Global Security and Intelligence Studies
in English , Spanish , French , German , and Arabic . RT set up a video on demand web service with the name Ruptly in 2013 . Altogether RT reaches 700 million people worldwide and it has close to 1.2 billion views of its news clips on Youtube and is , as a result , surpassing CNN as an international news source ( Spiegel Staff 2014 ). Putin also created the Valdai Forum , which is a Russian version of the Davos meeting and which aims to expand Russian influence by courting Western intelligentsia and politicians . Russia also followed the Western example of establishing and funding various NGOs that promote Russian culture and values . The purpose of the Russky Mir Foundation , created in 2007 , was to engage with the Russian diaspora abroad , “ predicated on the idea that Russian speakers across the world make up one unified civilization ” ( Pomerantsev and Weiss 2014 , 19 ). In 2009 , 14 of these NGOs were organized in the Coordinating Council of Russian Compatriots ( Perry 2015 ). The idea is to create relationships with ethnic Russians in the near-abroad , so that they can be mobilized in support of Russian foreign policy , as was done in Estonia , Georgia , and more recently in Ukraine .
The Search for a New Russian Ideology
Russia has no official or explicit state ideology because it is prohibited by the
Russian constitution , which states under Article 13.2 “[ n ] o ideology may be established as state or obligatory one .” This provision was included to prevent a return of totalitarianism in Russia . Besides , Marxism was in a severe crisis in the early 1990s , leaving Russia with no ideological orientation of its own . Since there was the widespread perception that Russian identity was under attack , a new ideology had to be developed that could provide a new vision for Russia ’ s national identity and for Russia ’ s role in the world . This ideological gap was soon to be filled by a hodgepodge of ideas and interconnected concepts , many of which were borrowed from Western thinkers , that are now known as “ Neo-Eurasianism .” This school of thought is derived from Eurasianism , which is a political ideology that had its origins in the 1920s . It was originally conceived as an alternative to both communism and Western parliamentary democracy by Russian émigrés living in the West . According to Marlene Laruelle , “ Eurasianism was thus born in the context of a crisis [ the Bolshevik takeover of Russia ], in an atmosphere of eschatological expectations : Its proponents had the feeling of standing at a turning point in human history . Their attempts to theorize these expectations made them look toward the future ” ( Laruelle 2012 , 19 ). Its main thesis is that Russian civilization does not belong to Europe or Asia but would be distinctive from both of these civilizations .
The most well-known Russian traditionalist thinker developing contemporary or Neo-Eurasianism is Alexander Dugin . Dugin is a former chair of the sociology department of Moscow State University . He is also a former member of the National Bolshevik Party , the founder of the Eurasia Party ( in 2002 ), and the founder of the Eurasian Youth Movement ( in 2004 ). Dugin is one of the best-
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