Russian fascist Aleksandr Dugin's dreams of dictatorship in Russia

The newly acquired independence of the democratic Ukrainian state is now under attack from the most imperialistic and war-mongering circles in Russia who are backing pro-Russian ultranationlists in the Crimea and are forming Russian terrorist troops for subversive operations in Ukraine.

One of these circles is the neo-Eurasianist movement headed by Russian fascist Aleksandr Dugin who is openly calling for killing Ukrainians and annexing parts of the Ukrainian state to Russia to build a fascist Eurasian Union.

American anti-Semite and former leader of Ku Klux Klan David Duke with his Russian colleague Aleksandr Dugin

Dugin and his followers in Georgian South Ossetia occupied by the Russian troops in 2008

While Dugin is sometimes associated with Putin's regime, Dugin himself hates Putin as he considers Russian president too liberal. Dugin's plan is to exert ideological influence on Putin's authoritarian state and provide it with the fascist ideological underpinnings disguised as Eurasianism.

For a number of years already, Dugin has been pushing forward an idea of Eurasianism being a "fourth political theory" with communism, fascism and liberalism being the first three. Some people fall for this trick and genuinely believe that Dugin's neo-Eurasianism is different from fascism. It is not, and a great number of academic studies acknowledge the fascist nature of neo-Eurasianism; check some of these studies:

• Stephen Shenfield, Russian Fascism: Traditions, Tendencies, Movements (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2001).
• Markus Mathyl, “The National-Bolshevik Party and Arctogaia: Two Neo-Fascist Groupuscules in the Post-Soviet Political Space,” Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 36, No. 3 (2002), pp. 62-76.
• Andreas Umland, “Aleksandr Dugin’s Transformation from a Lunatic Fringe Figure into a Mainstream Political Publicist, 1980-1998: A Case Study in the Rise of Late and Post-Soviet Russian Fascism”, Journal of Eurasian Studies, Vol. 1 (2010) 144-152.
• Alan Ingram, “Alexander Dugin: Geopolitics and Neo-Fascism in Post-Soviet Russia”, Political Geography, Vol. 20, No. 8 (2001), pp. 1029-1051.
• Anton Shekhovtsov, “The Palingenetic Thrust of Russian Neo-Eurasianism: Ideas of Rebirth in Aleksandr Dugin’s Worldview”, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Vol. 9, No. 4 (2008), pp. 491-506.

Furthermore, Dugin himself does not believe in the existence of four political ideologies. For him, there have always been only three ideologies - communism, liberalism and fascism - and Dugin puts neo-Eurasianism in the latter category.

Thanks to the informants among the neo-Eurasianists, I have a video of Dugin's private meeting with the activists of his Eurasian Youth Movement where he explains why Putin's non-ideological United Russia should turn Russia into a fascist dictatorship and what role the Eurasianist youth should play in this process. Here's an excerpt:

If you don't understand Russian, here are major points of Dugin's talk:

1. Three elements of the coming dictatorship:

(1) the United Russia party whose weak ideology shall be replaced by neo-Eurasianism, i.e. fascism;

(2) the Public Chamber (Общественная палата) that will, on "people's request", demand from the United Russia to introduce anti-democratic, anti-constitutional measures;

(3) a youth movement that will form a "commissar corps of illegitimate authority" to crackdown on all those who oppose the dictatorship.

2. "We had a liberal dictatorship, so the coming dictatorship will be illiberal. We had a Soviet dictatorship but it's now long gone. What will be next? Guess from three".

3. Neo-Eurasianists shall control two elements of the coming dictatorship: the ideology of the United Russia party and the youth movement.

4. As fascism is considered a bad thing in Russia, the neo-Eurasianist youth movement should avoid calling themselves "Hitlerjugend", and use names like "oprichnina", a name for the secret police under Tsar Ivan the Terrible.

Obviously, neo-Eurasianists are planning to get rid of Putin and establish a full-fledged totalitarian fascist state. As Andreas Umland argues, Putin’s current project for the Eurasian Union is authoritarian and restorationist, while Dugin's project is fascist and revolutionary. However, even if their goals are different, Dugin sees Putin as a temporary ally. Moreover, “the first step to Dugin’s new empire is the restoration of the old empire sought by Putin”. In this sense, Putin, even if not directly pursuing Dugin’s plan, does perform steps which may – in the long run – lead to the implementation of Dugin’s project.

This project is meaningless without at least some parts of Ukraine integrated into the Eurasian Union. Already in the 1990s, Dugin wrote that Ukraine's sovereignty should be removed and the country should be dismembered into several "zones":

The sovereignty of Ukraine represents such a negative phenomenon for Russian geopolitics that it can, in principle, easily provoke a military conflict. [...] Ukraine as an independent state with some territorial ambitions constitutes an enormous threat to the whole Eurasia, and without the solution of the Ukrainian problem, it is meaningless to talk about the contitental geopolitics. [...] Considering the fact that a simple intergration of Moscow with Kyiv is impossible and will not result in a stable geopolitical structure [...], Moscow should get actively involved in the re-organisation of the Ukrainian space in accordance to the only logical and natural geopolitical model.

Russian fascism - whether disguised as neo-Eurasianism or anything else - should be stopped, and the free nations of Europe must help Ukrainians to preserve their democracy.