Neo-Eurasianism and the Russian elite: the irrelevance of Aleksandr Dugin’s geopolitics

Kirill Kalinin

Post-Soviet Affairs, 2019, vol. 35, issue 5-6, 461-470

Abstract: The consistency and effectiveness of Russia’s assertive foreign policy has earned Putin, both domestically and internationally, the image of a powerful and ambitious leader with a strategic plan to re-establish the Russian empire and defend Russia’s core national interests. Speculation among scholars and practitioners regarding the existence of such a “strategic plan” makes Aleksandr Dugin’s conspiratorial neo-Eurasianism project an especially appealing subject of research. This paper explores key ideas of Dugin’s neo-Eurasianism, as described in his Foundations of Geopolitics, and tests them empirically with data from the Survey of Russian Elites: 1993–2016 using a Bayesian Structural Equation Modeling approach. Its main finding is that the theory has limited utility for understanding elites’ foreign policy perceptions and therefore its influence should not be overstated. Moreover, there is no evidence that Dugin’s theory is more salient in the post-Crimean period than in the pre-Crimean period.

Date: 2019
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DOI: 10.1080/1060586X.2019.1663050

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