The Popularity of Duginism: Duginism as Dream Come True
What seemed to be Dugin’s meteoric rise to the country’s political Mt. Olympus coincided with his popularity among the people in the former USSR. Western observers also started to pay attention to Dugin. The reason for this was clear: the early paradigms
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The Popularity of Duginism: Duginism as Dream Come True
The creation of the movement and then the party was a true culmination of Dugin’s not just political, but intellectual career. In a brief period, he enjoyed what very few Russian intellectuals enjoyed throughout modern Russian history and especially during the Soviet period. At that time, two types of Russian intellectuals existed. The first represented officially approved and institutionalized intellectuals. They easily published their books and articles and enjoyed quite a comfortable life. But no one read their writings, unless they were obligatory reading for students and official propagandists. They were also ignored in the West. The other group represented those who had problems with the authorities; for a variety of reasons, their works were not published, and their manuscripts circulated in typewritten form in what Russians called “samizdat ”—literally “selfpublishing.” Some of these people had managed to send their manuscripts abroad and were published in the West, in émigré journals, newspapers, and publishing houses, or—in some cases—in translation. These people often had a very unpleasant life and were harassed by the authorities, even during the comparatively “vegetarian” Brezhnev rule. Still, they were lauded by the intelligentsia, at least in the big cities. They were “prophets,” noble sufferers. They despise not just personal well-being but even the most essential comfort, at least from Westerners’ prospective. Practically all of them despise not just power but even the masses, the average man from the street as primitive animal foreign to any high © The Author(s) 2021 D. Shlapentokh, Ideological Seduction and Intellectuals in Putin’s Russia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49832-0_4
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pursuit. Most of them want to be published. Still, for some, one might assume, even this might not be essential. Indeed, publication as well as power and comfort implies a sort of prostitutionalization and implicitly imposed restrictions on one’s creativity. It is true that many of them would like to see their works published in the West. But the real West was terra incognito not just for them but even for the majority of lucky Soviets who visited places outside the “Iron Curtain.” Indeed, they had no real experience living in the West as ordinary residents and saw not the real West but show windows displayed by high-positioned and well-paid hosts to the rare exotic visitors from the “evil empire.” For these dissidents, the West was absolutely different from what they saw around them. The people were not similar to the average Soviet zombie—in the capacity of hoi polloi or party bureaucrats—but they were similar to the few refined intellectuals to whom the particular creator could give his work for assessment. These intellectuals, “guru” or “saint,” thought broadly and controversially. Their manuscripts were avidly read despite the danger such activity entailed. Young Dugin as anonymous street sweeper belongs to this category at the b
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