Shironin’s and Panarin’s works do have significant conceptual differences. Shironin’s ideas are mainly concerned with subversive US activities aimed at global domination. He portrays Russia as a key adversary of the USA, with the latter attempting to undermine the former through a highly-sophisticated combination of intelligence operations. Shironin’s analysis is thus reminiscent of Soviet propaganda and its main features can be traced back to the popular culture of the Cold War period.
Panarin’s work, which was published thirteen years after Shironin’s, is clearly influenced by foreign literature on conspiracy theories available in Russia at that time, and could even be said to function as a Russian guide to Western conspiracy theories. It is likely that his concept of Western conspiracy was shaped by ideas about global conspiracy which were popular in Western Europe and the USA, and that he then reinterpreted them as exclusively anti-Russian. For instance, he identified an American banker, David Rockefeller, as a key mastermind behind the Soviet collapse. Rockefeller can be found at the centre of numerous conspiracy theories in the USA that involve the Trilateral Commission and Council on Foreign Relations (Cooper, 1991; Keith, 1995). Panarin also depicted The Committee of 300, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission as the main centres of anti-Russian conspiracy in the West (Panarin, 2010, pp. 154–5). However, while these organizations do play major roles in Western conspiratorial literature, they are concerned with the creation of the New World Order, and do not specifically mention Russia.
In texts about the Soviet collapse, subversive ‘agents’ of the West are blamed for kindling nationalist movements in the Soviet republics which destroyed the multinational Soviet state. Many authors, including Panarin and Shironin, emphasize the role here of Aleksandr Iakovlev, one of Gorbachev’s closest political advisers and the mastermind of perestroika. According to the former head of the KGB, Vladimir Kriuchkov, Iakovlev was an American spy recruited in the 1950s during an internship at Columbia University (Kriuchkov, 2003, p. 324). Echoing this theory, Igor’ Froianov, a highly controversial Russian historian who was, nonetheless, dean of the History Faculty at St Petersburg State University, concluded (2009, pp. 222–4) that Iakovlev acted in agreement with Gorbachev to approve the military repressions in 1991 in Vilnius which triggered the separation of the Baltic states from the Soviet Union, a key milestone in the Soviet collapse (Suny, 1993, pp. 145–52).
The idea of ‘subversive agents’ intent on destroying the Soviet Union is one of the most popular conspiratorial notions. The search for a scapegoat in the form of a ‘foreign agent’ draws on a large body of publications and stories concerning treason against Russia. This concern about ‘foreign agents’ can be traced back to fear of German subversion before and during the First World War, the show trials accompanying the Great Purge in the 1930s, and a veritable spy mania on the part of the elites in the Soviet era. The concept of a ‘subversive agency’ can be a convenient and powerful tool. Authors of conspiracy theories merge real historical facts with imagined stories of treason, thus bringing into doubt former and current politicians’ loyalty to the state and, by doing so, undermining their reputations.
‘Westernized’ Intelligentsia Against Motherland
While Panarin and Kriuchkov are concerned with ‘agents of influence’, Sergei Kurginian, political consultant and former theatre director, has focused on the social factors relating to the Soviet collapse. Yet, it is rumoured that Kurginian was a political consultant to the leaders of GKChP, trying to arrange lucrative business under the government’s protection and later, in the 2010s, advised the controversial Moscow mayor Iurii Luzhkov, known for the corruption of the Moscow property market (Minkin, 2012; Belkovskii, 2016).
Kurginian blames the liberal intelligentsia and pro-Western political elites for selling the interests of the country in 1991 and ruining its historical mission. He uses the term anti-elite to describe what he sees as a union of the pro-Western political elites with the Russian liberal intelligentsia, who, together, corrupted Soviet politics during perestroika and ‘robbed’ the Soviet Union of its greatness (Chernykh, 2011). This anti-elite consisted of top-ranking figures in the Communist Party and the KGB. They initiated the August coup to cover up their destructive policies. Kurginian explains the dramatic decline in Russians’ standard of living as the result of pro-Western intellectuals making alliances with ‘shadowy business’, whose representatives eventually destabilized the Communist Party and became oligarchs, while the intelligentsia had to survive as best it could (Legostaev, 2002). The American ‘plan’ for Soviet destruction included producing a corpus of anti-Soviet historical research which corrupted Soviet ideology and demonstrated the supremacy of Western capitalism. During perestroika, as Kurginian (n.d.) argues, Russians were told that they should not dream about the glorious Communist future; ‘only the interests of the individual were important’.
Kurginian’s rhetoric about treacherous, pro-Western elites was interlaced with references to the socio-economic and ideological problems which emerged with the collapse of the Soviet state. His populist appeal, which involved laying the blame on the ‘anti-elite’ for the destruction of the state, was targeted primarily at educated Russians, the so-called intelligentsia, who suffered enormously under the economic reforms of the 1990s. Exploiting the grievances of this group, Kurginian further boosted his popularity by becoming a frequent guest on television talk shows. By the end of the 2000s he was hosting his own show, Istoricheskii protsess (The Historical Process), on the state-owned television channel Rossiia; this was dedicated to the discussion of various historical topics closely connected with contemporary political issues. Being the host of a television show provided him with an effective vehicle for disseminating conspiratorial ideas about the Soviet collapse. His popularity, in turn, helped him to gain a position in Putin’s presidential campaign of 2012 (discussed in Chapter 6); this clearly indicates the close ties he has with the Kremlin.
The Manipulation of Consciousness
The Russian chemist and writer Sergei Kara-Murza has presented another conspiratorial conceptualization of the Soviet collapse. This is based on the idea that a small group of people in the Soviet Union, with ‘external’ partners, and by means of manipulation, convinced the entire Soviet nation to destroy the country and abandon its ambitions to build Communism: ‘A certain influential and organized part of humankind (into which some of our compatriots have been accepted)… has convinced our society to act according to a programme which has brought enormous benefits to this group at enormous cost to ourselves’ (Kara-Murza, n.d.). He sees the consciousness of the Soviet people as a combination of ‘rationality (mind) and common ethics (heart)’ which allows them to grasp the world in its complexity, unlike the ‘technocratic Europeans’ who only have a restricted view of the world. He explains that a positive perception of the West first became popular among so-called anti-Soviet intellectuals; they distorted the meaning of Soviet symbols and institutions such as the Motherland, the State and the Army, all of which were crucial for the nation (Kara-Murza, 2009).