Alexander Dugin

In the early 1990s, Dugin's work at the National Bolshevik Front included research into the roots of national movements and the activities of supporting esoteric groups in the first half of the 20th century. Partnering with Christian Bouchet, a then-member of the French branch of Ordo Templi Orientis, and building on Nationalist and migratory-integrative interest groups in Asia and Europe, they contribute in bringing international politics closer to Russia's Eurasian geopolitical concept.

Dugin spent two years studying the geopolitical, semiotic and esoteric theories of the controversial Dutch thinker Herman Wirth (1885–1981), one of the founders of the German Ahnenerbe. This resulted in the book Hyperborean Theory (1993), in which Dugin largely endorsed Wirth's ideas as a possible foundation for his Eurasianism. Apparently, this is "one of the most extensive summaries and treatments of Wirth in any language". According to the Moldovan anthropologist Leonid Mosionjnik, Wirth's overtly wild ideas fitted perfectly well in the ideological void after the demise of communism, liberalism and democracy. Dugin also promoted Wirth's claim to have written a book on the history of the Jewish People and the Old Testament, the so-called Palestinabuch, which could have changed the world had it not been stolen.

At the end of the Second Chechen War, Dugin was apparently requested by the Chechen side to come and negotiate, in addition he has met with the former president of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev, and the ambassadors of Iran and Syria.

Dugin's ideas, particularly those on "a Turkic–Slavic alliance in the Eurasian sphere", have begun to receive attention among certain nationalistic circles in Turkey, most notably among alleged members of the Ergenekon network, which is the subject of a high-profile trial (on charges of conspiracy). Dugin's Eurasianist ideology has also been linked to his adherence to the doctrines of the Traditionalist School. (Dugin's Traditionalist beliefs are the subject of a book length study by J. Heiser, The American Empire Should Be Destroyed—Aleksandr Dugin and the Perils of Immanentized Eschatology.) Dugin also advocates for a Russo-Arab alliance.

In principle, Eurasia and our space, the heartland Russia, remain the staging area of a new anti-bourgeois, anti-American revolution ... The new Eurasian empire will be constructed on the fundamental principle of the common enemy: the rejection of Atlanticism, strategic control of the USA, and the refusal to allow liberal values to dominate us. This common civilizational impulse will be the basis of a political and strategic union.

The reborn Russia, according to Dugin's concept, is said by Charles Clover of the Financial Times to be a slightly remade version of the Soviet Union with echoes of Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, where Eurasia was one of three continent-sized super states including Eastasia and Oceania as the other two and was participating in endless war between them. In the Eurasian public discourse sphere, the totalitarian communist policy deployed in over three decades of works by various international groups that are part of the movement, is "a version of reintegration of the post-Soviet space into a 'Eurasian' sphere of influence for Russia". The North American program "works with a wide range of partners from all sectors of civil society" and "is advanced through grant making, advocacy and research, regional initiatives, and close engagement".

The Kremlin invited Dugin to speak at its Anti-Orange Rally in Moscow in February 2012. There, Dugin addressed tens of thousands with this message:

Dear Russian people! The global American empire strives to bring all countries of the world together under its control. They intervene where they want, asking no one's permission. They come in through the fifth column, which they think will allow them to take over natural resources and rule over countries, people, and continents. They have invaded Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya. Syria and Iran are on the agenda. But their goal is Russia. We are the last obstacle on their way to building a global evil empire. Their agents at Bolotnaya Square and within the government are doing everything to weaken Russia and allow them to bring us under total external control. To resist this most serious threat, we must be united and mobilized! We must remember that we are Russian! That for thousands of years we protected our freedom and independence. We have spilled seas of blood, our own and other people's, to make Russia great. And Russia will be great! Otherwise it will not exist at all. Russia is everything! All else is nothing!

