Edmund Griffiths: Aleksandr Prokhanov and Post-Soviet Esotericism

Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society (SPPS)

Vol. 158

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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.

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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/

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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.

16

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.

I

Dabbling in the Ultranational

§ 1.

Readers who take up a copy of Mr Semtex,5 surprise winner of the National Bestseller literary prize for 2002, are likely to be struck first by Andrei Bondarenko’s grotesque cover design. A human face, in the advanced stages of decay, stares out through empty eye sockets above an immaculate collar and tie; remnants of a bald pate and what must once have been a goatee reveal that the face is that of Lenin, dressed in one of the succession of formal suits he has worn in the mausoleum since his death in 1924.6 And the action of the thriller does indeed take its protagonist, a retired intelligence officer by the name of Belosel'tsev, into the government lab where a team of specialists still work to prevent Vladimir Il'ich’s body from succumbing to historical inevitability. But before he is confronted with the hideous state of the corpse, Belosel'tsev has a chance to hear Dr Mertvykh,7 the mausoleum’s chief scientist, explain how he sees his work: There are many people in the world working on the problem of immortality: in India, in China, in the Arab countries. We know about one other’s work.

The resurrection of Lenin will take place in spring, in Russia, on Orthodox Easter, or the First of May, or Victory Day. The weather will be wonderful, a blue sky, trees and flowers in blossom. The bells will ring out and a prayerful cry will rise from the crowds gathered on Red Square, beneath the sacred walls of the Kremlin. The sun will play and sparkle in the sky, wondrous rainbows will flow around it, and he will step forth from the doors of the Mausoleum: Lenin, alive, bearing light, ‘by his death having trampled down

5

6

7

Aleksandr Prokhanov: Gospodin Geksogen, Moscow: Ad Marginem, 2002. The geksogen of the title is in fact RDX (‘Research Department Explosive’), otherwise known as cyclonite or cyclotrimethylene trinitramine; but ‘semtex’—originally a brand name for a plastic explosive in which RDX is the active ingredient—is much the most familiar label (at least in Britain; the equivalent for readers in the United States would be Mr C–4.)

Given the significance conspiracy theories will occupy in what follows, it seems proper to mention (if nothing more) the occasionally canvassed view that the body was replaced with a waxwork long ago.

The character’s name (mertvykh ‘of the dead’) is perhaps a play not just on his occupation but also on Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago (Church Slavonic zhivago ‘of the living [one]’).

19

20

ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM death’.8 Emperors and princes will arise from their white stone sarcophagi.

Resurrected pilots, cosmonauts, and heroes will step forth from the Kremlin wall. Across the world, billions of people restored to life will rise from the grave. The universal miracle of resurrection will be accomplished. The ‘red meaning’ will return to our lives, and the Soviet Union will be restored.9

§ 2.

It will have become clear long before this point, though, that Mr Semtex is anything but a conventional political thriller. The novel’s author is Aleksandr Andreevich Prokhanov (born 1938), who—despite a prolific fictional output going back to the 1970s— had for much of his career been best known as a journalist. His reports from Afghanistan in the 1980s earned him the soubriquet ‘the nightingale of the General Staff ’ [solovei genshtaba],10 and he greeted Mikhail Gorbachev’s reform programme with undisguised hatred: in 1988, indeed, he was praised by name in Nina Andreeva’s famous attack on the direction perestroika and glasnost' were taking.

Readers of Prokhanov’s later work will be surprised to learn that the particular pronouncement with which he had attracted Andreeva’s attention was a declaration that the attitudes of ‘neo-liberals’ and ‘neo-Slavophils’ were equally dangerous because equally opposed to ‘the socialism we have built in struggle’.11 It was not a view he was to hold for long; with the benefit of hindsight, Andreeva’s rebuke to Prokhanov for exaggerating the differences between the two anti-socialist blocs seems a first hint of what was to come. And some among what Prokhanov was still attacking as the ‘neo-Slavophil’ underground recognized in him a potential ally—

8

9 10

11

This phrase is in Church Slavonic and comes from the Paschal Troparion of the Orthodox Church: ‘Christ is risen from the dead, by his death having trampled down death, and given life to those in the grave’—Triod' tsvetnaya, Moscow: Izdatel'skii Sovet Russkoi Pravoslavnoi Tserkvi, 2002, p. [2].

Prokhanov: Gospodin Geksogen, op. cit., p. 312.

The nickname, along with many other reminiscences of this period, appears in his 2021 autobiographical novel Writers’ House—Aleksandr Prokhanov: TsDL, Moscow: Veche, Nashe Zavtra, 2021, ePub ed., chap. 32 [соловей генерального]. The title is the usual abbreviation for Tsentral'nyi Dom Literatorov ‘Central Writers’ House’, a Moscow club and event venue for members of the USSR Writers’ Union.

Nina Andreeva: ‘Ne mogu postupat'sya printsipami’, in Sovetskaya Rossiya for 13 March 1988, p. 2.

DABBLING IN THE ULTRANATIONAL

21

that is, if Aleksandr Dugin’s subsequent recollections are to be believed: Mamleev said to me at the end of the 1980s, in his classic whisper: ‘You know, Sasha, Prokhanov is “one of us” [Prokhanov «nash»]…’

I was surprised: ‘What do you mean, he’s “one of us”?’ I had thought he was on the other side of the barricades—that he was a cadre man, someone who loyally and unquestioningly served the System, which was rotten to the core. And in my eyes, at that time, that was a total disqualification.

‘No, you’re making a mistake,’ Mamleev continued to assure me. ‘He’s “one of us” all the same, but he’s “undercover”, “isolated”…’

I decided to believe Yurii Vital'evich, and I went to see Prokhanov at the Sovetskaya Literatura journal. After our meeting I had the dim feeling that Mamleev had been right.12

In 1991 Russia’s first presidential elections were held, and Prokhanov became a campaign worker for General Al'bert Makashov in his unsuccessful bid for office. The general, hostile both to Boris Yeltsin and to the ‘official’ Communist candidate Nikolai Ryzhkov, sought the votes of those who regarded the latter (Soviet premier 1985–1990) as fatally compromised by association with Gorbachev; his somewhat Spartan blend of anticapitalist austerity with fervid patriotism and frequent appeals to the military virtues won him the support of three million voters against more than thirteen million who backed Ryzhkov, leaving him fifth in a field of six candidates.

Despite his lack of electoral success, the general remained active in radical politics—and continued to attract Prokhanov’s admiration.

In 1999, for instance, Prokhanov would make the columns of his newspaper Zavtra available to him for a friendly conversation with David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, regarding the need for unity to fight the ‘world financial elite’. Duke felt obliged to question the USSR’s national-patriotic credentials; but Makashov was keen to reassure him: D. D.: My dear general, I agree one hundred percent with the picture of the future you have sketched [...] At the same time, being an anti-communist, I 12

Aleksandr Dugin: ‘Paladin pustoty’, in Den' literatury 2 (8) for February 1998, p.

5. See Chapter V for a brief general discussion of Dugin’s work. Mamleev was then a dissident with an interest in esoteric religion; for an expression of his views and those of his circle, see Unio Mistica [sic]. Moskovskii ezotericheskii sbornik (ed. Sergei Ryabov), Moscow: Terra, 1997.

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ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM hold the view that the same kind of experiment began on the Russian people as far back as 1917.

A. M.: Of course, for White Russian patriots the February and October revolutions did seem like that kind of experiment. The destruction of churches and the uprooting of traditions—all that did happen. But the Russian people and the national elements in the party managed to defeat this Trotskyist-Zionist line. The Trotskyists wanted to build their temple here;13 but there was a patriotic leader in their way, one who put the interests of the Russian people above the schemes of the ‘world conspirators’. Between 1927 and 1937, Stalin carried out a patriotic coup and shattered the plans to destroy Russia. The great Russian people, just as in the years of the Mongol yoke, managed to grind the adversary down, and a new patriotic elite emerged.14

And in a novella published comparatively recently, in 2019, Prokhanov introduces Makashov in the possibly unexpected role of the Lord God. The hero (named Viktor Belosel'tsev, as he is in Mr Semtex and a number of Prokhanov’s other works) finds himself in the Kingdom of Heaven. He keeps trying to tell the Almighty about the horrors he has witnessed, and those he has inflicted, from Nicaragua to Ethiopia and from Angola to Karabakh, in the spirit less of a soul making his confession to his Creator than of an intelligence officer delivering his report to his superior; but the Lord—who always takes the form of people the protagonist has known and loved: an aunt, a favourite teacher—prefers calmer or at least more personal memories.

Belosel'tsev was not surprised that the Godhead wore many faces. If God was in the burning bush, in the meteor falling like a heavenly emerald, he could still more easily appear before Belosel'tsev in the image of people who were dear to him.

And one such dear person, one person who took on the image of God, was General Al'bert Mikhailovich Makashov [...] He was in his field uniform with the green general’s stars, in the famous black beret he had worn when

13

14

The idea that Jews are plotting to build the third Temple occurs quite frequently in Russian antisemitic writing, including Prokhanov’s; the reference to it here is probably superfluous, given the existing mentions of Zionists and world conspirators, but perhaps for some readers it will have been a helpful pointer to the fact that when General Makashov says ‘Trotskyists’ he is not thinking of the details of the Transitional Programme.

David Duke [Devid Dyuk] and Al'bert Makashov, ‘My s vami, brat'ya po bor'be!’, in Zavtra 41 (306) for October 1999, p. 8.

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he stood on the balcony of the House of Soviets and ordered the defenders of the barricades to storm Ostankino.15

§ 3.

One very sympathetic critic has written of Prokhanov at this stage of his career that ‘if certain of his friends had an inferiority complex, or an envy complex, or an ambition complex, then Prokhanov had a complex of his own: military-industrial…’16 It was a complex that would find its next expression in the manifesto A Word to the People, of which Prokhanov was one signatory and the reputed author.17 The document called for patriotic unity among all opponents of perestroika, and urged drastic action to save the state from ruin: and the appeal seemed to bear fruit within a month of its publication, when a group of senior officials—including several of Prokhanov’s co-signatories—seized power and rolled tanks onto the streets of Moscow. Dubbing themselves the State Committee for the State of Emergency (GKChP), they detained Gorbachev on the pretext of illness and proclaimed Vice-President Gennadii Yanaev acting president of the USSR in his stead. The ‘GeKaChePists’ pledged to preserve the crumbling Union’s integrity; 18 but their rule was itself to disintegrate in a mere three days (19–21 August), leaving Yeltsin—whom the junta had unaccountably failed to arrest—in what seemed an unshakeable position. Already armed with a landslide victory in the first presidential election, he was now the hero who had slain the most formidable dragon the old

15

16 17

18

Aleksandr Prokhanov: Pevets boevykh kolesnits, in Pevets boevykh kolesnits, Moscow: Flyuid FriFlai, 2019, ePub ed., chap. 8 [Белосельцева не удивляла]. The volume includes two novellas or short novels, the title work (The Singer of War Chariots) and also The Sacred Grove [Svyashchennaya roshcha].

Vladimir Bondarenko: ‘Imperskii geroi Aleksandra Prokhanova’, op. cit., p. 176.

It was published in Sovetskaya Rossiya for 23 July 1991, with Prokhanov as one among a list of twelve signatories presented in alphabetical order. The text can conveniently be found in an anthology of Prokhanov’s non-fiction, also entitled A Word to the People, although the volume’s editor does not claim more for Prokhanov than the status of one co-author: Yurii Bondarev et al., ‘Slovo k narodu’, in Aleksandr Prokhanov: Slovo k narodu (ed. O. A. Platonov), Moscow: Institut russkoi tsivilizatsii / Rodnaya strana, 2013, pp. 863–868.

State Committee for the State of Emergency in the USSR: ‘Obrashchenie k sovetskomu narodu’, in Pravda for 20 August 1991, p. 1.

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ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM

apparatus could unleash.19 It is perhaps ironic that the act by which Yeltsin consolidated his victory—a decree banning the Communist Party on Russian territory20—should if anything have added to the influence enjoyed by those, like Prokhanov, who had been the GKChP’s strongest supporters: the initiative in what was emerging as Russia’s opposition passed from the Communist Party of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic to an assortment of street orators, small ad hoc parties, anti-Yeltsin intellectuals, individual members of the two Congresses of People’s Deputies and the two Supreme Soviets,21 and such interest groups as the Union of Soviet Officers. Prokhanov, as editor of the opposition newspaper Den' (initially an organ of the USSR Writers’ Union), was well placed to help decide the direction in which this new movement would evolve. § 4.

The two years that followed the GKChP’s defeat saw the opposition’s standing transformed. The dissolution of the USSR at the end of 1991 was followed by 1992’s economic disaster, in which millions lost their savings and their livelihoods. Gross domestic

19

20

21

Prokhanov has offered a fictionalized account of the GKChP in his novel The Last Soldier of the Empire—Aleksandr Prokhanov: Poslednii soldat imperii. Kremlevskii apokalipsis, Moscow: Kovcheg, 1993; idem: Poslednii soldat imperii, Moscow: Ad Marginem, 2003. The changes Prokhanov has made to this work over time will receive some attention in §38 below.

The ban covered both the CP of the Soviet Union and its recently formed Russian wing, the CP of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Party membership as such was never outlawed, but Party organizations—from the branches to the two Central Committees—were forbidden from operating.

That is, of the USSR and of Russia. The Congresses (elected in 1989 and 1990 respectively) were large unicameral assemblies meeting only periodically; each Congress elected a bicameral Supreme Soviet to stand in for it between sessions.

Both Congresses were formed through competitive election, although 750 of the USSR Congress’s 2,250 members represented institutions (from the CP and the Academy of Sciences to societies of bibliophiles and stamp collectors) rather than more conventional electoral districts. Since the elections predated the emergence of a multi-party system, fractional groupings in these bodies were always loose and shifting.

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product fell by 14.5%; inflation stood above 1,000%.22 Anti-government demonstrations grew in size and in frequency; and the combination of Orthodox regalia with portraits of Stalin, retired Soviet Army political officers with atamans of re-founded Cossack troops, appeals to proletarian internationalism and to the darkest antisemitism, ceased to surprise. The USSR Congress of People’s Deputies had been wound up, although a handful of its members had gathered in early 1992 to elect (without a quorum) a standing committee whose chair—the Chechen deputy Sazhi Umalatova—thus became something akin to a legitimist pretender to the title of Soviet head of state;23 but the balance of opinion in the Russian Congress was shifting fast, as hundreds of deputies who had once backed Yeltsin drifted into the opposition camp. And, from late 1991 onwards, loose alliances were growing into organized political groups. First in any list must be Viktor Tyul'kin’s Russian Communist Workers’ Party, whose mass front organization Labour Moscow (led by Viktor Anpilov; later reorganized as Labour Russia) played a key part in the capital’s street rallies. But this was also the period when Nina Andreeva (1938–2020) transformed her Bolshevik Platform into the Communist Party of the Soviet Union/Bolshevik, 24 and when a host of smaller groups took definite shape. In early 1993, finally, Aleksandr Dugin came together with the returned émigré novelist Eduard Savenko (1943–2020, much better known under his nom-de-plume, Eduard Limonov) to found the National Bolshevik 22

23

24

Figures from Goskomstat, quoted in William Tompson: ‘Economic Policy under Yeltsin and Putin’, in Steven White, Alex Pravda, and Zvi Gitelman (ed.): Developments in Russian Politics 5, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2001, p. 183.

The major subsequent activity of Umalatova’s ‘Standing Praesidium of the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies’ appears to have been issuing assorted medals and honours, allegedly at a hefty profit; she is probably not quite the only legitimist pretender in history of whom something similar could be said.

A description will be found in a catalogue written for collectors and museum staff—Boris Airapetyan: Ordena i medali Postoyannogo Prezidiuma S"ezda narodnykh deputatov SSSR. Osnovnye tipy i raznovidnosti. Praktika nagrazhdeniya, Moscow: Lyubimaya kniga, 2012.

Vsesoyuznaya Kommunisticheskaya partiya bol'shevikov, abbreviated VKPB, and differing only in a detail of punctuation from Vsesoyuznaya Kommunisticheskaya partiya (bol'shevikov) or VKP(b), the name borne by the USSR’s ruling party from 1925 to 1952.

26

ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM

Party. Prokhanov, as he had in A Word to the People, advocated Russian patriotism as the basis on which the opposition could unite; and the formation in late 1992 of the National Salvation Front, joining ‘red’ (communist) and ‘white’ (Orthodox Christian) patriots, represented a triumph for this approach. Supporters of the NSF tended to call themselves simply ‘patriots’; their foes dubbed them ‘red-brown’ [krasno-korichnevyi], the colour of Soviet communism linked with that of Hitler’s brownshirts. Prokhanov served as one of the Front’s co-chairs from July 1993 until April 1994: his colleagues during this turbulent period of Russia’s history included such luminaries of the opposition as General Makashov, the RCWP’s Richard Kosolapov, and—perhaps most significantly— Gennadii Zyuganov. When a 1993 ruling by the Constitutional Court overturned the ban on the Communist Party of the RSFSR, now renamed with the country as the CP of the Russian Federation, it was Zyuganov (one of the signatories to A Word to the People) who emerged as its leader: and the direction in which he led the relaunched party of Lenin was a distinctly patriotic one. Prokhanov became a close political ally of the CPRF leader, to whom his relationship can usefully (albeit at the risk of upsetting all concerned) be compared to that of Aleksandr Yakovlev to Mikhail Gorbachev: he was at once the culture specialist, the media contact, the link with non-Party radicals, and the voice always urging his leader to move further and faster from the Brezhnev-era verities. § 5.

As the standoff intensified between President Yeltsin and the newfound opposition majority in the Supreme Soviet and the Congress of People’s Deputies, Prokhanov and Den' swung what support they could behind the parliamentary side—ably coordinated by the Congress’s speaker,25 Ruslan Imranovich Khasbulatov. Khasbulatov, a Chechen economist, had been a Yeltsin ally dur-

25

In Russia, as in the USSR before it and in such countries as the USA, the post of speaker or chair of an elected assembly is a political one, rather than administrative and procedural as at Westminster. The exact nature of the office has varied (a) with the parliamentary balance of forces, and (b) with the relative strengths of parliament and President.

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ing the struggle against the GKChP; the same passion for opposition unity that has led Prokhanov to embrace undoubted fascists also moved him on this occasion to overlook past enmities. Emboldened by victory in a plebiscite, Yeltsin issued a decree dissolving the Congress and the Soviet: to which the parliamentarians responded with a counter-decree ejecting him from office and installing Vice-President Aleksandr Rutskoi as Acting President. The Constitutional Court found Yeltsin’s action to be unconstitutional; it could hardly have found otherwise. The security forces, however, were of a different opinion. The House of Soviets (Russia’s parliament building, since renamed Government House) was besieged, and supporters of the NSF rallied to its defence. They were joined there by the whole spectrum of the Russian radical opposition, from libertarian leftists to activists with Aleksandr Barkashov’s far-right Russian National Unity. Sergei Biets, who in 1990 had been a founder member of the first expressly Trotskyist organization to exist on Soviet soil since 1929 (the Committee for Workers’ Democracy and International Socialism), recalled many years later how in 1993 he had found himself on the same side of the barricades as Barkashov supporters who ‘basically wanted to shoot me because I was an internationalist communist, a Trotskyist’. 26 General Makashov coordinated the building’s defence, and Moscow was plunged into momentary civil war when some of the parliament’s supporters seized vehicles abandoned by government forces and tried to take the state television centre, Ostankino; many still believe the vehicles were left for them as a deliberate provocation. On 4 October 1993 the Congress of People’s Deputies was stormed with the use of tanks and special forces. Several hundred people lost their lives. 27 Den'—along with certain other opposition papers— was closed by decree (although it soon reappeared under the title 26 27

Sergei Biets, ‘25 let kontrrevoliutsionnomu perevorotu v Rossii’, in Rabochaya Demokratiya 3 (175) for 2018, p. 3.

For an eyewitness journal of the siege and storming of the Congress, written by the parliamentary correspondent on a substantially pro-Yeltsin newspaper, see Veronika Kutsyllo: Zapiski iz Belogo doma. 21 sentyabrya—4 oktyabrya 1993g., Moscow: Kommersant", 1993; for Acting President Rutskoi’s impressions of the conflict, see Aleksandr Rutskoi: Krovavaya osen'. Dnevnik sobytii 21 sentyabrya— 4 oktyabrya 1993 goda, Moscow: no pub., 1995.

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ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM

Zavtra). Sergei Biets’s Trotskyists were among the few groups who managed to bring out a newspaper giving the pro-parliamentarian side’s account of what had happened. As Biets wrote afterwards: Labour Russia militants helped us raise money for the issue, and everyone distributed it, even RNU members! I vividly remember one incomparable dialogue with an old granny from Labour Russia, outside the Lenin Museum. She was selling our paper, and at the same time she was telling everybody about how after Anpilov was arrested 'Yids and Trotskyists have seized control of the movement’. ‘So why are you flogging that paper?’ we asked her. And she said, ‘Well, nobody else writes the truth any longer’.

You’ve got to laugh, haven’t you?28

For Prokhanov (as for the granny) it was probably less of a laughing matter; he writes the events up in fictionalized form in his novel The Red-Brown, where the central character—modelled on the author— is killed in the fighting,29 and we should hardly be surprised that the defence of the House of Soviets has remained a persistent reference point in his writing ever since. The nominal objective may have been to uphold parliamentary government in the person of a Chechen professor of economics—but for those few days, with radicals of right and left joining hands against the common enemy, the red-brown revolution seemed to glimmer in the streets of Moscow.

It has never again felt as close. And the bitterness of the defeat has done little to make the memory less potent. § 6.

These events are also memorable, of course, because the definitive victory of the Kremlin and the military created the ultrapresidential system of government that has characterized Russian political life ever since. Yeltsin called elections for a new bicameral legislature, the Federal Assembly (State Duma and Council of the Federation), whose much-reduced powers were enshrined in a new constitution to be endorsed by plebiscite on the same day. Political parties deemed to have supported the Congress’s resistance to the dissolution decree were barred from contesting the election; but the results still did not represent the clear victory Yeltsin and his supporters had sought. Over eight million voters backed the Kremlin’s 28 29

Sergei Biets, ‘25 let kontrrevoliutsionnomu perevorotu v Rossii’, loc. cit.

Aleksandr Prokhanov: Krasno-korichnevyi, St Petersburg: Amfora, 2003.

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electoral vehicle, Russia’s Choice; but a shade under eleven million voted instead for one or other of the two ‘patriotic’ parties (Communists and Agrarians) that were cleared to contest the election, while more than twelve million plumped for Vladimir Zhirinovskii’s Liberal Democratic Party of Russia. Zhirinovskii, until his death in 2022, was a unique presence in Russian politics: believed by many to have been launched into late-Soviet public life as part of a KGB attempt to create a managed multi-party system, he invited comparisons with the French neo-fascist leader Jean-Marie Le Pen30 and issued calls for the Russian military to fight its way as far as the Indian Ocean.31 Many saw in the Zhirinovskii of the early 1990s a fascist dictator in the making, an idea the LDPR leader did nothing to dispel; and the ferocity of his rhetoric led observers and supporters alike to overlook the circumstance that he had stood aside from the defence of the parliament, and that his bloc in the new State Duma tended (once the shouting had subsided) to vote with the government. The strength of the LDPR vote in 1993 can probably be attributed in part to the fact that the Liberal Democrats were the only party with a strongly ‘patriotic’ appeal not to be covered by the temporary restrictions imposed on the opposition after the dissolution of parliament. Whether or not the KGB conspiracy theory is accepted, the LDPR has in fact served to direct potentially radical opposition votes into a safe channel. Its late leader, meanwhile, can best be understood as a court jester in the purest Shakespearian tradition. As with a court jester, his apparent clowning could sometimes reveal—in the most penetrating fashion—the foolishness or venality of those in power. But, as with a court jester, Zhirinovskii was ultimately a part of the system; his sallies could embarrass the powerful, but they represented no threat.

30

31

See Eduard Limonov: Limonov protiv Zhirinovskogo, Moscow: Konets veka, 1994.

The author was briefly a Zhirinovskii ally, and the book records his disillusionment; its title should perhaps be translated Limonov contra Zhirinovskii, to bring out the echo of Nietzsche contra Wagner.

Vladimir Zhirinovskii: Poslednii brosok na yug, Moscow: Izdatel'stvo LiberalDemokraticheskoi partii Rossii, 2001.

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§ 7.

The NSF broke up in 1995, but the rise in support for the ‘patriotic’ opposition continued. That year’s State Duma elections saw further gains: more than twenty-two million people cast their votes for ‘patriotic’ candidates, while the LDPR’s vote fell below eight million and the new pro-Yeltsin party Our Home is Russia took only seven million.32 The following year saw the launch of the People’s Patriotic League of Russia, a new umbrella organization built around the CPRF; Prokhanov was elected as one of the PPLR’s co-chairs. It also brought presidential elections, the first since Russia’s independence from the Soviet Union. Zyuganov stood, in the CPRF interest but with PPLR support and on an essentially PPLR manifesto: he took 32% in the first round against 35% for Yeltsin.

The LDPR’s downturn continued, with Zhirinovskii achieving only 6% and fifth place. A runoff between Yeltsin and Zyuganov led to the incumbent’s re-election with forty million votes, while thirty million were recorded for the challenger;33 Zyuganov’s supporters alleged fraud but did not take to the streets. The remainder of the Yeltsin years saw the ‘patriotic’ vote hold steady around 30%. The transition from Yeltsin to Vladimir Putin brought a noticeable decline, but the CPRF’s status as Russia’s second party remains unchallenged: the most recent legislative elections, in 2021, saw it take 19% of the vote. A further 7.5% supported Sergei Mironov’s proKremlin bloc, Equitable Russia34—For Truth, which also presents

32

33

34

The ‘patriotic’ total was 22,296,369 votes (32.22%), consisting of 15,432,963 (22.30%) for the CPRF; 3,137,406 (4.53%) for ‘Communists / Labour Russia / For the Soviet Union’, a bloc of smaller parties led by the RCWP; 2,613,127 (3.78%) for the Agrarians; and 1,112,873 (1.61%) for Nikolai Ryzhkov’s ‘Power to the People!’ bloc. A somewhat higher total could be reached by including several small parties that also presented themselves as ‘patriotic’ and / or ‘socialist’. The LDPR received 7,737,431 votes (11.18%) and Our Home is Russia 7,009,291 votes (10.13%).

The first round results for the leading candidates were Yeltsin 26,665,495 (35.28%), Ziuganov 24,211,686 (32.03%). Zhirinovskii received 4,311,479 votes (5.70%). The second round results were Yeltsin 40,202,349 (53.82%), Ziuganov 30,104,589 (40.31%).

This rendering of Spravedlivaya Rossiya—almost certainly the best that can be achieved, given that ‘Just Russia’ sounds like ‘Russia Only’ and ‘Fair Russia’ sounds like ‘la belle Russie’—was kindly suggested to me by D. J. Frost (private communication).

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itself as socialist and patriotic and seeks to appeal to a similar electorate. (As with all previous elections in post-Soviet Russia, questions were raised about the integrity of the count.) On the other hand, not everyone who voted for the CPRF’s candidates necessarily agreed with too much of what they may have read in its manifesto; the party’s status as the only non-government force large enough to be ensured representation at federal level has allowed it to attract ‘tactical’ votes from people with an exceedingly wide range of views (including liberal and conservative as well as socialist and red-brown). Some of this diversity has even found expression among the party’s elected representatives: in line with an electoral strategy that goes back at least as far as 1937, when the ruling party chose to fight that year’s elections to the first Supreme Soviet ‘in a bloc, an alliance with non-party workers, peasants, office workers, and intellectuals’,35 the CPRF has always liked to include a scattering of independent notables among the candidates it puts before the electorate. (This habit on the part of the CPSU, of course, explains the seeming oddity that the legislature produced by 1989’s contested elections actually had a higher percentage of paid-up party members among its deputies than the Supreme Soviet elected in 1984, when there had been only one candidate per district.) The result is that the CPRF’s voters are probably at least as diverse, politically and philosophically, as are those of large mass parties in other countries—and indeed those of the main pro-Kremlin party, United Russia 36 —while the federal, regional, and local deputies elected under its banner are if anything more so. Election results (even if they can be taken at face value) are crude and unreliable as

35

36

Election address by the Central Committee, quoted in Istoriya Vsesoyuznoi Kommunisticheskoi partii (bol'shevikov). Kratkii kurs, ed. a Commission of the CPSU(B) Central Committee, Moscow: Pravda, 1938, p. 335. The ‘bloc’ received, we are told, the suffrages of 98.6% of those voting, on a 96.8% turnout (ibid., p. 336).

‘One Russia’ would perhaps be a better translation of Edinaya Rossiya, but the English version used here has become firmly established. UR ought not to be referred to as Russia’s ruling party: the very apposite Russian phrase is partiya vlasti ‘party of the government’, ‘party of the regime’, ‘party of [those in] power’, which (unlike pravyashchaya partiya ‘ruling party’, ‘governing party’) carries no implication that it is the party that actually rules.

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a way of assessing the strength of ‘patriotic’ sentiment in Russian society. § 8.

Readers aware of some of this political background, and unfamiliar at first hand with Prokhanov’s voluminous writing, might well approach Mr Semtex with a reasonably clear expectation of what they would find there. This is, after all, a political thriller written by a highly political journalist, and set in what was then the very recent past; and many of the characters are based on real figures, easily recognizable even though the names are altered. It is a characteristic of Prokhanov’s fiction, in fact, that he incorporates current scandals and the public figures of the moment, in anonymized and exaggerated form but (to the novels’ likely readers) instantly identifiable. Naming the objects of these caricatures any more explicitly than he does would spoil the fun; it would seem gauche, or at best it would resemble those ancient newspaper cartoons where a man with ‘Prussia’ written across the skirt of his frock coat shakes his fist at a biretta’d clergyman labelled ‘The Church of Rome’. The price to be paid is that these facets of the books quite quickly become less readable as the particular headlines fade from memory: a time is probably foreseeable when younger readers of Mr Semtex will want notes.37 Many of the events in the novel, at any rate, are transparently to be read as versions of real events in the runup to Vladimir Putin’s accession to the Russian presidency. It would scarcely be extravagant to anticipate a thinly camouflaged presentation of some (real or imagined) secret information on how Putin’s meteoric rise had been achieved. Given the title’s reference to explosives, indeed, it would seem plausible that the plot would centre upon the widely rehearsed conspiracy theory that Putin himself was responsible for the 1999 bomb attacks in Moscow and Volgodonsk. And the novel does depict the entourage of ‘the Chosen One’ organizing those outrages; while its tone is certainly one of unremitting contempt for Russia’s post-Soviet elite.

37

‘The Idol’ [Istukan] = Yeltsin; ‘the Chosen One’ [Izbrannik] = Vladimir Putin; ‘the daughter’ = Tat'yana D'yachenko; Zaretskii = Boris Berezovskii; Astros = Vladimir Gusinskii; Grammofonchik = Anatolii Sobchak; ‘the public prosecutor’ = Yurii Skuratov; ‘the premier’ = Sergei Stepashin, etc.

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One reviewer will doubtless have caused Prokhanov a certain degree of innocent pleasure by writing that I know of no better instrument for destabilizing society than this kind of literature. The ‘direct action’ we hear so much about is simply what young people do after reading books like this one.38

But it is less clear exactly what ‘action’ Gavrilov expects Russia’s radical youth, inflamed by Mr Semtex, to take. And this is indicative of something slightly unexpected about the novel. Most conspiracy thrillers open with the reader and the protagonist in the dark as to the conspiracy, which is ultimately unmasked after a series of adventures: Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code39 can stand as a representative example. Even in thrillers of this type, the anticipation is frequently more pleasurable than the consummation; many of Brown’s multitude of readers will perhaps have felt some vague disappointment at discovering that the whole exciting machinery of secrecy and conspiracy has been thrown up around a rather dull series of speculations in dynastic history. Mr Semtex deviates somewhat from the usual pattern. A plausible enough conspiracy is unveiled not at the end, but in the second chapter out of 34: a group of retired state security officers aims to restore Soviet power. Electoral fraud rules out the ballot box; a popular uprising would be powerless against a modern military; and divided opinions within the officer corps mean a putsch would risk plunging the country into a civil war in which both sides had nuclear capability. So they must move by stealth, luring the ailing ‘Idol’ into voluntarily ceding power to a successor—‘the Chosen One’—who has been manoeuvred into place behind the scenes. Belosel'tsev, who resigned in disgust after the GKChP’s defeat, agrees to help: and his first assignment is to assist in the entrapment operation that will lead to

38

39

Aleksandr Gavrilov: ‘Radi krasno-korichnevogo slovtsa’, Grani.ru http://grani.ru /Culture/m.750.html (accessed 17 September 2022). The article’s title is a rather clever and completely untranslatable pun, substituting krasno-korichnevyi ‘redbrown’ into the set phrase radi krasnogo slovtsa ‘for effect’ (as in ‘to say something for effect’), literally ‘for the sake of a red/beautiful word’.

Dan Brown: The Da Vinci Code, London: Corgi, 2004.

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the chief public prosecutor’s dismissal once a sexually explicit videotape of him has been shown on television. (This is based on a real incident involving Yurii Skuratov, who had been investigating government corruption.) But this explanation of what is happening becomes less and less satisfactory as the novel progresses. Belosel'tsev comes to doubt the conspirators’ motives, and entertains a bewildering variety of alternative conspiracy theories: that the secret society with which he is involved was founded by Stalin, or by Lavrentii Beria; that it exists to create a renewed Russian Empire, or to prevent it; that it is directed by an international league of secret services, or by Russian antisemites; that it represents the germ of a future world government, or just another 1990s mafia clan. The ghastly possibility is even hinted at that on the deepest and most conspiratorial level the aim really is what it appears on the surface to be, and that the Chosen One’s mission truly is to carry on the work begun by the Idol. In the final chapter the plotters are themselves effortlessly brushed aside in one more staged terrorist attack, orchestrated by a group of whose existence Belosel'tsev has heard only vague and confusing accounts. All along, the conspirators have been tools in the hands of a deeper conspiracy, their grand strategy—whatever it was—just a step on the road towards realizing others’ ultimate purposes. And the conclusion, a brief epilogue in which the Chosen One simply dissolves into light and rainbows, resolves nothing beyond confirming that Putin at the moment of his triumph is simply a device in the hands of the obscure powers that stand behind him. § 9.

And the swirling conspiracy theories continually blur over into coincidence, fate, prophecy, and unambiguous black magic.

Belosel'tsev seeks guidance from the deranged prophet Nikolai Nikolaevich, an Orthodox fool-for-Christ [yurodivyi] with lashings of antisemitism and of nostalgia for Stalin. Dr Mertvykh preaches the resurrection of Lenin. The television mogul Astros (based on Vladimir Gusinskii) describes his network’s satirical puppet show— based on the Kukly programme shown on NTV from 1994 to 2002— in terms that the producers of Spitting Image would have been unlikely to choose:

DABBLING IN THE ULTRANATIONAL

35

‘In this humble workshop, we sew and knit politics. We sculpt leaders’ reputations. We burn their personalities in the crucible. We mine the “philosopher’s stone” of history.’ Astros laid his hand on a crystal prism. With his other palm he covered up a book of magic formulae. ‘Our puppet programme isn’t a farce, it’s not political satire, a fun show with dolls, as the simple-hearted man in the street imagines. It’s magic, a mystery, a sacrament, founded on the mystic relationship between Type and Prototype.

Their simultaneous extrasensory impact combines with the electromagnetic television wave, and a type is imposed on the world according to which it is then forced to act. We are proud that we have succeeded in combining the latest achievements of electronic civilization and the entertainment industry with the ancient knowledge of the magicians.’40

This revelation might surprise the reader; it does not surprise the protagonist. ‘Belosel'tsev had already guessed the nature of these […] shows’.41 But then, even the conspiracy’s down-to-earth leader General Grechishnikov has already warned him that the density of evil at Ostankino is greater than anywhere else in Russia. Psychics can’t work here: they suffer infarctions and brain haemorrhages. It’ll take about three hundred years to rehabilitate this place.42

What is distinctly more surprising, however, is just how familiar these various allegations already are. § 10.

There is very little in Mr Semtex, however extraordinary, for which no parallel can be found among assertions made in sober earnest by patriotic activists and commentators in Zavtra and elsewhere. Take, for example, the interpretation of the Kukly show as occult mind control. In 2002, the same year as Prokhanov’s novel came out, a reading of Kukly was also proposed by followers of General Konstantin Petrov. After a distinguished career in the Space Forces, including three years as deputy head of Mission Control [Tsentr Upravleniya Poletami kosmicheskikh apparatov] for the state space agency,43 the general had produced a stream of writing setting out his views on Stalin (strongly in favour), the Jews and the 40 41 42 43

Aleksandr Prokhanov: Gospodin Geksogen, op. cit., p. 171.

Ibid.

Ibid., p. 161.

Stranitsa pamyati Petrova Konstantina Pavlovicha, KPE / Conception of Public Safety, 25 July 2009, http://www.kpe.ru/itemap-144 (accessed 17 September 2022).

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ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM

ancient Egyptian priesthood (not strongly in favour), and much else besides.44 His Unification Conceptual Party would achieve only 1% of the vote in the parliamentary elections of 2003, and in 2007 its official registration was withdrawn. But in the last years before his untimely death in 2009 Petrov added the title of a priest or magus [volkhv] in Slavonic neopaganism to his roster of accomplishments, styling himself the volkhv Meragor. A photograph shows him beaming, his arms spread, in red and white vestments, with a kolovrat (eight-armed swastika) necklace replacing the chestful of medals to which he was entitled; behind him, a rainbow fills the sky.45 Back in 2002, Petrov or his supporters wrote that [w]e have revealed more than once that Kukly is a programme whose purpose is to convey information promptly to the shadowy control structures that are implementing an unstructured control [struktur upravleniya, osushchestvlyayushchikh bezstrukturnoe upravlenie]46 over Russia for the purposes of the ‘world conspiracy’ (the globalizers).47 […] Besides keeping the Russia-based periphery of the ‘world conspiracy’ informed, the Kukly show also carries out a second very important function: it programs all those who do not understand the processes of control, so that they behave in strict accordance with the plans that have been announced […] We start from the position that the symbolic and typological language of Kukly should be made comprehensible not only to the agents of the ‘world conspiracy’, but also to all citizens of Russia; this will make it possible to decipher the purposes of Russia’s enemies and the methods by which they are accomplished, on which basis people will be able effectively to cut off the anti-Russia, antipeople activity of the agents of the ‘world conspiracy’ and to implement our own control for the purposes of the people of Russia.48

Prokhanov would perhaps not have been ashamed to have created General Petrov as a fictional character; the significant point for our purposes is that there was no need to.

44

45 46

47 48

Copious materials by Petrov and his admirers are available on the KPE / Conception of Public Safety website, http://www.kpe.ru (accessed 17 September 2022).

Volkhv Meragor, https://meragor.jimdofree.com (accessed 17 September 2022).

The standard spelling would be besstrukturnyi: the use here of bez- , without assimilation of voicing, reflects the Petrovites’ partial rejection of the 1918 Russian spelling reform.

The word here translated ‘conspiracy’ is zakulisa, a collective noun whose most literal rendering would be ‘those behind the scenes.’ ‘«Kukol'noe» upravlenie Rossiei’, KPE / Conception of Public Safety, 4 December 2002, http://old.kpe.ru/rating/media/134/ (accessed 17 September 2022).

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§ 11.

People do not, of course, say in all seriousness outside the pages of novels that Lenin is going to come back from the dead as a supernatural redeemer. They say it about Stalin. In a Zavtra article in 1999 under the well-chosen title of ‘Mystical Stalinism’, Aleksandr Sergeev writes that [t]hey say if you put your ear to the Volga steppe outside Stalingrad you can hear his footsteps. Perhaps Stalin is already among us. No-one knows what form he will take in his new incarnation, nor can say what he is doing now: whether he is wandering the sacred forests of Vologda, or praying in some abandoned monastery, or cocking his assault rifle—these are things it is not granted us to know [znat' ne dano]. But that does not render any less palpable the sense that the Leader is near. And again, together with millions of people who await his advent, we repeat like an incantation: he is at hand, he is near, he will return.49

‘Initiates,’ Sergeev writes, ‘saw in his realm an archetype of Paradise, of incarnate harmony and beauty’; Stalin himself, his mission already fated before the continents had taken their present shape, was ‘a Hammer of Providence ready for apocalyptic battle.’ 50 Countless analogous passages could be adduced, both from Zavtra and from other sources—and many more will indeed be examined, alongside other novels of Prokhanov’s, in the pages that follow. But these samples are sufficient to establish one point at least: the phantasmagoria of conspiracies and occult happenings found in Mr Semtex is not simply the product of one novelist’s imagination. Prokhanov’s writing draws on, and helps to shape, a distinctive belief system or way of perceiving the world that has emerged in postSoviet Russia.

49 50

Aleksandr Sergeev: ‘Misticheskii stalinizm’, in Zavtra 44 (309) for November 1999, p. 5.

Ibid.

II The Second Cult of Stalin § 12.

In Prokhanov’s novel of 2016, The Governor, the title character is persuaded to visit a provincial church where prayers are said to be offered before some unusual ikons.

On a large board of gold and scarlet was an image of Our Lady the Sovereign [Bogomater' Derzhavnaya], surrounded by the Heavenly Powers—angels and cherubim. Beneath a veil of pink clouds towered Stalin in the white tunic of a generalissimus, 51 with a diamond star. Around, clustering like grapes, were marshals in parade uniforms with gold epaulettes. The banners of prostrate fascist divisions had been flung at Stalin’s feet. The ikon depicted the triumph of the Victory.

Plotnikov gazed in surprise. His eyes slid to the side, and he saw two more ikons. One of them, silvery, showed the heavenly hosts in motion: horsemen with haloes, knights in scarlet mantles, sharp-winged angels. And below, duplicating their impetus and rush, were tanks and armoured cars rolling across Red Square, and marching infantry, and skiers in white with assault rifles slung across their chests. Atop the mausoleum, under the rubycoloured stars, Stalin stood exhorting the troops. It was the parade of ’41, in the silver glow of an autumn sky, shrouded in snowstorms.52 The second ikon, scarlet, golden, jubilant, depicted the parade of ’45, Zhukov on a white horse, Stalin on the mausoleum, guardsmen throwing swastika standards to the ground. And above it all was the Mother of God, surrounded by earthly kings and heavenly saints, soaring above the parade.53

The first of these images, at least, actually exists, although its status as a canonical ikon (as opposed to merely a painting) is not unquestioned: there are photographs of Prokhanov presenting it, and a priest praying in front of it, at Engel's-2 air base in the Saratov region in 2015.54 Plotnikov, in the novel, is nonetheless surprised to 51 52

53 54

Stalin was awarded this rank in 1945, becoming the first person in Russia to hold it since Aleksandr Suvorov in 1799.

The reference is to the celebrations of the anniversary of the October Revolution in the first year of WWII, when military units famously paraded in Red Square and then marched straight to the front lines to defend the capital. This episode is often recalled in both the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ Stalinist literature.

Aleksandr Prokhanov: Gubernator, Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2016, ePub ed., chap. 3 [На большой].

Valentina Brykalina and Dmitrii Kozurov: ‘Na moleben na aviabaze pod Saratovom privezli ikonu s izobrazheniem Stalina’, KP.RU Saratov, 16 June 2015 https:// www.saratov.kp.ru/daily/26393/3271092/ (accessed 18 September 2022). In his comments to journalists, quoted here, and also in the novel through the

39

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see such a thing—but perhaps he should not be. If at the end of the 1980s the name of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was an accepted shorthand for all that was evil, then the post-Soviet decades have witnessed an astonishing reassessment. The rhetorical move back to Stalin first took place in the ranks of the opposition, where by 1997 even an advocate of ‘market socialism’ felt it necessary to preface his remarks with an appeal to 1952’s Economic Problems55 as ‘a kind of “market testament” of J. V. Stalin’.56 But, since 2000, supporters of the government have been joining in. This change, for which Prokhanov and Zavtra can take their share of the credit, is reasonably central to the present study; but it is also of obvious importance in understanding the general political and ideological evolution of post-Soviet Russia. If we can get to a position where the idea of Stalin appearing on an ikon of the Blessed Virgin no longer does surprise us too much, we shall have gained a valuable perspective on Russia’s contemporary political culture. § 13.

Roland Barthes, writing of what we must now call the first cult of Stalin, observes that Stalin, as a spoken object, has exhibited for years, in their pure state, the constituent characters of mythical speech: a meaning, which was the real Stalin, that of history; a signifier, which was the ritual invocation to Stalin, and the inevitable character of the ‘natural’ epithets with which his name was surrounded; a signified, which was the intention to respect orthodoxy, discipline and unity, appropriated by the Communist parties to a definite situation; and a signification, which was a sanctified Stalin, whose historical determinants found themselves grounded in nature, sublimated under the

55

56

mouth of a character, Prokhanov emphasizes that Stalin is not painted with a halo—the Church’s prerogative of canonizing saints is not being encroached upon.

Joseph Stalin: Ekonomicheskie problemy sotsializma v SSSR, Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1952; unsigned English translation as Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R., Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1972. The work argues that commodity production—production for exchange rather than for use—can and should exist under socialism.

Boris Kurashvili: Novyi sotsializm. K vozrozhdeniyu posle katastrofy, Moscow: Bylina, 1997, p. 36.

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41

name of Genius, that is, something irrational and inexpressible: here, depoliticization is evident, it fully reveals the presence of a myth.57

The Stalin of today’s second cult is no less mythical, and if anything more sanctified: Prokhanov has an article whose title reads simply ‘The Victory is a Religion, Stalin is a Saint!’58 And the first cult undoubtedly had its complexities and differences of emphasis too. But the new Stalin cult, where Orthodoxy is sometimes more prominent than orthodoxy, reveals multiple rhetorical layers that—while neither inexpressible nor, in their own terms, irrational—do require a certain amount of unpicking.

One must understand here by rhetoric a set of fixed, regulated, insistent figures, according to which the varied forms of the mythical signifier arrange themselves.59

First of all, a completely naïve Stalinism—a Stalinism that affirms the greatness and goodness of Stalin because it has never heard anything else—is not possible in the Russia of today. In Prokhanov’s youth, it may have been: he turned eighteen in the year of the Twentieth Congress. One day it may be again. But there can be few Russian Stalinists60 alive today who have not heard Stalin discussed by people who are very far from regarding him as a genius or a saint.

Even before the Gorbachev period, it had been a generation since anything resembling a cult of Stalin had been publicly celebrated in the USSR. The official stance after 1964—when Khrushchev’s deStalinization was halted but not reversed—was instead a distinctly uneasy compromise. It is instructive to examine a typical pre-perestroika statement on the subject, taken here from a standard onevolume encyclopaedia published in the dying days of the Brezhnev epoch. Notice the agonized balance, the avoidance of specifics, the 57 58 59 60

Roland Barthes: Mythologies (tr. Annette Lavers), London: Paladin, 1989, p. 160.

Aleksandr Prokhanov: ‘Pobeda—religiya, Stalin—svyatoi!’, in Zavtra 19 (546) for May 2004, p. 1. ‘Stalin is holy’ would be another possible translation.

Roland Barthes: Mythologies, op. cit., p. 164.

The term ‘Stalinist’, incidentally, is sometimes rejected in favour of ‘Stalinite’ [stalinets] by people to whom it might be thought to apply. Yurii Bondarev’s words are representative: ‘I’m not a Stalinist, but I am a Stalinite! That catchword “Stalinist” was brought in by people who hate Stalin’— quoted in Vladimir Bondarenko et al.: ‘Chechenskii blyuz’, in Zavtra 53 (265) for December 1998, p. 3.

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inability to state clearly just what the ‘mistakes’ were or how the ‘gross violations’ might relate to the achievements: ´STALIN (Dzhugashvili), Jos. Vissarionovich (1879–1953). Leading figure in the CPSU, the Sov. State, and the internat’l Comm. and workers’ movement; theoretician and propagandist of Marxism-Leninism […] Played a significant role in the construction of socialism in the USSR, in the defeat of Trotskyism, and in organizing the victory of the Sov. people in the Great Fatherland War. At the same time committed theoret. and polit. mistakes and gross violations of socialist legality and of the Leninist norms of party and state life. The cult of S.’s personality has been condemned by the CPSU as a phenomenon alien to Marxism-Leninism.61

A range of views regarding Stalin presumably did exist in Soviet society before 1985 (and, indeed, before 1953); but the freedom with which they could be publicly expressed in either period was starkly limited. § 14.

