This is the first part of a two-part series by Vinicius. The second part can be found here.

by Vinicius

In December Last year, I wrote to Bishop Richard Williamson to warn him about the Russian philosopher, Alexander Dugin, who the bishop had recently praised. I sent him several links to articles by Dugin. He replied: “I do believe that the thoughts of Putin and Dugin are heading rather for Heaven than for Hell” (4/12/24). He justified this on the basis that both men are opposed to liberalism.

Given that the thoughts of Putin and Dugin represent a mistaken and dangerous ideology, this exchange illustrates the challenge for Western Christians, especially traditionalists.

Several questions arise: Is liberalism the only dangerous error abroad today? What is the erroneous worldview that Russia now takes first place in promoting? How could an obviously well-intentioned and knowledgeable person like Bishop Williamson have been so blind to it?

I: Russia is singled out.

At Fatima, there was a mysterious message. If Our Lady’s requests were not heeded, Russia would spread its errors throughout the world and unprecedented (and yet unseen) evils would ensue. Many assumed that these errors referred only to Communism (which took power in Moscow a few months later, ruling until three decades ago) and hoped that, in any case, Russia’s conversion was just around the corner. The Soviets did expand through military force, but Sovietism remained unattractive, especially in the West after 1945. The leftist ideologies that have attained influence in the West over the last two generations were Western in origin, often opposed to Moscow. Karl Marx was a central-European and, strictly speaking, Russia was his ideology’s first victim.

But the last two decades have clarified what the specifically “Russian” errors referred to at Fatima are: a synthesis of all Western Enlightenment ideologies repackaged in a “traditional Russian” exterior as a kind of radical conservatism and exported to the modern West as its salvation from liberalism. It includes a “Eurasianist”, “multipolar” creed that denies Russia’s own specifically Christian identity and that of the entire West. This is combined with esoteric, occultist, neo-pagan, even satanist beliefs, marketed as religious “traditionalism”. Many of the best Westerners are buying it, or smiling upon it.

This ideological mix originates in the nineteenth century, with the Slavophiles and Dostoevsky. For these thinkers, society was everything. Religion grew out of society, and therefore it was proper for every society to have a different religion. They combined a worship of country with gnostic, occultist ideas derived from romanticist masonic lodges of the Martinist/Scottish Rite type.

These ideas bubbled away in Russian society before the revolution, influencing Orthodox Church intellectuals and the Royal family (Nicolas II employed a French charlatan, Monsieur Philippe, to “summon” the ghost of his deceased father for advice on government, with disastrous results.¹ ,² )

In 1917, the Fatima message concerning Russia caused confusion because these ideological undercurrents were poorly-known in the West. Later, it was assumed that only the October Revolution was referred to. Today’s increasingly successful export of Russian Messianism makes it obvious that the Bolshevik revolution was only one of Russia’s “errors”. Fatima was right to refer to these in the plural, and as Russian.

II: How far back did Russia’s “errors” begin?

They can be traced to Czar Peter I and his forced introduction of Enlightenment ideas to Russia in the early eighteenth century. Like the French under Napoleon, the Russians took up the errors of the Enlightenment with the enthusiasm of converts, producing extreme versions of socialism, liberalism, conservatism and fascism.

The current official ideology in Russia is a mix of all these things, accompanied by an Orthodox veneer. Russian national Messianism which, along with its invention of the myth of Moscow as a “Third Rome”, first appeared in the late nineteenth century,³ is now wedded to the concept of “saving” the West by exporting gnostic “traditionalism” to it. The great novelist, Fyodor Dostoevsky, who viscerally hated the Catholic West, was one of the founders of Russian Messianism. He is often viewed as an enemy of modernity, even a “mystic”, but did not believe in God as Christians do. Instead, his ideology was a synthesis of modern German philosophy.

Dostoevsky’s hatred for the Catholic Church was motivated by his rejection of all dogmas and certainties. For him, the only certainty was “the people”. Developing Hegel and Schelling’s ideas, he could not accept any “truth” that did not arise out of the people.

Dostoevsky asserted that every people had its own God, and the greater the people, the “greater” its God: “God’s personality is a synthesis of the entire nation”.⁴ This post- Enlightenment worldview has done enormous damage to Russian society. For Dostoevsky, speaking through his protagonist Myshkin (The Idiot, 1869), the Catholic Church was the “Antichrist” because it believed in dogma, whereas Russia would “rise to be the salvation of the West”, by “completing” the Enlightenment’s philosophies.

If the Church is merely a development of society, its beliefs can evolve, just as society does. Hence Russian Messianism’s opposition to the Catholic Church, which teaches that its doctrines are unchangeable and certain, come from God, not society, and that it is essentially distinct from (even when allied with) civil society. Pope Leo XIII taught that the Church is of divine right, whereas civil societies are not, being a development of human nature.

