My dinner with Aleksandr Dugin

OPINION:

President Trump has been making strenuous efforts to halt the war Russia has been waging against Ukraine. During an impromptu meeting at the Vatican this month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told Mr. Trump he was prepared for a “full and unconditional” ceasefire. Still, Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to refuse even to suspend his attacks on Ukrainian targets. Why? I think ideology is playing a significant role.

To explain, let me take you back to 1996, when a friend asked whether I would like to have dinner with an interesting Russian, Aleksandr Dugin.

Thought to be a populist like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Mr. Dugin was in Washington to be debriefed on Russian affairs. He spoke perfect English, had a bushy beard and long hair, and was dressed all in black, the garb of the traditional Russian holy man. There was something hypnotic about the way he stared you in the eyes. He dispensed sonorous if platitudinous sayings, such as that man needs not just materialism but also spirituality.

He made an impression, so I resolved to keep track of him.

I learned he was the son of a general in the GRU, Russia’s main military intelligence agency, and, for a time, a professor at Moscow State University. Despite his holy man air, he was a constant presence on Russian TV and radio and a practiced media performer. It was said that Mr. Putin told him to rid Russia of Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika.

During Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ossetia, Mr. Dugin posed with a Kalashnikov in front of a tank. When Russia seized Crimea, people became more aware of his influence and called him “Putin’s brain” or “Putin’s Svengali.” This is not apt. Mr. Putin is brainy himself and showed no sign of being in thrall to Mr. Dugin. Because of the obscurity of Kremlin politics, we don’t even know whether he and Mr. Putin have ever met, but we know Mr. Dugin’s ideology fed into Mr. Putin’s vision of a reestablished Russian empire.

When Mr. Dugin published his geopolitical magnum opus “Foundations of Geopolitics,” it became clear that he was not a Russian populist in the Solzhenitsyn mold. He was an avid proponent of Russian imperialism reclaiming its “lost” Slavic nations and its sphere of influence over the former Warsaw Pact, eventually culminating in war with Europe and the United States.

Western correspondents, including Charles Clover, began to provide thorough analyses of Mr. Dugin’s geopolitical manifesto. However, they did not delve deeply into Mr. Dugin’s ideology and its roots in European revolutionary extremism, especially the thought of Martin Heidegger in the 1930s during his commitment to National Socialism. That was where I could contribute.

Since gaining power in 2012, Mr. Putin has tried to reestablish a Russian veto over its former captive states’ foreign and military policies. Still, he does not want to restore the Soviet Union. He is an anti-Soviet authoritarian populist. Mr. Putin’s imperial agenda aims to gather the Slavic peoples of Europe back into the motherland’s fold. Mr. Dugin helped feed this utopian vision of a “new world.”

Slavophile thought is crucial to Mr. Putin’s worldview, including Nikolai Berdyaev’s Christian existentialist opposition to Vladimir Lenin and Mr. Dugin’s ideology of Eurasianist National Bolshevism. Mr. Dugin tried to rescue what he saw as the authentically Russian agrarian populist impulse behind the original Bolshevik Revolution from its betrayal by Lenin’s “scientific socialism” imported from alien European thought, calling for a “revolution of archaic values” based on the blood and soil traditions of family, rural life and religious faith. Mr. Dugin shared the conviction of Mr. Putin’s inner circle of military and security advisers that, after 500 years of autocracy, Russia could never be a democracy, proved by the disastrous democratic interludes of Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin.    

Mr. Dugin gave Mr. Putin the ideology he needed to reject the tainted European strain of Soviet communism while rehabilitating it as a great patriotic people’s movement, including the rehabilitation of Stalin in his role as wartime champion against Adolf Hitler but not as the international leader of Marxist-Leninism. This ideology also enabled Mr. Putin to argue that while Soviet communism should never be restored, the Slavophilic populism that was its true lifeblood can be: a national tribalism extending to all Slavic peoples, including those in Ukraine, Poland and the Balkans, who must be gathered back into the Russian fold.

Mr. Dugin’s fascination with Heidegger, who lent his prestige as Germany’s leading thinker in the 1930s to support National Socialism, was an important theme of his Slavophilic imperialism. Heidegger viewed the German “volk” in 1933 as between the “pincers” of the two global technological superpowers: America and Russia. Out of this struggle, the German people must reclaim their premodern destiny and lead all “the peoples” out of the grip of the rationalist global order back to their archaic tribal roots.

Mr. Dugin transferred this fascistic role of the salvational people from Heidegger’s Germany to Russia, whose spiritual values will liberate people everywhere from capitalist materialism. He even wrote to the American people in 2014, assuring them that they were not Russia’s foes and that Russia aimed to liberate them from their parasitic capitalist overlords.

Much about Mr. Dugin’s recent life remains obscure. His daughter, a staunch supporter of the invasion of Ukraine, was killed in a car bombing arguably intended for him. He sometimes appeared to think that Mr. Putin was not radical or bold enough in pursuing the war against Ukraine. Recently returned to public view, he has made it more clear than ever that the only acceptable outcome for Russia’s war with Ukraine’s “race of degenerates” is their literal extinction through genocide.

As the prospect for peace between Ukraine and Russia veers back and forth, the bottom line about Mr. Dugin’s influence on Mr. Putin is that, to the degree that Mr. Putin believes in his ideological worldview or finds it useful to appear to believe in it to mobilize Russian patriotism, Mr. Putin can never abide by a permanent agreement with Ukraine because that would imply the possibility of normal politics and coexistence with Europe, whereas his foreign policy aims are revolutionary. Ukraine is only the first step. As Russian lawmaker Aleksey Alexey Zhuravlev recently put it, after Ukraine, they must look to Poland and beyond.

• Waller R. Newell is an adjunct fellow at Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a professor of political science, philosophy and humanities at Carleton University in Ottawa.