B4 EZ BD THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, MAY 15 , 2022
for Ukraine nor dismemberment of the Rus-
sian army is necessary for Western security.
The Russian military is already beset by
terrible logistics, a lack of tactical acumen,
cratering morale and unreliable weapons. The
senior officer corps and battalion tactical
groups have suffered brutal attrition, and the
coming battles in Ukraine’s east will only
exacerbate these problems. Russia’s ground
forces are not in a position to go on the
offensive against NATO anytime soon.
Russia remains a threat to the West, but as
the Pentagon explicitly told Congress a month
after the war began, it plays second fiddle to
the competition with China. We s hould not let
Putin’s mistake of invading Ukraine prod us
toward making our own error: spending
valuable resources and attention on an esca-
lating proxy war against an adversary that has
already inflicted large wounds on itself.
Fortunately, there is an alternative, one that
is consistent with continued substantial mili-
tary support to Ukraine. The West should
frame its infusion of aid as a means to help
Kyiv achieve an acceptable settlement. These
military resources can help Ukraine regain
portions of its lost territory in the south and
east and better preserve its economic andern policymakers), he may become willing to
roll the dice. Putin could see escalation as a
way to preserve the military as the basis of
both his international clout and domestic
security.
More prosaically, the longer the war contin-
ues, the higher the probability that NATO and
Russia will be drawn into direct conflict —
through accident or incident. Russia has every
incentive to attack the coming avalanche of
Western military aid to Ukraine. Such attacks
could easily lead to a head-on collision
between superpowers: Planes and munitions
might go astray across international borders,
for instance, or Moscow could decide to
deliberately target the NATO bases where
Ukraine receives military aid and training.
Such a confrontation would carry obvious
nuclear risks.
But assume there is no nuclear escalation.
A nearly inevitable result of expanded West-
ern war aims will still be a longer, more
intense conflict that grinds up cities and
towns and keeps killing civilians. For an
example of the kind of damage that a proxy
war without end can cause, we need only look
at Syria.
And the reality is that neither total victorylarly the liberal West. As Dugin argued in
“Foundations” and its 2009 follow-up, “The
Fourth Political Theory,” the contemporary
world order had to be understood as a pitched
battle between the forces of “human rights,
anti-hierarchy, and political correctness” rep-
resented by the “Atlantic” Americans and
Europeans, and the distinctly “Eurasian” Rus-
sian culture, which was still capable — unlike
the sclerotic West — of honoring the main-
stays of human life: “God, tradition, commu-
nity, ethnicity, empires and kingdoms.”
Yet Dugin’s vision of Russian restoration is
about more than a geopolitical order. Dugin
openly subscribes to a strain of explicitly
occultist, reactionary thought known as Tr a-
ditionalism. Although Tr aditionalism often
ahistorically claimed an older lineage, it can
be roughly dated to a network of reactionary
artists and writers living in and around Paris
during the twilight of the 19 th century. A
heady blend of dandies and decadents, reac-
tionary Catholics and surrealist Satanists,
penniless aristocrats and pretenders to titles,
this circle was defined by its alienation from,
and rejection of, what it saw as the problems
of liberal modernity, in particular its spiritual
desiccation and its abandonment of the (often
racial and gendered) hierarchies that suppos-
edly defined the world order of a half-imag-
ined, mythical past. The circle was defined,
too, by its passion for all manner of the occult
— a blend of sincere interest in the magical
arts and a thoroughly avant-garde desire to
shock. What the world needed, these figures
argued, was a return to the old world: a world
of honor, of order, of authority, of people who
understood that some were naturally sover-
eign and others enslaved.
Influenced by these figures, foundational
Tr aditionalists such as the Frenchman René
Guénon (1886-1951) and the Italian fascist-
mystic Julius Evola (1898-1974) turned these
intellectual currents into a (somewhat) coher-
ent narrative. The world had once been“Da smert” (Yes, death), delivered with a
sieg-heil - style raised arm.
