When referring to the most influential figures within Russia, one would be hard-pressed to ignore the exploits of Grigori Rasputin. An infamous mystic, Rasputin’s esoteric allure would grant him unparalleled influence over the royal family, allowing him to fill ministerial positions with sycophants aligned with him at whim. A person prone to a similar charisma and cryptic prose of equal indirect power in contemporary Russia is that of Aleksandr Dugin, a man who has earned himself the monikers of “The Most Dangerous Man In The World,” “Putin’s Brain,” and, indeed, “Putin’s Rasputin.”
Beginning his political career with a prominent position in the nativist neo-Nazi group Pramyat from 1987 to 1989, Dugin would continue to augment his ideology with the anti-bourgeois rhetoric fostered by Soviet thought, eventually founding the National Bolshevik Party with novelist Ėduard Limonov in 1993. National Bolshevism, an ultranationalist strand of Marxism described by the Communist Party’s Young Left Front as “a bizarre mixture of totalitarian and fascist symbols, geopolitical dogma, leftist ideas, and national-patriotic demagoguery,” served to represent the synthesis of Dugin’s ultranationalist sentiments with his influence from the former Soviet Union’s Marxist and anti-bourgeois rhetoric. This set the stage for the Eurasian ideology and its distinctly chauvinist and illiberal nature.
Eurasianism, as posited by Dugin, argues that the twenty-first century will be defined by a conflict between the Atlanticists, referring to the thalassocratic liberal hegemony and world order espoused by the United States and its allies, and the Eurasianists, referring to the land-based powers, primarily referring to Russia, who reject such an order. This narrative of conflict has differed greatly from classical proponents of Eurasianism who have traditionally portrayed Romano-Germanic Europe as a unifying threat. Such a plan involves stoking anti-American nationalism among Japan, Germany, and Iran, the last of which is of particular interest with renewed Iranian-American tensions in the wake of Qasem Soleimani’s death. Additionally, a geopolitical issue integral to Eurasianism is that of Russia’s claim to Ukraine, a belief which had served to bolster Dugin’s following in the wake of Russia’s actions in Crimea and the Donbass.
When directly countering the American liberal world order, Dugin’s Eurasian doctrine directs its followers “to provoke all forms of instability and separatism within the borders of the United States,” mentioning historical racial divisions as a promising wedge. To cement Eurasianism as a universally appealing alternative to liberalism, much of the Eurasian doctrine is rooted in elements of both Fascist and Communist thought due to neither “belonging to the spirit of modernity” and thus are free of its supposed corruption at the hand of liberal thought. In his primary ideological work, The Fourth Political Theory, Dugin summarizes this ideology as the rejection of “socialism without materialism, atheism, progressivism, and modernism,” instead focusing on the concepts of intense religious, ethnic, and national pride. These are the criteria by which Dugin believes facilitate “Dasein,” a term in Heideggerian existential philosophy used in the context of individual identity and personhood. Whereas the Eurasian movement allows Dugin appeal to the more hawkish of the Russian elite, the integration of the Fourth Political Ideology at its foundations has served to rapidly grow his following of the disillusioned through its incorporation of all radical fringes of the political spectrum.
While the tenets of such an ideology and its revanchist ambitions might lead one to believe such a movement exists solely on the fringes of the Russian public and political spheres, many Russian figures prominent in such realms have offered Dugin’s philosophy not only acceptance but praise. During a 1999 interview, former Chairman of the State Duma and prominent early supporter of President Putin, Gennadiy Seleznyov, publicly advocated for Dugin’s work to be made compulsory reading in Russia’s school curriculum. Though the popularity of Dugin’s work has yet to make an impression on the Russian economic elite, one may also notice exceptions to this phenomena, such as the man’s amicable ties to retail mogul President of Russian Gold, Alexander Tarantsev, who greatly helped Dugin finance the publication of new editions of his work.
Beyond the public sphere, the works of Dugin and the Eurasian movement have also made a lasting impression within one of the Russian government’s most formidable assets: its military. Lectures based on what would become Dugin’s magnum opus, Foundation of Geopolitics, have according to an uncontested claim by Dugin himself, been used as required reading for Russia’s General Staff Academy, one of Russia’s premier military learning institutions. This lasting impression of this Eurasianist Il Principe on Russia’s policy makers has not been lost on prominent scholarship. John Dunlop, a leading figure on the topic of post-Soviet Russian nationalism, further affirms this popularity by stating that there has “not been another book published in Russia during the post-communist period that has exerted an influence on Russian military, police, and statist foreign policy elites.”
