main

The Eurasian Politician - Issue 4 (August 2001)

THE RISE OF THE EURASIANS

By: Victor Yasmann
Source: RFE/RL Security Watch, 30th April 2001

Eurasianists rally around Putin. Speaking at the founding congress of the new political movement "Eurasia," geopolitician Aleksandr Dugin said his group has been created to provide "total support" to President Putin, RIA-Novosti reported on 21 April. Among participants in the movement are Vsevolod Chaplin, the secretary of the Patriarchate’s Foreign Relations Department, Talgat Tadzhuddin, the chief mufti of the Russian Muslim Spiritual Directorate, Did-Khabalam, the leader of Russian Buddhists, and Hassidic Rabbi Avram Shmulevich.

* * *

The new Eurasia movement brings under one political roof representatives of all major religious confessions, something that has not happened since Soviet times. More importantly, it represents another effort to popularize the concept of Eurasianism and make it into a national ideology for post-Soviet Russia.

Since the demise of the Soviet Union, several variants of Eurasianism have been proposed, but they have not attracted much support either because they were too mired in the 19th century origins of that idea or failed to correspond to the new conditions of globalization.

Given the background of Eurasianism, articulated by Count Nikolai Trubetskoi in the 1920s and then developed by anthropologist Lev Gumilyov in the 1960s, that is not surprising. The ideology’s chief postulates are that Russia has a special role to play in the lives of other Eurasian states, that the people of the region live in non-antagonist relationships, that there is an irreconcilable difference between them and the West, and that this confrontation cannot be overcome by compromise but only by the victory of one side or the other.

During Soviet times, Eurasianism attracted supporters within the military and the KGB, particularly the latter’s special anti-terrorist Alfa group. Many Alfa men are now among the founders of the new movement. And that background is reflected in the earlier career of the leader of the movement, Aleksandr Dugin.

The son of a KGB officer and knowledgeable in many languages, Dugin was trained as a historian. He began his public career in the early 1980s as an activist in Dmitry Vasiliyev’s rabidly anti-Semitic Pamyat organization. Later, Dugin joined forces with Eduard Limonov to form a group called Conservative Revolution. A decade ago, they translated into Russian and popularized the ideas of many German and Italian fascists, but the two had a falling out, and Dugin turned toward Eurasianism, an idea that attracted solid financial support and which enabled him to publish his works on geopolitics.

Dugin updated Eurasianism by dropping its initial postulate about the eternal hostility of Russia and the West as a whole. Instead, he spoke about the concentration of what he called "the world evil" in the naval powers of the West, Great Britain, and the United States. And he argued that Russia should form an alliance with Europe against those Atlantic powers, not only for ideological but also for geoeconomic dominance.

According to Dugin, the economic strength of the naval powers is based on their control of the oceans. In response, Russia should lead Eurasia in creating east-west and north-south land transport networks. That idea has already found expression in the speeches of President Vladimir Putin.

In the Eurasia movement’s manifesto, published at the website http://www.eurasia.com.ru, Dugin suggests that "Neo-Eurasianism has had a strong impact upon political parties and movements in modern Russia – we find large borrowings from the neo-Eurasianist ideological arsenal in the programmatic documents of Unity, the Communist Party (KPFR), Fatherland-All Russia (OVR), the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, the movement Russia, and in a series of smaller movements and parties."

And in yet another indication of the rising influence of Dugin and Eurasianism, the media reported last year that the hall of Lev Gumilyov University in Astana was decorated with Dugin’s slogans when President Putin came to visit. Dugin, who also serves as an official adviser to Duma speaker Gennady Seleznyov, has stressed, however, that he does not seek power but only an extension of his ideological influence. He clearly has achieved a lot in that direction already.

* * *

main