When Lyosha was about three, Galina started to have the television turned on at all times. Sometimes she sat down in front of the black-and-white set and watched for hours as gray men on the screen did nothing but talk, occasionally raising their voices. Galina talked to Lyosha about the men—she seemed to have personal relationships with them—and there was tension in what was happening on-screen, a sense of earnestness and importance, so it was not boring. Lyosha learned some names, including Gorbachev, who was the most important. He had a large mark on his forehead, and Lyosha's cousin, who was quite a bit older, told Lyosha that it was a map of the USSR because Gorbachev was the president. When Lyosha told Galina that, she laughed and said it was just a birthmark. She had to be right, but the cousin would not hear of it. Galina took Lyosha to the polls, explaining that it was their "civic duty." What exactly their civic duty was, was unclear, but Lyosha liked voting because the precinct was decorated with red cloth and there were open salami sandwiches for sale.
In the summers, Lyosha stayed in the village with his grandmother. Assorted cousins were sent there as well, and their parents floated in and out, sometimes spending a week or two and sometimes staying just the weekend. One day when he was five, his aunt said, "Let's go get baptized," and they all went to another village, where there stood a church in a profound state of decay that was only accentuated by some recent spot repairs. A man in a dress took Lyosha by the hair and dunked his face in a vat of water. At that moment Lyosha hated the man and his own aunt, but a few minutes later he liked the bread and the wine the man put on his tongue, and he loved the little cross the man put around his neck. When they got back to their own village, Lyosha ran up to his mother shouting, "Look what I have"—meaning the little cross. Galina took a step back, looking like she might faint. She later explained to him that she was an atheist, and what that meant.
Lyosha loved to hear Galina explain things, especially when they had to do with history. She had many history books at home, and Lyosha worshipped these, particularly the ones about the Great Patriotic War. He read The Wreath of Glory, a set of heavy books in red leatherette covers. The giant anthology collected works of fiction and nonfiction, with each volume devoted to one aspect of the war: a book on the defense of Moscow, a book on Leningrad, a book on victory itself.19 He listened to vinyl records of war songs—the great march songs calling on people to rise up, the lyrical ballads about missing loved ones and fighting for them, and the heartbreaking postwar songs about lost comrades. Lyosha was convinced that his birth date was no accident: he was not just born on Victory Day—he was born on the fortieth anniversary of the end of the greatest war ever fought. When relatives came over on his birthday, he would grill them on their knowledge of war history. Once he was older, he turned the ritual into a quiz, putting days into preparing questions about the great battles at Stalingrad and Kursk. He did his best to play war songs on the piano. One of his cousins had given him a collection of Great Patriotic War sheet music for one of his birthdays. Lyosha took lessons in playing accordion, not piano, but he could read music, and he had intense determination. He played using one finger.
four
HOMO SOVIETICUS
perestroika was an impossible idea on the face of it. The Party was setting out to employ its structures of command to make the country, and itself, less command-driven. A system whose main afflictions were stagnation and inflexibility was setting out to change itself. Worst and probably intractable was the fact that people who had spent their lives securing power and individual leverage were expected to devise change that would dismantle the hierarchy of levers and might dislodge them. The system resisted change instinctively, and a great number of individuals plotted consciously to sabotage the change.
As the man appointed by Gorbachev to think through perestroika, to design it and guide it, Alexander Nikolaevich was confronted daily with the futility of the task. Much of the Party's leadership rejected change for fear of losing power. Those who appeared to welcome change, like, most notably, the head of the Moscow Party organization, Boris Yeltsin, were ultimately also driven by the desire for power, and this made them unreliable allies. The leaders of many of the Soviet Union's constituent republics were becoming lax in monitoring and containing nationalist forces: for decades the country had prosecuted local nationalist activists as enemies of the state, but perestroika loosened talk of self-determination in the Baltic republics, Ukraine, Georgia, and even in places that were nominally part of the Russian republic within the USSR. It was beginning to pull the country apart, creating tension and instability when the USSR could least afford it. The media, which were now—in large part thanks to Alexander Nikolaevich's efforts—granted greater freedom and even encouraged to tackle difficult subjects, were by turns too passive and too conservative, even reactionary. The public, to the extent that Alexander Nikolaevich could track what the public was thinking, also seemed torn between inappropriate passivity and equally inappropriate action: those who began speaking out seemed invariably to choose extreme positions, whether they were speaking in favor of democratization or in favor of cracking down to preserve the Soviet order. Alexander Nikolaevich took to calling all of them "extremists."
As a man who had struggled to educate himself, who had had to teach himself to think, Alexander Nikolaevich was sympathetic to the great number of people resisting change simply because they had never been exposed to anything outside the Party's dogma. In May 1988 he convinced the Central Committee to approve a concerted effort to restore thought and knowledge to the land. "It has come to the point where the West now has scholars who are better versed in the history of our own homegrown philosophy than we are," he wrote in the draft of an address to the Central Committee. "Twentieth- century Western philosophy contains a number of ideas that are avidly debated in books, at conferences, and so on. But many of these ideas were originally articulated by our thinkers. This is not surprising, for the tension [his italics] of the spiritual quest in Russia in the years leading up to the Revolution exceeded that of any European country." Alexander Nikolaevich suggested creating a team of five or six editors who would put together a library of Russian philosophers, between thirty-five and forty volumes that would include works by depublished nineteenth-century thinkers as well as those who had sailed on the Philosophers' Ship. He compiled his own list of thirty-nine thinkers to be restored to the Russian canon. And if this went well, he wrote, then books on history and economics (which he still called "political economy") could follow. The Central Committee said yes.1
before the planned collection could materialize, journals began publishing previously silenced philosophers. Even Heidegger could now see print. For someone like Dugin, this was a confounding moment. On the one hand, he no longer had to spend his days hunting down copies of banned books or hurting his eyes by trying to read the microfilm projected onto his wooden desktop. On the other hand, his entire life was constructed around just this: fighting his way to difficult ideas, becoming one of the few people in the country to understand them, and continuing his process of self-education, knowing that he had all the time in the world, his hated static world. If the world was no longer static, and if the knowledge was no longer banned, who was Dugin now?