Dugin Not ‘Conservative Russian Traditionalist’ He and Others Insist He Is, Pushchayev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 2 – Aleksandr Dugin is not the Russian traditionalist many believe but someone who denies there is a Russian philosophical tradition worth saving and approaches the task of creating one by importing from the West not Marxism as Trotsky did but the ideas of Martin Heidegger and European right of the 1920s and 1930s, Yury Pushchayev says.

            The Moscow State University instructor in philosophy says that “many talk about Aleksandr Dugin but few read him and thus mistakenly accept the way journalists and commentators characterize him as accurate (politconservatism.ru/articles/yavlyaetsya-li-dugin-russkim-traditsionalistom).

            If one does read Dugin’s books, Pushchayev says, one sees that the sources of his ideas are to be found in “the European conservative revolution” of a century ago and that they have “practically no relationship to Russian history.” Indeed, he continues, many of these ideas are in open conflict with that history.

            Not only that but Dugin himself is openly hostile to most Russian philosophers, arguing that there is as yet no such thing as “Russian philosophy” and that after what people call that is “swept away as trash,” it is up to him and his young acolytes to finally form one based on these imports and to do so in a revolutionary rather than evolutionary way.

            In his article, Pushchayev cites numerous examples of Dugin’s reliance on the European right and his open contempt for Russian philosophers and ideologues including the Eurasianists with whom he is incorrectly associated. And he stresses that Dugin’s nihilism with regard to Russian ideas and especially the traditional Russian focus on justice will be his downfall.