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A perceptive observer of the Russian political scene, Françoise Thom, noted as far back as 1994 that fascism, especially its "Eurasianist" variant, was already at that time displacing Russian nationalism among statist Russian elites as a post-communist "Russian Idea," especially in the foreign policy sphere. "The weakness of Russian nationalists," she emphasized, "stems from their inability to clearly situate Russian frontiers. Euras[ian]ism brings an ideological foundation for post-Soviet imperialism."2
There has perhaps not been another book published in Russia during the post-communist period that has exerted an influence on Russian military, police, and foreign policy elites comparable to that of Aleksandr Dugin's 1997 neo-fascist treatise Osnovy geopolitiki: Geopoliticheskoe budushchee Rossii (Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia).3 The impact of this intended "Eurasianist" textbook on key elements among Russian elites testifies to the worrisome rise of fascist ideas and sentiments during the late Yeltsin and the Putin periods. The book's implications for the future of Ukraine can be simply stated: if its ideas were to be implemented, then Ukraine would cease to exist as an independent state and would likely be dismembered.
As Andrzej Nowak, a research fellow at the Polish Academy of Sciences, has noted, the question of whether Ukraine continues to exist as an independent state will necessarily affect the future of all of the states of Central and Eastern Europe: "We can observe," Nowak has pointed out, "a clash of two processes . . . . On the one hand, there is an effort on the part of the emancipating Eastern and Central European societies (and their political elite) to create an entity whose structural properties congeal into a nation-state ruled by a constitutional government. On the other hand, a process is going on whereby a new form of colonial state may emerge, as the case of Belarus demonstrates. Which of the two processes will prevail? We will soon know . . . . Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire. If it is no longer an empire, it poses much less threat to Central Europe. The geopolitical condition of Central Europe becomes transformed by Ukraine's continued independence."4 As Nowak underscores, if a Russian "colonial" model, such as that advocated by Dugin, were to prevail, then the consequences for...