Dugin was baptized at the age of six in the Russian Orthodox church of Michurinsk by his great-grandmother Elena Mikhailovna Kargaltseva. Since 1999, he formally embraced a branch of the Old Believers, a Russian religious movement which rejected the 1652–1666 reforms of the official Russian Orthodox Church. Dugin's Eurasian philosophy owes much to Traditional Integralism and Nouvelle Droite movements, and as such it resonates with Neopaganism, a category which in this context means the movement of Slavic Native Faith (Rodnovery), especially in the forms of Anastasianism and Ynglism.

Dugin's Eurasianism is often cited as belonging to the same spectrum of these movements, as well as also having influences from Hermetic, Gnostic and Eastern traditions. He calls to rely upon "Eastern theology and mystical currents" for the development of the Fourth Political Theory.

According to Marlene Laruelle, Dugin's adherence to the Old Believers allows him to stand between Paganism and Orthodox Christianity without formally adopting either of them. His choice is not paradoxical, since, according to him—in the wake of René Guénon—Russian Orthodoxy and especially the Old Believers have preserved an esoteric and initiatory character which was utterly lost in Western Christianity. As such, the Russian Orthodox tradition may be merged with Neopaganism and may host "Neopaganism's nationalist force, which anchors it in the Russian soil, and separates it from the two other Christian confessions".

In Foundations of Geopolitics, Dugin advocated for the dismantling of the People's Republic of China, with Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and Manchuria becoming buffer states. After the loss of leadership in Russia, Zhang Weiwei, director of the China Institute of Fudan University, invited Dugin for lectures, which caused a shift in Dugin's attitude towards China. Originally advocating "territorial disintegration, division, and political and administrative partition" of China, Dugin has since supported China's "Tianxia" and believes that a Russian-Chinese alliance would help counter Atlanticism. Dugin has been appointed as a senior fellow at Fudan University, and Chinese public opinion considers Dugin to be the most important thinker around Putin.

Dugin wrote a 1997 essay in which he described Soviet-era serial killer Andrei Chikatilo as a mystic and "a practitioner of Dionysian "sacraments" in which the killer/torturer and the victim transcend their "metaphysical dualism" and become one".

Ukraine gave Dugin a five-year entry ban, starting in June 2006, and Kyiv declared him a persona non grata in 2007. His Eurasian Youth Union was banned in Ukraine. In 2007, the Security Service of Ukraine identified persons of the Eurasian Youth Union who committed vandalism on Hoverla in 2007: they climbed up the mountain of Hoverla, imitated sawing down the details of the construction in the form of the small coat of arms of Ukraine by tools brought with them and painted the emblem of the Eurasian Youth Union on the memorial symbol of the Constitution of Ukraine. He was deported back to Russia when he arrived at Simferopol International Airport in June 2007.

Before war broke out between Russia and Georgia in 2008, Dugin visited South Ossetia and predicted: "Our troops will occupy the Georgian capital Tbilisi, the entire country, and perhaps even Ukraine and the Crimean Peninsula, which is historically part of Russia, anyway." Afterwards he said Russia should "not stop at liberating South Ossetia but should move further," and "we have to do something similar in Ukraine." In 2008, Dugin stated that Russia should repeat the Georgian scenario in Ukraine, namely attack it. In September 2008, after the Russian-Georgian war, he did not hide his anger towards Putin, who "dared not drop the other shoe" and "restore the Empire."

On 10 October 2014, Dugin said, "Only after restoring the Greater Russia that is the Eurasian Union, we can become a credible global player. Now these processes slowed down very much. The Ukrainian maidan was the response of the West to the advance of the Russian integration." He described the Euromaidan as a coup d'état carried out by the United States: "America wishes to wage the war against Russia not by its own hands but by the hands of the Ukrainians. Promising to wink at up to 10 thousand victims among the peaceful population of Ukraine and actually demanding the victims, the United States led to this war. The United States carried out the coup d'état during the maidan for the purpose of this war. The United States raised neo-Nazis Russophobes to the power for the purpose of this war."

