Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society (SPPS)
Vol. 158
ISSN 1614-3515 General Editor: Andreas Umland,
Commissioning Editor: Max Jakob Horstmann,
Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies, andreas.umland@ui.se
London, mjh@ibidem.eu
EDITORIAL COMMITTEE* DOMESTIC & COMPARATIVE POLITICS Prof. Ellen Bos, Andrássy University of Budapest Dr. Gergana Dimova, University of Winchester Dr. Andrey Kazantsev, MGIMO (U) MID RF, Moscow Prof. Heiko Pleines, University of Bremen Prof. Richard Sakwa, University of Kent at Canterbury Dr. Sarah Whitmore, Oxford Brookes University Dr. Harald Wydra, University of Cambridge SOCIETY, CLASS & ETHNICITY Col. David Glantz, “Journal of Slavic Military Studies” Dr. Marlène Laruelle, George Washington University Dr. Stephen Shulman, Southern Illinois University Prof. Stefan Troebst, University of Leipzig POLITICAL ECONOMY & PUBLIC POLICY Dr. Andreas Goldthau, Central European University Dr. Robert Kravchuk, University of North Carolina Dr. David Lane, University of Cambridge Dr. Carol Leonard, Higher School of Economics, Moscow Dr. Maria Popova, McGill University, Montreal
FOREIGN POLICY & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS Dr. Peter Duncan, University College London Prof. Andreas Heinemann-Grüder, University of Bonn Prof. Gerhard Mangott, University of Innsbruck Dr. Diana Schmidt-Pfister, University of Konstanz Dr. Lisbeth Tarlow, Harvard University, Cambridge Dr. Christian Wipperfürth, N-Ost Network, Berlin Dr. William Zimmerman, University of Michigan HISTORY, CULTURE & THOUGHT Dr. Catherine Andreyev, University of Oxford Prof. Mark Bassin, Södertörn University Prof. Karsten Brüggemann, Tallinn University Dr. Alexander Etkind, University of Cambridge Dr. Gasan Gusejnov, Moscow State University Prof. Leonid Luks, Catholic University of Eichstaett Dr. Olga Malinova, Russian Academy of Sciences Dr. Richard Mole, University College London Prof. Andrei Rogatchevski, University of Tromsø Dr. Mark Tauger, West Virginia University
ADVISORY BOARD* Prof. Dominique Arel, University of Ottawa Prof. Jörg Baberowski, Humboldt University of Berlin Prof. Margarita Balmaceda, Seton Hall University Dr. John Barber, University of Cambridge Prof. Timm Beichelt, European University Viadrina Dr. Katrin Boeckh, University of Munich Prof. em. Archie Brown, University of Oxford Dr. Vyacheslav Bryukhovetsky, Kyiv-Mohyla Academy Prof. Timothy Colton, Harvard University, Cambridge Prof. Paul D’Anieri, University of Florida Dr. Heike Dörrenbächer, Friedrich Naumann Foundation Dr. John Dunlop, Hoover Institution, Stanford, California Dr. Sabine Fischer, SWP, Berlin Dr. Geir Flikke, NUPI, Oslo Prof. David Galbreath, University of Aberdeen Prof. Alexander Galkin, Russian Academy of Sciences Prof. Frank Golczewski, University of Hamburg Dr. Nikolas Gvosdev, Naval War College, Newport, RI Prof. Mark von Hagen, Arizona State University Dr. Guido Hausmann, University of Munich Prof. Dale Herspring, Kansas State University Dr. Stefani Hoffman, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Prof. Mikhail Ilyin, MGIMO (U) MID RF, Moscow Prof. Vladimir Kantor, Higher School of Economics Dr. Ivan Katchanovski, University of Ottawa Prof. em. Andrzej Korbonski, University of California Dr. Iris Kempe, “Caucasus Analytical Digest” Prof. Herbert Küpper, Institut für Ostrecht Regensburg Dr. Rainer Lindner, CEEER, Berlin Dr. Vladimir Malakhov, Russian Academy of Sciences
Dr. Luke March, University of Edinburgh Prof. Michael McFaul, Stanford University, Palo Alto Prof. Birgit Menzel, University of Mainz-Germersheim Prof. Valery Mikhailenko, The Urals State University Prof. Emil Pain, Higher School of Economics, Moscow Dr. Oleg Podvintsev, Russian Academy of Sciences Prof. Olga Popova, St. Petersburg State University Dr. Alex Pravda, University of Oxford Dr. Erik van Ree, University of Amsterdam Dr. Joachim Rogall, Robert Bosch Foundation Stuttgart Prof. Peter Rutland, Wesleyan University, Middletown Prof. Marat Salikov, The Urals State Law Academy Dr. Gwendolyn Sasse, University of Oxford Prof. Jutta Scherrer, EHESS, Paris Prof. Robert Service, University of Oxford Mr. James Sherr, RIIA Chatham House London Dr. Oxana Shevel, Tufts University, Medford Prof. Eberhard Schneider, University of Siegen Prof. Olexander Shnyrkov, Shevchenko University, Kyiv Prof. Hans-Henning Schröder, SWP, Berlin Prof. Yuri Shapoval, Ukrainian Academy of Sciences Prof. Viktor Shnirelman, Russian Academy of Sciences Dr. Lisa Sundstrom, University of British Columbia Dr. Philip Walters, “Religion, State and Society”, Oxford Prof. Zenon Wasyliw, Ithaca College, New York State Dr. Lucan Way, University of Toronto Dr. Markus Wehner, “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” Dr. Andrew Wilson, University College London Prof. Jan Zielonka, University of Oxford Prof. Andrei Zorin, University of Oxford
* While the Editorial Committee and Advisory Board support the General Editor in the choice and improvement of manuscripts for publication, responsibility for remaining errors and misinterpretations in the series’ volumes lies with the books’ authors.
Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society (SPPS) ISSN 1614-3515 Founded in 2004 and refereed since 2007, SPPS makes available affordable English-, German-, and Russian-language studies on the history of the countries of the former Soviet bloc from the late Tsarist period to today. It publishes between 5 and 20 volumes per year and focuses on issues in transitions to and from democracy such as economic crisis, identity formation, civil society development, and constitutional reform in CEE and the NIS. SPPS also aims to highlight so far understudied themes in East European studies such as right-wing radicalism, religious life, higher education, or human rights protection. The authors and titles of all previously published volumes are listed at the end of this book. For a full description of the series and reviews of its books, see www.ibidem-verlag.de/red/spps.
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Zwei „Sonderwege“? Russisch-deutsche Parallelen und Kontraste (1917-2014)
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157 Vladimir V. Karacharovskiy, Ovsey I. Shkaratan, Gordey A. Yastrebov Towards a New Russian Work Culture Can Western Companies and Expatriates Change Russian Society? With a foreword by Elena N. Danilova Translated by Julia Kazantseva ISBN 978-3-8382-0902-9
Edmund Griffiths
ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM
Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. Cover picture: The grave of Stalin in Red Square, Moscow. © Graham Colm Licensed under CC BY 3.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
ISBN-13: 978-3-8382-0963-0 © ibidem-Verlag, Stuttgart 2023 Alle Rechte vorbehalten Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Dies gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und elektronische Speicherformen sowie die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Printed in the EU
For my brother Rupert
Contents Preface ............................................................................................. 9 Acknowledgements ..................................................................... 11
Introduction .................................................................................. 13 I
Dabbling in the Ultranational [§§1–11] ..................................... 19
II
The Second Cult of Stalin [§§12–26] .......................................... 39
III An Imperial Centre [§§27–41] .................................................... 61 IV Nothing Is What It Seems [§§42–55] ......................................... 83 V
Old World Symphony [§§56–76] ............................................. 111
VI The Insurrection of the Dead [§§77–88] .................................. 155 VII The Uses of Hyperbole [§§89–100] .......................................... 177
Conclusion .................................................................................. 193 Works Cited ................................................................................ 197
7
Preface This book is derived from my doctoral thesis (University of Oxford, 2007). A certain amount has happened in Russia and in the world over the intervening fifteen years, however, and Prokhanov has published a considerable quantity of new material; it would anyway probably not speak well of me if I had not changed my mind on some points. The text has therefore been substantially revised and reorganized, and large parts rewritten entirely. Prokhanov’s latest novel, The Swordbearer [Mechenosets], did not appear in time for me to look at it for this book. Given his prodigious output, however, something of the sort would probably always have been true; and I already discuss novels of his from five different decades (1980s to 2020s). Russian names and words are transliterated according to British Standard BS 2979:1958, omitting the diacritics; this is neither the most scientific system nor, always, the likeliest to give non-Russophones a reliable idea of the pronunciation, but it has the great advantages of familiarity and simplicity. Spellings that are already firmly established—because the people in question are very wellknown, or because they lived outside Russia and wrote their names a particular way—are retained even when they differ from the system: Yeltsin not El’tsin, Trubetzkoy not Trubetskoi. Translations from Russian (and occasionally from other languages) are mine unless noted otherwise. The Bible is quoted in the Authorized Version of 1611. Now that literary works are disseminated in electronic formats, as well as on the printed page, it is no longer always possible to identify the source of a quotation by giving a page number. Paragraph numbers would be the obvious solution; but existing software does not seem to offer a way of finding them. Where I have quoted a book from an electronic edition, therefore, I provide the chapter number and also the first two or three words—only enough to find the passage unambiguously—in the original Russian in square brackets.
