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John B. Dunlop is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His current research focuses on the conflict in Chechnya, Russian politics since 1985, Russia and the successor states of the former Soviet Union, Russian nationalism, and the politics of religion in Russia.
One perceptive observer of the Russian political scene, Francoise Thom, noted as far back as 1994 that fascism, and especially its "Eurasianist" variant, was displacing Russian nationalism among statist Russian elites as a post-communist "Russian Idea," especially in the foreign policy sphere. "The weakness of Russian nationalists," she emphasized, "stems from their inability to clearly situate Russian frontiers. Euras[ianism] brings an ideological foundation for post-Soviet imperialism." 1
There probably has not been another book published in Russia during the post-communist period that has exerted an influence on Russian military, police, and statist foreign policy elites comparable to that of Aleksandr Dugin's 1997 neo-fascist treatise, Foundations of Geopolitics. 2 The impact of this intended "Eurasianist" textbook on key elements among Russian elites testifies to the worrisome rise of fascist ideas and sentiments during the late Yeltsin and Putin periods.
The author of this six-hundred-page program for the eventual rule of ethnic Russians over the lands extending "from Dublin to Vladisvostok," Aleksandr Gel'evich Dugin, was born in 1962, the son, grandson, and great-grandson of Russian military officers. 3 His father is said to have held the rank of colonel, and, according to one source, he served in Soviet military intelligence, in the GRU. 4 By all accounts, Dugin was a bright and precocious youth with a talent for learning foreign languages. (He is said to have mastered at least nine of them.) While still a teenager, he joined a secretive group of Moscow intellectuals interested in mysticism, paganism, and fascism. Both the "masters" of this group and their "disciples" engaged, inter alia, in translating the works of foreign writers who shared their interests. As one of his contributions, Dugin completed a translation of a book by the Italian pagan-fascist philosopher Julius Evola.
Dugin is reported to have been detained by the KGB for participating in this study group, and forbidden literature was subsequently discovered at his apartment. According to one account, he then was expelled from the Moscow Aviation Institute, where he had enrolled...