Who is "Putin's brain" Alexander Dugin, whose daughter was killed in car blast?

Darya Dugina, a daughter of Alexander Dugin, was killed in a car explosion in Moscow. Alexander Dugin, known as Putin’s brain, is the main ideologist of the “Russian world.” Dugin, a self-admitted neo-Nazi with a lifelong history of work for the KGB and FSB, Soviet and Russian security services, is behind the Eurasianism ideology. Alexander Dugin is connected with major neo-Nazi, nationalist and separtists movements in the US and worldwide and has been openly calling to “kill, kill, kill Ukrainians.”

Assasination of Darya Dugina

Darya Dugin, a 29-year-old daughter of the ideologist of the “Russian world” Alexandr Dugin, was killed in a car explosion near Moscow on August 20. Her father, also known as “Putin’s brain,” was supposed to be driving with her. The family could have been the target of the assassination attempt; a criminal case on the murder was opened.

Darya Dugina, an ideologist and political scientist, wrote under the pseudonym Daria Platonova, for the International Eurasian Movement, her father’s organization and other Kremlin-funded publications such as RT (Russia Today) and Tsargrad.

Both father and daughter Dugin are on the US and UK sanctions list, Darya Dugina recently for being:

“a frequent, high-profile contributor of disinformation in relation to Ukraine & the Russian invasion of Ukraine; provided support for & promoted policies or actions which destabilize; undermine; threaten the territorial integrity, sovereignty or independence of Ukraine.”

Alexander Dugin’s quotes are at the core of the Kremlin’s foreign policy:

“It is important to provoke all forms of instability in the US… especially important to introduce geopolitical disorder into internal US activity, … all kinds of separatism; ethnic, social & racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements — extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, …destabilizing internal political processes.”

Following his doctrine, planting discord and “divide and conquer,” the Kremlin supports separatist movements, such as Texas secessionist Preston Wiginton and Calexit leader Louis Marinelli (resident of Ekaterinburg, Russia) in Moscow.

The Russian element behind California’s separatism movement

Notably, the alleged assassination happened on August 20th — an important date in modern Russia’s history.

On 19–22 August 1991, a small group of KGB generals and top military personnel attempted a coup, trying to restore the Soviet Union. Alexander Dugin was on the editorial board of an ultra-nationalist weekly, funded by the Ministry of Defence, that supported the coup and openly sided with the coup’s leaders.

Dugin, in his own words,

“sided with the [coup leaders] realizing that the preservation of the great union is much more important than other, minor, private problems… There are two ideologies — socialism and capitalism. I chose socialism, sided with the communists.”

Who is Alexander Dugin?

Alexander (Alexandr) Dugin is a Russian neo-fascist philosopher, ultranationalist, and former adviser to Sergei Naryshkin, a key member of Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party.

Dugin has received the nickname “Putin’s brain” and is the man behind the geopolitical theory of Russia as a “civilization model.” His ties to the far-right and radical left in the West are well covered, along with his alleged involvement with the French, Italian and the EU Parliamentary elections of 2017–2019.

Dugin’s father, Geli Alexandrovich Dugin (1935–1998), reportedly was a Lieutenant General of the GRU, the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the USSR, the largest foreign intelligence agency.) However, despite the multiple reports confirmed by Alexandr Dugin himself, there are no official records online.

“Dugin has been vague in various interviews about his father’s profession. He told me and others that Geli was a general in military intelligence (the GRU.) But when pressed, he admitted he didn’t actually know for a fact what he did.

‘At the end of his life he worked for the customs police, but where he worked before that — he did not tell me. That I do not really know.’

Dugin’s friends, however, are adamant that his father must have been someone of rank within the Soviet system… According to Dugin’s close friend and collaborator Gaidar Dzhemal, Geli Dugin had, on more than one occasion, intervened from a high-ranking position in the Soviet state to get his son out of trouble.

Dzhemal said that Geli was Dugin’s ‘get out of jail free’ card, which allowed his son to regularly violate the orthodoxies of Soviet life and get away with it,” writes Charles Clover, a former Moscow bureau chief for the Financial Times, in his detailed review of Eurasianism Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism. (Yale University Press, 2016, p. 156.)

