Right-wing Russia: Alexander Dugin: Advance of the White Army

It is one of the most prestigious universities in the country: The Russian State University for the Humanities (RGGU) in Moscow. It has been in the headlines since last Friday because its students are protesting against the founding of a new study center, the name of which says it all: “Ivan Ilyin Political University.”

The sympathies of the Russian philosopher and legal scholar Ivan Ilyin (1883–1954) for fascism are well known. And the term “political” instead of “political science” is no coincidence: the purpose of the new institution is to establish a new “paradigm” of “Russian civilization” at universities in order to preserve and further develop “traditional values”. It is logical that the right-wing theorist Alexander Dugin becomes the director. In one Petition of the protesting students, who also distribute anti-fascist stickers, Dugin is described as an “ultra-right philosopher” and rather reservedly points out that in the “socio-political atmosphere in which our country finds itself” the name of a supporter of fascism is hardly suitable for one scientific institution is suitable. Within a few days the petition received 5,500 signatures.

For Dugin, the same forces are behind the protests against him and his new institute as those behind the assassination attempt on his daughter and fellow activist Darya Dugina in August 2022. Alexander Bezborodov, the rector of the RGGU, claims that 5,500 signatures all come from a “Ukrainian agency.” would. A loyal Telegram group “Students for Ilyin” was also created, but it only has 530 members.

Both Ilyin and Dugin are heavily mythologized figures whose importance is often greatly exaggerated by the media. Ilyin is often referred to as the “chief ideologist of the Russian counter-revolution” and “Putin’s favorite philosopher.” He spent the Russian Civil War from 1917 to 1922 between the “Reds” and the “Whites” in Bolshevik Moscow, where he worked on his dissertation “Hegel’s philosophy as a textbook on the nature of God and man”, which he wrote under the atheist rulers also successfully defended. Ilyin made no secret of his religious and philosophical views, which earned him several arrests, but he made no attempt to make his way to the counter-revolutionary “Whites.” Finally, in September 1922, he was forcibly expatriated by the Bolsheviks and expelled from Soviet Russia to Stettin on a so-called philosopher’s ship with a number of other intellectuals.

However, he did not achieve a major philosophical career in Germany. Rather, he became a very active anti-communist publicist. When the “white army” was defeated militarily, battles broke out over its intellectual and organizational heritage and over its political status. The “white” veterans were divided over what they wanted: restoration of the monarchy, a liberal constitution, a Russian nation-state or perhaps a new political order? Ilyin became the theoretician of the “Russian All-Military Union” (ROWS), which saw itself as a kind of exiled army, but which did not want to predetermine the political order of a post-communist Russia, which is why its relations with the legitimist monarchists were strained. At the same time, Ilyin advocated the unconditional continuation of the armed struggle and rejected all “conciliatory” currents. And so he was also an enemy of “Eurasianism,” which was developed by right-wing Russian intellectuals in exile at the beginning of the 1920s and to which Alexander Dugin still refers today. It is an ideology according to which Russia stands between Europe and Asia and, as an authoritarian, “ideocratic” state, should stay away from all Western influences.

Ilyin hailed both Mussolini and Hitler as the “saviors of Europe from communism” and took an active part in Nazi propaganda and defended Hitler’s anti-Semitism. At the same time, as a conservative Christian, he had close contact with the right-wing Protestant circle around the Berlin magazine “Eckart,” which later developed into civil resistance against Hitler. For a short time he headed Ilyin the Russian State Scientific Institute after a number of employees there had already been fired for political and racist reasons. In 1938 he was accused of “Freemasonry” and collaborating with the Bolsheviks and fled to Switzerland. But even well after the Second World War, Ilyin emphasized the supposed positive aspects of fascism. For him, Spain under Franco and Portugal under Salazar were role models for a post-Communist Russia because they were compatible with Christianity. He described this as a “non-totalitarian” variant of fascism.

Ilyin envisioned a state in which not “demagogues” but those supposedly “best” in moral and intellectual terms would rule selflessly. He consistently assessed any, whether formulated by individuals or classes, as a threat to the national well-being. The dissident and Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was politically influenced by Ilyin’s corporatist ideas, contributed to Ilyin’s popularity in post-Soviet Russia. Vladimir Putin probably came across Ilyin’s texts through Solzhenitsyn. But the fact that he is his “favorite philosopher” is a misunderstanding, because what Putin quotes from Ilyin mostly comes from his extensive daily political journalism, in which he basically praises everything “Russian.”

Dugin’s path, on the other hand, led from right-wing esoteric circles in the late Soviet Union via “Pamajat”, the first legal organization of Russian nationalists in the 1980s, via the authoritarian and dazzling “National Bolshevik Party” of the late writer Eduard Limonov into the circles of the European “New Right”. , whose authors he made known in Russia. He is more of a media phenomenon than a politician; all his attempts to found his own political organization came to nothing. He defends his reputation on the propaganda front all the more zealously.