In August, 2022, six months after Russian troops invaded Ukraine, a cultural festival named Traditions was held outside Moscow, at the onetime summer retreat of Alexander Pushkin. The star speaker was Alexander Dugin, a scholar and a prominent proponent of the war who has been called the prophet of the new Russian Empire. In his book “Being and Empire” (2023), which runs to a Heideggerian length of seven hundred and eighty-four pages, Dugin characterizes Russia as nothing less than “the last place of the true subject of history in time and space.” His lecture at the festival, “Tradition and History,” was as sprawling as its title suggested. Sitting under a canopy, he extemporized on the seasonal labors of the Russian peasantry, finding in the pre-modern past the “secret center” of the nation’s spiritual life.
For Dugin, the greatest enemy of Russia is liberalism, which he has defined as the “false premise that a human is a separate, autonomous individual—a selfish animal seeking its own benefit. And nothing more.” He has written that “such a liberal person—completely detached from God, history, and society; from the people and culture; from the family and loved ones; from collective morality and ethnic identity—does not exist; and if they do exist, they ought not to.”
After the talk, some members of the audience gathered around Dugin. A young man asked, “This liberalism thing—is it possible that concealed within it is some link to the Lord that will take it and bring it down?”
“Perhaps,” Dugin told him. “That’s why there are people who fight against the liberal world, even within the liberal world.”
“Maybe there is simply a certain substance that has flooded everything, all the brains,” the young man went on. “Then a flame is lit inside it by its offspring, which instantly turns the game upside down?”
The crowd looked befuddled, but Dugin cottoned at once. “Ah,” he said. “That would be Donald Trump!”
Everyone laughed, including Dugin’s daughter, Daria Dugina, who’d accompanied him to the event. A writer and broadcaster, Dugina also worked as a publicist and scheduler for her father. That evening, as they drove in different cars, an explosive attached to the underside of Dugina’s S.U.V. detonated. Her father got out of his vehicle as other drivers stopped. Someone taped the scene; Dugin can be seen stepping among the flaming wreckage, holding his hands to his head. The next day, Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, sent Dugin a telegram calling Dugina’s death “a vile, cruel crime.”
An obscure Russian paramilitary group claimed responsibility for the bombing, but Moscow insisted that the order had come from Ukraine’s intelligence services. Ukraine denied the charge, but Biden Administration officials reportedly agreed with Russia. The intended victim was presumably Dugin. In some ways, he was a curious target: Dugin is not a politician or a military commander, nor does he seem to be a secret agent, despite predictable rumors to the contrary. Yet his voluminous writings, from books to online essays, have indelibly shaped Russian politics and policy. His conviction that the Russian Federation’s destiny is to become a holy empire along tsarist lines, a notion that he has been promoting for more than three decades, has been adopted by much of the Russian political élite—including by Putin himself. So has Dugin’s long-held belief that Ukraine is a proxy battlefield for a larger mortal conflict with the West. Whereas the Biden Administration opposed Russia’s imperial aggression, the Trump Administration appears willing to ratify it, if not to mimic it.
Since invading Ukraine, Putin has regularly invoked old arguments about Russia’s imperial role in the world, yet his references amount to a mercenary patchwork. In contrast, Dugin’s fluency with these arguments is as formidable as his loathing for liberalism is sincere. A close reading of his work offers an answer to the central question of the war, a question that, after three years, has still not been adequately addressed: Just why did Putin want to conquer Ukraine?
Only some of Dugin’s writing is about matters of state. Other pet subjects are literature, art, theology, music, and philosophy. He composes poetry (the not bad “In a Soviet Basement” contains the lines “He spins in a waltz, black as a cat / In his hands a Walter, in his hands a Walter / In his hands, Walter Scott”), records experimental music, and translates an array of right-wing European writers into Russian, releasing the books through his publishing house. Until 2014, he taught sociology at Moscow State University. He is not a Kremlin insider but, rather, a member of Moscow’s intelligentsia—or what now passes for it. He has written, co-written, or edited nearly a hundred books, and in his graphomania, if not in the quality of his work, he is a throwback to the Golden Age of Russian literature, in the nineteenth century. And, like the conservative Slavophile authors of that era who first formulated the nativist views that have resurged under Putin—such as the historian Mikhail Pogodin—Dugin assails the West and its values. He inveighs against democracy, secularism, individualism, civil society, multiculturalism, human rights, sexual openness, technology, scientific rationalism, and reason in general, which he rejects in favor of the mystical revelations of the Russian Orthodox Church. Although he is an avid tweeter and frequently posts on Telegram and Facebook, he claims to have no use for modernity. He once wrote that “the best course would be to eradicate the state and replace it with the Holy Empire.”