9
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ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM
I am writing these lines at a time of war in Europe (a war that Prokhanov welcomed*). The purpose of this book is not primarily to expound my own political views; but I should like to say that my solidarity is with those people (in Russia and in all countries) who are working towards a peaceful, democratic, and socialist world, in which empires will be a thing of the past.
*
Aleksandr Prokhanov: ‘Raskaty russkoi istorii’, in Zavtra 8 (1496) for March 2022, p. 1.
Acknowledgements My first debt is to Michael Nicholson, who supervised the doctoral thesis on which this book is based, and whose unfailing support and wise advise enabled me to hear my contemporaries’ occasional horror stories with Schadenfreude and scepticism rather than active sympathy. I am deeply grateful to my examiners, Catriona Kelly and Geoffrey Hosking. It was a privilege to begin the study of Eurasianism under G. S. Smith. I would not have been able to pursue a doctorate at all if I had not received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (a UK public-sector body). The librarians of the Taylor Institution and Sackler libraries were always helpful and efficient. Sections of the book were read in draft, at various stages, by Jennifer Baines, Ghayur Bangash, Paul Chaisty, Julie Curtis, Brendan George, Vladimir Vava Gligorov, J. S. Kennedy, David Paterson, Christopher Walton, and James Womack: I thank all of them for their kind and perceptive comments. Any errors of fact or interpretation that I have still failed to put right—in spite of having received so much help—are nobody’s fault but my own. The series editor, Andreas Umland, together with Jana Dävers and Jessica Haunschild at ibidem-Verlag, showed infinite patience while I was hanging fire with the manuscript, followed by utter professionalism and speed as soon as I wasn’t. The debt I owe my parents is one that, in the nature of things, I can never really repay; but it is possible they will feel I have made a start over the years by telling them quite a lot of things about Prokhanov.
11
Introduction In a novel of 1957, Nabokov remarks of a couple of minor characters—people the reader is not supposed to like very much—that [o]nly another Russian could understand the reactionary and Sovietophile blend presented by the pseudo-colorful Komarovs, for whom an ideal Russia consisted of the Red Army, an anointed monarch, collective farms, anthroposophy, the Russian Church and the Hydro-Electric Dam.1
Oleg and Serafima Komarov are obscure émigrés attached to an obscure liberal arts college, and they are fictional; it is possible that few observers, Russian or otherwise, have ever made very much of an attempt to understand the way they see the world. Today, when a strikingly similar ‘blend’ (albeit with Steinerian anthroposophy supplemented or replaced by a spreading diversity of historiosophical, mystical, and esotericist doctrines) enjoys widespread support in Russia and has even had some influence on the way the Kremlin presents its decisions, we should probably all be trying a little harder. This book seeks to describe and analyse ‘red-brown’ Russian patriotism through the work of one of its pre-eminent literary exponents, the novelist and newspaper editor Aleksandr Prokhanov (born 1938).2 Prokhanov has been a central figure in imperial-patriotic and neo-Stalinist3 political and cultural life since the end of the 1980s. In 1991 he co-signed (and by all accounts wrote) the document that was regarded as the manifesto for the unsuccessful putsch against Mikhail Gorbachev in August of that year; he went on to hold senior positions during the 1990s in the anti-Yeltsin National Salvation Front, and then in the People’s Patriotic League grouped 1 2
3
Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin, New York: Avon, 1969, p. 71. See, e.g., Charles Rougle and Elisabeth Rich: ‘Aleksandr Prokhanov’, in South Central Review, vol. 12, No. 3/4 for 1995, pp. 18–27; Vladimir Bondarenko: ‘Imperskii geroi Aleksandra Prokhanova’, in Real'naya literatura. 20 luchshikh pisatelei Rossii, Moscow: Paleya, 1996, pp. 175–184. For the present, these terms (and various others used in the Introduction) should be accepted as convenient labels gesturing in the general direction of Prokhanov’s thinking; the themes of Stalin and of empire will each receive chapter-length treatment in what follows.
