Sievers was not just a stage name: it was a complete persona and alter ego. This was painstakingly composed of as many antisocial elements as its creator could find – a total and malevolent rebellion not just against the Soviet Union, but against convention and public taste as a whole: his namesake, Wolfram Sievers, had been the Reichsgeschäftsführer, or director, of the Ahnenerbe, a Nazi organization set up by Heinrich Himmler to study esoteric and paranormal phenomena. The real Sievers was hanged in 1947 by the Nuremburg court, charged with experimenting on concentration camp victims.
The lyrics composed by Dugin/Sievers were both clever and intended to achieve maximum shock value. They were mainly inspired by nineteenth-century author Isidore-Lucien Ducasse, aka the Comte de Lautréamont, whose ‘Maldoror verses’ were taken up by twentieth-century surrealists. Maldoror was the chronicle of an eponymous outcast monster who embarks on a surreal binge of torture, cannibalism and general malevolence – a vicious being in total revolt against every form of moral authority and every convention.
Dugin recounted later that his interest in Lautréamont was a product of his implacable hatred for the stultifying conformity of the Soviet existence: ‘It is so out of tune with the traditional gold-plated lie of our culture that it seems there is no more anti-Soviet and non-conformist reading, no more unacceptable author, no more inappropriate discourse’, he said in a radio interview a decade later.
While Dugin was exploring the surreal and the spiritual, Russia’s intellectual class was dabbling in the same currents en masse, though in a less extreme manner. Evgeny Nikiforov, a friend of Dugin’s in the 1980s, reminisced in an interview with me about the creative journey of the intelligentsia: ‘First, we all learnt yoga, then we studied Sanskrit, then we read the New Testament. It was all the same to us at the time. Only later did we become spiritually mature. No one had the first clue. The KGB even thought karate was a religion.’
The Yuzhinsky circle was fascinated by anything esoteric, occult, mysticaclass="underline" from meditation to theosophy to black magic. One major focus of its spiritual studies was a philosophy known as ‘traditionalism’, founded in the first half of the twentieth century by French Sufi mystic René Guénon. He taught that all world religions were the outward expression of a single esoteric core – a single metaphysics that came to mankind via divine revelation. Traditionalists believed that the modern world was a profane creation, and sought to rediscover the divine centre, the content of the initial revelation, which, they believed, continues to echo through the teaching of mystical religions the world over, principally eastern ones, such as Islamic Sufism and Zen Buddhism. They did so through the study of eastern mystical religions, through meditation and by studying traditional thought, such as pagan myths and occult numerology.
Traditionalism and other esoteric studies have always had a reputation for fascism, and vice versa: the Nazi party grew out of the occultist Thule Society, launched in 1918. Guénon’s most illustrious disciple, Baron Julius Evola, a monocled Italian aristocrat, eventually joined the Italian fascist movement and worked briefly for the SS, later becoming a major inspiration for postwar right-wing terror groups in Italy. Due to an apparent oversight by a librarian at the Lenin Library, the Yuzhinsky circle had discovered the books of Evola in the general reading section sometime after the Cuban missile crisis.10 ‘They clearly belonged in the restricted section’, joked Dugin, who was so profoundly intrigued by Evola that he learned Italian just so that he could translate his 1961 book Ride the Tiger into Russian samizdat.
For traditionalists, separation from the profane world is prized, and everything bourgeois is anathematized. Evola believed that mankind is living in the Kali Yuga, a dark age of unleashed materialistic appetites, spiritual oblivion and organized deviancy. To counter this and summon a primordial rebirth, Evola presented his world of the spiritual and the divine. He was a proponent of rigidly hierarchical political life, and he divided humanity into ‘castes’ which determined one’s essential function in society. His approach to ‘spiritual racism’ was endorsed by none other than Mussolini in 1941, and he believed that war was a form of therapy, leading mankind into a higher form of spiritual existence. According to Franco Ferraresi, a top Italian scholar of the extreme right, ‘Evola’s thought can be considered one of the most radically and consistently antiegalitarian, antiliberal, antidemocratic, and antipopular systems in the twentieth century.’11
The Yuzhinsky group, at least what was left of it under Golovin’s tutelage, also dabbled in fascist kitsch: in addition to the posters of Hitler and the odd ‘Roman salute’, they sang songs lionizing the SS. Dudinsky committed some of these to memory, and he allowed me to record them in his Moscow flat one day, over honeyed tea and surrounded by his avant-garde paintings. One goes:
Others wrote overtly fascistic books, such as Dzhemal’s Orientation to the North, published in samizdat form in 1979. They copied and translated what they could find of writings by Europe’s extreme right. Like other groups of dissidents, they learned what they could of like-minded movements abroad, treating the Western writings on their chosen field with special reverence. Terrorism by Europe’s extreme right – including some of Evola’s followers – was reaching fever pitch in 1980. That summer and autumn, a series of bombings and massacres in a Bologna train station, a Parisian synagogue and Munich’s Oktoberfest heralded the rebirth of the extreme right as a lethal political power on the continent.
Dugin, whose youthful rebellion seemed to be leading him further and further towards nakedly fascistic politics, was also by this stage clearly the most capable intellectual of the entire group. His interest in Evola evolved naturally from his dabbling in the occult, from his comrades’ interest in Guénon and mysticism. It is hard to overstate the hunger for new ideas in the stultifying atmosphere of official censorship. Anything which had the hint of the banned, the forbidden, automatically had cachet. Even if the ban was for perfectly sensible reasons – as in the case of Evola – the label only increased the hunger to read it. Evola was the channel for Dugin, Dzhemal and others to follow their occult musings and youthful rebellions into politics.
Dugin’s membership of these dissident societies meant – at that time at least – that he would never get a real job on a respectable newspaper or be published in one of the wide distribution ‘thick journals’. He began to come to the attention of the KGB and the police for his regular attendance at sessions. To make ends meet, he made do with a variety of odd jobs, like washing windows, cleaning streets and doing construction work on country houses outside Moscow. In the evenings he read voraciously, learned to speak Italian, German, French and English, played the guitar and wrote songs.