Premium Episode 174: Diggin' For Dugin with Liv Agar (Sample)
We explore Aleksandr Dugin, the Russian philosopher who always seems to find a place in Russian politics — even before the USSR fell. From underground punk in Moscow, to co-founder of the Nazbol party, to Eurasian traditionalist and supposed "brain" behind Putin, we chart the man's path through the ages.
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Liv Agar: https://linktr.ee/livagar
Annie Kelly: https://twitter.com/VaccinePodcast / https://twitter.com/AnnieKNK
Episode written by Liv Agar. Music by Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz.
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Welcome, listener, to Premium Chapter 173 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the Digging for Dugan episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Brokatansky, Annie Kelly, Liv Agar, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
America's long-standing obsession with Russian politics has caused many in the West to attempt to understand the inner mechanisms of Putin's political core.
This interest has spiked following the full-blown invasion of Ukraine by Russia earlier this year.
Many analysts have been dumbfounded by the reason that Putin would initiate a full-blown invasion of Ukraine, kick-starting the first European land war since Yugoslavia fell apart in the 90s.
It seems like the relative failure of the invasion, compounded with massive economic sanctions that America and other Western nations have imposed onto Russia, have demonstrated a fact that many before the war had been repeating.
A full-blown invasion makes no sense for Russia.
Their military isn't prepared for it, and the economic benefits it would bring would not outweigh the inevitable massive sanctions.
So what could Putin's motivation be?
Some have looked for a potential ideological reason to justify Putin's war, specifically pointing to a political philosopher that is popular among Putin and some Russian elites by the name of Alexander Dugin.
Dugin has been an influential ideologue in Russia for a few decades, Pushing a unique form of Eurasianism to justify Russia remaining an autocratic traditionalist society that pushes against any encroaching influence from American quote-unquote Atlanticist bourgeois liberal capitalists.
Surely the rabid Russian response to Ukraine potentially binding itself with this quote-unquote Atlanticist West through joining institutions like the EU and even potentially NATO could logically evoke a response by Putin that is inspired by Dugin's right-wing traditionalist Eurasianism.
For this reason, many have contextualized Dugin as a modern Rasputin, a far-right ideologue driving Russia even further into a traditionalist death spiral against the West.
But is this really true, or just an oversimplification told by Western sources in order to drum up support for anti-Russian sentiment?
From being a famous participant in the punk far-right scene in the Moscow underground as a youth, to helping found his own national Bolshevik party that would form a large portion of the mainstream resistance against Yeltsin, to buddying up with Russia's political and military elite through his unique form of Eurasianism, Dugin is a historical figure in recent Russian history that deserves a deep dive into.
To understand Dugin, we must first understand the context he comes out of.
Being born in 1962, he spent his youth in the developing countercultural anti-Soviet punk scene in Moscow.
Before Perestroika, the late Soviet era reforms that loosened up many of the explicit bans on political association and anti-Soviet speech, his resistance to the Soviet Union was mostly partaking in the libertine anti-Soviet counterculture on the streets of Moscow.
Political censors kept most of the critiques of the Soviet government in this period subtle, manifesting themselves in underground gatherings of bohemian intellectuals, punks, and general rabble-rousers, where unregistered pamphlets denouncing the government would be handed out behind the roar of edgy anti-Bolshevik punk music.
The Moscow underground scene in the 70s was primarily occupied by the newly formed upper-middle class of the Soviet Union, who had begun to experience an increase in economic prosperity contrary to their forefathers, who had gone through the Great Patriotic War, World War II, and its fruitless aftereffects.
Dugin himself is quite vague about his father's profession.
At one point he says he was military intelligence, but seems to have backed out from that later, but nevertheless he was likely some connected member of the Moscow elite.
Needless to say, it seems that Dugin was in the new generation of petite bourgeois Soviet kids whose parents and grandparents had fought, often quite literally, for them to achieve some semblance of a middle-class life.
Arguably, a middle-class life more stable than their counterparts in the West, even if they had far fewer commodities.
For those like Dugin, medical care was free, pensions were comparatively generous, and a decent paying job was easily secure.
Yet for many of those like Dugin, this was not enough.
There was no rush, no excitement.
Thus came the burgeoning underground music scene in the 60s.
Music production in the Soviet Union at this time was organized by the Central State Media Company, who had given Soviet citizens some access to Western music, such as The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, which they produced and distributed without a care for Western copyright systems, of course.
That is amazing.
Yeah.
That is a baller move.
Yeah, why would you pay the Beatles?
What are they going to do, sue you?
Sue the Soviet Union?
Yet many wanted more than the few Western albums that the government provided to them.
And any more access to Western-style music either came through smuggled records or underground music productions.
The Soviet population, especially those aforementioned upper-middle-class youth, were quite fond of all the music coming in from the West.
For those like Dugin looking for excitement, they were particularly attracted to rock and roll and punk.
They admired much of its rebellious carefree attitudes and its denouncement of the powers that be, and many like Dugan began producing their own music in this style.