Dugin has a lifelong history of working for the KGB and the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation. In the 90s, Dugin worked at the Academy of the General Staff and wrote for the Russian Federation’s Ministry of Defense’s magazine.

General Nikolai Klokotov of the General Staff Academy served as an official consultant for Dugin’s major book Foundations of Geopolitics (1997), currently used as a textbook in Russian state military schools. Alexander Tarantsev, linked with organized crime and accused of contract killings, tax evasion and smuggling, financed a new edition of Foundations of Geopolitics in 1999.

On 28 March 2000, the next day after Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer and the head of the FSB, became the president of the Russian Federation, Dugin published an article titled The Dawn in Boots. The title is a reference to the iconic boots worn by the Cheka, the early Bolshevik secret services. In the article, he called the KGB the future “backbone of the Eurasian Renaissance” and the “Ruler.”

Dugin’s projects and publications (in Russian and English) Katehon and “Orthodox TV channel” Tsargrad are sponsored by Russian right-wing nationalist Konstantin Malofeev, the founder of Marshall Capital, one of the leading Russian investment groups.

Malofeev is connected with the Russian Orthodox Church and Patriarch Kirill, a former KGB officer. Malofeev is one of the chief financiers of Russian mercenaries and separatists fighting against the Ukrainian government.

https://twitter.com/ZarinaZabrisky/status/964654504929980416

Putin, Dugin, and the Eurasian Movement

From the beginning of his presidency, Putin, heartbroken by the fall of the Soviet Union, has been consistently pushing the Eurasianism theory: the idea of creating a Eurasian State, stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok, with the Russian nation at the core.

In 2000, in his speech dedicated to the opening of Lev Gumilyov University in Kazakhstan, Putin, said:

“The confirmation of the ideas of the age-old community, the interconnectedness of peoples inhabiting the vast expanses of Eurasia: from the Baltic and the Carpathians to the Pacific Ocean. The instructive charge that Eurasian ideas carry is especially important today when we are building truly equal relations between the countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States.”

In 2004, Putin said, “…any map will make it clear: Russia is in the very center of Eurasia.”

In 2005, Putin said, “Also certain is that Russia should continue its civilizing mission on the Eurasian continent.”

Eurasianism doctrine has a rich history, worthy of several thrillers. It was first authored by prominent Russian linguists Prince Nikolay Trubetskoy, Roman Jacobson, and other emigre thinkers in the 1920s. It was later developed in Gulag by Lev Gumilev, the son of two prominent Russian poets: Nikolai Gumilev, executed by the Bolshevik Cheka, and Anna Akhmatova, prosecuted by Stalin’s regime.

For the last 30 years, Eurasianism was pushed by Alexander Dugin. In 2001, Dugin co-founded and chaired a political party, Evrazia, with KGB veteran Petr Suslov, who served in a unit that conducted special operations abroad. Financial and logistical support for Evrazia was provided through regional organizations of KGB/GRU veterans.

Suslov is reported to have broad connections within the leadership of the FSB, the Presidential Administration. Artyom Kruglov, the editor of the Putinism site, said in an interview that the assassinated ex-Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko mentioned Suslov as one of the coordinators of assassinations in the 90s.

Evrazia was supported by a part of the staff of the Presidential Administration. Dugin organized a nationalistic forum on the premises of the KGB veterans club and the board included Vladislav Revsky, the chairman of the club and an ex-KGB officer with 10 years of experience in Vympel, a special operations unit attached to the First Chief Directorate of the KGB.

By 2003, Dugin’s party branched out to form the International Evrazia Movement, registered by the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation at an official ceremony.

In 2003 to 2004, Dugin became the Chairman of the Council of the International Eurasian Movement (IEM), presiding over several high-level government officials, such as Assistant to the President of the russian Federation as per the former and current Evrasian Movement websites, and the chairman of the International Eurasian Movement executive committee.

The Eurasian movement was also supported by several leading Russian Orthodox Church priests, including father Vsevolod Chaplin, the right hand of Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, allegedly a former KGB officer, and Nikolai Patrushev, a former KGB officer from Leningrad who served as Director of the FSB (Federal Security Service, the main successor organisation to the Soviet KGB) from 1999 to 2008, and a Secretary of the Security Council of Russia, a consultative body of the President that works out his decisions on national security affairs, since 2008.

