In 1989, as the Cold War began to fade and the eastern frontier opened, a young, penniless would-be Russian writer made the classic trip from Moscow to Paris to meet the man he had selected to be his intellectual mentor. The mentor was the writer Alain de Benoist. Born in 1943, De Benoist had started his career in 1960 as a literary critic at Lectures Françaises, a review founded by Henry Coston, the former vice president of the Anti-Jewish Journalists Association during the war. Coston was later appointed by Marshall Pétain as head of the Information Bulletin on the Jewish Question, the official press organ of the Bureau of Jewish Affairs in charge of the spoliation and the deportation of Jews under Vichy. Lectures Françaises also published the first Holocaust deniers in Europe (who all happened to be French).
As for the young penniless Russian, that was Alexander Gelyevich Dugin, Putin’s future own personal, paranoid mystic Rasputin—and today the transgressive cultural icon of Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, and other trendy podcasters and influence peddlers on the American right. Because of his newfound status in these precincts, Dugin has become the object of mystified fascination, with commentaries parsing his words to uncover the hidden agenda being hawked by his acolytes in the so-called influencer class. However, such endeavors have been largely confused, variously identifying disparate ideological currents depending on the critics’ own inclinations. Consequently, American commentators who criticize Dugin and his new American followers as “communists” are misled. Dugin’s vision, such as it is, owes as much to the mystical darkness of Russian feudalism as it does to third-worldist and right-wing trends that emerged in post-World War II France and to 21st-century chaos.