Dugin said Russia is the major driving force for the current events in Ukraine: "Russia insists on its sovereignty, its liberty, responds to challenges thrown down to it, for example, in Ukraine. Russia is attempting to integrate the post-Soviet space." As Israeli political scientist Vyacheslav Likhachov states, "If one seriously takes the fact that such a person as Alexander Dugin is the ideologist of the imperial dash for the West, then one can establish that Russia is not going to stop as far as the Atlantic Ocean."

In the 2014 article by Dmitry Bykov "Why TV, Alexander Dugin and Galina Pyshnyak crucified a boy", Channel One Russia's use of the aired story by Dugin and Pyshnyak about the allegedly crucified boy as a pretext for escalating the conflict was compared to the case of Beilis. On 9 July 2014, Dugin on his Facebook account wrote a story that a 6-year-old child was allegedly nailed down to an advertisement board and shot to death before his father's eyes.

On 16 July 2014, Novaya Gazeta provided a videotape of its correspondent Eugen Feldman walking along the main square in Sloviansk, asking local old women if they had heard of the murder of the child. They said such an event did not take place. The website Change.org hosted a petition of citizens who demanded "a comprehensive investigation with identification for all persons involved in the fabrication of the plot."

On 2 October 2014, Dugin described the situation in Donbas: "The humanitarian crisis has long since been raging on the territory of Novorossiya. Already up to a million, if not more, refugees are in the Russian Federation. A large part of the inhabitants of the DPR and the LPR simply moved abroad." In the end of October 2014, Dugin advised the separatists to establish dictatorship in Novorossiya until they win in the confrontation.

Aleksandr Dugin has portrayed the war in Gaza as part of a broader conflict between Russia and the West. Dugin has claimed that Jerusalem is originally Russian and called for Russia to re-conquer the land and has also questioned Israel's right to exist. Dugin considers Israel as a proxy government controlled by Western powers that America and its allies utilize to attack and demonize the Muslim world. Per this world view Dugin claims that "Muslim countries will recognize that the conflict between Israel and Hamas is part of the battle over the new world order, and will then better understand the war that Russia is waging in Ukraine."

Dugin believes that the Israel-Hamas war is the natural process of the world becoming multipolar with the Russia-Ukraine War and the China-Taiwan conflict being the other two battles that will determine polarity. Dugin has claimed that Russia and China are the allies of the Muslim world, and that each society should aid each other to expediate world multipolarity. Dugin has called on "shariah has to overcome the capitalism" and says that he hopes that Muslims will the international battle against the “globalist elite." Dugin opposes the 2026 Iran War, and has called for a global insurrection in response to the United States' strikes on Iran.

Dugin's influence on the Russian government and on president Vladimir Putin is disputed. He has no official ties to the Kremlin, but is often referred to in the media as "Putin's brain", and as being responsible for shaping Russian foreign policy. Others contend that Dugin's influence is limited and has been greatly exaggerated, on the basis that the correlations between his views and Russian foreign policy do not imply causation.

In 2016, international relations professor Peter Rutland wrote a review of a book by Charles Clover, the Financial Times's Moscow correspondent. Rutland wrote:"Clover makes it clear that Dugin does not have any sort of direct influence over Putin. Rather what is happening is that Dugin expressed, early on, the zeitgeist of post-Soviet Russia, identifying the forces of disorientation and ressentiment that fueled Putin's subsequent actions."Mark Galeotti, writing in 2022 for The Spectator, argued that Western commentators tend to overstate the importance of Dugin in Russian politics, sometimes even describing him as a new Rasputin. He argued that Dugin's influence on the politics since 2016 was negligible, but that he tried to present himself as an influential person.

In November 2022, the Latvia-based newspaper Meduza reported that, according to sources close to the Kremlin, Dugin's influence on Putin had grown after the killing of his daughter Daria Dugina. According to Meduza's interlocutors, the Western media had often exaggerated Dugin's political influence in the past, but after the murder of Dugina, Putin had allegedly started to take a serious interest in his ideas and to use one of his favourite terms ("Anglo-Saxon") in a public speech.

