Moscow's new chief ideologist:
Ivan Demidov


By Andreas Umland

[JdN: formerly a visiting fellow at Stanford, Harvard and Oxford]

[All photos and captions by John de Nugent]

Online Journal Guest Writer
(from an Online Journal article of March 25, 2008)

From: http://www.thephora.net/forum/showpost.php?p=533474&postcount=18

Recent attention by Russian and Western commentators was focused on the presidential elections of March 2, 2008, and the personality of Dmitry Medvedev. Therefore, the appointment of 44-year-old Ivan Demidov as head of the Ideological Directorate of the Political Department of United Russia’s Central Executive Committee in late February 2008 went largely unnoticed.

Ivan Demidov.

Demidov is a colorful Russian politician who became a cult figure among the young in the 1990s when he was a popular moderator and producer of youth-related programs for various TV stations. His new post as official chief ideologist of Russia’s ruling party had to be freed up by another prolific politician, Leonid Goryainov, for Demidov.

As Russia has recently returned to a de facto single-party system, Demidov occupies a unique position in Putin’s “vertical of power.” His office has the explicit purpose of formulating and spreading the ideology of the party that controls most of Russia’s federal, regional and local parliaments, and which (together with some minor parties) officially nominated Medvedev as candidate for president.

Demidov with unknown Russian girl. Demidov has a large following
from his TV days among Russia's youth.

Demidov had already before his recent advance been working as an advisor for United Russia. In addition, he was editor of the party’s nationalist “Russian Project” website, and head of the Coordination Council of United Russia’s rabidly anti-Western [JdN disagrees: anti-Jewish-controlled Western] youth wing called “The Young Guard.” He also worked as director of the small religious TV channel “Spas” (in Russian, "Savior") which transmits a variety of programs infused with strong anti-Americanism. [JdN disagrees: Demidov is against the Washington regime. which he correctly perceives as Jewish-controlled, multiracial, nation-invading, and spreading economic and military chaos.]

Demidov had become famous, however, before these political appointments. In the 1990s, he was known as a non-conformist journalist coming out of a group of young anti-Soviet TV men who, with their widely-watched talk shows, had their share in the delegitimization of the late USSR’s social-political system.

Demidov was then seen as somebody linked to Russia’s liberal or, at least, anti-totalitarian movement. Yet, in recent years, he developed along the lines of a number of other Russian prominent figures of his age, including Sergei Markov or Mikhail Leont’ev -- two of the Kremlin’s preferred political commentators whom one can see on prime time TV shows several times per week. Like Markov or Leonte’v, Demidov went from being a symbol of Russia’s new post-communist generation to becoming a part of Moscow’s neo-traditionalist establishment.

He is now an advocate of Russia as a unique world civilization as well as self-sufficient great power, and participates in the Kremlin’s increasingly successful spread of such attitudes among teenagers and students. His recent promotion follows general trends in the Kremlin cadre's policies expressing itself in the appointment, earlier this year, of the prolific Russian nationalist Dmitry Rogozin as Russia’s new envoy to NATO Headquarters in Brussels.

Demidov -- a typical “tough Russian.” Although Americans and Westerners are taught to adore the last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, as a liberator from communism, Russians unanimously see his reign as a catastrophe -- for the white world and for Russia, since it led to a total takeover of Russia under Boris Yeltsin by Jewish billionaire “oligarchs.” This brought about an economic depression, mass poverty, and skyrocketing alcoholism, suicide and crime rates. Just as bad, Gorbachev's weak and chaotic rule caused the catastrophic breakup of the Russian Empire – whether called that openly under the tsars or called the “USSR.” (Under Joseph Stalin, 1878-1953, the Russian Empire added almost all of Eastern Europe.) Since the latter days of Stalin's rule, Jews could never rise to higher than the number-two position in any factory, university department, hospital, government agency, or military command. (This was personally confirmed to me by a Russian Jewish psychiatrist, Alexei Nissenbaum.) An Aryan Russian had to be supreme in every department, never what the Russians would call a zheed (in Russian, “kike.” Jews in Russia are officially called “Hebrews,” which is wrong since they are mostly Turkish Khazars converted en masse by their sultan to Talmudic Judaism 1200 years ago.) The GPU (Soviet military intelligence, not the KGB) required that all members prove they had no Jewish blood going back many generations. Stalin used Jews for much of his dirty work -- but then realized they were a threat to him and to the regime, and arrested or annihilated all Jews, large and small, who could oppose his agenda. He cracked down on them in three waves: 1) in the 1930s (in the “Moscow show trials” of the heavily Jewish Old Bolsheviks), after 1945 (in the Cold War campaign against those whom he euphemistically called “the cosmopolitans” ), and in the early 1950s (in the purge called the “doctors' plot” campaign, which alleged that Jewish physicians were poisoning Soviet leaders who were their patients.). When Stalin died at age 75 in 1953, he was planning a massive anti-Jewish purge -- one of the many “silver linings” to the dark clouds of Stalinism. Most Russians have ambivalent feelings about Stalin, who was unquestionably a vozhd, a “great/strong leader.”

