Fascist Tendencies in Russian Higher Education: The Rise of Aleksandr Dugin and the Faculty of Sociology of Moscow State University

Doctoral dissertation, Tampere University, 2024

Universities are more than educational institutions. They are entangled with a multiplicity of powerful forces: imperial histories, neoliberal ideas of competition, and state-formation projects, which embed higher education institutions into world politics and international political economy. Capital and state penetrate universities in order to reproduce particular social relations, for example, by reinforcing the accumulation of resources, training the necessary workforce, producing ideologies, or strengthening state coercion. This dissertation is an investigation into the neoliberalization of and in Russian universities. The neoliberalization of academia, i.e., subjecting university activities to the ideas of market efficiency, has permeated academic discussions, with contributions from different contexts and areas of academic life. However, most of the research on neoliberalization of universities uses epistemological points of departure from the Global North. In this dissertation, I theorize the workings and shapes of neoliberalization from another epistemological standpoint, taking into account its connection to other projects of power that universities become a part of, in particular the statist projects of the Russian authoritarian neo-imperial regime. In order to analyze the connections between seemingly incompatible elements of authoritarian governance and neoliberal reforms, the concept of assemblages informs the theoretical, methodological, and analytical frameworks of this study. Assemblage theorizing enables analysis of neoliberalization – along with authoritarianism – beyond the binary of the global and the local, to show how it is actualized in a specific manner producing recontextualized compositions. The focus here is on authoritarian-neoliberal assemblages and their compositions, decompositions, and recompositions, or de/re/compositions: these are thought of as projects of power that are always in motion, yet may be temporally stabilized and entangle seemingly paradoxical elements in order to mutate and survive. Neoliberal policies traditionally associated with the idea of free markets, deregulated competition, and privatization in Russian universities became attached to authoritarian governance, massive state control, and neo-imperial imaginaries of Russia’s greatness and uniqueness. Methodological choices for this research have been informed by the logic of relationality and heterogeneity that assemblage analysis assumes. In order to analyze the de/re/compositions of university neoliberalization and authoritarian governance by the Russian state, various datasets were generated through nonlocal ethnography. The methodology of nonlocal ethnography drew attention to the multiplicity of socio-material elements of the assemblage and made it possible to let go of universal understandings of neoliberalism and authoritarianism. The main sources of data were interviews, participant observation of academic events, university visits, policy documents, media publications, and discussions in Russian academic journals. Each empirical chapter analyzes a specific domain in the field of higher education. Chapter 5 shows how Russian universities are assigned different statuses as a state project to manage global international academic competition in search of “Russian” greatness and success. In chapter 6, the Bologna Process is analyzed as a neoliberal Eurocentric project, demonstrating the frictions it produced with the Russian search for sovereignty. Chapter 7 describes academic labor where neoliberal policies are imposed and chapter 8 shows how the aim is to ensure academic performance, cost-efficiency, and often (when entangled with authoritarian politics) political loyalty. Finally, chapter 9 presents alternative academic projects – the life in the ruins of an authoritarian-neoliberal university. This dissertation contributes to two big strands of research in International Relations: on the global workings of neoliberalism and its relation to the authoritarian neoliberalism, and on the compositions of the contemporary Russian Putinist regime and its place in world politics. Contrary to the previous research on the Russian authoritarian regime which sees (neo)liberal reforms as a way to democratize the Russian state, this dissertation shows that neoliberal reforms oftentimes reinforce authoritarian and neo-imperial control. The dissertation enriches the scholarly understanding of the politics of oppression and dispossession which both authoritarianism and neoliberalism generate and proposes possible projects to reclaim academia.

Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences of the University of Cambridge for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Ph. D.), 2007

This dissertation is the result of my own work and includes nothing which is the outcome of work done in collaboration except where specifically indicated in the text. No parts of the text have been submitted for another qualification.

Russian Politics & Law, 2009

The Significance of the Rise of Aleksandr Dugin for the Interpretation of Public Life in Contemporary Russia the aggressiveness of neo-Eurasianism expresses itself through, among others, aleksandr dugin's positive references to nazi ideas, the third reich and russian neo-nazism. this review article briefly comments on the current state of, above all, western scholarly, publicistic and journalistic analysis of the nature and rise of dugin's movement. Doctor of Political Science Aleksandr Gel'evich Dugin (born 1962), leader of the International Eurasianist Movement (IEM), is a prolific publicist who in the 1990s had already attracted attention among researchers of the Russian right-wing movement, both in Russia and outside its borders. 1 In 1998 he was appointed official adviser to the then Speaker of the State Duma, Gennadii Seleznev, thereby becoming part of the political establishment of the Russian Federation. In recent years he has won fame not only in the former Soviet Union but also in the West. 2 Today he is known, perhaps, to most people with an interest in Russian politics and to many foreign specialists on Eastern Europe

Contestations of Liberal Order: The West in Crisis?, edited by Marko Lehti, Henna-Riikka Pennanen, and Jukka Jouhki. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019

The chapter examines Russian political theorist Aleksandr Dugin's (b. 1962) attack on the perceived Western liberal order. The chapter introduces Dugin's role on the Russian right-wing political scene and his international networks, Russian neo-Eurasianism as his ideological footing, and his more recent "fourth political theory" as an attempt to formulate a new ideological alternative to the key twentieth-century ideologies, for him, liberalism, communism, and fascism. Dugin's "fourth" ideology draws inspiration from the German conservative revolutionary movement of the Weimar era. In particular, Martin Heidegger's philosophy of history, with its thesis of the end of modernity and another beginning of Western thought, and Carl Schmitt's pluralistic model of geopolitics are highlighted as key elements of Dugin's eclectic political thought, which is most appropriately characterized as a form of radical conservatism.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2018

Alexander Gelyevich Dugin [A e ca p e e y ,)] (b.1962) is one of the most prominent and most prolific political philosopher of Russo-Eurasianist polemology and co-founder of several extremely anti-western movements. Dugin propagates selected aspects of Jean-François Thiriart's ideas and Hegelian synthesis of the Strasserist and Stalinist authoritarian concepts of existence as the theoretical foundation of geopolitical bi-civilizational 'Eurasian Heartland Empire (Foundations of Geopolitics (1997). Julius Evola, Yahya Abd-al-Waheed (Rene Guenon), Oswald Spengler and Lev Gumilev are discussed as godfathers of his 'Third Way Bolshevism' proclaimed in his works like Konservativnaya revoliutsiia, [Conservative Revolution] (1994), Metafizika blagoi vesti: Pravoslavnyi ezoterizm, [Metaphysics of the good news: the Orthodox esoteric] (1996) and Misterii Evrazii, [Mysteries of Eurasia] (1996). Dugin's Philosophy of War is a meta-historical and para-philosophical amalgamation of his neo-conservative thoughts which he preaches recently in the Faculty of Sociology at the Lomonosov University in Moscow.