Alexander Dugin: A Russian fascist who helped convince Putin to invade

The name Alexander Dugin is not known to most outside Russia, but millions are now openly dealing with the consequences of this man’s strange ideas.

According to his biography, Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin was born in Moscow on 7 January 1962. Dugin is a Russian philosopher, professor, political analyst and strategist and the main organizer of the National Bolshevik Front and is a leading member of Vladimir Putin’s ruling United Russia party.

But Dugin is far more than just a political philosopher turned politician. Since 1999, he formally embraced the Old Believers, a Russian religious movement that rejected the reforms of the official Russian Orthodox Church.

He was the organizer and first leader of the ultranationalist National Bolshevik Party from 1993 to 1998 and of the Eurasia Party, whose philosophy combines Neopaganism, Slavic Nativism, Gnosticism, Hermeticism and Eastern Orthodox traditions and draws upon certain mystical traditions for the development of Dugin’s "Fourth political theory".

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His adherence to the Old Believers allowed him to combine Slavic Paganism and Orthodox Christianity without formally adopting either – a choice he claimed was not paradoxical, since he said the Old Believers have “preserved an esoteric and initiatory character” which has been lost in Western Christianity.

As such, his own Russian Orthodox tradition has merged with Neopaganism becoming a potent nationalist force.

Adopting the alter ego of "Hans Siever", a reference to Wolfram Sievers, a Nazi researcher of the paranormal, Dugin’s ideas could be best described as being "Slavo-Nazism", influenced by the likes of Julius Evola, Alain de Benoist and the beliefs of the Traditionalist School.

They are also inherently anti-Semitic in the old Russian pogrom sense of the term.

In her book, Aleksandr Dugin: A Russian Version of the European Radical Right? , political scientist Marlene Laruelle writes Dugin is the inventor of a form of Russian fascism that harbours far-right ideologies underpinned by esoteric Nazism, Traditionalism, the German Conservative Revolution and the European New Right as its backbone.

And when not reinventing ‘fascism with a Russian soul’, he has also dabbled in Satanism, via the "Yuzhinsky group", a dissident group that played with Satanism and the occult.

Dugin is the author of more than 30 books, among them Foundations of Geopolitics and The Fourth Political Theory.

But it's Foundations of Geopolitics that is the cause of much the world and now Ukraine’s angst.

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It was Vladimir Putin who insisted this book become the official textbook for the Academy of the General Staff of the Russian military and in some ways, is the Russian version of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

In 1997, in his article, 'Fascism – Borderless and Red', Dugin described "national capitalism" as pre-empting the development of a 'genuine, true, radically revolutionary and consistent, fascist fascism' in Russia.

He says that it was:

'... by no means the racist and chauvinist aspects of National Socialism that determined the nature of its ideology.

The excesses of this ideology in Germany… are a matter exclusively of the Germans ... while Russian fascism is a combination of natural national conservatism with a passionate desire for true changes.'

Another one of Dugin’s projects was the Eurasia Party, an ultranationalist offshoot of the National Bolsheviks, an extremely traditionalist, socially conservative with fascist economic views whose members have volunteered forces to help Russian Separatists of eastern Ukraine.

As an author of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Dugin has written that the war between Russia and Ukraine is “inevitable” and has said that 'The Russian Renaissance can only stop by Kiev'.

However, for those that still don’t readily recognise Dugin’s work, it's all over the internet and has been the wellspring of global Alt-Right and White Identitarianist thought for the past 20 years.

This became clear only days after Putin ordered his brutal invasion of Ukraine, when he wrote on his Facebook page what sounded like lines from the pages of the manifesto of Norwegian neo-Nazi Anders Brievik, the Christchurch shooter or convicted Serbian war criminal Vojislav Seselj, along neo-Nazi websites decrying the so-called "Great Reset" theory.

He wrote:

As the war (not with Ukraine, but with the West) is already underway, this is the time when we must oppose the West our structures of civilization: theories, ideas, paradigms, teachings, values, principles. And Western values must at least relative or be completely disqualified.

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In another earlier post, he said:

Russia rejects everything in globalism: unipolarism, atlantism, on the one hand, and liberalism, anti-tradition, technocracy, Grand Reset in one word, on the other. It is clear that all European leaders are part of the Atlantic liberal elite.

Russia is building a global resistance camp. His victory would be a victory for all the alternative forces, both the right and the left, and for all the people. As always, we are starting the most difficult and dangerous processes.

“What does it mean for Russia to break up with the West? It is the salvation. The modern West, where Rothschild, Soros, Schwab, Bill Gates and Zuckerberg triumph, is the most disgusting thing in the history of the world.

Russia is out to defend Tradition values against the modern world. It's just that "revert against the modern world.

A break with the West is not a break with Europe. It's a breakdown with death, degeneration and suicide. It's the key to recovery. And Europe itself, the European peoples, should follow our example: topple the anti-national globalist council. And building a real European house, a European building, a European cathedral.

For Alexander Dugin, Ukraine is just the first step in reinventing humanity in some bizarre Neopagan, Slavic Nativist, Eastern Orthodox, anti-Capitalist "New World Order", which ironically is an accusation both Dugin and his useful idiots in Anglo and European Far-Right movements accuse everyone else of trying to conceive.

How this will eventually play out no one knows, but one thing is for sure: millions of innocent Ukrainians have already paid dearly for Dugin’s "Slavo-Nazi" perversity with their homes, their livelihoods and even with their lives.

Branko Miletic is a journalist, editor, historian and author who has written extensively on the wars in the Balkans and post-Yugoslavia politics for the past 20 years. You can follow Branko on Twitter @journovox9.