- General (ret.) of the Yugoslav Army and deputy head of the Serbian Radical Party Bo??idar Delić.
Dugin's Public References to Fascism
While the ties linking some of these figures to Dugin are obvious, the reasons for the MED affiliation of others listed here remain a mystery. As indicated, throughout the 1990s, Dugin repeatedly eulogized, in disguised or open form, inter-war European and contemporary Russian fascism (sometimes, under his pseudonym as a poet "Aleksandr Sternberg," he did so in rhymes). The most explicit apologies for fascism can be found in Dugin's programmatic articles “Left Nationalism” (1992) or “Fascism – Borderless and Red” (1997) which are, as of April 2009, still openly accessible on the MED leader’s official web sites http://arcto.ru/ and http://my.arcto.ru/. Moreover, a number of these articles from the 1990s are, by now, available in Western languages. Some of them have been repeatedly quoted, in Russian and English language scholarly and journalistic analyses of Dugin and his movement.
To be sure, Dugin has, for obvious reasons, been eager to disassociate himself from German Nazism, at times strongly condemning Hitler’s crimes, and now often introduces himself as an “anti-fascist.” Yet, at certain points, he seemingly could not help but acknowledge the relevance of, above all other regimes, the Third Reich as a model for his own ideological constructs, like for instance, in his seminal analyses “Conservative Revolution: The Third Way” (1991) or “The Metaphysics of National Bolshevism” (1997) at http://my.arcto.ru/. As late as March 2006, at a point when he was already a full member of Moscow’s political establishment, Dugin, in a KM.ru online conference, publicly admitted that his ideology is close to that of the inter-war German brothers Otto and Gregor Strasser. In that interview, the transcript of which was re-produced on MED’s website, Dugin introduced the Strasser brothers as belonging to the anti-Hitler branch of German left-wing nationalism. Dugin, however, “forgot” to mention that the Strassers were once themselves National Socialists and played an important role in the rise of the Nazi party (NSDAP), in the mid-late 1920s. They subsequently indeed opposed Adolf Hitler, but did so first within the Nazi party. Gregor Strasser’s one-time personal secretary, Joseph Goebbels, in spite of his once also “left-wing” inclinations, went on – as is all too well-known – to become one of Hitler’s closest associates. Today, Strasserism is an important branch within the world wide network of neo-Nazi groupuscules – a pan-national movement to which Dugin, in view of his stated closeness to the Strassers, would seem to belong.
Mikhail Leont'ev and Ivan Demidov as Dugin's Accomplices
Normally, such details would be sufficient for serious students of international security to dismiss this figure and his organization as objects worthy of deeper political analysis. Dugin and Co., it would appear, are phenomena better left to the scrutiny of cultural anthropologists, psychopathologists, sociologists, or, at best, historians of current affairs. Yet, as illustrated by the list of former and current MED Supreme Council members, Dugin is, by now, firmly located within the mainstream of Russian political and intellectual life. He publishes in major periodicals and is regularly invited to top-notch political and academic round-tables and conferences.
Among Dugin’s most important collaborators is electronic and print media commentator Mikhail Leont’ev. Once called Vladimir Putin’s “favourite journalist,” Leont’ev officially entered the Supreme Council of the MED only recently, although he had participated in the foundation congress of Dugin’s movement in 2001, after which he was also briefly listed as a member of the organization's leadership on Dugin's website. Since then, Leont’ev has provided for Dugin, numerous times, a mass audience by letting the MED leader present his views on prime time television shows broadcast by Russia’s First Channel. One of Russia’s most well-known propagandists of anti-Americanism, Leont’ev’s frequent tirades against the West, in general, and the US, in particular, are obviously informed by Dugin’s Manichean schemes. To be sure, Dugin himself appeals to an only limited circle of political activists and young intellectuals. Via television shows like Leont'ev's Odnako, an encrypted and somewhat softer from of Duginism, however, reaches much of Russia's population on an almost daily basis.
