Ideas about creating a “Eurasian Union” were not new. They had already been circulating
for many years in Russia. What was new was the fact that the Russian leadership, after
years of hidden support, finally decided to embrace the project openly. One of its
main protagonists was Igor Panarin, a former KGB analyst, who, in his capacity as
dean of the Diplomatic Academy of the Foreign Ministry, became one of the main ideologists
of the Eurasian idea. In an interview in Izvestia,[2] published in April 2009, he had predicted the creation of a powerful “Eurasian
Union,” led by Vladimir Putin. This Union, modeled on the EU, would have a parliament
in Saint Petersburg and create a single currency. The Eurasian Union, he said, would
not only encompass the territories of the former Soviet Union. He predicted that Alaska
would return to Russia and that Russia would play a leading role in Iran and the Indian
subcontinent. In the end China and the European Union would also become members and
form a triumvirate that would dominate the world. Panarin predicted that the global
role of the United States was over. According to him this country would soon fall
apart.[3] In a lecture, delivered in Berlin in February 2012—after Putin’s official adoption
of the Eurasian Union project—Panarin declared that “the Eurasian Union should have
four capitals: 1. St. Petersburg; 2. Almaty; 3. Kiev; 4. Belgrade.”[4] He added a timetable also. Armenia, Tajikistan, and Ukraine could join by December
30, 2012; Serbia and Montenegro, as well as Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Mongolia,
by December 30, 2016. After this date “Turkey, Scotland, New Zealand, Vietnam, and
several other countries could join.”[5] When Putin declared that the Eurasian Union is not a reconstitution of the former
USSR, he was completely right because the scope of the project seems to be much more
ambitious. Panarin mentioned here no fewer than seven possible members that were not former parts of the defunct Soviet Union, although
New Zealand[6] and Scotland (after independence) are improbable candidates. Panarin warned that
the West had started the “Second World Information War” against Putin’s Eurasia project.
This war would be led by Zbigniew Brzezinski (“an agent of British (!) Intelligence”),
Mikhail Gorbachev (“the Judas of Stavropol,” who must “be brought before a public
tribunal in Magadan, for his role in the collapse of the USSR”), and Michael McFaul,
the US ambassador in Moscow (“a theoretician and practitioner of coups d’état,” “sent
to Moscow to enhance the efficiency of Operation Anti-Putin”).
A similar combination of geopolitical megalomania and wishful thinking could be found
in another admirer of the Eurasian idea, Aleksandr Dugin, the founder of an international
Eurasian movement. Dugin similarly pleaded for a reconstitution of the Soviet Union.
And like Panarin he did not want to stop at the frontiers of the former empire, but
wished also to incorporate the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (except the
former GDR), as well as Manchuria, Xinjiang, Tibet, Mongolia, and the Orthodox world
of the Balkans. Dugin’s main focus, however, was Ukraine, the independence of which
he considered to be an anomaly. For him, “the battle for the integration of the post-Soviet
space is a battle for Kiev.”[7] It might not come as a complete surprise that Dugin is an admirer of Italian fascism.
In his book Konservativnaya Revolyutsiya (The Conservative Revolution) he praised the “third way,” which was “not left and
not right” and was embodied in “Italian fascism in its early period and also in the
time when the Italian Social Republic [Mussolini’s mini-fascist state at the end of
the war—supervised by the Germans] existed in Northern Italy.”[8] Dugin was also a source of inspiration for the Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev,
who in 1994 had spoken out in favor of the formation of a Eurasian Union.
Fear of Loss of Sovereignty
