Alexander Dugin’s project denies the truth of Russian history

The tragedy of Russia is that our reformers are traditionally people who have no idea what they want to reform. You need to know that the values ​​of Article 2 of the Constitution, at least until the Russian Spring of 2014, were the main values ​​of the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin. Even when he appeared on the political scene in 1999, in his article “Russia at the turn of the millennium,” as a Westerner, he argued that after a senseless communist experiment in many respects, we are returning to “the high road of civilization, which is based on the principles of a market economy and democracy.” In this article, Putin essentially sets out the values ​​of Russian liberal conservatism, the values ​​of the same Peter Struve, who proposes to combine the values ​​of European civilization and freedom with the values ​​of Russian sovereignty.

In my opinion, there is no reason to derive the current ideology of the Northern Military District, which repeats the main theses of Alexander Dugin’s Eurasianism, from the anti-communism and liberal conservatism of Putin of the 2000s. And personally, it scares me that today, somehow, by itself, the values ​​enshrined in our Constitution are being pushed out by the values ​​of not just Eurasianism, but the pro-communist Eurasianism of Dugin, who insists that Russia is alive as long as it expands its territory. And I was, of course, amazed that V. Surkov, who did a lot in the 2000s to promote the enlightened patriotism of the Westerner Pyotr Struve, today repeats, following Alexander Dugin, that stopping the expansion of Russia’s territory would be tantamount to suicide for it.

And the most dangerous thing is that this Dugin version of the current slogan “Russia is not the West” is already called the essence of Russian civilization by the ideologists of the Valdai Forum, for example, Konstantin Bogomolov. And following Alexander Dugin, they teach us that the implementation of the Eurasian project presupposes the endless feat of the Russian people, their willingness to make unimaginable sacrifices and hardships, if only the national idea is realized and developed.

“If earlier,” argues Alexander Dugin, “we brought to life the messianistic idea of ​​Karl Marx, now we claim the last word in earthly history. This is the highest super task of the nation as a God-bearing people. Russians care about everything and everyone.” Moreover, Alexander Dugin believes that the Russians followed the Bolsheviks, not because they promised the peasants peace (that is, saving their lives) and land (a piece of landowners’ plots), but because supposedly the Russians felt in the communist idea their own eschatological ideas – the triumph of Justice and Truth. In fact, Dugin, in his project “EurAsia,” calls for a return to the Soviet mobilization economy, “to prevent the processes of privatization and capitalization, as well as stock trading and financial speculation” in his new Eurasian empire.

And at the same time, Alexander Dugin insists that in fact his project is a version of Russian Slavophilism, coming from A.S. Khomyakov. And of course, Dugin refers to the undoubted authority of the Russian philologist and historian Nikolai Trubetskoy as the creator of the Eurasian idea. Indeed, before Nikolai Trubetskoy, until the early 1920s, the concept of a “Eurasian idea” did not exist at all. And it never occurred to anyone to look for the legacy of the Tatar-Mongol yoke in the soul of a Russian person. The religious-national upsurge that Nikolai Trubetskoy spoke about when he still considered himself the father of the Eurasian idea was caused by a protest against the Tatar-Mongol yoke, and it coincided with the collapse of the Mongolian state. But in the very religious-national consciousness of the Russian people there was nothing oriental.

For some reason, all our current Eurasianists never remember that for Nikolai Trubetskoy himself, his Eurasianism was a game of the mind of a young scientist who, by creating this myth, wanted to show that he was neither with the Reds nor with the Whites, but with something yours. None of them remembers that already in the late 1920s Nikolai Trubetskoy ended his games of Eurasianism and until the end of his life he regretted that he had devoted so much effort to creating this myth about the supposedly Eurasian nature of Russian national consciousness. Yes, the Russian nation is located on Eurasian territory. Yes, the Russian state was a combination of the life of the Slavs with the peoples of the East. But in Russian culture itself, in the Russian national consciousness, there was nothing from the Asian peoples who lived in Russia. Trubetskoy wrote to his friend Suvchinsky on March 10, 1928: “In fact, this whole “Eurasian nightmare” is a heavy cross for me, and I want to leave it, get away from it, forget about it, and that would be great happiness for me.” But what was a nightmare for Nikolai Trubetskoy is becoming our state ideology today, I mean the belief that Russia lives as long as it expands its territory.

