The Voice Behind The Vision

"The reconquest of Crimea has caused a clear change of tone in Moscow, with celebration of old-fashioned Russian nationalism coming into fashion. It's clear that Moscow intends to conquer something like half ... of Ukraine, through quasi-covert means if possible, by overt invasion if necessary."
John Schindler, historian

"There has probably not been another book published in Russia during the post-communist period which has exerted (such) an influence on Russian military, police, and statist foreign policy elites."
John Dunlop, scholar

"Our troops will occupy the Georgian capital Tbilisi, the entire country, and perhaps even Ukraine and the Crimean Peninsula, which is historically part of Russia anyway."
Aleksandr Dugin, Moscow State University 

Aleksandr Dugin, Founder, Russia's Eurasian Party

In the lead-up to the annexation of Crimea, Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin, Russian intellectual, son of a KGB officer, appeared on Russian television programs, in support of and promoting Vladimir Putin's policies as representing "a struggle for reunification of Slavic peoples". Where "the reunion with the Crimea (is) a victory for us", and that a "Russian Spring" revealing Europe and Russia allying would enable them to "break loose of American hegemony."

According to Russian political scientists the 52-year-old Aleksandr Dugin has "become part and parcel of the daily political and intellectual life of contemporary Russia". Mr. Dugin has achieved enough respect in his contention that Russia must bring an end to U.S. world dominance to become championed by people of influence, including the Speaker in the Duma. Head of the sociology of international relations department at Moscow State University, he urges a resurgent Russia.

"The West's hegemonic status, particularly that of the United States, may soon be an historical memory", stated political scientist Alexandros Petersen, claiming that the world is witnessing the throes of the West being eroded, no longer representative of geopolitical order, economic power and military supremacy.

A more assertively confident Russia has emerged throughout the course of Vladimir Putin's three presidential terms. Energy wealth has enabled the country to flaunt its capacity to make both east and western Europe tremble at the dictatorial tantrums of the energy giant. Its humbly meek exterior seen after the collapse of the Soviet empire has been transformed as Russia has slid past its Cold War persona into that of a country which has invested hugely in new arms to bolster its geographic aspirations.

Russia, through Vladimir Putin, dreams of a Eurasian empire. Aleksandr Dugin visualized the concept of Eurasianism that would restore Russia to its former glory as a super power and then propel it into an even larger, more powerful position of strength, influence and power. His work, Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geo-political Future of Russia, published in 1997, has influenced Russia's power elites through the siren song of its urges to conquest.

His position on Eurasianism imagines an axis of power through three Russian-dominated groups; Moscow-Berlin; Moscow-Tokyo; Moscow-Tehran, with the common enemy of all identified as the "Atlantic" West, specifically the United States and Britain. Russia and Germany, according to Dugin, would divide Central and Eastern Europe with the Germans claiming Central and Eastern Europe, and Russia controlling Finland, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and the northern Balkans from Serbia to Bulgaria.

The Heartland Theory represents Dugin's adoption of British geostrategist Halford Mackinder's imagined geopolitical strategy in the early 20th century where the argument was made that the world's land mass be divided into three zones; a "world-island", including Europe, Asia and Africa; the "offshore islands" of Britain and Japan, and the "outlying islands" including North and South America, and Australia.

The Heartland, a region stretching from the Volga River to the Yangtze River, running north to south, from the Arctic Ocean to the Himalayas, represents the core of the world-island. And whoever controls the Heartland with its immense population base, and natural resources obviously has world domination in hand.

"In Mackinder one can find the clearly formulated and minutely described ideology of accomplished and absolutized 'Atlanticism', whose doctrine stands at the base of Anglo-Saxon geopolitical strategy in the 20th century", wrote Aleksandr Dugin in a 1992 essay. "Mackinder's ideas ... opened the way to the explicit ideological formulation of the opposition to Atlanticism in the pure Euroasian doctrine."

In 2007, Vladimir Putin gave warning to NATO that Russia had no intention of standing by as Western encroachment on regions it considers part of its sphere of influence took place. In 2008, Putin tasked Russian troops to seize two Georgian provinces giving ample warning he would not tolerate the country brought into NATO.

History is now repeating itself in Ukraine. And the dream of Nazi Germany has been transferred to Russian domination of the new world order.