Dugin openly criticized Putin for failing to defend "Russian cities" such as Kherson, which was liberated from Russian control on 11 November 2022.

Dugin made contact with the French far-right thinker Alain de Benoist in 1990. Around the same time he also met the Belgian Jean-François Thiriart and Yves Lacoste. In 1992 he invited some of the European far-right figures he had met into Russia. He also brought members of Jobbik and Golden Dawn to Russia to strengthen their ties to the country.

According to the book War for Eternity by Benjamin R. Teitelbaum, Dugin met Steve Bannon in Rome in 2018 to discuss Heidegger, Traditionalist esotericism, and a series of geopolitical matters which Bannon disagreed with him, wherein Bannon pressed him to abandon his support for China, Turkey, and Iran. Dugin also developed links with far-right and far-left political parties in the European Union, including Syriza in Greece, Ataka in Bulgaria, the Freedom Party of Austria, and Front National in France, to influence EU policy on Ukraine and Russia. Dugin is also closely aligned with Israeli journalist Avigdor Eskin, who previously served on the board of Dugin's Eurasia Party.

Following Donald Trump's re-election in 2024, Dugin celebrated the result, declaring that "'Putinism' has triumphed in the United States" and advocating for Russian victory in the Russo-Ukrainian War. He also said that "One of the ideologues of Trumpism, Curtis Yarvin, has declared that it's time to establish a monarchy in the United States. If Republicans gain a majority in both houses, what could stop them?"

Despite previously hailing Trump as an ally against "liberal globalism," Dugin expressed growing disillusionment with the U.S. leader during 2026. He argued that Trump had moved away from his original 'Make America Great Again' (MAGA) principles and aligned more with neoconservative interests, leading him to conclude that engaging with Trump in his current form was inadvisable.

In his 2014 speech at the Vatican, Steve Bannon, who led Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign and served as a former White House chief strategist, compared Aleksandr Dugin's work to Julius Evola a philosopher and writer of the 20th century whose work influenced the Italian fascist movement.

American social media influencer Candace Owens visited Russia, in early June of 2026 initially framing the visit as a family vacation to St. Petersburg centered on touring catholic churches but also spoke on a panel during the vacation at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), where she shared the platform with Russian officials and Aleksandr Dugin.

In 2024 far-right commentator Tucker Carlson had a sit-down interview with Dugin where Carlson claimed that Dugin was so dangerous that his books “have been banned by the Biden administration.”

In one of his publications, Dugin introduced the term the sixth column and defined it as "the fifth column which just pretends to be something different", those who are in favor of Putin, but demand that he stand for liberal values (as opposed to the liberal fifth column, which is specifically against Putin). During the 2014 Russian military intervention in Ukraine, Dugin said that all the Russian sixth column stood up staunchly for Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov. As he asserts, "We need to struggle against the fifth and sixth columns."

Russian-American artist Mihail Chemiakin says Dugin is inventing "the sixth column". "Soon, probably, there would already be the seventh one as well. 'The fifth column' is understandable. That is we, intelligentsia, lousy, dirty, who read Camus. And 'the sixth column', in his opinion, is more dangerous, because that is the personal entourage of Vladimir Putin. But he is naïve and understands nothing. And as for Dugin, he can tell him who to shoot to death and who to imprison. Maybe Kudrin, and maybe Medvedev..."

According to Dugin, the whole Internet should be banned: "I think that Internet as such, as a phenomenon is worth prohibiting because it gives nobody anything good." In June 2012, Dugin said in a lecture that chemistry and physics are demonic sciences, and that all Orthodox Russians need to unite around the president of Russia in the last battle between good and evil, following the example of Iran and North Korea. He added: "If we want to liberate ourselves from the West, it is needed to liberate ourselves from textbooks on physics and chemistry."

In June 2014, Dugin characterized his position on the Russo-Ukrainian war as "firm opposition to the Junta and Ukrainian Nazism that are annihilating peaceful civilians" as well as rejection of liberalism and US hegemony.