13
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ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM
around the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. As editorin-chief of the weekly newspaper Zavtra [Tomorrow] (founded in 1990 as Den' [The Day], but banned under that title in 1993), Prokhanov has been in a position to influence the patriotic and redbrown opposition—and his influence has consistently been exerted to glorify Stalin, to promote Russia’s imperial destiny, and to damn Gorbachev and Yeltsin as traitors. (His attitude to Vladimir Putin has fluctuated.) Prokhanov and Zavtra have played a central role in the emergence of what is here characterized as an esotericist belief system, where the more narrowly political concerns merge—amid a constant fizz of conspiracy theories—with ideas of universal resurrection and the war between cosmic good and cosmic evil. Prokhanov is also a genuine writer with a distinctive literary voice, and the prize awarded to his 2002 novel Mr Semtex was not wholly undeserved, although (partly because he is very prolific) he is apt to reuse similar effects, characters, and episodes from one book to the next. His novels dramatize and express the central doctrines of esoteric red-brown patriotism, and constitute a unique phenomenon in the literary life of post-Soviet Russia. To the extent, finally, that Russia’s media operations for overseas audiences (which rarely aim to encourage respect for the existing authorities) tend to offer a diet of nationalist grievance, anticapitalism, and esoteric mystery, the question even arises of whether Prokhanov in the 1990s inadvertently helped to shape their editors’ mental image of what a radical opposition ought to look like. Some or all of the beliefs treated here are likely to strike readers as exotic and unappealing, as indeed they strike me; they are not, however, incomprehensible. We can trace the logical connections between the various doctrines put forward by Prokhanov and others, and arrive at a reasonable account of how it is possible for people to see the world that way. We can even begin to understand where the attraction lies. That, at least, is my aim in the present book. It is not to condemn Prokhanov (or to exculpate him); and I have tried to avoid interspersing the analysis with my own political or philosophical judgements (‘Prokhanov wrongheadedly asserts that...’).
INTRODUCTION
15
Figures other than Prokhanov—some quite well-known in Russia and internationally (Gennadii Zyuganov, Aleksandr Dugin), others (Konstantin Petrov, Vladimir Sidnev) less so—are discussed at various points in the book, when their ideas are relevant to the general exposition; the sketches of those ideas offered here should not, of course, be regarded as complete. I hope this book will find some readers who are interested in conspiracy theories, red-brown politics, or other phenomena from a comparative perspective, as well as those whose focus is specifically on Russian affairs. There are undoubtedly parallels to be drawn between post-Soviet esotericism and a variety of belief systems or movements in Western countries and elsewhere, but I have not attempted to draw them here: it seems more useful to set out the facts about the Russian case, together with whatever understanding I have been able to reach, than to attempt a broader survey that would inevitably be spotty and impressionistic. Comparative treatment of other belief systems has therefore been almost entirely excluded from what follows. The only substantial exceptions are the discussions of Gnosticism in Chapter IV and of reactionary socialism in Chapter V, which are necessary to develop the account I am offering. (The former is not, in fact, purely comparative, since Prokhanov has quoted some of the Gnostic literature himself.) Similarly, questions of theory and general methodology are not addressed here at all; I have written about such topics elsewhere.4 Among Russianist readers, meanwhile, it seems plausible that some will be interested in Prokhanov primarily as a novelist, others as a journalist and a political activist. Perhaps neither group will be wholly satisfied with the balance I strike between talking about his politics and talking about his prose; but, if there are any politically engaged writers whose literary activity can be sharply and cleanly divided from their political commitments, Prokhanov is not one of them. His fiction deals insistently with current political controversies and with ideas drawn from the spectrum of red-brown politics;
4
See Edmund Griffiths, Towards a Science of Belief Systems, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. A few pages of that book do refer to the Russian material, but the direct overlap with issues covered in the present study is not enormous.
