60 Minutes (pre-Bari Weiss) ran this short segment on Dugin recorded in 2017: (1)
It’s worth being cautious about Western assertions about Putin operating on a grand historical viewpoint. For one thing, Western pundits and even some scholars are tempted to treat Putin’s Russia as the reincarnation of a Western understanding of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Communist governments from Lenin to Gorbachev did have a Communist/Marxist-Leninist viewpoint. Even that evolved over time.
But the “realist” foreign-policy theorists would point out – correctly – that Soviet leaders understood that they had to take into account the competitive and anarchic nature of the international system. In 1918 before Russia pulled out of the First World War via the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, the Bolshevik leadership was considering offers from the Entente powers, Lenin expressed his position this way: “I request that my vote be added in favor of the acceptance of potatoes and arms from the bandits of Anglo-French imperialism.” (2) Later examples would include the clandestine postwar collaboration with Weimar Germany to help Germany clandestinely build up its armed forces. And in the infamous German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939, also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the Hitler-Stalin Pact. The latter was an example of cold-blooded realist diplomacy on the USSR’s and Germany’s part – in response to the cold-blooded (if misguided) and even more infamous Munich Agreement of 1938.
Manfred Quiring describes Dugin’s Big Vision of Russia’s world-historical mission this way:
Eurasia, and thus Russia, is entrusted with a "historic mission," Dugin preaches, which should ultimately lead to success in the confrontation with the West. “The Russians understood the meaning of their existence in history as the fulfillment of a unique mission. It is entrusted only to us, but it must touch all others ... We took universal responsibility for the fate of the world, for the difficult matter of saving the spirit that seeks completion and perfection. (3)Much of the Western foreign policy establishment, particularly in Europe at the moment, are inclined to see Russia as a relentlessly imperial power determined to take back control of at least the former Warsaw Pact countries. Which, from a realist point of view, would be a spectacularly dumb goal for Russia to adopt. Most foreign-policy realists and “restrainers” would presumably argue that NATO, Ukraine, and Russia all made some bad decisions leading up to 2014 (Crimea) and 2022 (the current war) which a more hard-headed realist approach on all sides could have avoided.
We can be reasonably comfortable assuming that Putin does see his foreign policy goals as including “universal responsibility for the fate of the world, for the difficult matter of saving the spirit that seeks completion and perfection.”
It turns out the Dugin has his own Substack, called “Alexander Dugin Channel.” (I couldn’t locate any source commenting on whether it’s actually Dugin’s or not.) I’m not linking to it here because I don’t want some algorithm to start sending me lots of crap on the Dugin kind. But his post of June 11 is called, “Alexander Dugin on Trump, the Deep State, and the Future of America.” He harshes on J.D. Vance but describes a recent X post of his as “sincere and honest.” Dugin also says it’s time to “start the Great Turning,” which presumably means in the immediate sense that the US should abandon Ukraine and adopt a full-on pro-Russian foreign policy. Which Trump could likely be persuaded by addition bribes and threats to do. Although actually doing so would require some real ability to conduct a coherent strategic foreign policy, which Trump very obviously does not have.
Whether the English version comes directly from him or through a translation, it’s pretty poor. For example:
The communism is wrong target. The real evil is liberal centre. It is the core of Epstein’s class - left liberals + right liberals. They are the System, the Deep State, the Swamp.Maxim Trudolyubov and Ekaterina Kotrikadze explained in 2024:
The left changed the strategy from woke/DEI to the left populism, social justice. The woke and DEI on the left is the same repulsive block as Israel and interventionism (neocons) on the right.
Dugin is important to the Kremlin because he is a radical pro-war agitator. In May 2014, after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Dugin gave an interview to a Donetsk-based media outlet in which he exclaimed: “Kill, kill, kill those who allow atrocities in Ukraine!” That happened after forty-two anti-Maidan and pro-Russia activists died in a building fire in the Ukrainian city of Odesa during pro-Russia protests that turned deadly.Dugin promotes a quirky version of the original theory of “geopolitics” associated with Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914) and Halford Mackinder (1861-1947). The latter in particular stressed a concept of “Eurasia” as the more-or-less inevitable center of world power, which essentially viewed Russia as the center world power. And so does Dugin, albeit in a kind of fuzzy-mystical sense. In a view at least vaguely related to Mackinder’s, Dugin considers the world to be divided between two sets of value systems. Dugin, writes Quiring, works the Mahan-Mackinder notion of geopolitics into the idea of the “special meaning of Russia in the world.”
