One of my old college buddies sent me these gleanings from his recent visit to his son, who married a Ukrainian girl and now lives there. The son is fluent in Russian and follows the Russian media closely. Here is a summary of his observations concerning the murder of crackpot intellectual Aleksandr Dugin’s daughter Darya and its impact on the Russo-Ukrainian war:
- Dugin was a marginal extreme Orthodox-nationalist with little influence on Putin or Russian opinion in general.
- Blowing up his daughter has changed that situation overnight. She is now a martyr and his public statement about the matter is widely known and probably influential.
- Dugin’s statement is that revenge is beneath us Russians as a nation; what is worthy of us is winning this war, and we must now unite our efforts to do it.
- This is potentially a game changer, as Putin has lacked sufficient support for a general mobilization and all-out war effort. As my son puts it, Putin has avoided any inconvenience to the wealthy and powerful elites of Moscow and St Petersburg, who definitely don’t want their sons sent off to war. Nor does the military-age population of Russia’s large cities have any enthusiasm for killing Ukrainians.
- I’ve seen how Russian atrocities have motivated my son’s Ukrainian friends to support all-out war, as in, “We’d rather die than submit to Russia.” That dynamic is capable of working both ways.
The first point is, by the way, consistent with Mark Galeotti’s appraisal of Dugin in The Spectator:
This murder will only add to the Dugin myth, one he himself has so assiduously developed. There are many in the West happy to take him at face value, as “Putin’s Brain” or “Putin’s Rasputin.” He is not, though, and never has been especially influential. He has no personal connection to Putin, but rather is just one of a whole breed of “political entrepreneurs” trying to pitch their plans and doctrines to the Kremlin. For a while, in 2014, he was in favor; his notions of Russia’s civilizational destiny and status as a Eurasian nation convenient to rationalize a land grab in Ukraine’s Donbas. Suddenly he was on every TV channel, his book Foundations of Geopolitics was on the syllabus at the Academy of the General Staff and he was offered a chair at MGU, Moscow State University, the country’s premier institute of higher learning.
But then the Kremlin decided against outright annexation of the Donetsk and Lugansk “People’s Republics” and Dugin was no longer useful. The invitations began to dry up, MGU rescinded its offer, and he was back in the marketplace, hawking his books to the public and his ideas to the leadership. In the process, he mastered the art of retrospective thought-leading. In other words, of picking up on hints about what the Kremlin was about to do and loudly advocating just this move – and then claiming the credit. Overall, though, he has been more effective in selling himself to western alt-right circles – which to be sure, gives him some value to Moscow as an agent of influence – than to the Kremlin.
So this is the Dugin paradox, he is Schrödinger’s Ideologist: at once important and also not. He may not have real traction with the government, but his capacity to present himself as a profound thinker whose (often barking mad) ideas frame Kremlin thinking means he is considered important. And if people think him important, then to a degree he becomes important. Or rather, the myth of Dugin does.
The comparison of Dugin to Rasputin is ironic. While the false monk was undoubtedly an evil presence in the Romanov court, his opinions about foreign policy were pacific. He pleaded with Nicholas II not to enter the Great War. If the Tsar had listened, Russia might well have been spared a century of sorrow.
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