Among the latter are Nataliya Vitrenko, the well-known head of the so-called Progessive Socialist Party of Ukraine, and Dmitro Korchinsky, formerly leader of the Ukrainian fascist party UNA-UNSO and now chairman of the Bratstvo (Brotherhood) Party. Dugin’s name was recently mentioned in Ukrainian mass media in connection with the scandal that arose when Ukrainian Presidential Advisor Mykola Zhulinsky was barred from entering Russia during a private trip to St. Petersburg this summer. This was interpreted as a retaliation for Ukraine’s refusal to permit Dugin entering Ukraine shortly before. In June 2006, Dugin had been declared persona non grata in Ukraine until 2011 for violating Ukrainian law, and was thus deported back to Russia after he had arrived by plane at Simferopol airport in early June 2007 in order to attend the festival “The Great Russian Word” organized by the Russian Community of the Crimea. In spite of this conflict with the Ukrainian authorities, the youth organization of Dugin’s Movement, the Eurasian Union of Youth, has an active branch in Ukraine, and is particularly visible in Sumy, Kyiv and the Crimea.
Dugin’s increasing celebrity in the CIS is remarkable considering that the chief “neo-Eurasian” is not only among the most influential, but also one of the most brazen of Russia’s ultra-nationalist publicists. While authors such as Kurginyan or Shafarevich are satisfied to promote a renaissance of classical Russian anti-Western sentiments in their pamphlets and subtly draw on Western sources, Dugin admits openly that his main ideas are based on non-Russian anti-democratic concepts such as European integral Traditionalism (e.g. René Guénon, Julius Evola, Claudio Mutti, etc.), Western geopolitics (e.g. Alfred Mahan, Halford Mackinder, Karl Haushofer), the German “conservative revolution” (e.g. Carl Schmitt, Ernst Jünger, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck), and the francophone New Right (e.g. Alain de Benoist, Robert Steuckers, Jean Thiriart).
Furthermore, during the 1990s, Dugin repeatedly hinted at his sympathy for selected aspects of Italian Fascism and National Socialism, such as the SS and its Ahnenerbe (“Ancestral Heritage”) Institute, and has described the Third Reich as the most consistent incarnation of the “Third Way” that he explicitly advocates. In the chapter “Fascism – Boundless and Red” of the online version of his 1997 book Tampliery Proletariata (The Templar Knights of the Proletariat), he expressed the hope that the inconsistent application of originally correct ideas by Hitler, Mussolini, etc. would, eventually, be followed in post-Soviet Russia by the emergence of a “fascist fascism”. In Dugin’s apocalyptic worldview, global history consists of a centuries-old confrontation between hierarchically organized “Eurasian” continental powers and liberal “Atlantic” naval powers. Today, this confrontation is carried out between Russia and the US as the main representatives of the two antagonistic types of civilization, and its final battle is approaching (Dugin uses the German word Endkampf, which has Nazi connotations, without a Russian translation).
One might expect Dugin, and other extremely right-wing pundits offering similar pro-fascist statements, to be subjected to the same public stigmatization as neo-Nazi parties and skinhead groups are currently experiencing in Russia. However, this has not been the case so far. On the contrary, Dugin and others of his ilk, such as the well-known editor-in-chief of Russia’s leading ultranationalist weekly Zavtra (“Tomorrow”), Aleksandr Prochanov, are popular guests in prime-time political television shows such as Vremena (“Times”, hosted by Vladimir Pozner), Tem vremenem (“In the Meantime”, hosted by Aleksandr Archangelsky), Voskresnyi vecher’ (“Sunday Evening”), or K Bar’eru (“To the Barricade”, hosted by Vladimir Solovyov), and are even invited to popular talk shows like Pust’ govoryat (“Let Them Speak”, hosted by Andrei Malakhov).