‘The Great Game’: Alexander Dugin in a new light
As readers of my essays know very well, I have been using two talk shows on Russian state television as my markers for what the chattering classes are saying: Sixty Minutes, with hosts Olga Skabeyeva and Yevgeny Popov, and Evening with Vladimir Solovyov. In general, I consider such shows valuable because policy decisions taken in the Kremlin are fenced in by the thinking of members of the elite who are given the microphone on these shows. I also make extensive use of them because I live in Belgium, where these two shows are easily accessible ‘live’ on the internet via smotrim.ru
Now that I am spending three weeks in Petersburg, I have had the opportunity in the comfort of my apartment to turn on another leading Russian news analysis and talk show that is broadcast on the Pervy Kanal of state television but is not available ‘live’ on the internet: The Great Game (Bol’shaya Igra), which is hosted by Vyacheslav Nikonov and Dmitry Simes. By good luck, on the evening of 2 May I came upon an interview with the philosopher Alexander Dugin conducted by Simes that was fascinating for reasons I will explain in a minute. However, Simes regularly interviews important people on the show, as last night’s edition with Jeffrey Sachs on a video link from the States proved. This compels me to make a greater effort to watch this program in future within the constraints of next-day availability on the ‘Rutube.’
First, a word about the hosts. Vyacheslav Nikonov is a member of the hereditary elite: he is the grandson of Communist leader Molotov. He is also a very clever and well educated fellow who projects moderation and tolerance for his interlocutors, in sharp contrast to the generally boorish Vladimir Solovyov. He has served in the Russian parliament for decades and was long the head of the state sponsored Russky Mir organization which aims to give cultural and moral support to the Russian diaspora in the ‘near’ and ‘far’ abroad.
Dmitry Simes had an extraordinary career in the United States before he peremptorily pulled up stakes and moved to Moscow in the days following the launch of the Special Military Operation. Towards the end of his interview with Dugin last night, Simes said that his repatriation was driven by emotion. Whereas a good many Russians left for the West, acting on their emotions, he headed East. In fact, his presence at the head of a U.S. think tank had become untenable and he moved to his original homeland where his sympathies now clearly lay.
Simes made his career in the States when he became a close advisor to Richard Nixon after Nixon left the presidency. He traveled with Nixon to Russia and other destinations. Following Nixon’s death, Simes became the director of what was originally called The Nixon Center and later was renamed the Center for the National Interest. If that last title does not say much to you, it is because you have not considered that the fundamental lever in foreign policy as practiced by Nixon was ‘interests’ as opposed to ‘values,’ the supposed North Star of today’s Neo-Liberals and Neocons.
When The Great Game was launched in 2018, it was usually presented in the form of a ‘tele-bridge,’ with Nikonov holding down the Moscow studio and Simes holding down a studio in Washington. D.C. That came to an end with Simes’ repatriation to Russia.
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Alexander Dugin came to the attention of Western media in August 2022 when his daughter Darya Dugina, an activist journalist, was brutally murdered by a car bomb set by Ukrainian terrorists. The more likely intended target had been Dugin himself.
Going back well before the Ukraine conflict, Dugin had made a name for himself as the philopher-adviser to President Putin and promoter of a modern day version of the Eurasianist world view that was first developed in Russia before the First World War and later promoted into the 1930s. He put forward a Eurasianist identity for Russia to distinguish it on the world stage. This Eurasianism may be kindly described as eccentric, less kindly as quackery. It was that Dugin who was thrown out of Moscow State University where he had been teaching philosophy. Given that the deans and professorate were and surely remain substantially pro-Western, they must have found the presence of Dugin in their midst to be objectionable. Today Dugin carries the title of Director of the Ivan Il’in Higher School of Politics within the Russian State Humanities University in Moscow.
Without any basis in fact, our Western journalists spoke of Dugin père as being close to Putin when the tragedy of his daughter’s death unfolded, and this made him newsworthy to the celebrated American journalist Tucker Carlson when he was visiting Moscow. This interview was released on youtube on 30 April and immediately was attacked by anti-Carlson mainstream U.S. media.