“Dugin can write a book in one night,” Marat Guelman, a former political consultant to the administration of Boris Yeltsin and a former acquaintance of Dugin’s, told me. “He is full of words.” Some of those words are sound enough. In “Templars of the Proletariat,” from 1997, Dugin observes that “the Russian national idea” is “paradoxical,” and “a colossal labor of the soul is required in order to make sense of it.” But, just when you think he is onto something serious, he says something risibly unserious. In his 2012 book, “Putin vs. Putin,” he presents pages of admissible arguments about Putin’s lack of vision for Russia’s future, only to announce, with a note of portentous climax, that Putin took office on a date predicted by Nostradamus. A critique of the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, which lucidly dissects the contradictions of perestroika, is undercut by musings on the occult implications of the “characteristic mark” on the former premier’s forehead. Dugin’s Russian critics like to say that he has kasha v golove—porridge in the head. Alexander Verkhovsky, a scholar of Russian extremism, dryly told me, “His books are very impressive, especially if, when you read them, you’re not thinking much.”
Nevertheless, you can find Dugin’s latest works in Russian bookstores, and he has found some avid readers abroad. The more extreme elements of the European New Right love his disdain for democracy. His books have been translated into French, Spanish, German, Italian, and English; in the United States, at least one of them—a 2014 treatise on Martin Heidegger—was published by a company run by the white nationalist Richard Spencer. Dugin makes President Trump’s accounts of American decline seem modest by comparison. In “Being and Empire,” Dugin calls the U.S. an immoral wasteland—“the direct opposite of the Holy Empire.” (His writing is full of italics.)
Last April, Dugin was interviewed by Tucker Carlson during the pundit’s tour of Russia. The expression of amiable skepticism that Carlson had worn through an earlier interview with Putin descended into a baffled frown when Dugin told him that the triumph of Western liberalism, which promotes “individualism” and rejects all kinds of “collective identities,” had led mankind to “the historical terminal station” where all ties to the past—religion, family, nation-state—were cut and “human identity” was “abandoned.” His anti-Western militancy is so intense that the U.S. and the European Union have both placed sanctions on him.
More dramatically, Ukrainian prosecutors have charged Dugin with genocide, though he appears to have played no material role in the war. His crime is rhetorical: he argues that the destruction of Ukraine is essential to Russia’s continued existence. In his 1997 book “Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia,” which brought him to fame in his home country, he writes, “The existence of Ukraine within its current borders, and with its current status as a ‘sovereign state,’ is tantamount to delivering a monstrous blow to Russia’s geopolitical security.” Although other Russian intellectuals have called for Ukraine’s incorporation into the Russian Federation, none have done so for quite so long, or with such a murderous tone, as Dugin. “Russia can be either great or not at all,” he writes in his 2014 book “Ukraine: My War,” adding, “Of course, for greatness, people always, in all centuries, pay a very heavy price, sometimes shedding entire seas of blood.”
Putin was once known for his distaste for ideology. Just before becoming his country’s acting President, in 2000, he wrote, “I am against the restoration of an official state ideology in Russia in any form.” In the decade after he took office, whenever he did resort to violence abroad—continuing the war in Chechnya; invading Georgia, in 2008—no grand ideology lay behind it. These were acts of opportunism by a cold-eyed pragmatist. The same could be said of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, which was brazen and unlawful but also virtually bloodless, so much so that it moved Henry Kissinger to call Putin “a serious strategist.” (The mandarin of Realpolitik knew no higher praise.)
Putin’s decision, in 2022, to try to conquer all of Ukraine can’t be arrived at by extrapolating from those prior invasions. This was less the gambit of a master of Realpolitik than the reckless gamble of an ideologue, and the impulse to invade belongs to an antique tradition of Russian political thought—a messianic imperialism that originates not in the Soviet Union (which the former K.G.B. agent Putin has been accused, imprecisely, of wanting to revive) but in tsarist Russia.
Today, Putin talks like a Romanov-era zealot. This once terse apparatchik seems to have succumbed to the notion, as Dostoyevsky put it in “The Brothers Karamazov,” that “all true Russians are philosophers.” Putin has even taken to quoting Dostoyevsky; not too long ago, the idea that he’d ever read Dostoyevsky would have been laughable. Putin waxes on about the “civilizational identity” that underlies Russia’s claims to cultural dominance, and about the “historical and spiritual space” of Greater Russia, which, naturally, includes all of Ukraine. “The world has entered a period of fundamental, revolutionary transformation,” he declared in a speech several months after attempting to topple Kyiv. Russia, he said, was defending not only its national interests but also the oppressed of the world against the “Western élites” who exploited them. His country had made “a glorious spiritual choice.”
