Alexander Dugin is a right wing russian philosopher, leader and ideologue of Neo-Eurasianism, founder of International Eurasian Movement and Eurasian Youth Union. In connection with military action in Ukraine in May 2015, Alexander Dugin was placed on the U.S. sanctions list. Some researchers call Dugin the philosopher who ideologically justified Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2022.

Dugin has been called a philosopher listened to by the russian military but this information cannot be confirmed or denied. Some researchers believe that Dugin is an intermediary between the European far-right and Russia as part of the construction of the so-called “Black International,” but his influence on power circles in Russia is overestimated.

**Political views**

Dugin considers himself as and ideologist of the “fourth political theory,” which he contrasts with the three ideologies of the 20th century: liberalism, communism, and fascism. “From the right, no xenophobia, no racism or hierarchy between people; from the left, no atheism, no materialism. Yes – social justice and cultural identity”. Dugin sees Russia as self-sufficient civilization. It does not belong in the “European” or “Asian” categories but instead to the geopolitical concept of Eurasia.

**Soviet Period**

He was born in 1962 in Moscow. His father Geli Dugin was a lieutenant general of the GRU (Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation), his mother a doctor. In 1979 he entered the Moscow Aviation Institute (MAI), but was expelled from the second year. Subsequently, when defending his dissertation, he presented to the Academic Council of RSU a diploma on graduation from the Novocherkassk Reclamation Engineering Institute by correspondence.

He was a member of the so-called circle of admirers of the writer Yuri Mamleev’s works, where his meetings were held. And in 1980 he joined the Black Order SS circle, which was created and led as a “Reichsfuhrer” mystic by one of the first Russian “New Rightists” Evgeny Golovin. Dugin considers himself a pupil of Golovin. In 1988, he joined the main Soviet monarchist organization “Pamyat”, but was later deprived of membership in this organization by the official wording for having “contacted and is in contact with representatives of emigrant dissident circles of occult-satanic persuasion, in particular with a certain writer Mamleyev”.

In the period from 1990 to 1992 he worked with declassified KGB archives, on the basis of the materials of which he prepared a number of newspaper and magazine articles, books and television program “The Secrets of the Century” aired on Channel One.

In the 1980s, Alexander Dugin held radically anti-Soviet and anti-communist views. According to Dugin himself, he took his young son “to spit on Lenin’s monuments,” which he later regretted. During this period, Dugin was fascinated by the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, the writings of Mircea Eliade, the ideas of the European New Right, the theorists of the “conservative revolution” of the interwar period, geopolitical theorists (Karl Haushofer, Friedrich Ratzel, Carl Schmitt), as well as such authors as Julius Evola, Hermann Wirth.

**National-bolshevism**

Perestroika and the destruction of the Soviet Union changed Dugin’s view of the Soviet system and communism. He interprets the defeat of the USSR in the Cold War in terms of geopolitics – as a victory of the “civilization of the sea” over the “civilization of the land. Dugin refers to Marxism, National Bolshevism, the metaphysics of communism (Nikolai Klyuev, Andrei Platonov), Eurasianism (Nikolai Trubetskoy, Peter Savitsky, Nikolai Alekseev, Lev Gumilev), the New Left (Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard). In October 1993, Alexander Dugin took part in the defense of the Russian Supreme Soviet, and accepted the parliament’s defeat as a personal tragedy. Shortly thereafter, together with Eduard Limonov and Yegor Letov, Dugin formed the National Bolshevik Party (NBP), which was in irreconcilable opposition to president Boris Yeltsin and was noted for its radical anti-liberalism and anti-Americanism at the time.

Over the next few years Dugin, as an ideologist of the NBP, published a number of radical political and metaphysical texts whose style is marked by poetry and metaphor. His interest in Russian Orthodoxy led Alexander Dugin to believe in the rightness of [edinoverie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edinoverie) – the preservation and revival of the pre-Rasko traditions of Russian Orthodoxy in the bosom of the Russian Orthodox Church

In the spring of 1998, Dugin split with Limonov and the National Bolshevik Party. In 1998 Dugin became an adviser to Gennady Seleznev, the Chairman of the State Duma, and in 1999 he headed the Center for Geopolitical Evaluations of the Expert-Consultative Council for National Security Problems affiliated with the Chairman of the State Duma. During the same period, Alexander Dugin began lecturing on geopolitics at the Russian General Staff.

**Putin and Eurasianism**

When Vladimir Putin came to power, a new period began in Alexander Dugin’s political activity – from radical opposition he switched to a position of loyalty to the current government. Since the early 2000s, Dugin has championed the ideas of Eurasianism and conservatism, offering them as an ideological platform for the Russian authorities, which he blames for the lack of any ideology.

Eurasianism emerged among the Russian emigration of the 1920s and 1930s as an idea in which the historiosophic and culturological concept of Russia-Eurasia as an original civilization that united elements of the East and the West. Eurasia was understood (in a narrower sense than geographical Eurasia) as the middle part of Europe and Asia (Russia and a number of neighboring countries, uniting three plains: East European, West Siberian and Turkestan. Dugin brought to Eurasianism the idea of the “third way” (combining capitalism and socialism), geopolitics (Eurasianism as a tellurocracy, opposing the Atlantic Anglo-Saxon thalassocracy) and Soviet conservatism (the USSR as a Eurasian power). In Dugin’s writings, Eurasian concepts and positions are intertwined with those of the European New Right. Researchers note that in his philosophical problems and political projects he significantly departs from classical Eurasianism, which is presented very selectively and eclectically in his numerous works.

**Political and academic activity**

In 2003 Dugin establishes the International Eurasian Movement. In 2005, Dugin organizes the first “Russian March,” stealing the march idea from the Left with its “Anti-Capitalism” march. Eurasian Youth Union was founded in a same year. In the spring of 2006, he gave a course of lectures entitled “Post-Philosophy” at the Philosophy Faculty of Moscow State University. In 2007, Dugin gave a series of lectures on Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, the result of which was Dugin’s application of Heidegger’s methodology to Russian history, summarized in a lecture on “Russian Heideggerianism”. In November 2008, at the sociology department of MSU, Dugin organized an international conference with the French philosopher [Alain de Benoit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_de_Benoist) one of the leaders of the New Right movement. In September 2008, Dugin became a professor at Lomonosov Moscow State University and head of the Center for Conservative Research, an all-Russian sociological organization which aims to develop and establish a conservative ideology in Russia with the support of a scientific community. Dugin has been lecturing at Moscow State University’s Sociology Department since February 2009 on “structural sociology,” ethnosociology, the sociology of geopolitics, and the sociology of international relations. Throughout the 2000s Dugin regularly appears in the press. During the Georgia war in August 2008, Dugin expressed support for the Russian leadership and armed forces, calling for the occupation of Tbilisi and the establishment of a pro-Russian regime in Georgia.