Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia's New Nationalism

Likewise Gleb Pavlovsky and Marat Guelman, spin doctors extraordinaire, were massively helpful both during my time as a journalist and in helping me to track the infiltration of nationalist ideas into the political mainstream.

Eduard Limonov, when he was not being stuffed into police paddy-wagons, was patient with my questions on the National Bolshevik Party.

Caroline Dawnay, my London agent, sat patiently with me while I waded through the process of deciding to write this, and believed in it enough to take it to Yale University Press. I am equally grateful to Zoe Pagnamenta, who represents me in the US, who found me by reading a magazine piece I had written about Fallujah and showed impeccable judgement in signing me up. I’m incredibly grateful to both for their patience and great ideas. Robert Baldock of Yale University Press was patient and pushy in the appropriate measures, and thanks to him this project is where it is. Also thanks to Yale’s Rachael Lonsdale, Lauren Atherton and Bill Frucht, as well as to Clive Liddiard, who edited the manuscript and turned an incoherent jumble of gobbledygook into something resembling a book.

A posthumous thanks to Vladimir Pribylovsky, a critic of the Kremlin and specialist in Russian nationalism who spent several hours helping me with the subject matter. As I write comes the news that he has been found dead in his Moscow flat. I hope his death will be investigated.

I owe an immense debt of gratitude to Katerina Shaverdova and Elena Kokorina of the Financial Times Moscow office, who frankly made possible the research that went into this, tracking down impossible-to-find phone numbers, helping me set up interviews and locating interesting articles.

Thanks ever so much to my FT colleagues Catherine Belton, Courtney Weaver and Neil Buckley, who made coming to work every day a joy and a laugh, and who taught me to be a better journalist.

And most of all, thanks to the love of my life, Rachel, without whom I would never have had all these wonderful adventures. She has read various versions of this book, has given me much constructive criticism – and has made me promise not to write another one ‘too soon’. And thanks to our lovely daughter Jaya, my father, Frank, the best professor I ever had, and my late mother, Dorothy, who I wish could have seen this.

Photographs

^{1 ‘The question of “to where” has become more important than “from where”’: Roman Jakobson (left) and Nikolay Trubetskoy (right) in Brno, 1933.}

^{2 ‘Russia in search and struggle, in a bid for a city not of this world’: Petr Savitsky.}

^{3 ‘You are my son and my horror’: Russian poets Nikolay Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova with their son Lev, 1916.}

^{4 ‘It was basically like reading a novel. Unlike most history books, you read until the last page’: Lev Gumilev in 1983.}

^{5 A Soviet Virgiclass="underline" Yury Mamleev.}

^{6 ‘The St Cyril and Methodius of fascism’: Alexander Dugin.}

^{7 Neal Cassady to Dugin’s Kerouac: Gaidar Dzhemal.}

^{8 Alain de Benoist in his Paris office.}

^{9 The nightingale of the General Staff: Alexander Prokhanov in 1992.}

^{10 Boris Yeltsin addresses the crowd in front of the White House, 1991.}

^{11 It’s Me, Eddie: Eduard Limonov in 1986.}

^{12 Inside the besieged White House, October 1993.}

^{13 ‘Operation Crematorium’: a truck rams the entrance to Ostankino in October 1993.}

^{14 ‘I was in a very radical mood’: Valery Korovin on how he came to find Dugin.}

^{15 ‘The Kremlin needed people who were free of intellectual complexes’: spin doctor Gleb Pavlovsky in 2012.}

^{16 ‘We are a victorious people! It is in our genes, in our genetic code’: Vladimir Putin in front of a map of Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States, 2006.}

^{17 ‘From the pitch-black darkness of nothingness, a new Russia burst forth in front of our eyes’: Pavel Zarifullin, 2012}.

^{18 ‘In 1996, we beat the Communists, but in so doing, we gave the regime a tool for staying in power until the end of time’: Marat Guelman.}

^{19 Kremlin demiurge Vladislav Surkov, 2006. He operated an ‘ideological centrifuge’ which ‘scattered all ideological discourses to the periphery’.}

^{20 ‘You can believe those rumours if you want’: Putin’s confessor, Father Tikhon, in 2014.}

^{21 The Moscow apartment bombings, September 1999.}

^{22 People sheltering during the Kiev sniper massacre, February 2014.}

^{23 The ‘polite people’: unmarked Russian troops occupy Crimea, patrolling Simferopol International Airport, 2014.}

^{24 A ‘Novorossiya’ military badge worn throughout the war in Donbass.}

INTRODUCTION

Vladimir Putin’s annual address to the federal assembly, delivered every year in the glittering St George’s hall of the Kremlin, is a festival of crystal-chandeliered, live televised grandeur. Over 600 dignitaries fill the room in costumed finery: sleek designer suits, minority nationality headdresses, lacquered towers of hair, Chanel gowns, cassocks, turbans, shoulder boards, braids of all sorts, and absurdly tall peaked caps. Sitting awkwardly on small, white, hard-backed chairs, the assembled dignitaries know they are in for three hours of gruelling oratory.

As the president takes the stage, the applause from the audience is rapturous and sustained. Russia’s handpicked elite fill the room, all of whom know that their careers, their incomes, their property and their futures depend on one man, and that this speech will contain vital clues about which way these considerations are tending. Civil servants hang on Putin’s every word to see which programmes will be funded and which will not. Kremlinologists watch to see who is seated next to whom. Journalists hope Putin will say something threatening or off colour (which he often does), and this will become a Twitter hashtag within seconds. And in December 2012, everyone was watching to see if Putin, who had limped noticeably during a meeting with Israeli President Shimon Peres and who was rumoured to be in ill health, would make it through the speech.

He did, but almost no one was paying attention to the most important thing: a fleeting reference to an obscure Russianized Latin term, which was flung into the speech at about minute 5: ‘I would like all of us to understand clearly that the coming years will be decisive,’ said Putin, vaguely hinting, as he did very frequently, at some great, massive, future calamity. ‘Who will take the lead and who will remain on the periphery and inevitably lose their independence will depend not only on the economic potential, but primarily on the will of each nation, on its inner energy which Lev Gumilev termed passionarnost: the ability to move forward and to embrace change.’