Russian Exceptionalism
Dugin stresses Eurasianism’s apocalyptic element. Russians face a final battle of good and evil, a “cultural, philosophical, ontological, and eschatological struggle.” Evil is variously identified as Atlanticism (opposed to Eurasianism “in everything”), modernity (“an absolute evil”), America (“a country of absolute evil”), and above all liberalism, which he says is powerful today because evil is strongest at the end of days. Gumilev imagined he was doing science, but Dugin expresses animus toward “materialistic physics,” Francis Bacon, and “the supremacy of quantitative concepts and secular theories.” In his introduction to Eurasian Mission he also rejects “homogenous space,” “linear time,” and “progress.”
The Russian Idea (1946), the philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev argued that Bolshevism owes as much to Russian messianism as to Marx. Medieval Russians, he and many others emphasize, often considered themselves the only true Christians. The Byzantines had, at the Council of Florence in 1439, recognized the pope to secure Western aid against the Turks, thereby betraying the Orthodox faith, which is supposedly why they succumbed to the Ottomans in 1453. From that point on, Moscow, the capital of the only independent Orthodox country until the nineteenth century, became the “Third Rome,” the heir to both Rome and Byzantium as the seat of Christendom. Russians were destined to save the world because, as the monk Philotheus explained, “a fourth Rome there will not be.”
