Alexander Dugin,
Source Author duma.gov.ru;
licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

At Quora, our favorite interpreter of all things Russia, Dima Vorobiev reveals Dugin, the mad philosopher infecting Putin’s thinking.  Excerpt:

Alexander Dugin is an eccentric, erudite theorist, with strong interest in history and culturology, who has several colorful theories. He is our answer to Lyndon Larouche, with a lumberjack beard and fluency in ten languages.

Russia, much like Turkey, straddles two continent with very disparate cultural traditions. Ever since the middle of XIX century, we tried to produce a set of ideas and mental imagery that expresses this. For some time, we thought Communism would do the job, but it didn’t work out. Now, Mr Dugin tries to raise that banner again.

His trademark Eurasianism is a variation of National Bolshevism, the closest call to Fascism made in Russia, so far. I haven’t read his opus magnum “Foundations of Geopolitics”, but read a great deal of his interviews and watched a couple of his lectures.

…

The man has an outstanding memory and the steely, cerebral passion of a half-mad Siberian mystic. We in Russia love people who are not afraid to shock and speak their mind, no matter how outlandish this mind is. We call it “rubít právdu-mátku” (literally, to chop and serve primeval truth). Dugin delivers this in spades, well-articulated, with pronunciation and vocabulary I would’ve called “Russian Oxbridge” if we had something like this.

Boiled down, his idea is like this. Russia possesses a distinct cultural code that makes it strive for expansion and domination, no matter what. Other nations are hardwired to prevent this and destroy Russia. We must obey our destiny and grow larger and mightier. Either that, or we die.

Slava Ukraine!