One of the main theorists who inspired President Vladimir Putin to expand Russian presence in neighboring countries, philosopher and political scientist Aleksandr Dugin, 60, has a legion of followers in Brazil and diverse ties to the country.
Called by many “Putin’s ideologue” and compared in influence to the Brazilian Olavo de Carvalho, Dugin has come to Brazil twice, speaks Portuguese, founded a study center in São Paulo and is an admirer of MPB, bossa nova and Brazilian literature. He likes Ariano Suassuna, Darcy Ribeiro and Vinicius de Moraes.
The Russian is the creator of the Fourth Political Theory, in which he defends an alternative to the three ideologies that dominated the 20th century: liberalism, communism and fascism.
According to his proposal, formulated in a 2009 book, the main subject of history would be the people, not the individual or the State. In the European context, it is reflected in “Eurasianism”, the expansion of Moscow’s presence to all regions of historical influence of the Russian people — no matter if they belong to other sovereign countries, such as Ukraine.
In an interview with sheet in 2014, Dugin claimed that Ukraine is an “artificially created failed state”. That year, he came to Brazil for a seminar on the ideas of the philosopher Julius Evola (1898-1974), considered one of the theorists of Italian neo-fascism.
At the time, the Russian already had admirers in Brazil. With a follower, the philosopher Flávia VirgÃnia, he created the Center for the Study of Multipolarity, a think tank to spread the idea that there must be alternative poles of power in the world beyond the West.
Djavan’s daughter, Virginia played the center, currently deactivated, with the participation of some USP academics in events. Wanted, she declined to give an interview.
The Russian’s disciples don’t even come close to the critical mass of Olavo de Carvalho’s followers, but there is an incipient Duguinism in Brazil. One of the main organizations is Nova Resistência (NR), created in 2015 in Rio de Janeiro and which brings together around 250 militants in cells spread across 20 states. It is dedicated to the propagation of Dugin’s ideas and of his Fourth Theory.
One of the founders of the entity, journalist Lucas Leiroz, says that it is not correct to characterize Dugin as an extremist. “For someone to say that, it’s either because they don’t know his work or because they know him and want to defame him. There are people who accuse him of being on the extreme left, others say he’s on the extreme right. no theory.”
Even Dugin’s conservatism, according to him, is more a result of his defense of the concept of people, which by definition must maintain their traditions.
The vaunted ascendancy over the Russian president is something relative, believes the Brazilian disciple. “There is a grain of truth in this, but some of it is exaggeration. His level of influence over Putin is now lower than it used to be. And he competes with other advisers to the president, who have more access to him,” he says.
In the 1990s, Dugin was an open nostalgic for the Soviet Union, having been one of the founders of the National Bolshevik Party. His position shifted to the defense of “Eurasian space” at the beginning of this century, a period that coincided with Putin’s rise to power.
The following decade was the closest between the two. The philosopher worked during this period on the concept of the “post-Soviet space”, which was absorbed by the president. This does not mean, according to Leiroz, the conquest of countries — not even Ukraine, despite the rapid advance of the tanks towards Kiev.
“If there is an annexation, it will be a big surprise. Russia’s objective is to prevent NATO from occupying Ukraine,” he says.
The New Resistance is not the only exponent of Duguinism in Brazil. Recently, the entity suffered a dissidence, with some of its members creating a new movement, called Frente Sol da Pátria.
“Although the press often presents Dugin as a type of ‘Rasputin’ or as an Olavo de Carvalho, the truth is that the Russian has solid academic work as a social scientist and university professor. And consistent theses that are grounded in geopolitics classic”, says professor André Luiz dos Reis, one of the founders of the new entity, which currently has a few dozen members.
The split, he explains, was generated by administrative issues, unrelated to the conflict in Ukraine. For Reis, responsibility for the war, which he says is “always a tragedy and a calamity”, is not just Putin’s.
“The causes of the conflict are not in Putin’s supposed idiosyncrasies. There is a transformation in the structure of international relations and a transition to multipolarity,” he says, pointing to events such as the expansion of NATO and the “color revolutions” in Georgia and Ukraine itself as factors putting pressure on the Russian president.
“All the justifications Putin gives for intervening in Ukraine were used by the US to defend the independence of Kosovo, invade Iraq, bomb Libya, support extremist groups in Syria, etc.”
In 2012, Reis helped bring Dugin to Brazil for the first time for a series of events. The philosopher drank mate in Curitiba, went to a bar in Rio de Janeiro and participated in debates in São Paulo and João Pessoa.
“He knows more about Brazil than many Brazilians,” says Uriel Irigaray Araújo, a translator of texts by Dugin and a doctoral student in anthropology at the University of BrasÃlia (UnB).
An analyst at Infobrics, Araújo maintains constant contact with the philosopher. “The first thing you’ll find in polls is that he’s far-right. In the 1990s he was National Bolshevik, an ideology that some experts liken to fascism but others consider closer to Stalinism.”
But he renounced that, he says. “Conservative he is, that is undeniable, but he is an important guy, who has already debated with [Francis] Fukuyama, [Bernard] Henri-Levy, among others.”
Regarding the war, Araújo reinforces the assessment that Russia is reacting to a chain of events. “Nobody wants to justify or applaud an escalation of violence, but there is a context. Ukraine had been refusing to implement the Minsk Accords and a week earlier [da invasão] bombed the Donbass region [leste]. But nobody says that, it’s a non-fact,” she says.
A point that unites Duguinists and Olavists is the rejection of the comparison made between the two. Although in form and conservatism there may be similarities, both had rough discussions, which even became a book. Olavo, who died in January, was radically pro-Western, anti-Communist and anti-China, unlike Dugin, who manages to fit Beijing into his Eurasian vision.
In addition, several of Dugin’s followers place themselves as opponents of Bolsonaro, although they also share conservative ideas with him.
​”We ​​fight intensely against Jair Bolsonaro on all fronts”, says Reis, for whom the current president is an “expression of the sewer of Brazilian society, where militiamen who are a legacy of the basements of the civil-military regime thrive”.
