‘Pro-Trump’ Alexander Dugin three years later: globalization, stop the ‘hegemony’ of the West
What is your opinion of, and relationship to Vladimir Putin?
He was much better than Yeltsin. He saved Russia from a complete crash in the 1990s. Russia was on the verge of disaster. Before Putin, Western-style liberals were in a position to dictate politics in Russia. Putin restored the sovereignty of the Russian state.
That is the reason why I became his supporter.
However, after 2003, Putin stopped his patriotic, Eurasianist reforms, putting aside the development of a genuine national strategy, and began to accommodate the economic liberals who wanted Russia to become a part of the project of globalization.
As a result, he began to lose legitimacy, and so I became more and more critical of him. In some circumstances I worked with people around him to support him in some of his policies, while I opposed him in others.
Joint press conference with Syrian President following Russian-Syrian talks. 2010 Photo/Presidential Press and Information Office
When Medvedev was chosen as his heir, it was a catastrophe, since the people positioned around him were all liberals. I was against Medvedev. I opposed him, in part, from the Eurasianist point-of-view.
Now Putin will return.
All the liberals are against him, and all the pro-Western forces are against him. But he himself has not yet made his attitude toward this clear. However, he is obliged to win the support of the Russian people anew. It is impossible to continue otherwise. He is in a critical situation, although he doesn’t seem to understand this. He is hesitating to choose the patriotic side. He thinks he can find support among some of the liberals, which is completely false.
Nowadays, I am not so critical of him as I was before, but I think he is in a critical situation. If he continues to hesitate, he will fail. I recently published a book, Putin Versus Putin, because his greatest enemy is himself. Because he is hesitating, he is losing more and more popular support. The Russian people feel deceived by him.
He may be a kind of authoritarian leader without authoritarian charisma. I’ve cooperated with him in some cases, and opposed him on others. I am in contact with him. But there are so many forces around him. The liberals and the Russian patriots around him are not so brilliant, intellectually speaking. Therefore, he is obliged to rely only upon himself and his intuition. But intuition cannot be the only source of political decision-making and strategy. When he returns to power, he will be pushed to return to his earlier anti-Western policies, because our society is anti-Western in nature.
Russia has a long tradition of rebellion against foreign invaders, and of helping others who resist injustice, and the Russian people view the world through this lens. They will not be satisfied with a ruler who does not govern in keeping with this tradition.
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