Free Republic

On April 6, Eurasianist storm troopers operating under Kremlin coordination launched assaults, seizing government buildings in Donetsk, Kharkiv, Lugansk, and several smaller cities in eastern Ukraine; declared themselves to be the assemblies of independent governments; and immediately invited Russian troops to invade and annex their respective fictional statelets. There can be no doubt that many of the thousands of invaders involved were in fact Eurasianist storm troopers, and not, as reported by some media outlets, “pro-Russian protesters.” They carried the outward-radiating eight-arrowed flag of Putinist ideologue Aleksandr Dugin’s fascist Eurasianist movement and shouted and displayed its slogan for the operation,...

What is Eurasianism? Dr. Aleksandr Gelyevitch Dugin, founder of the International Eurasian Movement, attempted to explain the ideological prospects and tendencies for this Russian geopolitical movement -- "not a party," he insisted -- last Wednesday night, at Johns Hopkins' Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. Since I had lived in Moscow and Central Asia, and had heard about it, I was very interested to have a chance to meet the primary theoretician of a school of thought that some say is close to that of the Kremlin. The event was hosted by Johns Hopkins professors Fred Starr and...