Alexander Dugin added to the Eurasian project of Nikolai Trubetskoy his belief in the irresistible communist character of the Russian nation, added the idea that Russia is not just a Eurasian empire, but a special Eurasian world, a special Eurasian mission, which supposedly pushes the Russian people to constantly expand their statehood, join more and more new territories. Don’t forget, Nikolai Trubetskoy, as a Westerner and as a Christian, could not help but understand that if Russia is a country that is expanding its territory, then it is a country that is constantly at war and that is constantly killing its people. Such thoughts were unacceptable for Nikolai Trubetskoy, for all representatives of Russian culture.

We cannot, for the sake of current Eurasianism, abandon Article 2 of the Constitution, because all Russian literature, all Russian social thought recognized the original values ​​of European civilization, the value of human life and personality, the value of freedom and democracy. The father of Russian religious philosophy of the early twentieth century, Nikolai Berdyaev, said that the principle “man cannot be a means” lies at the basis of Russian religious humanism.

Yes, the Slavophiles were repulsed by the pressure of European rationalism, which, from their point of view, cripples the human soul. But none of them, as Nikolai Berdyaev drew attention to, denied the main value of European civilization – the value of freedom. All of them, as Berdyaev wrote, “were ardent supporters of personal freedom, freedom of conscience, thought, speech and original democrats, recognizing the supremacy of the people.” And the idea of ​​glasnost, the idea that truth is needed for normal social life, belongs specifically to the Slavophile Ivan Kirievsky. An example of this is the letters and articles of Kirievsky, his defense of the political culture of the West, its democracy, namely the Constitution of monarchical England, its policy of openness.

By the way, the idea of ​​a constitutional system, a constitutional limitation of the Russian autocracy, which the Cadets led by Pavel Milyukov will put forward, already exists in the articles of Ivan Kirievsky. From his point of view, there is nothing terrible in the constitution, because the foreign word “constitution” in Russian translation means nothing more or less than “structure.” And everything that, from the point of view of Alexander Dugin, is hostile to the Eurasian civilization, which, as he says, is called upon to overthrow the colossus of Western civilization, was in fact preached by Russian Slavophiles.

None of the Slavophiles defended individual rights and freedoms as passionately as the founder of Slavophilism, Alexey Khomyakov, in his articles back in the late 30s of the 19th century. What is the Slavophile Khomyakov proud of? The fact that torture was abolished in Russia when it existed in almost all European courts. What is “the serfdom of the peasants introduced by Peter the Great” for Khomyakov? Nothing less than the “abomination of slavery.” Why was Russia attractive to Khomyakov in the 19th century? Because the death penalty was abolished, “philanthropy appeared in criminal law.” What does Khomyakov believe in, what does he hope for? That “in our time (the text was written in 1839 – A.Ts.) the abomination of slavery, difficult for us in every sense, should soon be eradicated.”

And Dugin, broadcasting on the radio a few days ago, said that there is nothing more alien to our native civilization than Western individual rights and freedoms and the values ​​of civil society. And this is just one example… The scary thing is that today, especially in the conditions of the Northern Military District, we completely deny all the achievements of our culture, Russian social thought. What Russian writer, thinker could have thought that after the end of the communist experiment we would take on the insane mission of fighting the basic values ​​of our own national culture, our own social thought. I am convinced that suicide is not the rejection of the idea of ​​the constant expansion of the Russian idea, but the current rejection of Russian truth, the truth about the Russian national character, the truth about Russian history of the twentieth century.