The speech could have been written by Dugin. In “Foundations of Geopolitics,” he writes, “The Russian people certainly belong to the messianic peoples, and, like any messianic people, it has a universal, pan-human significance.” Putin has come to sound like Dugin to such an extent that Dugin has been called Putin’s Rasputin and Putin’s philosopher. “Putin’s Brain” was the headline of a Foreign Affairs profile of Dugin; “Inside ‘Putin’s Brain’ ” is the title of a recent book. All oversell the point. Putin’s telegram of condolence to Dugin notwithstanding, there is little to suggest that the two men have a personal relationship. But wars don’t arise from personal relationships. They arise from ideas—from the accretion, and corruption, of ideas over time. Putin’s assimilation of Dugin’s thinking is likely indirect, maybe even unconscious. It might be more apt to call Dugin the Russian President’s imperial id. When I asked the historian Andrei Tsygankov, the author of “Russia and the West from Alexander to Putin,” about the pair’s connection, he said, “Putin uses Dugin in the way that the tsars used the Slavophiles”—for “mobilizing the population to their cause.”
When Putin announced the start of his “special military operation” in Ukraine, on February 24, 2022, he didn’t mention that country by name until the latter half of a nearly four-thousand-word speech. The first half was taken up with excoriating the West, and especially the U.S., that “empire of lies,” for forcing the war on Russia by seeking to “destroy our traditional values and force on us their false values . . . that are directly leading to degradation and degeneration, because they are contrary to human nature.” That speech, too, could have been written by Dugin, who has written that “the entirety of Russian history is a dialectical argument with the West and against Western culture.”
Putin and Dugin came to prominence simultaneously, in the nineteen-nineties. After leaving the K.G.B., Putin became the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, then joined the staff of President Yeltsin, who made him chief of the Federal Security Service (the K.G.B.’s successor), then Prime Minister, and eventually tapped him for the Presidency. This was one way up in post-Soviet Russia. Another was through the reactionary underground. This was Dugin’s path. February 24, 2022, can be seen as the day those two trajectories, the official and the unofficial, collided.
Putin describes himself as a “pure and utterly successful product of Soviet patriotic education” in “First Person,” a collection of interviews with him published in 2000 and the closest thing we have to an autobiography. Dugin is a more exotic specimen in Russia: a child of the sixties, almost in the same sense that Westerners would use that term. He was born in Moscow to a minor official in 1962, nine years after the death of Joseph Stalin, from whose murderous purges the Russian intelligentsia was slowly recovering. Writers and other educated élites were then “under such monstrous ideological pressure that one wonders why art and the humanities have not altogether vanished in our country,” the dissident Andrei Sakharov wrote.
Stalin suppressed Ukrainian culture and caused the death of untold numbers of Ukrainians. While Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, continued expanding the Soviet imperium, he reversed Stalin’s policy on Ukraine. Khrushchev, who grew up in Ukraine, elevated it to the status of the second most powerful Soviet republic after Russia and, in 1954, transferred Crimea to its control—an act for which Putin assails him today. He also instituted the thaw, as it was known, relaxing cultural restrictions. The year Dugin was born, Khrushchev both precipitated the Cuban missile crisis and approved the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s account of a Soviet Gulag, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” arguably the most subversive novel to have been legally published in the U.S.S.R. Beneath the sanctioned renaissance sprang up an illicit counterculture that defied the Soviet cult of reason with occult religion.
From this spiritualist subculture emerged the young Dugin, by all accounts unforgettably. Tall, regal, and formal looking, he looked like “a representative of a higher race,” one of his friends said. He was a walking paradox: in the aristocratic Russian manner, he wore cavalry jodhpurs and rolled his “R”s; at the same time, he adopted the style of a medieval peasant, complete with a “pudding bowl” haircut. The writer and poet Eduard Limonov recalls in his memoir “My Political Biography” that Dugin was a “plump, cheeky, belly, busty, bearded young man” who was “full of exaggerated emotions.”
While Putin got a law degree and entered the intelligence services, Dugin dropped out of aviation school and took up with a different sort of secret society: the Iuzhinskii Circle, a group of writers in Moscow’s “metaphysical underground.” The circle had been formed, in the nineteen-sixties, by Yuri Mamleev, a novelist who has noted, “We felt distinctly that there was a bottomless chasm beneath us and that the whole planet was sinking into it.” The first members of the salon gathered in Mamleev’s small Moscow apartment to listen to him read from his writings, which were too outlandish to be published even during the thaw. One novel, “Shatuny,” was regarded as a kind of sacred text. A late-twentieth-century answer to “Crime and Punishment,” it follows a half-witted, sex-crazed serial killer as he screws and slaughters his way through Russia, in an effort to glimpse his victims’ souls. Dugin said that the novel was “the secret seed of the nineteen-sixties,” writing, “It is as though what you hold in your hands is not a book, but an empty space, a black, impish vortex that can suck large objects into itself.” A similar feeling may have been induced by the circle’s initiation rites—Bacchic episodes with copious drinking and sex.