Conversation with Alexander Dugin on the Sputnik TV program Escalation.
Host: Today is June 22 — besides being the longest day and the shortest night... Incidentally, these phrases are also connected to events from the middle of the last century. Eighty-five years ago, the Great Patriotic War began. Many different lessons have been drawn, many different conclusions supposedly made. But recent years show that those answers and those learned lessons were not as solid as we thought. Because in light of today’s events, there is much we can recall about those years. I suggest we start with this — talk a little, remember a bit, but naturally draw parallels from 1941 in the 20th century to 2026 in the 21st.
Alexander Dugin: Of course, these are completely different eras, but certain conclusions and certain sudden flashes of memory about that tragic moment — the surprise attack by Hitler’s Germany on the Soviet Union without a declaration of war — which led to the seizure of huge swathes of our territory. In the first months, even the first year of the war, the Germans advanced. They advanced methodically and in massive force, while we retreated. We were not ready for this war at the time. We did not expect it, we had not prepared for it properly, and we believed it was impossible.
Stalin trusted Hitler until the very end, as we know. He believed that Hitler took the word “socialism” in “National Socialism” seriously. That was the ideology of Nazi Germany, and Stalin thought that Hitler would choose, say, an alliance or at least neutrality with another socialist power in the face of the Anglo-Saxon capitalism that Hitler genuinely hated — and with which he was also at war. After all, World War II did not begin on June 22 with Hitler’s attack on us, but in 1939 with Germany’s war against Britain. So anything could be expected from Hitler. In this respect, he somewhat resembles Trump — or Trump resembles Hitler — because his positions also shifted and his policy was quite inconsistent. At times he cursed the Soviet Union and communism, at others he turned against the liberal bourgeois West.
Hitler’s National Socialism is an ideology banned in the Russian Federation. At the same time, it was both anti-capitalist and anti-socialist — the so-called “third way” ideology. And of course, Stalin probably hoped that the balance in this intermediate ideological state would tip toward confrontation specifically with the liberal West and Anglo-Saxon capitalism, which Hitler truly hated. But it turned out that he hated not only them, but us as well. And I believe that we were pushing him toward confrontation with the West, while the West was pushing him toward confrontation with Russia.
A great deal of material about these backstage negotiations has now been made public. And in the fact that June 22 happened — the attack by Nazi Germany on Russia, which was prepared and planned — a significant role was played by those same Anglo-Saxon agents. They understood that if Hitler... And Hitler’s Germany was essentially the European Union of that period. All of continental Europe was under Hitler’s heel — he had either installed loyal regimes or simply occupied it. This was an enormous challenge. If Hitler had continued fighting on one front against the West, it would have been very difficult for both Britain and America.
It was precisely during this period that a major success of British intelligence — through various channels — was to set Hitler against the Soviet Union. To ensure that the “national” element in National Socialism outweighed the “socialist” one. This was a huge ideological, philosophical, and intelligence operation. Only now are we beginning to seriously suspect this, seeing the first signs of this deep work by British special services, which tried to play on Hitler’s racism: “The Anglo-Saxons are people like us, but the Russians are Untermenschen — subhumans.” Incidentally, we hear exactly the same thing from the West today. Everything is repeating itself.
This Anglo-Saxon operation succeeded, and the result was the tragedy of June 22, 1941. It was also the beginning of the end for Hitler, because this attack on Russia became for him what the campaign against Russia had been for Napoleon. The British and international globalist forces — those same financial networks — at the critical moment, understanding that they could receive a blow from a consolidated continental Europe, set that force against Russia.
And what happened next? The end of Germany, the end of sovereign Europe. But the blow our people endured was enormous. These were monstrous losses. Yes, we won this war triumphantly and brilliantly, but at what cost!
And here is something else important: Europe, divided as a result of our Victory into two camps, already carried within itself a certain geopolitical trap. This line of division proved insufficient. We should have either gone all the way to the Atlantic, liberating all of Europe, or... But we stopped, entered into agreements, and decided to come to terms with the Anglo-Saxons. We divided Europe, and this laid a mine under the future. We held out for a long time — several decades by historical standards. From 1945 to 1989 — a decent stretch, but not centuries.
And then all the results of our Victory, all our successes and colossal sacrifices were crossed out by the betrayal of the Soviet leadership at the end of the 1980s. Our Victory was simply stolen from us — by the liberals, Westernizers, and reformers of the 1990s. They even stole the very date from us.
That is why today we think: how did this happen? Why is everything repeating itself? Why is it again June 22, and we again see calls in the Western press to fight Russia — essentially calls to finish what their grandfathers started? We are once again facing a war with the West, only now the enemy is much closer to our heart, to our historic Russian lands. The threat looms over us again. June 22...
This now belongs to the past that has not passed. In Soviet times it seemed to us that it was simply history. We would remember it, focus, become serious, pay tribute to the memory of our ancestors who won that war. But it still seemed like a closed chapter. It turned out that it is about the future — it is about the present. June 22, 1941, is that historical moment in which we did not live for several decades, but in which we are living once again.
But where is our 1945? Where is our capture of Berlin, London, Washington, Paris, Helsinki, Warsaw, and Rome? Where is that? In reality, we don’t even have it in our plans. And here, just as Stalin then overestimated Hitler, overestimated Europe and the ideological orientation of those who prepared the attack, so too, in my view, we today do not understand the modern West.
