Aleksandr Dugin has been called Putin’s Rasputin. He is a philosopher who cut his teeth in the underground Iuzhinskii Circles in Moscow during the days of the USSR. His ideas were not mainstream Soviet ideas; full of nationalism and metaphysics and the occult. The Kali Yuga. None of this was kosher in the Communist party, consumed by atheistic international revolution.

Dugin’s main thesis upon which he finally arrived is Eurasianism. The idea of the Eurasian continent as the antithesis of the West; of the seat of illiberalism. Of a civilizational response to the West’s monoculture that comes from the land and the Orthodox Church and the historic ancient struggles of the Slavic people against the demonic forces of the west. The idea of communal rights juxtaposed against individual rights; that the Eurasian continent with a savior will finally balance a world through blood and assume its rightful place to lead the community of nations.

I will write about this more, but for now, I found an extraordinary debate between Aleksandr Dugin and Bernard Henri Levi which for me revealed so much about the Ukraine war. It, however, did not leave me more at ease, but less so. Because it would seem that Putin sees it as his role to bring about Dugin’s Eurasian empire through blood and violence. And this means we are at the start of a long and dangerous conflict; because a utopia is impossible to achieve.

I highly recommend you watch this debate.

Bernard Henri Levi: “For me, the embodiment of nihilism today is you (Dugin), and your friends, and the Eurasian current and this morbid atmosphere which fills your books and the way in which you dissolve the very idea of human rights, of personal freedoms, of singularities in some big blocks of community, big faith, sacred origins and so on… In Moscow there is a morbid atmosphere of nihilism, (…) for this great Russian civilization today there is a bad, dark wind of nihilism in its proper sense, which is the Nazi and Fascist sense which is blowing on this great Russia.”