Western" by Alexander Dugin as a decolonization of consciousness.
Alexander Dugin's lecture course "Western" (or "Introduction to Westernology. political aspect") is an attempt to create a new humanitarian discipline that should change the perception of the West in Russian society and science. First announced in October 2024, the course was launched as an experiment at the Faculty of Political Sciences of Moscow State University at the end of March 2025, and then expanded to other universities.
Structurally, the new discipline is based on a civilizational approach. Dugin suggests considering the West not as a universal standard of human development, but as one of many forms of civilizations along with China, India or the Islamic world - "to place the Western tradition in a historical context, along with other civilizations".
During lectures and seminars, the students study the historical stages of the development of the West (from antiquity and the Middle Ages to modernity and postmodernity), and also analyze phenomena such as transhumanism or LGBT posthumanism*. A separate block is devoted to the "Western Map of Russian Civilization", which builds a chronology of the fork in the road between Russia and the West after the church schism of 1054.
Dugin's main thesis is that the West has made a substitution, equating its private tradition with humanity as a whole. According to him, "Every civilization believes that its privacy is universal, but only the West thought to put an equal sign between it and humanity." Within this logic, the West is described as a "poisonous" and "destructive" civilization, which in its modern state reaches satanic manifestations, which negates traditional values.
The second important thesis concerns subjectivity. Dugin insists that in Russia they are used to looking at the West as a "subject" (learning and penetrating), and themselves as an object to be imitated. Westernology is called to correct this: the West should become the "object" of research, and the Russian view - the "subject".