Kryuchkov, for his part, accused Yakovlev in his own 2003 memoirs of being an agent of the Western intelligence services.18
Yakovlev said that Kryuchkov oversaw the rear-guard action by hardliners aimed at averting the collapse of the system. It was around this time that a number of oddly named and conceived political projects were started, helped by what Yakovlev called ‘the “yesterday forever” forces grouped around Kryuchkov and a group of military and party fundamentalists frantically trying to stop the collapse of the regime, to save their regime… They managed to do some things, but by far not everything they tried worked.’19
Some would say that Pamyat was in fact the first such project, originally designed to control the democratic process. Had it not been led so erratically by an obvious sociopath, Pamyat could ultimately have been registered as an independent political party. Instead, this honour went to its successor, another obvious creation of the central committee with just as nationalist a bent. Known as the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), it was neither liberal nor democratic.
Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the LDPR, was Vasilyev’s political heir apparent. He has become one of Russia’s most successful opposition politicians, although the LDPR has a suspicious track record of voting with the Kremlin on major issues. Zhirinovsky’s political persona is arguably copied from none other than Vasilyev: Dugin, an associate of both men, insists that Zhirinovsky used to listen to tapes of Vasilyev’s speeches and learned his trademark demagogic style from him. The enfant terrible of Russian politics, Zhirinovsky routinely gets into fist-fights with political opponents. He has at various times exhorted Russian soldiers to ‘wash their boots in the Indian Ocean’; has demanded the return of Alaska from the United States; and has threatened to spread nuclear waste to the newly independent Baltic states using gigantic fans.
But whereas Vasilyev appears to have been truly crazy, Zhirinovsky is a talented impersonator whose insanity is purely for public consumption. In private conversations he is composed, analytical and thoroughly sober. He first came to national attention in 1991 by taking third place in the Russian Federation’s presidential elections. Running against Yeltsin, he amassed 6.2 million votes – an astounding number given his lack of name recognition. At one point in the 1990s, the LDPR controlled a quarter of parliament.
Zhirinovsky’s success was testament to his skill as a politician, but also to the fact that the fortunes of the nationalist hardliners were attributable to help from unseen hands (a phenomenon first witnessed in the case of Pamyat). Zhirinovsky, for example, is widely rumoured to have been be a KGB officer – in fact, he was expelled from Turkey for espionage in 1970. Though he strenuously denies any hidden help from the KGB, he was nonetheless always the subject of rumours about the real source of his success.
Registered with suspicious haste in 1991, the LDPR was the first political party to be created following the legalization of political parties, and benefited from numerous interventions by senior bureaucrats: Vitaly Koroticha, at the time editor of the popular weekly magazine Ogonek, tells the story of how one day in 1990, following the creation of the LDPR, Vladimir Sevruk, deputy chief of the propaganda department of the central committee, ‘bombarded’ him to run an interview with Zhirinovsky: ‘You don’t like it that we don’t have a multiparty system. Why don’t you raise him on your shield?’
More evidence of Communist Party help for Zhirinovsky came when Yakovlev published his memoirs in 2005. In them, he publicly accused the LDPR of being a creation of the Communist Party central committee, and specifically of Vladimir Kryuchkov, chairman of the KGB. Yakovlev included a direct quote from a document providing the initial LDPR funding, an interest-free loan of 3 million roubles of Communist Party money to a firm managed by Zhirinovsky’s deputy at the time, Andrey Zavidiya, who would run as Zhirinovsky’s vice-president in 1991.
The LDPR was probably the most successful of several joint Communist Party–KGB political projects to anticipate and attempt to control political reform. Some of these, like the LDPR, were designed to win elections; others were designed to avoid them.
Yet another clique of top Communist Party officials who also appear to have had the blessing of Kryuchkov attempted to salvage the legitimacy of the Communist Party by refurbishing the actual ideology of communism. This was begun in 1987 by Moscow Communist Party boss (and later Politburo member) Yury Prokofyev, who patronized the creation of something known as the Experimental Creative Centre, headed by a moon-faced former rocket scientist and theatre director named Sergey Kurginyan. Under Prokofyev’s patronage, Kurginyan says that he hired hundreds of specialists, armed with computers and the latest technology, aimed at dreaming up a new Soviet ideology. ‘We became the main think tank of the government’, Kurginyan told me, with only mild exaggeration. After Prokofyev succeeded to the Politburo, the project was championed by Valentin Pavlov, one of the ring-leaders of the doomed 1991 coup attempt. The 93-page product of the Centre was a pamphlet entitled ‘Post-Perestroika’ and was a blueprint for rolling back liberal reforms and replacing communist orthodoxy with something a great deal weirder.
‘Post-perestroika’ was a programme for ideological and spiritual renewal following the period of upheaval brought on by Gorbachev’s reforms. It imbued secular communism with a theological meaning: Kurginyan proposed a ‘Cosmic philosophical religious social idea’ based on a ‘red religion’. The Soviet economy would be transformed from ministries into state corporations, pushing the boundaries of progress, while Soviet managers were to become ‘knights and priests of the Red faith’.20 It was a bald attempt by conservatives within the party to transform communist ideology into something resembling a fusion of communism, nationalism and Orthodox Christianity, with a dash of something known as ‘Cosmism’.
It was as though Kurginyan had turned the clock back to an earlier period, to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century – the maximalist era of Russian philosophy, when science merged with Christian theology and the mystical occult. In his study Post-Perestroika Kurginyan riffed on the mystical theology of Vladimir Solovyev, who taught that humanity strove for ‘Godmanhood’, a semi-divine state. He alluded to Vladimir Vernadsky, the biologist who had inspired Lev Gumilev and had proposed the unification of all knowledge in the ‘noosphere’. But Kurginyan found most of his inspiration in the theories of Nikolay Fedorov, a nineteenth-century librarian whose only known work, published posthumously and called Philosophy of the Common Task, was devoted to the idea that mankind should devote all its resources to the resurrection of dead ancestors from particles of cosmic dust, after which, lacking space on earth, mankind would have to develop space travel in order to colonize other planets.
While Fedorov is not mentioned by name in Post-Perestroika, Kurginyan uses the title of his programme – ‘Common Task’ – capitalized four times in the pamphlet. His aim, as he described it, was: ‘Accepting a communist ideology and melding it into the metaphysics of the Common Task.’
Kurginyan, who has in the past decade reinvented himself as a successful TV talk-show debater, admits that Fedorov was the main inspiration for the project of ‘post-perestroika’. Fedorov, he says, symbolized a return to a more expansive era of philosophy, rooted in the nineteenth century: ‘I had to demonstrate the Russian tradition, to explain that communism in Russia was not accidental, and had deep metaphysical roots in this country.’