A Killing in Russia

By Andrew Stuttaford

Sunday, August 21, 2022

 

CNN:

 

Darya Dugina, the daughter of influential Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin, was reportedly killed on Saturday when the car she was traveling in exploded in the Moscow region, the Russian state news agency TASS has reported.

 

Andrei Krasnov, head of the Russky Gorizont (Russian Horizon) social movement and a personal acquaintance of the woman’s family, told TASS on Sunday that Dugina had been killed when her car caught fire following an explosion . . .

 

Images from the aftermath of the explosion began circulating on Russian social media Saturday, appearing to show a vehicle on fire at the side of the road and smashed car parts strewn across the surrounding area. CNN is not able to independently verify the images.

 

Krasnov told TASS he knew Dugina personally and that the car she was traveling in belonged to her father. He believed Alexander was the true target of the blast, or possibly both of them.

 

“It’s her father’s car,” Krasnov told TASS. “Dasha (Darya) drives another car, but she drove his car today, and Alexander went separately.”

 

The senior Dugin is a far-right Russian author and ideologue, credited with being the architect or “spiritual guide” to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He is purported to have significant influence over Russian President Vladimir Putin and is frequently described as “Putin’s Brain.” . . .

 

In March 2022, the US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned Dugina for her contribution to an article on the United World International (UWI) website suggesting that Ukraine would “perish” if it is admitted to NATO. Dugina was UWI’s chief editor.

 

Although Dugina appeared to have shared many of her father’s views, it seems unlikely (if this was indeed a deliberate killing) that she would have been considered important enough to have been a target in her own right. As for whether Dugin can be described in any sense as “Putin’s brain,” I am in no position to know, but I doubt it, although he has had his uses.

 

Over time, Putin has developed a relatively coherent ideology — authoritarianism, pseudo-traditionalism, and aggressive nationalism both at home and abroad — which is rooted in a logic of sorts, however distasteful. By contrast, Dugin, who has been a very vocal supporter of the war in Ukraine, is a “philosopher” not known for his grasp of logic. He has spent years promoting and updating Eurasianism, a misty concoction first dreamt up, at least in something approaching its modern form, by Lev Gumilev, both inside the Gulag (he was the son of Anna Akhmatova, Russia’s greatest 20th century poet, no friend of the Soviet regime) and, later, outside it.

 

A good starting point for understanding Eurasianism is Black Wind, White Snow by Charles Clover (a former Moscow bureau chief for the Financial Times), which I reviewed for the Weekly Standard in 2016. In the course of the review, I wrote:

 

Much of modern Eurasianism is based on little more than the imagination of Lev Gumilev: “He invented people, he invented documents, or transported things magically through time so that they would fit his narrative” of a “super-ethnos,” no less, formed by the fusion of cultures between Russians and a series of surprising pals—the Mongols and other unlikely folk—from the steppe. With Gumilev as its leading, somewhat unhinged, spokesman, Eurasianism spread as a nationalist alternative or (within the ranks of the regime) supplement to the exhausted Marxism-Leninism of the Brezhnev years, a period in which ideological discourse was more complicated than the usual image of a Soviet monolith would suggest . . .

 

Eurasianism has proved to be a most useful ideology [in the more recent Putin years], a tool for Kremlin authoritarianism and a channel for mischief-making with the Western hard right. And its belligerent view of international politics, combining reconquest of the “near abroad” with paranoia about the eternal Atlantic adversary, makes for martial mood music, handy for drowning out domestic dissent . . .

 

So, what now?

 

Whether or not Ukrainian forces (or, for that matter, opponents of the war) were responsible for Dugina’s death, it is reasonable to assume the former will be blamed by the Kremlin, with consequences that will surely include some form of retaliation.