Since the mid-1990s, Dugin has become a noted political philosopher. A prolific writer, he has authored numerous books and articles about Russian nationalism, its foreign policy, and its place in the world. But the cornerstone of his thinking is elaborated in Osnovi Geopolitiki(“The Foundations of Geopolitics”), a rambling, 924-page treatise that lays out Dugin’s strategy for recreating an anti-Western Russian empire. ²The tome is a manifesto of sorts for renewed national greatness—and for the idea that Russia, as Dugin puts it, “cannot exist outside of its essence as an empire, by its geographical situation, historical path and fate of the state.” ³It is also an eloquent articulation of why, according to him, Russia and the United States are destined for global confrontation. “The strategic interests of the Russian nation,” Dugin has written, “must be oriented in an anti-Western direction . . . and toward the possibility of civilizational expansion.” ⁴

But Russia cannot do so alone. In light of its current, diminished international stature, Dugin posits a series of strategic alliances—with Iran, Germany, and possibly even Japan—through which Russia can again achieve international dominance. These partnerships, Dugin believes, should be based on the common “rejection of Atlanticism, strategic control of the USA, and the refusal to allow liberal values to dominate us.” ⁵

Dugin’s ideas have taken concrete form. In 2000, he presided over the creation of “Eurasia,” a sociopolitical movement dedicated to the revival of the art of geopolitics—and to the idea of a “Greater Russia” stretching from the Middle East to the Pacific. Two and a half years later, Dugin’s ideas were formally entrenched in Russian political discourse with the chartering of his “Eurasia Party,” a political faction deeply supportive of President Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy line. Today, he occupies the chairmanship of the Department of Sociology of International Relations at the prestigious Moscow State University, where he fills eager young minds with his ideas about Russia’s geopolitical destiny.

Over the years, Dugin’s influence has ebbed and flowed with the currents of Russian foreign policy. But he remains a figure to watch because his popularity represents a bellwether for Russia’s relationship with the West, as well as its global aspirations. Today, Dugin is again prominent on the Russian political scene, featured regularly in the national media in support of Putin’s plans for a Eurasian Union unifying Russia with Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ukraine. ⁶Most recently, he has even emerged as a voice for the Russian government on the international scene, penning a March 2013 editorial in the Financial Timesurging the West to better “understand” (and accommodate) Putin’s global efforts. ⁷

Even more significant and politically relevant is Dmitry Rogozin. At one time the deputy chairman of the State Duma, the ultra-nationalist Rogozin has long argued that Russia’s government needs to work toward a post-Soviet Union of Slavic peoples. In his book We Will Reclaim Russia for Ourselves, published in the late 1990s, Rogozin makes the case that the country “should discuss out loud the problem of a divided people that has an historic right to political unification of its own land.” Russians, he contends, “must present ourselves with the problem of a union, no matter how unrealistic this idea is in today’s conditions. And we must create conditions to result in the environment with which Germany dealt for forty years coming out united in the end.” ⁸

Rogozin has spent the years since putting this idea into practice. Since the early 2000s, he has served as the Kremlin’s special envoy to a number of enclaves held or coveted by the Russian state, including Kaliningrad and Moldova’s Transdniester region. ⁹Between 2008 and 2011, Rogozin was Russia’s ambassador to NATO, where he championed an increasingly assertive foreign policy line toward the post-Soviet space—one at odds with the objectives of the Atlantic Alliance. ¹⁰Rogozin has risen to the rank of deputy prime minister in Putin’s government, as well as to the head of the Military-Industrial Commission of the Russian Federation, which aims to “revive the country’s military-industrial complex” and “strengthen the defense of our country.” ¹¹

Rogozin’s political prospects look even brighter. In Moscow, his name—like Kudrin’s—is discussed as a potential successor to Putin should Russia’s president decide to bow out of national politics several years hence and leave the Kremlin to someone cut from the same cloth. ¹²

Such sentiments about Russia’s future are not held exclusively on Russia’s Right, however. Across the Russian political spectrum, thinkers have long been contemplating ways to reconstitute their country’s international greatness.

Their ranks include the late, great literary giant and anti-Communist icon Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who in the 1990s argued in favor of the reconstitution of the Slavic nation. “The trouble is not that the USSR broke up—that was inevitable,” Solzhenitsyn wrote in his 1995 book The Russian Question. “The real trouble, and a tangle for a long time to come, is that the breakup occurred mechanically along false Leninist borders, usurping from us entire Russian provinces. In several days, we lost 25 million ethnic Russians—18 percent of our entire nation. . . .” ¹³The optimal solution, according to Solzhenitsyn, was the reconstitution of a greater Slavic state encompassing “a Union of the three Slavic Republics and Kazakhstan.” ¹⁴Solzhenitsyn’s ideas found a lot of resonance in the Kremlin—so much, in fact, that despite his dissident status the civic crusader was invited in 1995 to repeat his call for Slavic unity on the floor of the State Duma. ¹⁵

This sort of thinking is also pervasive on Russia’s Left. Even Anatoly Chubais, the liberal architect of Russia’s pro-Western economic reforms during the 1990s, has weighed in in favor of Russia’s imperial expansion. “It’s high time to call a spade a spade,” Chubais wrote in Nezavisimaya Gazetain October 2003. “Liberal imperialism should become Russia’s ideology and building up liberal empire Russia’s mission.” ¹⁶

The implications are clear. Irrespective of political outlook, the allure of “greater Russia” continues to fire the imaginations of Russia’s elites. Indeed, more than a few politicians seem to believe that their country, in the words of Dugin, “can be either great or nothing at all.” ¹⁷

So do ordinary Russians. The collapse of the Soviet Union—and the loss of the constituent republics in the Caucasus and Central Asia, as well as satellites in the Baltics and Eastern Europe—was deeply traumatic to Russia’s citizens, who had grown accustomed to their country’s status as a superpower (even if a deeply repressive one). The political and economic upheaval that followed during the 1990s only intensified that trauma.

The numbers reflect this thinking. For example, more than 70 percent of respondents in a 2005 poll by the Moscow-based Levada Center said that the unification of Russia with Ukraine would be a positive move. ¹⁸Roughly 40 percent of those polled said that they approved of a union with Belarus—an idea that has been advocated by the Kremlin for some time. ¹⁹What’s more, people in at least some of the territory of the former USSR (including Belarus and eastern Ukraine) are still sympathetic to—and see themselves as a part of—Russia, in both ethnic and political terms. ²⁰

AN ENDURING IMPULSE

The Kremlin has set about making such a union a reality. In 2001, in a move that went largely unnoticed by the international community, it passed a law formally codifying the procedures and protocols by which the Russian Federation could be expanded. ²¹That new law provides a legal framework outlining how new subjects could be formed within Russia and how others could be annexed to it. ²²