Keeping Up With the Dugins

Compact's Absurd Defense of Aleksandr Dugin

Aleksandr Dugin and David Duke

I’ve been teased by friends and foes alike for writing about fascism all the time—trust me, I would like not to, but there seems to be a lot of it around these days!

Yesterday, news broke of the car bombing of Darya Dugina, a pro-Kremlin propagandist and the daughter of the “philosopher” Aleksandr Dugin. It seems likely that Dugin, a supporter of Putin and the war in Ukraine, was the primary target of the attack. Dugin’s proximity to the regime is disputed, but he peddles an extreme, ultra-nationalist ideology leavened with esoteric references and mystical hallucinations.

But my interest here is in a short article in Compact Magazine entitled “When Liberals Tolerate Political Violence.” The argument is patently fatuous: it compares Dugina’s death to the stabbing of Salman Rushdie, and clucks at liberals’ supposed silence of the latter and celebration of the former, and tries to paint this as a case of hypocrisy or inconsistency on the part of liberals. As the author is forced to tacitly admit, Dugin’s ideas prefigured the creation of a more violent world and he longed for the sort of imperialist war Russia is seeing now. He has openly called for the jailing and deportation of dissidents, which he likened to a Fifth Column in Russia. But the part that really jumped out to me was this passage:

Both father and daughter are leading proponents of a political theory that is anti-liberal, anti-communist, anti-fascist, anti-globalist, anti-Atlanticist, anti-woke, pro-Eurasian, pro-multipolar, pro-traditionalist, pro-Russian. Both had spoken in favor of Russia’s war against Ukraine as part of a great clash of civilizations, ideologies, and geopolitical forces. Alexander was particularly adamant during the 2014 hostilities that Putin should do more to punish the anti-Russian Ukrainian regime by fighting for the establishment of Novorossiya in the East. In their view, a Westernized Ukraine that joins NATO poses an existential threat to Russian civilization. In a 2021 speech, Putin likened the danger to the use of a weapon of mass destruction against Russia.

You’ll notice I put the word “anti-fascist” in bold. This is just not true. And the author, Michael Millerman, Dugin’s primary English translator, ought to know better. This is not a matter of hermeneutics, either: Dugin has openly stated he’s a fascist.

In the 1990s, Together with Eduard Limonov, he founded the National Bolshevik party, which attempted a syncretic combination of Soviet nostalgia and ultra-nationalism. In the words of the scholar Marlene Laruelle:

The party is inspired by so-called third-way ideas: it asserts that national revolution and social revolution emanate from one and the same principle, and that the extremes, left and right, should join forces to form a common front in the name of a “general principle of uprising.” The development of an avant-gardist National Bolshevik doctrine owes much to the theoretician Alexander Dugin. Basing himself on anarchism and terrorism, Dugin developed the idea of forming an alliance between the revolutionary radicalism of the left and the right, and proffered an exalted romantic vision of action and death…The movement claimed that the key solution was to form a new Great Imperial Russia: it accordingly managed to gain the attention of authorities in Latvia and the Ukraine, who were anxious about its members’ activities on their territories, and in Kazakhstan it fomented attempted “uprisings” alongside Cossack circles.

In 1998, Dugin split with with the NBP after members found him to be too fascist even for them. That’s probably because he wrote a 1997 essay entitled “Fascism - Red and Borderless,” calling for “Not a faded, brownish-pinkish national capitalism, but the blinding dawn of a new Russian Revolution [sic], fascism—borderless as our lands, and red as our blood.”

Since his split with the NBP, he moved on to develop his ideology of “Eurasianism” and his notion of a “Fourth Political Theory,” which he claims supersedes liberalism, communism, and fascism, but is a bizarre welter of portentous invocations of Heidegger, Julius Evola, Carl Schmitt with calls for an apocalyptic confrontation with the West, ethnic particularism, and reactionary traditionalism. To take at face value that Dugin is not a Fascist because he claims to have invented a kind of super-duper Fascism is absurdly credulous.

I guess the other basis for Millerman’s “anti-fascist” claim is Dugin’s recent echoing of the Kremlin’s line that the Ukrainians are all “Nazis,” but he knows the actual content of his thought.

I previously wrote that Compact’s attempt to synthesize socialism and reactionary traditionalism reminded me of proto-fascism, a notion that one of the founders claimed to find preposterous. (He has since left the publication.) One good way not to substantiate my criticisms would be to not publish apologetics for fascists.

As for the death of Dugina, any number of people could be responsible. To speculate too much is to get oneself wrapped up in the conspiratorial mentality of contemporary Russia, but it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine figures within the regime would want to kill two birds with one stone: dispose of Dugin and blame the Ukrainians. In Russia, gangster tactics are a technique of statecraft. Despite Dugin’s stated support for Putin, his ideology is not quite that of the regime, which doesn’t really have one as such, just a mafioso’s keen sense of rival power centers. It’s worth recalling here that Nicholas I repressed the Pan-Slavists and ideologues of “Official Nationality” who supported him when he found their feverish visions of clashing nationalities to be a threat to his preference for the status quo at all costs.