And when this enforced consensus began to break down, it did so in a spirit not of idolatry but of iconoclasm. The perestroikaera attack on Stalin and his legacy was at once more thorough, more aggressive, and more emotionally charged than the vague and anaemic criticisms offered beforehand. As is so often the way, the debate in the later part of the 1980s revolved around more than (even the most painful episodes of) Soviet history: in tandem with renewed attention paid in the media and the arts to the victims of the repressions, the forced collectivization, and the Ukrainian famine came the use of ‘Stalinist’ as a label that could be attached to any aspect of the Soviet system that differed from the speaker’s idea of what it should be. Any deviation from reform-communist, then social democratic, then social liberal or liberal or even liberal-conservative norms could be tagged as ‘Stalinist’ and thus associated with the increasingly grim image of the Stalin period that was taking shape in the public mind. By 1989 it was possible for Yurii Afanas'ev to describe the Supreme Soviet elected by that year’s USSR Congress of People’s Deputies as a ‘Stalinist-Brezhnevite’

61

Sovetskii entsiklopedicheskii slovar', ed. A. M. Prokhorov et al., Moscow: Sovetskaya entsiklopediya, 1982, p. 1275, sub Stalin.

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body,62 and the phrase’s dubious coherence will not have detracted from its effectiveness as polemic. § 15.

It is no surprise that this treatment of history aroused resentment in certain quarters. As early as 1987, Egor Ligachev— never quite the Stalinist, or even ‘Stalinist-Brezhnevite’, of legend— took the opportunity of a speech in the town of Elektrostal' near Moscow to criticize the way the history of the Stalin period was being used: A lot gets said these days about the cult of personality. It is very important that we get to the bottom of the reasons for that phenomenon in a responsible way, and, above all, that we create conditions under which anything like it would be impossible. This is our sacred duty and our obligation. The party and the people are now engaged in this work, the centrepiece of which is the process of democratizing public life.

But there is something else we cannot ignore. People overseas, and even some here in this country, are trying to vitiate the whole path of the construction of socialism in the USSR, to present it as nothing but a series of mistakes, to use the fact of unjustified repressions to hide the people’s achievement in creating a mighty socialist great power… It is those who were in office at the time who must answer for the acts of lawlessness committed in the 1930s.63

It will be noted that Ligachev’s Elektrostal' speech represents an appeal not only to the standpoint, but even to the vocabulary of the pre-perestroika official consensus—a vocabulary itself derived very largely from the ‘secret’ speech On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences in which Khrushchev denounced his predecessor. The same remains broadly true throughout what can conveniently be called the prehistory of the patriotic opposition. See, for instance, the section dealing with Stalin in Nina Andreeva’s famous letter: I share the anger and indignation felt by all Soviet people at the mass repressions that took place in the 1930s and 1940s, through the fault of the then leadership of the party and the state. But common sense protests resolutely

62

63

Quoted in Giulietto Chiesa: ‘The Congress of People’s Deputies’, in Soviet Communism from Reform to Collapse (ed. Robert V. Daniels), Lexington, Massachusetts and Toronto: D. C. Heath and Company, 1995, p. 166.

Egor Ligachev: Zagadka Gorbacheva, Novosibirsk: Interbuk, 1992, p. 120.

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ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM against the attempt that has begun to predominate in sections of the press to present these contradictory events in a monochrome light.64

The proto-opposition contented itself, at least in public, with attempts to reaffirm the line as it had been set out in the 1982 Soviet Encyclopaedic Dictionary and with complaints about the radicals’ rhetorical use of the term ‘Stalinist’; it was not until the USSR’s collapse had become an accomplished fact that this cautious holding position would give way to an efflorescence of hagiography that was to exceed anything said or written even at the height of the original cult. § 16.

Against that background, however, even a completely faithful reproduction of naïve Stalinism could not have quite the same effect as it would have done in its hero’s lifetime. The reproductions that are sometimes generated are, indeed, faithful to the point of pastiche: the CPSU/Bolshevik, Andreeva’s ‘anger and indignation’ long forgotten, adopted in 2000 a programme calling for the dictatorship of the proletariat to be exercised through Soviets and guided ‘by the tenet of Lenin and Stalin that with the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat and in the course of socialist construction the class struggle does not cease, but adopts new forms.’65 Similar examples are not hard to find in the resolutions and party periodicals of the various anti-revisionist groups operating in today’s Russia (from the relatively large and effective Russian Communist Workers’ Party to any number of smaller splinters), or in fact in those of analogous organizations outside the former USSR. But it will perhaps not be superfluous to cite a comparatively rare case from outside the genre of party political documentation. Vladimir Sidnev’s Fate, written and rewritten from 1988 to 2000, is a series of episodes from Stalin’s life and career, presented in the terms of the traditional propaganda and versified in a

64 65

Nina Andreeva: ‘Ne mogu postupat'sya printsipami’, loc. cit.

Chast' 7. Tseli i zadachi VKPB, in Programma Vsesoyuznoi Kommunisticheskoi partii bol'shevikov. Prinyata na III s"ezde VKPB (26–27 fevralya 2000 goda, LENINGRAD), Communist Party of the Soviet Union/Bolshevik, https://vkpb.ru/index.php/programma-vkpb#p7 (accessed 19 September 2022).

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manner consciously modelled on that of Dem'yan Bednyi.66 The author, born in 1965, was one of a group of CPSU/B members based in St Petersburg (as they did not call it) who quit Andreeva’s party in 1996, fearing it had deviated from the true Bolshevik line, and established their own Organization of Leningrad Bolsheviks.67 Fate is marked by the same striving after period flavour that can be observed in the publications of the RCWP, CPSU/B, and others; it is some time, after all, since Russian poets have been in the habit of informing their readers that [w]e shall live better, more prosperously, and we’ll build giant projects: Magnitogorsk, Kuznetsk, the Ural Motor Works, the Turkestan-Siberian Railway, and the Dnepr Hydroelectric Power Station.68

But the central thrust of Sidnev’s appeal to Stalin is the unfavourable comparison he seeks to draw between the virtuous and principled past and a seedy, money-grubbing present: The ’30s… How I’d have loved To live and work in those years!

I could have done so much good For the country and the people! […]

Those great days are far off now, Those inspired years…

It’s as if they were just a dream…

What’s up with the people now?!69

In a similar vein, Sidnev uses the comparison with Stalin to express his anger at the desperate situation faced by Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal (1988) and the mujahideen victory (1992): I see your suffering before me, But I close my eyes… […]

Back then, could our distant brother

66 67 68 69

Vladimir Sidnev: Sud'ba, Leningrad (sic): no publisher, 2000, p. 5.

Ibid., p. 39.

Ibid., p. 14. The various projects listed are all poster achievements of Stalin-era industrialization. I have not attempted to reproduce the verse form.

Ibid., p. 19.

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ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM Have been shamelessly abandoned?!70

The answer to the rhetorical question, incidentally, may not be as clear as the author believes: Soviet foreign policy under Stalin was guided by considerations besides world revolution, and a number of occasions could be cited from ‘those great days’ on which Moscow in fact refrained from helping its political allies overseas if it might have meant risking a confrontation with other powers at a time and place where it was not welcome. § 17.

But the value of Sidnev’s verses for our purposes is that they make explicit the particular emotional colouring that is always at least implicit in this type of neo-Stalinism, but was absent from the naïve Stalinism of the ‘inspired years’: the contrast between Stalin and what exists today. On the surface it looks like nostalgia, nostalgia for their childhood among people of Andreeva’s (and Prokhanov’s) generation, nostalgia among younger Stalinists for an imagined glorious past; but it probably makes more sense to view it primarily as defiance. After all, the advocates of perestroika and privatization had emphatically identified themselves as anti-Stalinists, and used the name of Stalin as a symbol for everything they were working to demolish. Nothing could be more natural than for some people, in the chaotic and impoverished 1990s, to take them at their word and decide that Stalin, in that case, must be worth defending. ‘We should support whatever the enemy opposes and oppose whatever the enemy supports.’71 Even if we assume for the sake of argument that every proposition affirmed by the neo-Stalinists of today would have passed as unimpeachably orthodox in 1952 (an assumption that in fact is not quite accurate), the affective charge associated with these orthodox propositions is still novel: it expresses a deliberate and total rejection of the Gorbachev and Yeltsin years (at least), and it cannot be appreciated at all without an awareness of the varieties of anti-Stalinism it is directed against.

70 71

Ibid., p. 24.

Mao Tse-tung: ‘Interview with Three Correspondents from the Central News Agency, the Sao Tang Pao and the Hsin Min Pao’, quoted in Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (tr. unsigned), Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967, p. 15.

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§ 18.

The turn to Stalin among opponents of Gorbachev and of Yeltsin is made all the easier by the disorienting experience of the way the USSR collapsed. There was no armed rebellion and no foreign invasion: the Soviet Union just wound itself up, under its duly appointed leadership, almost without a fight, and all the panoply of its defences—from the KGB to the twenty million party members to the strategic nuclear deterrent—could not save it. For people who regard the Soviet system as having been fundamentally vicious, there is no particular puzzle here: the edifice was rotten, and it crumbled. But those are not the people this book is about. The people who interest us are people who mourn the collapse of the Soviet order, but who—precisely because that collapse was so self-inflicted—find it difficult to assert that what existed prior to 1985 was uncomplicatedly the good society and should simply be restored just as it was. Mikhail Gorbachev was already a Central Committee secretary and a member of the Politburo prior to 1985. The crew who would steer the ship into the iceberg were already on the bridge; the good society was about to destroy itself. This problem is at the core of red-brown thinking in the immediate post-Soviet period, and we shall return to it: a number of ideological phenomena that might otherwise appear strange start to seem almost inevitable when they are understood as ways of thinking through the question of self-inflicted collapse. For now, all we need to note is that neo-Stalinism is actually one of the easiest ways to deal with the problem. The society that collapsed was not the undefiled socialism of Lenin and Stalin—it was a partially corrupted version, in which anti-Soviet liberals had already been able to establish a bridgehead. What happened in the 1980s and 1990s was that those liberals went onto the offensive, aiming (as they made clear at the time) to erase whatever of Stalinism still survived; and the revisionist decadence that had been tolerated since 1956 sapped the system’s ability to resist. Therefore: back to the genius of all the ages and peoples. The manoeuvre is simple enough, but it saves a lot of cherished appearances.

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§ 19.

And, looking back as the Soviet Union was collapsing around you, there would not have seemed to be too many alternative candidates.

Khrushchev was Gorbachev’s double, with his indefatigable talkativeness, his ambitious desire to show off among world leaders, and his thaw—a forerunner of perestroika.72

Brezhnev brought Gorbachev onto the Central Committee, and Andropov brought him onto the Politburo. Chernenko left a party hierarchy ready to support Gorbachev for the leadership unanimously. They all presided over the period leading up to the catastrophe; they all failed to avert it. With Bukharin rehabilitated, and even Trotsky seemingly on the point of being airbrushed into history, few figures of the first rank remained untainted. Stalin, in contrast, was by 1990 the object of universal condemnation.

He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.73

There could hardly be a better proof of his authenticity. § 20.

This analysis of the emotional impetus behind at least the simpler kinds of neo-Stalinism gains some reinforcement from the fact that a similar affective load of anti-perestroika, anti-liberal defiance can sometimes be discerned even in cases where the specific propositional content of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist orthodoxy has all boiled away. This is nowhere more clearly visible than in a chant that has enjoyed some popularity on demonstrations: Here’s how we’ll complete the reforms: Stalin, Beria, the Gulag!74

72 73 74

Aleksandr Prokhanov: ‘Trupnye pyatna istorii’, in Zavtra 35 (1496) for September 2022, p. 1.

Isa. 53:3.

Quoted in Daniil Toropov: ‘Krasnyi avangard’, in Zavtra 45 (520) for November 2003, p. 4.

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(It rhymes in Russian.) The slogan appears to have originated with the National Bolshevik Party, although Limonov himself once described its use as ‘masochistic’ and ‘inappropriate’ at a time when there were NBP members in jail. 75 As befits what must in some sense be described as folk literature, certain textual variants exist; but the wording given here is both the most widespread and almost certainly the original. In fact, the hand of the party official—or conceivably the youth league official—can probably be detected in other versions. They look suspiciously like attempts to soften the slogan, or at least to render it less nihilistic: Here’s how we’ll complete the reforms: All the oligarchs to the Gulag!76

Or, going still further in the same direction: Here’s how we’ll complete the reforms: Our red flag over the Kremlin!77

The success of the original text, meanwhile, probably explains Beria’s appearance in other rhyming chants: Lenin, Stalin, Beria— Soviet empire!78

What is most striking about ‘Stalin, Beria, the Gulag’, however, is that the Stalin it evokes is not Sidnev’s and Andreeva’s Leninist industrializer: it is the Stalin of the anti-Stalinist 1980s, associated less with any of the positive achievements his admirers claim than with the Siberian camps and the notorious figure who managed them.

75 76

77

78

Eduard Limonov: Kak my stroili budushchee Rossii, Moscow: Presskom, 2004, p. 506.

‘Ul'yanovksie levoradikaly otmetili den' rozhdeniya Stalina aktsiei’, Forum.msk.ru 22 December 2005 https://forum-msk.org/material/news/6095.html?ysclid=l8aokor36z720661642 (accessed 20 September 2022).

Aleksandr Akhtyrko: ‘Brozhenie do otstavski’, ZakS.ru. Politicheskaya zhizn' Peterburga https://www.zaks.ru/amp/archive/view/125301 (accessed 20 September 2022).

‘Pervomai: komu Beriyu, komu—kvas s popkornom’, 72.ru Tyumen' onlain, 1 May 2010 https://72.ru/text/gorod/2010/05/01/60717121/ (accessed 21 September 2022).

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People did not sing and shout about the Gulag, when it existed— they were quiet about it (either because they did not know very much or because they did). It is only in an environment where Stalin’s crimes have been widely publicized, where the link between ‘Stalin’ and ‘Beria, the Gulag’ feels natural anyway, that a slogan of this nature comes to appear powerful and provocative. § 21.

A tendency towards verbal bloodthirstiness is palpable even when Stalin is not mentioned by name. A typical example comes from a Viktor Anpilov speech: Viktor Ivanovich even announced that an armed uprising had been scheduled for 3–4 October. ‘And then: Allahu akbar! Then Chubais79 up against a wall!’ cried Viktor Ivanovich, and called on journalists to quote him exactly.80

Similarly, Natal'ya Vitrenko—leader of the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, and at the time her party’s presidential candidate—once pledged if elected to send ‘the entire current ruling elite […] to the uranium mines’.81 ‘Blood and Blood and Blood, A General Revolution their mus be…’ But the very violence of such threats points to a sense of impotence.82

Brecht gets it right, in an incidental song in The Threepenny Opera:83 the audience is almost tricked into finding the anticipated brutality of Pirate Jenny’s vengeance off-putting and regrettable—before we

79

80 81

82 83

Anatolii Chubais, deputy prime minister 1992–94 and one of the major architects of privatization, making him a particular hate figure in red and red-brown circles. He subsequently held a number of positions in government, politics, and industry until March 2022, when he resigned and left the country in opposition to the invasion of Ukraine.

Boris Klin: ‘Data vooruzhennogo vosstaniya ob"yavlena’, in Kommersant" 98 for 7 July 2001, https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/270003 (accessed 19 September 2022).

Quoted in Tat'yana Ivzhenko: ‘Predvybornoe ChP na Ukraine’, in Nezavisimaya gazeta 176 (1992) for 22 September 1999, https://www.ng.ru/cis/1999-0922/chp.html (accessed 19 September 2022).

E. P. Thompson: The Making of the English Working Class, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986, p. 249.

Bertolt Brecht: ‘Jenny die Seeräuberbraut’, in Die Dreigroschenoper, Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1971, pp. 28f.

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remember that the whole thing is a consolatory fantasy, and the pirate husband (if he exists) probably has a girl in every port, and the pirate ship is never coming, and Jenny will be pot-washing forever.

To have worried, in 2001, about whether or not Mr Chubais was going to receive a fair trial before Labour Russia stuck him up against the wall would have revealed a comically mistaken grasp of the actual power relations in Russian society. § 22.

It should therefore not be taken for granted that people who chant the names of Stalin and Beria would all, in a more reflective mood, endorse everything that Stalin and Beria did. Some would endorse less, some more. But if there is any aspect of Stalin’s career that receives wider assent in modern Russia than any other, it is undoubtedly his role in winning the Second World War. (The reality and constructiveness of that role have in fact been challenged, by Khrushchev and others, but the actual history is not very relevant when we are interested in beliefs, perceptions, and rhetoric.) It is perfectly possible, of course, to praise Stalin as war leader without departing at all from the canonical language and themes of the first cult of personality; but it is not always done. Victory in WWII is often held up as an object of loyalty in its own right, with no reference to the wider political system; and Stalin is defended much more as the generalissimus of the victory than as the General Secretary of the party of Lenin. Liberals who condemn Stalin can then be accused of insufficient reverence for the sacrifices and the triumph of 1941–45. As the former GKChP member Marshal Dmitrii Yazov put it, in an article under the title ‘Stalin and the Pygmies’: You can and should be critical, but not of your very own Great Victory.84

And a similar orientation is visible in the works of the writer and controversialist Vladimir Bushin (1924–2019), who himself fought on the front lines in the Great Fatherland War and whose defence of Stalin was often predicated more on the war than it was on the

84

D. T. Yazov: Stalin i pigmei, in Zavtra 19 (231) for May 1998, p. 1.

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revolution.85 Bushin’s invocation of Stalin does retain enough of the Bolshevik manifest content to stop him also praising White generals from the Civil War, or the Nazi collaborator General Andrei Vlasov; his ‘If I were Aleksandr Prokhanov’ (1998) rebukes the Zavtra editor for providing column space to people who are less fastidious: What else would I do if I were in Aleksandr Prokhanov’s shoes? But of course, I’d stop publishing literary nutcases.86

Still, the ‘statist’ [gosudarstvennik] Stalin posited in rhetoric of this type often seems to be detached from any specifically Bolshevik or revolutionary associations. § 23.

A character in A Golden Time,87 a 2013 novel by Prokhanov, explicitly presents Stalin and the victory as a sacred symbol, uniquely capable of reconciling ‘red’ and ‘white’ (Orthodox, monarchist) in a shared patriotism: There were fearful persecutions of the church, murders of priests, profanity triumphant, the preaching of Godlessness. And that makes it possible to call the ‘red age’ an age of people rejected by God. But was it? The War and the Victory refute that. From the very first days, the Fatherland War was referred to as a ‘sacred war’.88 And the Victory that our church now celebrates as a religious holiday—the Victory was sacred too. The troops who gained the sacred Victory, the platoons, companies, and battalions, the regiments, divisions, and armies: they are also sacred. The commanders of regiments

85 86 87

88

See Vladimir Bushin: Pobediteli i lzhetsy, Moscow: Paleya, 1995; idem: Prezidenty!

Net na vas Stalina, Moscow: Algoritm, 2005.

Vladimir Bushin: ‘Esli by ya byl Aleksandrom Prokhanovym... (K shestidesyatiletiyu so dnya rozhdeniya)’, in Genii i prokhindei, Moscow: Algoritm, 2004, p. 358.

The title refers to the first line of an untitled lyric poem by Fedor Tyutchev, ‘I remember a golden time’—F. I. Tyutchev: Izbrannoe, Moscow: Adelant, 2012, p.

252.

Most prominently in the title and refrain of a poem of 1941 by Vasilii LebedevKumach, which became universally known as a patriotic song in Aleksandr Aleksandrov’s musical setting—Vasilii Lebedev-Kumach: ‘Svyashchennaya voyna’, in Izbrannoe. Stikhotvoreniya, pesni, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1984, pp. 433f. ‘Holy war’ would be more natural in English than ‘sacred war’, and a translation of Lebedev-Kumach would probably use it; I have kept to the literal ‘sacred’, however, because the Prokhanov passage describes the Red Army that way (svyashchennyi) rather than using the word svyatoi ‘holy’.

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and battalions, of divisions and armies, are surrounded by a nimbus of sanctity. The supreme commander-in-chief, the generalissimus who led the army to Victory, he is surrounded by the halo of sanctity.89

And from here it is only a step, if even that, to the version of Stalinism we have already seen General Makashov presenting to David Duke—the version where Lenin and the other Bolsheviks were antinational Russophobes, and Stalin was the imperial statesman who ‘killed the executioners of the tsar [and] gathered the empire together’. 90 There are certainly circles of opinion in today’s Russia where Stalin is much more acceptable as a historical reference point than Lenin, for precisely this reason: This, of course, can refer only to J. Stalin’s ‘Soviet Empire’ and to the succeeding ‘cold war’ years: the ‘internationalist’ Bolsheviks of the time of the revolution, the Civil War, and the ‘red terror’ had, in essence, been acting on the side of the ‘civilization of the BEAST’ by destroying the previous RESTRAINT—the Russian Empire and everything on which it stood.91

One more twist is thus accomplished in the involved history of the idea that Stalin was a statist patriot rather than a Leninist revolutionary: the hope of the Smenovekhists and Eurasians92 in the first emigration, then taken up and revalued as negative by Trotsky and the Left Opposition, it now recurs once again as positive. (It is this idea, rather than Limonov’s blend of punk quasi-anarchism with Hitlerian posturing, that has the historical right to be known as National Bolshevism.) Stalin as heir to the tsars and opponent of antiRussian Leninism is, of course, the antithesis of the iron Bolshevik eulogized in the rhetoric of the RCWP and CPSU/B; and it is no surprise that the anti-revisionists have reacted with fury to what 89 90 91 92

Aleksandr Prokhanov: Vremya zolotoe, Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2013, ePub ed., chap. 26 [Были страшные].

Ibid., chap. 26 [убил палачей].

Vladimir Medvedev, Vladimir Khomyakov, and Valerii Belokur: Natsional'naya ideya ili Chego ozhidaet Bog ot Rossii, Moscow: Sovremennye tetradi, 2005, p. 153.

The Vekhists (from vekhi ‘landmarks’) had been liberals who turned to favouring an accommodation with the monarchy after the scare of the 1905 revolution; the Smenovekhists (from smena vekh ‘change of landmarks’) were White émigrés who favoured an accommodation with the Soviet authorities as representing the only viable form of existence of the Russian state after 1920. For the Eurasians see chapter VI below.

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they see as a deliberate attempt by reactionaries to co-opt their hero.

Speaking at a conference to mark the 140th anniversary of Stalin’s birth, Viktor Tyul'kin—who had just stepped down after a long stint as the RCWP’s first secretary—railed against people who try to ‘turn Stalin from a Marxist into either a statist, or a Slavophil patriot, or an inspired war leader, or a super-effective manager’.93 But the growing popularity of just this patriotic, anti-Leninist Stalin was hailed by Andrei Fefelov in Zavtra as early as 2004. The author is Prokhanov’s son, although he publishes under his mother’s maiden name; and his prose style bears witness to an admirable filial piety: The high-speed express train named Russian History has stirred a little after its agonizing overnight stop; slowly, as if unwillingly, it has begun its quiet motion. The springs screech and the train speeds up, going faster and faster with every passing minute, heavily cutting itself a path through the gloom, tearing into the thick cosmic blizzard of the Future. At the controls is a mysterious engine-driver. His silhouette, uniform, and cap are familiar to all of us—so familiar it hurts, so familiar the tears come. Can it really be him?

Yes. Stalin’s back.94

§ 24.

There is a further corollary. It is useful to have—from General Makashov and others—unambiguous evidence that the patriotic, anti-Bolshevik strain of Stalinolatry was circulating before the year 2000: because in the new century it has become so convenient that one might be tempted to think it had been cooked up retrospectively. After all, if it could happen once that a leader came to power as part of an anti-national regime, and yet quietly, without any open or formal break, turned against the Westernizers and cosmopolitans and set to work patriotically to rebuild the empire they had fragmented, then maybe it can happen again. Maybe it is happening right now. The parallel with Stalin, in fact, does a lot to render Putin palatable to sections of patriotic opinion where his status as

93

94

Viktor Tyul'kin: Nekotorye soobrazheniya o variantakh v «zashchite Stalina». Tezisy doklada na nauchnoi konferentsii v Moskve 21-22 dekabrya 2019g., posvyashchennoi 140-letiyu so dnya rozhdeniya I. V. Stalina, Russian Communist Workers ’Party https://rkrp-rpk.ru/2020/01/26/некоторые-соображения-о-вариантах-в/ (accessed 19 September 2022).

Andrei Fefelov: ‘Stalin—zdes' i seichas!’, in Zavtra 52 (579) for December 2004, p. 1.

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Yeltsin’s designated successor might otherwise be difficult to overlook. Prokhanov himself did not accept that version overnight.

Back in 1999, an article entitled ‘Does Putin look like Joseph Stalin?’ could take it for granted that the answer was No and that Putin’s patriotic pose was a fake: When Putin talks about patriotism he looks like a talking fish. Wide-eyed with the tension, extruding bubbles of water between his lips, he pontificates about ‘patriotism’ [...]

What has happened? An order from the Americans? A NATO directive? A private message from the Pope? A secret ruling of the Jewish Congress? [...] What does it mean?

It means Russia is not dead. It means the Russian people has not been broken, and is preparing a retaliatory strike95 [...]

How can you tell a patriot from an enemy of the people? Ask whether they love Comrade Stalin. Stalin loved the Motherland more than his own son. Possessing limitless power, he was the servant of the state. He left behind him a well-smoked pipe, a modest dacha in Kuntsevo, and a vast, flourishing Motherland that sent rockets to Mars.96

Two decades and more have passed since then, and Prokhanov’s attitude to Putin has fluctuated considerably. In 2011, introducing a volume of Zavtra articles under the title The Putin We Believed In, he confessed himself still unable to decide: Putin—the human being and the politician—is elusive. He changes moment by moment [...] Now Putin is a patriot and a great-power man [derzhavnik]; but you only need to take your eyes off him for a moment, and now he’s a liberal and a democrat [...] In this book I do not even try to answer the ritual question, ‘Who are you, Mr Putin?’:97 I merely provide my pure reflections, almost entirely unaltered, on this shimmering, which certainly does fascinate me as a writer.98

95 96 97

98

This phrase (udar vozmezdiya) belongs to the jargon of strategic nuclear war.

Aleksandr Prokhanov: ‘Pokhozh li Putin na Iosifa Stalina?’, in Zavtra 45 (310) for November 1999, p. 1.

The ritual question was first asked by Trudy Rubin, a US journalist, at the 2000 World Economic Forum in Davos. The usual wording is in fact ‘Who is Mr Putin?’, and in that form it became proverbial in Russia (often in transcribed English: khu iz mister Putin?

Aleksandr Prokhanov: Putin, v kotorogo my verili, Moscow: Algoritm, 2011, p. 5.

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And in 2020, when Russia and the world was faced with a new virus ‘from the mysterious depths either of laboratories or of megagalaxies’,99 he welcomed the president’s call to create a coronavirus vaccine but feared that Putin’s Russia—hampered by the ‘infernal character’ of its entertainment industry, and with no ‘organizational genius’ like Beria to take charge of the project—would be incapable of a crash development programme comparable to the construction of atomic weapons under Stalin. 100 In the long run, though, a writer whose ‘complex’ was always ‘military-industrial’ could hardly remain unmoved as defence spending went up from 65.1 billion roubles in 1998 to 3,168.8 billion in 2020:101 Stalin was the man of a project, one that he did not live long enough to complete. He fought for power and seized it from the Provisional Government.

He created the fragile foundations of a new state [...]

Vladimir Putin incarnates a project. He became head of the country without a struggle, without a fight, no bloody discord, nothing but Divine providence, at a time when Russia still had no state [...] He built this state under the very nose of the mighty global empires [...] He armed the Russian State, creating an army of a new type, where new-generation nuclear missiles guarantee the safety of a Russia that is still so young and so imperfect [...]

He filled the spiritual emptiness yawning in the country after the downfall of the red empire with the Orthodox Church, for whose restoration he has done no less than Paul the Apostle [...] he has made Russia a country of altars and arms factories [...]

And now somebody wants Putin, in the middle of realizing this grand project of his, to give way to someone else: a liberal pro-Western upstart, or an ignorant, one-dimensional chief of a corporation? Maybe in 1943, during the Battle of Stalingrad, Stalin should have given way to a general or a clever Politburo member?102

§ 25.

Some of these are the thoughts that ought to be triggered by an ikon of Stalin and the Virgin Mary. But the decision to model

99 Aleksandr Prokhanov: ‘Uslysh' noosferu’, in Zavtra 23 (1381) for June 2020, p. 1.

100 Aleksandr Prokhanov: ‘Proverka na derzhavnost'’, in Zavtra 20 (1378) for May 2020, p. 1.

101 Roman Kunitsyn: ‘Chekhovskoe ruzh'e ili nemnogo voennoi statistiki’, Rabkor.ru, 20 March 2022 https://rabkor.ru/columns/analysis/2022/03/20/chekhovs_gun _or_some_military_statistics/ (accessed 21 September 2022).

102 Aleksandr Prokhanov: ‘Konets srokov, nachalo vremen’, in Zavtra 11 (1369) for March 2020, p. 1.

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the ikon specifically on Our Lady the Sovereign [Bogomater' Derzhavnaya, otherwise Derzhavnaya ikona Bozhiei Materi—the Sovereign, or Reigning, Ikon of the Mother of God] also deserves brief comment. This particular wonder-working ikon, of no great age and (to the secular eye) no outstanding artistic merit, has acquired a special status among Russian monarchists from the circumstance that it is said to have been discovered, grimy and forgotten in a church cellar, on the very day in 1917 when Nicholas II abdicated the throne.103 If we were not familiar with the ideological context, the choice might thus seem a pure provocation: not only did the Bolsheviks seize the empire, not only did they kill the Tsar, but now a Bolshevik is desecrating with his presence even the symbols of Orthodox Christian kingship. That interpretation would be understandable; but it would be a mistake. Prokhanov has been deliberately associating Stalin with the last Tsar, as well as with the Kingdom of Heaven, for some time: Of the specimens included in our collection, only Tsar Nicholas’s brain and Stalin’s brain were linked—as you put it—with heaven. We have discovered traces in both of brain activity occurring under extremely powerful outside influence. We attribute this activity to the existence of a supra-individual mind, which in the language of the theologians could certainly be called God.104

The novel from which this passage is taken, 2009’s The Virtuoso, deals with a guileless young patriot—and possible claimant to the Romanov crown—who is plucked from Siberian obscurity by Kremlin wire-pullers so they can use him as a counter in the ongoing political and occult battle between President Lampadnikov and his predecessor, Viktor Viktorovich Dolgoletov, who plans to resume the presidency at the first opportunity. (This was a topical theme at the time of writing, when Dmitrii Medvedev was president of Russia.) Recollections of the martyred Tsar, predictably enough, have their part to play in the story; and perhaps by this 103 For the history and cult of Our Lady the Sovereign see Sergei Fomin: Tsaritsa Nebesnaya. Derzhavnaya pravitel'nitsa Zemli Russkoi, Moscow: Russkii izdatel'skii tsentr, 2017.

104 Aleksandr Prokhanov, Virtuoz, Moscow: Algoritm, 2009, ePub ed., chap. 1 [Из представленных].

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stage we will not be wholly shocked to discover that, when the Emperor is bracketed with the General Secretary, Prokhanov has the Second World War in mind as well: It was in the very first months of the war, the Germans tearing towards Moscow, panic in the city, all the officials burning papers and fleeing the capital.

They say the government train was already on the tracks, waiting for Stalin to board. One night the head of the Kremlin guard was making his rounds, checking the security posts and the ack-ack emplacements, when suddenly he noticed that the doors of the Cathedral of the Dormition, which were usually kept locked, were open. He looked in, and in the darkness he saw ikon lamps burning: and in the light of the lamps he saw Stalin—and facing him the tsar, in the uniform of a colonel. The tsar was telling the leader [vozhd'] something, and Stalin was listening, his head bowed. Then two burning candles appeared in the Sovereign’s hand. He gave one of them to Stalin, and they both turned towards the iconostasis and prayed. The head of the guard was frightened, and he left. But the next day he went back to the cathedral, and found droplets of solidified wax on the floor in front of the iconostasis.

A month later, Stalin addressed the people from Red Square with the words, ‘Brothers and sisters.’ He recalled the great ancestors, Dmitrii Donskoi and Aleksandr Nevskii, Suvorov and Kutuzov. He reintroduced the tsarist uniform in the army, he started opening the parishes, and the course of the war began to change.105

§ 26.

The second Stalin cult thus comes to stand for communism and anti-communism, atheism and faith in God, opposition to the post-Soviet government and support for it, even opposition to the pre-Soviet government and support for it. Are we then to conclude that ‘Stalinism’ has become meaningless? Not entirely, no. The propositional machinery is subject to considerable variation; but the central emotional content we have identified—a defiant rejection of liberalism—is present in every case. That, above all, is what the name of Stalin means in contemporary Russia. And perhaps the very fact that Stalinism is now less a fixed body of doctrine than an emotional attitude, and an attitude with the particular colouring it has, helps to explain why today’s Stalinism is often most convincingly expressed in semi-humorous forms—something that will hardly be said of the original Stalinism. ‘Stalin, Beria, the Gulag’, ‘Lenin, Stalin, Beria—Soviet empire’, the Stalin ikon, Sergeev’s ‘mystical Stalinism’: none of them can be fully understood without 105 Ibid., chap. 11 [Это было в самые].

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a realization that they are intended to shock people the speaker dislikes. The point is not at all that today’s Stalin cultists do not really believe the things they say. Very probably they believe every word; but they are certainly enjoying saying it.

III An Imperial Centre § 27.

Regular readers either of Zavtra or of Prokhanov’s fiction will soon encounter the concept of imperskost'—a slightly awkward expression (necessitated perhaps by the fact that imperializm ‘imperialism’ will still strike many in the intended audience as the name of something Western and deplorable) whose most accurate English equivalent is ‘imperiality’. Imperiality is presented as a fundamental attribute of the Russian state: Below, hidden by clouds, Europe was relaxing after the end of the ‘cold war’—naïvely imagining that Russia had ceased forever to be an empire, and Russian tanks would now never reach the Elbe and the Oder. Strizhailo gulped his whisky and smiled subtly at the mistake the Sybaritic continent was making.106

Western readers, Sybarite or otherwise, are possibly less inclined today than they were in 2005 to make that particular mistake; but this only adds to the risk that they might miss the unexpectedness of the rhetoric chosen. The conjunction of the words ‘Soviet’ and ‘empire’ has long, in English, been a matter of tedious routine. Since 1991 it has in part become so in Russian too. But any suggestion, while Stalin lived, that the Soviet Union was an empire, or that its existence gained meaning only from the realization of an imperial destiny, would have violated the strictest of taboos. How far the label of ‘empire’ really applies to the USSR is a legitimate question, but one that is of little real import here; for the present purpose it is sufficient to remember, as Terry Martin has observed, that—while the Soviet Union existed—the application to it of the label ‘empire’ was invariably a signal of hostility to its political system.107 § 28.

The emergence of imperiality as a core doctrine of redbrown patriotism can only be understood in relation to its particular historical context: the period from November 1989, when the 106 Aleksandr Prokhanov: Politolog, Ekaterinburg: Ul'tra.Kul'tura, 2005, p. 188.

107 Terry Martin: The Affirmative Action Empire. Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939, Ithaca, New York and London: Cornell University Press, 2001, p. 19.

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rupture in Berlin of what few were still calling the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart signalled that the post-1945 European order was being torn up rather than simply reformed, to the shelling of the Russian Supreme Soviet in October 1993. These few years saw the USSR collapse and liberalism triumph; but they also witnessed the dawn of the patriotic opposition. Counterintuitive as it may seem in the light of subsequent developments, it was initially far from certain that Yeltsin’s enemies would succeed in coopting the laurels of Russian patriotism. Experience in Latvia, Georgia, and other member republics of the disintegrating USSR had demonstrated the effectiveness of patriotism in building support for radical reform: and circles close to President Yeltsin were engaged in a serious attempt to emulate the same tactics in the RSFSR, by elaborating a Russian political identity distinct from and opposed to the ‘all-union’ Soviet identity. Russia had been until 1990 the only one of the USSR’s constituent republics to possess neither its own anthem nor its own republic-level Communist Party and Central Committee (it did of course have a Supreme Soviet and a Council of Ministers; but in the Soviet political system it was generally understood that leadership at each level was exercised much more by the relevant party committee than by the Soviet and its executive). The RSFSR thus occupied an anomalous position, somewhat resembling that of England within today’s United Kingdom—where again there is neither a national anthem nor a devolved administration—and probably for much the same reasons: a propensity (both in government circles and among the general public) not to distinguish very sharply between the state as a whole and its original and largest section, coupled with an awareness that a ‘regional’ political leadership in this particular region could very easily become a rival to the overall leadership of the state. Yeltsin and his supporters, engaged in just such a rivalry with Mikhail Gorbachev, seemed to many to stand for a distinctively Russian politics and patriotism.

Russia, it was argued, had itself been one more victim of the Soviet empire; and the time had come to reject the outdated symbols of Soviet patriotism in favour of a liberal Russian patriotism exemplified by the tricolour national flag, by the heritage of classical, dissident, and émigré culture, by a new national anthem based on music

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by Mikhail Glinka,108 and by the still energetic figure of Yeltsin himself. § 29.

It was against this background that opponents of the liberal project sought to develop their own construction of Russian patriotism. In place of liberal patriotism and its goal of a Russian nation-state, they held up the despised ‘empire’ as a transnational homeland to which all Soviet citizens could devote their allegiance.

Among the early expressions of this new patriotism was the manifesto A Word to the People. It does not mention the word ‘empire’, but its appeal for unity to uphold the Soviet state is cast in expressly ‘patriotic’ rather than Leninist terms: Dear Russians! Citizens of the USSR! Compatriots! […] The Motherland, our country, that great State entrusted to our care by history, by nature, and by our glorious forefathers, is dying, breaking, plunging into darkness and non-existence […] We appeal to you with words of the utmost responsibility. We appeal to the representatives of all professions and estates, all ideologies and faiths, all parties and movements, all those for whom our differences are nought before our common sorrow and pain, our common love for our Motherland—a Motherland we see as one and indivisible, a Motherland that has rallied the fraternal peoples into a mighty state without which we can have no existence under the sun.109

A Word to the People was a seminal tract; but its overt echoes of the USSR’s then anthem110 are of a piece with the crudity this attempt at rhetorical patriotism displays when set against later productions. § 30.

The patriotism of A Word to the People, even—or especially—when backed up by the tanks of the GKChP, did not vanquish liberal patriotism overnight. On the contrary, Yeltsin was

108 The music was adopted with no words to go with it, so in the 1990s Russia’s national anthem could be performed as an instrumental piece but could not be sung.

109 Yurii Bondarev et al.: ‘Slovo k narodu’, in Aleksandr Prokhanov: Slovo k narodu, op. cit., pp. 863f.

110 ‘Great Russia has rallied for eternity / An indivisible union of free republics. / Long live what the will of the peoples created, / The united, mighty Soviet Union!’—S. V. Mikhalkov and G. A. El'-Registan: ‘Gosudarstvennyi gimn Soyuza Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik (okonchatel'nyi variant ot 25 maya 1977 goda)’, Geral'dika.ru http://geraldika.ru/symbols/25 (accessed 22 September 2022).

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able during the Emergency Committee’s brief reign to present himself as the very incarnation of genuine Russian patriotism, risen to defend the country’s nascent free institutions against a bureaucratic coup d’état: the Russian tricolour has perhaps never looked more like a national symbol than it did on those August days, and the Russian Federation’s declaration of independence from the USSR (24 August 1991) seemed the culmination of the liberal-patriotic victory. But the victory was to be short-lived. Russian Independence Day became one of the least-celebrated public holidays in the calendar; and by 1996 the State Duma had concluded that the dissolution of the Soviet Union had been without legal force.111 And the CPRF leader Gennadii Zyuganov, in a book of the same year entitled Russia is my Motherland: the Ideology of State Patriotism, saw fit to expound the new patriotism in a form that would have left Lenin astounded and dismayed: They tell us that EMPIRE and GREAT POWER mean the omnipotence of bureaucratic officialdom and of a stifling censorship, the absence of elementary freedoms. They tell us they mean violence against national sentiments, contempt for the human personality, and disregard for the norms of human social existence…

Lies! Empire is the historically and geopolitically conditioned form of development of the Russian State […] Russia has known itself, since ancient times, as the successor and maintainer of an imperial heritage. As early as the turn of the fifteenth to the sixteenth century, the monk Filofei expressed the centuries-old inheritance of the Russian state idea with the utmost concision in the words ‘Moscow is the Third Rome’ [… T]he historical movement from Rome through Byzantium to Moscow represented the gradual coming into being of the three chief planks of imperial statehood. The legal and governmental unity of Rome was enriched with the spiritual, moral, and Christian unity of Byzantium, and finally reached its fulfilment in the

111 ‘Postanovlenie Gosudarstvennoi Dumy Rossiiskoi Federatsii ot 15 marta 1996 g. № 157-II GD O yurisdicheskoi sile dlya Rossiiskoi Federatsii—Rossii rezul'tatov referenduma SSSR 17 marta 1991 g. po voprosu o sokhranenii Soyuza SSR’, Narodnyi front «Sevastopol'Krym-Rossiya» http://sevkrimrus.narod.ru/ZAKON/1996-157.htm (accessed 22 September 2022).

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popular unity of Muscovy and then of Russia. It was this that found its reflection in the formula ‘Orthodoxy. Autocracy. Popularity’, proposed a century and a half ago by Education Minister S. S. Uvarov.112

§ 31.

Political imperiality, then, is sharply distinguished from the civic patriotism of the liberal nation-state; indeed, it exists to counter it. But nor is it reducible to an ethnic nationalism. When Prokhanov and other ‘imperials’ list their political heroes, it is noteworthy that they often include few or no ethnic Russians: in his speech to a 2004 patriotic conference Prokhanov cited Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Fidel Castro, Yasser Arafat, Hugo Chávez, and Stalin.113 If imperiality means a patriotism focused on the state, then it is incompatible with an ethnically defined nationalism: Prokhanov has warned his fellow patriots that they should not go along with that idiotic notion of a ‘Republic of Rus'’,114 ‘Russia for the [ethnic] Russians’. That would be a doomed, bastard, narrow nationalist, and truly non-[ethnic-]Russian approach. The [civic] Russian Empire is home to hundreds of peoples, thousands of languages, a multitude of faiths.

So Russia without non-[ethnic-]Russians would not be Russia.115

This vision of empire as a harmony of multiple nations and ethnicities is a regular theme in Prokhanov’s writing. A character visiting the front lines, where Ossetians—with Russian support—are fighting Georgians, reflects that all three peoples ‘had once been

112 Gennadii Zyuganov: Rossiya—rodina moya. Ideologiya gosudarstvennogo patriotizma, Moscow: Informpechat', 1996, pp. 223–225. The word translated ‘popularity’ in Sergei Uvarov’s slogan could also be rendered as ‘nationality’; this slogan, and also the phrase about the ‘third Rome’, are both familiar staples of imperial patriotism, usually expounded along very much the same lines as those set out here by Zyuganov.

113 Aleksandr Prokhanov: ‘Rodina ili smert'’, in Zavtra 51 (578) for December 2004, p. 1.

114 Rus' was the name of the mediaeval Russian state, as opposed to today’s Rossiya; but it is here used to mean ‘ethnically Russian Russia’.

115 Georgii Il'ichev: ‘Meshayut li Rossii nerusskie?’, in Izvestiya for 28 January 2005, online at https://iz.ru/588378/meshaiut-li-rossii-nerusskie (accessed 22 September 2022). The words rossiiskii and russkii have here been translated as [civic] Russian and [ethnic] Russian respectively, in order to clarify a text where the distinction between the two is essential; readers are warned that this unavoidably makes the ethnic/civic dichotomy more salient and more seemingly conscious than it would necessarily appear in the original language.

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like precious diamonds in the diadem of the great empire’.116 And the same imperial pluralism even extends (at least sporadically) to Jews: Dialogue between [ethnic] Russians and Jews is vital and urgent. Let it take place under the aegis of the Most Holy. Let it be conducted by Russia’s patriots—those Jews and [ethnic] Russians who will not allow our Motherland, weakened and insulted by the ‘reformers’, to be plunged into a last bloody slaughter. The boundary between people does not follow the line ‘[ethnic] Russian or Jew’, ‘Chuvash or Tatar’: it follows the line ‘thief, or robbed’; ‘liar, or slandered’; ‘traitor, or son of the Fatherland’.117

And yet the empire of Prokhanov’s imagination does not belong to all its subjects quite equally. All the diamonds are precious; the empire does not willingly part with the least of them: but one still glitters a little more brightly than any other. In the same Izvestiya interview where Prokhanov condemns the ‘Republic of Rus'’, he nonetheless insists that the central people for Russia is the [ethnic] Russian people. It is now subjected to fearful pressure. It’s dying out […] So we must discuss ethnic relations [mezhnatsional'nye otnosheniya] in Russia in general, as a whole; we must discuss the tragedy of the [ethnic] Russian people, and it is in this context that we must discuss these kind of barbarous, ferocious expressions of a[n ethnic] Russian people that is being murdered. These anti-Caucasian and anti-Tajik sentiments don’t come from a well-fed life: they come from the great tragedy of the [ethnic] Russians.118

(It may not be over-reading this passage to observe that the awkwardness of ‘in general, as a whole’ [voobshche ... v tselom] reflects a certain hesitancy brought on by an awareness that the argument is an uncomfortable one.) Groups other than the ethnic Russians have their place in the empire; it would scarcely rank as an empire without them; but, ultimately, their role is to be picturesque threads in an imperial tapestry woven by somebody else. As Prokhanov wrote in 2017, after a visit to western Siberia,

116 Aleksandr Prokhanov, Virtuoz, op. cit., chap. 24 [когда-то входившие].

117 Aleksandr Prokhanov: ‘General Makashov i politicheskaya padal'’, in Zavtra 47 (259) for November 1998, p. 1.

118 Georgii Il'ichev: ‘Meshayut li Rossii nerusskie?’, loc. cit.

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[t]he Russian oil civilization that has arisen amid the ice and the snows is part of the age-old Russian cause, which transforms icefields and deserts into places of blossoming and creativity [...] Here in Yugra,119 amid ancient pagan sanctuaries, fishing grounds, and reindeer pastures, there live the Khanty, Mansi, Forest Nenets, and Selkup120—peoples who are wonderful in their unique beauty, each of them precious to Russia, each contributing their own marvellous brushstroke, their own beautiful sound, their own reflection of the sky.121

§ 32.

By the early 2000s, at the very latest, it was clear that the liberal interpretation of Russian patriotism was struggling, and the imperial interpretation was gaining ground. The State Duma (now equipped with a reliably pro-Government majority) voted in 2000 to reinstate the Soviet anthem with a new set of words, and—while retaining the tricolour flag—to restore the red banner as symbol of the Russian armed forces.122 United Russia’s campaign for the 2003 Duma elections became the first time in some years that the leading Russian political party had issued posters featuring portraits of Stalin and Dzerzhinskii (alongside more than one deceased Autocrat of All Russia).123 Even the definitive pro-Kremlin liberal, Anatolii Chubais, sought to redefine his politics in the language of empire.

In a characteristically witty speech on the occasion of his honorary doctorate from the St Petersburg State University of Engineering and Economics, he argued that Russia is today the one, unique natural leader throughout the CIS space, both in terms of the size of its economy and in terms of living standards and quality of life. This is simply stating a fact. I realize that even stating this fact might provoke an almost hysterical reaction from some of our friends. But 119 Officially the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous District—Yugra, although the ‘titular’ Khanty and Mansi make up only a tiny percentage of the population.

120 All these groups speak languages belonging to the Uralic family. The traditional classification (which is not unchallenged) groups Khanty and Mansi with Hungarian as Ugric languages, while Forest Nenets and Selkup belong to the Samoyedic branch.

