Communism, in other words, was a profoundly Russian idea, whose philosophical roots went deep in Russian soil. Kurginyan’s project, while it grabbed the imagination of some of the ruling elite, nonetheless failed because they could not hold onto power. A copy of Post-Perestroika was discovered on Kryuchkov’s desk on 22 August 1991, the day he was arrested following the abortive three-day coup attempt by hardliners. In fact, Kurginyan’s connection to the KGB may have been more than casual; in 2014, while filming a webcast with the governor of Donetsk People’s Republic, Pavel Gubarev, he referred to himself an ‘officer’: ‘You say to me, an officer, that you know better than I what the situation is?’ he retorted, giving Gubarev a dressing-down. It may have been an inadvertent slip of the tongue, but, given Kurginyan’s association with the senior KGB leadership, it would surprise no one if that referred to an actual military rank.
The pamphlet’s real influence is debatable – Kurginyan says that Kryuchkov assured him after his arrest that he had not put the copy of Post-Perestroika on his desk where it was photographed following his arrest. It was a set-up, according to Kurginyan, ‘to discredit me. To take me out of the equation.’
Given the enthusiasm of the KGB and an element of the central committee for programmes of ideological renewal and authoritarian alternatives to communism, Dugin’s projects following his departure from Pamyat deserve some scrutiny. It was the era in which, as we have seen, Gumilev’s histories were achieving monumental popularity, and the idea of ‘Eurasia’ was in the air, helped by the interventions of senior figures in the Communist Party such as Gumilev’s patron Anatoly Lukyanov, the chairman of the Supreme Soviet.
Eurasianism, as has been discussed, was one of several authoritarian ideological projects. In the chaos enveloping the elite, it was regarded by some hardliners in the regime as an alternative both to an exhausted official metaphysics of socialism, and to the rapidly encroaching ideas of liberal democracy.
In 1990, the central committee agreed to fund a journal known as Continent Russia. Dugin put this together in partnership with his comrade Igor Dudinsky, who had since joined Znamya, the central committee’s in-house journal, and who fronted the endeavour. A lacklustre project devoted to Russian civilization and Eurasia, it never achieved much success – just a few issues appear to have been produced. According to Dudinsky:
They were in so much agony, the Central Committee. They were looking for any sort of alternative, any idea. They knew they were finished. They were willing to work with anyone, cooperate with anyone. Anything was okay, so long as it allowed them to stay in power… They wanted to stay in power at any price, but they were too conservative. Any initiative just drowned in their general backwardness, in the bureaucracy. They couldn’t do anything. These issues of Continent Russia just sat on the shelf and got dusty.
More interesting were two books published by Dugin the previous year, with curiously large print runs – 100,000 each, according to him. The first was a series of essays entitled The Way of the Absolute. It was devoted to the traditionalist theories of Julius Evola, who taught that the authoritarian state should be based on a ‘spiritual aristocracy’, whose fitness to lead was based on the values of elitism and spiritual authority. The second, The Metaphysics of the Gospel, was based around placing the traditionalism of Guénon and Evola in the context of the Orthodox Christian faith. Dugin called for the restoration of a medieval Byzantine social hierarchy, served by elite priest and warrior castes, in a Church–state ‘symphony’, a ‘synthesis and acme of the adequate combination of priestly and warrior principles’. Russia, wrote Dugin, is the heir to the Byzantine Empire, which provided a ‘unique synthesis of the kingdom of god and the earthly kingdom, having become that providential thousand year kingdom’.21 Both books were full of esotericism, occult numerology and very tendentious scholarship. And both books – like Kurginyan’s project – harked back to the turn-of-the-century era of Russian philosophy, when theology and philosophy, the occult, aesthetics and poetry blended seamlessly in the work of Russia’s greatest thinkers.
As Dugin himself put it in a history of the period: ‘The model of Soviet self-knowledge had broken… The society had lost its orientation. Everyone understood the necessity of change, but this feeling was vague and no one knew what direction it would come from.’22 Occult movements, spiritualism, new metaphysics, conspiracy theories, anti-Semitism, nationalism, theosophy – all found their feet in the new zeitgeist. Russia had already in the twentieth century shown itself uniquely susceptible to being carried away by ideology. Now the door was once again thrown wide open.
These two books are important for another reason. According to Dugin, the huge print runs and sales of the books (which he has trouble explaining) provided enough revenue to fund several very curious trips to Western Europe from 1990 to 1992, when he met far-right activists and thinkers whose ideas he eagerly imported to Russia. He thus became, in the words of Eduard Limonov, ‘the St Cyril and Methodius of fascism’. At the time, travelling to Europe was still prohibitively expensive, even disregarding the issue of Dugin’s dissident status and the difficulty of getting a foreign travel passport.
Whether Dugin acted on his own, as a lone intellectual entrepreneur, or whether he had help from unseen hands is an interesting, though ultimately futile mystery. Either way, the ideas he brought back from Europe – of geopolitics and other far-right ideas – would revolutionize Russian politics over the next two decades. Perhaps it was the project of a solitary romantic. But probably more likely it was done with help from elements of the state that had an established track record, at precisely this time, of sponsoring right-wing ideological experiments.
Acquaintances are cautious about corroborating Dugin’s version of his travels. Sergey Zhigalkin, for example, who published most of Evgeny Golovin’s books and who has detailed knowledge of that segment of the publishing market (esoteric mysticism), doubts that Dugin made much money from his books.
However, Dugin’s recollection, voiced in a 2005 interview with me, is that:
Back then, books that are now published in 1,000 or 2,000 copies, we issued in 100,000 copies. There was a boom. Some workers were buying, though it is not clear why they needed these books. We issued several editions, earned some money and went off to Paris.
CHAPTER NINE
PARIS 1990
Before being introduced to Alexander Dugin in June 1990, the French writer Alain de Benoist had never really gone out of his way to meet Russians, and they had never really gone out of their way to meet him. With the exception of the occasional long-time émigré, he had never really socialized with anyone from Eastern Europe, and had only once set foot in the Eastern bloc when attending a book fair in Leipzig a few years previously. It wasn’t that de Benoist didn’t like Russians; it just sort of went with his job. De Benoist’s aristocratic countenance, scraggly beard and wire-rimmed glasses had for two decades been the leading intellectual inspiration for one of the most right-wing movements on the continent, the French Nouvelle Droite. Until that year, hanging out with Russians was not what European radical conservatives did.
But 1990 was a big year for political philosophers like him who were busy pronouncing dramatically on the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact only a few months before. Now that ‘right’ and ‘left’, the reliable geostationary indicators of public life on the continent, had lost their traditional significance, many other barriers were coming down as well.