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Chad C. Mulligan: [Other way ‘round. That Putin acts according to Dugin is more likely. Certainly the long paragraph on Ukraine fits that mold.

Judging by some comments coming from other Moscovite power players, they are mighty close to Dugin’s “teachings”. (Hence the claim that Putin is a “moderate”.)

Do not fail to listen to your enemy.....]

Ideologists are like advertising execs or PR men for politicians. They dress up personal whim in the finery of deeper goals with which the population at large might identify. In the end, few remember the whys and wherefores in regard to Peter the Great’s conquests. They just remember that he was a Great Man who conquered, leaving judgments on morality to the next world.

Why would a ruler need to justify anything? Don’t his subjects instinctively obey his every command? Even in the most pitiless absolutism, a ruler had to justify actions that risked his soldiers’ lives and wreaked havoc on the welfare of his subjects. The risk was of troop mutiny and armed rebellion. So they came up with elaborate reasons, weaving in history, grievance and personal benefit. That’s where a guy like Dugin comes in.

Why invade Ukraine? Putin is at the top of the totem pole in Russia. Land grabs are a very traditional way to increase your fame. Putin could make Russia the richest country in the world, and it wouldn’t put him on the same pedestal as Peter. Plus - land grabs are easier and theoretically more achievable than the feat of catching up economically to the US. And few remember rulers who made their countries rich, whereas even a failed conqueror gets an ocean of ink.

I'm not sure you meant to, but you support my point re Dugin and Putin rather well. Conquerors get written up as heroes, and Czars don't have to justify anything to anybody. This is the philosophy Dugin is espousing in painstaking modern detail, but it has been so in Russia since the Mongol conquests, when Moscow learned how it was done.

Even if Putin doesn't take weekly phone calls from him, Dugin's world-conquest philosophy is the milieu that has surrounded Putin 24/7/365 for his entire life. He most assuredly was subjected to the heroic films of Sergei Eisenstein, as I was in high school by our Russian history teacher, (who probably was a Communist, looking back on it 60 years later).