Alexander Dugin

Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin (Russian: Александр Гельевич Дугин; born 7 January 1962) is a Russian political philosopher who is the leading theorist of Russian neo-Eurasianism.

Born into a military intelligence family, Dugin was an anti-communist dissident during the 1980s, and joined the far-right Pamyat organization. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, he co-founded the National Bolshevik Party, which espoused National Bolshevism, with Eduard Limonov in 1993 before leaving in 1998. In 1997, Dugin published his most well-known work, Foundations of Geopolitics, in which he called on Russia to rebuild its influence through alliances and conquest in order to challenge a purported rival Atlanticist empire led by the United States. Dugin founded the Eurasia Party in 2002, and continued to develop his ideology in books including The Fourth Political Theory (2009). His views have been characterized as far-right and fascist. He has rejected liberal democracy and Marxism advocating a "conservative revolution" against Enlightenment ideas in Russia and has drawn on the writings of René Guénon, Julius Evola, Carl Schmitt, and Martin Heidegger.

Dugin was an early advisor to Gennadiy Seleznyov and later Sergey Naryshkin. He served as head of the Department of Sociology of International Relations at Moscow State University from 2009 to 2014, when he lost his post due to backlash after he called for the death of pro-Maidan Ukrainians. Since 2023, he has served as the director of the Ivan Ilyin Higher School of Politics at the Russian State University for the Humanities.

Dugin is a strong supporter of President Vladimir Putin. Although he has no official ties to the Kremlin, he is often referred to in foreign media as "Putin's brain"; others say that his influence has been greatly exaggerated. Dugin vocally supported the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea and the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. His daughter, Darya, was assassinated in a car bombing on 20 August 2022. The assassination is widely believed to have been conducted by Ukraine, though the exact relation of the assassins to the Ukrainian government is undetermined.