Whilst the ideological characteristics of the Eurasia Movement and the Fourth Political Theory have made a relatively small impression on the Russian political and military sphere, the aforementioned geopolitical doctrine espoused by the movement have been viewed with great interest by Russian policy makers, helping carry both its military and ideological aspects into the mainstream. With this in mind, the threat of a successful execution of the Eurasian geopolitical philosophy by the Russian government would pose a twofold threat to the democratic ideals of the United States’ government and its people, and should thus be a priority for United States policymakers.
One such area of which action is recommended to be taken is the countering of the aforementioned Eurasian strategy of sowing discontent through “encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements-- extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S.” This policy has seen itself come to fruition through the actions of entities associated with Russian soft power, the most infamous being the pro-Russian Internet Research Agency. The organization’s skill at dividing and conquering was made apparent in the U.S. Senate Select Committee On Intelligence’s Report On Russian Active Measures And Interference In The 2016 Election, where a plethora of attempts were made by the group to incite racial hatred among Americans. In fact, 66 percent of Internet Research Agency Facebook ads mentioning race in an inflammatory manner and one of the group’s proxy accounts designed to galvanize black police retaliation, titled “Blacktivist,” garnered a total of 11.2 million engagements on Facebook before promptly being taken down by the U.S. government after its Russian ties were revealed. The Eurasianist’s efforts to galvanize identity politics in the U.S. is not restricted to Black Americans, however, as figures such as Richard Spencer and Steve Bannon have both worked with and drawn inspiration from Dugin and his nativist vision.
As Putin’s geopolitical maneuvers in Ukraine and Georgia continue to mirror one another, the United States must look towards another former Soviet territory at high risk of hybrid warfare with Russia frequently mentioned as an invaluable prospect for satellite states under “special status” under a Russo-Eurasian hegemony: the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In fact, defense strategists working on behalf of the United States Armed Forces have concluded that these Baltic nations are “vulnerable to low-level, hybrid, and full-scale attacks by Russian special operations and regular military forces deployed close to their borders,'' with little preventing increased Russian military and diplomatic pressure in the region.
There indeed exist factors that facilitate such acts, such as the traditional cultural divides that also render the United States and Ukraine vulnerable to Russian soft power. This is especially dangerous in the case of the Baltic States due to their respective Russophone population “[relying] primarily on Russian origin media for information and entertainment,” rendering them susceptible to online information manipulation. Additionally, the impact of the Baltic States’ Russophone population losing faith in their government institutions would greatly shift public opinion and, eventually, the Baltic governments themselves away from NATO. This would effectively prevent direct American intervention in the event that the three countries withdraw from the military alliance. If the Baltic States allow Russia to alienate their native Russophone population, the latter would “not require a major effort to provide a pretext for Russian intervention should Moscow desire one.”
With this in mind, it is highly recommended that policymakers urge the social media industry to adhere to the solutions offered by the aforementioned Committee, which involve the promotion of increased interindustrial cooperation through the creation of “formalized mechanisms for collaboration that facilitate content sharing among the social media platforms in order to defend against foreign disinformation” as well as the offering of “notifications to individual users [that] should be clearly stated, device neutral, and provide users all the information necessary to understanding the malicious nature of the social media content or accounts they were exposed to.” This will allow those using such online platforms to know where the information they consume is coming from and identity possibly malicious intent. However, while social media companies have agreed to cooperate “on an ad-hoc basis,” it will take continuous and sensible cooperation if the IRA or its like are to be mitigated in the United States’ political system in the future.
In regards to an all-too-possible situation in which Putin will continue to mirror the Eurasian geopolitical agenda and eye the nations of the Baltic with pragmatic interest, Stephen Flanagan of the Rand Corporation recommends that the American Armed Forces work in cooperation with NATO personnel in the specialized training of the Baltic militaries. This includes in the fields of “crisis management, civil defense, and countering … and ‘grey zone’ attacks,” areas of which the quantitatively diminutive Baltic militaries must excel in if they are to prevent Russian engagements in hybrid warfare.
Taking note of the prospective problems concerning Russian manipulation of media, Ulrich Kuhn of the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg believes that Russian hybrid warfare can be primarily mitigated through the funding of Russophone media within the Baltic States as opposed to Russia, spanning from traditional media outlets such as newspapers, television, and radio… [to] social media and internet resources.” This would effectively provide the Baltic States’ Russian-speaking population an alternative to complete dependence on Kremlin-influenced media, an alternative that presents itself as more cost-effective than an increase in NATO defense funding.