Russia’s Relations Towards the West and the States in Post-Soviet Europe in the Works of Dugin, Solzhenitsyn and Narochnitskaya

Abstract

For Russia, the collapse of the USSR and the rise of a number of independent states meant a return to the territorial scale held by the country several hundred years ago. Today, this is the subject of extensive political, social, and intellectual discussions. Over the course of the post-Soviet development, we can observe a whole range of political representatives, scholars, and publicly influential individuals who call for the expansion of the Russian territory into regions previously ruled by Moscow, which is a demand that they support with a wide array of arguments. These are authors whose ideological backgrounds often differ; their resulting aims, however, are not dissimilar – their basic aim is to expand the contemporary Russian territory. The goal of this paper is to provide a comparative analysis of the ways in which three selected publicly influential individuals (Natalya Narochnitskaya, Alexander Dugin, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) deal with the position of independent states in post-Soviet Europe. This paper examines the manner in which these authors evaluate the existence of these independent states and what motivations and legitimizing factors they use to support their demand for Moscow to expand both its influence and the present borders of the Russian Federation.