What To Make Of The Attempted Assassination Of Aleksandr Dugin?

I say that the death of Dugin’s daughter, Daria Dugina, in a car bombing near Moscow was an attempt on Dugin himself. This view mirrors what appears to be the consensus, given that Dugina was driving Dugin’s car when it exploded—although Dugina was an active mouthpiece for her father’s views.

Visegrád 24 @visegrad24

Alexander Dugin at the site near Moscow where his daughter Darya was killed tonight in a car bombing.

What to make of this event? Obviously the Russians can’t be happy about any terrorist attack on Russian soil that targets a Russian citizen. Russia has “implied” that Ukraine is responsible—an implication that Ukraine denies. The Russian implication is at least a logical surmise, and a disturbing one, in that it would further suggest the possible support of Western intel such as the CIA and MI6.

Is this attempted assassination, which did bag the target’s daughter, a continuation of a string of Western provocations against Russia and China? The intent of these provocations appears to be to elicit some sensational response from one or both countries—shooting down Pelosi, downing a UK spy plane over Russian territory, spectacular retaliation for HIMARS attacks, etc.—that would banish domestic economic and political woes for the ruling elites in both the US and Europe, who are faced with elections in a matter of months. A spectacular response could serve to tag dissidents from Prog orthodoxy in the West as supporters of our “enemies”, tarring their preferred candidates as treasonous.

While at first glance this might appear to be an attractive theory, there is one major obstacle to it: Dugin himself.

If you do a search on Aleksandr Dugin, you’ll find him referred to as a “Russian philosopher”, as a “staunch ally” of Putin, a “close aide”, a “close adviser”, a “pal”, a “spiritual guide”, a “major influence” on Putin—and a “fascist.” In reality, none of this is actually true.

My own first hand exposure to Dugin’s thinking (in translation) is relatively slight. Someone—I forget who it was—urged me to read one of his screeds. I was frankly underwhelmed, negatively impressed. Anyone who cares to read through the linked Dugin Wikipedia page—and you really need to a lot of reading between the lines on that one—will quickly discover that the characterization of Dugin as a “philosopher” is a major stretch. His thinking is heavily influenced by Nazi ideology, including people like Martin Heidegger, with a generous dollop of Neo-gnostic, neopagan orientations. If you read about the movements he has been openly associated with—Neo-Eurasianism, Eurasia Movement, National Bolshevism—even there you’ll need to sift through what you read. For example, the Eurasia Movement is said to adhere to

the neo-Eurasian ideology, which adopts an eclectic mixture of Russian patriotism, Orthodox faith, anti-modernism, and even some Bolshevik ideas.

The Eurasia Movement also adopts some fairly traditional Russian opposition to Western liberalism.

However, to give some idea of how Dugin falls outside any real categories as described, it suffices to examine his supposed “Orthodox faith.” If you do you’ll learn that it owes just as much to his youthful infatuation with Nazi ideology:

Russian Orthodoxy and Rodnovery

Dugin was baptized at the age of six in the Russian Orthodox church of Michurinsk by his great-grandmother Elena Mikhailovna Kargaltseva. Since 1999, he formally embraced a branch of the Old Believers, a Russian religious movement which rejected the 1652–1666 reforms of the official Russian Orthodox Church. Dugin's Eurasian philosophy owes much to Traditional Integralism and Nouvelle Droite movements, and as such it resonates with Neopaganism, a category which in this context means the movement of Slavic Native Faith (Rodnovery), especially in the forms of Anastasianism and Ynglism.

Dugin's Eurasianism is often cited as belonging to the same spectrum of these movements, as well as also having influences from Hermetic, Gnostic and Eastern traditions. He calls to rely upon "Eastern theology and mystical currents" for the development of the Fourth Political Theory.

According to Marlene Laruelle, Dugin's adherence to the Old Believers allows him to stand between Paganism and Orthodox Christianity without formally adopting either of them. His choice is not paradoxical, since, according to him—in the wake of René Guénon—Russian Orthodoxy and especially the Old Believers have preserved an esoteric and initiatory character which was utterly lost in Western Christianity. As such, the Russian Orthodox tradition may be merged with Neopaganism and may host "Neopaganism's nationalist force, which anchors it in the Russian soil, and separates it from the two other Christian confessions".

