COMMENTARY – HISTORICAL ESOTERICISM AS A COGNITION METHOD: How Russian Pseudo-scholars have Contributed to Moscow's Anti-Western Turn

In: World affairs: a journal of ideas and debate, Band 186, Heft 1, S. 210-225

Abstract

A number of para-academic tendencies in Russian social science helped prepare the Ukraine war. In addition to propaganda and disinformation campaigns by the Kremlin, an intellectual deformation of the Russian elite by the Manichean ideas of such theorists as Lev Gumilyov and Aleksandr Dugin is partly responsible for Russia's increasing secession from Europe. Post-Soviet public discourse has become infected with an array of speculative, often conspiratorial, and sometimes occultist or racist theories. Their proponents have crowded out acknowledged social scientists and historians from intellectual and media debates. This parallel public discourse has been developing since the beginning of glasnost, 35 years ago, and became one of the determinants of Russia's attack on Ukraine in 2014.