121 Aleksandr Prokhanov: ‘Yugorskaya mechta’, in Zavtra 51 (1255) for December 2017, p. 1. Where the word ‘Russian’ occurs in this extract it translates russkii, the word rendered ‘[ethnic] Russian’ above.

122 ‘Duma approves Soviet anthem’, BBC News, 8 Decenber 2000 http://news. bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/1060975.stm (accessed 22 September 2022).

123 ‘Fakty i mneniya. Vedushchii Lev Roitman. Net edinoi Rossii’ (transcript), Radio Svoboda, 4 November 2003 https://archive.svoboda.org/programs/rt/2003/rt.

110403.asp (accessed 22 September 2022).

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ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM hysterics are best treated with a shock; and, as you are aware, we know a thing or two about shock therapy. So let’s move from stating the fact to posing a task.

I think Russia is not just already a leader: it can and it must do everything possible to strengthen and cultivate its position of leadership in this part of the planet over the next fifty years. I shall say more. I think that Russia’s ideology—and I am profoundly convinced of this—must for the foreseeable historical future be the ideology of liberal imperialism. And the aim of the Russian state must be to build a liberal empire.124

This is very much the conception of empire that Prokhanov puts into the mouth of his character General Grechishnikov, in Mr Semtex; and it is a conception that Prokhanov and his fellow red-browns rejected with horror. § 33.

‘Liberal empire’, for them, was not a partial or variant realization of the imperial dream—it was a mutilation and a mockery.

And the reason goes beyond the difficulty of incorporating a liberal strand into Zyuganov’s proposed patriotic alliance, with its communist and socialist ‘left’, its imperial ‘centre’, and its religious ‘right’.125 The easiest way to elucidate it, however, is to begin with its prehistory—in the voluminous writings Prokhanov set on the periphery of the ‘empire’, primarily in the then Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, over the course of the 1980s. Typical here is a novella of 1985, Brighter than Azure,126 whose title refers to Lermontov’s lyric of 1832, ‘The Sail’. 127 As in a number of Prokhanov’s works from this period and subsequently, Brighter than Azure is structured by the conjunction between the dirty, complicated, and dangerous everyday of Afghanistan at war and a series of the protagonist’s childhood memories and early spiritual reflections:

124 Anatolii Chubais, ‘Rossiya kak liberal'naya imperiya’, Russkii Arkhipelag, https:// archipelag.ru/geopolitics/nasledie/empire/russia/ (accessed 23 September 2022).

125 See Gennadii Zyuganov: Rossiya—rodina moya, op. cit., pp. 232–237.

126 Aleksandr Prokhanov: Svetlei lazuri, in Stolknovenie. Ostrosyuzhetnaya politicheskaya povest' (ed. V. K. Mashkin), Moscow: Politizdat, 1989, pp. 3–94.

127 ‘Below is a stream brighter than azure, / Above is a golden sunbeam... / But he, rebellious, begs for storms, / As though in storms there were peace!’—Mikhail Lermontov: ‘Parus’, in Izbrannoe, Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaya literatura. Leningradskoe otdelenie, 1979, p. 19.

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He had seen that light for the first time in his window one morning, when he was recovering from a bad flu.128 After several days of fever and delirium.

After the nightmares, and the red smoke pouring from a coal-black gulf (which was his nightlight, wrapped in a red cloth), he had woken up weak and feeble, almost fleshless, but healed. And then, in the window that morning, he had seen the azure. The breathing radiance filled him with happiness: it was directed towards him, and there was wonderful news in it.

Since then he had sought that azure, and he had found it—which had confirmed that there exists in the world a perfectly pure secret. This secret was connected to him, and to the possibility of approaching it. And he strove for it, for that colourless blue, with the pupils of his eyes and with his soul and with his whole unending life.129

This characteristic note of mysticism is intimately connected in Brighter than Azure and in Prokhanov’s other war stories with a recurring interest in the relationships that exist between the setting (Afghanistan, Angola, 130 Chechnya 131 , and others) and Moscow.

These relationships range from the businesslike and matter-offact—the hero of Brighter than Azure is commanding a battalion stationed to defend the Salang Tunnel, the only all-weather route leading from Kabul to the Soviet border and hence the only reliable freight passage from Moscow to central and southern Afghanistan—to the deeply subjective: Konovalov, the deputy political officer, was asleep, muttering something scarcely audible as he slept. But the battalion commander couldn’t get to sleep. He felt how tired he was; he felt his mind and his memory demanding oblivion. But his nerves, split into numberless excited fibres, shook and quivered. He was in this narrow army dwelling, the field telephone ready to explode with ringing, next door to a tunnel stuffed with conveyor lorries where sentries cowered, encased in their bullet-proof vests. And at the same time he was walking through Moscow—its boulevards and bridges, its ring roads squeezing tighter and tighter around the Kremlin, its precious heart.

He wandered into empty yards along Meshchanskaya and Troitskaya Streets, places that no longer existed: swept away by new builds, walled over with glass and concrete. He stood on a sparkling snowdrift to listen to the sounds of a grand piano through a low open window. He went into his

128 The word translated ‘flu’ is literally ‘angina’; but it is customary in Russian to apply this term to any brief illness more severe than a sniffle, much as Englishspeakers complain generically of ‘the flu’.

129 Aleksandr Prokhanov: Svetlei lazuri, op. cit., pp. 16f.

130 Aleksandr Prokhanov: Afrikanist, Moscow: Armada-press, 2002.

131 Aleksandr Prokhanov: Idushchie v nochi, Moscow: ITRK, 2001.

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ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM building on Taganka Square, where the familiar jasper lamp was still hanging, and the scratch on the cabinet door still reminded him of his childhood pranks, and his father’s decrepit jacket still hung in the cupboard smelling of long-ago tobacco, and his grandfather’s burnt-out pipe still stood in the red wooden cup on the table, and, if you took it to your lips and inhaled, grandfather would come to life in a bitter sigh. He stood by the entrance to a tall building, by those familiar doors behind which his darling lived, the one he had once loved. He stood and watched by her entrance in the evening. He circled and circled through Moscow in dear, beloved circles.132

§ 34.

The wars Prokhanov describes are specifically ‘local conflicts’ [lokal'nye konflikty], a term whose English translation risks failing to capture the technocratic edge and distinctive period flavour of the Russian original. A ‘local conflict’ in this sense is not simply a local war as opposed to a world war: it is that characteristic phenomenon of the post-1945 age, a local war serving as an expression of or a substitute for a world war. Prokhanov’s characters fight the forces of Ahmad Shah Masoud, of Isaias Afeworki, of P. W. Botha: but the real enemy is not these. And a significant tragic principle in Prokhanov’s treatment of ‘local conflicts’ arises from the inevitable differences of perspective between local allies and Soviet officers as to why the war is being fought. (See, for instance, The Palace.133) ‘Local conflicts’ can be painful, confusing, morally ambiguous: but they are validated, for Prokhanov’s characters, by the association with Moscow and by the certainty that the fate of the Soviet Union is bound up with the vagaries of a Nicaraguan or Ethiopian battlefield. The poet and critic Samuil Marshak (now remembered chiefly for his verse for children) once reflected that Nowhere have poets written so much about long distances as they have in Russia. The endless spaces of the plains, for a Russian, are what the sea is for an Englishman.134

132 Aleksandr Prokhanov: Svetlei lazuri, op. cit., p. 14.

133 Aleksandr Prokhanov: Dvorets, St Petersburg: Amfora, 2002. The title refers to Tajbeg Palace in Kabul (Tadzh-Bek in Russian), which was stormed by Soviet forces on 27 December 1979 with the death of Afghanistan’s then president, Hafizullah Amin. It then became the headquarters of the Soviet 40th Army.

134 Samuil Marshak: Radi zhizni na zemle. Ob Aleksandre Tvardovskom, Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel', 1961, p. 47.

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Marshak’s comparison is probably a strong one: in the two countries, those have typically been where people have gazed if they wanted to see an example of untamed infinity; those are the directions from which invaders have sometimes come in the past; and, of course, those are where explorers and conquerors have set out in search of colonies. But what is relevant here is that Prokhanov, in this proto-imperial period of his writing, is interested not in abstract distance as such but in distance from a specific centre. The ‘local conflicts’ themselves, and the Soviet personnel who fight in them, are sustained and rendered meaningful by their link back to Moscow. § 35.

This prehistory of Prokhanov’s treatment of imperiality provides the groundwork for an appreciation of the novel in which imperiality first becomes a central concern—The Last Soldier of the Empire. 135 The protagonist rejoices in the possibly over-programmatic name of Petr Konstantinovich Avvakumov, evoking at once Peter I of Russia, Constantine I of the Roman Empire, and the ‘Old Believer’ leader the Archpriest Avvakum. Avvakumov is an archetypal member of a social stratum we can call the military intelligentsia: intelligence analysts, strategists, staff officers, and rocket technicians, a group who held an honoured position under the system of ‘technocratic state socialism’136 and who now provide the ‘nightingale of the General Staff ’ with heroes for many of his novels. On this occasion, the character has spent his career in ‘local conflicts’ from Central America to Cambodia—but now the relationship between the local conflicts and the centre has decisively changed. Instability, uncertainty, plots and counter-plots, coups, counter-coups, and highly professional military intellectuals from analytical centres in the USA stalk Moscow itself in the buildup to the GKChP’s doomed last stand. Avvakumov, paralysed by the absence of a directing centre, recognizes the techniques that are being 135 Aleksandr Prokhanov: Poslednii soldat imperii. Kremlevskii apokalipsis, Moscow: Kovcheg, 1993.

136 This term comes from the analysis of late-Soviet society given in Albert Szymanski: Is the Red Flag Flying? The political economy of the Soviet Union today, London: Zed, 1983.

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deployed against ‘the Union’ (‘Soyuz’, a perhaps distinctively military way of referring to the country) but does not know to whom he can turn to lead the fight against them. The failure of the centre fatally disrupts the topography of Prokhanovian space—and then inverts it altogether, as Avvakumov finds himself turning for reassurance to his memories of distant struggles and of ‘local conflicts’ on the Mekong or the Limpopo. Moscow suddenly feels peripheral; ‘local conflicts’ have overrun the centre. And the shock dramatized in Prokhanov’s novel was felt acutely by Russia’s imperial patriots.

Gennadii Zyuganov’s famous open letter of 7 May 1991 to Aleksandr Yakovlev, ‘The Architect Amid the Ruins’,137 declares that The country is experiencing discord, disharmony, disintegration, dissolution. Confrontation and irresponsibility have become the basis of existence.

Just take a look at the capital, Aleksandr Nikolaevich, to say nothing of the ‘hot spots’ you avoid visiting. Here, under the noses of leaders of every shade and hue, it has become a USSR-wide political dumping ground and a seedbed for everything that is unhygienic and amoral. Can the people look at all this bedlam, and believe that perestroika is developing in the correct direction? One would think not.138

For Zyuganov, the situation in the capital—tellingly conjoined with the ‘hot spots’ in which ‘local conflicts’ are apt to occur—is the most convincing proof that the policy of the Gorbachev leadership has brought the Soviet Union to the brink of ruin. § 36.

And this leads naturally to the suspicion that Moscow is what St Petersburg was sometimes felt to be in the nineteenth century: a hostile and alien presence in the Russian state. It is a recurring theme in red-brown writing (especially during the 1990s) that Moscow—with its English-language advertising hoardings, foreign-owned supermarkets, and expatriates armed with corporate credit cards—is a city under occupation. And the closest parallel in 137 The title is sometimes mistakenly given as Arkhikektoru razvaliny ‘To the architect of a ruin’, for instance in the Gorbachev Foundation’s Chronicle of Perestroika: ‘Khronika vnutripoliticheskikh sobytii v SSSR. 1991’, in Khronika perestroiki https://www.gorby.ru/archival/expocenter/vnutrpolitika/show_29321/ (accessed 23 September 2022).

138 Gennadii Zyuganov: ‘Arkhitektor u razvalin’, in Sovetskaya Rossiya for 7 May 1991, reproduced in Rossiya—rodina moia, op. cit., p. 182.

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the historical practice of official communist parties to Zyuganov’s offer of a coalition with imperial patriots and Orthodox Christians is the policy of ‘national unity’ pursued in resistance movements during the Second World War. As Palmiro Togliatti said in 1944, when the Italian Communist Party was backing the anti-German monarchist Government of Marshal Badoglio, we have been reproached with being ‘collaborationists’, ‘government men’, which, according to those who make this charge, is incompatible with our character of militants of a Marxist party.

This reproach is based on an ignorance of our principles. When a country is invaded by a foreign power, when it has to carry on a fight to win back its national independence, unity and freedom, and the working class is an important part in that country, we have always allowed the working-class parties to take part in a government that has set itself the task of fighting to drive the foreign invasion back as quickly as possible. […] What is critical is that a strong and authoritative democratic war government should be formed to wage war in earnest and create the necessary atmosphere for this throughout the whole country. […] We are the party of unity. Unity of the working class, unity of the anti-fascist forces, unity of the whole nation in the war against Hitlerite Germany and the traitors in its service.139

The essential political division here is between resistance and collaborators, not between workers and employers; many Russian patriots in the 1990s and subsequently have made the same claim about the former Soviet Union. And if, in an earlier epoch, collaboration and the influence of outside empires were likely to be stronger along the coasts than in the hinterland, today’s transport and communications offer that role pre-eminently to the national capital. Patriots’ suspicion of Moscow could only be strengthened by the comparative strength of liberal opinion there—as measured by election results or by demonstrations—and by the weakness of patriotic parties whose support in the provinces was considerable. § 37.

The overall picture as the 1989–1993 period drew to a close was thus of a Westernized and liberal capital increasingly out of

139 Palmiro Togliatti: ‘The Communist policy of national unity. Speech to the cadres of the Communist organization in Naples, 11 April 1944’ (tr. Derek Boothman), in On Gramsci and Other Writings (ed. Donald Sassoon), London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1979, pp. 51, 61.

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step with an opposition-minded country. Moscow stands condemned in the eyes of many imperial patriots as a peripheral centre, closer in political culture and even in travel time to Western capitals than it is to most of Russia: the city that was once the stronghold of the state has now succumbed to the invaders’ blandishments. As Rustem Vakhitov, a self-proclaimed ‘Red Eurasian’140 based in the Bashkortostani capital of Ufa, wrote during the brief interlude between the fall of Baghdad (April 2003) and the beginning of serious armed resistance to the US-led invaders: Baghdad has fallen [...] How could it happen? Little provincial Umm Qasr resisted for more than a week, […] but Baghdad with its seven million people, a European-level city with vast reserves of arms and provisions, with a network of underground communications, with bomb shelters and several lines of defence: Baghdad—has fallen.141

Vakhitov develops the parallel between Baghdad in 2003 and Moscow after 1991 into a general thesis: But the explanation is simple: Baghdad surrendered so unexpectedly, so quickly, and so humiliatingly precisely because it is the capital. In today’s modernist and postmodernist world it is not just the best minds, talents, and gifts that flow into the capital: it is also careerists, conformists, chancers, and graspers of every kind. The provinces are too narrow for their measureless ambitions; they need the capital, where national policy is transacted, where the ‘flower of the bureaucracy’ is concentrated, where ‘high positions’ are given out… The division between ‘provinces’ and ‘capital’ now marks out the line between traditional values, loyalty to one’s people, one’s land, one’s faith, and one’s state, willingness to work hard, and decency, on the one hand; and, on the other hand, cosmopolitan liberalism, uprootedness, nihilism, consumerism, and cynicism.142

A conservative mistrust towards the big city blends in Vakhitov’s article with an anti-colonial preference for the global periphery against the centre: 140 See his website of the time: Krasnaya Evraziya. Web-proekt kandidata filosofskikh nauk Rustema Vakhitova, http://redeurasia.narod.ru/krasnaya_evrazia/index. html (accessed 23 September 2022). Eurasianism, red and of other colours, will be treated in chapter V below.

141 Rustem Vakhitov, ‘Irakskaya Amerika’, Internet protiv teleekrana, 10 April 2003 http://www.contrtv.ru/common/933/index.html (accessed 23 September 2022).

142 Ibid.

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Since the whole spectrum of these liberal cosmopolitan ‘values’ is now incarnated in America (where they have found their most radical expression, even though in the USA itself they are strangely interwoven with a hypocritical and bigoted Protestant fundamentalism), each country has its own ‘America’ associated with the Westernized lifestyle of the capital. The ‘Russian America’ is today’s Moscow, and the ‘Iraqi America’ is Baghdad.143

This attitude to Moscow resonates throughout Prokhanov’s post1990 depiction of the city; and the concept of ‘imperiality’, of imperial Russia and of the imperial grandeur of Moscow, is insistently fused with this bitter sense that Moscow has become an administrative centre on the periphery of someone else’s empire. § 38.

There is a prejudice in some quarters against authorial revisions and rewrites of already-published work. Whatever might be said about certain other prejudices, this one at least will scarcely be entertained by admirers of Prokhanov’s The Last Soldier of the Empire. A full elucidation of the changes introduced in the revised edition of 2003144—which is about twice the length of the original— would exceed the available space, but it is not inappropriate to touch on a few points which bear directly on the topic in hand. The original Last Soldier was hardly optimistic about the country’s future: but the picture presented in the revised text breaks much more decisively with naturalism to add a glint of all-embracing nightmare to the portrayal. The relationship between the centre and the periphery, still central to the novel’s dynamic, is expressed in less overtly political and military terms; and the ‘third world’ reminiscences of the hero, now Viktor Andreevich Belosel'tsev rather than Petr Konstantinovich Avvakumov, have been drastically cut. (The passages dealing with butterfly collecting on the fringes of ‘local conflicts’ have escaped the blue pencil: similar moments are to be found in Mr Semtex,145 The Africa Expert,146 and others.) Belosel'tsev is trapped in a phantasmagoric Moscow where imperial dream, mystical insight, and cruel delusion merge under the aegis of the

143 144 145 146

Ibid.

Aleksandr Prokhanov: Poslednii soldat imperii (2003), op. cit.

Aleksandr Prokhanov: Gospodin Geskogen, op. cit.

Aleksandr Prokhanov: Afrikanist, op. cit.

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demonic Secret Policeman [Chekist], a character based on Vladimir Kryuchkov, the head of the KGB from 1988 to 1991 and one of the members of the 1991 GKChP. Kryuchkov has since been condemned by Prokhanov as a deliberate traitor who doomed his ‘decent but weak-willed [...] decent but earthbound’ colleagues by refusing to give the order for Yeltsin’s arrest.147 One quite concise episode retained from the earlier text (the hero’s all too brief visit to the village, which parallels the trip to Pskov in Mr Semtex and to the White Sea coast in The Red-Brown148) is loaded with additional significance. Coming as it does after Belosel'tsev’s near-breakdown under the pressure of supernatural or illusory torments, it represents a desperate and doomed attempt at flight from the possessed city to the sanity of the provinces. And the sense in the original that the shape of reality has been disrupted and then inverted, noted above in a more narrowly political sense, is now replicated in expressly universal terms. The seasons become confused: high summer over the Moscow River coincides with winter in Red Square.

The dead rise from their graves to attack the Soviet government.

The ‘red gods’ leave their resting places in the mausoleum and the Kremlin wall. The space shuttle Buran returns from a test flight with its cargo bay seething with cockroaches. And the ‘bolt of the world’ [bolt mira], buried deep in the mountains of eastern Kazakhstan and uncovered by a nuclear test, makes one small turn to signify the end of an epoch. § 39.

The 2003 Last Soldier of the Empire is perhaps Prokhanov’s most effective dramatization of 1990s, Yeltsin-era imperial despair.

The GKChP has passed into history; and the forlorn hope of rallying those who have served the Motherland in ‘local conflicts’ to defend its imperial integrity in Moscow—the idea of the ‘Afghan brotherhood’, still alive in Prokhanov’s A Dream of Kabul (1996)149, or even less plausibly of the ‘Chechen brotherhood’—has suffered 147 Aleksandr Prokhanov: ‘GKChP. Poslednii akkord’, in Zavtra No. 32 (1493) for August 2022, p. 1. This account of Kryuchkov’s role is also presented in his novel Writers’ House, although less floridly than it is in The Last Soldier.

148 Aleksandr Prokhanov: Krasno-korichnevyi, op. cit.

149 Aleksandr Prokhanov: Son o Kabule, Moscow: Armada-press, 2002.

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a string of disappointments. What remains of imperiality after the fall of the House of Soviets is, firstly, a ‘red-brown’ patriotism founded on the idea of the sovereignty of the state, and, secondly, a deeply hostile attitude to the capital city, seen as something akin to a garrison town holding down occupied territory and corrupting or maddening it in the process. § 40.

But, by the time the revised version appeared, the ‘bolt of the world’ was already turning again. The reinstated Soviet anthem was a hopeful sign; and as early as 2001 the answer to the ‘ritual question’ seemed (in Prokhanov’s article ‘Russia is the Empire of Light’) to be that Vladimir Putin is the imperial leader patriots have longed for: It doesn’t take a prophet, just a keen, attentive observer watching from the window as the sick yellow foam of history’s latest epileptic fit dries out, to say it: the Russian Empire will be born again.

Each catastrophe that has annihilated Russian statehood has ended with a new imperial upsurge and renewed imperial beauty and might.150

Imperiality is the eternal opposite of liberalism: The liberal idea—ancient as syphilis, found in the bones of Neanderthal man—has repeatedly quartered Russia, torn it up with hooks, and scattered its trembling, moaning organs among the ravines and rubbish-pits. And again and again, in the twilight of history, there has appeared the mysterious Maid of Eurasia, whose face resembles now a Slav, now a Tatar, now a Georgian.151

Prokhanov hails the Kremlin’s rhetorical move from liberal to imperial patriotism—and it is of course the military intelligentsia who can form the kernel of the new Russian Empire, if Putin will choose to lead them: Putin—a regular officer of the KGB—is bringing Russia’s new elite into the light: an elite consisting of intelligence officers and generals, topped up with military intelligence analysts and army staff officers, whose task will be the

150 Aleksandr Prokhanov: ‘Rossiya—imperiya sveta’, in Zavtra 24 (393) for June 2001, p. 1.

151 Ibid.

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The Putin elite is coming to light, like young grass through the slag of the liberal wasteland.

It’s not that Putin is cutting off the liberal period in recent Russian history. The liberal hasn’t been put up against the wall; he isn’t locked in the Gulag; he isn’t digging the White Sea–Baltic canal. 152 He hasn’t been expelled from NTV,153 or banished from TV-6.154 The liberal has run dry. He’s shrunk down, decayed, like a slimy, overripe mushroom, and become a little hole in Russian history.155

§ 41.

The clearest indication that the Kremlin had indeed repudiated the Yeltsin-era attempt to construct a liberal patriotism came in 2004, with Putin’s address after the Beslan school tragedy: In the history of Russia there have been more than a few tragic pages and difficult trials. Today we are living in the conditions that took shape after the collapse of a vast and great state. A state that sadly turned out to be unviable in the conditions of a rapidly changing world.

But, in spite of all difficulties, we managed to preserve the core of that colossus, the Soviet Union. And we named our new country the Russian Federation.156

The Russian Federation, it now seems, is not a liberal nation-state that freed itself from the ‘Soviet empire’—it is the last remnant of that empire, formed into a ‘new country’ because the original (how or why is not explained) had become ‘unviable’. In important respects, the official account of Russia’s history and of Russian political identity had come to resemble the account first sketched by the imperial-patriotic opposition of the 1990s. And the drift towards imperial rhetoric has continued. Speaking in September 2022, Putin listed the great names of the past—from Ryurik to Ivan the Terrible 152 Originally the Stalin White Sea–Baltic Canal, dug using convict labour in 1931–33.

153 Television station, owned in the 1990s by Vladimir Gusinskii and friendly to liberals. At the time Prokhanov’s article appeared it had recently been acquired

by Gazprom-Media, a holding company belonging to the partly state-owned fossil fuel corporation Gazprom.

154 Television station, owned at the time by Boris Berezovskii. It would cease to broadcast the following year.

155 Ibid.

156 Vladimir Putin: Obrashchenie Prezidenta Rossii Vladimira Putina. 4 sentyabrya 2004 goda 17:52. Moskva, Kreml', website of the Russian presidency, 4 September 2004 http://www.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/22589 (accessed 22 September 2022).

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to Yurii Gagarin, taking in Igor' Kurchatov (the father of the Soviet atom bomb) and General Anton Denikin (one of the leaders of the Whites in the Civil War)—and went on: These and many other of our compatriots were vast, complex, sometimes contradictory historical personalities. Some of them had their own views of Russia’s future, and even found themselves on different sides of the barricades. You know, when I was writing this text I kept including and crossing out names such as Nicholas II, Lenin, and Stalin. There hasn’t been very much time, from the historical viewpoint, I think, to provide proper, objective assessments, free from current political circumstances.

But all of them—statesmen, toilers, warriors, explorers, scientists, ascetics, saints, and above all our whole people—made Russia a great world power. They defined its destiny [...]

Modern Russia is the heir of Old Holy Rus', as well as of the Tsardom of Muscovy, the Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union.157

The attitude that is exemplified here, and that is presently more or less canonical in Russia, will perhaps feel unfamiliar to observers in other countries. We are apt to think that the October Revolution and its consequences were, in very broad terms, either good or bad; and we assume that someone who approves of the establishment of Soviet power must regret its dissolution (and vice versa). These are not, of course, the only judgements that are possible. There are certainly people on the anti-Stalinist left who, while continuing to profess allegiance to the revolutionary goals of 1917, think those goals had been so distorted and betrayed, the chance of revitalizing them within the CPSU’s system so attenuated, that no way forward remained open except the complete breakdown that occurred in 1991: their judgement is therefore that both were ‘good’, at least in a qualified sense. But the judgement that both events were ‘bad’—that the Leninist state should never have been created, but once created should never have been destroyed—risks seeming simply incoherent. It is not, of course; at least, not unless Burkean conservatism is

157 Vladimir Putin: Torzhestvennyi kontsert, posvyashchennyi 1160-letiyu zarozhdeniya rossiiskoi gosudarstvennosti, website of the Russian presidency, 21 September 2022 http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/69397 (accessed 21 September 2022).

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incoherent in general. Russian imperial patriots could plausibly rebuke both Lenin and Yeltsin in the same terms as Burke addressed to the revolutionaries in France: [Y]ou chose to act as if you had never been moulded into civil society, and had everything to begin anew. You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you. You set up your trade without a capital [...] Respecting your forefathers, you would have been taught to respect yourselves.158

And Prokhanov, at least, seeing his military intellectuals dishonoured in the 1990s, would probably have been prepared to go further with Burke: [Y]our present confusion, like a palsy, has attacked the fountain of life itself.

Every person in your country, in a position to be actuated by a principle of honour, is disgraced and degraded, and can entertain no sensation of life, except in a mortified and humiliated indignation [...] The next generation of the nobility will resemble the artificers and clowns, and money-jobbers, usurers, and Jews, who will be always their fellows, sometimes their masters.159

In 2013, meanwhile, he depicted a character based on Putin being advised not to suppress protests by force but instead to play on the memory of both 1917 and 1991 to paint radical change as too dangerous: You need to do everything you can [...] to make the square seethe like a pan of soup, while new spices and seasonings keep being flung into it. A bay leaf in the form of the communist, Mumakin. Pepper in the form of the revolutionary radical, Langustov. Cinnamon in the form of the society courtesan, Yagailo. A walnut in the form of the Jewish activist, Shakhes. Garlic in the form of the Russian nationalist, Korostylev. You need to increase the heat under the pan so the soup froths and overflows. Let them smell the reek of it in every town and village [...] You need to frighten people with the bloody maw of a new revolution [...] February ’17, the nightmare of civil slaughter, the war of all against all, camps, shootings, poverty, the best Russian people fleeing abroad. You need to compare Bolotnaya Square to perestroika, Yeltsin, Belovezh'e160 [...] You need to compare Gradoboev to Kerenskii and Gorba-

158 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (ed. Frank M. Turner), New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003, p. 31.

159 Ibid., pp. 41f.

160 Refers to the 1991 accords by which Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus declared that the USSR no longer existed (and established the CIS).

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chev [...] The risk is enormous, but my plan is based on a profound understanding of the Russian mind [... I]f the people have to choose between a bad state and chaos, they will choose the bad state. They will choose you.161

It is a curiosity, perhaps, to find supporters, members, and even leaders of a body styling itself a Communist Party so prominent among the early exponents of what is fairly recognizably a form of conservatism; but it is scarcely to be wondered at if the idea of loyalty to the grand sweep of Russian imperial statehood has eventually proved congenial to the Kremlin.

161 Aleksandr Prokhanov, Vremya zolotoe, op. cit., chap. 5 [Надо делать все].

IV Nothing Is What It Seems § 42.

The world of Prokhanov’s fiction, and to a great extent the world presented throughout red-brown patriotic writing, is a place where nothing is what it seems. Elections are rigged; terrorist attacks are staged; one gang of conspirators plots against another; women who profess to love the hero have been scheming to destroy him (and, usually, the empire) all along; friends are exposed as enemies, and seeming enemies turn out to be working together after all. In a 2021 novel depicting his own patriotic awakening during the later perestroika years, when politics seemed dominated by the standoff between Gorbachev and Yeltsin, Prokhanov writes that Kuravlev was more and more firmly and consciously taking the side of the state, which was cracking under the pressure of Gorbachev’s vile politics.

But, strange to say, he could not get rid of the sensation that these two hostile forces were growing from the same root, were nourishing one another. They were directed by the same undercover priests162 and wicked camp-followers, feeding their wicked counsel to both Gorbachev and Yeltsin, making their fight ever more vicious and merciless. He thought he could see it more and more clearly, the conspiracy that was maturing in offices in the Kremlin palaces. He evaluated the conspirators. Like a secret intelligence agent, he wanted to uncover the secret plans. Alone, with his writer’s vision, he saw the existence of two centres of force. He wanted to uncover the secret connections by which they were linked. He wanted to break them, stop the explosion, save the state.163

Another recent work, 2019’s The Sacred Grove, has a contemporary setting, but the central character is again a writer in the early stages of his career. Sergei Podkopaev, the aspiring novelist, is drawn— seemingly by coincidence—into the toils of a paranormal conspiracy directed against Russia and its president, Konstantin Vyazov (a very thinly fictionalized portrayal of the present incumbent). The attacks directed against Vyazov are sometimes purely magical and symbolic, but sometimes take the form of this-worldly media operations: a tell-all interview with the president’s ex-wife, or a shock 162 The word for ‘priest’ here is zhrets, which refers specifically to a priest of a nonChristian religion.

163 Aleksandr Prokhanov: TsDL, op. cit., chap. 25 [Куравлёв всё твёрже].

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London press conference given by an exiled oligarch (Leonid Borodulin, modelled on Boris Berezovskii) who was thought to have committed suicide years ago. The allegations they make against Vyazov—he is having an affair with an Olympic athlete,164 he deliberately refused to save a stranded submarine crew (to be read as referring to the Kursk disaster) because they could have told the country the Americans were to blame for the vessel’s loss,165 he carried out the 1999 Moscow bombings to give him a pretext for war in Chechnya,166 the hostage-takers in Beslan were willing to release the children but he preferred to open fire and let them all die so the public would be scared of terrorism and accept a strong leader,167 he has corruptly acquired a fortune worth three hundred billion American dollars,168 he is planning to sell the Kurile Islands to Japan,169 and so forth—are not really new: we have heard the same, or very similar, from Prokhanov before, and from plenty of other sources too. But this time there is supposed to be unchallengeable proof. We are never explicitly told that any of the accusations is false; and the former first lady’s allegation about the affair with the Olympian is certainly true, because we see the two of them in bed together. But the stories’ truth or otherwise is beside the point— these are supernatural weapons wielded by bankers, decadents, and diabolists, and, once their occult power has been terribly magnified by a selection of exotic magical trees maintained for the purpose in a Moscow orangery, they can inflict real and grievous physical injuries on the tormented president. The attacks would certainly be fatal, in fact, if Vyazov did not enjoy supernatural protection—perhaps from the prayers of holy monks who love Stalin, possibly even from a good magical tree growing in a sacred grove somewhere in the republic of Mari El. (The Mari sacred groves, and

164 Aleksandr Prokhanov: Svyashchennaya roshcha, in Pevets boevykh kolesnits, op. cit., chap., 7 [А теперь эта].

165 Ibid., chap. 7 [Он обещал].

166 Ibid., chap. 9 [взрывы жилых].

167 Ibid., chap. 9 [Во время захвата].

168 Ibid., chap. 9 [Есть исследование].

169 Ibid., chap. 9 [У меня есть подлинник].

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the continued vitality—albeit with some Christian and latterly neopagan admixture—of the traditional religion practised there, are not fictional;170 but, although there is a chapter set in Mari El and the author’s attitude towards the Mari people seems benevolent if patronizing, The Sacred Grove does not make very much use of any specific knowledge Prokhanov may possess on the subject.) Can Podkopaev unmask the plotters, save the president, save Russia, find love, and possibly even write his novel? Or is he being manipulated all along by the forces of evil, in the hope he will lead their chainsaw men right to the Mari tree? § 43.

Conspiracy theories are thus central to Prokhanov’s writing, and in fact to red-brown thought in general. But ‘conspiracy theories’ is a deeply unsatisfactory label for them. It sounds as though it means any explanation involving a conspiracy, but manifestly it does not: everyone believes that conspiracies happen sometimes. And it is associated with peculiar clichés, such as the idea that ‘conspiracy theories’ are popular because they present a comforting image of an orderly world where everything happens for a reason. At least with reference to Prokhanov, this assessment seems wildly wrong: his characters rarely seem to be very reassured by the nightmarish and anti-national plots that keep turning their reality inside out. But perhaps the explanation is not meant quite literally. As an attempt to account for such ideas’ actual appeal, it misses the mark badly; but it is stingingly effective as polemic against them, because it throws back at ‘conspiracy theorists’ the very reproaches—of wanting the world to be simple and comfortable—they were themselves ready to deploy against anyone who accepts official versions of events.171 Nonetheless, the term ‘conspir-

170 ‘Veneration of trees and the forest is widespread among the Mari [...] Researchers in the eighteenth century, speaking of the Mari nature cult, noted that the people revered the oak and the birch as gods [...] In certain sacred groves of the Mari Republic the author has also documented the linden, fir, and pine serving as sacred trees’—Lidiya Toidybekova: Mariiskaya mifologiya. Etnograficheskii spravochnik, Ioshkar-Ola: no pub. / in collaboration with MPIK, 2007, p. 35.

171 I owe this wise suggestion to Sam Meoch (private communication).

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acy theories’ does at least gesture in the direction of a real and identifiable group of beliefs. The claims that Jews run the world, or that Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Kryuchkov were all working together to bring down the USSR, or that popular satirical programmes are a means of occult mind control do share distinctive characteristics: but what will be found to be most distinctive about them is not their invocation of the idea of a conspiracy. What these various ‘theories’ share is less a particular content (the allegation of a conspiracy) than a epistemological strategy. In each instance, the explanation offered assumes the existence of secret meanings—of an inner truth, known only to a few and radically separate from the outward sense presented to the masses. In short, the presumption made is that of esotericism: beside the outward, public, exoteric (Greek exōterikós) sense of a news report or a political event, there is a hidden, inward, esoteric (Greek esōterikós) sense, of which most people are necessarily unaware. Lucien Goldmann remarks somewhere that one and the same worldview can be found expressing quite distinct ‘economic and social situations’ and quite distinct infrastructural interests in different historical contexts.172 He neglects, however, to add: the first time as spiritual quest, the second time as political commentary. § 45.

The demand that the term ‘esoteric’ should be used in a single sense by all those who choose to employ it is apparently an unrealistic one. It is used here simply and formally, to denote the belief in a hidden truth as opposed to the public truth—esoteric as the opposite of exoteric. It should be further noted that the categorization of the theories under discussion as esoteric refers so far only to their epistemological posture. The alleged esoteric truth discovered to underlie political events can, in principle, be anything the discoverer chooses: and it is possible to construct an esoteric reading with no implications outside the understanding of the specific event explained. Such readings can even offer a certain charm, simply from the sudden shift in perspective they bring about. But 172 Lucien Goldmann: The Human Sciences & Philosophy (tr. Hayden V. White and Robert Anchor), London: Jonathan Cape, 1969, pp. 131f.

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‘conspiracy theories’ of this kind are rather rare. It will more commonly be found that the hidden truths unearthed by esoteric investigators share certain clear characteristics, regardless of the field (theology, recent history) to which they supposedly relate. The esoteric content discovered will tend to be one that justifies the esoteric method used to discover it: the hidden truth is that there are hidden truths. This point can perhaps best be illustrated on the basis of a reasonably cohesive body of esoteric thought, such as the Gnosticism of the first centuries CE. Hitherto dependent on fragmentary evidence derived chiefly from anti-Gnostic polemics, the study of ‘that sombre and repellent theosophy’173 has been revolutionized since the discovery in 1945 of a corpus of some 52 mostly Gnostic tractates at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt. The documents are written in Coptic, the form of the Egyptian language current in the late Roman, Byzantine, and early Islamic periods, but have undoubtedly been translated from the Greek. The fact they have survived in Egypt is due less to any special popularity there than to the country’s unusual climate, with near-rainless desert within easy walking distance of cities and densely-populated agricultural regions: a very diverse range of papyrus manuscripts have therefore survived which elsewhere would have perished unless they had been deliberately curated and recopied. The Nag Hammadi codices can confidently be dated to the fourth century CE, although some of the material is certainly of much earlier date (including a short excerpt from Plato’s Republic). A complete English translation was made available in 1977. 174 Many distinct Gnostic sects (Sethians, Valentinians, Barbelognostics, etc.) are known from Nag Hammadi and from other evidence; and the question of how far these texts represent a common belief system is further complicated by the fact that several Nag Hammadi tractates show clear evidence of doctrinally motivated redaction. The texts comprising the Nag Hammadi 173 Henry Chadwick: Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition. Studies in Justin, Clement, and Origen, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984, p. 7.

174 The Nag Hammadi Library in English. Translated and introduced by members of the Coptic Gnostic Library Project of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, Claremost, California (gen. ed. James M. Robinson), Leiden: E. J. Brill and New York: HarperCollins, 1990.

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library may have originated in different parts of the Greek-speaking Eastern Mediterranean over an interval of several centuries— but the fact that they were found together at Nag Hammadi demonstrates, at the least, that one group of readers found their teachings all to be edifying. The claim to esoteric knowledge is present in these texts in the clearest possible form: These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down.

And he said, “Whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings will not experience death.”

Jesus said, “Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over the all.”175

One of the most relevant of the Nag Hammadi tractates is The Hypostasis of the Archons, in which the fundamentals of the sectaries’ worldview are presented in a concise narrative form. The Hypostasis is perhaps intended for novices in the Gnostic faith: it draws closely on—and seems to assume some familiarity with—the canonical Judaeo-Christian scriptures, while offering a radical reinterpretation of their message. It can therefore usefully be compared with the presentation of ‘conspiracy theories’ in the political press, where writers are able to assume that the reader will already be aware of the standard interpretation (or exoteric cover story). The combination of close textual correspondence with a transformed meaning is well illustrated by a familiar Bible story, as presented in the Hypostasis176 and in the book of Genesis:

175 The Gospel of Thomas (tr. Thomas O. Lambdin), ibid., p. 126.

176 The Hypostasis of the Archons (tr. Bentley Layton), ibid., pp. 164f.

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The Hypostasis of the Archons

Gen. 3:1–5

Then the female spiritual principle came <in> the snake, the instructor; and it taught <them>, saying, “What did he <say to> you (pl.)?

Was it, ‘From every tree in the garden shall you (sg.) eat; yet—from the tree of recognizing evil and good do not eat’?”

The carnal woman said, “Not only did he say ‘Do not eat,’ but even ‘Do not touch it; for the day you (pl.) eat from it, with death you (pl.) are going to die.’ ” And the snake, the instructor, said, “With death you (pl.) shall not die; for it was of jealousy that he said this to you (pl.). Rather your (pl.) eyes shall open and you (pl.) shall come to be like gods, recognizing evil and good.” And the female instructing principle was taken away from the snake, and she left it behind merely a thing of the earth.

1. Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?

2. And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: 3. But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.

4. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: 5. For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and movement color.

The translation perhaps makes the Nag Hammadi text feel more abstract and high-theoretical in tone than it necessarily is in the Coptic: the word rendered as ‘the female spiritual principle’ is tipneumatikē, literally ‘the (female) spiritual’ (with the adjective being used as a noun), and is admittedly not too easy to put into idiomatic English; but ‘the female instructing principle’ is just treftamo, ‘the (female) instructor’ or ‘the (female) teacher’.177 No ‘principles’ are directly in evidence. Nonetheless, this excerpt clarifies the distinction between the esotericism of the Nag Hammadi tractates and the traditions of Jewish and Christian exegesis (according to which the

177 The Reality of the Rulers (The Hypostasis of the Archons), in Coptic Gnostic Chrestomathy. A Selection of Coptic Texts with Grammatical Analysis and Glossary (ed.

Bentley Layton), Leuven: Peeters, 2004, p. 51.

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serpent is usually read as being Satan). The difference should not be misidentified as that between a literal and a non-literal interpretation: there is as little of Satan in the passage from Genesis, after all, as there is of ‘the female instructing principle’. But the orthodox exegetes’ reading, however much it adds, does not alter the essential import or moral point of the story—while that of the Gnostic esotericist transforms it. It will be noticed that The Hypostasis of the Archons, like most successful conspiracy movies and conspiracy stories, incorporates substantial elements that will already be familiar to the likely audience. Prokhanov is fond of the same device. The 2003 revision of The Last Soldier of the Empire, for instance, deploys lengthy sections of narrative that rehearse events the reader will remember; but the surrounding material is sufficient dramatically to alter the way the facts are perceived. The notorious clumsiness and hesitancy of the GKChP’s first press conference—something of which any reader would be aware—is given a characteristically Prokhanovian explanation: A woman stepped onto the stage. She placed a carafe of water and a few tumblers on the table. And that simple glass carafe, standing on the bare table, gave an impression of the stark, ascetic truth for which the cause of the GKChP stood. […] In the twilight of the hall, hidden by the TV cameras, lurking behind other people’s heads and faces, wearing a black velvet frockcoat and a top hat, with a hump on his back where his webbed wings were folded and hidden, sat John Leslie of Baltimore—a colonel in American naval intelligence and the chief wizard of the Solar System. […] “Comrade gentlemen!”—the Trade Union Boss, talkative, chairman of many meetings, toastmaster at long banquets, opened the press conference […] Belosel'tsev […] suddenly noticed bluish transparent rays, filled with foggy tints and shadows, emerging from the glass lenses of some of the TV cameras and making for the stage […] The men sitting behind the table answered the questions incoherently, not getting to the point, using dim and unconvincing words, as if their heads were full of smoke.178

Against the hallucinatory backdrop of The Last Soldier, the reader is often more surprised by familiarity than by novelty; and the same, indeed, is generally true of works of fiction that present a putative hidden story behind some historical or political event. The audience is hooked not when it sees the plot to kill Kennedy taking shape, 178 Aleksandr Prokhanov: Poslednii soldat imperii (2003), op. cit., pp. 394–398.

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but when it catches sight of the book depository and the Grassy Knoll and the motorcade. The Hypostasis, likewise, strikes the reader most forcefully when the serpent is allowed to repeat its wellknown lines in a context where these familiar words suddenly seem to prove the truth of the text’s allegation. § 46.

The identification of the serpent in Eden as ‘the instructor’ must raise some serious questions about the identity of the creator.

And these questions—whose answers are fundamental to the Gnostic belief system—are treated more fully in another Nag Hammadi document, without title in the codex and conventionally referred to either as The Untitled Writing or as On the Origin of the World. (Some of the same ground is also covered, albeit less fully, in The Hypostasis of the Archons.) The creation and the events leading up to the temptation in the garden are here recast as part of an involved drama played out between ‘the prime parent’ (Yaldabaoth; also known as Samael, Ariael, Saklas, etc.) and a number of divine beings including Pistis (faith, Greek pístis), Sophia (wisdom, Greek sophía), Zoe (life, Greek zoḗ), and Pronoia (forethought, Greek prónoia). Yaldabaoth, ‘being devoid of understanding,’ denies that anything has existed before him.179 He issues a challenge, whose ultimate result is that a radiant being, the Adam of Light, becomes polluted by chaos and is ‘unable’ to return to the purity of ‘his light—i.e., the eighth heaven […] because of the poverty that had mingled with his light.’ Assisted by ‘the authorities’, Yaldabaoth makes a replica of the Adam of Light and entraps some souls to be ‘shut into the prisons of the modelled forms.’ The ‘seven rulers’ (Archons, from Greek árchōn) fashion their Adam as a ‘man with his body resembling their body, but his likeness resembling the man that had appeared to them’—the Adam of Light. However, Sophia Zoe is able to send ‘her breath into Adam’, with the result that he awakens; and Sophia succeeds in dispatching ‘her daughter Zoe, being called Eve, as an instructor’. The ‘authorities’ propose to rape

179 The following account is excerpted from that given in On the Origin of the World (tr. Hans-Gebhard Bethge, Bentley Layton, and the Societas Coptica Hierosolymitana), in The Nag Hammadi Library, op. cit., pp. 177–184.

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Zoe–Eve in the hope of polluting her as the Adam of Light had been polluted: Now come, let us lay hold of her and cast our seed into her, so that when she becomes soiled she may not be able to ascend into her light. Rather, those whom she bears will be under our charge. But let us not tell Adam, for he is not one of us. Rather let us bring a deep sleep over him. And let us instruct him in his sleep to the effect that she came from his rib.

But ‘Eve, being a force, laugh[s] at their decision’. She hides herself in the tree of knowledge (Greek gnôsis, from which the term ‘Gnostic’ is derived; in this translation rendered as ‘acquaintance’), and leaves a ‘likeness’ for ‘the authorities’ to defile. The Archons try to bully Adam into avoiding the tree and remaining in a state of ignorance: They said to him, “The fruit of all the trees created for you in Paradise shall be eaten; but as for the tree of acquaintance, control yourselves and do not eat from it. If you eat you will die.” Having imparted great fear to them they withdrew.180

This final extract, of course, is another instance of the same manoeuvre discussed above: a line from Scripture is inserted into the narrative in a context where it represents not the ineffable and majestic will of God, but a panicked attempt by a group of distinctly fallible ‘authorities’ to respond to a situation over which they are fast losing control. And the passage where the reader is shown the ‘authorities’ agreeing a cover story—itself, once again, familiar from Genesis181—because Adam ‘is not one of us’ stands comparison with anything from the world of conspiracy fiction. In view of these striking similarities in narrative technique between the Gnostic scriptures and the modern conspiracy tale, it will have come as no surprise to his regular readers when Prokhanov chose a line from the Gospel of Thomas—containing one of Nag Hammadi’s most explicit

180 On the Origin of the World, in The Nag Hammadi Library, op. cit., p. 184.

181 ‘And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept; and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof. And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man’—Gen. 2:21f.

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and blatant claims to esoteric knowledge—as epigraph to his 2005 novel The Political Analyst: If I tell you one of the things which he told me, you will pick up stones and throw them at me; a fire will come out of the stones and burn you up.182

Prokhanov identifies the line as a quotation the Gospel of Thomas, but does not credit a translator or an edition; in fact the version he has used is that of the eminent Coptic scholar Marianna Trofimova.183 § 47.

But this narrative also reveals a central plank of the worldview contained in many of the Nag Hammadi documents.

Where Christian orthodoxy presents the universe—and humanity—as the purposive creation of a God endowed with omniscience, omnipotence, eternity, perfect goodness, and other such attributes, On the Origin of the World ascribes the creation instead to the individual interests of the powerful but ignorant Yaldabaoth. Even Yaldabaoth’s heaven is a poor thing of matter compared to the radiance in which Faith and Wisdom have their being: Now the eternal realm (aeon) of truth has no shadow outside it, for the limitless light is everywhere within it. But its exterior is shadow, which has been called by the name darkness. From it there appeared a force, presiding over the darkness […] Like a shadow it came into existence in a vast watery substance […] And when Pistis Sophia desired to cause the thing that had no spirit to be formed into a likeness and to rule over matter and over all of her forces, there appeared for the first time a ruler, out of the waters, lionlike in appearance, androgynous, having great authority within him, and ignorant of whence he had come into being. Now when Pistis Sophia saw him moving about in the depths of the waters she said to him, “Child, pass through

182 Aleksandr Prokhanov: Politolog, op. cit., p. 5; English translation quoted from The Gospel of Thomas, op. cit., p. 128.