You can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIULmTprQ6o and I advise you to take a look. It is in English, which will make it accessible to all readers of these pages while Simes’ interview with him is only available in Russian.
In fact the two interviews are complementary. For unclear reasons, though abstract issues are not his strength, Carlson probed Dugin’s political philosophy for 18 of the 21 minutes that he interviewed him and got around to the question of why American Liberals so hate Russia in the last 3 minutes.
Dugin explains where Western Civilization has taken a wrong turn that arises from excesses of Liberalism which follow directly from its underlying stress on the individual and liberation from all outside collectivist constraints, beginning with religion, state and ending with sex and humanity.
For those who would like to better understand how and why the evolution of Liberalism has led Western Civilization to its present madness, I direct you to a philosopher in our own midst, that is to say in France, Alain de Benoist, who set all of this out in a collection of essays entitled Contre Liberalisme. La société n’est pas un marché. For those who do not have a command of French, I provide a brief summary of the essential points in the book review I published in A Belgian Perspective in International Affairs (2019), pp. 564-571.
Dugin does not mention de Benoist, but it is hard to imagine that he is unaware of the latter’s writings. In fairness, for his part, Benoist does not mention Russia: his vision of European politics goes no further east than to Hungary. Several essays in this collection are devoted to Viktor Orban and the underpinnings of what Orban promotes as the illiberal state.
The interview with Alexander Dugin conducted by Dmitry Simes on The Great Game can be viewed here: https://rutube.ru/video/f440a210a7de27fc026b74f5b667b964/
By contrast with Carlson, Simes took the question of Western Liberals’ hatred for Russia as the featured issue in his interview and moved on to when and how Russian government and society responded to that unwelcome reality.
Dugin’s explains the West’s hatred for Russia in relation to the West’s total intolerance of other countries’ values and interests which collides with Russia’s determined defense of its sovereignty. The more Russia successfully resists the economic, informational and military attack of the Collective West, the greater the encouragement to China, to the Islamic world, even to Africa and Latin America to resist diktats from Washington. In this way, by acting defensively Russia threatens the US led world order.
The next most important point addressed in the interview is why Russian elites for so long in the 1990s and beyond thought that the false idea of brotherhood with the West was realizable. The answer lies in the way that they moved the riches which they made in Russia to the West and then became hostages to that offshore wealth. Even today, those who have not physically moved themselves out of the country to where their money is persist in what Dugin calls the hallucinatory belief that after the war is over, life will return to the pre-war normal of globalism.
According to Dugin, the stresses and price that Russia is now paying in gold and blood while prosecuting the Special Military Operation are creating a new society, a new country, a new ‘sovereign’ elite .
The final minutes of the interview are particularly interesting. Simes and Dugin are entirely on the same wave length. They are saying that this is no time for blaming anyone for the unpatriotic views of some since in the years following the break-up of the Soviet Union we all looked to the West. The context for these remarks is the behavior of some leading Russian personalities whom we see on television, like Vladimir Solovyov, who is regularly cursing this or that Russian entertainer or other public figure for their treachery and betrayal of the Motherland. The same may be said of the cinema director Nikita Mikhalkov and his program Besogon, which he uses to expose the self-hating words of many Russian celebrities and political figures inside and outside of Russia.
What Dugin and Simes are calling for is instead a constructive program of helping to form the new pro- sovereignty Russian elite that will eventually fully replace today’s compromised elites.
Note the use of the key word “sovereignty.” It replaces the word “patriotic.” If Dugin may be said to be influencing the thinking of Vladimir Putin today, then surely it is in this very concept of “sovereignty,” meaning self-sufficiency and self-pride in a unique culture and society as opposed to the usual tribal nationalism that the European Union, for example, blames for war-making.
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Having walked you through my intellectual discoveries during this visit to Petersburg, I return to the realities of daily life. My shopping expeditions have taken in a lot more than just comestibles.