Dugin’s position on Russia’s occupation of Ukraine’s territories is, in his own words, “opposition to the [Ukrainian] junta and Ukrainian Nazism that exterminates civilians.” He is also an ardent supporter of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s steps “in his confrontation with Kyiv and Washington.” (4)
Quiring describes how Dugin sees Russia’s position in this scheme: "Russia, as the ‘core of mainland civilization,’ is therefore condemned to wage the centuries-long struggle with the Anglo-Saxon world. Its core used to be the British Empire, today it is the United States.” (5)
As Quiring explains:
[Dugin] paints a picture of an unavoidable, natural antagonism between two value systems, that of the "mainland" and that of the "sea". He attributes to the mainland the values that are in harmony with those of the "Russian world" as the "heartland of Eurasia": "tradition, faith (for Russians, Orthodox Christianity), empire, people, the sacred, history, family, ethics." For Dugin, the world of the sea is described by such gruesome terms as "modernization, trade, technology, liberal democracy, capitalism, parliamentarism, individualism, materialism, gender politics."This view is broadly consistent with Putin’s polemics against Western democracies. But it would be mistaken to assume that Putin is some kind of devotee of Dugin’s particular religious-political worldview. Dugin himself argues, “The salvation of Europe lies in Orthodox Christianity.” (Quiring, 194) Quiring describes Dugin’s viewpoint as “fascistoid.”
Liberalism - in the classic sense of democratic government with the rule of law and traditional capitalism - is the central target of his philosophical hostility. Homophobia is also a key element of the Dugin worldview. (5)
Dugin is a fan of Putin’s sometime idea of a Eurasian Union. Putin put forward that idea during his campaign for the 2012 Russian presidential election. Uwe Halback explained then, “He placed particular emphasis on the partnership with the European Union. … [But] Putin is likely fixated on Russia’s position in the post-Soviet region, the main priority in terms of foreign policy.”
Dugin seems to function as a cheerleader for a broad Russian nationalism which Putin shares. But it would be misleading to assume that Dugin somehow speaks for Putin. Even though he has been referred to as “Putin’s Brain.” Anton Shekhovtsov wrote in 2014 about Putin’s concept of Neo-Eurasianism, which is how Dugin has identified his ideology:
Despite the name, Neo-Eurasianism has a limited relation to Eurasianism, the interwar Russian emigre movement that could be placed in the Slavophile tradition. Rather, Neo-Eurasianism is a mixture of the ideas of Guenon, Evola and the ENR, as well as classical geopolitics and National Bolshevism to which Dugin was introduced in the beginning of the 1990s by Belgian New Right author Robert Steuckers. In Russia, for the sake of political and cultural legitimacy, Dugin argued for continuity between interwar Eurasianism and his own ideology, but his Neo-Eurasianism is firmly rooted in western, rather than Russian, far right intellectual tradition. (6)It’s even misleading to assume that Dugin’s ideas derived from Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914) and Halford Mackinder in any meaningful way. As Shekhovtsov puts it:
Putin never revealed that his foreign policy was guided by any kind of ideology and always stressed the "pragmatic" nature of the Russian approach to the West. Had Putin named any particular guiding ideology, then he would have been challenged intellectually - a battle that he would have been doomed to lose. Moreover, the assumption that the Kremlin was following Dugin's ideas made Putin predictable. At the end of the day, Dugin has put forward a very clear, "ready-to-use" geopolitical strategy, but it is Putin's unpredictability that plays to his advantage in foreign relations.He also explained Dugin’s background in his 2014 essay:
Despite the metapolitical nature of the ENR, its ideas have influenced many radical right parties in Europe. One particular idea of the ENR, namely ethnopluralism, is especially popular among the ideologues of the party-political far right, as it champions ethno-cultural pluralism globally but is critical of cultural pluralism (multiculturalism) in any given society. The ENR thinkers have supplied Dugin with the most important ideological ammunition that he employed to create Neo-Eurasianism.This is another example of the present-day Nationalist International: nationalist ideologues in various countries all borrowing each others’ ideas.