183 See Evangelie ot Fomy (tr. M. K. Trofimova), in Apokrify drevnikh khristian. Issledovanie, teksty, kommentarii (ed. A. F. Okulov), Moscow: Mysl', 1989, p. 251. Prokhanov uses Trofimova’s version verbatim except for two minor changes involving words not present in the Coptic that the translator inserts in parentheses to aid comprehension (in one instance he drops the parentheses, in the other he drops the word).

94

ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM to here,” whose equivalent is “yalda baōth.”184 […] And because of that voice, he called himself Yaldabaoth. [… I]t was only himself that he saw: he saw nothing else, except for water and darkness […] And from matter he made himself an abode, and he called it heaven. And from matter, the ruler made a footstool, and he called it earth.185

The Gnostic worldview thus sees physical creation as something debased, the product of a flawed and blind creator. It is customary to refer to this sub-divine creator as the Demiurge (Greek dēmiourgós ‘workman’), a term whose origin in the sense of ‘creator’ is Platonic; for Gnosticism is a Platonic heresy as well as a JudaeoChristian one, and attracted condemnation from the neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus186 as readily as it did from the Fathers of the Church. Against this intrinsically vile created world, the Gnostics set the spiritual realm of light: the two are radically distinct, and it is only through some cosmic accident that fragments of light have become ‘imprisoned’ in Yaldabaoth’s universe. ‘God’, in so far as the term retains any meaning, is unspeakably perfect and remote, although something can be known of his emanations (wisdom, life, and so forth); while the creator-God of the canonical Scriptures, and especially of the Hebrew Bible, is read as the Demiurge. Gnosticism is thus a radical example of cosmological dualism: good and evil, or light and darkness, or spirit and matter, or truth and falsehood, are seen as two distinct and irreconcilable principles. Dualism, however, occurs relatively frequently in many accounts of the origins of the universe;187 it is not unknown even in Russian and other Slavonic folk cosmologies: The myth follows the well-known schema: on the primordial sea, God recognizes Satan and orders him to dive to the bottom of the waters and bring back to him some mud in order to create the Earth […] A characteristic of 184 This etymology clearly recalls Semitic languages (Syriac yaldā ‘child’; perhaps also Hebrew bâ ‘come’, imperative bô), but is most unlikely to be the real source of the name.

185 On the Origin of the World, in The Nag Hammadi Library in English, op. cit., pp. 172f.

186 See Plotinus: Enneads II.9 ‘Against the Gnostics; or Against Those that Affirm the Creator of the Cosmos and the Cosmos Itself to be Evil’, in The Enneads (tr. Stephen MacKenna, rev. B. S. Page), London: Faber and Faber, 1956, pp. 132–152.

187 A historical survey of cosmological dualism is available in Yuri Stoyanov: The Other God. Dualist Religions from Antiquity to the Cathar Heresy, New Haven, Connecticut and London: Yale University Press, 2000.

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the Russian versions is the appearance of the Devil, and in certain cases of God, in the form of the aquatic bird […] Compared with the central Asiatic variants of the same cosmogonic myth, the Slavic and southeastern European versions accentuate the God-Satan dualism.188

Perhaps the best-known dualistic faith is Zoroastrianism, state religion of Persia until the Islamic conquest and still practised by minorities in Iran and in India; and Persian religious conceptions exerted a profound influence on the thought of Mani, a Mesopotamian prophet of the third century CE whose teaching—known to Mani’s followers as the Religion of Light, and to others as Manichaeism—gained adherents everywhere from Roman Africa (including, for a time, Augustine of Hippo) to Sogdiana, Tibet, and China.

It is probable that by the sixth century the force of [its] impetus was spent […] But the alarm that it had caused was proved by the horror with which the word “Manichaean” came to be regarded. In future the average orthodox Christian, when faced with any sign of dualism, would cry out “Manichaean”, and everyone would know that here was rank heresy, and the authorities be seriously disquieted and take action. Ideas that were Gnostic or Marcionite or crudely Zoroastrian were swept up into this all-embracing epithet.189

It is by a half-remembered survival of this usage that the word ‘Manichaean’ is applied even now to denote a narrow-minded insistence on viewing the world in terms of black and white, ‘us’ and ‘them’; which by implication does something of an injustice to Mani, who among the religious founders is notable by his acceptance that predecessors as diverse as Abraham, Jesus Christ, Gautama Buddha, Plato, and the prophet Zarathushtra or Zoroaster had all received authentic revelations and qualified as true messengers of the light. § 48.

Where the dualism of the Nag Hammadi documents differs from that, say, of the folk myth in which God and Satan are two 188 Mircea Eliade: A History of Religious Ideas (3 vols; vols 1–2 tr. William R. Trask; vol. 3 tr. Alf Hiltebeitel and Diane Apostolos-Cappadona), Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988, vol. 3, p. 35.

189 Steven Runciman: The Medieval Manichee. A Study of the Christian Dualist Heresy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 17.

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ducks on the primordial waters is in the particular inflection it gives to the duality of light and darkness: the world is less a field of struggle between good and evil, or an indifferent space in which both principles exist, than a domain of evil in which a few particles of good have become trapped. Emissaries from the light only enter the Demiurge’s creation in disguise, on secret missions of which that of the serpent and of the spiritual Eve is one. Another Nag Hammadi text, Trimorphic Protennoia (‘first thought in three forms’), gives a first-person account of a still more dramatic such incursion into the world of Yaldabaoth, called here the ‘Archigenetor’ or arch-begetter (Greek archigenétōr): <The Archons> thought <that I> was their Christ. […] I am their beloved, <for> in that place I clothed myself <as> the Son of the Archigenetor, and I was like him until the end of his decree, which is the ignorance of Chaos.

And among the Angels I revealed myself in their likeness, and among the Powers as if I were one of them, but among the Sons of Man as if I were a Son of Man, even though I am Father of everyone.

I hid myself within them all until I revealed myself among my members, which are mine, and I taught them about the ineffable ordinances, and (about) the brethren. But they are inexpressible to every Sovereignty and every ruling Power except to the Sons of the Light alone […] He who possesses the Five Seals of these particular names has stripped off <the> garments of ignorance and put on a shining Light. And nothing will appear to him that belongs to the Powers of the Archons. Within those of this sort darkness will dissolve and <ignorance> will die.190

(Readers will once again be struck by the close analogy between this reversal—Christ as an undercover operative, pretending to be the creator’s son in order to escape detection—and any number of fictional or sincere ‘conspiracy theories’.) The aim of such incursions, as with that of the serpent, is to bring knowledge (gnôsis) of the real state of affairs to the souls held ‘in the prisons of the modelled forms’, so that these trapped elements of the divine light can learn how to escape from the Demiurge’s creation. A similar vision is to be found in the thinking of Isaac Luria Ashkenazi (1534–1572), founder of an important branch of the Kabbalah. In Luria’s thought,

190 Trimorphic Protennoia (tr. John D. Turner), in The Nag Hammadi Library in English, op. cit., pp. 521f.

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the deity—the En Soph or ‘boundlessness’—has experienced a catastrophe known as ‘the breaking of the vessels’, as a result of which sparks of the divine light have become mingled with the qelippoth (‘husks’, ‘shells’). In the words of the historian of the Kabbalah, Gershom Scholem, The breaking of the vessels was thus an event that took place within the Deity itself. Its repercussions are manifest in every single detail of Lurianic cosmology. But for the breaking of the vessels, everything would have occupied its rightful and appointed place. Now everything is out of joint. […] In fact, since the breaking of the vessels, exile is the fundamental and exclusive— albeit hidden—mode of all existence. […] Redemptive restitution (tiqqun) therefore involves two things: the gathering of the divine sparks that had fallen, together with the fragments of the broken vessels, into the realm of qelippoth, as well as the ingathering of the holy souls imprisoned in the “shells” […] Both processes of tiqqun are subsumed under the symbol of the “raising of the sparks.”191

Nathan of Gaza, a brilliant and heterodox Lurianist who became the foremost theoretician of the movement associated with the selfproclaimed messiah Sabbatai Tzvi, extended these ideas in his elaboration of the messiah’s esoteric significance. According to Scholem’s summary of one of Nathan’s tracts (a ‘vision’ attributed to a certain Rabbi Abraham), The redeemer will not appear at the head of an army to fight the messianic war; he will come “without hands” and without military strength. His real war will be against the demonic powers of the qelippah, and it will be waged essentially on the “inner,” spiritual levels of the cosmos, although it might eventually manifest itself on the material level as well. The messiah struggles in the depths of his soul to extract the sparks of the divine light from the embrace of the qelippoth. Hence also the mystery of his suffering. He will subdue Pharaoh, the great dragon; but he is also himself the true Pharaoh and the “holy serpent.” He is locked in combat with the very principle that is his own metaphysical source, subduing it, but at times also subdued by it and falling into its bottomless abyss. His ultimate messianic task consists, apparently, not merely in the defeat and annihilation of the power of evil, but in raising it up to the sphere of holiness, that is, in the tiqqun of the qelippah.192

191 Gershom Scholem: Sabbatai Ṣevi. The Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676 (tr. R. J. Zwi Werblowsky), Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989, pp. 34, 40.

192 Ibid., p. 227.

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What is most fundamental in the Lurianic Kabbalah—including Nathan’s version—is less any cosmological dualism in the straightforward sense than this notion of the ‘divine sparks’ embedded, exiled, in a false world from which it is the true purpose of religious, mystical, and messianic activity to emancipate them. § 49.

Esotericism as an epistemological stance thus correlates not with cosmological dualism per se, but with the specific sense of entrapment in a world that is felt to be radically spurious. The connection on the basis of internal logic is an obvious one: if the public, exoteric version of events is essentially unsound, it is a small step to hypothesize the existence of some force or power sustaining it in each instance. And it is understandable that this power should tend to grow and become coherent in the imagination; even so firm a monotheist as Isaac Luria pictured a ‘Satanic Anti-Adam, who corresponds, on the evil side, to the Primordial Adam of the holy sphere’ 193 (compare the ‘Adam of Light’ in On the Origin of the World), and the theorists of classical Gnosticism did not hesitate to present the God of the Hebrew Bible as identical with Yaldabaoth.

The same motivation drives ‘conspiracy theorists’ to postulate ever more global and ever more all-encompassing conspiracies in which the nefarious ‘authorities’—to use a Nag Hammadi term—represented by the CIA, the Jews, the freemasons, or the television proprietors come to resemble the Demiurge and Archons of the Gnostic scriptures in their power over this world. The conspirators’ power always reaches beyond the specific crime to embrace the cover-up, whereby an exoteric veil is drawn over the hidden truth of the event concerned. Ultimately the Demiurgic or Archontic forces in question become all but omnipotent, their power only restricted by the fact that a marginalized minority of ‘conspiracy theorists’ (or sparks of light) is able to uphold the truth. Nothing can be admitted to be coincidence; the ‘authorities’ stand behind every event, however trivial and however apparently opposed to their own interests. It is thus no surprise that authors of conspiracy fictions should more

193 Ibid., p. 39.

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than once have turned to the traditions of Gnostic and esoteric religious thought for their plots. (The Da Vinci Code is once again a relevant example, although Philip K. Dick has made much more perceptive and sympathetic use of Gnostic material in his novel Valis and elsewhere.194) In the case of Prokhanov, however, the investigator is confronted less by a novelist appropriating Gnosticism’s ready-made structure of conspiracies, secrets, and undercover operations—though he has referred to ‘the voice of the World Demiurge’ [golos Mirovogo Demiurga]195—than by a parallel development in which the essential conjunction of esotericism on the epistemological level with a sense that the world is dominated by lies and deception and with a search for the occult power responsible for this endemic falsehood arose from years of sustained ideological work among the pamphlets, tracts, journals, and newspapers of Russian red-brown patriotism. § 50.

The correlation established between epistemological esotericism and a particular inflection of dualism does not, of course, prove that the development occurs in that direction: the internal logic is equally valid if the movement is from cosmology to epistemology. The question that drove the Gnostic writers to dualism, and thence onward to esotericism, has long been recognized: The common foundation of Gnostic doctrines is a problem of morality, that of the origin of evil (where does evil come from?), raised to a problem of cosmology.196

The problem of evil, or theodicy, has been a major concern both of rigorous theology and of popular devotion in monotheism and beyond; and dualism has frequently been invoked as a solution. One writer has felt able to dismiss the dualist position as ‘the Oriental solution that evil is due to matter, the creation of an evil god’.197 194 Philip K. Dick: Valis, London: Gollancz, 2001.

195 Aleksandr Prokhanov: Teplokhod «Iosif Brodskii», Ekaterinburg: Ul'tra.Kul'tura, 2006, p. 119.

196 Guido de Ruggiero: Storia della Filosofia (3 vols), Bari: Gius. Laterza & Figli, 1950, vol. 1, p. 183.

197 W. A. de Burgh: The Legacy of the Ancient World, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967, p. 338.

100 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM There is, of course, no rational sense in which dualism—which is found, in various forms, around the world—is ‘Oriental’; the specific variant of cosmological dualism discussed in the previous chapter, however, does owe much of its distinctiveness to its location within a particular religious and philosophical tradition. It is against a backdrop of monotheism that advocacy of a dualist explanation for evil—good comes from one source, evil from another— begins to involve the believer in contradictions. The folk dualism of the two diving ducks, while it may be expressed in a partially Christianized language, must—especially in the light of similar myths’ currency in Central Asia—be regarded as pre-Christian in origin and as not having experienced substantial redaction under the influence of Christian speculative thought. And the Mazdaean opposition between the forces of light and darkness, truth and falsehood, has not led to any widespread conviction either that Angra Mainyu (Ahriman) is the creator of the universe or, indeed, that important truths are hidden and accessible only to a few in whom there is some of the light. But the monotheist driven to posit an evil principle in the universe is thrown onto difficult ground; and the same is true of the neo-Platonist who holds, with Plotinus, that [W]e must therefore take the Unity as infinite not in measureless extension or numerable quantity but in fathomless depths of power.

Think of The One as Mind or as God, you think too meanly; use all the resources of understanding to conceive this Unity and, again, it is more authentically one than God, even though you reach for God’s unity beyond the unity the most perfect you can conceive […] The good of its being can be no borrowing: This is The Good […] This is base to all, cause of universal existence and of ordered station […] This Principle is not, therefore, to be identified with the good of which it is the source; it is good in the unique mode of being The Good above all that is good.198

Rather than jettisoning this vision of the perfect, both Gnosticism and the Lurianic Kabbalah remove it to a great distance and interpose vast tracts of fallen being between the Godhead and the world.

God’s goodness is thus preserved, while an account of the origins

198 Plotinus: Enneads VI.9 ‘On The Good, or The One’, in The Enneads, op. cit., pp.

619f.

NOTHING IS WHAT IT SEEMS 101 of evil—Yaldabaoth, or the Archons, or the qelippoth—is now forthcoming. It is therefore unsurprising that evil should come to be felt as a trap, a realm of matter and falsehood in which the spark of the divine light (that is to say, the believing Gnostic) is ‘imprisoned’, far from the sight of the loving God. § 51.

Evil is thus explained (or explained away) by reference to the manipulations of evil and anti-Divine forces; and the very same manipulations are adduced to explain why these forces’ true nature is hidden. What is hidden, it should be noted, is not necessarily the forces’ existence as such: the ‘conspiracy theorist’ will frequently point to a real and exoterically benign power (the CIA, the Papacy, the United Nations, the Russian security forces, the television networks) as the visible manifestation of the occult forces whose fake world order we all inhabit—not, of course, assuming that the esotericists are always mistaken in disputing such bodies’ good will.

And it is the creator God of monotheism who himself appears as a front behind which there lurks the blind and greedy Yaldabaoth.

The sectaries are thus constituted as a group through their claim to be uniquely in possession of this hidden truth about the nature of the world. Gnosticism represents a clear instance of this process: even its enemies’ choice of ‘Gnostic’ (from gnôsis; the term ‘Gnostic’ is not found in the Nag Hammadi literature) as a label indicates the centrality of this claim, and the one Gnostic sect that has survived from antiquity into the present day—that of the Mandaeans of Khuzestan and southern Iraq, whose forebears influenced the young Mani199—takes its name (Mandāyē) from the equivalent Mandaic word mandā ‘knowledge, gnosis’.200 But the same process can also be observed operating indirectly, especially when the esoteric project is brought down from the multiplied sub-heavens of Nag Hammadi. The classical Gnostics divided humanity into two chief categories, those in whom a fragment of the upper light was encased—and who could therefore aspire to enter the third category,

199 Geo Widengren [Videngren]: Mani i manikheistvo (tr. S. V. Ivanov), St Petersburg: Evraziia, 2001, pp. 30–39, 46.

200 Ibid., p. 31.

102 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM that of the initiates themselves—and those who were purely material.201 But if the theodicy is aimed less at explaining the existence of evil in the universe as a whole, and more at accounting for specific wrongs suffered here and now, then the construction of Demiurge and Archons can take place on a plane other than the strictly cosmological. ‘The authorities’ can be human. During the European witch-craze, each piece of individual misfortune was explained as the result of diabolical pacts concluded between Satan and what some have seen as a misunderstood pagan nature-religion with its origins in the Iron Age, but Norman Cohn convincingly argues was a purely invented heresy described in stock terms borrowed in part from the standard literature on how heretics were expected to behave.202 Sceptics at the time noted the undue power this seemed to give Satan over what was notionally God’s creation; and at least one writer against the ‘witch-moongers’, Reginald Scot, was sufficiently astute to point out—at the beginning of his 1584 Discoverie of Witchcraft—the similarity between the witch-hunters’ beliefs and those of Christian dualism: The Martionists acknowledged one God the authour of good things, and another the ordeiner of evill: but these make the divell a whole god, to create things of nothing, to knowe mens cogitations, and to doo that which God never did; as, to transubstantiate men into beasts, &c.203

The witch-hunters did not go so far as to formulate a cosmology or a cosmogony, which would have forced them to renounce or to make explicit the dualistic theodicy implied in their allegations; but the power they allotted to Satan and to his minions left conventional monotheism far behind. What is most interesting for the present purpose, however, is the way this version of esotericism

201 The purely material were known as hylics, from húlē ‘matter’; those in whom there was some light as psychics, from psuchḗ ‘soul’; and the elect as pneumatics, from pneûma ‘spirit’. See Steven Runciman: The Medieval Manichee, op. cit., p. 9.

202 Norman Cohn: Europe’s Inner Demons. An enquiry inspired by the great witch-hunt, London: Paladin, 1975.

203 Reginald Scot: The Discoverie of Witchcraft, New York: Dover, 1972, p. 2. ‘Martionists’ here = Marcionists, followers of the second-century dualist theologian Marcion of Sinope (whose thinking Scot may vulgarize somewhat).

NOTHING IS WHAT IT SEEMS 103 changes the emphasis while retaining the same basic logic. The primary division within humanity is now that between the honest, potentially deceived majority, and the hidden adherents of a nightmarishly powerful cult. The accent moves from a claim to possess secret knowledge to an attempt to unmask the secret knowledge of the ‘witches’: esotericism is thus still present but partially deflected, with the assertion that the ‘witch-moonger’ knows the truth about the world complemented (not replaced) by a frantic belief in the occult knowledge and veiled powers attributed to ‘the authorities’.

Such esotericism does not set out to found sects—it imagines them all around it. What constitutes the ‘witch-moongers’ as a distinct group is, as with classical Gnosticism, the claim that they alone know how ‘the authorities’ operate: but the articulation here is more complex, the emergence of a group of initiates apparently a by-product of the drive to identify a pre-existing sect of initiates of darkness. § 52.

This pattern is followed closely by several of today’s ‘conspiracy theories’, of which the most notorious is perhaps the antisemitic assertion that there is a ‘Jewish world conspiracy’. Antisemites, like ‘witch-moongers’, seek to blame perceived evils on the supposed machinations of ‘the Jews’; and early (nineteenth-century) manifestations of modern antisemitism did not shrink from alleging contact with Satan in person.204 This comparison, of course, bears out the observation that ‘[p]olitical antisemitism had extremely little to do with the Jews as such’. 205 If such allegations could be presented against ‘witches’—a group that the best evidence suggests never existed at all—and could lead to a fearful wave of persecutions directed against alleged members of that alleged group, then any attempt to explain European antisemitism on the basis of things individual Jews or groups of Jews may have done is likely to prove fruitless. Antisemitism frequently draws on claims

204 See Norman Cohn: Warrant for Genocide. The myth of the Jewish world conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, London: Serif, 1996.

205 James Parkes: An Enemy of the People: Antisemitism, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1945, p. 10.

104 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM originating in the popular or religious Judaeophobia of the European Middle Ages and even late antiquity, but at its base the claim of a ‘world conspiracy’ is an instance of the internal logic of negative esotericism expressed in more purely non-theistic terms: the occult force maintained to underlie world events is no longer the Demiurge or Devil, served by earthly minions, but a sinister association made up of those minions themselves. There are moments, indeed, at which Prokhanov seems to lurch close even to the cruder, ‘world conspiracy’ plus overt Demiurge mode of anti-Semitism. In the 2006 novel The Steamboat Joseph Brodsky, US Ambassador Kershbow206 threatens the Russian presidential chief of staff with the fate that has befallen other enemies (or unreliable friends) of America: Kershbow looked at Esaul attentively, tenderly, as though he liked what he saw. He looked at him the way an entomologist looks at an emerald beetle just before piercing its metal back with a sharpened pin and transferring it to a glass case. The collection of America’s deposed enemies was already adorned with beetles of many colours: spotted reds, gunmetal blues, fiery yellows. Milošević, once proud and insubordinate; Saddam Hussein, deposed; Noriega, intractable and power-hungry. Everyone who had fought, threatened an uprising, burnt American flags, and then grown weak and given in—they were all included in the collection. Under the freezing look from those green, watery-sunny eyes, Esaul experienced cosmic horror. He felt as though the worlds had been pulled apart and a sharpened blade had poked through, piercing his shoulderblades with blue steel; he was writhing on the needle like a transfixed beetle, helplessly waving his tiny legs in the air. And someone enormous and attentive was looking at him from the skies, with the green eyes of a Hebrew.207

Such moments recur in Prokhanov’s writing, but they are rarely integral either to a novel or to a Zavtra article: his frequent antisemitic remarks are more usually either casual or else presented through the medium of what might best be called jokes about antisemitism.

206 I write ‘Kershbow’, with an E, for Prokhanov’s Kirshbou because the character’s name refers to Alexander Vershbow, United States ambassador to Russia 2001– 2005, who was always called Virshbou in Russian.

207 Aleksandr Prokhanov: Teplokhod «Iosif Brodskii», op. cit., p. 17. ‘Hebrew’ here translates iudei, cognate with English ‘Jew’, which is the correct word for a religious Jew, someone who practises Judaism (and also for ‘Judaean’, in a historical context); compare the usual word evrei, cognate with English ‘Hebrew’ and meaning a Jew (by heritage). Iudei is thus not uniformly a term of abuse, but is nonetheless still sometimes employed with derogatory connotations.

NOTHING IS WHAT IT SEEMS 105 Thus, Oleg Shchukin will write a Zavtra piece against the Kyoto climate change protocol under the title ‘The Protocol of the Elders of Kyoto’.208 Or Prokhanov, again in The Steamboat Joseph Brodsky, will have one of his characters remark à propos of the luxury vessel on which most of the action takes place that If a boat like this one had been built in Germany in 1937 they’d have called it the Adolf Hitler. But now, in this blessed time, we have given it the name of the Joseph Brodsky, in honour of that great cosmopolitan, who rejected empire in all his works.209

Brodsky, who spent much of his life in American exile and who published poetry in English as well as Russian, might fairly be called a ‘cosmopolitan’; but here, as often, the word is consciously used as a synonym for ‘Jew’. Often, the existence of a Jewish world conspiracy is taken for granted, without being central to the argument or the plot. In A Golden Time, a character modelled on Aleksei Naval'nyi boasts that he has tricked the Jewish power into endorsing him: World Jewry, which follows developments in Russia and participates in them directly, seems to be ready to bet on me [...] Jewish world energy is once again ready to feed a Russian revolution. But it will again be making a mistake.210

The predominant impression from Prokhanov’s writing is not so much that he is obsessed with Jews or with a Jewish world conspiracy: it is more that he enjoys antisemitism, and expects his readers to enjoy it too. § 53.

A good example of how Russian esotericists have imagined the ‘voice of the World Demiurge’ is the notorious ‘Dulles memo’ or ‘Dulles doctrine’, quoted here from Autocracy of the Spirit (1996), a posthumously-published book by Metropolitan Ioann of St Petersburg and Ladoga. Ioann had been close to red-brown patriotism in the last years of his life and ministry, and had written frequently 208 Oleg Shchukin: ‘Protokol kiotskikh mudretsov’, in Zavtra 41 (568) for Oct. 2004, p. 2.

209 Aleksandr Prokhanov: Teplokhod «Iosif Brodskii», op. cit., p. 80.

210 Aleksandr Prokhanov: Vremya zolotoe, op. cit., chap. 8 [Мировое еврейство, которое].

106 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM for the CPRF-aligned newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya. The ‘Dulles’ document has enjoyed a wide circulation, even passing from hand to hand in leaflet form, and textual variations exist; but this version is typical. It purports to be a 1945 memo from Allen W. Dulles, the future Director of Central Intelligence, in which he sets out the CIA’s strategy for the impending cold war against the USSR. Parts of the wording, in fact, have been traced to speeches by a villain in a Soviet novel from the 1970s, Anatolii Ivanov’s The Eternal Call.211 Even without that information, though, readers may struggle to see how anyone could have accepted Dulles’s authorship as at all plausible: We shall sow chaos in Russia, and then, unnoticed, we shall replace their values with false ones and make them believe in these false values. How? We shall find ourselves collaborators, allies, and helpers inside Russia itself.

The tragedy will play out, episode by episode, and on a grand scale—the tragedy of the death of the most insubordinate people on earth, the final extinction of its self-awareness.212

The government of the United States will, of course, have had its strategies aimed at weakening its counterpart in the USSR; and until the files are opened at Langley, Virginia we would be unwise to claim total certainty as to what such strategies might have involved.

But it seems implausible that Allen Dulles should have explicitly described the aim of US propaganda as being to instill false values, or that he should have looked ahead to the collapse of the Soviet Union as a ‘tragedy on a grand scale’ involving the destruction of a highly admirable people. Neither would he necessarily have written that [l]iterature, the theatre, and the cinema will all depict and glorify the very basest human feelings. We shall do all we can to support and promote those so-called artists who propagate and who force into people’s consciousness

211 Nikolai Sakva: ‘O dolgovremennykh politicheskikh planakh’, http://sakva.ru/ Nick/DullPlan.html (accessed 25 September 2022).

212 ‘Allen W. Dulles’, quoted in Ioann (Snychev) mitropolit Sankt-Peterburgskii i Ladozhskii: Samoderzhavie dukha. Ocherki russkogo samosoznaniya, Moscow: Institut russkoi tsivilizatsii, 2007, p. 478. ‘People’ here is to be read as a collective noun (‘the Soviet people’), rather than as the plural of ‘person’.

NOTHING IS WHAT IT SEEMS 107 the cult of sex, violence, sadism, and treachery—in a word, immorality of all kinds.213

Read as an attempt at the voice of Allen W. Dulles, the document risks seeming preposterous; as the ‘voice of the World Demiurge’, however, it acquires an unintended pathos. To realize the depth of frustration and dismay experienced by the marginalized post-Soviet conservative, just imagine a frame of mind in which you could take the ‘Allen W. Dulles doctrine’ as genuine. Here are the Archons scheming among themselves, just as we saw them in the Nag Hammadi documents; here they are, designing the inauthentic reality in which we now find ourselves trapped: And only a few, a very few, will guess or understand what is taking place.

We shall put such people in a helpless position: we shall make a laughingstock of them. We shall find a way to slander them and present them as the dregs of society.214

§ 54.

The factors impelling this kind of theodicy are not far to seek. From the perspective of former Soviet citizens blindsided by the post-1991 economic crash, the problem of perestroika closely resembles the theological ‘problem of evil’. Those who mourn the loss of the Soviet system are predisposed to regard that system as the good society, now lost; to take a highly favourable stance toward the Communist Party and Soviet institutions; and to view the USSR’s collapse as a catastrophe. But, as we saw briefly in §18 above, the catastrophe was troublingly self-inflicted. There need be no shame in defeat. Steven Runciman writes of the Greeks, even long after the fall of Constantinople, that they remembered the threnes that had been composed when news came that the city had fallen, punished by God for its luxury, its pride and its apostasy, but fighting a heroic battle to the end. They remembered that dreadful Tuesday, a day that all true Greeks still know to be of ill omen; but their spirits tingled and their courage rose as they told of the last Christian Emperor standing in the breach, abandoned by his Western allies, holding the infidel

213 Ibid.

214 Ibid., p. 479.

108 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM at bay till their numbers overpowered him and he died, with the Empire as his winding-sheet.215

Neither are Greeks the only ones who have remembered: even the present leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (§30 above) is proud to claim the Second Rome as a forerunner. Perhaps it would have been different, if the last of the Palaeologi had survived the siege and gone on to appear in an advertisement for an Ottoman pizza chain.216 The policies that had led to the USSR’s disintegration had been spearheaded by its duly elected leader, ratified by overwhelming majorities at the Twenty-Seventh (February–March 1986) and Twenty-Eighth (July 1990) Congresses of the ruling party, and endorsed by a USSR Congress of People’s Deputies in which the overwhelming majority of deputies were (at least nominal) Communist Party members. The best the opponents of perestroika and glasnost' could muster was the unsteady three days’ rule of the GKChP; and the only serious resistance, that of the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies in 1993, was mounted by a body that had originally backed Yeltsin and whose leaders had stood with him in 1991. In 1917, some Russian monarchists had desperately tried to understand the ‘apocalypse’ of the October Revolution.217 After 1918, some Germans opposed to the democratic Republic—including, but not limited to, future members of the National Socialist Party—sought to blame defeat in the First World War on a ‘Stab in the Back’ by ‘Socialist agitators, Jews, profiteers, and democratic politicians’ 218 rather than on their beloved army.

But the collapse of the Soviet Union was harder to accept than either. The government was overthrown, with no revolutionaries; stripped of its territories, with no victorious Allies. The monotheist bewildered by how ‘bad things can happen to good people’ asks 215 Steven Runciman: The Fall of Constantinople. 1453, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969, pp. 190f.

216 ‘Gorbachev’s pitch for pizza released’, CNN, 23 December 1997 http://edi tion.cnn.com/WORLD/9712/23/gorby.pizza/ (accessed 27 September 2022).

The report observes that ‘Sergei Tatosyan, the manager of the Moscow eatery where the ad was filmed, said it will not be shown in Russia, where Gorbachev is still widely disliked and blamed for the 1991 Soviet downfall.’

217 See, e.g., Vasilii Rozanov: Apokalipsis nashego vremeni, Moscow: Zakharov, 2001.

218 Alan Bullock: Hitler. A Study in Tyranny, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971, p. 55.

NOTHING IS WHAT IT SEEMS 109 how a benevolent deity can permit the existence of evil: the Soviet patriot after 1991 asks how a benevolent Politburo can permit the USSR to collapse. The Gnostic or ‘witch-moonger’ concludes that there must be dark forces at work in the world, together with powerful agencies devoted to keeping their existence a secret: and the red-brown patriot comes to precisely the same conclusion. And the stock situation in which the heroes of Prokhanov’s novels find themselves—trapped in the Bedlam or Babylon that is post-Soviet Moscow, suspicious of everything they are told (but not always suspicious enough), looking for ways they can still serve the Stalinist and imperial dream in a world where nothing is what it seems— vividly encapsulates the state of mind of the seeker after esoteric knowledge, embedded in the Demiurge’s creation.

V Old World Symphony § 55.

The prophets of Eurasianism219 have, belatedly, found honour in their own country. Obscure pamphlets brought out in the 1920s in the emigration are now gathered into anthologies, issued in generous print-runs, and popularized through the periodical press (not least, through Zavtra). Public debates are studded with the hitherto recherché terminology of Eurasian political economy and Eurasian cultural geography, with or without the modifications introduced by the geographer and historian Lev Gumilev— who seems, to say the least, to have been unduly pessimistic in dubbing himself ‘the last Eurasian’. 220 Nikolai Trubetzkoy is more widely and enthusiastically cited as the author of Europe and Humanity221 than as the author of Principles of Phonology. It all amounts to an extraordinary change in the fortunes of a movement, launched in 1921 among Russian émigrés and never more than a minority interest even within the emigration, that had dissolved in factional squabbles in 1928—although certain individuals had continued to publish material of a recognizably Eurasian character—and of which Otto Böss had been able in 1961 to write that

219 There is an extensive literature on the original émigré Eurasianism, much of which falls outside the purview of the present book. For an introduction to the movement as a whole, as well as to one of its most brilliant members, see G. S. Smith: D. S. Mirsky. A Russian–English Life, 1890–1939, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. An earlier study that retains some interest is Otto Böss: Die Lehre der Eurasier. Ein Beitrag zur russischen Ideengeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts, Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1961. A more political focus can be found in Marlène Laruelle: L’idéologie eurasiste russe ou comment penser l’empire, Paris and Montreal: L’Harmattan, 1999. There are, of course, many other books and articles dealing with specific facets of Eurasianism and its legacy.

220 For instance, in the title to his 1990 essay Lev Gumilev: Istoriko-filosofskie sochineniya knyazya N. S. Trubetskogo (zametki poslednego evraziitsa), printed posthumously in Nikolai Trubetzkoy: Istoriya. Kul'tura. Yazyk, Moscow: Progress– Univers, 1995, pp. 31–54.

221 Nikolai Trubetzkoy: Evropa i chelovechestvo, ibid., pp. 55–104.

111

112 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM [h]owever relevant many problems touched on by the Eurasians may seem in view of the present situation in the Soviet Union, and also quite generally, the doctrine itself has now become history.222

Böss’s remark, in fact, can today be precisely reversed: however irrelevant many specific questions dealt with by the Eurasians may now appear (attitude to the Bolsheviks, perspectives for the development of Soviet power, the reasons why the White Guard lost the Civil War), their doctrine itself has never shown greater vitality. § 56.

Before examining this Eurasian renaissance, and its relation to Prokhanovian esoteric patriotism, it is of course necessary to consider the nature and characteristics of the original, émigré Eurasianism. Such consideration can only be cursory—but even a cursory treatment cannot aspire here to any great brevity. The Eurasians presented their movement as a political one whose aims included the conquest of state power: The Eurasians must take it upon themselves to realize these ideas by forming a Eurasian Party to replace the Communist party in its organizing and governing role.223

But it is a pecularity of Eurasianism that its leaders (and there were few enough members besides) were all in fact intellectuals, and sometimes considerable scholars: Trubetzkoy was a linguist, Petr Savitskii was an economic geographer, Lev Karsavin a philosopher, Georgii Florovskii a theologian, D. S. Mirsky (Dmitrii SvyatopolkMirskii) a literary critic, Nikolai Alekseev a theorist of law, and Pierre Souvtchinsky a musicologist. It is no surprise that each member of this pléiade—to which other names could be added—should have brought to Eurasianism a distinct set of problems and interests. Alekseev can be found producing ‘Eurasian’ work on legal philosophy (as in his stimulating essay on federalism),224 Savitskii

222 Otto Böss: Die Lehre der Eurasier, op. cit., p. 124.

223 Evraziistvo (formulirovka 1927g.) III.1, in Rossiya mezhdu Evropoi i Aziei: Evraziiskii soblazn. Antologiya (ed. L. I. Novikova and I. N. Sizemskaya), Moscow: Nauka, 1993, p. 220.

224 Nikolai Alekseev: ‘Sovetskii federalizm’, in Mir Rossii—Evraziya. Antologiya, (ed. L. I. Novikova and I. N. Sizemskaya), Moscow: Vysshaya shkola, 1995, pp. 154–165.

OLD WORLD SYMPHONY 113 on geography and economics,225 and Trubetzkoy on the relationship between the Russian and Church Slavonic languages;226 and, while it is not necessarily to the Eurasians’ discredit that they should have pursued their individual intellectual concerns rather than submerging them in a formalized joint approach, the resultant diversity must tend to cast doubt on whether Trubetzkoy’s goal of ‘a unitary system of the sciences’ had in reality been attained: Thus instead of an encyclopaedia, i.e. an anarchic conglomeration of mutually incoherent ideas in the sciences, in philosophy, in politics, in aesthetics, etc., there must be created a firm and coherent system of ideas. And to this system of ideas there must also correspond a system of practical action.227

This, incidentally, is far from the only occasion on which the émigré Eurasians betray their envy of the universal ideology that they see as the Bolsheviks’ great strength. Savitskii writes that Even some of the leaders of the White armies, in themselves major personalities, fell into nonentity, since they were not borne aloft on the wings of any inspired historical idea; and, conversely, even nonentities were raised to the stature of major historical figures on the back of the Satanic, evil, but enormous idea of Communism […] Denikin, incidentally, was defeated because when it came to his intellectual horizons he was a provincial compared to the Bolsheviks.228

But the tendency towards eclecticism renders the Eurasian legacy not only a source on which widely varying modern ideologies can readily draw, but also a ground where it is frequently tempting to identify some epiphenomenon or tangent as the main point to which all else can then be reduced. This danger is only exacerbated in the case of the Eurasians by the oddity that the thinkers concerned should have chosen to name their movement after what was one of its least interesting and least original contentions. The view that Russia was neither ‘Europe’ nor ‘Asia’ had, after all, been a 225 See the works collected in Petr Savitskii: Kontinent Evraziya, Moscow: Agraf, 1997.

226 Nikolai Trubetzkoy: ‘Obshcheslavyanskii element v russkoi kul'ture’, in Istoriya.

Kul'tura. Yazyk, op. cit., pp. 162–207.

227 Nikolai Trubetzkoy: ‘K probleme russkogo samopoznaniya’, ibid., p. 109. Emphasis Trubetzkoy’s.

228 Petr Savitskii: ‘Poddanstvo idei’, in Mir Rossii—Evraziya, op. cit., pp. 67, 69.

114 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM given of nineteenth-century Slavophilism, and one that Petr Chaadaev had felt able to dismiss with an epigram a hundred years before Eurasianism: It is said that Russia belongs neither to Europe nor to Asia, that it is a world in its own right. Very well; but it remains to be proven that humanity, besides the two faces known by the designations ‘West’ and ‘East’, can possess any third face.229

It will thus be necessary to sketch émigré Eurasianism in its emergence and logical development over the 1920s—in spite of the Eurasians’ stated distaste for what they saw as the characteristically Western ‘wisdom of systems’. 230 The contradiction between this and Trubetzkoy’s words quoted above is revealing, and not atypical. § 57.

It goes without saying that Eurasianism took shape in response to a specific historical event. As Souvtchinsky writes in his essay ‘The strength of the weak’, published in 1921 in the first Eurasian collection, Exodus to the East, [t]his event is the Russian Revolution, but not in its social and political meaning and significance: in its national and metaphysical essence.231

The best starting-point, however, is with a book Trubetzkoy published in his Bulgarian period, before Eurasianism as such existed: Europe and Humanity. The word ‘and’ in the title should be read as ‘versus’: Trubetzkoy’s call is for Russia to maintain its own identity and heritage, rather than aping that of ‘Romano-Germanic’ Europe.

So much is familiar from the Slavophil and nativist writers of the then-recent past, in whose work the ‘Russia/Europe’ dichotomy assumes a defining importance; where Europe and Humanity breaks decisively with Slavophilism, however, is in the reasons its author gives. The thesis is no longer that Russian culture is any truer, any

229 Petr Chaadaev: Fragments et pensées diverses, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i izbrannye pis'ma (2 vols), Moscow: Nauka, 1991, vol. 1, p. 230.

230 Foreword (unsigned) to Iskhod k vostoku (ed. O. S. Shirokov), Moscow: Dobrosvet, 1997 [1921], p. 46.

231 Pierre Souvtchinsky: ‘Sila slabykh’, ibid., p. 58.

OLD WORLD SYMPHONY 115 better, or any more valuable than that of Western Europe. It is one of absolute cultural relativism: the lack of any generally acceptable yardstick by which human civilizations might be judged, Trubetzkoy argues, vitiates any attempted categorization of cultures into ‘more’ or ‘less’ advanced. The only rational conclusion is to ascribe equal value to them all, or else to refuse the exercise altogether as meaningless: People say to us, ‘Compare the mental baggage of an educated European with the mental baggage of some Bushman, Botocudo,232 or Vedda:233 isn’t it obvious that the former is superior to the latter?’ But we assert that this obviousness is only subjective [… D]ue to this diversity in the material of their mental life as between the ‘savage’ and the European, it must be acknowledged that their respective mental baggage cannot be compared, nor can the one be measured against the other. The question of one’s superiority over the other must therefore be considered insoluble.234

It is important to underline the radicalism of the surgery that is thus performed on the traditional Slavophilism: Europe and Humanity explicitly collapses the ‘Russia’ side of the opposition between ‘Russia’ and ‘Europe’, leaving ‘Europe’ as the sole claimant to a universal superiority whose logical basis is denied. Admittedly, the thoroughgoing nature of Trubetzkoy’s anti-Europeanism exists in a certain uneasy tension with the extravagantly ‘Western’ and scientistic manner of his exposition. The work is laced with diagrams and snippets of algebra,235 and is written in a Russian loaded with ‘Romano-Germanic’ borrowings: in the space of a short work the reader is confronted with apriornyi, assimilirovat'sya, orbis terrarum, kolliziya, fazis, petitio principi, vae victis, kvazi-, proetsirovat', kul'turtregerstvo (from Kulturträger), ex nihilo nihil fit, temperament, inventar', eklektizm, differentsirovannyi, ex abrupto, and instruktor.236 This is not to suggest that Trubetzkoy would have done better to 232 The Botocudos (Aimborés) formerly inhabited Espíritu Santo in Brazil; by Trubetzkoy’s time they had been forced into Minas Gerais by European colonists.

233 The Veddas (Wanniya-laeto) are descended from the earliest known inhabitants of Sri Lanka, where, however, they now constitute only a small minority of the population.

234 Nikolai Trubetzkoy: Evropa i chelovechestvo, op. cit., pp. 79f.

235 See, for instance, Nikolai Trubetzkoy: Evropa i chelovechestvo, op. cit., pp. 77f.

236 Ibid., pp. 57, 59, 60, 62, 66, 68, 69, 75, 78, 82, 84, 85, 88, 93, 96, 98, 100.

116 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM adopt an artificially purged and purified Russian, although many of these words can perfectly adequately be replaced with a native (or at least a Slavonic) term: prisposablivat'sya for assimilirovat'sya, stolknovenie for kolliziya, yakoby for kvazi-, nrav for temperament, uchitel' for instruktor, etc. But if with another author the preponderance of Westernisms might plausibly be accidental, Trubetzkoy’s sensitivity to the nuances of different etymological strata of the literary Russian vocabulary237 makes it impossible that this feature of his text is anything but conscious and deliberate. His technical terminology and his Latin tags are of a piece with the form he gives his work, that of a learned essay drawing on the then-modish sciences of psychology and ethnography—but this means assimilating the form of Europe and Humanity to the ‘mental baggage’ of the European intellectual, rather than to that of the Botocudo. Europe and Humanity persistently reads as if written for Europe, not for humanity. Trubetzkoy reluctantly acknowledges that non-Romano-Germanic peoples may need to borrow weapons for their resistance struggle from the arsenal of the enemy;238 but his style includes a tacit admission that this process will have far wider implications than a straightforward appropriation of European military technology. § 58.

This observation should not detract from the originality of Trubetzkoy’s conclusions. By positioning Russia not simply against Europe but alongside the peoples of the colonies and semi-colonial states, he moves from Slavophilism to lay the foundations for what Marlène Laruelle has dubbed ‘a Third Worldism before the term existed’ [un tiers-mondisme avant la lettre].239 It is noteworthy that Trubetzkoy’s dissolution of Slavophilism in ‘Third Worldism’ is almost exactly contemporary with Lenin’s elevation of anti-colonialism to a central place in the politics of Russian Marxism, a movement that had always been firmly ‘Westernizing’ and opposed to

237 See Nikolai Trubetzkoy: ‘Obshcheslavianskii element v russkoi kul'ture’, op. cit.

238 Nikolai Trubetzkoy: Evropa i chelovechestvo, op. cit., pp. 98, 101f.

239 Marlène Laruelle: L’idéologie eurasiste russe, op. cit., p. 205.

OLD WORLD SYMPHONY 117 any manifestation of Slavophilism or Russian particularism.240 The association between communists and ‘third world’ nationalists was to become such a familiar element of the world scene later in the twentieth century that it is important to remember it was something of a departure in 1919 to argue that the socialist revolution will not be solely, or chiefly, a struggle of the revolutionary proletarians in each country against their bourgeoisie—no, it will be a struggle of all the imperialist-oppressed colonies and countries, of all dependent countries, against international imperialism.241

Trubetzkoy was subsequently to acknowledge this common theme in Eurasianism and Bolshevism: Eurasianism also coincides with Bolshevism in its call for the liberation of the peoples of Asia and Africa, enslaved by the colonial powers.242

This breakdown in the traditional split between ‘Westernizers’ and ‘Slavophils’ should, of course, be seen against the dual backdrop both of the devastating European war of 1914–1918 and of the upsurge of nationalist sentiment and action in parts of the colonial and semi-colonial world: the Persian revolution of 1905–1911, the Young Turk and then Kemalist movements in the Ottoman Empire, the growth of Arabism and of the Indian National Congress, and the first stirrings of pan-Africanism. Despite Trubetzkoy’s assertion that he had been nursing the idea of Europe and Humanity for a decade before its publication,243 the work in its present form bears the imprint of its time both in its urgent questioning of Europe’s claim to serve as a model of civilization and in the sanguine prospects its 240 One of the distinguishing features of early Russian Marxism, as opposed to other strands of populist, socialist, and anarchist thinking, was its insistence that Russia could not rely on its indigenous peasant institutions to bypass capitalism, but must instead learn from the experience of Social Democratic parties in Western Europe. See V. I. Lenin: What the “Friends of the People” Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats. A Reply to Articles in Russkoye Bogatstvo Opposing the Marxists (tr. unsigned), Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1950.

241 V. I. Lenin: ‘Address to the Second All-Russia Congress of Communist Organisations of the Peoples of the East’ (tr. unsigned), in Selected Works (3 vols), Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975, vol. 3, p. 246.

242 Nikolai Trubetzkoy: ‘My i drugie’, in Istoriya. Kul'tura. Yazyk, op. cit., p. 355.

243 Nikolai Trubetzkoy: Evropa i chelovechestvo, op. cit., p. 55.

118 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM author sees for anti-colonial political action. Trubetzkoy closes his pamphlet with a call for unity of which any later Third Worldist or Tricontinentalist could approve: We must never for a moment lose sight of the real essence of the problem.

We must not be distracted by separate nationalism or by such partial solutions as Panslavism or any other Pan-ism. These only obscure the essence of the matter. We must always firmly remember that opposing Slavs to Germans or Turanians to Aryans244 does not yield any genuine solution to the problem, and that there is only one genuine opposition: that between the Romano-Germans and all other peoples of the world. Europe, and humanity.245

§ 59.

Readers could be forgiven for feeling a certain surprise that Trubetzkoy should have moved so rapidly—in the space of only a year—from this appeal to unity among all non-‘Western’ peoples to the adoption of Eurasianism, itself suspiciously close to a ‘Pan-ism’.

The manoeuvre, however, is not an inexplicable one. Given Trubetzkoy’s acceptance that different ‘civilizations’ (even if they cannot be rated against one another) are stable and distinct realities, he is driven to construct opposition to Romano-Germanism in terms of the reappropriation by each of an indigenous ‘civilizational’ heritage. ‘Separate nationalism’, in Trubetzkoy’s understanding, would refer rather to the perceived attempt by nationalists in some non-Western countries to detach themselves from ‘their’ civilization and adopt that of the Romano-Germans, thus reducing themselves—whether or not they succeeded in achieving and defending a narrowly political sovereignty—to nation-states within ‘Europe’. The ideologist of Kemalism, Ziya Gökalp, was urging his compatriots in the 1920s to ‘Belong to the Turkish nation, the Muslim religion and European civilization’.246 Trubetzkoy’s essay ‘On true and false nationalism’ sets forth a different goal: 244 ‘Turanians’: people speaking Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, or Uralic languages; ‘Aryans’: speakers of Indo-European languages. These terms were current at the time Trubetzkoy was writing, and should not be read as implying any racial theory. ‘Germans’ here translates germantsy, another linguistic term, referring to speakers of Germanic languages.

