As Limonov gradually got to know Dugin, he found he was materially better-off than he let on. He had a vaulted Stalin-era apartment in the centre of Moscow, rare books and a computer. As Limonov wrote: ‘I think Dugin exaggerated his poverty because he was embarrassed. I think when I left they threw the sausages in the trash and ate meat.’ Dugin’s relative wealth is perhaps an indication that the writer received funding beyond what can be explained by his book sales.
Dugin, according to Limonov, was an impossible romantic, but otherwise had no real strict beliefs: ‘Dugin was like a chameleon or an octopus, who can mimic the colours of whatever environment it is put in. He lived in a fascist environment, and so he assumed fascist colours.’ He also brought a ‘bright spirit of megalomania’ to the party, and an indifference to traditional ideas of right and left. ‘Unconditionally, as an intellectual, Dugin surpassed practically any other single figure in the Russian world at the time’, said Limonov, even after their acrimonious break-up in 1998.
‘Operation Crematorium’
In 1993, amid economic shock therapy that plunged Russia into crisis, the situations of the democrats and the patriotic opposition were reversed. Once ascendant, Yeltsin’s camp very rapidly lost support to a growing opposition nationalist mood, stoked by hardliners in the system.
The economy was mostly to blame. Yeltsin had come to power on the promise that democracy would usher in an era of Western-style economic prosperity; instead, in 1992 the economy collapsed. In January of that year came the first market reforms, which saw prices rise by 245 per cent that month alone, creating widespread panic. Hyperinflation wiped out the savings of the university professors, bureaucrats and intellectuals who, just a few months before, had been the strongest bulwark of liberal reforms. The balance of opinion in the Supreme Soviet shifted fast. Hundreds of deputies who had once backed Yeltsin drifted into the opposition camp.
The nationalists, whose initial experiences at the ballot box had been farcical, began to gain popular support, becoming a political threat to Yeltsin. And it was he – the selfsame politician who, just two years before, had faced down tanks – who ultimately would be forced to rely on armed force to secure his power.
Politically, the reformers were in trouble. There were mass defections from the democratic camp to the side of the patriotic opposition. Ruslan Khasbulatov, an economist who was speaker of the Supreme Soviet, and even Yeltsin’s own vice-president, former fighter pilot Alexander Rutskoy, joined the opposition against him.
Yeltsin deftly managed to shed most of the blame for the dislocation caused by economic reforms and push it onto his prime minister, the 35-year-old whiz-kid Egor Gaidar (who was in and out of power according to Yeltsin’s mood), and his privatization chief, the enigmatic economist Anatoly Chubais. Yeltsin was still popular: when parliament threatened to impeach him, he held a referendum and won 59 per cent of the vote. But his influence was nonetheless waning, and Russia’s political system slid towards conflict once again. Throughout the summer of 1993, Yeltsin plotted to dissolve parliament and hold fresh elections, while his opponents still planned to try again to impeach him. But neither could garner the political support to finish the other off.
The events of September–October 1993 would lead to armed conflict in the centre of Moscow, the worst fighting there since 1917, and very nearly to full-scale civil war. The motives and behaviour of both sides remain extremely puzzling to this day. After the conflict was over, US President Bill Clinton said Yeltsin had ‘bent over backwards’ to avoid bloodshed; however, there is accumulating evidence that bloodshed is exactly what he wanted – to do militarily what he could not do politically: destroy the opposition, suspend the constitution, and unilaterally redress the balance between executive and legislative powers to create a super-presidency. That is exactly what he got.
On 21 September, Yeltsin struck, signing ‘Decree 1400’ dissolving parliament. He freely admits in his memoirs that this was an unconstitutional measure, but ironically it was the only way to defend democracy in Russia, he claimed: ‘Formally the president was violating the constitution, going the route of antidemocratic measures, and dispersing the parliament – all for the sake of establishing democracy and rule of law in the country.’
Again, at the centre of the stand-off was the famed White House, which was a familiar symbol of freedom to Western television viewers – the very place where Yeltsin had stood stalwart and called for resistance to the generals’ coup in August 1991. This time the tables were turned: Rutskoy and Khasbulatov were ready and they barricaded themselves in the White House. The political confrontation turned increasingly ugly with each passing day, as the city of Moscow turned off the electricity and water to the building. But parliament held firm, voting to impeach Yeltsin, who was on thin legal ice in dissolving parliament. For days the confrontation hung in the balance. The army did not want to become involved in politics, as it had been in 1991 and during the various independence struggles around the Soviet Union which had preceded its break-up. However, it became clear that only the army could eventually decide the outcome.
Curiously, while electricity to parliament was cut off immediately, it took a week before the Interior Ministry put a cordon of razor wire and police around the building – a delay that allowed political leaders, ex-generals, thrill-seeking teenagers, disgruntled pensioners and everyone in between to flood in. They all milled around inside the building, meeting by candlelight, with no one visibly in charge.
Vladislav Achalov, a former tank commander who was drummed out of the army for supporting the August 1991 coup, was the acting defence minister, appointed by Rutskoy. He made the fateful decision – in retrospect a bad miscalculation – to appeal to paramilitary patriotic opposition groups to join the defenders. Thus Dugin, Prokhanov, Limonov and other nationalists joined the parliamentary defenders in the gloomy candlelit darkness. Dugin was deeply unimpressed: ‘There was chaos. Everyone was wandering around, they thought they would receive new government posts, that they would rule the country. Nobody thought they would simply be shot.’
The arrival of fighters and radical extremists was welcomed by Khasbulatov and Rutskoy as an extra show of muscle. But throwing in their lot with the nationalist opposition would ultimately prove a gigantic mistake. They were out of their depth. They thought they would be fighting for control of buildings and neighbourhoods, when the real battle was for television screens and world opinion.
That was the only thing constraining Yeltsin. He did not lack muscle – he used only a handful of the 6,000 riot police during the crisis.4 He had army Special Forces units, tough-eyed commandos under the command of the Federal Security Service (FSB – the successor to the KGB) and the Interior Ministry; and although it remained officially neutral, he also controlled the army. The Taman Motor Rifle Division, which had roared into Moscow two years previously, was based an hour away, as was the Kantemirov Tank Division. The only thing Yeltsin lacked was the legitimacy to use the force arrayed at his disposal. Had he declared a state of emergency and fired on parliament during the first day, there would have been an outcry worldwide and probably a mutiny within the armed forces. But the appearance of gangs of communists, mercenaries, crypto-fascists and neo-Nazis may have provided the spectacle he needed to justify the use of force, and to call parliament a ‘fascist communist armed rebellion’, which he did on 4 October, an hour before tanks opened fire.