Putin Ally Attacks Decembrists as ‘Masonic Conspiracy’ against Russian State and People

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 26 – Today on the 191^st anniversary of the Decembrist uprising in 1825, Eurasianist leader and Putin crony Aleksandr Dugin has attacked those who took part as “Masonic” enemies of “their own people, the powers, the faith and the tsar,” a reminder of just how difficult the year ahead will be as Russia marks the centenaries of the revolutions of 1917.

            In Soviet times, Dugin says, the Decembrists “were presented as bearers of progress and advanced ideas, and as fighters against the autocracy and supporters of democracy” whose only failure was the “bourgeois” one of not  using enough force and violence to achieve their ends (politobzor.net/show-117545-dekabristy-vosstali-protiv-svoego-naroda-derzhavy-very-i-carya.html).

                “In fact,” the Eurasianist says, “the Decembrists were a Masonic sect which arose on the model of European Masonic lodges and with the very same goals – the undermining of traditional empires, the destruction of the Christian tradition and its replacement by the secular atheistic and Masonic cult … and the transfer of power from the clergy and aristocracy to the urban bourgeoisie.”

            Dugin continues: “The Russian Decembrists planned the murder of the tsar, the coming to power of a military junta, and the establishment of a Republic on the model of the US.” Its members were “closely connected with Polish Masons,” to whom the Decembrists planned to give independence and large portions of Russian lands.

            In short, he suggests, this criminal conspiracy “copied Western and especially American models” and wanted to “transform unique Orthodox Russian society into a copy of European nation states with a bourgeois-republican oligarchic system … a liberal dictatorship which would destroy to the roots everything Russian, Orthodox and autocratic.”

            “No one is saying,” Dugin continues, “that there weren’t problems in Russian society and that nothing needed to be done.” In fact there were many, including serfdom, “but to kill the tsar, destroy the church, and hand over imperial territories to the devil knows whom” were not appropriate and cannot be forgiven.

            The Decembrists, which he dismisses “as a group of terrorist conspirators,” only got as far as they did by “deceiving simple soldiers that the Constitution they backed was the wife of Grand Duke Constantine.” Fortunately, he says, “they were stopped, disarmed and seized” in a timely fashion. Even “the dreamy tsar Aleksandr I” had banned Masonry three years earlier.

            “For loyal Russian conservatives, for every full-blooded Russian man … the Decembrists are pure evil, their memory is accused, and their actions shameful,” Dugin says.  Moreover, he argues, “if we don’t view a terrorist as a terrorist, a murderer as a murderer and an agent of influence as an agent of influence, we risk that all these crimes will be repeated again and again.”