245 Ibid., p. 104.

246 Quoted in Maxime Rodinson: Islam and Capitalism (tr. Brian Pearce), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980, p. 127.

OLD WORLD SYMPHONY 119 The duty of any non-Romano-Germanic people consists firstly of overcoming any egocentrism of its own, and secondly of protecting itself against the lie of ‘universal human civilization’ and against the desire to be a ‘real European’ at all costs. This duty can be formulated in two aphorisms: ‘know thyself’, and ‘be thyself’.247

Europe and Humanity thus represents this ‘duty’ only in its merely negative side, as rejection of Romano-Germanic civilization; and the task Trubetzkoy puts forward, and which Eurasianism is an attempt to realize, is to ‘know’ Russia as a non-Romano-Germanic civilization. This formulation perhaps reflects the influence exerted on Trubetzkoy, Karsavin, and others by the philosophical movement in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russia associated with the name of Vladimir Solov'ev, who sought to develop Orthodox Christian theology in the twin light of mysticism and of the insights of German idealism, particularly those of F. W. J. von Schelling.248 If Russia is to be a free historical subject, it must first— through its Eurasian intelligentsia—attain ‘knowledge’ of itself.249 The Romano-Germanizing legacy of the Imperial period from Peter I onwards must therefore be abandoned, and Russia’s true selfhood sought in the historical experience of an earlier epoch. It had already been far from unknown in pre-Revolutionary intellectual circles to emphasize the part (not necessarily seen as a benign one) played in Russia’s cultural life by what were identified as ‘Eastern’ influences:250 but the Eurasians were the first to present these influences, and primarily those of the Mongol–Tatar period, 251 as the cornerstone of Russia’s historical identity. Where others had seen a ‘Tatar yoke’, the Eurasians saw a ‘pax mongolica’;252 where others had viewed the Mongol–Tatar rulers through the jaundiced eyes of 247 Nicolas Trubetzkoy: ‘Ob istinnom i lozhnom natsionalizme’, in Istoriya. Kul'tura.

Yazyk, op. cit., p. 115.

248 A sketch of Solov'ev’s ideas is available in Frederick Copleston: Philosophy in Russia, as vol. 10 of A History of Philosophy (11 vols), London and New York: Continuum, 2003, pp. 201–240.

249 See Nicolas Trubetzkoy: ‘K probleme russkogo samopoznaniya’, op. cit.

250 See Andrei Belyi: Peterburg, Moscow: Nauka, 1981, etc.

251 This period begins in 1240 with the fall of Kyiv to Batu Khan; it is traditionally taken as ending with the Battle of Kulikovo Field in 1380, although tribute was still paid to the Mongol–Tatar suzerains until 1476.

252 Petr Savitskii: ‘Step' i osedlost'’, in Mir Rossii—Evraziya, op. cit., p. 66.

120 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM the byliny (folk epics),253 Eurasian writers hailed them as the model of the Russian statesman; where others had mourned the Mongol invasion as a historical tragedy severing Old Russia from the European and Byzantine culture of which it had formed a part, Petr Savitskii and his colleagues celebrated it as a redemptive event in which ‘the Tatars purged and sanctified’254 a Russia that was already fast degenerating. (This version of Russia’s history was to become one central tenet in the slightly idiosyncratic recension of Eurasianism proposed by Lev Gumilev.255) ‘Russia,’ Savitskii declares, ‘is the heir to the Great Khans, the continuer of the cause of Chingis256 and Timur, the unifier of Asia’.257 § 60.

‘Eurasia’, then, is the name given to the geographical and cultural core of the Chingisid Empire, and in particular to that of the Golden Horde—a district of that Empire and then a successor state to it, comprising territories conquered for the Mongols by Chingis’s eldest son Juchi and by the latter’s sons Batu and Orda.

This origin explains the Horde’s alternative name, Juchi Ulus or ‘Juchi’s realm’; the word ulus (modern Mongolian uls, as in Mongol uls ‘Mongolia’), used by the Chingisids to refer to a large subdivision of their territory, becomes something of a catchword with the Eurasians, for whom it appears to possess the same resonance felt by many European empire-builders in the Latin word imperium. The Golden Horde consisted of Western Siberia, the north-western part of Central Asia, the Volga basin, Ukraine, and European Russia.

Following Timur’s conquests it broke up into separate khanates, of which Ivan IV invaded the most substantial in 1552–1556; the Khan-

253 Cf., e.g., Il'ya Muromets i Idolishche, in Byliny (ed. B. N. Putilov), Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel'. Leningradskoe otdelenie, 1986, pp. 69–73.

254 Petr Savitskii: ‘Step' i osedlost'’, op. cit., p. 61.

255 See, for instance, L. N. Gumilev: Ot Rusi k Rossii. Ocherki etnicheskoi istorii, Moscow: Ekopros, 1992.

256 This spelling reproduces the way the conqueror’s name is written in both Russian and modern Mongolian. If a time-honoured and traditional form is preferred, then it should be Gibbon’s ‘Zingis’ or Milton’s ‘Cambuscan’; there is no case for ‘Genghis’.

257 Petr Savitskii: ‘Step' i osedlost'’, loc. cit.

OLD WORLD SYMPHONY 121 ate of Siberia was annexed to Russia by the end of the century, leaving only Crimea as a Tatar state under Ottoman protection (‘Crim Tartary’) until 1783. Although the Golden Horde’s dynasts were descended from Chingis Khan, the main languages spoken were Turkic and few Mongolians ever settled in the region. The Eurasians interpret the history of Muscovy from the breakup of the Golden Horde to the accession of Peter I not as a restoration of the independence once enjoyed by Kyiv but simply as a shift of power within Eurasia from one ulus to another, the decline and eclipse of Sarai (the Golden Horde’s capital on the lower Volga) being matched by the rise of Moscow to a position of pre-eminence among the various principalities and petty khanates left behind after the disintegration of the Horde as a unitary state. It will be noted—and it was not lost on the Eurasians—that the territory of their ‘Eurasia’ corresponds closely to the ‘Heartland’ identified as early as 1904 by Sir Halford Mackinder, an eminent geographer and one of the founders of ‘geopolitics’.258 Mackinder defined the Eurasian landmass (the whole of Europe and the whole of Asia, rather than the ‘Eurasia’ of Eurasianism) as the ‘world island’, and argued that a Power that could control the ‘Heartland’—the central and northern portion of the ‘world island’, including Eastern Europe, Russia, Ukraine, and Central Asia—would be in a position to defend itself against any possible coalition of ‘peripheral’ powers, and would therefore enjoy unchallenged global domination. (Mackinder’s ideas influenced those of Karl Haushofer and, through him, those of some leading German Nazis; but there is no basis on which to accuse Mackinder, who was several times elected to Parliament in the Conservative and Unionist interest, of sympathy for fascism or Nazism.) ‘Eurasia’ as a cultural and political whole is seen, perhaps especially by Savitskii, as being at least potentially latent in the geography of the region (the steppe and forest belts of Asia and of Eastern Europe); and the achievement of the Mongol conquerors is that they were the first to realize this potential in practice by uni-

258 See Halford J. Mackinder: Democratic Ideals and Reality, New York: Norton, 1962.

122 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM fying ‘Eurasia’, hitherto divided into a multitude of separate communities of which Old Russia was just one, into a single empire. As he writes in the same essay, ‘Steppe and Settlement’, Doing this took a special feel for steppes, mountains, oases, and forests [...]

Let us say it directly: in the whole of world history the Western European feel for the sea is matched, as an equal even though as a polar opposite, only by the Mongolian feel for the continent. And the same spirit, the same feel for the continent, can be seen in the Russian ‘explorers’ and in the scale of Russia’s conquests and discoveries.259

Whatever might be the geographical and climatic factors inclined to favour the rise of a single ‘Eurasian’ state, Savitskii’s model cannot therefore be reduced to one of ‘geopolitical’ determinism. The geographical circumstances are seen as critical, but it still requires a particular cultural or national genius to realize the potential these circumstances offer: without Chingis Khan, the potential for Eurasia might have remained latent indefinitely. For Savitskii, any distinction between seagoing and continental (‘thalattocratic’ and ‘tellurocratic’) powers is mediated through culture and history rather than arising axiomatically from the data of geography. § 61.

Eurasianism thus presents the claim that the history of the Golden Horde and of pre-Petrine Muscovy forms a continuous development in which a distinctly ‘Eurasian’ culture and civilization are consolidated. This culture and this civilization are conceptualized in terms not of race but of what Trubetzkoy and Karsavin term a ‘symphonic personality’260—a community, that is, of many individuals and perhaps of many nations or nationalities that nonetheless possesses the same characteristics of integrality and uniqueness as does an individual personality, and that therefore falls within the scope of the science of ‘personology’ or ‘prosopology’.261 The ‘personal’ particularities of the ‘symphonic’ individual can then be

259 Petr Savitskii: ‘Step' i osedlost'’, op. cit., p. 60.

260 Nikolai Trubetzkoy: ‘K probleme russkogo samopoznaniya’, op. cit., p. 105.

261 See Lev Karsavin: O lichnosti, in Religiozno-filosofskie sochineniya (2 vols), Moscow: Renessans, 1992, vol. 1, pp. 1–232.

OLD WORLD SYMPHONY 123 studied through the sciences of ‘historiosophy’, ‘ethnosophy’, ‘geosophy’, and others.262 Reasons of space prohibit any adequate discussion here of the various characteristics of this Eurasian ‘symphonic personality’ as they are allegedly discovered in the fields of aesthetics, spirituality, and political culture. It is useful, however, to devote some attention to the remarks Savitskii—as the Eurasians’ chief spokesperson on matters of economics—makes on the subject of political economy in pre-Petrine Eurasia. Understandably enough, the picture he paints of this otherwise mildly abstruse topic is one coloured by a desire to erect favourable comparisons with the perceived decadence of the present; but what may perhaps come as a surprise is how much attention he pays rather to the decadence of the recent past. Savitskii, driven from his homeland by Red revolution, undertakes a critique less of socialism than of capitalism: The entrepreneur as a spiritual entity is above all and even exclusively Homo œconomicus, ‘capitalist man’. He relates in only one way to that whole, that system of people and goods, which is represented by the ‘production unit’ he heads—from the standpoint of how he can obtain the largest possible pure return.263

Against both market capitalism and Soviet collectivism Savitskii calls for a humane and personal economic life, in which the individual ‘master’ [khozyain] will acknowledge himself to be bound to his workers by a whole network of social and emotive ties, and he complains that ‘Neither capitalism nor socialism affirms the concrete, living person in economic activity’.264 Whether Savitskii’s idyll corresponds to any reality of Muscovy’s economic life is neither an interesting question nor a particularly relevant one. More significant is to note the striking parallel between this brand of economic mediaevalism and that put forward by the British art critic and foe of H. œconomicus John Ruskin, in his tracts against the prevailing Victorian understanding of political economy:

262 Nikolai Trubetzkoy: ‘K probleme russkogo samopoznaniya’, op. cit., p. 108.

263 Petr Savitskii: ‘Khozyain i khozyaistvo’, in Kontinent Evraziya, op. cit., p. 218.

264 Ibid., p. 242.

124 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM Observe, I neither impugn nor doubt the conclusions of the science if its terms are accepted. I am simply uninterested in them, as I should be in those of a science of gymnastics which assumed that men had no skeletons. It might be shown, on that supposition, that it would be advantageous to roll the students up into pellets, flatten them into cakes, or stretch them into cables; and that when these results were effected, the re-insertion of the skeleton would be attended with various inconveniences to their constitution.

The reasoning might be admirable, the conclusions true, and the science deficient only in applicability. Modern political economy stands on a precisely similar basis. Assuming, not that the human body has no skeleton, but that it is all skeleton, it founds an ossifiant theory of progress on this negation of a soul; and having shown the ultimate that may be made with bones, and constructed a number of interesting geometrical figures with death’s-heads and humeri, successfully proves the inconvenience of the reappearance of a soul amongst these corpuscular structures.265

Savitskii and Ruskin are alike in their rejection of industrial capitalism, in their preference for the ‘goodly master’ [dobryi khozyain] of an imagined mediaeval past, and even in both blaming the emergence of revolutionary socialism on the evils of Europe’s capitalist rulers; Ruskin writes shortly after the fall of the Commune of Paris that the guilty Thieves of Europe, the real sources of all deadly war in it, are the Capitalists—that is to say, people who live by percentages on the labour of others; instead of by fair wages for their own. The Real war in Europe, of which this fighting in Paris is the Inauguration, is between these and the workman, such as these have made him.266

Ruskin is here following the lead of his own ‘master’, Thomas Carlyle, who as early as 1837 had written of the condition of the Irish peasantry that ‘Such things were; such things are; and they go on in silence peaceably:—and Sansculottisms follow them’.267 Ruskin would certainly have endorsed Savitskii’s appeal to the perceived

265 John Ruskin: Unto this Last, in Unto this Last and other writings (ed. Clive Wilmer), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985, p. 168. The work’s title quotes Matt.

20:14—‘Take that thine is, and go thy way: I will give unto this last, even as unto thee’—and alludes to Ruskin’s contention that it is immoral to pay more for work that is done well than for work that is done badly.

266 John Ruskin: Fors Clavigera No. 7 for Jul. 1871, in Fors Clavigera. Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain (2 vols), New York: no pub., no date, vol.

1, p. 97.

267 Thomas Carlyle: The French Revolution (2 vols), Oxford: OUP, 1989, vol. 2, p. 442.

OLD WORLD SYMPHONY 125 economic wisdom of the Middle Ages against the greed of modern capitalism: There is something instructive in the picture of how the ancient wisdom of the moral covenant, and the primordial philosophy of ‘subordinate economics’, which had held people’s egoistic instincts back with a word of admonition or of accusation, breaks at the close of the Middle Ages and over the course of modern times under the assault of the new period’s new ideas, as the theory and practice of ‘militant economism’ presumptuously assert themselves.268

The similarity between Eurasianism and Ruskinian political economy could, of course, be overstated; Savitskii lacks some of Ruskin’s particular bugbears on such questions as the moral acceptability of steam power,269 and his experience of the October Revolution prevents him from sharing Ruskin’s mixture of foreboding and glee as the prospect of ‘the great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast’270 growing into a purifying revolutionary war against the corrupt rich: Truly, as you have divided the fields of the poor, the poor, in their time, shall divide yours […] The British Constitution is breaking fast. It never was, in its best days, exactly what its stout owner flattered himself. Neither British Constitution, nor British law, though it blanch every acre with an acre of parchment, sealed with as many seals as the meadow had buttercups, can keep your landlordships safe, henceforward, for an hour.271

Any reader who cares to examine the two authors’ principal economic works will, nonetheless, find that the parallel between their ideas is both real and surprisingly close—closer, at any rate, than there is any justification for believing economic arrangements to have been in mediaeval Venice and in pre-Petrine Muscovy (on which these ideas are meant respectively to be based). Such a reader may also recall the admittedly dismissive reference made in the 268 Petr Savitskii: ‘Evraziistvo’, in Kontinent Evraziya, op. cit., p. 89.

269 Ruskin’s view is close to that of Leo Tolstoi; see George Woodcock: Anarchism. A history of libertarian ideas and movements, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963, p. 215.

270 John Ruskin: The Stones of Venice II.6 ‘The Nature of Gothic’, in The Genius of John Ruskin. Selections from his Writings (ed. John D. Rosenberg), Charlottesville, Virginia and London: University of Virginia Press, 1998, p. 180.

271 John Ruskin: Fors Clavigera No. 45 for Aug. 1874, in Fors Clavigera, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 259.

126 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM Communist Manifesto to an ideological phenomenon its authors term feudal Socialism: half lamentation, half lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart’s core; but always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history.272

Gamely applying the term ‘feudal’ either to Muscovy or to Savitskii’s conception thereof (or indeed, a fortiori, to the Golden Horde) would be to invite legitimate definitional arguments that are of little moment here; Marx and Engels, in any case, offer a satisfactory alternative when they characterize ‘feudal Socialism’ as one subtype of a broader tendency. The name they give to this tendency is ‘reactionary Socialism’,273 which is of course to be understood as meaning a critique of capitalism that rests on an idealization of some pre-capitalist order rather than on an imaginative vision of a future society (‘Utopian Socialism’) or on an analysis of capitalism itself (‘scientific Socialism’). The term ‘reactionary socialism’ will here be used in this sense only, with no intention of insulting (as opposed to categorizing) the thinkers whose work is discussed; it should not, incidentally, be taken to mean that all reactionary socialists are necessarily ‘reactionaries’ in the sense in which that word is now colloquially used (bigoted, chauvinistic, etc.), although they may be. Nor should reactionary socialism be confounded with the attitude expressed in the notorious slogan of the 1922 South African mineworkers’ strike, Workers of the world unite and fight for a white South Africa.274

This slogan resembles not reactionary socialism but the ‘social imperialism’ associated with Benjamin Disraeli, albeit here deployed—by, among others, the nascent Nationalist Party—against

272 Karl Marx and Frederick [sic] Engels: Manifesto of the Communist Party (tr. unsigned), in Selected Works (2 vols; tr. unsigned), Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1951, vol. 1, p. 53.

273 Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 51–56.

274 Quoted in Brian Bunting: The Rise of the South African Reich, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964, p. 35.

OLD WORLD SYMPHONY 127 the proponents of British imperial unity. The promise to defend the interests of some (geographically, ‘culturally’, ‘racially’) privileged section of the working class is nothing uncommon: see, for instance, the attempts by racists in Britain to organize such groups as ‘Trade Unionists Against Immigration’ (TRU–AIM).275 But it is, perhaps, an interesting phenomenon that the former ‘Tory Chartist’ Disraeli should have drifted from reactionary socialism into social imperialism; a similar progression (or decline) is discernible in Thomas Carlyle’s career. § 62.

As with certain other phenomena described in the Manifesto, reactionary socialism can now be seen to have reached its apogee only many years after Marx and Engels announced its historical obsolescence. In Britain—which was to become a stronghold, perhaps the stronghold, of reactionary socialist thinking—the first flowering of ‘Tory Chartism’ caught the attention both of Marx and Engels and of other observers; as one historian has written, It was just this bizarre intermingling of the old and the new, the survival of ancient institutions in the midst of a volcanic technological upheaval, that struck contemporaries as particularly British.

There is some justification for saying that the beginnings of socialism in England were marked by a similar quality. They had their emotional and intellectual background in a conservative reaction against the disruption of [an] established way of life. And when this Tory romanticism had passed away, the new socialism at first presented itself in the guise of a defensive movement to safeguard the existence of the independent artisan.276

But the peak of the movement’s influence should be dated to the last part of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, when it possessed a Catholic right wing in the Distributism of Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton277 and a left wing influenced by the Marxism of William Morris, as well as a thriving centre composed of Guild Socialists, Christian Socialists, and much of the early Labour Party. The Labour Members of Parliament of

275 See Martin Walker: The National Front, Fontana/Collins, 1977, p. 139.

276 George Lichtheim: A Short History of Socialism, Fontana / Collins, 1980, p. 43.

277 See Hilaire Belloc: The Servile State, Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1977; G. K. Chesterton: The Outline of Sanity, Dublin: Carraig, 1974.

128 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM the 1906 intake listed Ruskin’s Unto this Last as one of the books that had had the greatest influence on their political views;278 the future Labour Party leader Ramsay MacDonald made his first appearance on a socialist platform when he presented a paper on Ruskin to the Bristol branch of the Social Democratic Federation,279 and some mediaevalist cadences are detectable even much later in the words of rebuke he addressed to the aims and ambitions of a civilisation as frankly materialist as any that the world has ever known, or that the laws of righteousness have ever brought to ruin.280

If Savitskii’s praise for the economic and social order of mediaeval Muscovy occasionally sounds oddly familiar to the British reader, then the responsibility lies with this depth and richness of the reactionary socialist strand to Britain’s own literary and ideological past: such preoccupations as sobornost'—originally ‘conciliarity’ or ‘collegiality’ in church government but now used to denote the allegedly Russian or Orthodox or Eurasian virtue of organic collectivism—would have held few surprises for a Guild Socialist or an early Labour MP. Britain is not, of course, unique on this point. Reactionary socialism can easily be detected in the ‘state feudalism’ advocated in Germany by the anti-capitalist wing of the early Nazi Party, in particular by the brothers Gregor and Otto Strasser, 281 where it co-exists with an antisemitic nationalism that would have been quite foreign to Ruskin or to the Guild Socialists (although not entirely to Belloc): outside Britain—where capitalism and industrialization were manifestly indigenous developments—the old economic order could always be identified as specifically national and the new as a foreign or ‘cosmopolitan’ imposition. Indeed, readers of novels are most likely to be familiar with reactionary socialist ideas from the set-piece debate Thomas Mann introduces into The

278 See Clive Wilmer’s introduction to John Ruskin: Unto this Last, op. cit.

279 T. L. Jarman: Socialism in Britain from the Industrial Revolution to the Present Day, London: Gollancz, 1972, p. 108.

280 J. Ramsay MacDonald: Socialism: Critical and Constructive, London, New York, Toronto, and Melbourne: Cassell, 1924, p. 5.

281 Alan Bullock: Hitler, op. cit., p. 136.

OLD WORLD SYMPHONY 129 Magic Mountain (1924) between Settembrini, a liberal of a nineteenth-century cut, and the violently mediaevalistic reactionary socialist Naphta—although Naphta’s thinking is theological rather than nationalistic: Can it have escaped your Manchester liberalism that there exists a social doctrine that means humanity overcoming economism—a doctrine whose principles and aims coincide exactly with those of the Christian State of God? The fathers of the Church called ‘mine’ and ‘thine’ pestilent words, and private property they called usurpation and theft. […] The proletariat has taken up Gregory’s work, his fervour for God is within it, and it will no more be able to hold back from shedding blood than he was. Its task is terror, to heal the world and to achieve the salvific goal: stateless and classless life as children of God.282

The reference to Gregory is presumably to Pope Gregory VII (Hildebrand; reigned 1073–1085), whose policy of papal supremacy saw Henry IV, King of the Romans and future Holy Roman Emperor, reduced to doing penance before him in the snow (25–27 January 1077) at Canossa in the foothills of the Apennines.283 But Mann is notably accurate in depicting Settembrini’s reaction to this outburst. Reactionary socialism, to the sincere among its adherents a desperate cri de cœur, can only seem a laughable if virtuosic exercise in political paradox when viewed from the standpoint of confident liberalism: Astounding. Okay, I admit I’m shaken, I hadn’t been expecting that. ‘Rome has spoken’—and how! He’s pulled off a hieratic salto mortale before our very eyes.284

§ 63.

Eurasianism’s political economy thus reveals a distinctly European flavour. At its heart is what Savitskii calls ‘subordinate economics’, the demand that the greed of H. œconomicus should be, if not eliminated—a project that most reactionary socialists would be likely to reject as impossible—then at least brought to its Canossa: forced, that is, to accept the chastening discipline of a society 282 Thomas Mann: Der Zauberberg, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2000, pp. 552–554.

283 For abridgements of two documents in which Gregory sets out his view of the controversy see Henry Betternson (ed.): Documents of the Christian Church, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1944, pp. 144–153.

284 Thomas Mann: Der Zauberberg, op. cit., p. 554.

130 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM where self-interest would be viewed with perpetual suspicion, rather than being celebrated as the key to market prosperity. As the noted Christian Socialist scholar R. H. Tawney argued in 1922, just as Savitskii was propounding his own views, To a generation disillusioned with free competition, and disposed to demand some criterion of social expediency more cogent than the verdict of the market, the jealous and cynical suspicion of economic egotism, which was the prevalent mood of the Middle Ages, is more intelligible than it was to the sanguine optimists of the Age of Reason, which, as far as its theory of the conduct of men in society is concerned, deserves much more than the thirteenth century to be described as the Age of Faith. In the twentieth century […] the economic harmonies are, perhaps, a little blown upon. The temper in which it approaches questions of economic organization appears to have more affinity with the rage of the medieval burgess at the uncharitable covetousness of the usurer and the engrosser than it has with the confidence reposed by its innocent grandfathers in the infallible operations of the invisible hand.285

Even the Age of Reason, even the eighteenth century, was not in fact entirely immune to arguments of a reactionary socialist character. D. S. Mirsky, writing in the USSR after the end of his Eurasian period, describes much the same phenomenon in an illuminating essay on Jonathan Swift: Since the Tories were the enemies of those who had made the ‘Glorious Revolution’, they attracted all those elements of the dominant classes who were for any reason dissatisfied with the order that had taken shape. The Tories particularly attracted provincial landowners and the bulk of the clergy […]

Generally speaking, neither the provincial landowner nor the clergyman [klerdzhiman] was an enemy of the existing social system. The first participated energetically in the main process of plundering peasant land, while the second used his moral authority to shield him. But they nonetheless nurtured a certain spite towards the big fish of primitive accumulation—the lords and the money men […] This made the Tory party a more welcoming refuge, too, for those whose enmity towards the new forms of exploitation was more profound.286

285 R. H. Tawney: Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. A Historical Study, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961, pp. 72f.

286 D. S. Mirsky: Svift, in Stat'i o literature, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1987, p. 76.

OLD WORLD SYMPHONY 131 § 64.

Mirsky writes with the discernment of one who has experienced similar ideological cross-pressures at first hand. Much as Carlyle and Ruskin had threatened or taunted the Victorian bourgeois with prophecies of a social revolution to come unless the inhumanities of nineteenth-century manufacturing were replaced with a supposedly just and sustainable mediaevalism, so Savitskii blames the October Revolution on the short-sightedness of Russia’s ‘Romano-Germanizing’ elite in sacrificing the ‘Eurasian’ economic heritage of Muscovy and of the Golden Horde on the altar of growth and technological advance. And, just as Ruskin reserved his harshest blame not for the ‘thoughtless and ignorant’ landlords but for ‘your two professed bodies of teachers; namely, the writers for the public press, and the clergy’,287 so too the Eurasians allocate to the intelligentsia a particularly decisive share of the responsibility for Eurasia’s good or ill fortune. The relationship is obvious between this aspect of Eurasianism and the very limited scope for political involvement beyond the theoretical and the literary that was open to the Eurasians as a smallish group of educated émigrés trying to establish a movement in exile at a time when, as Trubetzkoy himself was grimly to acknowledge, all forms of political activity, or even of apolitical work to restore Russia’s existence as a State, are closed off to the Russian emigration by being manifestly pointless.288

This practical circumstance could only strengthen the sense of distance, anyway characteristic of reactionary socialism, between the political intellectuals and the people for whom they notionally speak: With Ruskin the people are always ‘You’; with Carlyle they are even farther away, they are ‘they’; but with Morris the people are always ‘We’.289

287 John Ruskin: Fors Clavigera No. 27 for Jan. 1873, in Fors Clavigera, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 384.

288 Nikolai Trubetzkoy: ‘Russkaya problema’, in Istoriya. Kul'tura. Yazyk, op. cit., p. 305.

289 Bruce Glacier: William Morris, quoted in Otto Jespersen: The Philosophy of Grammar, London: George Allen & Unwin, no date, p. 213.

132 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM But with the Eurasians the special rôle allocated to the intelligentsia becomes a matter of principle. Their desire to form Eurasianism into a theoretical and political project comparable in range to Marxism has already been mentioned, as has the concern—arising from their philosophical background—for the ‘cognition’ [poznanie; Erkenntnis] of Russia–Eurasia as a non-Romano-Germanic civilization. The logical conclusion is to emphasize, as the title of the first section of their 1926 manifesto Eurasianism (A Systematic Exposition) has it, ‘The harm done by false ideologies and the vital necessity of a true ideology’.290 The Eurasians rejected the specific content of Bolshevik ideology, but their reading of the political system adopted in the RSFSR and then the USSR in the 1920s—a single party whose claim to rule rested on its understanding of the state’s ideological foundations, coupled with broad-based institutions to draw the mass of the population into politics under that party’s guidance—was something they could enthusiastically endorse.

The Eurasians view the Soviet system as an organ for determining the popular will and separating out worthy elements from all strata of the population into the framework of the state apparatus.291

It was in dialogue with existing Soviet practice that the Eurasians proposed their notion of ‘ideocracy’ [ideokratiya]: The new method of selecting a ruling stratum that life is now forging, and that is called to succeed both aristocracy and democracy, might be termed ideocracy, or the ideocratic system. Under this system the ruling stratum consists of people who are united by their worldview.292

The Bolsheviks are an ideocratic ruling élite, a position to which the Eurasians aspire. And the Eurasian Soviet state would be not democratic, but ‘demotic’: A state order where power belongs to an organized, united, and strictly disciplined group, who implement that power for the sake of satisfying the needs of the broadest popular masses and of realizing their aspirations, can

290 Evraziistvo (opyt sistematicheskogo izlozheniya), in Mir Rossii—Evraziya, op. cit., p. 233.

291 Evraziistvo (formulirovka 1927g.) III.6, in Rossiya mezhdu Evropoi i Aziei, op. cit., p. 222.

292 Nikolai Trubetzkoy: ‘O gudarstvennom stroe i forme pravleniya’, in Istoriya.

Kul'tura. Yazyk, op. cit., p. 412.

OLD WORLD SYMPHONY 133 be termed a demotic system. The Eurasians are supporters of the demotic system.293

It might be objected that ‘demotic ideocracy’ in the form the Eurasians advocate would amount to nothing more than the allegedly benevolent tyranny of an intellectual clique; but such criticism would be to miss the essential point, which is the similarity between the Eurasians’ proposal and the state of affairs they took already to obtain in the USSR. The Soviets, the one-party system,294 indirect elections, and federalism were all borrowed from the system the Bolsheviks had introduced. Only one aspect of Soviet constitutional theory was spurned by the Eurasians. The early Soviet Constitutions were unambiguous about the class affiliations of the State system they encapsulated: the RSFSR Constitution of 1918 declares in Article 9 that The fundamental task of the Constitution of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, which is intended for the present transitional moment, is to establish the dictatorship of the urban and rural proletariat and of the poorest peasantry in the form of a strong Russia-wide Soviet government, in order completely to crush the bourgeoisie, to abolish the exploitation of man by man, and to introduce socialism, under which there will be neither class division nor state power.295

As regards the system of government they propose, the Eurasians are prepared to borrow everything from the transitional dictatorship of the proletariat except the transition, and the proletariat. And this is consistent with the general observation that Eurasianism has a great deal more to say about pre-Revolutionary Russia than it does on the subject of the Soviet order per se. The Eurasians, largely young men (very few women) of impeccable social standing who could have looked forward to a future among the cream of Russia’s intellectual and aristocratic beau monde had the Revolution not supervened, seem to have been stung by that historic shock less into 293 Evraziistvo (formulirovka 1927g.) II.2, in Rossiya mezhdu Evropoi i Aziei, op. cit., p. 218.

294 The Eurasian opposition to multi-party democracy is eloquently stated in Lev Karsavin: Osnovy politiki, ibid., pp. 174–216.

295 Konstitutsiya (Osnovnoi Zakon) Rossiiskoi Sotsialisticheskoi Federativnoi Sovetskoi Respubliki, in Yu. S. Kukushkin and O. I. Chistyakov: Ocherk istorii Sovetskoi Konstitutsii, Moscow: Politizdat, 1987, p. 243.

134 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM hatred for the new régime—although they could be intemperate, as well as admiring, towards Marxism—than into a stark realization of how flawed and how fragile the old régime had been all along.

(Perhaps the same is true of some of those caught up in any great social transformation; at any rate, it took sections of the post-Soviet Russian opposition a number of years to turn their attention away from devising alternative reform projects that might have salvaged the by then already defunct Soviet Union.) It was the question of their attitude to the Soviet authorities that led the Eurasians to the fatal split of 1928;296 and the problem was never one with which they seem to have been entirely comfortable. They were always on firmer ground when they were exposing the vices of a social order that had already been destroyed. ‘The owl of Minerva,’ as the saying goes, ‘begins its flight only with the onset of dusk’;297 or, as in this instance, some hours after nightfall. § 65.

And it is only after another such twilight that Eurasianism has attained anything approaching a mass following. Reasons of space prohibit any detailed treatment here of the work of Lev Gumilev, whose lonely decades as ‘the last Eurasian’ yielded an extensive corpus of research and speculation on various facets of the history of ‘Eurasia’298 as well as a number of additions to the theory.

The most striking of these additions is the concept of ‘passionarity’ [passionarnost'] as a quantifiable index of the mental and ideological energy at the disposal of a given ethnos at a given time—one that can be plotted on graphs, and calculated with the aid of such impressive mathemes as Pik for the level of passionary tension in the system.299 The term ‘passionarity’ has entered Prokhanov’s vocab-

296 A small but useful selection of documents from both sides of the dispute is available in Mir Rossii—Evraziya, op. cit., pp. 293–312.

297 G. W. F. Hegel: Elements of the Philosophy of Right (tr. H. B. Nisbet), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 23.

298 See, for instance, the studies collected in Lev Gumilev: Ritmy Evrazii. Epokhi i tsivilizatsii, Moscow: Ekopros, 1993.

299 See Lev Gumilev: Ot Rusi k Rossii, op. cit., pp. 15–18.

OLD WORLD SYMPHONY 135 ulary, together with the associated adjective ‘passionary’ [passionarnyi] and the noun ‘passionaire’ [passionarii] to denote an individual who shows the quality: Today the stock of Russian passionarity is more valuable than any precious stones, uranium lodes, or ancient ikons.300

But it is far from clear that he is using Gumilev’s terminology in any specifically Gumilevian sense. Neither Prokhanov nor many of his contemporaries seem to have adopted Gumilev’s system in full, complete as it is with a more elaborate associated apparatus of such terms as ‘the acmatic phase of ethnogenesis’ [akmaticheskaya faza etnogeneza], defined as the phase that sets in after the liftoff phase [faza pod"ema], characterized by a level of passionary tension that is maximal for the given system.301

It is therefore possible to treat ‘passionarity’, outside Gumilev’s own writings, as meaning nothing more than a degree of willingness to sacrifice oneself for a (national or ethnic) idea. § 66.

The same reasons of space rule out any adequate treatment of the Eurasianism of ex-president Nursultan Nazarbaev,302 to the extent that this is felt to represent a ‘historiosophical’ position as opposed to a rhetorical justification for Kazakhstan’s policy of limited reintegration with Russia and other CIS states through the Eurasian Economic Community and similar cross-border institutions.

It is, however, worthwhile to pause for a moment on one new use to which Eurasianism has been put outside the ranks of the patriotic opposition. Under circumstances where the established doctrinal expression of the reality of a multi-ethnic society—‘the friendship

300 Aleksandr Prokhanov: ‘Irak poet «Dubinushku»’, in Zavtra 17 (544) for April 2004, p. 1.

301 Lev Gumilev: Ot Rusi k Rossii, op. cit., p. 322.

302 For the officially approved Kazakhstani interpretation of Eurasianism see A. K. Koshanov and A. N. Nysanbaev (ed.): Idei i real'nost' evraziistva. Materialy Valikhanovskikh chtenii «Istoricheskie korni i perspektivy evraziistva kak sotsiokul'turnogo i sotsiopoliticheskogo fenomena» (11 dekabrya 1998g., g. Astana), Almaty: Daik-Press, 1999.

136 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM of the peoples’ [druzhba narodov]—has vanished along with its Soviet ideological context,303 some have detected a viable substitute in Eurasianism’s acceptance of ethnic, linguistic, racial, and national diversity within the Eurasian ‘symphonic personality’. In the work of such writers and politicians as Ramazan Abdulatipov—who chaired the Soviet of Nationalities in the 1990–1993 Russian Supreme Soviet, and whose subsequent career has included a stint (2013–2017) as leader of Dagestan—the appeal to Eurasian historiosophy serves the same purpose, mutatis mutandis, as does the theory of multiculturalism in Western societies.304 The Eurasian Party of Russia was set up in 2001 not by red-brown patriots but by Abdul-Vakhed Niyazov, who had been elected to the State Duma for the pro-government Unity slate (the forerunner of today’s United Russia party) and who now styles himself president of the European Muslim Forum.305 This deployment of Eurasianism as a way of conceptualizing national and religious minorities’ stake in Russia has been perhaps especially marked among Tatar public figures, not only because of the classical Eurasians’ friendly attitude towards the Golden Horde but also because Tatar nationalism and separatism were particularly strong in the early 1990s: 61.4% of those who took part in a plebiscite in March 1992 agreed that the Republic of Tatarstan was a sovereign state and a party to international law, forming its relations with the Russian Federation and with other republics and states on the basis of treaties between equals.306

In the context of the Soviet Union’s disintegration, the affirmation of ‘state sovereignty’ was generally understood as falling one step 303 For a survey of early Soviet nationalities policy, including the origins of ‘the friendship of the peoples’ as a way of conceptualising multi-ethnic society, see Terry Martin: The Affirmative Action Empire, op. cit.

304 See R. G. Abdulatipov: Sud'by islama v Rossii. Istoriya i perspektivy, Moscow: Mysl', 2002, pp. 110–119.

305 European Muslim Forum https://euromuslimforum.org (accessed 6 September 2022).

306 Aleksei Zverev: ‘Znachenie opyta Tatarstana dlya Gruzii i Abkhazii’, in Bruno Coppieters, David Darchiashvili, and Natella Akaba (ed.): Federal Practice. Exploring Alternatives for Georgia and Abkhazia, Brussels: Vrije Universiteit Brussel University Press, 1999, p. 117.

OLD WORLD SYMPHONY 137 short of a fully-fledged declaration of independence; but it is still indicative of strong separatist feelings in the republic. As the prospects for establishing Tatarstan as a genuinely sovereign state have receded (especially since the accession of Vladimir Putin to the federal presidency), therefore, the need has become acute for a statement of national purpose that does not presuppose national independence. And Eurasianism has offered one such account. When Rafael' Khakim, an adviser to then-president Mintimer Shaimiev and the son of the Tatar poet Sibgat Khakim, declared in a widelypublicized manifesto that ‘in any event, there’s nothing in Eurasia for a Russia without a Turkic component’307 he was conceding considerable ideological ground to federalism; but admitting dependence on a common Eurasia is, seemingly, an easier step than making the same admission vis-à-vis Russia as a nation-state. § 67.

These uses of Eurasianism, although unquestionably interesting, are tangential to a discussion of Eurasianism in esoteric and imperial-patriotic circles. One figure who is central to such a discussion, however, is the founder of ‘neo-Eurasianism’, Aleksandr Gel'evich Dugin. Attempting to examine or even to catalogue the various ideologies—some very recondite and many distinctly unappetizing—with which Dugin has sought to synthesize Eurasianism would be a formidable undertaking: it has been thought best at this point simply to provide the reader with a list of ideologies and ideologues earning Dugin’s tribute, taken from a 1996 manifesto (on the understanding that not all the people and ideas listed herein should be damned by association either with Dugin or, in many instances, with one another). Dugin writes that These are the formulae of resistance to the modern world: Orthodoxy (revolutionary + esoteric / hesychastic)—Islam (Iranian, Shi‘ite, revolutionary; + Sufism)—Traditionalism—The Conservative Revolution— National Bolshevism—The Third Way—Eurasianism (+ neo-Eurasianism)—Russia—Socialism—Islamic socialism—Nationalism—Nonconformism—Anarchism of the right (and of the left)—The Social Revolution—

307 Rafael' Khakim: Kto ty, tatarin? II. Yazyk materi http://miraska.narod.ru/tatars/hakim2.htm (accessed 6 September 2022).

138 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM Alternative geopolitics—Cultural radicalism—Hard mysticism [Khard-mistitsizm]—The subversive counterculture—Continentalism (in geopolitics)— Tantrism—Dzogchen—Eschatologism—Revolutionary Kabbalah (= Sabbataism)—The New Right (Nouvelle Droite in the French and Italian sense, not new right in the Anglo-Saxon sense)—The New Left—Anticapitalism—Revolutionary syndicalism—The Last Empire—The New Aeon—The Last Judgement These are the individuals (archetypes) central to our cause: René Guénon—Julius Evola—The Archpriest Avvakum—Karl Marx—Konstantin Leont'ev—Georges Sorel—Ernst Junger—Baron Ungern—Martin Heidegger—Ernst Niekisch—Nikolai Ustrialov—Arthur Moeller van den Bruck—Karl Haushofer—Georg Lukács—Friedrich Nietzsche—Jean Thiriart—Fedor Dostoevskii—Carl Schmitt—Georges Bataille—Hermann Wirth—Jean Parvulesco—Carl Jung—Lev Gumilev—Herbert Marcuse— Guy Debord—Gottfried Benn—Nicolas Trubetzkoy—Ramiro Ledesma Ramos—Boris Savinkov—Petr Savitskii—Nikolai Kliuev—Lautréamont—The Ayatollah Khomeini—Jean-Paul Sartre—Ali Shariati—Henri Corbin— Louis-Ferdinand Céline—Mircea Eliade—Ezra Pound—Sri Ramana Maharishi—Gilles Deleuze—Arthur Rimbaud—Mikhail Bakunin—Georges Dumézil—Alain de Benoist—Che Guevara308

Readers faced with the preponderance in this line-up of mystical fascists (Evola) and fascist mystics (Wirth) may recall with a shudder the appeal made in Dugin’s 1997 book Knights Templar of the Proletariat to what he calls [t]he one and indivisible Revolution, beyond ‘right’ and ‘left’, in the dialectical triad ‘Third Rome—Third Reich—Third International’.309

The Third International, however, is conspicuous here by its absence: the only official Communists on the list are Lukács, a literary critic more than a politician (and a participant in the 1956 uprising in Budapest), and Guevara, who became politically active long after the International had been dissolved and whose rebel chic has made him an icon to many who would be unlikely to display a poster of Georgi Dimitrov or Maurice Thorez. The major leaders of the Communist International are nowhere to be found. It is worthwhile to

308 Abissus [sic] abissum [sic] invocat. Manifest Arktogei http://arcto.ru/article/46 (accessed 6 September 2022).

309 Aleksandr Dugin: Tampliery proletariata (natsional-bol'shevizm i initsiatsiya), Moscow: Arktogeya, 1997, ePub ed., chap. I.7 [По ту сторону «правых»]. Dugin writes raikh for ‘Reich’, instead of the standard reikh.

OLD WORLD SYMPHONY 139 compare what is admittedly a much briefer list of heroes, put forward in Zavtra by Stanislav Kunyaev. Kunyaev lists Gandhi and Khomeini as ‘religious prophets’; Stalin, Mao, Marshal Tito, and Radovan Karadžić as ‘organizers of the popular masses and poets’; Fidel Castro, Muammar Gaddafi, Guevara, and Saddam Hussein as ‘tribunes and publicists’; and Kemal Atatürk, Yasser Arafat, Slobodan Milošević, and Aleksandr Lukashenko as ‘builders of new states’.310 But despite Dugin’s omission of Soviet communism, his conjunction of fascists, socialists, mystics, anarchists, Situationists, symbolists, and religious historians might seem baffling as well as distasteful; and the temptation might arise to address to Dugin the same criticism that Trubetzkoy had to answer on behalf of classical Eurasianism: People ask the Eurasians: ‘Who are you? Are you on the right, on the left, or in the middle? Are you monarchists, or republicans? Democrats, or aristocrats? Constitutionalists, or absolutists? Socialists, or supporters of the bourgeois system?’ And when they receive no direct answers to these questions, they either start to suspect that there must be some deeply hidden secret intrigue, or else they shrug their shoulders in contempt and pronounce the whole ‘movement’ to be a purely literary tendency and a simple exercise in playing at originality.311

This attack, as will be seen below, is not without some substance in reference to Dugin; but some of his combinations are nonetheless motivated as opposed to wilful. His reinterpretation of Eurasianism is one such instance: the nature of his relation to the original Eurasian doctrine is apparent from his references to Traditionalism and to its founder, René Guénon. It is not difficult to map Guénon’s opposition between the ‘West’—uniquely severed from the ‘perennial philosophy’ he believed to underlie all ‘traditional’ systems of metaphysics—and the ‘East’, where that philosophy and its associated modes of spirituality have retained their full force, 312 onto a Trubetzkoian counterposition of Europe and humanity.

310 Stanislav Kunyaev: ‘Vozhd' narodnyi’, in Zavtra 44 (571) for October 2004, p. 5.

311 Nikolai Trubetzkoy: ‘My i drugie’, op. cit., p. 349.

312 See René Guénon: East and West (tr. Martin Lings), Ghent, New York: Sophia Perennis, 2004.

140 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM § 68.

Readers are warned against rushing to the conclusion that Dugin’s variant of Guénon’s ‘esoterism’—which Dugin seems originally to have acquired from Mamleev and his associates—represents the master lode of the esotericism analysed in Chapter IV above. There is, in point of fact, little common ground between the attempt—whether motivated by a nostalgia for Hermann Wirth’s Ahnenerbe313 or by a simple spiritual search for truth—to confabulate a belief system out of the ‘inner’ teachings of Hinduism, Sufism, and Zen, on the one hand, and on the other hand the formation of an esoteric perception of the world in response to the perceived selfinflicted catastrophe of 1989–1991. It is unquestionable, however, that Dugin has acted as a principal conduit by which Russian patriots have become aware of a whole range of ideologies, from neofascism to Eurasianism, and that his ‘continentalism’ and ‘neo-Eurasianism’—Eurasianism integrated respectively with Haushoferian geopolitics and with Traditionalism—have coloured the reception given to Eurasianism in post-Soviet Russia. It is understandable both that the Kazakhstani Eurasians should accuse him of discrediting Eurasianism by associating it with neo-fascism,314 and that Yakov Bromberg’s 1920s attempt to interpret Jewishness in Eurasian terms should—despite Dugin’s contributing two of his own articles to a recent edition of Bromberg’s work315—have won few supporters. Dugin, be it noted, has denied that he is an antisemite: to general astonishment, he even withdrew his diminutive Eurasia Party from the Motherland electoral alliance ahead of the State Duma elections of 2003 on the basis that it, Motherland, included Vladimir Davidenko—a former official of Aleksandr Barkashov’s neo-Nazi ‘Saviour’ group—and that he, Dugin, could not be party to an alliance with Nazis (literally korichnevye, ‘browns’). 316 Antisemitism 313 The Ahnenerbe (‘ancestral inheritance’) was the mystical wing of the SS, headed by Wirth. It features in the 2003 version of Prokhanov’s The Last Soldier of the Empire.

314 This is the main burden of the foreword to A. K. Koshanov and A. N. Nysanbaev (ed.): Idei i real'nost' evraziistva, op. cit.

315 Aleksandr Dugin: ‘Evrei i Evraziya’, in Yakov Bromberg: Evrei i Evraziya, St Petersburg: Agraf, 2002, pp. 278–291; and ‘Obrechennyi Izrail'’, ibid., pp. 292–297.

316 Anatolii Kostyukov: ‘«Rodina» bez fashistov’, in Nezavisimaya gazeta 213 (3045) for 6 October 2003, online at https://www.ng.ru/politics/2003-10-06/1_motherland.html (accessed 6 September 2022).

OLD WORLD SYMPHONY 141 had, of course, been rejected by the émigré Eurasians on the same basis as that on which they rejected other racial doctrines. § 69.

Dugin’s claim to be a Eurasian in the classical sense is in any case a highly dubious one. He shares few of the old-Eurasian doctrines on such central matters as ideocracy, the symphonic personality, the demotic state, and the equal value of different civilizations; he shows little interest in political economy, and there is no basis on which to identify him as a reactionary socialist; his penchant for the racier outworks of Guénonesque syncretic mysticism separates him from the Eurasians’ focus on the particular spiritual legacy of the Othodox Church and on its perceived integration of religion into the daily life of the people; and even on such a definitive question as ‘Europe and humanity’, Dugin’s view is far from unambiguous. His ‘Eurasianism’ and ‘continentalism’ are levelled very rarely against Romano-Germanic Europe, and very frequently against ‘Atlanticism’.317 Representatives of the most thoroughgoing Romanism (Pound318) and Germanism (Moeller van den Bruck) are cited as allies; Prussianism and Eurasianism are presented as cognate phenomena; and ‘Eurasia’ ultimately comes to resemble the outline on the map of the Third Reich, satellites, and conquests as of 1943 much more than it does that of the lands once ruled by the Golden Horde. Dugin, of course, has every right to call himself a neo-Eurasian; but this should not be taken as implying that Trubetzkoy, Savitskii, Karsavin, and Souvtchinsky—for all the very worst that can be said of them—were proto-Duginists.

