Alexandr Dugin alias "Putin's brain"

[Parodite]

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[Typhoon]

Tablet Mag | Putin, Tyrant

Although Putin’s ambition is to restore Russian control over its former Warsaw Pact captive states, he in no way wishes to restore the Soviet regime itself. Russian history has long been riven by a cultural conflict between those who look to Europe, the West, and the Enlightenment as the path that Russia should follow and those who are loyal to Slavic nationalism, which is deeply religious and not interested in economic prosperity. In literature, this divide was typified by the different outlooks of Turgenev and Dostoyevsky, which Tolstoy crystallized as the difference between St. Petersburg and Moscow. During the era of anti-Soviet dissidence, this split was typified by Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn. Putin is in the Slavophile camp. A devotee of Berdyaev, a Slavophile critic of Marxism-Leninism, Putin believes that Soviet communism was an import of European rationalism that poisoned the authentic Russian soul, which has nourished the country’s national and artistic greatness.

Does the Russian soul really matter to Putin? . . . , modern tyrants and conquerors since Robespierre have been bolstered by an ideology. Slavophile thought is crucial to Putin’s worldview, including both Berdyaev and also the modern writer Aleksandr Dugin’s ideology of “Eurasianist National Bolshevism.” Dugin, an academic and popular pundit, tried to rescue what he saw as the authentically Russian agrarian populist impulse behind the original Bolshevik Revolution from its betrayal by Lenin’s “scientific” socialism imported from European thought, calling instead for a “revolution of archaic values” based on the blood and soil traditions of family, rural life, and religious faith. Putin commissioned Dugin to overhaul the Russian education system to remove all traces of Gorbachev-era glasnost and perestroika, which both believed were signs of creeping Enlightenment rationalism and materialism corrupting the Motherland.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

It's Count Sergey Uvarov's triad adapted to incorporate the soviet period.

[Parodite]

So far the history of Russia has been cycles of eating neighbors or eating your own.

For sure the Dugin philosophy has its charms with some "fair enough" elements that are not too hard to embrace. But there always is this terrible caveat: how many people you need to kill in the persuit of a romantic territorial ideal and after that prevent paradise from decaying again? Failed and violent dreams fill the Russian score boards so far. Enlightenment, reason, democracy, freedom of speech and free market capitalism so far have considerably reduced the bloodshed and represent the strongest military and economic powerhouse which is the West.

The archetypical Russian Czar, like all dictators, does keep a lid on civil cannibalism that would otherwise rage through the territories. All Czars do get eaten in the end by their subordinates however, so the Ukrainian expedition might also be in part a desperate attempt of the soon to be ex-tyrant to feed the Russian bear's stomach with some fresh meat of a neighbor to keep it satisfied for a while and not turn on its own.