In a 1993 interview, de Benoist described a number of ideological divergences with Dugin. After that the two ceased communication for a number of years. ‘I have a lot of reservations about a “Eurasian” construction, which seems to me to be mainly phantasmagorical’, de Benoist told philosopher Pierre-André Taguieff.41 But de Benoist remained one of Dugin’s chief inspirations. And in the words of some mutual acquaintances, the European theories filtered through Dugin were decisive in the ideology of the post-Soviet Communist Party, which was to go on to be the largest and most influential opposition political group in Russia for the next two decades.
Those close to both Zyuganov and Dugin, for example, said that many of Zyuganov’s ideas were originally Dugin’s, and the latter happily takes credit for the ideologically Eurasianist line of the Communist Party, writing: ‘At the critical moment of ideological choice, Zyuganov placed a bet on neo-Eurasianist populism, the main contours of which were described and formulated by myself and my colleagues at The Day newspaper.’42 Dugin’s view is supported by Alexey Poberezkin, chairman of the Spiritual Heritage think tank, which published most of Zyuganov’s books and helped to finance the party.43 Gennady Seleznev, former Duma speaker and Zyuganov’s perpetual rival for power until he was forced out of the party in 2002, says the same.
Thus began the first experiment with what Dugin referred to as ‘National Bolshevism’ (and what came to be known as ‘Red Brown’ ideology in the Russian press): the marriage of communist ideology with hardline nationalism and geopolitics.
CHAPTER TEN
SATAN’S BALL
Moscow’s Central House of Writers is, for both good and bad reasons, one of the most written-about buildings in Russian literature of the twentieth century. Built on leafy Herzen Street (now Bolshaya Nikitskaya) in 1934 by Stalin to house the USSR’s Writers’ Union, membership was a bauble awarded to the loyal, denoting membership of the elite club of the purveyors of official culture.
One of the few proper functioning restaurants in Moscow in hard times, the Central House of Writers (Tsentralny Dom Literatov – TsDL) was endlessly hagiographed by favour-seeking hacks who spun its rather bland official atmosphere as an incubator of literary genius. But it was just as large a bull’s eye for dissident writers and satirists such as Mikhail Bulgakov, who featured it as the ‘House of Griboedov’ in The Master and Margarita (from which the reputation of the building never recovered). The TsDL was the slightly adjusted ‘old, two-storeyed, cream-coloured house’ with an asphalt veranda into which the novel’s poet Ivan Bezdomny bursts, half-crazed having witnessed Satan and a giant pistol-toting housecat decapitate the head of the Writers’ Union, carrying a wedding candle and wearing only his underwear (and causing a major ruckus).
There was a certain symmetrical and slightly demonic surrealism in the air in December 1992 when Prokhanov, chairman of the Russian Writers’ Union, threw a gala dinner there for opposition nationalists. One of these happened to be Eduard Limonov, a wiry, goateed dissident, recently arrived back from exile in France, having decided, according to his own account, ‘that it was time to interfere in history as it was unfolding in Russia’. Another attendee happened to be Dugin, sporting his pudding-bowl skobka haircut (‘à la a young Alexey Tolstoy’, as Limonov recollected). He had clearly been drinking before he arrived.
There, at tables festooned with fine food and endless bottles of liquor, were assembled the beau monde of hardline nationalism in Russia. At one table was Prokhanov. The Day was the nerve centre of the patriotic opposition, the ‘ship of dignity in the midst of an ocean of shamelessness and hyper conformism’, according to Dugin, who called Prokhanov the ‘Russian Don Quixote’ for his continued idealistic loyalty to the lost cause. Across the room sat Zyuganov, the potato-faced chairman of the rejuvenated Communist Party, with whom Dugin was currently feuding, accusing him (justifiably) of stealing his ideas.
By 1992, the ‘Red Brown’ opposition was a pastiche of contradictions: Orthodox monks carrying portraits of Stalin and retired Soviet Army political officers alongside atamans of refounded Cossack troops; appeals to proletarian internationalism vying with the darkest anti-Semitism in the same speeches. New opposition organizations sprang up like mushrooms, mostly on the model of the old ultra-nationalist gang Pamyat. These mainly consisted of a rabid, polyphonic leader, some armbands and a bit of money from who knew where.
The evening featured a host of other nationalist political and cultural figures, such as deputy speaker of the Duma, Sergey Baburin; Stanislav Kunyayev, chief editor of the nationalist ‘thick journal’ Nash Sovremennik; Valentin Rasputin, the acclaimed nationalist author; and the mathematician Igor Shafarevich, author of famous samizdat essays.
Limonov himself was a recent convert to the nationalist cause. A former dissident writer, like Solzhenitsyn he was exiled in the early 1970s. (Or, as he put it: ‘I was detained by the KGB in 1973 and they suggested I emigrate.’) He had lived for years in the US and France before returning to Russia following the collapse of communism. Unlike other exiles who came back to a life of slippers, tea and occasional quotes in the newspaper decrying the state of the country for an audience that barely remembered them, Limonov was determined to make his mark once again.
He had not had the average dissident’s life in the US. He was no Joseph Brodsky or Alexander Solzhenitsyn, retiring to the rural perfection of Vermont. Nor did he stay in the nostalgic lap of the Russian émigré community in Brighton Beach. Instead Limonov took to 1970s America like a fish to water: sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll. Limonov’s world revolved around Manhattan’s Lower East Side – the drugs, the punk scene of the CBGB music club, the Ramones and plenty of heroin. His first and most famous book, It’s Me, Eddie, was completed in New York in 1976 and managed to shock the jaded US literary establishment with the tale of ‘Eddie’, a Russian émigré writer, who (one only hopes) was not based entirely on Limonov himself. Solzhenitsyn famously called it ‘pornographic’. ‘I am on welfare. I live at your expense, you pay taxes and I don’t do a fucking thing’, wrote Limonov in one of the most oft-quoted portions of the book. ‘I consider myself to be scum, the dregs of society, I have no shame or conscience.’ The book was an account of the disintegration of Limonov’s first marriage soon after he emigrated to New York with his wife Elena Shapova, a stunning Russian beauty who left him for an Italian aristocrat. It records his feelings of betrayal by both his native Soviet Union and the ugly American capitalism that confronted him. In agony over his divorce, Eddie turns to homosexuality, while Elena overdoses on sex and drugs – exploits recorded by Limonov in several rather graphic passages. She is ‘typically Russian, throwing herself into the very thick of life without reflection’.1
Limonov managed to catch the American zeitgeist at just the right time. An edgy beatnik, he was more a personality than a writer, trading on his mysterious, unhinged Russianness, which still had scarcity value on the New York literary scene. He played to the crowd, with stereotypical Russian temper and drunken exploits, dating a succession of models after Shapova. He also married another striking model, Natalya Medvedeva, who posed for Playboy and whose face adorns the cover of The Cars’ first album.