President has been influenced by writers and nationalists to seek to recreate the Russian empire
Russian President Vladimir Putin. Picture: THIBAULT CAMUS/REUTERS
Like Hitler, Vladimir Putin’s numerous foreign adventures have to be placed within a specific cultural and intellectual context. His loathing of liberalism, his macho-Orthodox Christianity and his hostility to the avant-garde, including his hatred of radical feminism, homosexuality and gay marriage, are all part of that.
Anti-communist but fervently nationalist, Dugin’s writing is spiced with mysticism and a mix of Russian Orthodoxy, Aryanism and occult theories that merge into a neo-fascism that seeks to recover a past Russian glory that incorporates, inter alia, Ukraine. was treated as a textbook. They can clearly be discerned in Putin, but to what extent is difficult to assess. To refer to Dugin as “Putin’s head” — as some have — is going too far, but his influence cannot be ignored.