In 2003, Dugin co-featured on the government-funded main TV Channel One with Marat Gelman, the Channel’s Deputy General Manager, responsible for implementing the Kremlin’s views and close to Vladislav Surkov, Deputy Prime Minister, who also worked with Dugin on several Kremlin-backed political initiatives. Dugin was also on the channel’s managing committee.

Alexander Dugin and fascism

In December 1983, Dugin played a guitar concert in Moscow at the studio of Gennady Dobrov, performing under the pseudonym Hans Sievers (after the Nazi Wolfram Sievers, Director of the Institute for Military Scientific Research which conducted extensive experiments using human subjects; sentenced to death during Nuremberg Trials for crimes against humanity.)

In 1993, Dugin produced a four-part series Secrets of the Century, including Magic of Hitler on Channel One, Russian main TV channel, as well as channel four. The show was a mix of classified materials on the occult interests of the Third Reich and the scandal brought Dugin out of obscurity. The show was shut down. The fact that Dugin was allowed to appear on air on a state-run channel with such a controversial subject led to many speculations in the press on the subject of his government connections.

Alexandr Dugin has documented ties to neo-Nazis, alt-right and ultra-right world movements and to virtually every American white supremacist leader.”

The US neo-Nazi Richard Spencer contributed articles to Dugin’s website. Spencer’s ex-wife, the Russian-born Nina Kouprianova (aka Byzantina), was a self-proclaimed “Kremlin troll leader” and Alexandr Dugin’s translator.

In October 2014, Alexander Dugin, Richard Spencer and his sponsor William Regnery of National Policy Institute were scheduled to speak at a neo-Nazi and ultra-fight forum in Budapest but under the orders of the Hungarian government, Dugin was declined an entry visa and Spencer was detained for 72 hours and banned for three years from the visa-free Schengen area of European countries, which includes most of the European Union.

In 2015, Dugin hosted a Skype lecture for the Traditionalist Worker Party (US), co-founded by Matthew Heimbach, an Orthodox Christian with strong ties to Russian ideologists and an open admirer of Putin. Heimbach, who was also a member of the World National Conservative Movement, was a product of the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM), which describes its ideology as “Christian Orthodox imperial nationalism” and does not hide its ties to the Kremlin.

According to Anton Shekhovtsov, a researcher of European far-right movements, the Russian Imperial Movement arose in part from the efforts of a Russian political party founded by Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin and a close ally of Putin. The group’s stated goals are similar to those pursued by the Kremlin, including the neutralization of the EU and NATO.

David Duke, an American white supremacist, antisemitic conspiracy theorist, far-right politician, convicted felon, and former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and Alexander Dugin were photographed together on at least one occasion and are linked by neo-Nazi Preston Wigginton, who reportedly sublets Duke’s apartment in Moscow. Source.

Ukraine, Daria Dugina and Alexander Dugin

Daria Dugina, who studied at Bordeaux Montaigne University, France, said she was proud of being on the sanctions list. She was called “Russian Marine Le Pen” and knew Marine Le Pen for many years, according to the Head of the ideological department Tsargrad Mikhail Tyurenkov.

https://twitter.com/ZarinaZabrisky/status/1561271647872720898

Alexander Dugin is known for his hate speech and calls for violence in Ukraine since at least 2014.

In a recent interview, Daria Dugina claimed that the Bucha massacre was the making of the US propaganda, noting that Bucha was chosen for sounding similar to “butcher,” referring to Joe Biden’s quote. Biden called Putin a “butcher” on 29 March 2022.

Euromaidan Press crew visited Bucha and interviewed multiple eyewitnesses of the Bucha killings documenting the Russian Federation’s war crimes in the occupied territories.

You could close this page. Or you could join our community and help us produce more materials like this. We keep our reporting open and accessible to everyone because we believe in the power of free information. This is why our small, cost-effective team depends on the support of readers like you to bring deliver timely news, quality analysis, and on-the-ground reports about Russia's war against Ukraine and Ukraine's struggle to build a democratic society. A little bit goes a long way: for as little as the cost of one cup of coffee a month, you can help build bridges between Ukraine and the rest of the world, plus become a co-creator and vote for topics we should cover next. Become a patron or see other ways to support. Become a Patron!