Pseudoscience fuelling Ukraine conflict

Nonetheless, Gumilyov and Dugin have a similar social impact with their writings. In their own way, they each helped shape Russia’s intellectual landscape and infiltrated the country’s social sciences and its humanities with alternative historical narratives. With their writings, they have laid the groundwork for Russia’s war against Ukraine and the new systemic confrontation with the West – unwittingly so, in the case of Gumilyov, and very consciously, in the case of Dugin.

The basis of the powerful creed of Eurasianism should have been debunked years ago, however. Gumilyov’s magnum opus, Ethnogenesis and the Earth’s Biosphere, develops a comprehensive theory of world history that is partly based on biology. Unlike Nazi thinkers, he was not a primitive racist who hierarchised groups of people according to racial characteristics. Instead, he connects the socio-political life of cultural communities with extra-societal determinants, such as the weather or even solar radiation, that allegedly act on communities.

According to his view, ethnic groups (nationalities and nations) and super-ethnic conglomerates (pan-national groups and civilisations) are primarily natural, with the historical process of country formation less important. These ethnic groups are in a cyclical process of ascent and descent, in which “passionate” heroic figures and parasitic foreign groups play central roles. While selfless and self-sacrificing “passionaries” may lead an ethnic group to its blossoming, the mixing of a host ethnic group with representatives of foreign ethnic groups (such as Jews) results in so-called chimeras, doomed to extinction. Mysterious micro-mutations caused by certain cosmic and solar radiations, which Gumilyov does not specify further, are responsible for more or less dynamism in the development of ethnic groups and great civilisations.

Such ideas are one reason why Gumilyov has received little recognition outside Russia. But they have helped Gumilyov achieve fame in Russia, where he is still acclaimed by many as a genius. His largely positive reception, even in parts of the Russian academy, has shaped the formation of partly bio-ethnological post-Soviet Russian civilisational studies. Some of his closed historical models are taught at universities.

In contrast, Dugin belongs more to the new era of social media communication and mainly sits outside academia, although he was head of Moscow State University’s department of sociology of international relations for five years. His oeuvre is more diverse and difficult to explain concisely, but its basic motif is the radical rejection of today’s liberal world and the need for conflict to overcome Western-influenced postwar modernity.

Despite, or perhaps because of, Dugin’s elliptic, inconsistent and moody rhetoric, he has found a following in the worldwide anti-liberal and, in particular, neo-fascist milieu. During visits to the US, Dugin was received by the late political scientist and diplomat Zbigniew Brzezinski, as well as by Francis Fukuyama, for brief talks, which Dugin made public afterwards and has mentioned repeatedly ever since. In 2014, the prestigious US journal Foreign Policy even classified Dugin as one of the world’s 100 “leading global thinkers” in the category of “agitators”. Such overvaluations of his influence illustrate the astonishing attention that Dugin’s speculative narratives have received.

One important strand of his work involves a fascination with the Third Reich’s “crown jurist” Carl Schmitt, which led to a temporary enthusiasm for a kind of physio-geopolitics. According to this approach, the physical location of nations on continents and their distance from the oceans, as well as the resulting land- or sea-based character of their cultures, explains world history. The collectivist and authoritarian land powers, today led by Russia, are in a centuries-old struggle for existence with the individualist and liberal sea powers, today led by the US, Dugin argues.

His described “neo-Eurasianism” is, in fact, a disguising tool to incorporate any number of non-Russian anti-liberal ideas, such as National Bolshevism, political occultism and ethnopluralism, into Russian intellectual discourse. He uses the name of the “Eurasianists”, a renowned interwar Russian intellectual émigré movement, to conceal the often proto-fascist Western sources of his radically anti-Western theories. Although Dugin’s writings have failed to gain wider resonance in Russia’s social science establishment, and he is generally not perceived as a serious academic even among Eurosceptic Russian social scientists, his speeches have found an audience.

In this respect, Dugin, among other conspiracy theorists, has contributed to poisoning the Russian public space with Manichaean ideas. The dominant presence of Dugin and similar actors in Russia’s social media and bookstores has contributed to the popularity of other dubious historical and social science findings for explaining Russian and broader international relations.

Such infiltration of speculative thinking into the public intellectual discussion can, of course, be also observed in other societies around the world, most recently in quite a few Western countries, too. However, the detachment of intellectual and media debates from the results of empirical research goes much further in Russia. In recent years and months, it has led to an increasing emigration or isolation of Russian social scientists and historians whose research is based on rationalist and empiricist premises.

The renewed distortion of the relationship between social science and Russian society after the end of the USSR had already begun before the interventions of Putin’s political technologists in public discourse started in the summer of 1999. The popularity of Gumilyov, Dugin, Fomenko and a host of similar pseudo-historians was therefore not only a symptom of the rise of a new post-Soviet anti-liberalism. The thousands of writings and other media products of Russian anti-Western para-intellectuals were also a determinant of Russia’s turning away from Europe in the new millennium.

A recovery of Russian society will require not only a change of political regime. It also depends on a rebirth of the country’s social and historical sciences, as well as its humanist intellectual discourse.

Andreas Umland is an associate professor in the department of political science at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (NaUKMA). He is also an analyst at the Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies (SCEEUS), part of the Swedish Institute of International Relations. He studied politics and history in Berlin, Oxford, Stanford and Cambridge. An earlier version of this article appeared in Durham University’s Global Policy journal.