Aleksandr Dugin

Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin (Александр Гельевич Дугин; born 7 January 1962) is a Russian far-right political philosopher.

In 1979, Aleksandr entered the Moscow Aviation Institute.

He was expelled without a degree either because of low academic achievement, dissident activities or both.

Afterwards, he began working as a street cleaner.

He used a forged reader's card to access the Lenin Library and continue studying.

However, other sources claim he instead started working in a KGB archive, where he had access to banned literature on Masonry, fascism, and paganism.

Born into a military intelligence family, Dugin was an anti-communist dissident during the 1980s.

Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Dugin co-founded the National Bolshevik Party with Eduard Limonov, a party which espoused National Bolshevism, which he later left.

In 1980, Dugin joined the "Yuzhinsky circle", an avant-garde dissident group which dabbled in Satanism, esoteric Nazism and other forms of the occult.

The Yuzhinsky circle gained a reputation for Satanism, for séances, a devotion to all things esoteric – mysticism, hypnotism, Ouija boards, Sufism, trances, pentagrams and so forth.

In the group, he was known for his embrace of Nazism which he attributes to a rebellion against his Soviet upbringing, as opposed to genuine sympathy for Hitler.

He adopted an alter ego with the name of "Hans Sievers", a reference to Wolfram Sievers, a Nazi researcher of the paranormal.

Studying by himself, he learned to speak Italian, German, French, English, and Spanish.

He was influenced by René Guénon and by the Traditionalist School.

In the Lenin Library, he discovered the writings of Julius Evola, whose book Pagan Imperialism he translated into Russian.

In the 1980s, Dugin was a dissident and an anti-communist.

Dugin worked as a journalist before becoming involved in politics just before the fall of communism.

He was transferred to the customs service due to his son's behaviour in 1983.

In 1988, he and his friend Geydar Dzhemal joined the ultranationalist and antisemitic group Pamyat (Memory), which would later give rise to Russian fascism.

For a brief period at the beginning of the 1990s he was close to Gennady Zyuganov, leader of the newly formed Communist Party of the Russian Federation, and probably had a role in formulating its nationalist communist ideology.

In 1993 he co-founded, together with Eduard Limonov, the National Bolshevik Party, whose nationalistic interpretation of Bolshevism was based on the ideas of Ernst Niekisch.

In 1997, he published Foundations of Geopolitics, in which he outlined his worldview, calling for Russia to rebuild its influence through alliances and conquest, and to challenge the rival Atlanticist empire led by the United States.

Dugin published Foundations of Geopolitics in 1997.

The book was published in multiple editions, and is used in university courses on geopolitics, reportedly including the Academy of the General Staff of the Russian military.

It alarmed political scientists in the US, and is sometimes referenced by them as being "Russia's Manifest Destiny".

In 1997, his article, "Fascism – Borderless and Red", described "national capitalism" as pre-empting the development of a "genuine, true, radically revolutionary and consistent, fascist fascism" in Russia.

He believes that it was "by no means the racist and chauvinist aspects of National Socialism that determined the nature of its ideology. The excesses of this ideology in Germany are a matter exclusively of the Germans... while Russian fascism is a combination of natural national conservatism with a passionate desire for true changes."

The "Waffen-SS and especially the scientific sector of this organization, Ahnenerbe," was "an intellectual oasis in the framework of the National Socialist regime", according to him.

He left the party in 1998 following disputes with Limonov.

Dugin continued to further develop his ideology of neo-Eurasianism, founding the Eurasia Party in 2002 and writing further books including The Fourth Political Theory (2009).

His political views have been characterized as fascist or neo-fascist.

Multiple sources:

Dugin served as an advisor to Gennadiy Seleznyov, and later Sergey Naryshkin, when they served as Chairman of the State Duma.

He was the head of the Department of Sociology of International Relations at Moscow State University from 2009 to 2014, losing the position due to backlash over comments regarding the 2014 Odesa clashes.

Dugin also briefly served as chief editor of the pro-Kremlin Christian Orthodox channel Tsargrad TV when it launched in 2015.

In 2019, Dugin was appointed as a senior fellow at Fudan University in China.

His influence on the Russian government and on president Vladimir Putin is disputed.

Although he has no official ties to the Kremlin, he is often referred to in foreign media as "Putin's brain";Multiple sources:

Dugin was born in Moscow, into the family of a colonel-general in the GRU, a Soviet military intelligence agency, and candidate of law, Geliy Aleksandrovich Dugin, and his wife Galina, a doctor and candidate of medicine.

His father left the family when he was three, but ensured that they had a good standard of living, and helped Dugin out of trouble with the authorities on occasion.