Evgenia left him. She joined a group of people who coalesced around a strange woman, Valeria Novodvorskaya. She was in her late thirties, and she had been in and out of punitive psychiatric clinics since she was a teenager—she was a radical lone-wolf dissident. Now, for the first time, she was assembling like-minded people. They began with a seminar, held in Moscow and Leningrad, for about eighty participants—a number that would have been unthinkable just a few months earlier. Even now, in April 1987, the organizers were terrified. They started with studying Soviet history—Novodvorskaya, who was a walking encyclopedia, lectured more often than anyone else—and soon began to organize protests on every topic they studied. They held tiny rallies to commemorate events that Soviet citizens had not been allowed to know about. Evgenia started getting detained on a regular basis. She seemed to enjoy it, and the publicity that accompanied it as Soviet papers began to cover what was happening in the streets. She was no longer living in the apartment she had shared with Alexander—she had managed to be allotted a place of her own, one room plus a kitchen in a 1970s concrete-block tower a short subway-plus-tram ride from the center. Dozens of people would cram into this space now, all of them rebel freaks, and as many as a dozen KGB cars were keeping vigil at the front door on any given day.2 Their son, Artur, was living with Alexander's mother now, and Evgenia took
him on weekends when she was not busy protesting or being held at a precinct.
Novodvorskaya's group began calling itself a political party—this in a country where for seven decades there had existed only one Party. The new party was founded in May 1988 in the course of a three-day "congress" with about a hundred attendees. Some of the sessions were held in Evgenia's apartment. Participants were harassed, some were detained, some roughly. A dacha where the third day's meetings were scheduled to convene was raided by KGB agents who turned the place upside down, rendering it unusable. Only about fifty of the participants dared sign their names to the new party's platform.3 It was an outrageous document, which called for the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and referred to the Baltic states— Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia—as "occupied," demanding that they, along with any other constituent republic that so wished, be allowed to secede from the Union. It abolished the KGB, the death penalty, and the draft. Novodvorskaya and Evgenia would have gone even further—their views were a combination of libertarianism and anarchism, both of which seemed to them, at that point, the ultimate in Western thought—but the rest of the group held them back. As it was, several of the old dissidents who had served time for their anti- Soviet activities thought the document was too confrontational.4 This was not even what Alexander Nikolaevich meant when he used the term "extremists": it was a caricature of what he meant. A prosecutor threatened Novodvorskaya with charges of high treason, which carried the potential of the death penalty. But the activists responded in an utterly un-Soviet way: they did not stop in fear, and they did not fight the prosecutor—they just paid the threat no mind. All the organizers received summonses, and all ignored them. They proceeded with their congress, even though several people were detained in the process and held for about a week. The first political party in the Soviet Union that was not the Communist Party would be called Demokraticheskiy Soyuz, the Democratic Union.5
Novodvorskaya would later write that Evgenia was not so much anti-Soviet, like Novodvorskaya herself, as un-Soviet.6 Evgenia was having the time of her life—she was engaged, she was performing, she was admired, and she was also in love. She was having such a good time, in fact, that she was proving too much even for the Democratic Union, which kicked her out for talking out of school, often while drunk. In 1989, when founding a new political party no longer seemed radical in itself, she cofounded the Russian chapter of the Transnational Radical Party, a pacifist non-electoral political group with headquarters in Italy. The Italians gave Evgenia her first computer, but then the Radicals, too, kicked her out, for oversleeping on the day of a demonstration in front of the Romanian embassy. She decided that she was more interested in capitalism than in politics and started the Russian Libertarian Party. She also came out as a lesbian—the love that had been fueling her political life was the love of a woman—and launched the first queer organization in the country, the Association of Sexual Minorities (more specific terms of identity, like "gay" or "lesbian," were not yet familiar to the Russian ear).7
among the many things that grew confusing in the late 1980s was the left-right dichotomy. The way Alexander Nikolaevich used the word "right," it was but a stand-in for "conservative" in the most basic sense of the word: just wanting things to stay the way they were. But the way they were, nominally, was "left"—the most conservative force was the Communist Party. Few people, therefore, wanted to call themselves "left." That made everyone "right," or something closer to "radical" or "democratic" as opposed to conservative. Evgenia's Radical Party, which would have been far left in Europe, and her Libertarian Party were roughly equidistant from the Communist Party, which made the leap from one to the other seem like a small step. In fact, all her views shared a category much more important than the familiar—and therefore suspect—political divisions: they were Western. Before finding Novodvorskaya, Evgenia was briefly involved in an effort called the Group for Trust Between East and West, whose sole agenda was to counter the most basic premise of Soviet propaganda: the idea that the West was a threat. Even in
Alexander Nikolaevich's rhetoric, if not necessarily in his thinking, this premise appeared inviolate: almost any time he wrote a letter or gave a speech on the state of things in the Soviet Union, he made note of Western efforts to undermine the country and Western plots to sabotage perestroika itself. So if one strove to be, first and foremost, un-Soviet, as Evgenia did, one did well to embrace any number of political positions, from libertarianism to pacifism, one more Western than the next. Gay rights, the legalization of drugs, and the abolition of the death penalty, the lifting of all state controls in favor of the reign of the unfettered free market—everything fell naturally into line.
As for Dugin, who had lost the woman he loved, his son, and his life of intensive open-ended learning, he was bound to look for and find the position that was the opposite of everything. First he drifted into Pamyat ("Memory"), an organization that in the mid-1980s was emerging from the underground. It had long trafficked in antisemitic rhetoric, from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to contemporary world-Zionist-conspiracy theories. Now it allied itself with Gorbachev's perestroika on the one hand and with an imagined Russian nationalist revival on the other.8 The combination was fairly intuitive: Soviet internationalist rhetoric was just one of the aspects of hollow ideology that were being deflated. While official Soviet media pre-glasnost doled out their own regular servings of antisemitism framed as anti-Zionism, the system had generally subdued outright Russian-nationalist voices. Now this lid was lifted and hatred emerged in many stripes, of which Pamyat was the brightest. The Soviet leadership was either unsure about how best to react or unwilling to react, but Alexander Nikolaevich raged privately and publicly. "I am not Jewish," he said during a talk at the Higher Party School in March 1990, "yet every day I get fliers from Pamyat in which I am called 'the head of the Judeo-Masonic lounge of the Soviet Union.' There is only one reason for this, as far as I can telclass="underline" I really do speak out publicly, in writing and in speaking, everywhere and anywhere I can, against all manifestations of nationalism, including antisemitism. And I consider it to be the shame of any