Dugin and many other extremists said they sensed a sharp shift in the Kremlin’s attitude towards nationalism and away from the West in the wake of the events of that October. ‘Yeltsin made a correction, a profound correction, after 1993’, says Dugin today. ‘Politically he castrated the political opposition, but also he has corrected, improved and changed his own political course.’
Yeltsin’s strategy of carrots and sticks split the nationalists – the Communists and the LDPR went into parliament, where they never again challenged the authority of the Kremlin. Meanwhile, Dugin and Limonov refused to join them. ‘We tried to remain radical and irreconcilable’, wrote Dugin, though he admitted that, during the following six years of Yeltsin rule,
…we, the defeated, humiliated, crushed party, can hardly brag about anything… But we have kept the most important thing, and no matter how dispersed, scattered, divided and separated we are we have kept precisely the Spirit that breathed then [at the massacre of Ostankino]. It doesn’t matter that it no longer burns, but it is obviously smouldering independently, it aches in us, torments us.
The shock of what he had seen, Dugin says, was profound. During his appearance on Red Square he was asked whether he bore responsibility for the killing that had taken place. The question shook him, but he handled matters skilfully, blurting out: ‘Yes, but your Yeltsin is a bloody assassin.’ The answer came in a single breath and so nothing could be edited out. The interview was not used. Nonetheless, ‘It was a trauma.’ Dugin withdrew temporarily from political life.
Limonov was just as demoralized, and disgusted with the nationalist movement in the wake of the 1993 disaster. He wanted to create a real opposition party, with an ideology ‘based not on ethnic emotions of bleating, primeval people, not based on some outdated ideology of orthodoxy, but on the concept of national interest’.
The two men sat in Limonov’s flat one day in the spring of 1994. Limonov proposed taking the National Bolshevik Front, which they had created the previous July, and turning it into a party. Dugin was none too keen on the idea. Since he had left Pamyat in 1988, he had vowed not to participate in political organizations, and the experience of October had even further decreased his appetite for politics. He said he would help in the organization of the National Bolshevik Party (NBP), but he did not want a formal post. In time, Dugin came around. The two men discussed their project in a beer tent on Old Arbat Street in Moscow. Dugin leaned over and said: ‘Eduard, your task as a warrior and kshatriya is to lead people; and I am but a priest, magician, Merlin, I have a woman’s role to explain and console.’16
In fact, the party was arguably Dugin’s brainchild – the name was his idea, as was the flag: a black hammer and sickle in a white circle on a red background, evoking the Nazi swastika. It was not going to win them any elections, in a country that lost 20 million to Hitler’s fascism; but that was not the NBP’s goal. The official NBP salute was a straight arm raised with a fist, alongside a cry of ‘Da, Smert!’ (Yes! Death!).17 Inside the group’s headquarters, the highest-ranking party member present was always referred to as the Bunkerführer. The veneer of fascism was very much calculated – it was a bohemian ‘political art project’, in Dugin’s words. He, according to Limonov, ‘seemed to have deciphered and translated the bright shock that Soviet youth experience when they pronounce the initials “SS”’.
The NBP’s ironic stance towards fascism, though, was also a carefully calculated ploy. The salutes, the slogans (‘Stalin, Beria, Gulag!’ was one) were so odd and over the top that they verged on parody. Equating their party with fascist symbols, however, was a pose – pioneered by Dugin – that would come to define Russia’s image of authoritarian rule under Putin in the coming decade. The NBP was a ‘sight gag’ that undercut criticism by making it seem – ever so slightly – as though it was missing the point. Calling the swastika-waving, goose-stepping NBP members ‘fascists’ frankly sounded so odd that no one ever did it, for fear of looking ridiculous. Both men were instinctive haters of conventional wisdom. They loved to shock. And the movement they founded was a mélange of each man’s upbringing: Dugin a product of the overly intellectual Moscow bohemia of the 1980s; Limonov, the pre-AIDS Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1970s transplanted to central Moscow.
The name of the party made no difference to Limonov, Dugin told American diplomats in 2008 (the cable was published in 2010 by Wikileaks): ‘He wanted to call it “National Socialism”, “National Fascism”, “National Communism” – whatever. Ideology was never his thing. The scream in the wilderness – that was his goal.’
Limonov, according to Dugin (they had had a bad falling-out by this point), was like ‘a clown in a little traveling circus. The better he performs, the more attention he wins, the happier he is’.18 At around the same time, when he spoke to me in 2009, Limonov called Dugin ‘a degenerate servitor of the regime, and shameful conformist’.
It would be a mistake to view the NBP as a serious political party with clear goals: the party’s code of conduct includes ‘the right not to listen when your girlfriend is talking to you’, and members were encouraged to vandalize Russian cinemas showing Western films (though no one in the party has any memory of this actually having happened). Instead, the NBP was designed to become the germ of a new counterculture, the core of what Andreas Umland, an expert on Russian nationalist groups, refers to as ‘uncivil society’, whose goal is not necessarily conquest of executive and legislative power, but rather ideological subversion aimed at acquiring dominance over the cultural superstructure.19 The NBP quickly became an icon. ‘You had three choices if you were a teenager here in the 1990s’, explained Andrey Karagodin, an NBP veteran. ‘You could get into rave, you could become a gangster, or you could join the NBP. That was it.’
Limonov enlisted his friend Egor Letov, lead singer with the popular band Civil Defence. His NBP membership card was number 4. He would routinely interrupt concerts with long diatribes against Yeltsin and in support of the NBP. Aside from Letov, ex-NBP members have distinguished themselves in some of the most creative professions in Russia. Zakhar Prilepin, who joined the movement later on, went on to become one of Russia’s most interesting young authors, after a career that, oddly, began in the elite police force, the OMON. Alexey Belyayev-Gintovt went on to win the coveted Kandinsky Art Prize. And Karagodin himself is now editor of Russia’s edition of Vogue.
The NBP was an exploration of the limits of freedom. In this Limonov and Dugin represented diametrically opposite poles: the anarchy of the Russian spirit on the one side; on the other, the ever-present totalitarian impulses that have gripped the Russian soul over five centuries of history. It was a party which espoused fascist ideas, yet simultaneously revelled in the libertine Moscow of the 1990s. It was a living demonstration of the paradox of freedom and a simultaneous suggestion of the authoritarian alternative. As Letov put it: ‘Everything which isn’t anarchy is fascism, and there is no anarchy.’ This dialectic of contradictory thesis and antithesis was played out in the playground of Yeltsin’s Russia, and became the ruling synthesis of the next decade. The movement pioneered the creation of ‘youth leagues’, which sprang up everywhere in the Putin era in a bid by the Kremlin to control the streets. ‘They stole all our ideas’, complained Limonov to me in 2011. Limonov went on to become the shouting conscience of the Putin era – the highest-profile dissident of a new regime; while Dugin would become the ideologist of the new autocracy.