This completely contrasts Russian messianism, which divinises society, confusing it with the Church, which is thereby secularised. Russian Messianism, a radically Enlightenment ideology dressed up in traditional costume, has been hard for many Western Christians to fully understand. In contrast to Communism, which operated by eradicating religion, Russian Messianism seeks to reinvent religion, changing its meaning and content, but preserving externals.

Today, for the first time, these obscure ideas are being promoted at the highest level in Russia. For the first time, many Westerners are eagerly imbibing them, especially those most opposed to Liberalism. Fatima has never been more relevant.

III: Alexander Dugin’s ideology. Its influence in Russia and the West.

On 20th August 2022, Alexander Dugin’s daughter, Darya Dugina was blown up in an attempt on his life. Vladimir Putin posthumously awarded her the Order of Courage. He called her a ‘true patriot” (she had been active in promoting Dugin’s philosophy). Shortly after that, President Putin delivered a speech in which he claimed the West “is afraid of our philosophy and that’s why they try to assassinate our philosophers.”

Alexander Dugin has been dismissed as a crackpot whose views do not represent the Russian state. Indeed, they are evil ideas. Dugin’s record of publishing texts openly promoting satanism is recurring and long term.⁵ Yet he is clearly influential, and valued by the Kremlin.

Alexander Dugin was born in 1962. His father was a colonel in Soviet military intelligence (the GRU). In 1997, Dugin attained real influence with the publication of his Foundations of Geopolitics,⁶ which for years has been a textbook at the Russian military’s General Staff Academy. Interestingly, apart from “Eurasianism” (see below), Dugin’s worldview makes a Moscow-Berlin alliance the core of a projected future expansionist war against the Christian West, something Yves Dupont has documented in various Catholic prophecies.⁷

Dugin doesn’t believe in a Christian Western civilisation, but in a Eurasian bloc of many religions opposing the West: “The idea of a continental Russian-Islamic alliance lies at the foundation [of the Eurasian strategy]”.⁸ In his Mission statement,⁹ Dugin bases his ideology on the “Cultural anthropology” of the anti-Christian, Franz Boas: “there cannot be a common universal measure when comparing cultures and civilisations”. This relativist, scepticist principle rejects Christianity and universal natural law. For Dugin, all civilisations and religions are “true” because “time and space are sociological constructs”, “God, man, time and space” change according to the society. But, from the Catholic point of view, the affirmation that all religions are true is the same thing as saying that none of them are true.

Dugin’s Russian Messianism makes all religions and civilisations “true”. This is different to Communism, which did proclaim one “truth” (Marxism), holding religions to be useless fictions, at best tolerated. Dugin’s Russian Messianism holds all religions to be “useful” fictions because they are “true” socially, as the expression of each society. This was the “traditionalist” thesis of René Guénon, an ex-Catholic occultist who, after passing through masonry and theosophy, became a Muslim. For Dugin, “René Guénon is closer to the truth than anybody else in last centuries”.¹⁰

Dugin often speaks using religious terms, even though he believes no doctrines. It can be seen in this typical example of his writing on his website, Geopolitika.ru: Christian terms, occultism, paganism and worse are mixed together.¹¹

His writing is eccentric, to say the least. Unfortunately, these ramblings are taken seriously by the most influential people in Russia. More importantly, for us, the use of Christian vocabulary makes Dugin’s Messianism seem harmless, even positive, compared to the old Communism or modern “woke values”, which are easy to spot. But for Western anti-liberal Christians, these “errors of Russia” are the most dangerous thing in the world today because they can seem appealing.

By Vinicius. by Vinicius. Vinicius is a Melbourne-based historian-researcher  focussing on early modernity as the Christian Western alternative to ideological, Enlightenment modernity. 

ENDNOTES

1. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, August 1914 ↩︎
2. https://firstthings.com/the-haunted-empire/ ↩︎
3. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41050783 ↩︎
4. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Possessed, New American Library, New York 1962, pp. 234, 237, 238 ↩︎
5. For example (there are many), in 2014, Dugin published this article defending luciferianism on his website, Geopolitica.ru, 3/2/2014: https://www.geopolitika.ru/en/article/hyperborean-wisdom-nimrod-
   de-rosario-and-gnostic-geopolitics In December 2024, he published this article. openly defending satanism, Geopolitika.ru, 25/12/24: https://www.geopolitika.ru/es/article/lucifer-apolo-y-la-vision-
   catara-de-la-luz-en-el-pensamiento-de-otto-rahn ↩︎
6. https://tec.fsi.stanford.edu/docs/aleksandr-dugins-foundations-geopolitics ↩︎
7. Yves Dupont. Catholic Prophecy, 1970. ↩︎
8. https://tec.fsi.stanford.edu/docs/aleksandr-dugins-foundations-geopolitics ↩︎
9. https://www.geopolitika.ru/en/mission ↩︎
10. https://www.geopolitika.ru/en/article/authentic-vs-inauthentic-existence-ultimate-choice ↩︎
11. https://www.geopolitika.ru/en/article/metaphysics-warrior-philosophy-way-sword ↩︎