Alexander Dugin: Neo-Eurasianism and Fourth Political Theory

Mind Games: Alexander Dugin and Russia’s War of Ideas

by Andrey Tolstoy and Edmund McCaffray


Alexander Dugin, the Russian philosopher and political activist, has attracted sporadic coverage in English-language publications over the past year. He is an engaging figure—prolific, radical, bearded, equally at home in university seminars and posing with tanks in South Ossetia and eastern Ukraine. So adept at self-promotion that he is sometimes not taken as seriously as he should be, Dugin is the intellectual who has Vladimir Putin’s back in the emerging ideological conflict between Russia and the West. At home, Putin uses him to create a nationalist, anti-liberal voting bloc, while abroad Dugin is the lynchpin of numerous irregular networks of anti-liberal political resistance and sabotage. No individual better represents the tactics of the current Russian regime.

Dugin’s rise has been partly camouflaged by an intellectual biography that is complex and at times contradictory. An anticommunist in the 1980s, he worked closely with the remnants of the Communist Party after the fall of the Soviet Union. In the mid-1990s, he became involved with National Bolshevism, a group of political parties that openly espoused a combination of communist economics and radical Russian nationalism. He has praised Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union while also supporting family and religious values.

Since the late 1990s, Dugin has organized his views into a geostrategic ideology and a complex political metaphysics known respectively as Neo-Eurasianism and Fourth Political Theory. The former posits an ongoing archetypal clash between land and maritime civilizations and holds that there is a struggle between, on the one hand, harmonious, land-based societies organized around history and tradition and, on the other, inherently liberal, “Atlanticist” “empires of the sea,” whose capitalistic drive abhors and undermines tradition.

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