His breakthrough work was the 1997 book
“The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopo-
litical Future of Russia,” which was so wildly
popular that supermarkets placed it at their
checkout counters. It set out a playbook for
dealing with the West that seems by now all
too familiar: using disinformation and soft
power to “provoke all forms of instability and
separatism” within the United States, includ-
ing by stoking racial and political tensions,
while bolstering nationalism and authoritari-
anism at home.
Continuing to balance his intellectual work
with more hands-on politics, in 2002 he
created the far-right Eurasia Party, which was
“welcomed by many in Putin’s administra-
tion,” the Russia analysts Anton Barbashin
and Hannah Thoburn write in Foreign Affairs.
They also note that he forged “strong ties”
with Sergei Glazyev, a leader of the patriotic
political bloc Rodria and now Putin’s top aide
on “Eurasian integration.”
Dugin and his followers have been involved
in several key moments in Russian imperial
expansion. He was active in the disputed
Ossetian regions during the 2008 Russia-
Georgia war and collaborated with separatist
activists in Ukraine in 20 14. In 2009, notes
Cathy Young in the Bulwark, he was appoint-
ed chair of the international relations section
of the sociology department at t he prestigious
Moscow State University, although he was
later pushed out — under disputed circum-
stances — in 20 14, possibly as a result of
incendiary comments calling for the mass
slaughter of Ukrainians (“Kill them, kill them,
kill them”). He r emains a ubiquitous commen-
tator on Russian television, a situation that
could not exist without Putin’s endorsement.
Reading Dugin’s w ork broadly, his goals are
straightforward: the restoration of a power-
ful, authoritarian Russian state and the inter-
nal dissolution of Russia’s enemies, particu-Alexander Dugin, a
Russian intellectual
and commentator,
is a proponent of
Traditionalist
beliefs — a strain of
reactionary, overtly
occultist thought.
His ideas have had a
strong influence on
President Vladimir
Putin.institutional relationships with Europe in
whatever deal Kyiv eventually makes to end
the war. Policymakers will have to be flexible
as they assess prospective settlements, but
President Biden himself recently broached
the key idea, arguing that “Congress should
quickly provide the requested funding to
strengthen Ukraine on the battlefield and at
the negotiating table.”
Effectively shaping a negotiated outcome to
the war will also require the West to put
diplomatic pressure on Kyiv to come to that
deal sooner rather than later. This includes
demonstrating a willingness to turn off the
spigot of military aid if needed. The present
tranche should be given time to work its
effect, but its ultimate purpose should be to
hasten the conclusion of a war that carries
awful risks and tragic humanitarian conse-
quences for all involved.
[email protected]
Twitter: @ProfTalmadgeBrendan Rittenhouse Green is an associate
professor of political science at the University of
Cincinnati. Caitlin Talmadge is an associate
professor of security studies in the Edmund A. Walsh
School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.hierarchical and pure; now, we lived not in an
age of mythic heroes but rather in the “Kali
Yuga” (a term borrowed loosely from Hindu-
ism): an age of chaos and mediocrity. The
natural order of things — in which everyone
knew and respected their natural and social
function — had been overturned by the false
promise of democracy. “Nobody any longer
occupies the place that he should,” Guénon
lamented. But a secret truth, available to
occult initiates and handed down to those
spiritual aristocrats wise enough to transcend
their era, could spell a resurgence of past
glory.
Dugin has been open about his Tr aditional-
ist leanings. He came to intellectual maturity
as part of the Yuzhinsky circle, a Guénon-ob-
sessed mix of neo-Nazis, punks and Satanists.
One of his first publications was a Russian
translation of Evola’s book “Pagan Imperial-
ism.” He has described political correctness
and liberalism as harbingers of the Kali Yuga,
and glowingly referred to the Eurasian order
as “the spiritual order that penetrates all
levels of reality, b oth subtle and coarse, soulful
and corporeal, social and natural.” For Dugin,
as for all Tr aditionalists, the culture war is a
cosmic battleground: a jihad against a liberal
order explicitly coded as demonic.
