Dugin appears to have had a direct political objective similar to Rachovsky’s: to discredit revolutionary elements in Russia which were on the rise, portraying them as some world-spanning, sinister threat. To be fair to Dugin, he has (albeit later) strongly condemned theories of a Jewish plot, rejected revisionism and has denied the authenticity of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He has not succumbed to the temptation to fit conspiracies around ethnic or confessional prejudices, which would have created the basis for violence. In fact, none of Dugin’s conspiracies have any identifiable Leon Trotskys, Baron de Rothschilds or Emmanuel Goldsteins – no physical figures that would serve as targets. While spinning wild fantasies, he kept a studied distance from his theories and took evident care to make sure that his writings would not translate into real hatred or violence directed at actual people. He seems to have combined a commitment to responsible demagoguery with the realization that physical ‘targets’ were not strictly necessary, and even detracted from the strength of the argument. Evil was at its most evil when it was hidden and amorphous.
‘Great War of the Continents’, an article written by Dugin in February 1991, was characteristic of this effort – the closest thing to a sensation that ran in The Day. Drawn clearly from his readings of geopolitics and his intellectual dalliances with European extreme rightists, Dugin interpreted the esoteric meaning of the Cold War not as a struggle between communism and capitalism, but as a hidden conflict between two concealed elites – the sea people and the land people: ‘A planetary conspiracy of two “occult” forces, whose secret confrontation and unwitnessed battle has determined the course of history.’
Out of Dugin’s great intellect, random facts were dissolved into laws, and coincidence into consistency. The political turmoil in the former Soviet Union, he argued, was in reality a behind-the-scenes struggle between the shadowy minions of Atlantic power and the agents of Eurasia. He even went so far as to accuse the entire KGB of being a front for the Atlantic conspiracy, while patriotic Eurasians, he said, were their military intelligence rivals in the GRU, which had often had a combative relationship with the KGB – and which remained loyal to the motherland.
Later in life, after he enthusiastically applauded the ascendance of Vladimir Putin, a former KGB colonel, to the presidency, Dugin admitted that he might have been mistaken about the KGB. In a 2005 introduction to an anthology of his conspiracy theories, he alluded to a number of ‘inconsistencies, inaccuracies and exaggerations and absurdities’ in the original text of ‘Great War of the Continents’. His wife Natasha today says categorically of his work from that period: ‘Give him a break, he was 28 years old!’
Conspiracy theories were always easy to sell in Russia, where people were accustomed to read the back pages of Pravda first, to figure out what stories the government was seeking to suppress. And conspiracy theories in the Soviet Union were prevalent precisely because they were so often true, but also because they were a staple of regime propaganda. Such theories, according to Hannah Arendt, ‘are more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself’. The major advantage of conspiracy theories over reality is that reality is not logical, consistent and organized the way a conspiracy theory is. It is worth noting that Europe’s twentieth-century totalitarian regimes found that conspiracy theories were always the easiest way of explaining ideology to an otherwise uninterested public. Few Germans understood the racial theories of the Third Reich, and nor did most Russians grasp the fundamentals of dialectical materialism. However, the public eagerly read and believed the Protocols, or the Wall Street conspiracy and the Trotskyist conspiracy. In the same way, the conspiracy theory filled the ideological void left by the collapse of communism.
In an effort to explain the incidence of conspiracy theories, some scholars have ascribed their prevalence in some societies either to a form of delusional paranoia, or to a cognitive disorder, in which people are prone to see a pattern or purpose in events where none actually exists. Others regard conspiracy theories as a vestige of religious life, the unseen battle of cosmic good against evil, a secularized fossil of the Judeo-Christian consciousness clothed in modern garb and which can proliferate against the backdrop of social crises.
Dugin adopted a clever stance in this regard, taking turns as both purveyor and ironic deconstructor of his arguments, equating conspiracy theories with myth and religious demonology. He followed ‘Great War of the Continents’ with ‘Introduction to Conspirology’ in 1990, in which he analysed his own work: ‘The actual existence or non-existence of the conspiracy in question changes nothing. When one analyses religion, one is not concerned with the fact of the existence of god, but with the fact of belief.’21, 22
The conspiracy theory was thereby spared any need to prove itself. Rather than setting about proving that the theories were true, Dugin set about proving that they were facts: ‘In our case we can say that a “conspiracy”, in the most direct sense of the word, exists insofar as there exists historically and sociologically established belief in it.’23 People who believe in UFOs, grassy-knoll sceptics and Templar Knights enthusiasts were thereby placed on the same level as Protestants, Buddhists and Bahais, whose belief is in some sense protected by a scholarly methodology. When one studies Islam, one’s task is generally not to try to prove or disprove the Qur’an and the Hadith, but to study the belief as it is incarnated in the world.
The pervasiveness of conspiracy theories, according to Dugin, has a religious, irrational element: the persistence of ‘stable unconscious archetypes that would ascribe concrete facts and events to mythological paradigms.’ ‘In conspirology, there are no rules and laws. Anything can happen.’24 This was an ironic stance to take, with Dugin spouting fantastical conspiracy theories and simultaneously explaining that conspiracy theories are manipulations, fakes, the products of mental illness, psychiatric fossils of a pre-modern era which, at other times, might have taken the form of witch-burning. Irony, in other words, was a constant companion to Dugin’s otherwise rather dire-sounding manifestos.
Dugin was simultaneously a critic, a theoretician and a practitioner of an art in which the three roles are (or should be) mutually exclusive. Such posing was to be a constant theme running through Dugin’s work for two decades. Two slightly unresolved parallel tracks run through his essays and his books: in one instance he is a Machiavellian manipulator, mobilizing the gullible in a propaganda exercise; simultaneously he deconstructs his own work, injecting doubt and analytical distance.