It was only a matter of time before the group would attract serious attention from the KGB. It happened to Dugin first. In 1983 a friend of Dudinsky’s entrusted Dugin with an archive of writings by Yury Mamleev. That December, as Hans Sievers, he gave a guitar concert for about 30 people in the Moscow art studio of Gennady Dobrov. At it he sang his most famous hit, ‘Fuck the Damned Sovdep’. Not long afterwards, as Dugin recalls, a group of plainclothes KGB officers appeared at the door of his family’s flat. His mother woke him up and he was taken away, while another group searched the flat and confiscated the archive. Both Dudinsky and Zhigalkin say that they suspect Dugin’s father was behind the denunciation and the search. ‘He probably thought things had gone far enough’, said Zhigalkin, whose wife, an artist, had also been interrogated by the KGB. Such encounters were not as terrifying as they had been in the 1930s, when death or imprisonment was almost certain. But even so, said Zhigalkin, ‘It took all day, they shine a light in your face and they say they’ll send you to Siberia. It really was quite unpleasant.’
The KGB men hustled Dugin out of a car and up a short flight of stairs at the back entrance to the Lubyanka, the feared headquarters of the KGB. Inside, the lights were on, offices were buzzing and it was a normal workday – for an organization that worked mainly at night. Dugin, with his goatee beard and hipster clothes, was led to a small interrogation room with a table, three chairs and a lamp. On the table was a folder – the largely handwritten archive of Mamleev’s work.
The interrogator’s tired, practised voice bade him sit, and the lamp was shone in Dugin’s face: as in the movies, the interrogator’s face hovered just on the periphery of the blinding light, bobbing and weaving, disorienting him. ‘What are you, some sort of idiot?’ the interrogator asked him. ‘For what are you singing about the “end of the Sovdep”? The USSR will stand forever, it’s an eternal reality. Look at our faces. And who are you, with your guitar and your hippy appearance.’12 During the interrogation, Dugin gave away the identity of the man who had entrusted the Mamleev archive to him. The man was fired from his job in the Ministry of Information and went on to become a lift operator, though Dudinsky says that he was ‘very grateful’ that he was forced to give up his ‘false life’. The KGB also interviewed Dugin’s mother, and sometime thereafter his father was transferred from the GRU to the customs service – according to Dugin, a severe demotion of status for the family. Dugin’s father was furious, and the two men never spoke after that.
Following the incident, Dugin was reduced to menial jobs in order to make a living. With such a stain on his record he had virtually no chance of a normal life in the USSR. He swept streets, washed windows, and all the while translated, learned foreign languages, read and plunged through the looking glass deeper into the Moscow bohemia.
Many members of the mystical underground never recovered. Some committed suicide, while others ‘just sort of went insane. Their heads were full of porridge’, according to Dudinsky. For some it was inevitable that the flirtation with fascist symbols, songs and Nazi paraphernalia would become more than just a harmless prank, a teen rebellion. Together with Dzhemal, Dugin began to dabble more and more in the politics of the perestroika era. ‘Those two, they wanted power. They were looking for any sort of elevator to the top, and they found it in fascism’, said Dudinsky.
Their nineteenth-century dilettante forebears had dipped into the well of European philosophy with disastrous consequences: Pan-Slavism, the so-called ‘Black Hundreds’ movements of Russian fascism, and finally Bolshevism. Now, a generation’s search for truth would have similarly dire consequences: the glasnost generation created not just democracy and a liberal dream, but raised some of the same monsters as before.
In 1986, Evgeny Nikiforov, a friend of Dugin’s and Golovin’s who also dabbled in the esoteric, introduced Dugin and Dzhemal to Dmitry Vasilyev, leader of an organization known as Pamyat.
Pamyat had actually begun in 1979 as an offshoot of VOOPIK. It was devoted to architectural restoration and had attracted a harmless intelligentsia following. But Vasilyev effectively took control of the movement during a panel debate held at a Moscow cultural centre in October 1985.13 The evening was dedicated to the restoration of monuments in Moscow, and Vasilyev rattled off a long list of those he blamed for the destruction of so much prominent architecture. Among them were ‘Zionists’. He proceeded to name several prominent Jewish communists, whom he charged to be part of a plot to destroy Russia’s patrimony.
The speech caused a ruckus in the audience, with one prominent poet calling Vasilyev a ‘fascist’ (which probably wasn’t far off the mark). But he emerged from the evening the dominant personality within Pamyat, and consolidated his control over the movement, becoming its secretary later that year. Under Vasilyev’s uneven leadership and demagogic style, Pamyat mutated from a gaggle of intelligentsia curiosities into a crypto-fascist street gang – an agglomeration of football hooligans and middle-class aesthetes like Dugin and Dzhemal. It would also be a sort of boot camp for a new generation of nationalist extremists. ‘It was Pamyat that gave birth to all the other patriotic movements’, said Dugin.
Joining the movement in 1987, Dugin’s erudition was noticed. Though he was only 24, no one else in Pamyat had read the massive amounts about fascism that he had, and his and Dzhemal’s talents were spotted by Vasilyev, who elevated them to the movement’s central board. They wore a uniform of sorts: a black shirt with a leather belt and shoulder strap evoking the feared ‘Black Hundreds’ of the tsarist times.
In turn, Dugin noticed (but was not particularly shocked by) one thing: ‘There were KGB people around all the time.’ Vasilyev was often summoned to the KGB. In itself that is hardly surprising for the leader of an illegal political movement in the Soviet Union. But Dugin believes that Vasilyev’s contacts with the KGB may have amounted to more than simply answering questions; more than the KGB merely monitoring the organization:
I think that somebody in the totalitarian system was responsible for Pamyat’s existence. This is 100 per cent certain. In the central committee of the Communist Party. Who? How? For what purpose? I don’t know. Maybe they were testing the situation. But I am sure that this could not have happened spontaneously. That is, I am sure that people in Pamyat were agents working for the KGB. They just could not have been anything else. Who would have let them exist otherwise?
Zhigalkin expressed similar doubts:
No one had heard of Vasilyev or any of these guys before. We were in the underground, and there, everyone knew each other, or at least knew of each other. Suddenly, these guys appear on the scene out of nowhere, and everything is possible for them. They get a huge profile just like that. It doesn’t just happen by accident. Their newspaper had a circulation of 100,000. How do you do that in the Soviet Union? If we wanted to start a newspaper, we’d have to sell a flat just to finance the first two issues. But they somehow can fund a newspaper with no visible effort.
The ubiquity of the KGB in the underground was something to which even Zhigalkin could testify: the first edition of Dzhemal’s Orientation to the North was published using a KGB Xerox machine. ‘Every Xerox machine in Moscow was monitored’, he said blithely. ‘They simply did it for money.’