This is Alexander Dugin, Putin’s leading thinker

Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin, 60, is considered the father of the current nationalism that permeates the Kremlin’s expansionist policy. However, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has never been seen in the company of Dugin, despite the obvious influence of his thinking on his ideology. He and not his daughter seems to have been the clear target of last night’s attack

Born in Moscow on January 7, 1962, Dugin works not only as an ultranationalist ideologue, but also as a philosopher, political scientist, sociologist, translator and author of numerous books. He is a doctor in sociology and political science in addition to having been a professor at the Lomonosov University of Moscow (MGU). He is the creator and leader of the International Eurasian Movement, which aims to reunite Russia with the former Soviet republics and even with other European countries.

Duguin is the author of the work “The fourth political theory”, according to his conception, it would be the next step after the three previous theories “liberalism, socialism and fascism”. He claims to be fluent in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. He was a disciple of the Russian poet and mystic, Evgueni Golovín.

Between 2009 and 2014, he directed the chair of Sociology of International Relations at the Faculty of Sociology of Lomonosov University, but was fired for his openly nationalist positions in favor of the so-called “Ruski Mir” (Russian World), which has been precisely the movement which led to the annexation of Crimea, the uprising against kyiv in Donetsk and Luhansk in April 2014 and the current war in Ukraine.

His father, Gelii Dugin, was a lieutenant general in the Soviet Army, and his mother, Galina Onufrienko, was a doctor. Despite the prevailing atheism in the Soviet Union, Alexander Dugin was secretly baptized at the age of six in an Orthodox church in the city of Michurinsk thanks to his fervent great-grandmother, Elena Kargaltseva, who passed on the practices and worship of the so-called “Old Believers,” an ultra-Orthodox wing within Russia’s ruling church.

In 1979, Dugin began studying at the Moscow Aviation Institute, but was expelled in the second year for “poor performance.” Later he graduated from

the Novocherkassk Institute of Agrarian Engineering. But his was not aviation, technique or the study of the field. In 1988 he joined the ultra-conservative organization “Pámiat” (Memory), from which he also had to leave after it was discovered that he had contacts with Russian dissidents abroad, in particular with the writer Yuri Mamléyev, who was accused of allegedly belonging to a occult-satanic organization.

Duguin created, together with the writer Eduard Limonov, the totalitarian organization, the National Bolshevik Party (NBP), whose emblem on a red background in a soft circle appears the hammer and sickle, unlike the Hitlerian National Socialist Party, which exhibits in the same context a swastika. Their paths would later separate and Limonov, who died in March 2020, founded the “Other Russia” party after the dissolution of his previous formation.

Dugin became the adviser to the president of the State Duma (Lower House of the Russian Parliament), Guennadi Selezniov, between 1998 and 1999. He also directed the ultra-nationalist television channel Tsargrad, disseminator of the ideas of the “Russian World”.

He is married to Natalia Meléntieva, who is also a Philosophy professor and directs the “Artogueya” publishing house. He has a daughter, Daria, who died in yesterday’s attack, and a son, named Ártur. In 2014, the US publication Foreign Policy listed Duguin among the top 100 “global thinkers” of the modern world in the “troublemakers” category. Due to his “racist” thinking, he is included in the sanctions lists of the European Union, the United States and Canada.