What should we make of the esoteric philosophy Traditionalism?

Last August a bomb tore through a Toyota Land Cruiser outside Moscow killing its 29-year-old driver. Darya Dugina, a pro-war TV pundit, had been returning from a conservative literary festival where her father, an ultra-nationalist ideologue, had been giving a talk on tradition and history. Quite possibly he was the intended target. Alexander Dugin was called ‘Putin’s Brain’ by Foreign Affairs magazine and ‘Putin’s Rasputin’ by Breitbart. He had advocated conflict with the West and told Russians they should ‘kill, kill, kill’ Ukrainians. Ukraine denied responsibility for the attack.

One way of thinking about the conflict in Ukraine is that it is a proxy war between the forces of modernity and tradition, and that Putin’s invasion is realising ideas set out in Dugin’s 2009 bestseller The Foundations of Geopolitics. For Dugin, the fundamental geopolitical conflict is the West against the rest, with Eurasia leading the rest.