I mentioned in passing when writing about the audience in the Aleksandriisky Academic Drama Theater that the young ladies were ‘well turned out.’ By that I meant, dressed in new chic clothing of this season and fashionably coiffed, with both goods and services procured locally. Russia may well be in a ‘war economy,’ as Western media keep telling us, but that does not mean that the female half of the population is dressed in coal miners’ uniforms with head lamps as the Wendy’s television advertisements suggested in the 1990s to general amusement when describing ‘Moscow evening wear’ for its ‘At Wendy’s you have a choice’ message. Apparently no one had ever tipped off the ad writers at the hamburger vendor that, as we used to say: “Russian girls are born in high heels.”
Whatever cutbacks in supplies of important medications Western pharmaceutical companies have made over the past two years to cause pain to the civilian population here, their confreres in France, Germany and elsewhere in the EU producing beauty aids have not followed suit. In pharmacies and specialized stores, ladies in Petersburg can buy most any products they are seeking to beautify themselves, including some skin creams from South Korea that actually do what they promise and wipe away the years…for at least half a day.
To those who will accuse me of gender bias for directing attention to ‘well turned out young ladies,’ I answer the following: there is not much complimentary to say about the male representatives of the species, because they clearly do not like to ‘dress up,’ however much their girl friends and wives may urge them. At best, they come to opera dressed for a football match. Fortunately outdoor temperatures are still wintry here and none yet shows up in the Mariinsky wearing a singlet. They will.
None of the indifferently dressed fellows is a poor boy. Indeed, my impression from taking a drink in the opera café during one of the half-hour intermissions was that some of my neighbors were here only because they are no longer able to fly to France and take seats in the Bastille Opera. They make do with the Mariinsky Theater and practice here the way of life they learned there. During the break, one pair at the next table ordered a couple of big red caviar sandwiches each together with a full bottle of Balaklava brut sparkling wine from the Crimea. That is quite a challenge to down in 30 minutes, but they succeeded with time to spare. Folks at other tables downed bottles of red wine in the same 30 minutes. These high-life Russians have over the course of two years substantially replaced the big spending lawyers and accountants from New York or London who used to keep the elite restaurants in the Mariinsky neighborhood busy before and after shows.
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Finally,I return to shopping basket issues with which I led my first installment of these Travel Notes, because of the geopolitical dimension to changes in product assortment that are worthy of mention.
In Europe, off season, we get yellow seedless grapes from Chile or from South Africa. Here, what I now find in the Petersburg supermarkets is the same grapes from India. Perfect grapes, by the way and at acceptable prices. Why is India frozen out of the European Union for such produce? That is a question for Frau von der Leyen.
More to the point, I see a broadening of foods being imported from Iran. Time was, just a few years ago, the only item one could name was pistachio nuts, of which Iran is the world’s biggest supplier. Then a year ago I saw Iranian celery on the vegetable counters here. Now there is excellent quality Iranian iceberg lettuce on sale in the Petersburg supermarkets, considerably better presented than what we get in Belgium from Spain, not to mention at a substantially lower price. Meanwhile the city market and the retail stores are all featuring Iranian early cabbage, which is a great favorite with Russians.
My first impression is that Iran is now elbowing aside Turkey as a prime supplier of fresh produce. The point of relevance to students of geopolitics is that the ever closer Russian-Iranian state to state relations go much further than certain joint infrastructure structures serving the North-South Eurasian trade corridors, much further afield than supply of Iranian drones and drone technology to Moscow in return for jets or air defense units. The economies are becoming more interdependent.
The still bigger point is that what you will find on the shelves of even the little green grocer down the block from our apartment complex is foodstuff from the whole world, often with multiple choices made available to the consumer. Oranges from Egypt, giant blueberries from Morocco, mangoes from Brazil. That chap is now offering perfectly ripe and aromatic strawberries from both the South of Russia (Kuban) and from Serbia at comparable prices. I ask my Belgian readers when is the last time they tried Serbian strawberries, which are fully competitive in flavor with the prized Hoogstraat brand strawberries grown in Flanders. The reality is that to a large extent the EU is a set of captive markets, not the grand Open Market it professes to be. Perforce Russia is more open to the world, in the same way that Dubai is open to the world, as I discovered on a stopover there a year ago.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024