Other views

Dugin wrote a 1997 essay in which he described Soviet-era serial killer Andrei Chikatilo as a mystic and “a practitioner of Dionysian “sacraments” in which the killer/torturer and the victim transcend their “metaphysical dualism” and become one”.

It seems pretty clear that Dugin is a troubled person with little formal education who has dabbled in a wide variety of fringe ideologies, always seeking to shock. He has found a niche as, essentially, a political gadfly and, in that capacity, is doubtless influential among extreme Russia nationalists and those who suffer from nostalgic longings for the Stalin era. Putin, by contrast, is very much in the political and cultural mainstream of Russian intellectual life, regarded—if anything—as to open to Western thought. He is also university educated, has a degree in international law, and has associated himself only with mainstream Russian Orthodoxy and culture. Further, Putin is notably cautious both in his actions as well as in his rhetoric, choosing his words carefully, and he rejects nostalgia for the Communist past except to the extent that he values the Russian cultural heritage.

Perhaps by now you’re getting the idea of why the Western media is so eager to associate Putin with this goof Dugin. In point of fact, the Dugin Wikipedia page contains 43 references to Putin—but not a single one that documents a personal meeting between the two. My DDG search, similarly, revealed no references to personal contacts, and the image search came up with no photos of the two together. Some “pal”, “spiritual guide,” “close aide” or whatever.

Actually, Dugin has not always been pleased with Putin, although he has been ridiculed in Russia for assiduous, even extreme, sycophantic behavior

Dugin supports Russian President Vladimir Putin and his foreign policies but has opposed the Russian government's economic policies. He stated in 2007: "There are no more opponents of Putin's course and, if there are, they are mentally ill and need to be sent off for clinical examination. Putin is everywhere, Putin is everything, Putin is absolute, and Putin is indispensable". It was voted number two in flattery by readers of Kommersant.

Putin ignored Dugin’s public statements re Georgia and Ukraine in 2008:

Before war broke out between Russia and Georgia in 2008, Dugin visited South Ossetia and predicted: "Our troops will occupy the Georgian capital Tbilisi, the entire country, and perhaps even Ukraine and the Crimean Peninsula, which is historically part of Russia, anyway." Afterwards he said Russia should "not stop at liberating South Ossetia but should move further," and "we have to do something similar in Ukraine." In 2008, Dugin stated that Russia should repeat the Georgian scenario in Ukraine, namely attack it. In September 2008, after the Russian-Georgian war, he did not hide his anger towards Putin, who "dared not drop the other shoe" and "restore the Empire."

Nor did Putin intercede on Dugin’s behalf in 2014:

During the 2014 war in Ukraine, Dugin also lost the offered post Head of the Department of Sociology of International Relations of the Faculty of Sociology of the Moscow State University (while being Deputy Head since 2009). In 2014, a petition entitled "We demand the dismissal of MSU Faculty of Sociology Professor A. G. Dugin!" was signed by over 10,000 people and sent to the MSU rector Viktor Sadovnichiy.

The petition was started after Dugin's interview in which he said in relation to anti-Maidan activists burned alive by Far-right extremists in Odessa on 2 May 2014: ("But what we see on May 2nd is beyond any limits. Kill them, kill them, kill them. There should not be any more conversations. As a professor, I consider it so"). While he was talking about "those who perpetrated lawlessness on May 2nd", media interpreted this as a call to kill Ukrainians.

…

Mark Galeotti, writing in 2022 for The Spectator, noted that Western commentators tend to overstate the importance of Dugin in Russian politics, sometimes even describing him as a new Rasputin. In fact, his influence on the politics since 2016 was negligible, but Dugin tried to present himself as an influential person.

It remains, of course, that no sovereign country wants car bombings on it streets, and especially not if they were instigated or supported by foreign powers. However, I’m going to guess, for now, that Russia will not rush to escalate in the wake of this killing. It may well be that Putin would prefer that Dugin be marginalized and will not want to grant him much in the way of recognition—which he has avoided doing so far.