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ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM
and his political non-fiction is consciously writerly, incorporating themes and images from his novels and often couched in a similarly extravagant style. It would not always be possible, presented with a page of text by Prokhanov, to tell whether it came from a leading article or a work of fiction. I have therefore treated his novels and his articles as a single body of work, expressing a single view of the world. The book consists of seven chapters and a brief conclusion. Chapter I (‘Dabbling in the Ultranational’) introduces Prokhanov, and the wider ideological world of which he is a part, by looking at themes from Mr Semtex. It includes a brief account of his literary and political career, concentrating on the formative 1990s. Chapter II looks at what is here called ‘the second cult of Stalin’—a cult whose excesses of praise outdo the first by a wide margin. Some attention is paid to what might be called Stalinist literalists: people like Viktor Tyul’kin or the late Nina Andreeva, who take the once-official depiction of Stalin broadly at face value and would ideally like to restore the Soviet political system of the 1930s (as they conceive it to have been). But when Stalin appears on an Orthodox ikon of the Mother of God (and Prokhanov has been involved in commissioning such an ikon), when he is deliberately bracketed with Tsar Nicholas II (and Prokhanov has so bracketed him), when a newspaper article declares that he will return from the dead (and the newspaper Prokhanov edits has carried an article saying exactly that), then we have moved far beyond anti-revisionist Marxism-Leninism. The chapter maps out where we have arrived. It has perhaps once again become a cliché, or a statement of the obvious, to describe Russia as an empire; but its political and intellectual leaders have frequently maintained that it was nothing of the kind. After 1917, and again after 1991, the imperial legacy was supposed to have been consigned to history. Chapter III (‘An Imperial Centre’) describes how the idea of empire re-emerged among the red-brown opposition (thanks not least to Prokhanov), and examines the uses to which this idea has been put. In Chapter IV (‘Nothing Is What It Seems’), the esotericist and conspiracy-spotting logic of Prokhanov’s worldview is explored
INTRODUCTION
17
through the parallel with esotericist religion, chiefly the Gnosticism of the early centuries CE. The next two chapters examine central influences on Prokhanov’s thought. Chapter V (‘Old World Symphony’) looks at Eurasianism, a theory of politics and of Russian history that was originally proposed by émigré writers in the 1920s and that has been widely and variously drawn upon in post-Soviet Russia, including by Prokhanov. This chapter is somewhat longer than the others, because the diversity and cloudiness of the uses to which Eurasian slogans are now put makes it necessary to go into the émigré sources in some detail before we can say with confidence which ideas count as properly ‘Eurasian’. Chapter VI (‘The Insurrection of the Dead’) is devoted to the nineteenth-century philosopher Nikolai Fedorov, a major influence on Prokhanov, who argued that there was a moral obligation to concentrate all available resources on resurrecting the dead and settling them on other planets. Both of Fedorov’s core themes—resurrection and space exploration—are strongly represented in Prokhanov’s writing; the chapter provides an account of the uses to which Prokhanov puts Fedorovian ideas, and shows how these ideas fit into the wider logic of red-brown esotericism. Chapter VII (‘The Uses of Hyperbole’) characterizes Prokhanov’s prose style as based on a very rapid alternation both between sharply different levels of rhetorical hyperbole and also between moments of mystical lyricism, harsh political satire, and the gleefully appreciative evocation of technocratic expertise and high technology (especially military). The conclusion sets out the central propositions that make up Prokhanov’s red-brown esotericism in summary form, so as to exhibit the logical connections between them. It is obvious that no conclusions can count as quite final, when we are talking about a living and very productive writer and one who is actively engaged with a complex, changing political context. Prokhanov’s next book could be a condemnation of Stalinism and empire, written throughout in tones of sweet reasonableness or cutting understatement; but I do not expect it to be.