Another consequential figure with unofficial, but apparently equally close ties to Dugin is the legendary TV producer and PR specialist Ivan Demidov. In the late 1980s and the 1990s, Demidov worked on national television and became famous for his participation in a number of popular TV projects like Vzgliad (View) or Muzoboz (Music Cart). At that time, he appeared, like Leont’ev in his early years, to be a representative of the new generation of anti-Soviet young, Westernizing media figures who helped to emancipate Russian pubic discourse. In the new century, Demidov’s profile, however, changed as he became the anchorman of one of Russia’s most brazenly nationalistic TV shows Russkii vzgliad (The Russian View) shown weekly on the Moskoviia (Muscovy) Channel. In 2005, Demidov was one of the co-founders of the new nationalist cable channel Spas (Saviour), where he provided Dugin with his own show called Vekhi (Landmarks). In the same year, Demidov became a politician when – allegedly, upon the request of Vladimir Putin – he was named leader of United Russia's official youth organization Molodaia gvardiia (Young Guard). He also directed the so-called "Russian Project" of United Russia – an attempt to attract ethnocentric Russian youth and intellectuals to Putin's regime. In 2008, Demidov was promoted to be the head of the Ideology Section of the Political Department of United Russia's Executive Committee, i.e. Putin's party's chief ideologist. A few months earlier, Demidov had, in an interview for Dugin's website Evrazia.org, admitted that Dugin's appearance was a "deciding factor, a sort of breaking point" in his life, and that he wants to use his talents to implement Dugin's ideas. Demidov called himself, with explicit reference to these ideas, a "convinced Eurasian." Oddly, this is the same phrase with which, fifteen years earlier, Dugin had, in the original version of his seminal article "The Great War of the Continents" (1991-1992, http://my.arcto.ru/), characterized SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich – the Holocaust's chief early organizer (the phrase was deleted in later editions of that article). In March 2009, Demidov was promoted to be the Head of the Department for Humanitarian Policies and Public Relations of the Domestic Politics Directorate of the RF Presidential Administration. In this function, Demidov will have special responsibility for the president's relations with religious organizations, i.e., above all, with the Russian Orthodox Church. In May 2009, Demidov was appointed "responsible secretary" of Dmitry Medvedev's infamous Commission for Counter-Action Against Attempts to Falsify History to the Detriment of Russia's Interests.
The Mimicry Tactics of the "Neo-Eurasianists"
Dugin himself recently managed to make further inroads into Russian public life. In 2008, he was appointed professor in the Sociology Department of Moscow's renowned Lomonosov University (MGU) where he now directs the Center for Conservative Studies (although Dugin, a Muscovite, acquired his academic degrees at obscure south Russian higher education institutions). His promotion to an MGU Professor is an important step in Dugin's further penetration of the mainstream since it provides him with a respected title and prestigious site for his press conferences and other meetings. Dugin's active use of the term "conservatism" also continues his earlier strategy of camouflaging his doctrine with terminology that fits Russian and international political correctness. While at the fringe of Russia's political life, in the early-mid 1990s, Dugin described his own ideology frankly as a program of the "Conservative Revolution," a construct he explicitly used to define fascism, or as "National Bolshevism" – a Russian version of National Socialism as the colors of the flag of the National Bolshevik Party, which Dugin co-founded in 1994, suggested. When he started drawing closer to the establishment, however, Dugin put more emphasis on labels like "Eurasianism" or "Traditionalism" although his "neo-Eurasianist" ideology, in important regards, sharply diverges from both classical Eurasianism and Integral Traditionalism. Today, Dugin poses front-stage as a proponent of "conservatism" while his back-stage agenda is still unabashedly revolutionary. The success of Dugin's and his supporters' tactic of political mimicry was recently illustrated when one of the activists of Dugin's youth organization, Evraziiskii soiuz molodezhyi (Eurasian Movement of the Young), the artist Aleksei Beliaev-Gintovt was awarded Deutsche Bank's Kandinsky Prize (in view of the rather different styles of Kandinsky's art and Beliaev-Gintovt's paintings - an odd choice, in any way). That one of their supporters won the prestigious German award was proudly presented by Dugin's organizations as another confirmation of the substance and seriousness of their intellectual project.
In view of the depth and multifariousness of Dugin's connections into Russia's highest political and cultural echelons, it is difficult to imagine how his current influence could be limited, or, at least, his future advance contained. At the same time, Dugin's recent political words and deeds indicate that, in comparison to his openly fascist phase in the early and mid-1990s, today only his terminology and public behavior, but not his ideology and aims, have fundamentally changed. Should Dugin and his followers succeed in further extending their reach into Russian politics and society at large, a new Cold War will be the least that the West should expect from Russia during the coming years.
(This article appeared first in "Russian Analytical Digest." Shorter versions were published before in "Russia Profile" and "Open Democracy.")
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