This might have been the reason why Demidov’s rise has, so far, caused little attention in Russia and the West. It needs to be added, however, that Demidov has professed to be under the influence of a particularly extreme brand of Russian imperialism, known under the label of “neo-Eurasianism.”

This ideology has been principally developed, in hundreds of articles and books, by the neo-fascist Russian theoretician Alexander Dugin (b. 1962), and constitutes perhaps the most radical anti-democratic ideology that has gained acceptance within Russia’s political establishment today.


In a November 2007 interview for Dugin’s website Evrazia.org ["Eurasia.org"], Demidov stated:

 

[JdN: Even if you do NOT understand Russian, an important Aryan language, still you should at least take a look at www.evrazia.org ("Eurasia.org"). The English-language website of the Movement Eurasia is http://evrazia.info/index.php?newlang=english]




Alexander Dugin. Every young man needs an older mentor in every organic, natural, healthy tribe (whether a white "tribe," a black, red or yellow one) regardless of the tribe's technological level. Dugin has been the mentor of Ivan Demodov, who has risen to become the chief thinker for the ruling United Russia Party of Vladimir Putin and of Russia's incoming president, Dmitry Medvedev. Wikipedia:: “One of the basic ideas that underpin his theories is that Moscow, Berlin, and Paris form a "natural" geopolitical axis, because a line or axis from Moscow to Berlin will pass through the vicinity of Paris if extended). Dugin's theories foresee an eternal world conflict between land and sea, and hence, Dugin believes, the U.S. and Russia. He says, "In principle, Eurasia and our space, the heartland Russia, remain the staging area of a new anti-bourgeois, anti-American revolution." According to his 1997 book, The Basics of Geopolitics, "The new Eurasian empire will be constructed on the fundamental principle of the common enemy: the rejection of Atlanticism, strategic control of the USA, and the refusal to allow liberal [anarchic] values to dominate us. This common civilizational impulse will be the basis of a political and strategic union." Dugin admires Jews as a dynamic, nationalist people, but not “Zionism”'-- in the sense of a Jewish urge to dominate the world from its power centers in Tel Aviv, London and New York. Dugin respects Jews who respect whites -- and who break with those Jews who try to destroy Mother Russia and Europe. "The pen is mightier than the sword" certainly applies here, an adage coined by the Englishman Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1839 for his play "Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy."



"The pen is mightier than the sword" adorns the Thomas Jefferson building in Washington (an old painting is seen above). The Jefferson Building is the main building (facing the east side of the US Capitol) of the Library of Congress, which contains fifty million books and periodicals. I spent many hours studying here while at nearby Georgetown, and ended up reading half of them.



A hall in the Jefferson Building. Jefferson bequeathed his entire library to the Congress after his death on July 4, 1826, the same day as his friend John Adams died in Massachusetts. Jefferson proved that an intellectual could be a GREAT revolutionary -- and a GREAT president.


 

The two men have been cooperating for a while now within Demidov’s “Spas” TV channel, where Dugin has his own show called “Vekhi” (Signposts). To be sure, Demidov has repeatedly stated that his various patriotic propaganda projects are designed to deprive Russophile ultra-nationalists of their control of the nationalist agenda and thus aim to fight the increase of xenophobia and hate crimes in Russia. He announced that “the words ‘Russian’ and ‘fascism’ are antonyms,” and that he and his associates will “fight against the infusion of the term ‘Russian fascism’ into mass consciousness.”

