On Saturday night, the violence that Russian ultranationalist thinker Alexander Dugin had preached for decades suddenly entered his own life when his daughter was killed by a car bomb on the outskirts of Moscow.
With long hair and a graying white beard, Dugin is arguably one of Russia’s best-known ideologues and has been variously described as “Putin’s mastermind” or “Putin’s Rasputin”. However, his actual influence over the Russian president remains a hotly debated topic.
Born in 1962 into a high-ranking military family, Dugin spent his early years as an anti-communist dissident. He joined several eccentric avant-garde collectives that emerged during the last two decades of the Soviet Union, where he was known for his flirtation with the politics of Nazi Germany.
He came to national attention in the 1990s as a writer for the far-right Den newspaper. In a 1991 manifesto published in Den, Dugin first laid out his illiberal and ultra-nationalist vision of Russia, a country he said was destined to confront an individualistic and materialistic West.
During the tumultuous years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Dugin co-founded the National Bolshevik Party with the novelist Eduard Limonov, fusing fascist and communist-nostalgic rhetoric and symbolism.
Dugin’s worldview is most clearly articulated in his 1997 publication The Foundations of Geopolitics, which became a textbook in the Russian general staff academy and cemented his transition from a dissident to a prominent pillar of the conservative establishment.
Daughter of Putin ally Alexander Dugin killed by car bomb in Moscow – video
In the book, Dugin laid out his vision for dividing the world, calling for Russia to rebuild its influence through annexations and alliances while proclaiming its opposition to Ukraine as a sovereign state.
“Ukraine as a state has no geopolitical significance, no particular cultural significance or universal significance, no geographical uniqueness, no ethnic exclusivity,” he wrote.
“Their determined territorial ambitions pose a huge danger to all of Eurasia, and without solving the Ukraine problem, it generally makes no sense to talk about continental politics.”
Twenty-five years later, Russia’s president repeated some of Dugin’s views on Ukraine in his 4,000-word essay On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians, which many saw as a blueprint for the invasion that launched only six months after its publication.
However, it was far from certain that Dugin’s radical anti-Western thoughts would become mainstream in Moscow when Putin became president in 2000.
Buoyed by high oil prices, the newly elected leader appeared to be overseeing the country’s integration into the global capitalist system as ordinary Russians embraced fast food and Western pop culture.
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Dugin’s illiberal totalitarian ideas were considered irrelevant and he found himself on the fringes of political power. Nevertheless, he continued to write and lecture, further developing the concept of Eurasianism, the fascist, Russian-flavored political doctrine that sees Moscow as the center of a rival empire to the Atlanticist West.
Dugin’s position changed in 2012 when Putin returned to power after mass anti-government protests and the Russian leader adopted a conservative view of his country.
Dugin felt further vindicated when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and launched a bloody war in Donbas following the pro-Western revolution in Kyiv.
“I think we should kill, kill, kill [Ukrainians]there can be no other talk,” Dugin said in a video address to his supporters at the time, making him one of the most hated Russian public figures in Kyiv.
Despite Dugin’s violent rhetoric, he continued to travel abroad, maintaining close ties with European New Right thinkers, who also denounced liberalism, feminism, and American domination.
He was also frequently invited to lectures around the world, debating French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy in Amsterdam as recently as 2019.
Dugin reportedly traveled insecurely in and out of Russia, which some were quick to point out as one of the possible explanations behind Saturday’s attack, which was an attempt to kill him.
Dugin’s actual influence over Putin’s day-to-day operations has long been a matter of debate, with some Russian experts calling him “Putin’s spiritual guide” and others, particularly those in Moscow, saying he was an irrelevant figure eager to appear close. in the Kremlin for personal gain. Dugin reportedly asked for up to €500 (£425) for interviews with Western media.
The two men have never been photographed together, and Dugin has never held an official position in the state.
“This pseudo-intellectual caricature is certainly not part of the decision-making system,” wrote Leonid Volkov, a key ally of jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, hours after the car bombing.
However, his brand of Russian nationalism has become unquestionably popular among much of Russia’s political elite, and his views helped shape the ideas behind the invasion of Ukraine.
The killing of Dugin’s daughter Darya, a pro-Kremlin journalist ideologically aligned with her father, will send shock waves through the highest levels of Russian society.
Images circulating across Russia of the burnt car will also bring back memories of the turbulent 1990s when car bombings were commonplace, a dark feature of an earlier era that Putin’s presidency has vowed to end.