Despite the name, Neo-Eurasianism has a limited relation to Eurasianism, the interwar Russian emigre movement that could be placed in the Slavophile tradition. Rather, Neo-Eurasianism is a mixture of the ideas of Guenon, Evola and the ENR, as well as classical geopolitics and National Bolshevism to which Dugin was introduced in the beginning of the 1990s by Belgian New Right author Robert Steuckers. In Russia, for the sake of political and cultural legitimacy, Dugin argued for continuity between interwar Eurasianism and his own ideology, but his Neo-Eurasianism is firmly rooted in western, rather than Russian, far right intellectual tradition.
Masha Gessen, like other experts on Russian politics debunks the notion of Alexander Dugin as "a sort of Putin whisperer, the brains behind the Kremlin’s ideology." But:
Western media accounts have portrayed Dugin as a sort of Putin whisperer, the brains behind the Kremlin’s ideology. He is not that, but his story tells a lot about recent Russian history and the current state of Russian society. Dugin came out of the Moscow cultural underground [during Soviet times]. The son of minor members of the Soviet nomenklatura, he was expelled from college and educated himself by reading banned and restricted literature. ...And she observes:
His star seemed to rise in 2014, when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine for the first time. Dugin had developed an entire arsenal of language for this occasion. He had called for the creation of a “Russian World,” a geographically non-specific concept that imagined Russia on a civilizational mission rooted in traditional values and the Russian Orthodox religion. Annexing eastern Ukraine would have been the first step to building the Russian World. In 2014, the Kremlin, in its pivot from the politics of Soviet nostalgia to the politics of imperial resurgence, started speaking Dugin’s language. (7)
Dugin taught himself languages in order to read the thinkers who interested him most. By the late nineteen-eighties, these were apparently mostly far-right, traditionalist, and fascist philosophers. The first book that Dugin translated was by Julius Evola, an Italian philosopher currently popular with a faction of the right wing in the United States. Steve Bannon has deployed Evola’s ideas. To the extent that the Russian political world can be compared to that of the U.S., [Steve] Bannon can serve as a useful reference: not only are his views related to Dugin’s—and not only are both Dugin and Bannon connected to European neo-Fascist networks—but Bannon’s and Dugin’s relationships to actual political power are complicated in similar ways. There were certainly moments, early in the Trump Presidency, when Bannon’s ideas seemed to exert great influence on U.S. political life. But, in the end, Bannon’s vision of the world—and himself in it — served Donald Trump for a limited time only. [emphasis added]Although Putin has made formal agreements in the past with far-right parties in France, Italy and Austria, he is not claiming to lead a global political movement or ideology. Although his government encourages sympathetic attitudes toward Russian foreign policy over Ukraine in particular, Putin does not promote an elaborate common ideology that could be compared to the way did with Communist parties in the West. Even Putin’s own political ideology appears to be a fairly vague mixture of nationalism, theocratic Christian conservativism of the Russian Orthodox variety, and a spattering of notions from assorted anti-democratic, rightist cranks like Dugin.
Notes:
(1) Aleksandr Dugin: The far-right theorist behind Putin's plan. 60 Minutes YouTube channel 04/12/2022. <https://youtu.be/Du7fOoW_euE?si=IUkIyxW-rHNiJ84M> (Accessed: 2026-06-11).
(2) Kennan, George (1956/2014): Russia Leaves the War: Vol. 1 of Soviet American Relations, 501. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
(3) Quiring, Manfred (2020): Russland-Auferstehung einer Weltmacht?, 75-76, 194. Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag. My translation from German.
(4) The US Right-Wing Media Embrace Russia’s Far-Right Ideologue. Wilson Center 05/10/2024. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/us-right-wing-media-embrace-russias-far-right-ideologue (Accessed: 2026-06-11).
(5) Halbach, Uwe (2012): Vladimir Putin's Eurasian Union. SWP Comments Jan. 2012. <https://www.swp-berlin.org/publications/products/comments/2012C01_hlb.pdf>
(6) Anton Shekhovtsov. "Putin’s Brain?" New Eastern Europe 04 (13):72-79. <https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=429899>
(7) Gessen, Masha (2022): The Mysterious Murder of Drza [Darya] Dugin. New Yorker 08/26/2022. <https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-mysterious-murder-of-darya-dugina>
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