317 See, e.g., Aleksandr Dugin: Filosofiya voiny, Moscow: Eksmo, 2004.

318 A study of the relationship between Pound’s antisemitism and his alleged economic views is available in Andrew Parker: ‘Ezra Pound and the “Economy” of Anti-Semitism’, in Jonathan Arac (ed.): Postmodernism and Politics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, pp. 70–90. Although the influence of Aristotelian economic prescriptions—including the ban on usury—is discernible on the thinking of some reactionary socialists, particularly those working in countries with a history of Scholasticism, readers will readily see the difference between the obsessions diagnosed by Parker and the reactionary socialist political economy characterized above.

142 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM § 70.

It would be unwise to leave Dugin, however, without making at least one further observation. He has used the term himself, albeit with some reservations: 319 so there is no danger of being thought merely tasteless or provocative in relating Dugin’s writings to postmodernism. Those familiar with the Baudrillardian dictum that ‘Playing with the pieces—that is postmodern’320 may already, comtemplating the diversity and apparent incoherence of Dugin’s proclaimed ideological heroes, have speculated as to how far his engagement with these remnants of the twentieth century’s ‘grand narratives’ might be ludic in character. It is sometimes alleged that postmodernism’s intellectual ancestry ought anyway to be listed as out of fascism by Martin Heidegger; this is not the place for any general investigation of this assertion, but Dugin’s enthusiastic embrace of aspects of postmodernism might at least cast a certain shadow over the sunny assertion that Baudrillard’s ‘playing with the pieces’ is necessarily destined to ‘cause sadness for dictators [and] nationalists’.321 It is true that Dugin has attacked the concept of the postmodern—or, as he prefers in this context to term it, the ultramodern [ul'tramodern]—in so far as it represents a continuation of the modernist rejection of Tradition;322 but the very same article contains the characteristically postmodern or poststructuralist assertion that ‘[e]conomics is just a language’, 323 and ends with a somewhat double-edged acknowledgement of the role irony can perhaps play in asserting plurality against the hegemonic ‘ultramodern’:

319 See the essays grouped under the collective title Postmodern: probuzhdenie titanov, in Aleksandr Dugin: Pop-kul'tura i znaki vremeni, St Petersburg: Amfora, 2005, pp. 409–493.

320 Cited in Steven Best and Douglas Kellner: Postmodern Theory. Critical Investigations, New York: Guilford, 1991, p. 128.

321 Richard Catlett Wilkerson: ‘Signs of Simulation, Symbols beyond Value: Jean Baudrillard and Grassroots Dream-work in Cyberspace’, International Journal of Baudeillard Studies vol. 6, No. 1 for January 2009, online at https://baudrillard studies.ubishops.ca/signs-of-simulation-symbols-beyond-value-jean-baudrilla rd-and-grassroots-dream-work-in-cyberspace/ (accessed 6 September 2022).

322 Aleksandr Dugin: ‘Postmodern ili ul'tramodern?’, in Pop-kul'tura i znaki vremeni, op. cit., pp. 436–445.

323 Ibid., p. 443.

OLD WORLD SYMPHONY 143 To the ultramodern you can say either Yes, or else… no-one’s going to listen to you, because it does not acknowledge the possibility of any other answer.

Except maybe as a joke.324

At other moments, however, Dugin’s association of his own method with postmodernism is less equivocal—as, for instance, in the foreword to the 2005 edition of his collection Conspirology: The Science of Conspiracies, Secret Societies, and Clandestine Warfare. It is in connection with his views on conspiracy theories that Dugin refers to postmodernism: Just as postmodernism, in its ironic play, easily reconciles the irreconcilable—rationalism and myth, the contemporary and the traditional, totalitarianism and liberalism, the meaningful and the meaningless—so too the conspiracy theory acts without rules or laws: here anything can happen, and the most implausible hypothesis—say, that America is being governed by extraterrestrials who have entered into a conspiracy with secret agencies of the CIA and with the head of the Federal Reserve—can perfectly well become the object of the most scrupulous investigations […] Of course, conspiracy theorists—unlike postmodern artists—tend sincerely to believe in their preoccupations and idées fixes: they don’t have the slightest trace of irony or cynicism […] But in this they are not so much behind the postmodernists as they are ahead of them: this is precisely the kind of post-ironic seriousness that the artists of the postmodern too must reach, if they pursue the general vector of their style ever further and further.325

Dugin is of course incorrect, in anything but the driest and most formal sense, in his assertion that ‘anything is possible’ in a conspiracy theory: his own example is relevant less because it is an ‘implausible hypothesis’ than because it corresponds very closely to the esotericism outlined in Chapter IV above, with the exoterically benign CIA and Federal Reserve revealed as a cover behind which the Archontic power of the space aliens controls the United States (or the Universe) for its own ends. At his best, however, Dugin as postmodernist is capable of such entertaining jeux d’esprit as that achieved in his 2002 essay ‘The Road to Armageddon’, in which what begins as a Continental intellectual’s predictable exposé of the

324 Ibid., p. 445.

325 Aleksandr Dugin: Konspirologiya (nauka o zagovorakh, sekretnykh obshchestvakh i tainoi voine), Moscow: Evraziya, 2005, p. 6.

144 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM part played by redneck Protestant fundamentalism in the Bush administration’s push towards war with Iraq is suddenly enlivened with the conceit that [T]he most striking thing about dispensationalism is the way its predictions have been fulfilled to the letter […] However improbable it might seem, the mythological Protestant fundamentalist interpretation of history turns out to be astoundingly close to the real state of affairs […] In this strange, strange world, someone actually has gone mad.326

At his worst he trades on the shock value of recreational extremism, as when he informed listeners to Ekho Moskvy radio’s Aleksandr Laertskii programme that the only valuable science is that which corresponds to no reality at all; and went on to illustrate the point with the claim that ‘seriology’ [seriologiya]—which he had studied while working on an television ‘serial’ [serial ‘episode’]—proved, despite being charlatanry and a pseudo-science, that Ukrainians had a uniquely evil blood group shared only by the Ainu of Japan.327 His urgings that this sinister blood group ‘really was discovered after the others, and it’s not even a definite fact that they’ve discovered it at all’328 establish that his comments are meant to be taken as a provocative game, in a society where few such topics are off limits, as clearly as they fail to provide much of an alibi for the actual chauvinism underlying Dugin’s ‘ironic play’. § 71.

It is possible, at least in the majority of instances, to establish on the basis of a close reading of Dugin’s several works a reasonable idea of the degree of irony present in each (it is rarely entirely absent). But it is far from clear that such a study would provide any useful answer to the prosaic question of whether Dugin is ‘really’ a fascist or ‘really’ a postmodernist—or even that the question as framed admits of any useful answer. The project of much of Dugin’s œuvre is compatible with either reading. Dugin’s interest in

326 Aleksandr Dugin: ‘Doroga k Armageddonu’, ibid., pp. 389f.

327 Aleksandr Dugin: ‘Sovsem ne pro fashistov (pervaya beseda Aleksandra Dugina c Aleksandrom Laertskim na radio «Ekho Moskvy»—programma «Monmoransi»)’, in Pop-kul'tura i znaki vremeni, op. cit., pp. 68–118; see especially pp. 91–94.

328 Ibid., p. 93.

OLD WORLD SYMPHONY 145 the Third Reich is not, in fact, unique among Russian postmodernists, whose flagcarrier Vladimir Sorokin has experimented in his well-known novel Blue Lard with an alternative history where the Nazi–Soviet pact lasts into a permanent and peaceable division of the Eurasian landmass between the two Powers’ spheres of influence, with Stalin founding a Bonapartesque new aristocracy of the Bolshevik hierarchs while President Roosevelt conducts the Holocaust in the United States.329 Even the ironic twist to Dugin’s writing can be interpreted either as characteristically postmodern or as characteristically fascistic. 330 In the final analysis, any attempt to separate Dugin’s postmodernism from his fascism would run the risk of resting less on the actual characteristics of his work than on the unproven assumption that the two must, on some profound level, be incompatible. § 72.

Dugin’s Eurasianism, as has been seen, is anything but classical; and his reinterpretation of the doctrine says more for the scope—if not for the wisdom—of his reading than it does for his originality as a thinker. Nonetheless, his influence on the ways in which Eurasianism has been taken up by Russian imperial patriots has been substantial. He has been able to reach a significant audience, including through numerous articles in Prokhanov’s Den' and then Zavtra, and through his involvement in the mid-1990s with Eduard Limonov’s National Bolshevik Party. Sergei Kara-Murza, the red-brown essayist and former academic chemist, reveals the influence of Dugin’s neo-Eurasianism in his emphasis on the dichotomy between ‘traditional’ and ‘modernist’ societies; 331 many other examples could be cited. With writers whose adoption of Eurasian tropes is more vulgarized it can be difficult to detect any trace of the émigré Eurasian tradition behind the Gumilevian and Duginian

329 Vladimir Sorokin: Goluboe salo, Moscow: Ad Marginem, 1999.

330 For a discussion of irony, in-jokes, and insincerity in fascist oratory see the essays collected in Theodor W. Adorno: The Stars Down to Earth and other essays on the irrational in culture, London and New York: Routledge, 1994.

331 See, e.g., Sergei Kara-Murza: Istmat i problema vostok—zapad, Moscow: Algoritm, 2001.

146 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM accretions.332 Prokhanov, however, demands closer study. Eurasian themes are clearly present in his writing, sometimes in the least subtle form: We will revitalize the defence factories and start producing the world’s best planes and tanks, the most perfect and invulnerable missiles. We will again flood the World Ocean with our ships, and seed near and distant space with laboratories and orbital detachments [...] We will begin the colossal work, so that everyone can find a place in it for their creativity, and in this Common Cause we will again feel our unity and indissolubility. We will turn to the peoples of Eurasia, who yearn for their old unity and prosperity, and start to build our magnificent fraternal union, combining spaces, peoples, and cultures in a symphonic unity.333

Prokhanov has given extensive publicity to Dugin, as well as to more orthodox Eurasians; and he has even found space on occasion to reprint extracts from the Eurasian classics in the pages of Zavtra.334 It is true that Zavtra has covered Dugin critically as well, with Denis Tukmakov ridiculing his Young Eurasian League335 as a farcical ‘Duginjugend ’ cooked up by Kremlin spindoctors;336 but Prokhanov’s weekly has often served as one of the main channels by which Eurasian and neo-Eurasian ideas have been put before the Russian reading public. Prokhanov himself has scattered his articles with references to Eurasia and to Eurasian ideas. And yet the imaginative and ideological picture of Russian history that is set out in Prokhanov’s fiction does not allow us to describe him as a Eurasian quite without qualification. He does sometimes—as in his 332 See, e.g., Maksim Kalashnikov: Genotsid russkogo naroda. Chto mozhet nas spasti?, Moscow: Yauza, 2005.

333 Aleksandr Prokhanov: Vremya zolotoe, Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2013, ePub ed., chap. 23 [Мы оживим]. The speaker is a character modelled on Vladimir Putin; the capitalized ‘Common Cause’ alludes to the thinking of Nikolai Fedorov, whose influence will be considered in the next chapter.

334 Petr Savitskii: ‘Vlast' predchuvstviya’, in Zavtra 5 (374) for February 2001, p. 8.

335 A literal translation of the organization’s Russian name, Evraziiskii soyuz molodezhi, would be ‘Eurasian Union of Youth’. It is, however, clearly modelled on the name of the Soviet-era youth movement Kommunisticheskii soyuz molodezhi, literally ‘Communist Union of Youth’ but invariably rendered into English as ‘Young Communist League’; it has therefore been thought best to adopt an analogous translation here, so as to make the parallel as obvious as it can be to the English-speaking reader.

336 Denis Tukmakov: ‘Dugin-yugend’, in Zavtra 39 (618) for September 2005, p. 5.

OLD WORLD SYMPHONY 147 novel of 2005, The Inscription—pay tribute to the ‘Eurasian’ heritage of the Russian people, with its roots in both Eastern Europe and the steppes of inner Asia: Shmelev’s face was dry, with high cheekbones and narrow, anxious eyes, cut with crisscrossing wrinkles as if it had long been bound up in a net. Such Asiatic-Slav steppe faces are born in the lower reaches of the Urals, where the Cossacks and the men of the Horde long fought, traded, exchanged goods and women, and eventually gave rise to a people of the borderland, sly, freedom-loving, and steadfast.337

But when Prokhanov’s characters try to flee from the mounting horrors of a nightmarish Moscow, they make neither for such noble Tatar foundations as Kazan or Astrakhan nor for the Eurasian wilderness of the steppe, but for the stereotypically Old Russian city of Pskov (Mr Semtex) or for the rural and ‘thalattocratic’ seclusion of a fishing community on the White Sea in Russia’s far North (The Red-Brown). In place of the age-old unity of the forest and the steppe, Prokhanov’s readers are presented with the bizarrerie of a scientific colony in Kazakhstan where undead Kazakh warlords lead living Kazakh technicians and scientists in a war to the death as the Soviet Union collapses around them: Belosel'tsev recognized the leader of the warband as Mukhtar Makirov, magically and terribly transformed into a fierce mediaeval warrior. After him there reeled and squeaked a chariot hauled by a dozen exhausted bulls.

Atop the chariot—surrounded by resinous torches, hot bronze lamps, and burning lanterns—towered the Supreme Deity, adorned with the skulls of people and of animals, with precious silks, and with bunches of dried wormwood.338

§ 73.

Nor is Prokhanov’s divergence from Eurasianism limited to his imaginative geography. It is a central postulate at least of classical Eurasianism that the Imperial Russia of the nineteenth century was set on drastically the wrong course as a result of its attachment to imported Romano-Germanic values; Prokhanov’s writing, in contrast, is shot through with an idealized vision of the nineteenth century: 337 Aleksandr Prokhanov: Nadpis', Moscow: Ad Marginem, 2005, p. 103.

338 Aleksandr Prokhanov: Poslednii soldat imperii (2003), op. cit., p. 198.

148 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM ‘Swahili’ was a first-class intelligence officer, entomologist, and ethnographer. His erudition recalled that of the officers of the tsarist General Staff, who would map the location of fords, mountain tracks, and wells in the desert, and thereby anticipate troop movements. At the same time they would describe the customs of the indigenous tribes, compile herbaria, and collect minerals, leaving behind them disquisitions to adorn the libraries of the universities and academies.339

Even the dialogue of Prokhanov’s novels aspires in places towards the elegant diction that might have characterized the nineteenth century (not to mention the fantasy that the sons of the Stalin-era elite were taught to dance and to speak foreign languages at exclusive Guards colleges from which they would emerge casually addressing their friends in French.340) The prevailing attitude to the nineteenth century in Prokhanov’s fiction—as in that of some other contemporary writers, notably Boris Akunin341—can be characterized as a slightly self-indulgent Victorianism blended with a very refined and purely literary Prussianism; and the mood that is thereby created could scarcely be further removed either from Trubetzkoy’s Mongolophile critique or from the somewhat feverish Traditionalism associated with Dugin. And when Prokhanov appeals to the long sweep of Russia’s imperial history, as he did at the end of 2017 in an article welcoming the announcement that Putin would seek another presidential term, he traces it back not to Chingis and the Horde but to the Battle of Kulikovo (1380), where the Russian principalities under Dmitrii of Moscow (known after the victory as Dmitrii Donskoi) defeated a Golden Horde army under Mamai: I should like to see Putin deliver his manifesto speech on Kulikovo Field.

Amid fogs and melting snow, in the pink dawns of spring, amid the forests and the blue skies, he is watched by the angels of Russian history. Angels

339 Aleksandr Prokhanov: Gospodin Geksogen, op. cit., p. 8.

340 Aleksandr Prokhanov: Nadpis', op. cit., pp. 54f.

341 See, e.g., Boris Akunin: Azazel', Moscow: Zakharov, 2000.

OLD WORLD SYMPHONY 149 who were once Peresvet and Obslyablya,342 Matrosov343 and the 28 guardsmen,344 Gagarin and the hero martyr Evgenii Rodionov.345 These numberless hosts of Russian people built their great state between the three oceans [...]

They wanted to make this kingdom resemble the kingdom of heaven, to make it a kingdom of the Russian dream, an embodiment of the dreams of the Russian storytellers, monks, literary visionaries, and prophets, the Russian cosmists346 and revolutionaries, who wanted one thing: grace, for all the world’s people.

Hearing that speech, we will believe that, despite all adversities and all the difficulties that are ahead, we shall continue our great Russian march.

These were the thoughts with which I greeted the news that Putin will seek office. Like many, I wish him victory.347

Similarly, when Prokhanov calls for a new ‘Fifth Empire’, the four empires that preceded it turn out to be those of old Kyiv, the Ryurikids, the Romanovs, and the USSR;348 or conceivably Kyiv, Moscow qua Third Rome, the renewed Christian empire inaugurated by the seventeenth-century Church reform under Patriarch Nikon, and the USSR.349 It is possible that the precise identity of the first four empires does not matter too much—the number may have been chosen more to coincide with the Biblical fifth monarchy in which ‘the saints of the Most High shall take the kingdom’.350 But the Juchi Ulus is still conspicuous by its absence.

342 Aleksandr Peresvet and Rodion Oslyablya, monks who fought at Kulikovo, both canonized by the Orthodox Church.

343 Aleksandr Matrosov (1924–1943), private in the Red Army, posthumously named Hero of the Soviet Union and awarded the Order of Lenin for his valour at the battle of Stalingrad.

344 Fighters with the 316th Rifle Division of the Red Army, posthumously honoured for their heroism during the defence of Moscow in 1941.

345 (1977–1996), conscript soldier, captured and killed in Chechnya. Reports that he refused an opportunity to save his life by converting to Islam have led to his veneration as a saint, although his cult has not been officially endorsed by the Church.

346 See the next chapter.

347 Aleksandr Prokhanov: ‘Prezident Polyarnoi zvezdy’, in Zavtra 50 (1254) for December 2017, p. 1.

348 Aleksandr Prokhanov: ‘Rossiya—miru spasenie’, in Zavtra 23 (654) for June 2006, p. 1.

349 Aleksandr Prokhanov: ‘Zachatie vo sne’, in Zavtra 25 (656) for June 2006, p. 1.

This number of the newspaper is devoted almost entirely to expounding the ‘Fifth Empire’ theme.

350 Dan. 7:18.

150 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM § 74.

We may therefore begin to wonder why our author has spent so much time associating himself with, and aiding the development of, a movement whose central postulate leaves him cold.

And the form of the question predetermines the form of the answer: for Prokhanov to feel drawn to Eurasianism even though one core Eurasian contention sits uneasily with his own instincts, those aspects of the doctrine that attract him must do so with some force.

At least one such aspect is clear. The leftist commentator Viktor Shapinov has already written an article under the title ‘National Patriotism is a Reactionary Tendency in the Communist Movement’, in which he characterizes the political trend to which Prokhanov belongs as reactionary socialist in character.351 Shapinov’s article is written as a polemic, and its author does not produce detailed argumentation to justify his use of the term ‘reactionary socialism’ in describing the ‘national patriotic’ wing of the Russian opposition; his central thesis, however, is difficult to deny. Prokhanov does not usually discuss economic questions in close detail; but, despite his hostility to privatization and liberalization, the economic arrangements he recommends in fact resemble Savitskii’s ‘subordinate economics’ much more than they do Soviet central planning. ‘The new Russia’, he wrote in 2022, will have a new and powerful project-oriented state [proektnoe gosudarstvo], capable of realizing ambitious development projects—the Arctic, space, artificial intelligence, new energy sources [...] Alongside this ‘State of Projects’ there will also appear a field of individual freedom [...] There will be billionaires and owners of large private companies [... T]he image of the future consists of a centralist ‘State of Projects’ and a field of individual freedom, and also a state structure to manage the relationship between them.’352

He draws a parallel between this vision and ‘the model proposed to China by the great Deng Xiaoping’, while still affirming that his ‘Russian Dream’—drawing on ‘the Russian people’s age-old striving for an ideal existence’—is not a mere copy of the ‘Chinese

351 Viktor Shapinov: Natsional-patriotizm—reaktsionnaya tendentsiya v komdvizhenii, in Golos kommunista 2 (124) for 2004, p. 4.

352 Aleksandr Prokhanov: ‘Russkii chertezh’, in Zavtra 22 (1483) for June 2022, p. 1.

OLD WORLD SYMPHONY 151 Dream’.353 But his description also coincides notably with ideas familiar from Eurasianism and the reactionary socialist tradition, where the greed of Homo oeconomicus is supposed to be tamed rather than eliminated: the mission of the managing or regulating ‘state structure’ that stands between the ‘state of projects’ and the private billionaire is to soften all contradictions, reduce the acuteness of conflicts, rule out crying social inequality, and halt the culture of defilement and degradation—the fruit of the twisted psyche of the surfeited individual.354

This is not Bolshevism, or Stalinism, or (in any straightforward sense) socialism: it is closer to what Tawney calls the ‘literary appeal to the average conscience which had been made by an older social order.’ 355 Savitskian ‘subordinate economics’ gives Prokhanov scope to be as anticapitalist as he wishes to be, without committing him to a greater degree of social egalitarianism than he would be likely to feel comfortable with. § 75.

Reactionary socialism, or subordinate economics, is not the only element of classical Eurasianism to display obvious resonances with Prokhanov’s thinking. The Eurasians opposed internationalist Bolshevism, but were not unequivocally hostile to the Soviet order—they hoped it could grow away from Marxism and become a patriotic, ‘demotic’ regime with its roots in Russian history.

Prokhanov agrees. They were writing at a time when the old imperial loyalties had been suddenly swept away, and (as they themselves put it) their ideas had ‘taken shape in the atmosphere of a catastrophic perception of the world’.356 The appeal to Prokhanov, with his own experience of catastrophic collapse, is self-evident.

They wanted an ‘ideocratic’ ruling elite; Prokhanov wants something similar. They opposed the West, and urged Russia to find its own path as a unique civilization; Prokhanov can only applaud.

They wanted Russia to be a symphonic unity of many peoples and 353 354 355 356

Ibid.

Ibid.

R. H. Tawney: Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, op. cit., p. 76.

Foreword (unsigned) to Iskhod k vostoku, op. cit., p. 45.

152 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM nationalities; they are playing Prokhanov’s music. It is no surprise that he should have found all these elements of their thinking congenial, or that he should have been willing as a result to promote the legacy and the importance of Eurasianism. What is less clear is whether he has really learnt anything from the Eurasians that he did not know already. He did not need Eurasianism to tell him that the West was the enemy, or that Russia needed to be an empire, or that liberal democracy was the wrong form of government. And on one point where the Eurasian literature definitely had something to tell him that he did not already believe—that Russia was the heir to the Mongol empire, rather than to Kyiv and Byzantium—he does not appear to have taken it in. There is therefore some basis for concluding that Eurasianism’s actual influence on Prokhanov is superficial: what he has borrowed from it is essentially a vocabulary that can be used to express convictions he would have been expressing, in one form or another, anyway. § 76.

In this he is far from unusual. Trubetzkoy called for Eurasianism to become a unitary system of the sciences; for its adherents to constitute themselves as a disciplined ruling elite that would be ready and able to govern the Soviet Union; and for its principles and its historiosophy to define the terms of political debate in the country from which their originators had emigrated or been exiled.

Significant steps have been taken since 1991 towards realizing the third of these objectives: from fascists to advocates of minority rights, from Moscow to Kazan to Astana, and from the CPRF to the ‘Duginjugend’, Eurasianism has become a perpetual reference point in the political life of Russia and the wider CIS. But the other two goals seem further off than ever. Not only is there no disciplined movement of orthodox Eurasians prepared to become the ideocratic kernel of a demotic Eurasian state; not only is there no coherent Eurasian theoretical system; but it is becoming harder even to define Eurasianism as a tendency. The original Eurasianism of the emigration was never, in truth, as cohesive as its founders wished— and Eurasianism in the present is still less so. The term ‘Eurasianism’ is coming to stand simply for a set of attitudes and odd-

OLD WORLD SYMPHONY 153 ments (Chingis Khan, ‘passionarity’, Dugin’s take on National Bolshevism, multiculturalism, subordinate economics) from which anyone can select a ‘Eurasianism’ to suit. Eurasianism, in short, may be losing its coherence as an ideology; but it remains a fertile resource on which almost anyone engaged in the debate over Russia’s cultural identity and political future can freely draw.

VI The Insurrection of the Dead § 77.

Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov (1828–1903) stands alone; he would have had it no other way. Despite his appeals to unbounded human solidarity, and despite the extraordinary personal charity that is one of the best-attested facts of his biography, 357 there is something forbiddingly lonely about the two monumental volumes of The Philosophy of the Common Cause.358 This book—on which its author’s reputation rests—was assembled after his death by two of his few disciples, V. A. Kozhevnikov and N. P. Peterson: it represents decades’ worth of notes and unpublished essays, and sees Fedorov return tirelessly to reworkings of his one central idea. Encyclopaedic in the range of problems it examines, numbingly repetitive in the diagnoses and remedies it prescribes, formless, and driven, Fedorov’s writing acquires in bulk an almost fractal-like quality. Even one sympathetic commentator has observed that a reader can obtain a general idea of Fedorov’s project by reading almost any twenty or thirty pages in either volume of his works. But to learn his entire thought on any single question, whether that question be the role of women in the task or the significance of the ideas of the early nineteenth century meteorologist V. N. Karazin, one may well have to read the entire 1200 pages.359

Fedorov did not publish his ideas in his lifetime, and left little beyond the devotion of his small circle of followers to ensure that he would not be swiftly forgotten. This failure to concern himself with the immortality of his name is not without significance: for he writes as one who is unable to reconcile himself to the fact that people die. And the stark demand resonating through the multitudinous sketches and drafts that make up the Philosophy of the Common Cause is for resurrection—not spiritual or metaphorical, not postponed to an indefinite future, but physical resurrection as an

357 For a general survey of Fedorov’s life and thought see George M. Young, Jr.: Nikolai F. Fedorov. An Introduction, Belmont, Massachusetts: Nordland, 1979.

358 Nikolai Fedorov: Filosofiya obshchego dela (2 vols), Paris: L’Age d’homme, 1985.

359 George M. Young, Jr.: Nikolai F. Fedorov, op. cit., p. 78.

155

156 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM achievable practical task. (He continually uses the word voskreshenie, from the transitive verb voskreshat' ‘to resurrect [someone]’, rather than the more familiar intransitive voskresenie from voskresat'.)

For Fedorov, any community that exludes the dead is inadequate; any filial loyalty that does not seek to resurrect our deceased ancestors is a betrayal; and any worldview that rejects universal physical resurrection is no better than a capitulation to the inhumanity of nature. Only the duty of resurrection [voskreshenie] can become a ‘common cause’ to unite all people—or at least all men—as brothers joined together to resurrect their fathers. A humanity committed to resurrection and to immortality will subjugate nature and remake the world for its own purposes; and an immortal humanity will carry life out into the universe, settling new planets and adopting new bodily forms to survive in environments where no life could previously exist. Fedorov (or Peterson, who sometimes served as his amanuensis) expresses these ideas with insistent urgency, blending Biblical idiom with note-form abbreviations: but any impression that the author is desperate to win broad support for the ‘common cause’ is illusory. Throughout his fiercely ascetic life Fedorov shunned publicity. His ideas intrigued both Leo Tolstoi and Fedor Dostoevskii, but the apostle of resurrection broke off contact with the first and failed to reply to the second’s letters. Even the posthumous edition of the Philosophy of the Common Cause appeared only in a small run, due in part to Fedorov’s insistence that any printed version of his thoughts should be distributed free of charge.

It made little impact on the Russian literary world. Those who did come into contact with Fedorov’s writing or with his surviving disciples were few in number; and thinkers who were influenced by his monolithic idea, both in the emigration and—thanks to the founder of the Soviet space programme, Konstantin Tsiolkovskii (1857–1935), who had known Fedorov—in the Soviet Union, were not always even aware of its origins. Fedorov’s ‘common cause’ became an implicit presence, his book invisible in bibliographies and

THE INSURRECTION OF THE DEAD 157 his name missing from indices; he would have had it no other way.360 § 78.

It is a matter of record, however, that Fedorov’s work received a sudden surge of interest just as the Soviet Union was disintegrating. There was even a brief period during which Michael Hagemeister was able to introduce a monograph on Fedorov with the assertion that [i]n the Soviet Union today, Fedorov is one of the most widely quoted and widely discussed Russian thinkers. Some even see him as the Russian philosopher par excellence (samyj russkij filosof), the true representative of the world-redeeming ‘Russian idea’, the founder of a ‘philosophy of the future’ which is at once national and universal, and which—born of the spirit of Russianness and of the ‘depths of the Russian heart’ (A. V. Gulyga)—might point the way for all humankind.361

As Hagemeister has documented, there exists in today’s Russia a dedicated band of what might perhaps be called orthodox Fedorovians, as well as a wider penumbra of readers whose attitude to Fedorov—inspired but questioning, or questioning but inspired— would doubtless have met in his lifetime with the sage’s fury and contempt. It is to this second group, if to either, that Prokhanov belongs. The ‘common cause’ is nonetheless a vital and persistent influence: traces of Fedorov’s thought run through his novels and articles, and he has written warmly of Fedorov in his own voice as well as in his characters’. His article ‘Easter is Russia’s National Idea’—part theoretical manifesto, part mythologized autobiography, part cry of longing for the resurrection of a father who died at Stalingrad when Aleksandr Andreevich was only four years old—contains an implausible but fascinating account of what he claims was his first encounter with Fedorov. The story begins in Prokhanov’s schooldays:

360 See also Stephen Lukashevich: N. F. Fedorov (1828–1903). A Study in Russian Eupsychian and Utopian Thought, Newark: University of Delaware Press and London: Associated University Presses, 1977.

361 Michael Hagemeister: Nikolaj Fedorov. Studien zu Leben, Werk und Wirkung, Munich: Otto Sagner Verlag, 1989, p. 1.

158 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM I was introduced to Nikolai Fedorov, his paschal mystery, and his philosophy of the ‘Common Cause’ when I was an adolescent, and in the strangest, most metaphysical way. I was studying at School No. 204, which had been built in the 1930s on the site of the Miusskoe Cemetery, next to the monastery.362

Quite properly for Soviet schoolchildren, the young gentlemen of School No. 204 were required to work at more than their books: Each year, during the spring voluntary work days, we would plant trees in the schoolyard. We’d hollow out beds, dig holes—and we’d unearth old crypts. We extracted jawbones with gold teeth and decayed civil service uniforms with double-headed eagles on the buttons. We planted our young Stalin Garden on the bones of vanished generations. When we were setting out a football pitch and putting up the goalposts, we dug up a skull. We were all young football enthusiasts, fans of Spartak or Dynamo. So we got to booting that skull around, playing football; and I remember my toe going into the empty eye sockets.363

The buildup to the single grotesque detail is well-timed; Prokhanov would have made a competent writer of horror fiction. After the toe and the eye socket, he immediately pulls away to a different perspective—in which the episode’s heavy moral is brought home: Many years later I studied the layout of that cemetery, already aware that Fedorov had been buried there, and I discovered that his grave had been located in roughly the place where we’d put up our goalposts. Of course I cannot be completely certain; but some mystic feeling tells me that I was playing football with the skull of Fedorov. And it was from that trampled skull, that hollow chalice of bone, that I first caught something of the words that Fedorov had preached: the ‘resurrection [voskreshenie] of the dead’ and the atonement for the sins of the fathers by the deeds of the sons.364

§ 79.

Fedorov’s injunction to overcome ‘the separation of the living from the dead and the cemetery from the dwelling’365 here finds expression in an almost high-mediaeval juxtaposition of spiritual exaltation with the grotesquerie of physical decay. But Prokhanov’s account should also be read as an attempt to transpose into specific

362 Aleksandr Prokhanov: ‘Paskha—natsional'naya ideya Rossii’, in Zavtra 16 (543) for April 2004, p. 1.

363 Ibid.

364 Ibid.

365 Nikolai Fedorov: Filosofiya obshchego dela, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 40.

THE INSURRECTION OF THE DEAD 159 memoiristic form the complex structure of interlocking guilt established in the Philosophy of the Common Cause. At times Fedorov lambasts ‘the sons’ for failing in their duty to resurrect ‘the fathers’: this division of the sons from the fathers366 is that very fall of society that is called progress.

Progress is the elevation of the younger generation (sons) over the older (fathers). But elevation is not exaltation [prevoznoshenie ne est' vozvyshenie]! Progress exists in its most perfect form in the animal kingdom. Animals not only do not care for the older generation, they even kill their elders.367

But there are also moments when it is the fathers, those victims of the sons’ neglect, who have eaten sour grapes—or worse—and caused the sons’ teeth to be set on edge: Once we have accepted universal resurrection as our duty, we will not be afraid to accept that all primordial humanity is guilty of the sin of cannibalism—cannibalism even of the nearest and dearest—and that we have no right to condemn this sin, because even today we are still living on the account of our ancestors, from whose dust we derive both our food and our clothing; so that the whole of history can be divided into two periods: a 1st period, of direct, unmediated cannibalism, and a 2nd, of veiled anthropophagy, which period continues to this day and will continue until man finds an escape from his incarceration on earth. But this second period must inevitably be followed by a third: the period of universal resurrection, as the only effective atonement for the sin of cannibalism.368

Primordial sin; inherited guilt; redemption through rebirth from the dead—Fedorov does not seek to hide the outlines of the Christian theology of atonement behind his ‘common cause’, even though the emphasis on the directly and inescapably hereditary character of the sin resembles the view on original sin of Latin Christianity (drawing on Augustine of Hippo) more than it does the teaching of the Orthodoxy to which Fedorov belonged. But the 366 ‘Sons’ here are specifically sons [syny], not (as they are in the title of the Turgenev novel translated Fathers and Sons) ‘children’ [deti]; no allusion to Turgenev or to the particular generational issues aired in that book is intended, or is likely to be perceived. It should, however, be noted that Fedorov employs the plural form syny (typically used metaphorically, in phrases like syny Otechestva ‘sons of the Fatherland’ or sukiny syny ‘sons of bitches’) instead of the prosaic synov'ya.

367 Ibid.

368 Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 95f.

160 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM soteriological burden is here removed from the Son and transferred to ‘the sons’, who can find their own salvation only by atoning as well for the sins of all previous generations of ‘fathers’. Unlike Jesus Christ, whom historic Christianity has presented as unblemished by original sin and even (according to Roman Catholic doctrine) as having been born to a mother who was herself free of that Adamic legacy, 369 the ‘sons’ are fully implicated in the guilt they inherit from previous generations—and the restoration of the ‘fathers’ to life is a necessary condition of their own redemption. But many sons are also fathers, and all fathers are also sons; the very generation whose duty it is to redeem the ‘fathers’ occupies itself instead with siring a further generation of ‘sons’ to whom the inherited guilt and the duty of redemption are simultaneously transmitted.

Fedorov thus arrives at a recursive vision of guilt and duty running through the generations; and his passionate commitment to celibacy (holding out the hope of a generation of sons who are not fathers) becomes the first prerequisite of universal resurrection precisely because it offers a way of controlling and then of breaking this pattern. It is this perspective of inherited and endlessly reproduced guilt that Prokhanov dramatizes in ‘Easter is Russia’s National Idea’, when he presents the mortal remains of the prophet of universal voskreshenie as the plaything of a thoughtless new generation. § 80.

But Prokhanov goes much further in his deployment of Fedorovian influences. The Philosophy of the Common Cause would scarcely be classed as esoteric; but there are moments when Fedorov’s theodicy does recall the Gnostic sense of entrapment in a spurious creation: God and world is the present relationship of dissimilars; God and peace370 is the future—if man, or any rational being, comes to manage the blind force rather 369 The phrase ‘immaculate conception’, vulgarly used to mean whatever must happen nine months before ‘virgin birth’, properly refers to the doctrine that Mary the mother of Jesus was free of original sin from the moment of her conception. No such doctrine is recognized by the Orthodox Church.

370 The passage plays extensively and untranslatably on mir ‘world’ and mir ‘peace’, which are pronounced identically and since the orthographic reform of

THE INSURRECTION OF THE DEAD 161 than submitting to it […] It is our view that at present there exist God and world, where world stands for the condition of the world as it is, i.e. stands for world with the duty unfulfilled; but when the duty is fulfilled, then world will become peace. When we say ‘God is not in nature, God is with us’, we are acknowledging the dominance of reason over the blind force, i.e. we are speaking of peace, and not of world, where the opposite relationship holds sway. World is a fact, peace a project.371

Startling as the ‘common cause’ may appear, Fedorov is determined that it is an achievable and practical goal. If humanity sets itself to the task, then the future can yet be quite unlike the past and the present; atonement can be made; and ‘world’ can become ‘peace’. Prokhanov retains this opposition between ‘world’ and ‘peace’, but he radically alters the articulation between them: he snaps Fedorov’s future ‘peace’ back into the past like a Gnostic heresiarch inserting scraps of light into the Demiurge’s creation. This manoeuvre’s very virtuosity, admittedly, can sometimes render expressions of it suspect in Prokhanov’s fiction. Perhaps the clearest, most luxurious, and most tempting example is that set out by the Secret Policeman in The Last Soldier of the Empire (2003), where it serves as a lure to entrap the tormented Belosel'tsev. The Secret Policeman tells Belosel'tsev that Yurii Andropov, KGB Chairman 1967–1982 and CPSU General Secretary 1982–1984, had discovered more than he had been looking for when he first investigated his department’s past: You ought to know that Yurii Vladimirovich wasn’t an intelligence professional: he was sent to work in our agency, along with other Party and Komsomol people, because Khrushchev hoped to establish Party control over the KGB that way—to root out Beria’s supporters once and for all.372

Beria acquires a certain mythic status throughout The Last Soldier.

1918 have also been written identically (мир); the old orthography, which of course is used by Fedorov, creates a visual distinction by writing міръ and миръ respectively. As will be seen from an examination of the English translation, Fedorov’s text at this point would be largely incomprehensible if it were transcribed into the Soviet spellings (or indeed if it were read aloud); in this respect it is almost unique in Russian literature, with the possible exception of artificial examples constructed in the emigration after 1918.

371 Nikolai Fedorov: Filosofiya obshchego dela, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 447.

372 Aleksandr Prokhanov: Poslednii soldat imperii (2003), op. cit., p. 143.

162 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM When he was talking with a certain general—a close associate of Beria’s, who was facing not just expulsion from the agency but jail or even the firing squad—he unearthed in the general’s file strange aerial photographs, taken from a great height over the Siberian taiga […] For Yurii Vladimirovich there then began a period of study and of searching […] And gradually he discovered a secret, grandiose plan, which contained the essence of the red meaning and the content of the October Revolution. A project on which the founders of the party had been working even in their Switzerland days.373

Andropov is thus presented to Belosel'tsev as having embarked on a quest to uncover the esoteric meaning of the Communist Party and the Soviet state: After the trials of the Trotskyites and Bukharinites, Stalin transferred this project to the NKVD under Beria’s personal supervision. Its true content was carefully concealed. But for the benefit of the public and of the people—who were mobilized to give the project flesh—it was named ‘the Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature’… […] This ‘Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature’, which naïve adepts interpreted as meaning the struggle against hot dry winds, and the cultivation of branched wheat, and the planting of protective forest belts, and the eradication of the gopher, in fact involved the creation of another history, another physics, another time and space. Another humanity, immortal, that would overcome the death of the individual and of the species, that would eliminate suffering, would stop one creature from eating another, and would bring life to dead planets and to deceased people, patch up the Universe’s black holes, bring victory over the third law of thermodynamics, and, in essence, attain Paradise as the supreme goal of historic and galactic development.374

For readers who have not recognized that this is the ‘common cause’, Fedorov’s book is cited by name as one of the ‘primary sources’ Andropov has to study in order to understand the ‘project’.375 And, in an instance of a familiar device of esoteric narrative, well-known facts about the Stalin period are presented in a context where they acquire a radically different significance. The ‘left science’ that afflicted genetics and other branches of Stalin-era research, for instance, slots comfortably into the Fedorovian scenario;

373 Ibid., pp. 144f.

374 Ibid., pp. 145f.

375 Ibid., p. 146.

THE INSURRECTION OF THE DEAD 163 and even the Generalissimus’s decision towards the end of his life to publish a pamphlet on linguistics376 can find its place there: Thus he became convinced that Michurin377 hadn’t been cultivating some kind of pear and apple varieties to be grown above the Arctic Circle: he’d been reproducing in his garden the trees of paradise, for eventual paradisiacal plantations on other planets [… T]he theories of Lysenko […] describe the laws of a future, paradisiacal life, reconciled in all its manifestations, where the lion would not eat the sheep, and the eagle would not do the dove to death […] Problems of Linguistics was aimed at re-creating the proto-language of paradise from before Babel.378

§ 81.

The Secret Policeman is not to be trusted. In this episode, he is cynically telling Belosel'tsev what he wants to hear; but, in fact, the latter feels he knows it already: Belosel'tsev had the illusion of a dozing memory being awakened in him.

He had known and sensed all this even when he was at school, in a classroom hung with posters showing the protective forest belts racing away into infinity, and blue streams and reservoirs hemmed in by concrete dams, and rising above them the Leader—calm, wise, screwing up his slightly weary eyes to gaze into the limitless distances of the ages.379

But the same casting of the esoteric meaning of the Soviet system in Fedorovian terms is a strand found time and again in Prokhanov’s writing; and it promises to shed important light on the intricate phenomenon of ‘Soviet nostalgia’. The existence of such nostalgia, of course, is in itself nothing surprising given the shattering economic and social costs of the ‘transition’. Even The Economist of London, a publication that will scarcely be accused of longing for a redbrown empire, wrote in the early years of Vladimir Putin’s presidency that

376 J. V. Stalin: Marksizm i voprosy yazykoznaniya, Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1951; unsigned English translation as J. V. Stalin: Marxism and Problems of Linguistics, Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1972, and many other editions. For a useful non-esotericist account of the background see V. M. Alpatov, Istoriya odnogo mifa. Marr i marrizm, Moscow: Editorial URSS, 2018.

377 Ivan Michurin (1855–1935), celebrated selectionist and geneticist, known especially for his work on fruit varieties.

378 Aleksandr Prokhanov: Poslednii soldat imperii (2003), op. cit., p. 146.

379 Ibid., p. 147.

164 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM [m]any rich countries have comparably low birth rates, though; it is Russia’s death rate that is beyond compare. It rocketed in the early 1990s; subsided between 1994 and 1998 “from the catastrophic to the merely gruesome”, as Nick Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, puts it; but has since exploded again […] Poverty is only part of the explanation […] alcoholism is itself just a symptom of the long, dark night of the Russian soul ushered in by the disorienting collapse of communism.380

But Prokhanov’s repeated choice to express nostalgia for the Soviet past through an esoteric appeal to Fedorov’s vision of the future serves at least three distinct purposes in how ‘Soviet nostalgia’ is organized in his work. Firstly, and least interestingly, it represents one way out of the dilemma of self-inflicted catastrophe: if Marxism–Leninism was only ever an exoteric cover for the Soviet state’s real intentions, then it becomes possible to argue that leaders from Khrushchev to Gorbachev had lost the original esoteric truth—or substituted another—while continuing to perform the required outward rituals. (Russian communists whose Stalinism is more conventional can, of course, make essentially the same accusation without the need for esoteric truths.) One specific attraction of the ‘common cause’ in this context is probably Fedorov’s emphasis on the betrayal of ‘the fathers’ by ‘the sons’. Many in the patriotic world do not need the Philosophy of the Common Cause to teach them a crushing sense that the present generation has failed its predecessors: earlier generations defeated enemies from Kerenskii to Trotsky to Hitler, rebuilt the economy, and handed their children a great world power—and their children contrived to lose it without a fight. But the Fedorovian reading of Soviet history makes this betrayal all the grander: the cause that has been betrayed is now the ‘common cause’, itself the only way to overcome the sons’ intrinsic betrayal of their fathers. Today’s ‘sons’ are thus uniquely guilty of a betrayal raised to a higher power. § 82.

The second use to which Prokhanov puts his deployment of Fedorov in reading twentieth-century history is to mark out the military intelligentsia—the group whose professional relationship 380 ‘Death wish. Russia appears to be committing suicide’, in The Economist vol.

373, No. 8395 for 2–8 Oct. 2004, p. 36.

THE INSURRECTION OF THE DEAD 165 with the clearly Fedorovian tasks of scientific research and space exploration was perhaps the most intimate—as the privileged bearer of esoteric patriotism. The political changes since 1985 have meant for the military intelligentsia not just a loss of material comfort, not just a loss of social respect, but also a crisis of self-worth.

Soviet space scientists had grudgingly accepted in 1969 that they might have an equal; they had never acknowledged a superior. Soviet military technology was widely regarded as being on a level with the best anywhere in the world. Soviet intelligence was a highly professional global network. Suddenly, though, budgets evaporated and political demand vanished.381 Russia found itself reduced to offering tourist trips into space for the Western superrich, and then to servicing an International Space Station built with US cash. The 2001 decommissioning of the Mir space station caused a tidal wave of shock and outrage in patriotic circles and became— along with the loss of the Kursk submarine, another humiliation for the military elite and the object of many conspiracy theories382—a central plot element in Prokhanov’s novel The Cruiser Sonata. 383 Yeltsin’s cancellation of Buran (the Soviet answer to NASA’s Space Shuttle programme; it only ever made one orbital flight, a test run with no crew on board) had already become an iconic betrayal.384 Military specialists and advisers whose expertise had once been keenly sought after on four continents found themselves unemployed; and the engineers of the military-industrial complex saw their erstwhile competitors in the USA implementing the latest technologies while Russia was struggling to keep its ships seaworthy and its planes in the air. Fedorov, in fact, had little time for the military and was not over-enamoured of an intelligentsia that failed to concentrate its researches on the task of resurrection. But the application of his theories to the Soviet past provides the reeling mil-

381 See William E. Odom: The Collapse of the Soviet Military, New Haven, Connecticut and London: Yale University Press, 1998.

382 See M. Yu. Kurushin: Podvodnaya lodka «Kursk»: Rozhdenie. Zhizn'. Versii gibeli.

Podrobnosti, Moscow: Olimp / AST, 2000.

383 Aleksandr Prokhanov: Kreiserova sonata, Moscow: Ad Marginem, 2003.

384 See, e.g., Aleksandr Prokhanov: Poslednii soldat imperii (2003), op. cit., pp. 211–219.

166 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM itary intelligentsia—especially those involved in the space programme, always the flagship—with a precious assurance that their work was indeed part of some grand, noble, and universal ‘project’ (a favourite Prokhanov word) rather than simply constituting the bloated military lobby of a dictatorial state. We should recall that General Petrov, the volkhv Meragor, spent his military career in the Space Forces. The elevation of space exploration to the status of a profound social and moral obligation obviously matches the material interests of Prokhanov’s beloved military intelligentsia and military-industrial complex—but we would be wrong to imagine it as a fully conscious exercise in special pleading. On the contrary, Prokhanov’s enthusiasm for interplanetary travel and colonization is in itself sincere; even people he would not ordinarily much admire—a US oligarch, say—can draw his praise if they show a sufficient commitment to space: You won’t find people among our billionaires like the American, Elon Musk, who spends his fortune on the conquest of space, possessed by the dream of settling humanity on other planets.385

The first use of esoteric Fedorovism here folds into the second: those who, following the collapse of the USSR, have lost faith in the former government’s official justifications for their activity can resort to the ‘common cause’ as the esoteric mission in whose service their lives were spent. § 83.