Dugin’s influence — and that of the Tr adi-
tionalists more broadly — is not limited to
Russia. As the historian Gary Lachman has
noted, in Hungary, far-right leader Gábor
Vona has engaged a Tr aditionalist spiritual
adviser, Tibor Baranyi, and contributed a
foreword to a publication of Evola’s “Hand-
book for Right-Wing Youth.” In Greece, the
Golden Dawn party includes Evola on its
reading list. Tr aditionalism, too, has under-
pinned far-right movements in the United
States. Nina Kouprianova, former wife of the
prominent white nationalist Richard Spencer,
has translated Dugin’s work into English.
And, as scholar of the far right Benjamin
Teitelbaum extensively reported in his 2020
book, “War for Eternity,” Donald Tr ump’s
sometime adviser Stephen K. Bannon has
frequently alluded to his interest in Tr adition-
al ideas.
The notion that global politics is under-
pinned by the visions of occultist mystics may
seem like something out of a Dan Brown
novel. But, from at least the 19 th century,
reactionary movements have contained a
powerful spiritual streak: attempts to re-en-
chant what they see as alienated modernity
through the promise of secret wisdom and
purifying bloodshed — an apocalypse that
presages a return to a more pristine state of
being. As D ugin told “60 Minutes” in 20 17, “We
need to be free and liberated, not only
physically as a state, as a people, but as well
[a] revival of Russian logos, of Russian spirit,
of Russian identity that is much more impor-
tant.”V
ladimir Putin has frequently tried to
legitimize his invasion of Ukraine by
invoking the idea of a religiously tinged
civilizational clash: Eurasia against the West.
For Putin, Moscow is the “third Rome,” the
spiritual and cultural inheritor of the legacy of
the Roman and Byzantine empires, the center
of a distinctly anti-European dominion, one
powerful (and authoritarian) enough to with-
stand the perceived threats of liberal moder-
nity, multiculturalism and progressive values.
The notion of an independent Ukraine, in
this view, is a fiction propagated by the
“secular authorities” of the decadent West.
Instead, to the Russian president, Russia and
Ukraine exist in “spiritual unity” — not only
because of their shared Orthodox Christian
faith but also because both peoples claim the
lineage and cultural ancestry of “Ancient Rus,”
a medieval, Kyiv-centred federation. The idea
of “spiritual unity” h ints at a mystical strain in
Putin’s thinking. Indeed, he appears to see his
imperial war as an earthly manifestation of a
wider, mythic battle between traditional or-
der and progressive chaos. To u nderstand that
mysticism — to understand the ideas under-
pinning the assault on Ukraine — we must
look to one of Putin’s most profound influenc-
es: the far-right occult writer and philosopher
Alexander Dugin.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that Dugin,
often termed “Putin’s Rasputin” or “Putin’s
brain” by the international press, is — as the
Washington Post columnist David Von Drehle
has also suggested — the de facto author of
Putin’s Ukrainian strategy. Although he holds
no formal position in government — rather, he
is a sometime academic and former chief
editor at Tsargrad TV, a network known for its
fervent support of both Putin and the Russian
Orthodox Church — and has been perpetually
cagey about the specifics of his relationship
with Putin, his language and rhetoric have
long been adopted by the Kremlin. As j ust one
small example, his 2013 and 20 14 uses of the
term “Novorossiya” (New Russia) for territo-
ries of Eastern Ukraine that Russia wished to
claim were reflected shortly afterward in
Putin’s propagandist language supporting the
occupation of Crimea. For anyone who has
read Dugin, the echoes of his thought in
Putin’s r ecent speeches about Russia’s suppos-
edly proper place in the world have been
unmistakable, and uncanny.