We should have begun preparing for a new war with the West immediately — on May 9, 1945. From that moment, we should have directed all the power of our state toward advancing further to the Channel, rather than simply holding the lines we had reached. Instead, we went into a deep defense, then made concessions, believed in the theory of convergence based on a common Enlightenment project — and that was it. In the end, we were almost steamrolled. If not for Putin, we might no longer exist. He went in a different direction and set a course for restoring our sovereignty and our state-civilization. We have set out on the right path, but after all the losses we have suffered, it turns out to be very difficult to follow it — especially if we hesitate and trust the West again.
The main lesson of June 22, 1941, is this: until we reorganize world space in our own interests — interests that will reliably protect our civilization — the threat will not disappear. This can be done not only by force, but also by peace. But it must be our peace, it must be our Russian World. Here, not only weapons matter, but also diplomacy, intellect, technology, and ideas.
The most serious conclusion from this analysis is that we won that war, but then we were thrown back. And now we need to secure that result once again, so that the victory of 1945 remains part of our historical existence, and not just a distant episode. Because today the West is essentially telling us that that victory was an accident, while the attack of June 22 was a natural outcome. The Russophobia that permeated Nazi ideology has not gone anywhere — it has now become mainstream in the West, and Ukraine has been artificially turned into the vanguard of this process.
Therefore, to the pride in the great feat of our ancestors and the grief over the losses, the ashes of the present are now mixed in. We are in a moment when the historical June 22 continues for us.
Host: Allow me to add an informational point here. You speak about victory, and I am sure that absolutely everyone listening to us will agree with your words. But this is the kind of time we live in: it is not enough to win — it is important to prove that you won. There are certain world leaders who — regardless of whether they won or lost, what happened, how it happened, or where it happened — tell everyone about their victories through their information megaphones and social networks. And a significant part of the world perceives it exactly that way.
What does Russia have in reserve, as a trump card (forgive the comparison), to prove, to explain, and to convey this idea to those who may not have forgotten, but who are beginning to doubt? Was it really exactly as we have been accustomed to thinking for the past 85 years? Because now from various sources — free, loud, and sometimes brazen — what is pouring out is, to put it mildly, perhaps not outright lies, but half-truths or truth torn out of context.
Alexander Dugin: First of all, history belongs only to the victors. The defeated have no history of their own — it is written for them by those who won. They come and say: this is how it was for you, this you won, but that — you did not. In order to have the right to our own history — and therefore to the victory of 1945 — we must win once again.
Today we let our victory slip through our fingers; we ourselves renounced it. Have we condemned Gorbachev? Have we held a tribunal for the traitors, for the liberals who seized power? The people reject this, and that is where Putin’s support comes from — he has taken a patriotic stance. But legally and ideologically, this has still not been formalized. The people who dismantled the Soviet Union — which was the continuation of the Russian Empire, our state — have never been held accountable.
Accordingly, we ourselves surrendered our sovereignty, and we should not be surprised that the West imposes its own version of history on us. The West today believes that Stalin was a tyrant just like Hitler. And our historians in the 1990s nearly agreed to accept this version of history written by the victors, signing Russia’s global capitulation. We came very close to complete loss of sovereignty, but Putin turned the ship of Russian statehood onto a course of revival.
Words, worldview, and philosophy play an enormous role here. Ideas, statements, national narratives — these are the main battlefield. A sovereign is someone who controls his own consciousness and the body of historical knowledge. If foreign models are implanted into our minds, then there is no need to conquer us militarily. Today colonization proceeds through the information sphere, and in this respect our civilizational discourse is largely losing.
This is connected to the structures responsible for information policy. Our journalists on the front lines are trying to promote our meanings, but when they turn to the rear for systemic support, they do not receive an adequate response. Everything still depends on the momentary moods of officials: if they decide to open the window a crack for patriotic ideas — fine; if they decide otherwise — everything shuts down.
This monstrous legacy of the 1990s and 2000s, when the West was considered the model — where families lived and money was kept — was accepted by the elites. We tried to fit into it. And we still have not fully replaced those people who, by inertia, remain carriers of this pro-Western, Yeltsin-era worldview.
They are still in their positions. Yes, they are loyal to our president, yes, they support him, but deep down, I think they do not agree either with the Special Military Operation or with the inevitable escalation of relations with the West — an escalation that is happening not through our fault, but according to the objective logic of history. They couldn’t care less about geopolitics. They studied from Western manuals, they were invited to conferences, they were treated with respect. In essence, a significant part of the Russian elite in the 1990s — and perhaps even in the late 1980s — was ideologically co-opted.
Accordingly, the people who today are supposed to be fighting the West and asserting sovereignty were raised on directly opposite principles: that the West is the ideal, that we should not fight it but imitate it, and that Russian sovereignty is merely a formality. That is their worldview. And these people remain in many key positions. We have not yet had a full-fledged change of elites.
At the same time, the West itself today is completely different — it is not the West that existed 20–30 years ago. It is changing rapidly, and we do not understand the deep philosophical, sociological, and anthropological processes taking place there. Many still cling to the illusion that it is comfortable and cozy, and that the money is there. But as the Gospel says: “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” This is a terrible problem. We cannot truly count on victory in an external war until we achieve victory over our own inner paralysis at home.
In 1991, a real treacherous coup took place, when a marginal rabble ready to carry out the West’s tasks imposed liberalism from above — something our society categorically did not share. We still have not recovered from that act of suicide. That is precisely why it is so difficult for us to advance our sovereign discourse and present to the world the image of Russia as a unique state-civilization, something our president constantly speaks about. We have enormous potential, but honestly, we have not yet even truly approached it.
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