Less than a year previously, army tanks had roared into downtown Moscow to intervene in the midst of the coup attempt. Maybe they sensed that in another year, in October 1993, they would be drawn into the midst of another constitutional crisis. The skeletal hand of civil war beckoned.
The nation’s mighty officer corps had defeated Hitler and Napoleon. But it now succumbed to a new enemy which no amount of battlefield prowess or hard power could defeat. The enemy it faced, in other words, was the lack of an enemy – a problem adeptly diagnosed by de Benoist. ‘All strategic conceptions are based on the understanding of a main enemy. Today, who is your enemy?’ asked de Benoist, according to a transcript published by Dugin in the first issue of Elements magazine. ‘One must answer indirectly, without, so to speak, naming names’, responded Klokotov. ‘If a state pretends to a certain role in world affairs, it must define itself in terms of military policy. And this policy must be based on who it will likely meet on the battlefield. Any state intending a leadership role must orient itself against the strongest element.’
Dugin sat quietly, translating the entire exchange from and into French. Communism had disappeared. Other empires had crumbled – the British, the Ottoman, the Austro-Hungarian – but Russia, they believed, would not succumb to this logic. Russia had not been defeated by history, but was rather temporarily indisposed. It simply needed some time and space to reassert itself. General Klokotov went on:
Historical experience gives us hope. The entire history of Russia is made up of profound crises, marked by the dispersal of peoples and territories which it has traditionally federalized. However, the centralizing forces have always proven to be the strongest… the imperial constants always reappear.
The meeting was the beginning of a channel for New Right ideas to find their way into Russia’s mainstream. Just as in Germany in the 1930s, the turmoil and economic chaos of Russia’s ‘Weimar Era’ provided fertile ground for narratives of cultural humiliation and victimization by a global elite, as well as of identity, national purity, anti-liberalism and geopolitics – all standard tropes of Europe’s extreme right.39
De Benoist and several other New Right figures, such as Robert Steuckers and Jean-François Thiriart, came on various trips arranged by Dugin and Prokhanov to meet army generals and politicians representing the vanquished nationalist and communist political extremes. Dugin’s geopolitics, borrowed from the New Right, would simply supplement and mould the already highly developed nationalist consciousness of the army.
From 1992 until 1995, Dugin held fortnightly lectures at the General Staff Academy under Rodionov’s auspices. ‘We had a lot of such meetings at the Academy’, said Rodionov, who added that he was often called into the office of Defence Minister Evgeny Shaposhnikov to account for why he had invited hardline ultra-nationalists, such as Vladimir Zhirinovsky and Dugin. However, there was little anyone could do about it. The state was in chaos, and random lectures on political philosophy were not the greatest threat facing the Russian army, which had to pay salaries, secure nuclear stockpiles and vacate entire countries.
Rodionov said that the idea of teaching political theory was frowned upon, but his own collision with big politics had taught him that his soldiers should have a grounding in the subject: ‘I had already commanded a military district, I felt it was my responsibility to teach the officers not just to understand strategy, but also to understand what is going on in the state, and what awaits us in the future.’
Dugin says he wasn’t paid a salary – or given an ID badge, as he recalls. Instead, he was picked up for his lectures and dropped off home again in military cars. After the lectures they would all go out to eat and drink, staying up late into the night discussing matters. These meetings would plant the seed of European extreme-right theory in the fertile ground of Russia’s military nomenklatura, shorn of its status and privilege, and there it began to germinate.
Slowly, Dugin’s teaching materials and notes, along with the suggestions of his audience, took shape as a textbook. It was assigned during the 1993/94 academic year, and would later be published as the blockbuster Foundations of Geopolitics in 1997. ‘Geopolitics, it filled the vacuum of their strategic thinking’, Dugin told me.
It was a kind of psychotherapy for them… Imagine the shock they were feeling: they had always been told the US is our enemy. Suddenly some democrats come to power, and they say, no, the US is our friend. Because there is no ideology. They were all confused. Their job is to aim missiles and they need to be clear… This was once an elite caste, responsible for huge institutes, thousands and thousands of warheads. And suddenly, these democrats come and take away everything from this hugely respected caste. And nobody offers them anything. I come to them and say, ‘America is our enemy, we must aim our missiles at them’, and they say ‘Yes that is correct.’ And I explained why.
It is today not entirely clear who financed the trips by the European Nouvelle Droite to Russia, or with what goal. Dugin, asked about this in 2005, said some associates of Prokhanov’s (whom he described as ‘bandits’ and declined to name) put up the money. Their idea, he said, was to ‘upgrade their previous, paradigmatical strategic thinking… This is something they needed absolutely, and that is why they were willing to disregard the total absence of social status in my case.’
It was out of these meetings that the first use of the term ‘Eurasianism’, along with the pervasive terminology of geopolitics, began to creep into the Russian mainstream. Twenty years before they were adopted by the Kremlin under Putin as a more or less official ideology, they began life in a series of discussions with the European right.
According to transcripts published in The Day, Elements and Steuckers’ own Vouloir (based on The Day transcript), during a later meeting with Russian parliamentarians de Benoist repeatedly called for a Eurasian alliance ‘on the level of culture, economy, and possibly military strategic as both necessary and desirable’.40 Steuckers, who had also journeyed to Moscow for some of the meetings, said, according to the same transcript: ‘We are condemned to continental alliance, just as we are condemned, in the geopolitical sense, to see in the United States a common enemy.’ It is striking the way in which the vocabulary and concepts that were current in the New Right began to seep into the Russian political opposition.
De Benoist also once met Gennady Zyuganov, at the time a rising star within the reformed Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), the provincial rump of the banned Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), which was to become the perennially second most powerful party in national politics, after a succession of official Kremlin-backed parties. When Zyuganov succeeded as chairman of the KPRF, he proceeded to retool the party with new nationalist messages that had little in common with an orthodox socialist message, and were strikingly similar to the ‘radical centre’ theories that Dugin says he imbibed from the European New Right (but which de Benoist insists he is not responsible for).
As we have seen, the Frenchman is dismissive about the influence his theories had – channelled via Dugin and Prokhanov – on Russian politics. ‘I cannot take responsibility for the representation of my writings in a language I don’t understand’, he has said. He is seemingly suspicious that some of his words have been translated inaccurately or invented – something that seems obvious in light of Dugin’s version, compared to his own.