The facility with which this manoeuvre can be negotiated is helped by the existence in Soviet culture of a slender but unbroken strand of what is called ‘cosmist’ thought on such topics as space exploration, deriving less from Fedorov himself than from the musings of Tsiolkovskii and others. Sudden flashes of recognizably Fedorovian thinking occasionally cast their distinctive, highly coloured light over Soviet writing about space. A clear ex-

385 Aleksandr Prokhanov: ‘Prevyshe bogatstva’, in Zavtra 43 (1453) for November 2021, p. 1. Mr Musk is the chairman and CEO of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., of Hawthorne, California.

THE INSURRECTION OF THE DEAD 167 ample is the 1962 sonnet ‘On the Question of Extraterrestrial Civilizations’, by the poet (and legitimate Cubo-Futurist president of the world386) Leonid Vysheslavskii: The more we gaze into the depths of the heavens, The more bitterly each day we are forced to admit: In the unknown worlds there is not a single soul, There are no passions there, to compare to human passions.

We do not know who breathed life into earthly clay, Stamped it out with the flood, then gave it strength again; But here it has caught fire so as never to go out, So as to flame up here and flare out everywhere.

One star twinkles, another pulsates, Another has clenched itself into a lump and is burning out fast, And our immemorial transit among them continues.

But the Earth is fated for a special calling.

I think the Earth is that force in the Creation Which will transform the worlds by means of itself.387

It is easy to see how members of the Soviet military intelligentsia, brought up on this kind of lyricism and on intense pride in the achievements of Sputnik, Vostok, and other projects, and then confronted with a denigrating liberal consensus that held their life’s work to have been wasted, might have felt a spark of recognition or even of gratitude at Prokhanov’s reinterpretation of that life’s work in the terms of the Fedorovian ‘common cause’. § 84.

In later years, when state funding for the defence industry had resumed,388 a character in Prokhanov’s A Golden Time could tell an audience of tank factory employees that their self-sacrifice— 386 The title of Predsedatel' Zemnogo Shara (‘chairman of the terrestrial globe’ or, approximately, ‘president of the world’) was originally borne by Velimir Khlebnikov; the story of how it came to Vysheslavskii is told in Tamara Gordienko, ‘Vnimanie! Govorit Predsedatel' Zemnogo Shara!’, in Literaturnaya gazeta + Kur'er kul'tury: Krym–Sevastopol' 7 (103) for 11 April 2019, p. 2.

387 Leonid Vysheslavskii: ‘K voprosu o vnezymnykh tsivilizatsiyakh’, in Kommunary shturmuyut nebo. Stikhi (ed. L. Ban'kovskii), Perm': Permskoe knizhnoe izdatel'stvo, 1987, pp. 113f. The translation makes no attempt to reproduce the verse form of the original.

388 See Roman Kunitsyn: ‘Chekhovskoe ruzh'e ili nemnogo voennoi statistiki’, loc. cit.

168 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM keeping production going on a shoestring during the dark 1990s— had all been in service of a holy cause. The allusions to Mir and the sinking of the Kursk are characteristic: You saved the factory and built your tank, but you were also saving Russian life and the Russian cathedral,389 planned in a heavenly design bureau [v nebesnom KB]390 according to heavenly blueprints [...]

You are creating the weapon of our days, your remarkable tank. But your tank, and the weapons of the Battle on the Ice391 and Kulikovo Field,392 of Borodino and Stalingrad, are all the same weapon, passed down from one generation of Russian people to another. In the cursed years, after the downfall of the USSR, this weapon was knocked out of Russian hands. It was incinerated in space, sunk in the ocean, blown up in secret silos, done to death in halted factories [...]

But a miracle occurred. The weapon that had been knocked out of the empire’s hands did not fall to the ground. It was snatched up in time by your hands, the hands of Russian arms makers. Thanks to your heroism, the Russian weapon survived. The scientific schools, engineering communities, and secret designs were preserved. And, one day, God-minded researchers will interpret this salvation as the Russian Miracle [...] Your tank is holy, because in its armour there is the sword of Prince St Aleksandr Nevskii and the chain mail of Prince St Dmitrii Donskoi. Your tank is an altar.393

Russia’s transcendent mission is concentrated in the conquest of space; and the enemies of the space programme are trying to suppress the cosmic good: ‘Gagarin possessed the Paradise Formula. He was the first to go into space, and the Paradise Formula was revealed to him. He wanted to tell people about it, but they wouldn’t let him.’

‘He was murdered? They arranged the crash?’

389 This phrase is difficult to translate. The word rendered ‘cathedral’ is khram, which could be a cathedral but could equally well be any religious building; I have chosen ‘cathedral’ because ‘temple’ in English sounds distinctively nonChristian, while ‘the Russian church’ does not sound like a building—it sounds like the institution headed by the Moscow Patriarch.

390 In the Soviet defence industry, a ‘design bureau’ [konstruktorskoe byuro] was a research and development institution, often bearing the name of a principal designer; familiar examples might include the aircraft design bureaux named after Pavel Sukhoi, Andrei Tupolev, or Artem Mikoyan and Mikhail Gurevich (MiG).

391 In 1242, when the Russian states under Aleksandr Nevskii defeated an army of the Livonian Order.

392 See §73 above.

393 Aleksandr Prokhanov: Vremya zolotoe, op. cit., chap. 24 [Вы спасали завод и; Вы создаете; Но случилось].

THE INSURRECTION OF THE DEAD 169 ‘He’s alive. They hid him away behind bars, and he’s still there to this day. There’s a maximum-security penal colony outside Nizhnii Tagil. That’s where Yurii Gagarin is.’394

And, by the same token, the disasters and the triumphs of Russian history are of universal import. The link between resurrection and space exploration, already established by Fedorov, becomes in Prokhanov’s writing the esoteric meaning of Russia’s earthly history.

As Metropolitan Epifanii tells President Vyazov, in The Sacred Grove: The Lord, in expectation of that terrible battle, knowing of the Victory to come, sent his sign to the Russians from heaven. He took a chunk of the stone from which the Heavenly Jerusalem was built and flung it down from heaven onto the earth. That black stone crossed the Universe and landed in Russia, and everyone thought it was the Tunguska meteorite. But Stalin knew it was a message from the Kingdom of Heaven [...] When the Victory happened, it wasn’t just the earth that exulted—it was the whole Universe.

Worlds floating in infinity became golden, or emerald-green, or scarlet. And on earth, for one moment, the dead rose and fresh shoots appeared on the stumps of old felled trees.395

§ 85.

The third consequence of Prokhanov’s reinterpretation of Fedorov arises to a certain extent out of the first two: but it is nonetheless of crucial importance for a critical understanding of Prokhanov’s ‘Soviet nostalgia’. ‘Soviet nostalgia’ is rarely a matter exclusively of protesting against the present and mourning the loss of the past. Like a child of the 1950s getting used to life with no jetpack and no holidays on the moon, many former Soviet citizens experience a profound sense of having lost the future. Although the more spectacular promises made for 1980—promises contained in the CPSU programme launched at the 22nd Congress, when Prokhanov was 23 years old—were quietly downplayed in the Brezhnev epoch, the perspective of building for the socialist and communist future remained a central one in the Soviet leadership’s account of itself. The rhetoric of the Gorbachev era was also forcefully tilted towards the future, offering a vision of rapid advance to a 394 Aleksandr Prokhanov, Virtuoz, op. cit., chap. 14 [Гагарин владел].

395 Aleksandr Prokhanov: Svyashchennaya roshcha, op. cit., chap. 18 [Господь, ожидая; Когда случилась].

170 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM more humanistic kind of socialism once the phenomena of ‘stagnation’ [zastoi] and ‘braking’ [tormozhenie] had been overcome. Nostalgia for ‘the radiant future’ is not, of course, a uniquely ex-Soviet prerogative. But it was perhaps felt more keenly in the 1990s there than elsewhere, if only because the moment of disappointment was so much clearer and so much more final. It is important here to recall that Fedorov’s worldview offers perhaps the most radical ontological and existential break between the present and the projected future that can be found anywhere outside purely religious promises of a creation transfigured. The Philosophy of the Common Cause means a new humanity; a new nature; a new heaven and a new earth. Michael Hagemeister has described ‘cosmism’, a touch unkindly, as ‘another Russian doctrine threatening to save the world’396—but it would be a mistake not to observe that this is precisely what makes Fedorov attractive to ex-Soviet citizens who feel deprived of their ‘bright future’. Prokhanov’s Fedorovization of the USSR is, of course, from this perspective very double-edged. The more the authenticity and universality of the Soviet project is salvaged, the greater is the guilt attaching to the generation on whose watch that project was betrayed. But it does allow nostalgia for what might be called ‘the future in the past’ to be given clear and passionate expression—as, for instance, by Klokotov in Prokhanov’s The Red-Brown: Three butchers rolled up their sleeves and hurled themselves on the sleepy country. They started hacking at it with axes, shattering, squelching, flinging chunks of meat to all sides! Well, we thought what they were chopping up was the party, communism, the long-range missiles, the giant collective farms. But what they were actually chopping up was the ‘Russian Civilization’ that had been born in the bowels of the Union, and that was beginning to take shape and to grow, like an embryo. It drew nourishment from the achievements of Soviet science and technology, from Russian insights into God and the Cosmos, human reverence before Nature, the protection of Earth our First Mother. All this was within us, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes finding expression in word and deed. An extremely complex

396 Michael Hagemeister: ‘Russian Cosmism in the 1920s and today’, in The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture (ed. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal), Ithaca, New York and London: Cornell University Press, 1997, p. 202.

THE INSURRECTION OF THE DEAD 171 synthesis was beginning, between earthly communist construction and the religious drive out into the unknown creation.397

Klokotov has just remarked that I was almost a dissident, I issued a manuscript journal. I took part in underground circles: politics, yoga, Orthodox mysticism.398

What he and those like him are fighting for is scarcely a return to the Brezhnev era; still less is it the Supreme Soviet and Congress of People’s Deputies they have assembled to defend. None of the various opposition leaders sketched in the novel has any coherent or even adequate strategy. The Fedorovian inflection of Klokotov’s nostalgia for the ‘bright future’ is thus persistently overlaid with a protest against the foreclosing of historical possibilities. The events of October 1993 are doubly determined as tragic: not only is this the final erasure of ‘Russian Civilization’ or of the ‘common cause’, but it also represents the crushing of the potential for any ‘bright future’ at all under the grimy present of liberalism, oligarchy, and Marlboro hoardings. And the crowds who gather with their Communist placards and their ecclesiastical gonfalons outside the besieged House of Soviets are bearing witness to promised alternatives that have failed or that have been betrayed. § 86.

Francis Fukuyama, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, commented on the sudden lack of historical alternatives: Today, by contrast, we have trouble imagining a world that is radically better than our own, or a future that is not essentially democratic and capitalist.

Within that framework, of course, many things could be improved: we could house the homeless, guarantee opportunity for minorities and women, improve competitiveness, and create new jobs. We can also imagine future worlds that are significantly worse than what we know now, in which national, racial, or religious intolerance makes a comeback, or in which we are overwhelmed by war or environmental collapse. But we cannot picture to ourselves a world that is essentially different from the present one, and at the same time better. Other, less reflective ages also thought of themselves as

397 Aleksandr Prokhanov: Krasno-korichnevyi, op. cit., p. 549.

398 Ibid., p. 548.

172 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM the best, but we arrive at this conclusion exhausted, as it were, from the pursuit of alternatives we felt had to be better than liberal democracy.399

Fukuyama is, perhaps, writing for those who have not over-exerted themselves in ‘the pursuit of alternatives’; but to Prokhanov, who had upheld alternatives to liberalism from Moscow to Afghanistan and who now saw his country plunged into poverty, this assertion of ‘the end of history’ will have acquired the nightmarish clang of doors being permanently slammed. ‘It is the heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man,’ as Sir Thomas Browne writes, ‘to tell him he is at the end of his nature; or that there is no further state to come, unto which this seems progressional.’400 And Prokhanov’s adoption of Fedorovian themes and ideas is constantly associated with precisely this insistent sense that historical options are being closed off. (At times, indeed, the esoteric version of the ‘common cause’ seems to become the natural idiom when speaking of any major catastrophe: what has been destroyed can always be presented as the hope for resurrection.) In ‘Easter is Russia’s National Idea’, Prokhanov reinterprets Fedorov’s extreme discontinuity between ‘world’ and ‘peace’ to underline the radical otherness of the USSR—its distance from the rest of the world and the rest of history: There exists a theory that the Moon was torn out of the Earth. In the southern hemisphere there is a depression, filled in by the ocean, where the Moon was torn from the Earth by a whirlwind and flung out into orbit, to exist as a heavenly body that would be an alternative to the Earth. The Soviet Union was that Moon which had been torn out of world history by the ‘red whirlwind’. The meaning of the Soviet period was to offer another kind of human development. An absolutely asymmetrical path, unrelated to traditional history: the path to the Absolute, to the ideal, to communism […] Communism is not an enormous patchwork quilt for all humanity to sleep under. It is not a machine that yields an infinite quantity of goods. It is not an ‘honour board’ with photographs of shock workers. It is overcoming death. This task

399 Francis Fukuyama: The End of History and the Last Man, Harmondworth: Penguin, 1992, p. 46.

400 Thomas Browne: Hydriotaphia. Urn Burial, in Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and The Garden of Cyrus, Oxford: OUP, 2001, p. 125.

THE INSURRECTION OF THE DEAD 173 was never formulated by communist politicians, whether by Marx, Brezhnev, or Stalin. But the whole pathos of Soviet futurology and Soviet technocratic thought was directed at creating an ‘elixir of immortality’.401

But the question that is begged here is whether the Fedorovian esoteric communism of the military and technocratic intelligentsia is really a potential ‘common cause’ for all humanity, or whether its attraction is partly just as an affirmation of the possibility of an alternative. Prokhanov’s furious rejection of ‘the end of history’, his desperation to maintain the idea that a fundamentally different future is still possible, can lead him into a paradoxical pluralism whereby the existence of any alternative at all to liberal capitalism is a token that the ‘bright future’ might not be finished. Irving Kristol is said to have remarked that a neoconservative is ‘a liberal who has been mugged by reality’; perhaps Prokhanov could be called an illiberal who has been mugged by fantasy. § 87.

One example is presented by an article he wrote during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It begins with an evocation of the glories of Saddam Hussein: Against the backdrop of this microcephalic ‘junior’, who returns the Bush clan to the earlier stages of evolution, the world leader and Arab leader Saddam Hussein stands out in grandeur.

We already knew him as a major politician, who had created in the seething magma of the Near East a strong state and a monolithic party, who had united many ethnic groups, many confessions, and many estates into a firm and cohesive system that had stood the test of wars and blockades.

We saw in him an original ideologist, who had combined Islam with Christianity, secular vanguardism with the ancient cultures of Assyria and Babylon, the socialism of the masses with the profound, esoteric aristocracy of the initiates.

But the greatness of Saddam has been revealed in these days, as the armoured molluscs have slithered across the Kuwaiti frontier and moved on Baghdad. As the jet-powered pterodactyls have torn themselves in flocks from the aircraft carriers and flown into Iraq, spraying their fiery venomous spittle.

We have seen Saddam the War Leader, who has lured the Americans into the furnace of the desert, sent them after a false trail, drowned them in the marshes, stretched their lumps of steel out into fine threads against

401 Aleksandr Prokhanov: ‘Paskha—natsional'naya ideya Rossii’, loc. cit.

174 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM which he directs cutting blows at lightning speed. He has spread the enemy’s ultra-powerful army group into a thin pancake and flung it into the frying pan of the sands. He has forged his basic forces into centres of resistance, where every town and village—Umm Qasr or Nasiriyah—has become a Brest Fortress against which Rumsfeld and Powell have broken their blunt foreheads. Baghdad has changed before our eyes into a vast workshop for the manufacture of American coffins.402

But it is the Iraqi leader’s status as representative of an alternative— any alternative—to the global status quo that draws Prokhanov’s warmest praise: But Saddam is much more than a politician, a general, and a leader. He is a saint. For he is come [ibo yavlen] into a world where Good and Evil have done battle openly and extremely: the natural, human, divine, that which affirms the flourishing diversity of the world; and the ‘mechanical’, inhuman, Satanic, that which denies the flourishing beauty of history and the free choice of the peoples. In this cosmic struggle, at the ‘high-voltage arc’ of creation, Saddam Hussein is doing battle for God against Shaytan, for man against machine, for historical creativity against the dictatorship of a starry and stripy fascist. And this sanctity is perceived by Arab Muslims, French Catholics, German Lutherans, Orthodox Russians, Chinese Confucians, Indian Buddhists. This sense of cosmic battle draws demonstrations of millions into the streets of world capitals. This presence of sanctity makes people pray for Saddam in mosques, churches, and pagodas.403

This article—which represents Prokhanov’s essayistic manner at its most striking—is markedly esoteric and dualistic. But what is relevant for the present purpose is the way Saddam Hussein’s ‘sanctity’ is predicated on his association with diversity and freedom of choice: the mere fact that Iraq’s political system is unlike that of the hegemonic USA becomes proof that the hegemon can be resisted; that other ways of ordering human societies are not inconceivable; and that the cause of Saddam Hussein must be the cause of anyone who opposes the emergence of a US-led one-party state on a global scale. § 88.

Cynics may feel that the Fedorovian ‘common cause’—so enormous, so difficult to realize—provides a convenient rhetorical 402 Aleksandr Prokhanov: ‘U Saddama net plokhoi pogody’, in Zavtra 14 (489) for April 2003, p. 1.

403 Ibid.

THE INSURRECTION OF THE DEAD 175 justification for military-related spending without imposing any unwelcome criteria by which results might be assessed. What is more important for our purposes, though, is to note the real influence Fedorov has had on Prokhanov. We saw in the last chapter (§75 above) that, despite Prokhanov’s enthusiastic use of Eurasian vocabulary, his engagement with Eurasianism is largely restricted to its vocabulary alone: he borrows Eurasian phrasing to express ideas that he would be highly likely to accept anyway, because they follow clearly from his existing beliefs, while Eurasian doctrines or attitudes that do not so follow are of little interest to him. The same cannot be said of Fedorov. Certainly, there are elements of the Philosophy of the Common Cause (such as the call for universal celibacy) that do not find reflection in Prokhanov’s worldview. But it is not at all self-evident how red-brown politics, or ‘Soviet nostalgia’, or opposition to US world domination, or the esotericist search for world conspiracies, or an admiration for the defence and space industry, would lead to the idea of bodily resurrection without Fedorov. And yet it is these very attitudes that make Fedorovian resurrection so attractive to him. At root, the function of the ‘common cause’ in Prokhanov’s writing is to translate what might otherwise be a merely political good and evil into something absolute and cosmic—a battle for infinite stakes, an eternal struggle where no compromise is possible, a war between darkness and light, universal death and universal life, waged by the designers and technicians of the post-Soviet military-industrial complex.

VII

The Uses of Hyperbole

§ 89.

For a time, the page of links to ‘Left and patriotic media’ on the CPRF website listed Zavtra first, ahead of the party’s own Pravda Rossii.404 Each title was provided with a brief descriptive comment: Pravda Rossii was just ‘[t]he CPRF’s weekly’, but Pravda-info was ‘[a] quality left internet publication aligned with the CPRF’, and Sovetskaya Rossiya ‘[b]asically provides decent coverage. But it’s usually only updated three or four times a week, sometimes not even that.’ (Readers will be relieved to learn that this is no longer true.)

Zavtra, however, was described merely as ‘Engineer Prokhanov’s hyperboloid’ [Giperboloid inzhenera Prokhanova]. The reference is to A. N. Tolstoi’s 1927 science fiction thriller Engineer Garin’s Hyperboloid,405 where the ‘hyperboloid’ of the title is actually a death ray with which the nefarious Garin proposes to take over the world.

Prokhanov, unlike Garin, cannot use his hyperboloid to sign his name all the way through a thick plank of wood,406—although the fact that such an oblique description was felt to be adequate suggests it has been an effective enough calling card nonetheless. But the allusion here is less to the plot of Tolstoi’s novel than to its title: whatever a hyperboloid may be in fiction, or indeed in fact, the clear association is with hyperbole. § 90.

There is an element of shamefacedness to this, of course.

The CPRF’s web designers recommend Zavtra, and even recommend it above anything else, but at the same time they signal to the reader with a wink that they would not like to be held responsible for quite everything that appears in it. Yet readers of Zavtra, or of its editor’s novels, are most unlikely to dispute the implication that hyperbole is a central characteristic of his prose. And they could 404 ‘Levye i patrioticheskie SMI’, Communist Party of the Russian Federation, archived 7 May 2007 by the Wayback Machine https://web.archive.org/web/ 20070521185211/http://www.cprf.ru/links/smi/ (accessed 27 September 2022).

405 Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi: Giberboloid inzhenera Garina, in Aelita. Giperboloid inzhenera Garina, Moscow: Pravda, 1986, pp. 169–445.

406 Ibid., pp. 176f.

177

178 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM substantiate the description, if it were challenged, by pointing to articles such as ‘Russia is the Salvation of the World’, which appeared in Zavtra in 2006, while the ‘hyperboloid’ link was live on the CPRF site: Some hidden defect is pushing the world towards its end. It’s not the wars and the use of ‘race bombs’. It’s not the delirium of the biosphere, sending down upon the cities venomous birds, crazed animals, pestilential fishes. It’s not the fact that the ‘buck’,407 that gilded axle on which the globe spins, is doomed. It’s not the thousands of Boeings full of furious men in beards that are flying towards Manhattan. It’s not the hallucinogenic culture filming its rainbow slime over our eyes, our souls, our impotence-sodden brains— brains where uncanny spectres quiver alongside misshapen chimaeras. But it’s all these things at once that are transforming humanity into a billionsstrong herd, howling in pain and horror, praying, and hating, injecting a sweet narcotic into the blackened vein as it stampedes, charging for the edge, whipped on by the monstrous Herdsman—the one who shepherds the human flock with a ‘rod of iron’.408

But what is distinctive here is less the presence of hyperbole per se than the ways in which it is employed. The ‘venomous birds’ are a reference to fears at the time surrounding the H5N1 strain of avian flu, and ‘crazed animals’ presumably allude to bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease) and variant Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease; but I am unable to gloss ‘pestilential fishes’. Their inclusion, in fact, suddenly shifts the sentence onto a different plane. The birds and the beasts could be read as commentary—picturesque, no doubt; highly coloured; hyperbolic; but still decipherable—on issues of current public concern: the fish suddenly project it into the realm of quasi-Biblical plagues and prophecy. § 91.

Analogous instances occur throughout both Prokhanov’s journalism and his fiction. In The Red-Brown, the conspirator Karetnyi attempts to recruit Belosel'tsev to what he claims is a patriotic plot: ‘We are the long sine wave of history […] We have preserved the gold reserve and the reserve of unique discoveries. Before the flood, we built an 407 The word Prokhanov uses in the original is baks, a colloquial name for the US dollar deriving from the plural baksy ‘bucks’.

408 Aleksandr Prokhanov: ‘Rossiya—miru spasenie’, loc. cit.

THE USES OF HYPERBOLE 179 Ark and loaded it with all the most valuable things that the people have created: the books, the devices, the plant seeds, the great organizational plans connected with the colonization of Mars. The flood has been unleashed; the Ark is on the water; and we are offering you a place on it. I shall say no more for now.’

Karetnyi was pale. His pallor, whether that of ecstasy or that of madness, made his eyebrows coal-black and his mouth a brilliant red. Belosel'tsev felt that what was in front of him was a porcelain mask painted in black and red. For a moment he was afraid, as though he had been shown a humanoid artefact made for sorcery and for arcane magical cults.409

By this point the reader will have no difficulty in noticing that Karetnyi is passing himself off as an esoteric Fedorovite. As Northrop Frye has observed of Paradise Regained, Satan’s temptations can only be truly effective if what the Prince of the Air is offering is something the author and the presumptive reader really do want: The temptation of Parthia, to ally the Messiah with an anti-Roman power in order to overthrow Rome, had, in short, been a temptation of Milton as well as of Christ.410

Frye acknowledges that this can make the Redeemer seem dramatically […] an increasingly unsympathetic figure, a pusillanimous quietist in the temptation of Parthia, an inhuman snob in the temptation of Rome, a peevish obscurantist in the temptation of Athens.411

The same cannot be said of Prokhanov’s heroes: they usually succumb to the temptation. For the present purposes, however, the extract cited is of interest primarily for its sudden swerves from gold reserves to the colonization of the solar system, from sober description to fantasies of magical poppets, and from sine waves to the language of the Bible (the flood, the ark) and back to that of the exSoviet intelligence officer. We have here one example of perhaps the single most characteristic technical aspect of Prokhanov’s post1991 prose: the very close conjunction, often within a single sentence, of strikingly varied levels of rhetorical hyperbole. What

409 Aleksandr Prokhanov: Krasno-korichnevyi, op. cit., p. 125.

410 Northrop Frye: ‘The Typology of “Paradise Regained”’, in Modern Philology vol.

53, No. 4 for May 1956, p. 233.

411 Ibid., p. 234.

180 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM might seem mere undifferentiated rant reveals itself on closer inspection to be a deliberately constructed pattern, in which repeated leaps from the everyday to the outlandish and back lend the text a distinctive and sometimes compelling rhythm. Readers who care to examine the various extracts from Prokhanov’s post-Soviet writing cited in previous chapters will discover this technique at work in nearly every case. § 92.

It is not merely different levels of hyperbole that are conjoined in Prokhanov’s writing, however: the hyperbolic material will often be found to derive from one or another of three main rhetorical strands, which are conceptually distinct even though they are often found in close association (certainly in Prokhanov’s most effective passages). The first can be identified as a highly lyrical, mystical style, one that seeks to express profound emotion—often, although not quite always, emotion attached to Stalinism, empire, Fedorovism, or some other major ideological commitment. Even in his war stories of the 1980s, Prokhanov is given to moments of mystical exaltation in which the notes of cosmism or Fedorovism are distinctly audible: He stood in his army padded jacket,412 barefooted, on the black, raked-over slag. His eyes clouded over with moisture. This moisture clothed the stars in tenuous, varicoloured envelopes, as though an atmosphere had appeared around the dry, stripped-bare stars. And that atmosphere was breathing, and life was being born in it. The universe wasn’t dead: it was inhabited.413

Or again, also from Sketches by a War Artist: He sketched, forming a likeness of the city on the sheet of paper. He felt he himself was building the city […] He surrounded that city with an invisible sphere. That protective sphere he created out of his native holy places, out of his superstitions and secrets, out of the best of that on which he pinned his hopes. And the city seemed to respond to his hopes. The voiceless grey roofs and the dry clay monolith suddenly became glassy and transparent.

The city became a city of glass. He could see right through it.414

412 The jacket is a bushlat, for which the English appears to be ‘pea coat’.

413 Aleksandr Prokhanov: Risunki batalista, Moscow: Molodaya gvardiya, 1989, p. 191.

414 Ibid., p. 164.

THE USES OF HYPERBOLE 181 This strand of lyrical mysticism continues into Prokhanov’s later, more polemically political work to become one of the chief hyperbolic elements that make his style what it is. § 93.

In his mature (post-Soviet) period, however, it is often combined with a sharply different although equally hyperbolic literary mode: political satire, frequently of the harshest and most scurrilous kind. Gorbachev, in the 2003 edition of The Last Soldier of the Empire, is seen escaping from a pact he has thoughtlessly made with the Devil by engaging in ritualistic sexual intercourse with Margaret Thatcher in Westminster Abbey;415 Yeltsin, in the same novel, is shown recouping his health for the coming political fight by injecting himself with extract of unborn foetuses. 416 Even when Prokhanov’s satire is focused purely on making his political enemies seem physically and spiritually repulsive (something to which he devotes considerable energy), he not infrequently finds it natural to resort to the language of religion and magic. Most characteristic of Prokhanov’s prose, however, is the close conjunction of astringent satire with a heavy, treacly lyricism and mysticism. In ‘America Has Been Kissed by the Angel of Death’, his Zavtra leading article after the attacks of 11 September 2001, he slots his invented fable of the origins of the Sahara Desert (it also appears in his novel The Africa Expert 417 ) into his delighted salute to the hijackers; and the piece, with its jokes that merge into its Biblicisms, interweaves the two stylistic strands so tightly that they are not immediately perceived as separate elements: The Tower of Babel was destroyed like that […] The tower grew, knocked its golden head against the sky, scraped the sky with its diamond fingernails; and it was fed by the blood and tears of the nations, whose bones were mixed with sand and rock and used in the tower’s construction. Four angels of death, the heralds of the Lord, flew up to that pillar from the four corners of the earth: their wings were of white metal and their lips were filled with wrath. They touched that heaven-reaching tower with their sharpened feathers, they breathed the Flame of the Wrath of the Lord, and the pillar evaporated. Its crest melted like a cloud and vanished into the heavens. Its 415 Aleksandr Prokhanov: Poslednii soldat imperii (2003), op. cit., p. 389.

416 Ibid., p. 357.

417 Aleksandr Prokhanov: Afrikanist, op. cit., p. 33.

182 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM foundations crashed onto the molten earth, where even now archaeologists find puzzling imprints on red flint amid the Sahara sands—imprints like those of pagers, cellular telephones, and Coca-Cola cans.

What has happened in Manhattan cannot be thought of in terms of ‘international terrorism’, or in the categories of economics and geopolitics. It must be thought of in terms of religious ethics and in the categories of historical justice and vengeance. When the Boeings hit the walls of the skyscrapers they righted the balance of a world that was reeling under the weight of American sin.418

(Many people who have no political sympathy with the United States felt moved in that week to offer their condolences; Prokhanov did not.) § 94.

A third stylistic component that plays a significant role in Prokhanov’s prose is a technocratic luxuriating in the achievements of industry and science. These can be consumer products: metal, glass, and plastic are described almost caressingly, and even the humble mobile telephone (this being the era when phones had illuminated keypads, before the touchscreens of today) becomes a ‘handful of pearls’, 419 if not a ‘tiny mollusc with its fluorescent droplets of light’. 420 (Mollyusk is one of Prokhanov’s favourite words, in fact: we have just seen him refer to US military vehicles engaged in the invasion of Iraq as ‘armoured molluscs’—see §87 above—and molluscs occur regularly, usually as metaphors but occasionally as themselves, in both his fiction and his articles.) Prokhanov is aware of this technophile character to his writing, and regards it as praiseworthy. In Writers’ House, when the central character is being proposed for the secretariat of the Writers’ Union, the poet Egor Isaev (1926–2013)—introduced into the novel under his own name, rather than in a disguised form421—comments:

418 Aleksandr Prokhanov: ‘Ameriku potseloval angel smerti’, in Zavtra 38 (407) for September 2001, p. 1.

419 Aleksandr Prokhanov: Gospodin Geksogen, op. cit., p. 175.

420 Ibid., p. 397.

421 The novel features quite a number of writers presented in both ways, and also in an odd compromise: Yurii Dombrovich, ‘author of a wonderful book, The Collector of Rarities. He had been in the camps’ (Aleksandr Prokhanov: TsDL, op. cit., chap. 3 [автор чудесной]), is a barely-disguised version of Yurii Dombrov-

THE USES OF HYPERBOLE 183 Just look at the way he writes! We trace our patterns on birch bark, but he traces patterns on metal as if it were birch bark!422

More commonly, however, the high-technology strand of Prokhanov’s style will be found interwoven with the mystical and lyrical strand. The markedly technological terms in which Belosel'tsev, in Mr Semtex, pictures the resurrection of Stalin do not detract from the episode’s lyricism: Stalin, in the glass sarcophagus, was alive. He was dozing to the quiet hum of the ventilation, wafted by cool air, gently illuminated by a ruby-coloured nightlight. His head wrinkled the pillow. The gold epaulettes shone on his dress tunic. A moment would come when bright electric light would blaze on, and people in white coats would raise the glass bell jar and swiftly inject something into that yellowish hand. Stalin would breathe, open his eyes, begin to rise. And the leader would step forth smiling to Red Square, mount the granite block of the Mausoleum, and wave his hand in greeting to crowds of new-born generations, ranks of snow-white athletes,423 columns of thundering tanks. And the blue sky would fill with the silver of flocks of doves…424

(It should be noted that this passage comes from before the protagonist has met Dr Mertvykh.) The blend of mysticism and technology here is appropriate to the Fedorovian context; for Fedorov, after all, resurrection was emphatically a scientific project. The same blend, however, is very often applied to objects that the apostle of the ‘common cause’ would have found less sympathetic. It becomes Prokhanov’s usual literary mode for depicting advanced weapons systems—warplanes, submarines, new models of tank, or (as in The

skii (1909–1978), former labour camp inmate and author of The Keeper of Antiquities, although Dombrovskii had in fact died before the time when Prokhanov’s book is set.

422 Aleksandr Prokhanov: TsDL, op. cit., chap. 19 [Вы посмотрите].

423 Prokhanov seems here to be recalling the opening ceremony for the 1980 Olympic Games, in Moscow, where the USSR team processed into the stadium in white uniforms created by the eminent Soviet fashion designer Vyacheslav (Slava) Zaitsev—see Marina Krylova, ‘Moda na Olimpiade-80: paradnaya forma ot Vyacheslava Zaitseva, plat'ya safari ot Iv-Sen Lorana i krossovki adidas’, Sport24.ru 20 July 2020 https://sport24.ru/news/other/2020-07-20-olimpiada-1980--paradnaya-forma-sovetskoy-sbornoy-vyacheslav-zaytsev-iv-sen-loran-fotovideo (accessed 29 September 2022).

424 Aleksandr Prokhanov: Gospodin Geksogen, op. cit., p. 264.

184 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM Virtuoso) an experimental strategic missile being prepared for a test launch: It had been made by human beings—but they had done it on the orders of an enraged Creator, who had instructed human beings to take care of the End of the World for themselves. He had given up the burden of himself dropping poisonous stars onto the earth, flooding the planet with boiling oceans, sawing the heavens and bringing them down upon cities and settlements. He had found inventors and engineers of genius among human beings and taught them to build a weapon that would end history on earth [...]

Its beauty seemed the pinnacle of creation. You could see the sculptures of Phidias in it and the texts of the Iliad, St Basil’s Cathedral and the philosophy of Kant, Russian folksongs and the Eiffel Tower. The whole immensity of culture, from cave paintings to sophisticated computer graphics, was present in the weapon of the End of the World and made it beautiful. But the understanding was horrified—it could not grasp the apocalyptic dialectic that transformed the benign striving for perfection into a monstrous denial of existence. The beauty of the missile was devilish, and in its chaste whiteness you could see a Satanic leer.425

§ 95.

At other times, the emphasis is less technological than purely technocratic: but the connection with magic and mysticism frequently remains, even when the general tone is satirical and humorous rather than lyrical. Prokhanov’s magicians and psychics are always experts, specialists, analysts, professionals, quite as though they were part of the military intelligentsia themselves. They often are, in fact; or else they are working with nefarious secret societies that are very possibly directed by military intellectuals from a different empire. An extract from A Golden Time is typical (Chegodanov is modelled on Putin; the unnamed journalist is to be read as Anna Politkovskaya, who was indeed assassinated on Putin’s birthday): Chegodanov was becoming hysterical, which happened to him extremely rarely. Only on occasions when his will came under the influence of sorcery.

Then he would be deprived of his ingratiating voice, his self-control, his ability to conceal his thoughts. He ceased to be able to handle the dark wave directed against him by psychological warfare experts, masters of magical attacks, aiming to paralyse and destroy their foe. It had happened once on his birthday, when they had murdered a well-known woman journalist who

425 Aleksandr Prokhanov, Virtuoz, op. cit., chap. 14 [Ее сотворили ... Ее красота].

THE USES OF HYPERBOLE 185 was tireless in denouncing Chegodanov. It was what is called a ‘sacral offering’. On a person’s birthday, the umbilical cord connecting that person to the creation comes alive. They are defenceless against external influences.

The journalist’s murder, this ‘sacral offering’, this terrible birthday present, had engendered a beam of deathly energy that sank into Chegodanov’s navel. He writhed in pain, bellowed in helplessness, spewed curses and abuse, and it seemed as though he had become insane. Only a monk, urgently summoned to come and pray, had ripped the invisible arrow out of Chegodanov’s navel and sent it back in the direction of the unseen archer.426

The identities of the occult military technicians involved, and of their Russian patrons, are mostly not revealed; but one of them is— and in Chegodanov’s own words. The character of Stotskii stands for Dmitrii Medvedev, who at the time the novel was written was plausibly a rival of Putin’s for power in the Kremlin: Stotskii, that vengeful dwarf and schemer, went to America. He had a secret meeting with the great magician, Copperfield,427 who is in State Department service and takes part in secret operations for the CIA. Stotskii showed the sorcerer my horoscopes and my psychological and spiritual codes, and Copperfield worked a spell. He paralysed my will, clouded my mind, cut me off from the life-giving sources—the ones that have always nourished Russia’s tsars and leaders.428

On other occasions the technocratic and the technological merge entirely. Jeffrey Styx [Dzhefri Stiks], a minor character in the same novel, poses as the Moscow correspondent for the The New York Times; in reality, he is not even human (although he may nonetheless be in some sense Jewish): The American was an ultra-powerful supercomputer, carefully camouflaged as a charming gentleman in a check jacket. Underneath that jacket was something that rustled and shimmered, and endless rows of fast-moving numbers. Gradoboev’s image and his words were being transformed into an electronic curve, a momentary impulse. This passed via communications satellite to a secret headquarters, where it was verified against other

426 Aleksandr Prokhanov, Vremya zolotoe, op. cit., chap. 5 [У Чегоданова начиналась].

427 The reference is to David Copperfield (stage name of David Seth Kotkin), the celebrated US illusionist; if he carries out supernatural attacks on behalf of the CIA then the fact is not public knowledge.

428 Aleksandr Prokhanov, Vremya zolotoe, op. cit., chap. 23 [Стоцкий, этот].

186 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM impulses and other capricious curves. And another gentleman, in an identical check jacket, with an identical hump on his nose, was extracting a sheet of analytical information from the printer.429

§ 96.

At particularly impressive moments in Prokhanov’s writing, all three of these strands or modes—the mystical and lyrical, the satirical, and the technological and technocratic—come together at once. In The Last Soldier of the Empire (2003), Belosel'tsev journeys to the Semipalatinsk region of Kazakhstan (where Soviet nuclear tests were conducted) in search of ‘the Mutant’, someone who he has heard was transformed and sanctified through direct exposure to a nuclear explosion under the supervision of ‘the Academician’ (based on Andrei Sakharov, a liberal dissident, and thus a hate figure for Prokhanov in spite of the glittering warheads he had helped design for the Soviet military). But not everything turns out to be quite the way the Academician had described it: Belosel'tsev stammered disjointedly: ‘But he told me about his sin… That you were a simple burglar… And Beria sentenced you to… That’s what he’s so repentent…’

‘That’s one of his myths. He’s become the victim of it: now he believes it himself. Like his myth of convergence,430 which is a vulgar simplification of the idea of a global and united humanity. No, I wasn’t a burglar, who he’ll have told you was burgling a rich physician’s home and so got caught up somehow in the “doctors’ plot” affair. I was an anthropologist: I had studied human genetic potential; I’d worked in a secret KGB science lab under Beria’s personal direction. We were very close to the idea of immortality. We hoped to make Comrade Stalin immortal, and then the whole Soviet people…’

The Mutant gazed at the lake, which was more and more taking on the colour of mother-of-pearl in the evening light. He held in his hands a little

429 Ibid., chap. 7 [Американец был].

430 Sakharov’s Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom, circulated in samizdat form and first published in English in The New York Times for 22 July 1968, calls for ‘convergence’ between a liberalized USSR and a progressive, reformist USA—Andrei Sakharov: Razmyshleniya o progresse, mirnom sosushchestvovanii i intellektual'noi svobode, in Trevoga i nadezhda. Stat'i, pis'ma, vystupleniya, interv'yu (2 vols, ed. Elena Bonner), Moscow: Vremya, 2006, vol. 1, pp. 124f. The English translation is available on the website of The New York Times https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/94-read-sakharov-s-original -essay/b639f1e6e0f204e3ad9a/optimized/full.pdf (accessed 29 September 2022).

THE USES OF HYPERBOLE 187 octopus. It squirmed gently, and it playfully waved its tentacles, and it had the head of Karl Marx. […] ‘I remember talking with the Academician. I suggested that he share what was to befall me: I promised him immortality, I tried to entice him with the chance to experience something no human being had ever experienced, something truly godlike. He refused. He said he had to mind the quality of the blast, so as to guarantee my safety. In fact, as I was to find out from someone working on the experiment, he doubled the power of the blast. He wanted to kill me off so he could have his way with my fiancée.

That’s the kind of man he is, that “martyr of Nizhnii Novgorod”,431 the great dissident, the conscience of the nation…’432

In this passage, the different strands of Prokhanov’s hyperbolic manner are blended so closely that only the forewarned or especially attentive reader is likely to discern how the effect is created.

But when the technique is handled less skilfully, the joins become obvious. The Cruiser Sonata (2003), for instance, differs from Prokhanov’s strongest novels in that moments of lyricism or of satire last in that book not for moments at a time, but for pages and even chapters. In part this is structural: the novel’s protagonist is a sailor from the submarine Moskva (based on the Kursk), which has been sunk by the US Navy using a secret weapon—and he alone has been saved, transported by some mystical intervention from the doomed ship Moskva to the equally nightmarish city of Moscow. As a result, passages dealing with the ‘Russian righteous man’ [russkii pravednik] are set apart from those describing the degradation and corruption of the capital’s political elite. These latter are not, perhaps, in themselves any more grotesque or animalistic than are the equivalent scenes in The Last Soldier. But the viciousness of the satire becomes sour and unconvincing when there is no lyricism to sweeten it and lend it meaning, while the mystical passages swiftly become cloying when they are not doused in satire. § 97.

On the level of plot, Prokhanov’s novels are typically structured by the twists and surprises, the temptations and betrayals, and the interlocking conspiracies that are perhaps endemic in the

431 Sakharov was in internal exile in Nizhnii Novgorod, then called Gor'kii, from 1980 to 1986.

432 Aleksandr Prokhanov: Poslednii soldat imperii (2003), op. cit., pp. 233, 235.

188 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM political thriller genre and are all the more frequent with an esotericist writer for whom nothing can ever be what it seems. Even the shining, apocalyptic, Phidian ‘weapon of the End of the World’ in The Virtuoso turns out to be a cheap fake, cobbled together from cardboard and papier mâché and stuffed with imported Chinese fireworks. The overall plot is usually of less importance, in fact, than this repeated dramatization of the esoteric worldview: what the reader retains from a Prokhanov novel is probably the kaleidoscopic suspicion, the feeling that everything is fraudulent and the world (or at least Moscow) is a trick by an anti-Russian Demiurge, rather than any final revelation or resolution. § 98.

One recent work, however, does turn almost entirely on an unexpected twist, and in the process reveals a fineness of technical control that Prokhanov might not have been thought to possess.

The book in question is his novel of 2016, The Orientalist.433 (Readers who would prefer to experience the surprise for themselves are advised to skip ahead to §99.) Until the very last page the book feels like a failure. It is the story of Leonid Torobov, a retired intelligence officer, who is summoned from his snow-covered garden to be sent on one last mission—tracking down and killing a dangerous ISIS434 leader, Farouk Nizar, whom Torobov knew slightly in Baghdad before the 2003 invasion. The trail leads him (or at least he goes) from Moscow to Brussels, Brussels to Tripoli, Tripoli to Beirut, Beirut to Cairo, Cairo to the Gaza Strip... Sometimes he is tailed through the streets, sometimes he is shot at; but each new city is inexplicably a fresh start, and the people he meets—even those who are attached 433 Aleksandr Prokhanov, Vostokoved (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2016). In a culture where the writing of Edward W. Said has not been widely influential, the title does not carry the connotations it would in English. Perhaps The Middle East and North Africa Area Studies Specialist would be an alternative.

434 In Russian, as in English, variant forms exist for the name of this organization.

Prokhanov uses ‘ISIL ’[IGIL] and ‘Islamic State ’[«Islamskoe gosudarstvo»]. The quotation marks in the second variant do not imply ‘so-called’, or not as directly as they would in English: quotation marks are habitually used in modern Russian with brand names, names of political parties, etc., but not with names of states, so that their use here is equivalent to the omission of the definite article in English. (‘Islamic State ’and ‘«Islamskoe gosudarstvo»’ sound like an organization; ‘the Islamic State ’and ‘Islamskoe gosudarstvo’ would sound like a country.)

THE USES OF HYPERBOLE 189 to Islamic State—once again take him at face value. He is always acting alone: this one pensioner seems to be Russia’s whole overseas intelligence apparatus. And yet even the one pensioner actually does almost nothing. He arrives in each capital, checks into a hotel (we are told which hotel each time), looks up old contacts, exchanges reminiscences, and hears that Farouk Nizar, alas, has just left: Torobov will have to follow him to the next stop on the tour.

The plot is repetitive, directionless. There is hardly any suspense and (until the last few sentences) no real surprise. The one moment that is built up as a shock—Torobov’s betrayal by Vera, a young woman with whom he enjoys a whirlwind romance in Istanbul until he discovers she is working with his enemies to keep him from proceeding to Syria—is almost comically predictable. It is not just that beautiful women in Prokhanov novels very often betray patriotic men. Why else is she so willing to be swept off her feet by (as she is supposed to think) an elderly lecturer who is having trouble with his university contract and who refuses to discuss his past?

Why else, if not as a blatant wish fulfilment, would she be in the story at all? Similarly, it is only the very naïve reader who will be genuinely astonished when—after a number of obtrusive mentions—Torobov’s ‘70 Years of Victory’ pen turns out to be a concealed single-shot pistol just when its owner needs one. At each stage, meanwhile, our hero insistently recalls the flash of azure he saw on the wing of a jay in his garden just before the fateful telephone call from his former employers. It appears to stand for an unattainable purity and peace—the jay is a recurring symbol in Prokhanov’s more recent writing,435 and azure has been there since the 1980s436—but the way the symbol is hammered home in The Orientalist must seem heavy-handed or peculiar. Neither this nor anything else in the novel, however, is so heavy-handed or so peculiar as to make the reader seriously question it. No individual chapter

435 ‘Listen to the Universe, and you will get an answer. An answer on the wing of a blue jay. Or of an aeroplane’—Aleksandr Prokhanov, Vremya zolotoe, op. cit., chap. 3 [Слушай Вселенную]. Other examples could be added.

436 See §33 above.

190 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM feels weaker than is believable for an uninspired chapter by a colossally prolific writer who has produced uninspired chapters before; the story sometimes strains credulity a little, but by the standards of Prokhanov’s surrealized esoteric Stalinism it is tame enough. And then, in the very last paragraph of the book, we discover that Torobov never left his garden. He has collapsed, perhaps (although we are not told) with a heart attack, and his frozen body will be found face down in the snow the following day. The whole plot—with its inconsistencies and its repetitions, its dreamlike absence of definite choices and actions, its continual encounters with old acquaintances, its elements of sheer fantasy—has been the hallucination of a dying man. The blue on the bird’s wing was one of the last things the protagonist saw. The Orientalist is thus an unusual example of a novel that is brilliantly constructed and genuinely effective, but only in retrospect: while you are still turning the pages it is dull to the point of being irritating. Not until you are about to close the volume and curse the author does the perspective suddenly shift. § 99.

The Orientalist is an exception among Prokhanov’s novels.

The specifically literary character of his work will usually be found to depend not on genuine surprise or fine-grained control over the reader’s expectations, but on the ‘hyperboloid’ technique sketched out in this chapter. One result is that different books (and articles too) can blur together in the reader’s mind: individual episodes and passages are memorable, but the overall plots (each of them keyed anyway to a particular slice of Russia’s recent history) are less so.

Some scenes—sturdy frontline soldiers giving one another nicknames before they go into battle, say, or sexual and Satanist orgies among the obscene rich—recur from one novel to the next and could really fit in anywhere. (Prokhanov very often conjoins liberals, devil-worshippers, and the ‘sexual minorities’, presumably in order to demonize each group by association with the other two.)