Not in any official capacity, of course, as they would have had to gone through official state media channels, but instead in the burgeoning underground punk music scene.
Despite attempts by Soviet censors in the early 70s to restrict this growing cultural phenomenon, it continued in size.
Given that the Soviet punk scene was even more explicitly opposed by its government than the ones in the West, it should not be a surprise how anti-authority, anti-Bolshevik, and anti-party its cultural productions were.
It became a haven for those that wanted a culture and social movement that opposed Soviet censors.
It was a perfect place for those like Dugin, whose relative well-off position gave them access to music and music production, and whose lives in the Soviet planned economy, with its drab architectural styles, boring office jobs, and limited open cultural expression, gave them a desire for more.
The Soviet underground was all about non-conformism, and anyone who didn't conform was invited to the party.
Some were anarchists, some were even liberals, some were traditionalists, and some, like Dugin, were fascists.
Dugan was openly fond of Nazism in this period, a fact he is today candid about.
He was obsessed with it.
It's apparently all he really talked about.
Given that the countercultural currents that the Soviet underground was copying were themselves quite edgy, as an example we can think of punks in the 70s in America such as Sid Vicious wearing a swastika for shock value, it shouldn't be a surprise that a young Dugan and his obsession with Nazism was given a place.
The counterculture gave the young Nazi Dugan a social world in which he was welcome.
Nazism was in fact such an important part of Dugan's life in this period, according to Charles Clover in Black Wind, White Snow, that almost everyone who knew Dugan in this period would immediately bring up his Nazism when asked about him.
Oh, that guy!
The guy who loves the hipper!
Oh yeah, the Nazi guy!
Oh yeah, of course.
Why didn't you just say the Nazi?
That's why everyone just calls him Nazi guy.
I don't even know his name, honestly.
And I mean, it's like you say Liv, like, I don't know, this would have been a scene which had like, I guess, more than a few Nazis.
Like, yeah, you kind of even have the sort of Western equivalents at this time.
But it would have probably been even more kind of edgy and subversive, right, to be a Nazi in the Soviet Union of all places.
Yeah.
So it really is like quite remarkable that people remembered him as being especially Nazi.
Yeah.
A very young Dugan begging Hitler to let him play riffs behind his speeches?
Come on, dude, it would be fucking sick!
Yeah.
Dugan thrived in this punk environment, where he made himself well-known in these circles in his teen years as an intellectual and a guitar-playing poet.
And he was quite a prolific musician, known for his reportedly famous song, Fuck the Damn Sovdep, or Soviet Departments.
It was quite popular and overly edgy even for its context.
The lyrics called for mass murder of all Soviet leadership and world conquest by Russian legions.
As an example of the lyrics, here is what appears to be the chorus of the song.
Liv, come on.
You've got to at least point to a person and make them do it.
If someone volunteers for this, you know... I'll do it.
I'll do it.
How about that?
The fucking end of the Sovdep.
It's just around the corner.
Two million in the river.
Two million in the oven.
Our revolvers will not misfire.
I think Jake should do it in the style of a Shakespearean monologue.
Yeah, that's a good idea.
I love being the one Jew on the podcast that has to read the word oven.
It's always great.
It feels good.
Today's a bad day at work right now for me as the producer.
People are just proposing anti-Semitic jokes.
What if we read it this way?
This shit doesn't even rhyme!
So it's the fucking end of the soft debt!
It's just around the corner!
Two million in the river!
Two million in the oven!
Our revolvers will not misfire!
You're so newsboy?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, that's, you know, that's like some British punk, I guess.
That sounded very believable.
In a Russian accent.
I don't know what Russian punk sounds like.
I'm gonna have to do a little bit more research, seeing as all the punk guys I listen to are, like, socialists.
I am hallucinating at this point.
I don't know what's happening.
We must move on.
It's very strange.
There's no recordings of it, given that it was produced in the underground, so, like, you can't have, like, any record label was owned by the state media.
So even though this song was apparently, like, very popular in the underground scene, we have no recordings of Young Dugan singing it, which I tried to find, but I could not find.
Oh, she couldn't find Nazi music, but I bet her search algorithm is great now.
Yeah, I'm on a list, though.
Stuffed in a vault, deep in a vault in the Kremlin.
She did find this cool band called Screwdriver.
It's not a surprise there's no official sort of recording of this, given how wildly illegal it was to advocate for mass murder of the Soviet government in reference to a sort of Holocaust-esque event.
In fact, merely attending some of these political and social meetings could blacklist one from some of the nicer party-affiliated jobs.
Something Dugin was certainly willing to give up, despite his apparently connected and well-off father.
Given how prolific he was in these circles, it shouldn't be a surprise that the KGB was at least aware of what he was getting up to.
His father had reportedly bailed him out of trouble quite a few times, something his father was clearly not fond of doing.
Dugin had given up a potentially well-connected life in the Soviet military establishment for his Nazi underground affiliations.
Some of these affiliations were also explicitly occultist.
One of the main groups Dukin associated with in this period was the Yuzinsky Circle, an occult secret society that practiced black magic rituals and theosophy.
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