However, in 2007, Demidov, with explicit reference to Dugin, also acknowledged being a “convinced Eurasian.” This is oddly the same phrase that Dugin had used 15 years earlier to describe the political beliefs of Reinhard Heydrich (1904-1942), the infamous chief of the SS Security Service and one of the planners of the Holocaust. [sic]

Dugin sees his Eurasian movement as the follower of a secret “Eurasian Order” that existed for centuries, and included, among others, various German ultra-nationalists. While, at times, strongly distancing himself from Hitler’s crimes, Dugin has, throughout the 1990s, repeatedly expressed his admiration for certain aspects of the Nazi movement. For instance, he called the theory sector of the Waffen-SS an “intellectual oasis” within the Third Reich, and admitted that National Socialism was “the fullest and most total realization” of the Third Way that Dugin advocates to this day.

In one of his numerous pro-fascist articles of the 1990s, Dugin got excited about the prospect that, after the failures of Germany and Italy, there will, in Russia today, finally emerge a truly “fascist fascism.” In the new century, to be sure, Dugin’s rhetoric has become more cautious. Now a frequent political commentator on various TV shows, he often poses as an “anti-fascist” and describes himself as a “radical centrist.” Dugin tries to draw a line between the inter-war right-wing intellectuals whom he admires and those who supported Hitler. Yet, as late as 2006, Dugin admitted that among his models are the ultra-nationalist German brothers Otto and Gregor Strasser who got into personal conflicts with Hitler in the early 1930s, yet had also played a crucial role in making the NSDAP a mass party in the 1920s. In March 2008, his website, Evrazia.org, confirmed that Dugin still has sympathies for the Strasser brothers.

Dugin at the Konstantin Vassilev Gallery in Moscow with David Duke, PhD (www.davidduke.com). One of the world's most well-known white civil rights activists, the charismatic Duke earned his Ph.D. in history in 2005 at the MAUP University, Kiev, Ukraine, for a doctoral version of his brilliant book Jewish Supremacism, available at Amazon.com.

In spite of many similar well-known statements by Dugin and his associates, Demidov enthusiastically expressed his admiration for Russia’s chief “neo-Eurasianist.” Demidov stated, among others, that:

 

Moreover, Demidov proclaimed that “it is high time to start realizing the ideas, as formulated by Alexander Dugin, of the radical center, through projects.” In his new position as chief ideologist of Russia’s ruling United Russia Party, Demidov will have ample opportunity and the necessary resources to do so.

Dr. Andreas Umland, a German, teaches at the National “Taras Shevchenko” University of Kiev, Ukraine.


Andreas Umland. He edits the book series (in Russian, German or English) entitled “Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society”, and compiles the biweekly “Russian Nationalism Bulletin.” [I could not find any active link to this.]

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Russia recently test-fired the A135 missile, the world's fastest and most accurate ICBM,
which also weaves and bobs unstoppably as it flies.



Vladimir the Great, proof that great men still arise among the Aryans. As Edward de Vere wrote, "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them" (from the comedy Twelfth Night). In Jewmerica, "Some become great through selling out their country, defaming their rival traitors, massive injections of fact-free hoopla, and thrusting themselves on unwilling voters who are not given a truly great man to vote for."

[Thanks for providing me this link --- to Constantin von Hoffmeister in St. Louis, who knows and has interviewed Alexander Dugin, and to Robert Prince in Washington. More info on Dugin -- provided by Von Hoffmeister and also reflecting his own personal views as an Eurasianist -- is to be found below:

http://nationalfuturism.org/Biopolit...opolitics.html

and in this piece (by Von Hoffmeister's friend and a brother former US Marine, Justin Cowgill):


Cowgill


http://evrazia.info/modules.php?name...ticle&sid=2187

important essays about the Eurasian idea:

http://evrazia.info/modules.php?name=News&new_topic=12

about Demidov:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4728203.stm


The Russian fighter-bomber “Sukhoi 30 MK”


The hip, cool website in Russian of the youth organization of the "Movement Eurasia"

 

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