multipolar world has become a reality, and everything depends only on our victory.

- You say that Putin was on his way to this for 22 years. Did he do it himself or was he pushed? Because he came to power aspiring to establish a dialogue with the West and even to join NATO. But the West consistently rejected this idea, which eventually led to what we have today.

- I think that the dilemma that defines the essence of the whole period of Putin's rule is the combination of two mutually exclusive things. Vladimir Vladimirovich wanted to be part of the West, but a sovereign part of it. This formula is not solved in any way. Neither theoretically nor practically. And sooner or later there comes a choice: inclusion in the Western global model or sovereignty.

- So it turns out that our president was mistaken?

- No, this was his strategy. Just like Deng Xiaoping's strategy - to join globalization in order to pull out of it at a critical moment. And we saw that in the case of Deng Xiaoping, that's what worked.

I wouldn't call it a mistake. I believe that this was Putin's strategy, the results of which are too early to judge. We'll talk after the victory. One thing is absolutely certain: the West only accepts Russia in exchange for surrendering its sovereignty.

There is an American structure: the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). This is a kind of ideological headquarters of the modern West. So, after the start of the Russian special operation, Richard Haass, chairman of the CFR, held a meeting on the Russian military operation in Ukraine. And they put forward a very interesting formula - not regime change in Russia, but "change" of Putin. Our regime, unlike the Iranian regime, suits them on the whole, because it is built according to the patterns of the 90s. Only Putin, who defends the sovereignty of his country, does not suit them.

- Now some are hoping for negotiations. Do you think it's possible to roll everything back?

- No. The West wanted to break our resistance by any means. So they built an anti-Russia in Ukraine, and to speed up the process of creating an artificial national identity, they supported Ukrainian neo-Nazism. Everything is against Russia. And if we are a pole, if we are a sovereign state, we had to decide on a special operation. We broke that thread, and there's no going back. The Rubicon has been crossed, the president has decided to defend sovereignty at any cost.

- Alexander Gelievich, you separate the concepts of "population" and "people". The population, as I understand it, does not need a special operation. According to you, the Russian idea lives exactly in the people. Could you reveal your thought and explain what is the people and what is the population?

- You have now actually reproduced the key formula that best describes the present moment. Contemporary Russian society can be understood using a formal criterion, that is, depending on how people determine their priorities, interests and values at a rational level. This is the population. Everyone is preoccupied with individual issues, problems, wants to live better, work less, consume more, wants to have a rest. The population is measured by material income, number of free hours, time spent on the Internet...

- It's neither good nor bad. It's a given, right?

- Right. But it's a population. They have one conversation with them. For them they create entertainment programs, they are promised comfort, they ritually participate in elections. But there is another layer - the people. The people are our awareness of our own existence in history. It is a sense of injustice and justice, a willingness to sacrifice themselves and their loved ones for the freedom and independence of the Fatherland. The people awaken, as a rule, in critical conditions. At other times they are hiding. But it exists, it is hidden in the population. In other words, you can not say that the population exists separately, and separately, somewhere near lives the people. People and population are two sides of the same. There is a surface level and a deep level. The "Immortal Regiment" is the people. Conditionally, Channel One is the population.

- We have been fattening up our population for a very long time, often to the detriment of the people. Don't you think that the people, who have been sharply lifted up by their ears and pulled out of the water, are now a little shocked by what has happened. Maybe we should have acted more smoothly, gradually?

- In theory, we could agree with you. But then we don't understand anything about Russian history. There is a saying that Russians take a long time to harness, but they go quickly. We cannot go slowly and gradually. There are traits in our psychology that do not allow us to do things consistently, calmly and evenly. We are not Japanese, not Germans, not Chinese. We are people of impulse. At first everything falls into our population - McDonald's, social networks - and then we don't notice the Russian spring or Donbass, and then the people wake up and start going fast and there is no stopping them.

At the same time, I believe that the Russian authorities do not yet seek to awaken the people. It wants to solve the conflict without mobilizing the people. So far we are talking about some kind of technical solution to this special operation. The fact is that the elite, which has remained since the 90s, really hates our people. It knows very well that it exists, but it is its enemy. And, when we fight Russophobia outside, we forget what a deep degree of Russophobia is present inside Russia itself.

