Aleksandr Dugin

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

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 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 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.

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"; others say that his influence is exaggerated. Dugin is known for conspiratorial rhetoric, such as his claim that fascist ideology is an inherent part of Western liberalism rather than Eurasianism. In line with this stance, Dugin portrays the Russian invasion of Ukraine as part of a holy war against "absolute Evil, embodied in Western civilisation, its liberal-totalitarian hegemony and in Ukrainian Nazism".