Since Vladimir Putin announced his return, it has been noted that some of the less savory elements of Russia’s political elite have come crawling out of the woodwork, in both people and idea form.   The FT notes today in a fascinating article that Putin’s Eurasian Union concept might owe a little to the ideas of one such character – Alexander Dugin:

The prospect of uniting with Kazakhstan and Belarus is unlikely to fill most Russians with a sense of grand imperial destiny. But for a small group of committed “Eurasianists”, the announcement by Vladimir Putin of a “Eurasian Union” between the three countries marks the epitome of their ambitions, the pay-off for a lifetime spent in the political wilderness.
“We have waited for 25 years for these words to be uttered in public by our leadership,” the leader of the Eurasianist Movement, Alexander Dugin, said in Moscow on Tuesday. For two decades he has worked to make dictatorship hip. Bearded and deep voiced, he veers effortlessly in conversation from the heroism of Muammer Gaddafi to the US conspiracy to destroy Russia.