Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn. Benjamin Franklin

Thursday, April 17, 2014

Putin's Brain

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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