Dugin travelled extensively in Europe. He spoke at a colloquium organized by de Benoist, and appeared on Spanish TV and at various conferences. In 1992 he would ultimately invite his new cohort of European far-rightists to Moscow, where they met some of Dugin’s new patrons, who – they were surprised to realize – included quite a few military men. As Dugin told me in a 2005 interview:
I absorbed this New Right model that resonated with Eurasianism very clearly. And it was enriching, with new names, new authors, new ideas. This was a fundamental upgrade, of conceptions, ideas, an update of the concept that had been forming in me. I was searching for parallels for this in Russian history and for resonances in Russian political philosophy of what I liked.
He referred to this as ‘a kind of backwards translation’.
By his own account, after seven or eight trips Dugin grew disenchanted with Europe: ‘It’s not that I disliked it. I just gradually understood that there is nothing interesting there, that everything interesting exists in Russia. That in Europe the history is closed. And in Russia history is open.’
‘The Nightingale’
During his first trip to Paris, Dugin had paid a call on a man who would provide a fateful introduction that would change his career.15 Yury Mamleev, founder of the Yuzhinsky literary circle and Dugin’s literary idol, had moved to France following an unsuccessful sojourn at Cornell University in the US, where he had had no better luck finding a publisher than he had in the USSR. The French, however, with more of a taste for the intellectual and metaphysical, gave him the welcome he felt he deserved, and he stayed on in France, writing, until the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In exile, Mamleev had become something of an absentee mentor for Dugin, and the two had exchanged the occasional letter during the 1980s. Dugin arranged to meet Mamleev on his first trip to Paris, and soon after that Mamleev made his first trip to Moscow in 15 years. ‘He was crossing himself at each lamp post, looked glowingly on each Russian face like it was a bright Easter egg’, joked Dugin later.
Mamleev now had a proposal for Dugin. The author had a good friend, a famed Soviet writer, whose close links to the Red Army high command were legendary. The two shared a counterculture background, coming of age in the ‘men of the sixties’ generation, though they had taken diverging paths, with Mamleev’s friend having succumbed to the temptations of the establishment to become a proselytizer and propagandizer of the Soviet military. His name was Alexander Prokhanov.
Throughout emigration, Mamleev had maintained his improbable contact with Prokhanov, whose nickname was ‘The Nightingale of the General Staff’ on account of his close friendship with top Red Army generals. Upon Mamleev’s return, the two renewed their friendship, and Prokhanov shared the details of an interesting project: he had been tasked by Vladimir Karpov, chairman of the USSR Writers’ Union, with organizing a newspaper. The Writers’ Union leadership had lost control of its in-house paper Literaturnaya Gazeta, which was seen by hardliners as being overly liberal and favouring reformist elements. Prokhanov’s newspaper would be a conservative counterweight to Literaturnaya Gazeta, and he needed talented young writers with a nationalist bent. Did Mamleev know of anyone?
Mamleev immediately thought of the young Dugin, and set about recruiting him. ‘You know, Sasha, Prokhanov is one of us’, Mamleev told the sceptical dissident. ‘How so?’ Dugin looked surprised. He believed Prokhanov to be ‘on the other side of the fence’, as he put it – a ‘cadre man’ who served the Soviet system. ‘Sasha, you are mistaken. He’s secretly with us. He is undercover, autonomous.’
Dugin became interested. He was intrigued by Prokhanov’s relationship with the army and the special services, seeing them immediately as a natural constituency for the radical ideas that he was exploring with his new contacts abroad in the European New Right. He went to see Prokhanov, who, it turned out, had the wild hair and spoke in the riffing style of a beatnik poet – not at all what Dugin had been expecting from a mythologizer of state power.
Born in 1938, Prokhanov had trained as a rocket scientist. But like many of his fellow ‘children of the sixties’ had been bitten by the Romantic bug and had left a comfortable position at his institute to work as a forester, observing nature and ‘the pagan cycle of life’, as he put it. He had come to nationalism by way of the quaint nostalgia of the village prose movement. But gradually Prokhanov began to be entranced with Soviet power. He himself says his epiphany came when he, a rookie journalist on Literaturnaya Gazeta, was sent in 1969 to cover the Sino-Soviet war. Following the March Soviet offensive on Damansky Island, he witnessed the grieving mothers of the dead Soviet soldiers, and wrote movingly about the scene, weaving elements of folklore and his knowledge of village tradition and slang into his writing. It was a sensation at the paper and catapulted Prokhanov immediately to its top ranks.
‘The feeling that the country stood on the verge of war with China, the sight of the dead, the sight of these war machines which groaned and rumbled, made me understand that the state is the highest of values. Thus began my transformation into a statist’, he told TV interviewer Vladimir Pozner in 2013.16
It also got him noticed by the Red Army who saw the makings of a gifted propagandist. Over the next two decades, Prokhanov was taken under the Red Army’s General Staff, and made his name reporting on the Cold War from a front-row seat. He made over a dozen trips to Afghanistan, covering the bloody decade-long Soviet campaign there. He went several times to the front lines of confrontation between the USSR and the West: Nicaragua, Mozambique, Cambodia, Angola.
By the 1980s, he had already acquired his nickname of ‘Nightingale’ on account of his links to top Soviet generals and his gift of extolling their virtues. He spent much of the 1980s attached to the 40th Army fighting in Afghanistan, and in 1982 wrote The Tree in the Centre of Kabul, which is to this day perhaps his best recognized and most praised work. The same year, largely with the backing of the Red Army, Prokhanov won the Komsomol Literature Prize, one of the most important literary prizes in the Soviet Union, and in 1985 he was made a secretary of the Russian Writers’ Union.
In 1987, Prokhanov emerged as one of the leading figures in the conservative counterattack on the Gorbachevite reformers. At a speech to the Eighth Congress of the USSR Writers’ Union in April of that year, he delivered a blistering rebuttal to the proponents of political liberalization, accusing them of copying the West: ‘such copying deprives us of our sovereign path and gives birth to an inferiority complex’.17
Prokhanov catered to the needs of his patrons in the military and security forces, and as they were drawn into the perestroika debates over reform, so was he. He became a central figure in an alliance between the military and nationalist intellectuals which began in the mid-1970s but became more active as the USSR’s ideological wheels began to wobble in the late 1980s.
While the army had always been the most ideologized of the Soviet institutions, tension between the army and the political masters in the Kremlin was building through the late 1980s and early 1990s due to a string of fundamental disagreements, miscommunications, tragic mistakes and attempts to dodge responsibility, which led to greater and greater disillusionment in the officer corps. The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan had brought the Red Army’s prestige to an all-time low, while feeding a sense among the top brass that they were being made to carry the can for a bankrupt and rudderless Kremlin. This frustration was fed by two horrific atrocities which were covered up and blamed on the field commanders. In 1989, Red Army paratroopers doing crowd control in Tbilisi lost control of a demonstration, ‘kettling’ demonstrators aggressively and attacking some with batons and shovels. This resulted in 21 deaths. In January 1991, 15 died when KGB commandos stormed the Lithuanian parliament and TV centre, which had been taken over by protesters. After both of these atrocities, when responsibility had to be assigned for the civilian death toll, the politicians disavowed all responsibility, pinning the blame solely on the army commanders, who insisted they had been given verbal orders. But without anything in writing, these objections were ignored.