In fact, we are no longer dealing with the fifth column, but with the sixth, which is located inside modern Russia. It formally portrays loyalty to Putin. Anatoly Chubais was a border figure between the fifth and sixth column. He was sort of pro-Putin, but also pro-liberalism and globalization. He ran away, but his maggots remained.

That being said, a special operation simply cannot be brought to victory without an awakening of the Russian factor. And the people are ready. The simpler the person, the more fierce, subtle and sharper he feels it.

- But a liberal will contradict you. There is no support for the special operation. There are those who are for it, but there are not more of them. They are just louder, because those who are against it are afraid to get on trial.

- I don't know who you're talking about. Liberals don't exist. They were artificially imposed on us along with our surrender. It was a condition of external control of the country.

- Well, there are opinion leaders of some urban youth. Hipsters or something. Somebody went out to rallies after all.

- That is not true at all! They are bots. They do not exist. They are a tiny fraction, zombified in the same way as the Ukrainian Nazis. There is not and never was this radio or TV station. No one noticed when they disappeared. They just cleaned up the viral content with an anti-virus.

Hipsters don't exist, they are ordinary Russian people. They are girls and boys who at some point will change into military uniforms and go to defend the country.

Appearance is deceptive

I once took a geopolitics class at MSU and noticed two girls - one had green hair and the other red hair. And both had huge earrings in their noses. They didn't want to answer me for a long time, and I thought they were turning against me and geopolitics. Finally they came over, and I told them, "You look like LGBT activists. But don't be afraid, if you want to criticize me, please, I respect any point of view". And suddenly, one of them starts talking about the greatness of Russia in such a deep, correct, thoughtful way. I was impressed. Then it turned out that they stayed away for a long time because they were modest and waited for their more traditional-looking fellow students to pass.

Russian nothingness is already something

I remembered another story. During the first campaign in 2014, a boy from Yekaterinburg wrote to me. He told me that he was using drugs, that he was weak, stupid, and would probably end his life very soon. At one point he collected money for a one-way ticket to Donetsk. To be useful to his homeland at least in this way.

I was moved to tears by this letter. Instead of bragging, the man admits that he's going to the DPR on his last breath, that no one needs him, that he's a complete nothing. But nevertheless, he is a Russian nothing! He didn't go there out of desperation, but because he is Russian. This guy soon became one of the outstanding commanders.

Complete control of Ukraine is necessary

Both to achieve demilitarization and to achieve denazification, full, irreversible, long-term control over the territory of Ukraine is a necessary condition. Otherwise we will achieve neither the first nor the second. If we demilitarize the Ukrainian military infrastructure now, leaving this state sovereignty, then after a while we will return to the same problem, but with nuclear weapons.

The same applies to denazification, because Nazism is part of the political course of modern Ukraine.

- So what do you think is the essence of denazification?

- In the establishment of another ideology in Ukraine, which would not be based on the principle of anti-Russia. In order to do this, it is necessary to abolish the idea of Ukraine building its own nation, which has nothing to do with us.

However, we cannot fight this artificial Nazism without offering something in return. If we offer Ukrainians to go to the West with us, it would be the most vicious and despicable thing that could ever happen.

- And what can we offer?

- We need to offer them belonging to a common East Slavic Eurasian Orthodox civilization. In order to do this, we ourselves should be able to realize ourselves as a civilization, not just as one of the European countries. We will not be able to denationalize Ukraine without a technological condition (complete control over the territory of Ukraine) and without incorporating Ukrainians into our civilizational identity.

China is not the problem, but the solution

- Recently a friend of mine was furiously trying to prove to me that there is no special way for Russia and there never has been. Our destiny is to be under the heel of either the West or China. How would you respond to him?

- I try to avoid such direct propaganda and to say only what I think is close to the truth. No matter what it costs me. So I will, ignoring your acquaintance's propaganda passage, say that China is a fundamental civilization that, under the guise of modernity and even Maoism, preserves very ancient Confucian foundations.

China is not ruled by such simple things as hegemony or the desire to take over someone. It has no potential ambition to replace the United States. China is the world in itself. There is the concept of stretching - everything under the sky (hence the name "Celestial Empire" - Ed.). And yes, they need Taiwan, they are not against expanding their influence in Indochina and some countries in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia. But they have absolutely no plans to conquer Russia. Today the Chinese have not even a remote thought that the PRC can offer us a unified model or even put Russia under their control.

Beijing is our main argument in the struggle for a multipolar world.