Born in 1962 to a high-ranking Soviet
family (Dugin’s father was a military intelli-
gence officer), Dugin came to national promi-
nence in the 1990 s as a writer for the far-right
newspaper Den. A 1991 manifesto serialized
in Den, “The Great War of the Continents,”
laid out his vision of Russia as an “eternal
Rome” facing off against an individualistic,
materialistic West: the “eternal Carthage.” In
the early 1990 s, he co-founded the National
Bolshevik Party with controversial punk-por-
nography novelist Eduard Limonov, blending
fascist and communist-nostalgic rhetoric and
imagery; edgy, ironic (and not-so-ironic)
transgression; and genuine reactionary poli-
tics. The party’s flag was a black hammer and
sickle in a white circle against a red back-
ground, a communist mirror image of a
swastika. The party’s half-sincere mantra?
The far-right mystical writer who helped shape Putin’s view of Russia
Alexander
Dugin sees the
Ukraine war as
part of a wider,
spiritual battle
between
traditional
order and
progressive
chaos,
writes Tara
Isabella
BurtonFRANCESCA EBEL/ASSOCIATED PRESSTwitter: @NotoriousTIBTara Isabella Burton is the author of the novels
“The World Cannot Give” and “Social Creature,”
and the nonfiction “Strange Rites: New Religions
for a Godless World.” Her next book, “Self-Made:
Curating Our Image From Da Vinci to the
Kardashians,” will be published in 2023.WOJCIECH GRZEDZINSKI FOR THE WASHINGTON POSToffensive operations, gaining some of it back.
Unfortunately, if Russian President Vladimir
Putin begins to think that his back is against
the wall, he may lash out by directly confront-
ing NATO, intensifying the conventional war
in the east, or even using nuclear weapons.
Moreover, building a Ukrainian army capa-
ble of the large-scale counteroffensives need-
ed to expel Russia or profoundly degrade its
military would almost certainly extend and
intensify the war, leading to additional suffer-
ing. The sooner that President Volodymyr
Zelensky and the Russians can get to the
peace table to arrange a deal that preserves
Ukrainian sovereignty, the better.
Keep in mind that while Russia’s campaign
has been horrific, it can still get much, much
worse. Russia has been fighting with one hand
tied behind its back, largely for domestic
political reasons. In Putin’s Russia, after all,
the conflict has not been described as a war
but rather as a “special military operation.”
But the worse the battle goes for Putin, the
more he will be tempted to mobilize his
society to fight it as a full-blown war, despite
the political risks of calling up reservists or
expanding conscription. Russia has more
than three times the population of Ukraine,
giving it a hard-to-surmount advantage in any
war of attrition, despite Ukraine’s skilled and
motivated soldiers. Ukraine should try assidu-
ously to avoid any further mobilization on
Russia’s part, yet the West’s expanding war
aims make it more likely.
Even worse, Putin could turn to unconven-
tional weapons, including low-yield nuclear
weapons, to stave off defeat. Skeptics might
argue that Putin is not suicidal and would
never risk nuclear escalation with the West.
But Russia is overwhelmingly likely to begin
any nuclear escalation — or, for that matter,
chemical escalation — inside Ukraine, which
would put the onus on the West as to how to
respond. With a handful of nuclear weapons
Putin could obliterate significant portions of
the Ukrainian army, e specially if conventional
battles forced it to mass in a relatively small
area in the east. (To presume that the architect
of Bucha would blanch at using nuclear
weapons against Ukraine, which cannot re-
spond in kind, is wishful thinking.) All the
new heavy weapons flowing to the Ukrainian
military would not save it from destruction in
this situation, to say nothing of the casualties
among Ukrainian civilians.
Going nuclear would be extremely danger-
ous for Putin. But if he believes that the West
is trying to permanently weaken Russia, will
never lift sanctions or even aims to topple his
regime (despite repeated denials from West-
UKRAINE FROM B1
The danger of getting
t oo ambitious in Ukraine
Volunteers clean up
around a war-
damaged building
in Kharkiv,
Ukraine, on May 3.
The conflict has
been devastating,
but Russia still
hasn’t treated it as a
full-scale war.