ABSTRACT
This essay examines the historical thought of the contemporary Russian political philosopher Alexander Dugin (1962-). Dugin’s writings are the product of a complex intellectual development in the particularly fraught context of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the economic and political instability of the Yeltsin presidency and the ultimate emergence and consolidation of Putinism. Dugin navigated this context by combining and recombining shifting and heterogeneous sources, often from ‘submerged’ intellectual traditions, and by a passage through a contradictory array of affiliations from the Yuzhinsky circle to the anti-Semitic Pamyat movement to National Bolshevism and Old Belief. The very heterogeneity of Dugin’s sources has, in turn, served to make him a particularly polyvalent link among Alt-Right groups, especially given Dugin’s charismatic personality, his extensive web presence and the official connections he has cultivated from his positions with Moscow State University and the Russian Interior Ministry.
