Alexander Dugin’s views of Russian history: collapse and revival

Abstract

Alexander Dugin is one of the most well-known and clearly the most prolific philosopher and public intellectual in post-Soviet Russia. He was especially popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when he clearly had obvious political ambitions. His influence declined later on. However, he continued to be an important intellectual who clearly earned his visible place in Russian intellectual history. His ideas still reflect the opinions of a considerable segment of the Russian elite and general public. This is one of the reasons why his views, including those on Russian history, its meaning and dynamics deserve to be presented. In addition, his view of Russian history as a cycle of decline and rebirth had much more broad appeal and application. It could be traced in the cultures of many societies, especially those in crisis. Here, the theory of decline and revival provided the hope that nothing is lost and that the country could reemerge in the future even greater than it was before. While studying Dugin’s views, one should remember that they changed over the course of time. This article deals with Dugin’s views of Russian history, which he espoused from the 1990s to approximately the early 2000s.

Keywords:

• Dugin
• time of trouble
• the USSR
• Russian empire

Notes

1. The literature on Eurasianism is extensive and growing. Glebov (2017) and Bassin, Glebov, and Laruelle (2015) provide a few examples.

2. Only recently when Gumilev’s popularity had passed its peak in Russia some time ago, monographs focused on his work and life started to be published in the West. See for example Bassin (2016) and Clover (2016).

3. Dugin continued his appreciation of the Byzantines up to the present and placed the announcement about “Byzantine Day” on his internet site, Katehon. See: Today is Byzantium Day, http://katehon.com/news/today-byzantium-day, 11 May 2016.

4. For many Ukrainian nationalists it is not just that Russians have nothing to do with Kievan Rus,’ but also that they have nothing to do with Slavs. This idea has a long historical pedigree in Ukrainian thought. One could assume that Franciszek Henryk Duchinski (1816–1893), a Pole from in Kiev and Ukrainophile, was one of the founders of such a view. For him, Russians were just Fino – Ugric peoples who speak Slavic languages. At the same time, Poles and Ukrainians were true Slavs and bona fide Europeans and this racial incompatibilty explains the conflict between these people and Russians. See for example, Duchinsky (1863).

5. Dugin’s appreciation of the Mongol conquest could be seen in his republication of Prince Sergei Trubetskoi’s – one of the founders of Eurasianism – work on the Mongols legacy. Dugin and D. Taratorin, one of Dugin’s followers, provided the introduction to the new edition of Trubestskoi’s well-known work, see Trubetskoi (1999).

6. See Penzev (2013). For some of the authors who tried to adjust their views to imperial nostalgia/nationalistic feelings of the public, the interpretations of the past were even more exotic. This was, for example, the case with A. T. Fomenko and his collaborator Gleb Nosovskii. In their futuristic theory, extremely popular up to the present, the Mongol invasion and what Russian historians usually called the “Tatar Yoke” plainly does not exist. It was not the Mongols and their associates – mostly Turkic by their ethnic background – but Russians who conquered most of Eurasia and created the enormous empire. See for example, Fomenko and Nosovskii (2010).

7. Dugin’s appeal to this period was not accidental. Many Russian intellectuals saw the direct analogies between the chaotic times during the Yeltsin era and the Time of Troubles. And only in 1995 almost two dozen books were published on this period. They included classical studies on the Time of Troubles such as Platonov (1995).

8. Golovin was a leading, or at least one of the, leading personalities in the circle of dissident intellectuals in late Soviet Moscow. On him, see Laruelle (2015).

9. This anti – Renaissance view firmly embedded in a particular vision of history – especially the transition from the mediaeval era to modern capitalism – as a process of spiritual degeneration was not a peculiarly Russian phenomenon. It could well be found, for example, in European Romanticism and beyond. It could also be seen in Russian twentieth century thought – Pavel Florensky (1882–1937) the theologian and philosopher could be a good example. In Florensky’s view the mediaeval era was a time of not just a high spirituality but also a period when people could understand several dimensions of reality. They understood that beyond the visible universe there is another spiritual universe where the basic physical laws of the terrestrial universe do not work. For example, the spiritual universe, this other dimension, has no progression of time and, in a peculiar form, both temporal and eternal exist in a holistic union. These notions, in Florensky’s view, were understood well by mediaeval people, the painters of icons. They had no reverse perspective and placed both events of the past and the present on the same level. The entire way of painting had changed by the time of the Renaissance when the painters of the intellectual elite – in a broader sense – abandoned celestial other worldly dimensions and saw nothing but the palpable terrestrial universe. At that point reverse perspective was introduced into painting. On Florensky’s view see Florenskii 2002. Aleksei F. Losev, a well-known historian and philosopher and Karem Rash, a Russian Kurd who died recently (2016), also had similar views on the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. While Dugin, most likely, was aware of these people and their writings, he clearly got most of his ideas from the New Right who also saw the transition from the Middle Ages to Modernity as a spiritual debasement.