There’s a great word in Italian, dietrologia, which, as a columnist for the Economist once explained, reflects the fact that “many Italians believe that the surface or official explanation for something can rarely be the real one. There’s always something behind, or dietro, that surface.” So dietrologia is the study of what that “real” truth might be. Conspiracists would understand.
I don’t know whether there is an equivalent word in Russian, but, given the way in which the country has long been run, there ought to be.
As I mentioned in my earlier post, “whether or not Ukrainian forces (or, for that matter, opponents of the war) were responsible for Dugina’s death, it is reasonable to assume the former will be blamed by the Kremlin, with consequences that will surely include some form of retaliation.”
It is, of course, entirely possible that the whole operation (which was almost certainly aimed at Dugina’s father, Alexander Dugin, a charlatan ultranationalist “philosopher” of uncertain sanity) was a false-flag operation aimed at using a supposed terrorist threat to boost support from ordinary Russians for the war against Ukraine. Putin, after all, owes his initial assumption of the presidency to a series of bombings in Russia, including, notoriously, of four apartment buildings. The bombings were blamed on Chechen terrorists and were used as an additional justification for the onslaught on Chechnya that was already getting going (it was to evolve into the Second Chechen War). Russians rallied behind their government and, in particular, its new tough-talking prime minister, Vladimir Putin. Within months he was president. We are unlikely ever to know for sure, but there are good reasons to think that those bombings were the work of Russian intelligence services designed to whip up support for that war and to create a “patriotic” opportunity for Putin to exploit, which he duly did.
Then again, it may be that killing Dugin would have been aimed at silencing ultranationalists’ criticism of the way the Ukrainian war is going.
It will be no surprise if we never discover what really happened, but it will be no surprise either if something like this, as described by Mark Galeotti, writing in the Spectator, takes place:
We likely will see some hurried arrests. No doubt there will be video footage of Federal Security Service officers bursting into a flat artfully staged with some bomb-making equipment, a gun, a teach-yourself-Ukrainian handbook, some US dollars and, maybe, a volume of Shakespeare (seriously: one was used as ‘evidence’ of the presence of British mercenaries fighting for Ukraine, as we all know squaddies are mad for a little King Lear). But we, and more to the point, the Russians, have seen it all before.
Galeotti on Dugin:
Already, Russian commentators are blaming Kyiv, without explaining either why either Dugin would be their target of choice — there are much more rabid and influential commentators on Ukraine — or how they managed to pull off an attack in the very heart of the Russian security state. Likewise, others assume this was a Kremlin hit, either because they wanted to make Dugin a symbolic martyr or else because they feared ultra-nationalists like him would stir up protest were Russia to step back from its war in Ukraine. . . .
This murder will only add to the Dugin myth, one he himself has so assiduously developed. There are many in the West happy to take him at face value, as “Putin’s Brain” or “Putin’s Rasputin”. He is not, though, and never has been especially influential. He has no personal connection to Putin, but rather is just one of a whole breed of “political entrepreneurs” trying to pitch their plans and doctrines to the Kremlin. For a while, in 2014, he was in favour; his notions of Russia’s civilisational destiny and status as a Eurasian nation convenient to rationalise a land grab in Ukraine’s Donbas. Suddenly he was on every TV channel, his book Foundations of Geopolitics was on the syllabus at the Academy of the General Staff and he was offered a chair at MGU, Moscow State University, the country’s premier institute of higher learning.
But then the Kremlin decided against outright annexation of the Donetsk and Lugansk “People’s Republics” and Dugin was no longer useful. The invitations began to dry up, MGU rescinded its offer, and he was back in the marketplace, hawking his books to the public and his ideas to the leadership. In the process, he mastered the art of retrospective thought-leading. In other words, of picking up on hints about what the Kremlin was about to do and loudly advocating just this move — and then claiming the credit. Overall, though, he has been more effective in selling himself to western alt-right circles — which to be sure, gives him some value to Moscow as an agent of influence — than to the Kremlin.