Alexander Dugin and the Philosophy Behind Putin's Invasion of Crimea
By Anton Barbashin and Hannah Thoburn
Foreign Affairs - March 31, 2014
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has searched
fruitlessly for a new grand strategy -- something to define who Russians
are and where they are going. “In Russian history during the 20th
century, there have been various periods -- monarchism, totalitarianism,
perestroika, and finally, a democratic path of development,” Russian
President Boris Yeltsin said a couple of years after the collapse of the
Soviet Union, “Each stage has its own ideology,” he continued, but now
“we have none.”
To fill that hole, in 1996 Yeltsin designated a team of scholars to work together to find what Russians call the Russkaya ideya
(“Russian idea”), but they came up empty-handed. Around the same time,
various other groups also took up the task, including a collection of
conservative Russian politicians and thinkers who called themselves Soglasiye vo imya Rossiya
(“Accord in the Name of Russia”). Along with many other Russian
intellectuals of the day, they were deeply disturbed by the weakness of
the Russian state, something that they believed needed to be fixed for
Russia to return to its rightful glory. And for them, that entailed
return to the Russian tradition of a powerful central government. How
that could be accomplished was a question for another day.
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