That Russia had a ‘deep state’ around August 1991 is very clear; but it is not so clear what became of it following the failure of the coup. Dugin’s further career is evidence of a continuation of such a subterranean organization, a conspiracy of sorts. However, any ‘deep state’ in Russia circa 1992 would have had very little consensus about what it sought to achieve. Communism enjoyed zero prestige as an idea, while Russian nationalism, the other competitor in the field of opposition ideologies, had just led to the dissolution of the USSR. Any attempt to recreate the Soviet Empire would have stumbled at the first hurdle – thus the question posed by Yazov: Why, and in whose name?
This ideological vacuum was what created work for public intellectuals like Dugin and Prokhanov, both of whom had numerous connections to the national security bureaucracy. Prokhanov secured Dugin a rather interesting teaching credential – a lectureship at what was formerly the Soviet (now Russian) Academy of the General Staff. This was led by a good friend of Prokhanov’s, General Igor Rodionov, who from 1985 to 1986 had led the Soviet 40th Army in Afghanistan, where indeed the two had met.
With Rodionov’s permission, Dugin joined the Academy as an adjunct professor, and began as a guest lecturer in the department of strategy, under General Nikolay Klokotov. ‘This was all new’, Rodionov told me when I invited him over to the Financial Times offices in Moscow to talk about his days at the Academy. Over the space of an hour and a half, the tale unfolded:
In the Soviet Union hardly anyone studied geopolitics. This type of analysis was done only in the central committee. Under the [Communist Party] everything else was forbidden, prohibited. You could only talk about it whispering in the kitchen with a glass of vodka with friends a little bit. And if the special services found out they would take measures. Then, suddenly, we had this freedom to say what we wanted.
The Academy was the premier officer-training establishment for the Soviet (now Russian) army, but for Rodionov it had been a humiliating demotion. At the height of his career he had been commander of the 40th Army in Afghanistan, and then commander of the entire Transcaucasian military district. But in April 1989 came his professional downfall. On his orders, Soviet paratroopers attacked a pro-democracy demonstration in Tbilisi, Georgia. Twenty-one people were killed in a stampede. Most died of suffocation, though some were killed by shovels and baton blows from the soldiers. The incident was hung around Rodionov’s neck: ‘No one wanted to take responsibility that they gave me the order, they needed a scapegoat, and it was me.’38
Rodionov had little respect for politicians during his career, and even less now that he had, in his prime years, been assigned to command the Academy, a traditional dumping ground for those who had fallen out of favour. He had commanded entire armies in the field as a general; now he was a teacher, a professor. It was a humiliation. His bitterness at this betrayal by the politicians was combined with the existential crisis that the fall of the Soviet Union created for him and his fellow officers.
The Academy thus became a hive of opposition to the government of Boris Yeltsin and liberal reformers – a bastion of hardcore reactionary zeal that supported Dugin’s work and nourished him with strategic insights, while he fed the generals with the new thinking of the European extreme right. That said, Rodionov never totally burned his bridges with the establishment and was appointed defence minister by Yeltsin in 1996–97. It was in the Academy that the first ideological experimentation began between hardcore right-wing fanatics and the Russian establishment. Dugin and Prokhanov began a project to construct a hybrid ideology from the mutually contradictory elements of the two losing ideologies, nationalism and communism. They replaced the outdated vocabulary of monarchism and orthodoxy with new terms and phrases taken straight from the pages of Dugin’s primers on geopolitics. ‘Eurasia’ began to take shape – a mix of Gumilev’s theories and Golovin’s alcohol-fuelled beatnikism with a dash of Russian fascism thrown in for good measure.
‘Prokhanov opened the road for me’, said Dugin in a 2005 interview. Within the space of a vertiginous three years he had gone from being a maladjusted fringe radical and member of a banned political organization to lecturing at the heart of the former USSR’s security establishment, with (presumably) security clearance. His was a position that, just months previously, a dissident such as himself could never have hoped to obtain, and the notion of which would have been preposterous: ‘I had no social status, it was incredible to think that they saw me as an equal, or could learn something from me.’ Dugin’s discussions with the generals opened up vistas for him. With the collapse of communism and official ideology, ‘They were utterly lost, they had no concept of the enemy; they needed to know who the enemy was.’
It would have been hard to find more fitting evidence of the end of politics as he knew it, thought de Benoist at the time. Here he was, the leading ideologue of one of Europe’s most right-wing political organizations, walking in to meet the commanders of the Red Army.
It was the end of March 1992. A few weeks earlier he had received an invitation from his acquaintance Dugin: come to Moscow and meet some people. There might be something to talk about. A few weeks after the invitation, de Benoist received a paid air ticket in the mail, then a visa.
When he arrived in Moscow he was met at the airport by an official government car, a black Volga sedan with curtains over the windows. It drove him into the city and on to the Hotel Ukraine, a spired cathedral of a building overlooking the river and what was then the new Russian parliament building on the other side – the White House.
The next morning, the black Volga picked him up at the hotel and sped through downtown Moscow, past the brooding spires of the Kremlin, and zipping down the centre lane of the broad Vernadsky Prospekt, out to the western outskirts of the city and to a palatial white-painted complex: the Frunze Academy of the General Staff. Dugin met de Benoist as he emerged from the car. He explained that he was a lecturer at the Academy, whose purpose it was to train Soviet officers ranked colonel and above in strategy and to prepare them for command of entire divisions or for staff positions in the high command (or Genstab) itself. Inside the Academy, the halls were dimly lit. Dugin stopped by the generals’ offices, one by one. And each general joined the procession heading for a conference room. There were seven generals in all, led by Lieutenant General Nikolay Klokotov, head of the department of strategy.
It dawned on de Benoist that in order to lecture at the academy, security clearance, background checks and high-level connections were all required. If Dugin were a simple dilettante, he would not even be permitted in the Academy’s car park. His association with the generals had to be more than just a casual one.
As they filed into a conference room for tea and cakes and a chat, it occurred to de Benoist that the generals looked ‘like orphans’. The state they had spent their lives defending had disappeared overnight, without a shot being fired, and was mourned by no one. Fifteen former republics – lands which these men’s ancestors, generals of the Russian Empire, had added to Russia and paid for in blood – had declared themselves independent. Prices had gone through the roof; starvation was imminent and the economy was in a state of total collapse.