Vladimir Putin appears in successive novels under different names; Viktor Andreevich Belosel'tsev features as the protagonist in numerous novels, and in several of them he dies. The emphasis is less

THE USES OF HYPERBOLE 191 on presenting a definite truth than it is on exposing what seems to be the truth as a vicious lie. § 100. It is not difficult to see how the main stylistic elements of Prokhanov’s prose arise from his basic commitments, as they have been described in the foregoing chapters. The lyrical and mystical strand, so often used in explicitly Fedorovite moments of cosmist rapture, is the literary mode in which Prokhanov seeks to convey his hope for redemption, resurrection, triumphant empire, and a fundamentally better world. The satirical strand, with its frequent cruelty and pervasive nastiness, expresses his hatred of Gorbachev, Yeltsin, the ‘world Demiurge’, and the world Archons: no civility is possible, and the appropriate response when any tragedy—individual or collective—befalls the enemy is a gleeful laugh. The technological and technocratic strand hails the military intelligentsia as the vanguard, on the patriotic side as also on the demonic: the war that is being waged is a spiritual war, but it is also one of analysts, strategists, weapons designers, and erudite technical specialists.

And the flickering, shimmering way in which the three strands are woven together correponds vividly to the esoteric dualist view of the world, where the sparks of divine Stalinist light can only be seen embedded deep in the Demiurge’s post-Soviet universe of rubbish.

Conclusion We are now in a position where we can summarize the propositional content of red-brown esoteric patriotism, as Prokhanov expresses it and as it has been reconstructed here, in the form of a logical sequence. The references—which are not exhaustive—are to places in the book where each given proposition is documented or discussed.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

The USSR, its military and intelligence establishment, and its defence and space industry were fighting for good against evil [§3].

The military intelligentsia and the armaments industry are noble fighters for good and constitute Russia’s elite [§82].

Space exploration is an important social and moral task and a matter of pride [§83].

But the USSR destroyed itself [§18].

Therefore, the USSR’s leaders in recent times were secretly plotting to bring it down [§54].

Evil operates through conspiracies and secret machinations, rather than appearing openly [§42].

The world is ruled by evil [§49].

Evil uses its control of the media to trap people in a fake world [§9].

Anyone who fights for good is presented exoterically as evil or deluded [§53].

Evil is concentrated in the USA and the West, and in those people in Moscow and elsewhere who follow the West’s lead [§37].

The evil world power is at least associated with Jews [§52].

Anyone who fights against evil is on the side of good [§87].

The cause of the good is the cause of a world that will be radically unlike the evil world of today [§85].

Russia cannot be a nation-state within the existing world order: it must be an imperial civilization in its own right, incorporating many peoples and nationalities in a symphonic unity [§31].

193

194 ALEKSANDR PROKHANOV AND POST-SOVIET ESOTERICISM 15. Russia must be ruled by a patriotic elite who understand the inner meaning of its history [§40].

16. There is a place for profit-making, but economic motives must be subordinated to the interests of the imperial state and its struggle against evil [§74].

17. Eurasianism said that 14 [§59], that 15 [§64], and that 16 [§61].

18. Therefore, the cause of Russian imperial patriotism can be presented in Eurasian terms [§75].

19. Fedorov said that 3 [§77] and that 13 [§80].

20. Therefore, the cause of the good and of Russia is the Fedorovian cause of abolishing death and colonizing the universe [§86].

21. The cause of the Russian empire is of cosmic, rather than merely political or military, significance [§84].

22. Evil and the people who serve it hate Stalin [§14].

23. Stalin led the USSR to victory in WWII and built an advanced military-industrial complex, laying the foundations for the space programme [§24].

24. Stalin reversed the internationalist, cosmopolitan, and proJewish aspects of Bolshevism [§2].

25. Therefore, Stalin is the exemplary warrior for cosmic good [§23].

It will hopefully be agreed, firstly, that this is a reasonable outline of Prokhanov’s beliefs as far as we can ascertain them from examining a fairly large corpus of his published work; secondly, that proposition 1 is not in itself extraordinary—many people believe something similar, about their own countries if not about the Soviet Union; and, thirdly, that no subsequent proposition represents a genuinely wild and unimaginable logical leap, provided the ones before it have been accepted. Even themes that might at first glance have struck us as peculiar—like the reiterated fantasy of Stalin coming back from the dead—appear motivated and almost natural in the light of the reconstruction as a whole (in this case, propositions 20 and 25). A number of subsidiary aspects (such as Prokhanov’s attitude to the Arctic or to Patriarch Nikon) have been no more than touched on in the book, and are omitted from the summary; others

CONCLUSION 195 have not even been touched on. But there is no reason to think that incorporating them would require any fundamental reorganization.

The helpfulness of analysing ideological phenomena in terms of base and superstructure is not, at present, accepted universally or without question. People have wondered whether it is really possible to understand a political programme, a philosophy of history, or a spiritual hope—to say nothing of the verbal mechanics of a prose style—in terms of the consciousness ‘imputed’ to a particular class or fraction of a class.437 Prokhanov, however, wears his imputed consciousness on his sleeve. He suffers from a ‘military-industrial complex’; everyone has always known it. Whatever else may be said about the esoteric dualist belief system we have described, it certainly makes it possible to regard the ex-Soviet defence industry and military intelligentsia as the radiant heroes Prokhanov wishes them to be. These ideas have shown they can also command assent from fairly broad social strata outside the military, who similarly regret the loss of the USSR; but this assent will tend to indicate a preparedness to accept the elite or at least vanguard status Prokhanov gives the military intelligentsia. Red-brown esotericism can thus be viewed as one decay product resulting from the breakdown of the Soviet technocratic system in 1989–91. How stable it will prove, in the unpredictable conditions of today’s Russian Federation, remains to be seen. The Soviet General Staff of the late perestroika era, however, are to be congratulated: whatever mistakes they may be judged to have made in other areas, few bureaucracies can ever have found a more dedicated nightingale.

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..

SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET POLITICS AND SOCIETY

.

Edited by Dr. Andreas Umland |ISSN 1614-3515 1

Андреас Умланд (ред.) | Воплощение Европейской конвенции по правам человека в России. Философские, юридические и эмпирические исследования | ISBN 3-89821-387-0

2

Christian Wipperfürth | Russland – ein vertrauenswürdiger Partner? Grundlagen, Hintergründe und Praxis gegenwärtiger russischer Außenpolitik | Mit einem Vorwort von Heinz Timmermann | ISBN 3-89821-401-X

3

Manja Hussner | Die Übernahme internationalen Rechts in die russische und deutsche Rechtsordnung. Eine vergleichende Analyse zur Völkerrechtsfreundlichkeit der Verfassungen der Russländischen Föderation und der Bundesrepublik Deutschland | Mit einem Vorwort von Rainer Arnold | ISBN 3-89821-438-9

4 5

Matthew Tejada | Bulgaria's Democratic Consolidation and the Kozloduy Nuclear Power Plant (KNPP). The Unattainability of Closure | With a foreword by Richard J. Crampton | ISBN 3-89821-439-7 Марк Григорьевич Меерович | Квадратные метры, определяющие сознание. Государственная жилищная политика в СССР. 1921 – 1941 гг | ISBN 3-89821-474-5

6

Andrei P. Tsygankov, Pavel A.Tsygankov (Eds.) | New Directions in Russian International Studies | ISBN 3-89821-422-2

7

Марк Григорьевич Меерович | Как власть народ к труду приучала. Жилище в СССР – средство управления людьми. 1917 – 1941 гг. | С предисловием Елены Осокиной | ISBN 3-89821-495-8

8

David J. Galbreath | Nation-Building and Minority Politics in Post-Socialist States. Interests, Influence and Identities in Estonia and Latvia | With a foreword by David J. Smith | ISBN 3-89821-467-2

9

Алексей Юрьевич Безугольный | Народы Кавказа в Вооруженных силах СССР в годы Великой Отечественной войны 1941-1945 гг. | С предисловием Николая Бугая | ISBN 3-89821-475-3

10 Вячеслав Лихачев и Владимир Прибыловский (ред.) | Русское Национальное Единство, 1990-2000. В 2-х томах | ISBN 3-89821-523-7 11 Николай Бугай (ред.) | Народы стран Балтии в условиях сталинизма (1940-е – 1950-e годы). Документированная история | ISBN 3-89821-525-3 12 Ingmar Bredies (Hrsg.) | Zur Anatomie der Orange Revolution in der Ukraine. Wechsel des Elitenregimes oder Triumph des Parlamentarismus? | ISBN 3-89821-524-5

13 Anastasia V. Mitrofanova | The Politicization of Russian Orthodoxy. Actors and Ideas | With a foreword by William C. Gay | ISBN 3-89821-481-8

14 Nathan D. Larson | Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the Russo-Jewish Question | ISBN 3-89821-483-4 15 Guido Houben | Kulturpolitik und Ethnizität. Staatliche Kunstförderung im Russland der neunziger Jahre | Mit einem Vorwort von Gert Weisskirchen | ISBN 3-89821-542-3

16 Leonid Luks | Der russische „Sonderweg“? Aufsätze zur neuesten Geschichte Russlands im europäischen Kontext | ISBN 3-89821-496-6

17 Евгений Мороз | История «Мёртвой воды» – от страшной сказки к большой политике. Политическое неоязычество в постсоветской России | ISBN 3-89821-551-2

18 Александр Верховский и Галина Кожевникова (peд.) | Этническая и религиозная интолерантность в российских СМИ. Результаты мониторинга 2001-2004 гг. | ISBN 3-89821-569-5 19 Christian Ganzer | Sowjetisches Erbe und ukrainische Nation. Das Museum der Geschichte des Zaporoger Kosakentums auf der Insel Chortycja | Mit einem Vorwort von Frank Golczewski | ISBN 3-89821-504-0

20 Эльза-Баир Гучинова | Помнить нельзя забыть. Антропология депортационной травмы калмыков | С предисловием Кэролайн Хамфри | ISBN 3-89821-506-7

21 Юлия Лидерман | Мотивы «проверки» и «испытания» в постсоветской культуре. Советское прошлое в российском кинематографе 1990-х годов | С предисловием Евгения Марголита | ISBN 3-89821-511-3

22 Tanya Lokshina, Ray Thomas, Mary Mayer (Eds.) | The Imposition of a Fake Political Settlement in the Northern Caucasus. The 2003 Chechen Presidential Election | ISBN 3-89821-436-2 23 Timothy McCajor Hall, Rosie Read (Eds.) | Changes in the Heart of Europe. Recent Ethnographies of Czechs, Slovaks, Roma, and Sorbs | With an afterword by Zdeněk Salzmann | ISBN 3-89821-606-3

24 Christian Autengruber | Die politischen Parteien in Bulgarien und Rumänien. Eine vergleichende Analyse seit Beginn der 90er Jahre | Mit einem Vorwort von Dorothée de Nève | ISBN 3-89821-476-1

25 Annette Freyberg-Inan with Radu Cristescu | The Ghosts in Our Classrooms, or: John Dewey Meets Ceauşescu. The Promise and the Failures of Civic Education in Romania | ISBN 3-89821-416-8 26 John B. Dunlop | The 2002 Dubrovka and 2004 Beslan Hostage Crises. A Critique of Russian CounterTerrorism | With a foreword by Donald N. Jensen | ISBN 3-89821-608-X

27 Peter Koller | Das touristische Potenzial von Kam’’janec’–Podil’s’kyj. Eine fremdenverkehrsgeographische Untersuchung der Zukunftsperspektiven und Maßnahmenplanung zur Destinationsentwicklung des „ukrainischen Rothenburg“ | Mit einem Vorwort von Kristiane Klemm | ISBN 3-89821-640-3

28 Françoise Daucé, Elisabeth Sieca-Kozlowski (Eds.) | Dedovshchina in the Post-Soviet Military.

Hazing of Russian Army Conscripts in a Comparative Perspective | With a foreword by Dale Herspring | ISBN 3-89821-616-0

29 Florian Strasser | Zivilgesellschaftliche Einflüsse auf die Orange Revolution. Die gewaltlose Massenbewegung und die ukrainische Wahlkrise 2004 | Mit einem Vorwort von Egbert Jahn | ISBN 3-89821-648-9

30 Rebecca S. Katz | The Georgian Regime Crisis of 2003-2004. A Case Study in Post-Soviet Media Representation of Politics, Crime and Corruption | ISBN 3-89821-413-3

31 Vladimir Kantor | Willkür oder Freiheit. Beiträge zur russischen Geschichtsphilosophie | Ediert von Dagmar Herrmann sowie mit einem Vorwort versehen von Leonid Luks | ISBN 3-89821-589-X

32 Laura A. Victoir | The Russian Land Estate Today. A Case Study of Cultural Politics in Post-Soviet Russia | With a foreword by Priscilla Roosevelt | ISBN 3-89821-426-5

33 Ivan Katchanovski | Cleft Countries. Regional Political Divisions and Cultures in Post-Soviet Ukraine and Moldova | With a foreword by Francis Fukuyama | ISBN 3-89821-558-X

34 Florian Mühlfried | Postsowjetische Feiern. Das Georgische Bankett im Wandel | Mit einem Vorwort von Kevin Tuite | ISBN 3-89821-601-2

35 Roger Griffin, Werner Loh, Andreas Umland (Eds.) | Fascism Past and Present, West and East.

An International Debate on Concepts and Cases in the Comparative Study of the Extreme Right | With an afterword by Walter Laqueur | ISBN 3-89821-674-8

36 Sebastian Schlegel | Der „Weiße Archipel“. Sowjetische Atomstädte 1945-1991 | Mit einem Geleitwort von Thomas Bohn | ISBN 3-89821-679-9

37 Vyacheslav Likhachev | Political Anti-Semitism in Post-Soviet Russia. Actors and Ideas in 1991-2003 | Edited and translated from Russian by Eugene Veklerov | ISBN 3-89821-529-6

38 Josette Baer (Ed.) | Preparing Liberty in Central Europe. Political Texts from the Spring of Nations 1848 to the Spring of Prague 1968 | With a foreword by Zdeněk V. David | ISBN 3-89821-546-6

39 Михаил Лукьянов | Российский консерватизм и реформа, 1907-1914 | С предисловием Марка Д. Стейнберга | ISBN 3-89821-503-2

40 Nicola Melloni | Market Without Economy. The 1998 Russian Financial Crisis | With a foreword by Eiji Furukawa | ISBN 3-89821-407-9

41 Dmitrij Chmelnizki | Die Architektur Stalins | Bd. 1: Studien zu Ideologie und Stil | Bd. 2: Bilddokumentation | Mit einem Vorwort von Bruno Flierl | ISBN 3-89821-515-6

42 Katja Yafimava | Post-Soviet Russian-Belarussian Relationships. The Role of Gas Transit Pipelines | With a foreword by Jonathan P. Stern | ISBN 3-89821-655-1

43 Boris Chavkin | Verflechtungen der deutschen und russischen Zeitgeschichte. Aufsätze und Archiv-

funde zu den Beziehungen Deutschlands und der Sowjetunion von 1917 bis 1991 | Ediert von Markus Edlinger sowie mit einem Vorwort versehen von Leonid Luks | ISBN 3-89821-756-6

44 Anastasija Grynenko in Zusammenarbeit mit Claudia Dathe | Die Terminologie des Gerichtswesens der Ukraine und Deutschlands im Vergleich. Eine übersetzungswissenschaftliche Analyse juristischer Fachbegriffe im Deutschen, Ukrainischen und Russischen | Mit einem Vorwort von Ulrich Hartmann | ISBN 3-89821-691-8

45 Anton Burkov | The Impact of the European Convention on Human Rights on Russian Law. Legislation and Application in 1996-2006 | With a foreword by Françoise Hampson | ISBN 978-3-89821-639-5

46 Stina Torjesen, Indra Overland (Eds.) | International Election Observers in Post-Soviet Azerbaijan. Geopolitical Pawns or Agents of Change? | ISBN 978-3-89821-743-9 47 Taras Kuzio | Ukraine – Crimea – Russia. Triangle of Conflict | ISBN 978-3-89821-761-3 48 Claudia Šabić | „Ich erinnere mich nicht, aber L'viv!“ Zur Funktion kultureller Faktoren für die Institutionalisierung und Entwicklung einer ukrainischen Region | Mit einem Vorwort von Melanie Tatur | ISBN 978-3-89821-752-1

49 Marlies Bilz | Tatarstan in der Transformation. Nationaler Diskurs und Politische Praxis 1988-1994 | Mit einem Vorwort von Frank Golczewski | ISBN 978-3-89821-722-4

50 Марлен Ларюэль (ред.) | Современные интерпретации русского национализма | ISBN 978-3-89821-795-8

51 Sonja Schüler | Die ethnische Dimension der Armut. Roma im postsozialistischen Rumänien | Mit einem Vorwort von Anton Sterbling | ISBN 978-3-89821-776-7

52 Галина Кожевникова | Радикальный национализм в России и противодействие ему. Сборник докладов Центра «Сова» за 2004-2007 гг. | С предисловием Александра Верховского | ISBN 978-3-89821-721-7

53 Галина Кожевникова и Владимир Прибыловский | Российская власть в биографиях I. Высшие должностные лица РФ в 2004 г. | ISBN 978-3-89821-796-5

54 Галина Кожевникова и Владимир Прибыловский | Российская власть в биографиях II. Члены Правительства РФ в 2004 г. | ISBN 978-3-89821-797-2

55 Галина Кожевникова и Владимир Прибыловский | Российская власть в биографиях III. Руководители федеральных служб и агентств РФ в 2004 г.| ISBN 978-3-89821-798-9

56 Ileana Petroniu | Privatisierung in Transformationsökonomien. Determinanten der Restrukturierungs-Bereitschaft am Beispiel Polens, Rumäniens und der Ukraine | Mit einem Vorwort von Rainer W. Schäfer | ISBN 978-3-89821-790-3

57 Christian Wipperfürth | Russland und seine GUS-Nachbarn. Hintergründe, aktuelle Entwicklungen und Konflikte in einer ressourcenreichen Region| ISBN 978-3-89821-801-6

58 Togzhan Kassenova | From Antagonism to Partnership. The Uneasy Path of the U.S.-Russian Cooperative Threat Reduction | With a foreword by Christoph Bluth | ISBN 978-3-89821-707-1

59 Alexander Höllwerth | Das sakrale eurasische Imperium des Aleksandr Dugin. Eine Diskursanalyse zum postsowjetischen russischen Rechtsextremismus | Mit einem Vorwort von Dirk Uffelmann | ISBN 978-3-89821-813-9

60 Олег Рябов | «Россия-Матушка». Национализм, гендер и война в России XX века | С предисловием Елены Гощило | ISBN 978-3-89821-487-2

61 Ivan Maistrenko | Borot'bism. A Chapter in the History of the Ukrainian Revolution | With a new Introduction by Chris Ford | Translated by George S. N. Luckyj with the assistance of Ivan L. Rudnytsky | Second, Revised and Expanded Edition ISBN 978-3-8382-1107-7

62 Maryna Romanets | Anamorphosic Texts and Reconfigured Visions. Improvised Traditions in Contemporary Ukrainian and Irish Literature | ISBN 978-3-89821-576-3

63 Paul D'Anieri and Taras Kuzio (Eds.) | Aspects of the Orange Revolution I. Democratization and Elections in Post-Communist Ukraine | ISBN 978-3-89821-698-2

64 Bohdan Harasymiw in collaboration with Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj (Eds.) | Aspects of the Orange Revolution II. Information and Manipulation Strategies in the 2004 Ukrainian Presidential Elections | ISBN 978-3-89821-699-9 65 Ingmar Bredies, Andreas Umland and Valentin Yakushik (Eds.) | Aspects of the Orange Revolution III. The Context and Dynamics of the 2004 Ukrainian Presidential Elections | ISBN 978-3-89821-803-0 66 Ingmar Bredies, Andreas Umland and Valentin Yakushik (Eds.) | Aspects of the Orange Revolution IV. Foreign Assistance and Civic Action in the 2004 Ukrainian Presidential Elections | ISBN 978-3-89821-808-5 67 Ingmar Bredies, Andreas Umland and Valentin Yakushik (Eds.) | Aspects of the Orange Revolution V. Institutional Observation Reports on the 2004 Ukrainian Presidential Elections | ISBN 978-3-89821-809-2 68 Taras Kuzio (Ed.) | Aspects of the Orange Revolution VI. Post-Communist Democratic Revolutions in Comparative Perspective | ISBN 978-3-89821-820-7

69 Tim Bohse | Autoritarismus statt Selbstverwaltung. Die Transformation der kommunalen Politik in der Stadt Kaliningrad 1990-2005 | Mit einem Geleitwort von Stefan Troebst | ISBN 978-3-89821-782-8

70 David Rupp | Die Rußländische Föderation und die russischsprachige Minderheit in Lettland. Eine Fallstudie zur Anwaltspolitik Moskaus gegenüber den russophonen Minderheiten im „Nahen Ausland“ von 1991 bis 2002 | Mit einem Vorwort von Helmut Wagner | ISBN 978-3-89821-778-1

71 Taras Kuzio | Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives on Nationalism. New Directions in Cross-Cultural and Post-Communist Studies | With a foreword by Paul Robert Magocsi | ISBN 978-3-89821-815-3

72 Christine Teichmann | Die Hochschultransformation im heutigen Osteuropa. Kontinuität und Wandel bei der Entwicklung des postkommunistischen Universitätswesens | Mit einem Vorwort von Oskar Anweiler | ISBN 978-3-89821-842-9

73 Julia Kusznir | Der politische Einfluss von Wirtschaftseliten in russischen Regionen. Eine Analyse am Beispiel der Erdöl- und Erdgasindustrie, 1992-2005 | Mit einem Vorwort von Wolfgang Eichwede | ISBN 978-3-89821-821-4

74 Alena Vysotskaya | Russland, Belarus und die EU-Osterweiterung. Zur Minderheitenfrage und zum Problem der Freizügigkeit des Personenverkehrs | Mit einem Vorwort von Katlijn Malfliet | ISBN 978-3-89821-822-1

75 Heiko Pleines (Hrsg.) | Corporate Governance in post-sozialistischen Volkswirtschaften | ISBN 978-3-89821-766-8

76 Stefan Ihrig | Wer sind die Moldawier? Rumänismus versus Moldowanismus in Historiographie und Schulbüchern der Republik Moldova, 1991-2006 | Mit einem Vorwort von Holm Sundhaussen | ISBN 978-3-89821-466-7

77 Galina Kozhevnikova in collaboration with Alexander Verkhovsky and Eugene Veklerov | UltraNationalism and Hate Crimes in Contemporary Russia. The 2004-2006 Annual Reports of Moscow’s SOVA Center | With a foreword by Stephen D. Shenfield | ISBN 978-3-89821-868-9

78 Florian Küchler | The Role of the European Union in Moldova’s Transnistria Conflict | With a foreword by Christopher Hill | ISBN 978-3-89821-850-4

79 Bernd Rechel | The Long Way Back to Europe. Minority Protection in Bulgaria | With a foreword by Richard Crampton | ISBN 978-3-89821-863-4

80 Peter W. Rodgers | Nation, Region and History in Post-Communist Transitions. Identity Politics in Ukraine, 1991-2006 | With a foreword by Vera Tolz | ISBN 978-3-89821-903-7

81 Stephanie Solywoda | The Life and Work of Semen L. Frank. A Study of Russian Religious Philosophy | With a foreword by Philip Walters | ISBN 978-3-89821-457-5

82 Vera Sokolova | Cultural Politics of Ethnicity. Discourses on Roma in Communist Czechoslovakia | ISBN 978-3-89821-864-1

83 Natalya Shevchik Ketenci | Kazakhstani Enterprises in Transition. The Role of Historical Regional Development in Kazakhstan’s Post-Soviet Economic Transformation | ISBN 978-3-89821-831-3

84 Martin Malek, Anna Schor-Tschudnowskaja (Hgg.) | Europa im Tschetschenienkrieg. Zwischen politischer Ohnmacht und Gleichgültigkeit | Mit einem Vorwort von Lipchan Basajewa | ISBN 978-3-89821-676-0

85 Stefan Meister | Das postsowjetische Universitätswesen zwischen nationalem und internationalem Wandel. Die Entwicklung der regionalen Hochschule in Russland als Gradmesser der Systemtransformation | Mit einem Vorwort von Joan DeBardeleben | ISBN 978-3-89821-891-7

86 Konstantin Sheiko in collaboration with Stephen Brown | Nationalist Imaginings of the Russian Past. Anatolii Fomenko and the Rise of Alternative History in Post-Communist Russia | With a foreword by Donald Ostrowski | ISBN 978-3-89821-915-0

87 Sabine Jenni | Wie stark ist das „Einige Russland“? Zur Parteibindung der Eliten und zum Wahlerfolg der Machtpartei im Dezember 2007 | Mit einem Vorwort von Klaus Armingeon | ISBN 978-3-89821-961-7

88 Thomas Borén | Meeting-Places of Transformation. Urban Identity, Spatial Representations and Local Politics in Post-Soviet St Petersburg | ISBN 978-3-89821-739-2

89 Aygul Ashirova | Stalinismus und Stalin-Kult in Zentralasien. Turkmenistan 1924-1953 | Mit einem Vorwort von Leonid Luks | ISBN 978-3-89821-987-7

90 Leonid Luks | Freiheit oder imperiale Größe? Essays zu einem russischen Dilemma | ISBN 978-3-8382-0011-8 91 Christopher Gilley | The ‘Change of Signposts’ in the Ukrainian Emigration. A Contribution to the History of Sovietophilism in the 1920s | With a foreword by Frank Golczewski | ISBN 978-3-89821-965-5

92 Philipp Casula, Jeronim Perovic (Eds.) | Identities and Politics During the Putin Presidency. The Discursive Foundations of Russia's Stability | With a foreword by Heiko Haumann | ISBN 978-3-8382-0015-6

93 Marcel Viëtor | Europa und die Frage nach seinen Grenzen im Osten. Zur Konstruktion ‚europäischer Identität’ in Geschichte und Gegenwart | Mit einem Vorwort von Albrecht Lehmann | ISBN 978-3-8382-0045-3

94 Ben Hellman, Andrei Rogachevskii | Filming the Unfilmable. Casper Wrede's 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich' | Second, Revised and Expanded Edition | ISBN 978-3-8382-0044-6

95 Eva Fuchslocher | Vaterland, Sprache, Glaube. Orthodoxie und Nationenbildung am Beispiel Georgiens | Mit einem Vorwort von Christina von Braun | ISBN 978-3-89821-884-9

96 Vladimir Kantor | Das Westlertum und der Weg Russlands. Zur Entwicklung der russischen Literatur und Philosophie | Ediert von Dagmar Herrmann | Mit einem Beitrag von Nikolaus Lobkowicz | ISBN 978-3-8382-0102-3

97 Kamran Musayev | Die postsowjetische Transformation im Baltikum und Südkaukasus. Eine vergleichende Untersuchung der politischen Entwicklung Lettlands und Aserbaidschans 1985-2009 | Mit einem Vorwort von Leonid Luks | Ediert von Sandro Henschel | ISBN 978-3-8382-0103-0

98 Tatiana Zhurzhenko | Borderlands into Bordered Lands. Geopolitics of Identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine | With a foreword by Dieter Segert | ISBN 978-3-8382-0042-2

99 Кирилл Галушко, Лидия Смола (ред.) | Пределы падения – варианты украинского будущего. Аналитико-прогностические исследования | ISBN 978-3-8382-0148-1 100 Michael Minkenberg (Ed.) | Historical Legacies and the Radical Right in Post-Cold War Central and Eastern Europe | With an afterword by Sabrina P. Ramet | ISBN 978-3-8382-0124-5 101 David-Emil Wickström | Rocking St. Petersburg. Transcultural Flows and Identity Politics in the St. Petersburg Popular Music Scene | With a foreword by Yngvar B. Steinholt | Second, Revised and Expanded Edition | ISBN 978-3-8382-0100-9

102 Eva Zabka | Eine neue „Zeit der Wirren“? Der spät- und postsowjetische Systemwandel 1985-2000 im Spiegel russischer gesellschaftspolitischer Diskurse | Mit einem Vorwort von Margareta Mommsen | ISBN 978-3-8382-0161-0

103 Ulrike Ziemer | Ethnic Belonging, Gender and Cultural Practices. Youth Identitites in Contemporary Russia | With a foreword by Anoop Nayak | ISBN 978-3-8382-0152-8

104 Ksenia Chepikova | ‚Einiges Russland’ - eine zweite KPdSU? Aspekte der Identitätskonstruktion einer postsowjetischen „Partei der Macht“ | Mit einem Vorwort von Torsten Oppelland | ISBN 978-3-8382-0311-9

105 Леонид Люкс | Западничество или евразийство? Демократия или идеократия? Сборник статей об исторических дилеммах России | С предисловием Владимира Кантора | ISBN 978-3-8382-0211-2

106 Anna Dost | Das russische Verfassungsrecht auf dem Weg zum Föderalismus und zurück. Zum Konflikt von Rechtsnormen und -wirklichkeit in der Russländischen Föderation von 1991 bis 2009 | Mit einem Vorwort von Alexander Blankenagel | ISBN 978-3-8382-0292-1

107 Philipp Herzog | Sozialistische Völkerfreundschaft, nationaler Widerstand oder harmloser Zeitvertreib? Zur politischen Funktion der Volkskunst im sowjetischen Estland | Mit einem Vorwort von Andreas Kappeler | ISBN 978-3-8382-0216-7

108 Marlène Laruelle (Ed.) | Russian Nationalism, Foreign Policy, and Identity Debates in Putin's Russia. New Ideological Patterns after the Orange Revolution | ISBN 978-3-8382-0325-6 109 Michail Logvinov | Russlands Kampf gegen den internationalen Terrorismus. Eine kritische Bestandsaufnahme des Bekämpfungsansatzes | Mit einem Geleitwort von Hans-Henning Schröder und einem Vorwort von Eckhard Jesse | ISBN 978-3-8382-0329-4

110 John B. Dunlop | The Moscow Bombings of September 1999. Examinations of Russian Terrorist Attacks at the Onset of Vladimir Putin's Rule | Second, Revised and Expanded Edition | ISBN 978-3-8382-0388-1

111 Андрей А. Ковалёв | Свидетельство из-за кулис российской политики I. Можно ли делать добрo

из зла? (Воспоминания и размышления о последних советских и первых послесоветских годах) | With a foreword by Peter Reddaway | ISBN 978-3-8382-0302-7

112 Андрей А. Ковалёв | Свидетельство из-за кулис российской политики II. Угроза для себя и окружающих (Наблюдения и предостережения относительно происходящего после 2000 г.) | ISBN 978-3-8382-0303-4 113 Bernd Kappenberg | Zeichen setzen für Europa. Der Gebrauch europäischer lateinischer Sonderzeichen in der deutschen Öffentlichkeit | Mit einem Vorwort von Peter Schlobinski | ISBN 978-3-89821-749-1

114 Ivo Mijnssen | The Quest for an Ideal Youth in Putin’s Russia I. Back to Our Future! History, Modernity, and Patriotism according to Nashi, 2005-2013 | With a foreword by Jeronim Perović | Second, Revised and Expanded Edition | ISBN 978-3-8382-0368-3

115 Jussi Lassila | The Quest for an Ideal Youth in Putin’s Russia II. The Search for Distinctive Conformism in the Political Communication of Nashi, 2005-2009 | With a foreword by Kirill Postoutenko | Second, Revised and Expanded Edition | ISBN 978-3-8382-0415-4

116 Valerio Trabandt | Neue Nachbarn, gute Nachbarschaft? Die EU als internationaler Akteur am Beispiel ihrer Demokratieförderung in Belarus und der Ukraine 2004-2009 | Mit einem Vorwort von Jutta Joachim | ISBN 978-3-8382-0437-6

117 Fabian Pfeiffer | Estlands Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik I. Der estnische Atlantizismus nach der wiedererlangten Unabhängigkeit 1991-2004 | Mit einem Vorwort von Helmut Hubel | ISBN 978-3-8382-0127-6

118 Jana Podßuweit | Estlands Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik II. Handlungsoptionen eines Kleinstaates im Rahmen seiner EU-Mitgliedschaft (2004-2008) | Mit einem Vorwort von Helmut Hubel | ISBN 978-3-8382-0440-6

119 Karin Pointner | Estlands Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik III. Eine gedächtnispolitische Analyse estnischer Entwicklungskooperation 2006-2010 | Mit einem Vorwort von Karin Liebhart | ISBN 978-3-8382-0435-2

120 Ruslana Vovk | Die Offenheit der ukrainischen Verfassung für das Völkerrecht und die europäische Integration | Mit einem Vorwort von Alexander Blankenagel | ISBN 978-3-8382-0481-9

121 Mykhaylo Banakh | Die Relevanz der Zivilgesellschaft bei den postkommunistischen Transformationsprozessen in mittel- und osteuropäischen Ländern. Das Beispiel der spät- und postsowjetischen Ukraine 1986-2009 | Mit einem Vorwort von Gerhard Simon | ISBN 978-3-8382-0499-4

122 Michael Moser | Language Policy and the Discourse on Languages in Ukraine under President Viktor Yanukovych (25 February 2010–28 October 2012) | ISBN 978-3-8382-0497-0 (Paperback edition) | ISBN 978-3-8382-0507-6 (Hardcover edition)

123 Nicole Krome | Russischer Netzwerkkapitalismus Restrukturierungsprozesse in der Russischen Föderation am Beispiel des Luftfahrtunternehmens „Aviastar“ | Mit einem Vorwort von Petra Stykow | ISBN 978-3-8382-0534-2

124 David R. Marples | 'Our Glorious Past'. Lukashenka‘s Belarus and the Great Patriotic War | ISBN 978-3-8382-0574-8 (Paperback edition) | ISBN 978-3-8382-0675-2 (Hardcover edition)

125 Ulf Walther | Russlands „neuer Adel“. Die Macht des Geheimdienstes von Gorbatschow bis Putin | Mit einem Vorwort von Hans-Georg Wieck | ISBN 978-3-8382-0584-7

126 Simon Geissbühler (Hrsg.) | Kiew – Revolution 3.0. Der Euromaidan 2013/14 und die Zukunftsperspektiven der Ukraine | ISBN 978-3-8382-0581-6 (Paperback edition) | ISBN 978-3-8382-0681-3 (Hardcover edition)

127 Andrey Makarychev | Russia and the EU in a Multipolar World. Discourses, Identities, Norms | With a foreword by Klaus Segbers | ISBN 978-3-8382-0629-5

128 Roland Scharff | Kasachstan als postsowjetischer Wohlfahrtsstaat. Die Transformation des sozialen Schutzsystems | Mit einem Vorwort von Joachim Ahrens | ISBN 978-3-8382-0622-6

129 Katja Grupp | Bild Lücke Deutschland. Kaliningrader Studierende sprechen über Deutschland | Mit einem Vorwort von Martin Schulz | ISBN 978-3-8382-0552-6

130 Konstantin Sheiko, Stephen Brown | History as Therapy. Alternative History and Nationalist Imaginings in Russia, 1991-2014 | ISBN 978-3-8382-0665-3

131 Elisa Kriza | Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Cold War Icon, Gulag Author, Russian Nationalist? A Study of the Western Reception of his Literary Writings, Historical Interpretations, and Political Ideas | With a foreword by Andrei Rogatchevski | ISBN 978-3-8382-0589-2 (Paperback edition) | ISBN 978-3-8382-0690-5 (Hardcover edition)

132 Serghei Golunov | The Elephant in the Room. Corruption and Cheating in Russian Universities | ISBN 978-3-8382-0570-0

133 Manja Hussner, Rainer Arnold (Hgg.) | Verfassungsgerichtsbarkeit in Zentralasien I. Sammlung von Verfassungstexten | ISBN 978-3-8382-0595-3

134 Nikolay Mitrokhin | Die „Russische Partei“. Die Bewegung der russischen Nationalisten in der UdSSR 1953-1985 | Aus dem Russischen übertragen von einem Übersetzerteam unter der Leitung von Larisa Schippel | ISBN 978-3-8382-0024-8

135 Manja Hussner, Rainer Arnold (Hgg.) | Verfassungsgerichtsbarkeit in Zentralasien II. Sammlung von Verfassungstexten | ISBN 978-3-8382-0597-7

136 Manfred Zeller | Das sowjetische Fieber. Fußballfans im poststalinistischen Vielvölkerreich | Mit einem Vorwort von Nikolaus Katzer | ISBN 978-3-8382-0757-5

137 Kristin Schreiter | Stellung und Entwicklungspotential zivilgesellschaftlicher Gruppen in Russland. Menschenrechtsorganisationen im Vergleich | ISBN 978-3-8382-0673-8 138 David R. Marples, Frederick V. Mills (Eds.) | Ukraine’s Euromaidan. Analyses of a Civil Revolution | ISBN 978-3-8382-0660-8

139 Bernd Kappenberg | Setting Signs for Europe. Why Diacritics Matter for European Integration | With a foreword

by Peter Schlobinski | ISBN 978-3-8382-0663-9

140 René Lenz | Internationalisierung, Kooperation und Transfer. Externe bildungspolitische Akteure in der Russischen Föderation | Mit einem Vorwort von Frank Ettrich | ISBN 978-3-8382-0751-3

141 Juri Plusnin, Yana Zausaeva, Natalia Zhidkevich, Artemy Pozanenko | Wandering Workers. Mores, Behavior, Way of Life, and Political Status of Domestic Russian Labor Migrants | Translated by Julia Kazantseva | ISBN 978-3-8382-0653-0

142 David J. Smith (Eds.) | Latvia – A Work in Progress? 100 Years of State- and Nation-Building | ISBN 978-3-8382-0648-6

143 Инна Чувычкина (ред.) | Экспортные нефте- и газопроводы на постсоветском пространстве. Aнализ трубопроводной политики в свете теории международных отношений | ISBN 978-3-8382-0822-0

144 Johann Zajaczkowski | Russland – eine pragmatische Großmacht? Eine rollentheoretische Untersuchung russischer Außenpolitik am Beispiel der Zusammenarbeit mit den USA nach 9/11 und des Georgienkrieges von 2008 | Mit einem Vorwort von Siegfried Schieder | ISBN 978-3-8382-0837-4

145 Boris Popivanov | Changing Images of the Left in Bulgaria. The Challenge of Post-Communism in the Early 21st Century | ISBN 978-3-8382-0667-7

146 Lenka Krátká | A History of the Czechoslovak Ocean Shipping Company 1948-1989. How a Small, Landlocked Country Ran Maritime Business During the Cold War | ISBN 978-3-8382-0666-0

147 Alexander Sergunin | Explaining Russian Foreign Policy Behavior. Theory and Practice | ISBN 978-3-8382-0752-0

148 Darya Malyutina | Migrant Friendships in a Super-Diverse City. Russian-Speakers and their Social Relationships in London in the 21st Century | With a foreword by Claire Dwyer | ISBN 978-3-8382-0652-3

149 Alexander Sergunin, Valery Konyshev | Russia in the Arctic. Hard or Soft Power? | ISBN 978-3-8382-0753-7 150 John J. Maresca | Helsinki Revisited. A Key U.S. Negotiator’s Memoirs on the Development of the CSCE into the OSCE | With a foreword by Hafiz Pashayev | ISBN 978-3-8382-0852-7

151 Jardar Østbø | The New Third Rome. Readings of a Russian Nationalist Myth | With a foreword by Pål Kolstø | ISBN 978-3-8382-0870-1

152 Simon Kordonsky | Socio-Economic Foundations of the Russian Post-Soviet Regime. The Resource-Based Economy and Estate-Based Social Structure of Contemporary Russia | With a foreword by Svetlana Barsukova | ISBN 978-3-8382-0775-9

153 Duncan Leitch | Assisting Reform in Post-Communist Ukraine 2000–2012. The Illusions of Donors and the Disillusion of Beneficiaries | With a foreword by Kataryna Wolczuk | ISBN 978-3-8382-0844-2

154 Abel Polese | Limits of a Post-Soviet State. How Informality Replaces, Renegotiates, and Reshapes Governance in Contemporary Ukraine | With a foreword by Colin Williams | ISBN 978-3-8382-0845-9

155 Mikhail Suslov (Ed.) | Digital Orthodoxy in the Post-Soviet World. The Russian Orthodox Church and Web 2.0 | With a foreword by Father Cyril Hovorun | ISBN 978-3-8382-0871-8

156 Leonid Luks | Zwei „Sonderwege“? Russisch-deutsche Parallelen und Kontraste (1917-2014).

Vergleichende Essays | ISBN 978-3-8382-0823-7

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

158 Edmund Griffiths | Aleksandr Prokhanov and Post-Soviet Esotericism | ISBN 978-3-8382-0963-0 159 Timm Beichelt, Susann Worschech (Eds.) | Transnational Ukraine? Networks and Ties that Influence(d) Contemporary Ukraine | ISBN 978-3-8382-0944-9

160 Mieste Hotopp-Riecke | Die Tataren der Krim zwischen Assimilation und Selbstbehauptung. Der Aufbau des krimtatarischen Bildungswesens nach Deportation und Heimkehr (1990-2005) | Mit einem Vorwort von Swetlana Czerwonnaja | ISBN 978-3-89821-940-2

161 Olga Bertelsen (Ed.) | Revolution and War in Contemporary Ukraine. The Challenge of Change | ISBN 978-3-8382-1016-2

162 Natalya Ryabinska | Ukraine's Post-Communist Mass Media. Between Capture and Commercialization | With a foreword by Marta Dyczok | ISBN 978-3-8382-1011-7

163 Alexandra Cotofana, James M. Nyce (Eds.) | Religion and Magic in Socialist and Post-Socialist Contexts. Historic and Ethnographic Case Studies of Orthodoxy, Heterodoxy, and Alternative Spirituality | With a foreword by Patrick L. Michelson | ISBN 978-3-8382-0989-0

164 Nozima Akhrarkhodjaeva | The Instrumentalisation of Mass Media in Electoral Authoritarian Regimes. Evidence from Russia’s Presidential Election Campaigns of 2000 and 2008 | ISBN 978-3-8382-1013-1 165 Yulia Krasheninnikova | Informal Healthcare in Contemporary Russia. Sociographic Essays on the PostSoviet Infrastructure for Alternative Healing Practices | ISBN 978-3-8382-0970-8

166 Peter Kaiser | Das Schachbrett der Macht. Die Handlungsspielräume eines sowjetischen Funktionärs unter Stalin am Beispiel des Generalsekretärs des Komsomol Aleksandr Kosarev (1929-1938) | Mit einem Vorwort von Dietmar Neutatz | ISBN 978-3-8382-1052-0

167 Oksana Kim | The Effects and Implications of Kazakhstan’s Adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards. A Resource Dependence Perspective | With a foreword by Svetlana Vlady | ISBN 978-3-8382-0987-6

168 Anna Sanina | Patriotic Education in Contemporary Russia. Sociological Studies in the Making of the PostSoviet Citizen | With a foreword by Anna Oldfield | ISBN 978-3-8382-0993-7

169 Rudolf Wolters | Spezialist in Sibirien Faksimile der 1933 erschienenen ersten Ausgabe | Mit einem Vorwort von Dmitrij Chmelnizki | ISBN 978-3-8382-0515-1

170 Michal Vít, Magdalena M. Baran (Eds.) | Transregional versus National Perspectives on Contemporary Central European History. Studies on the Building of Nation-States and Their Cooperation in the 20th and 21st Century | With a foreword by Petr Vágner | ISBN 978-3-8382-1015-5

171 Philip Gamaghelyan | Conflict Resolution Beyond the International Relations Paradigm. Evolving Designs as a Transformative Practice in Nagorno-Karabakh and Syria | With a foreword by Susan Allen | ISBN 978-3-8382-1057-5

172 Maria Shagina | Joining a Prestigious Club. Cooperation with Europarties and Its Impact on Party Development in Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine 2004–2015 | With a foreword by Kataryna Wolczuk | ISBN 978-3-8382-1084-1

173 Alexandra Cotofana, James M. Nyce (Eds.) | Religion and Magic in Socialist and Post-Socialist Contexts II. Baltic, Eastern European, and Post-USSR Case Studies | With a foreword by Anita Stasulane | ISBN 978-3-8382-0990-6

174 Barbara Kunz | Kind Words, Cruise Missiles, and Everything in Between. The Use of Power Resources in U.S. Policies towards Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus 1989–2008 | With a foreword by William Hill | ISBN 978-3-8382-1065-0

175 Eduard Klein | Bildungskorruption in Russland und der Ukraine. Eine komparative Analyse der Performanz staatlicher Antikorruptionsmaßnahmen im Hochschulsektor am Beispiel universitärer Aufnahmeprüfungen | Mit einem Vorwort von Heiko Pleines | ISBN 978-3-8382-0995-1

176 Markus Soldner | Politischer Kapitalismus im postsowjetischen Russland. Die politische, wirtschaftliche und mediale Transformation in den 1990er Jahren | Mit einem Vorwort von Wolfgang Ismayr | ISBN 978-3-8382-1222-7

177 Anton Oleinik | Building Ukraine from Within. A Sociological, Institutional, and Economic Analysis of a NationState in the Making | ISBN 978-3-8382-1150-3

178 Peter Rollberg, Marlene Laruelle (Eds.) | Mass Media in the Post-Soviet World. Market Forces, State Actors, and Political Manipulation in the Informational Environment after Communism | ISBN 978-3-8382-1116-9

179 Mikhail Minakov | Development and Dystopia. Studies in Post-Soviet Ukraine and Eastern Europe | With a foreword by Alexander Etkind | ISBN 978-3-8382-1112-1

180 Aijan Sharshenova | The European Union’s Democracy Promotion in Central Asia. A Study of Political Interests, Influence, and Development in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan in 2007–2013 | With a foreword by Gordon Crawford | ISBN 978-3-8382-1151-0

181 Andrey Makarychev, Alexandra Yatsyk (Eds.) | Boris Nemtsov and Russian Politics. Power and Resistance | With a foreword by Zhanna Nemtsova | ISBN 978-3-8382-1122-0

182 Sophie Falsini | The Euromaidan’s Effect on Civil Society. Why and How Ukrainian Social Capital Increased after the Revolution of Dignity | With a foreword by Susann Worschech | ISBN 978-3-8382-1131-2

183 Valentyna Romanova, Andreas Umland (Eds.) | Ukraine’s Decentralization. Challenges and Implications of the Local Governance Reform after the Euromaidan Revolution | ISBN 978-3-8382-1162-6

184 Leonid Luks | A Fateful Triangle. Essays on Contemporary Russian, German and Polish History | ISBN 978-3-8382-1143-5

185 John B. Dunlop | The February 2015 Assassination of Boris Nemtsov and the Flawed Trial of his Alleged Killers. An Exploration of Russia’s “Crime of the 21st Century” | ISBN 978-3-8382-1188-6 186 Vasile Rotaru | Russia, the EU, and the Eastern Partnership. Building Bridges or Digging Trenches? | ISBN 978-3-8382-1134-3

187 Marina Lebedeva | Russian Studies of International Relations. From the Soviet Past to the Post-Cold-War Present | With a foreword by Andrei P. Tsygankov | ISBN 978-3-8382-0851-0

188 Tomasz Stępniewski, George Soroka (Eds.) | Ukraine after Maidan. Revisiting Domestic and Regional Security | ISBN 978-3-8382-1075-9

189 Petar Cholakov | Ethnic Entrepreneurs Unmasked. Political Institutions and Ethnic Conflicts in Contemporary Bulgaria | ISBN 978-3-8382-1189-3

190 A. Salem, G. Hazeldine, D. Morgan (Eds.) | Higher Education in Post-Communist States. Comparative and Sociological Perspectives | ISBN 978-3-8382-1183-1

191 Igor Torbakov | After Empire. Nationalist Imagination and Symbolic Politics in Russia and Eurasia in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century | With a foreword by Serhii Plokhy | ISBN 978-3-8382-1217-3

192 Aleksandr Burakovskiy | Jewish-Ukrainian Relations in Late and Post-Soviet Ukraine. Articles, Lectures and Essays from 1986 to 2016 | ISBN 978-3-8382-1210-4

193 Natalia Shapovalova, Olga Burlyuk (Eds.) | Civil Society in Post-Euromaidan Ukraine. From Revolution to Consolidation | With a foreword by Richard Youngs | ISBN 978-3-8382-1216-6

194 Franz Preissler | Positionsverteidigung, Imperialismus oder Irredentismus? Russland und die „Russischsprachigen“, 1991–2015 | ISBN 978-3-8382-1262-3

195 Marian Madeła | Der Reformprozess in der Ukraine 2014-2017. Eine Fallstudie zur Reform der öffentlichen Verwaltung | Mit einem Vorwort von Martin Malek | ISBN 978-3-8382-1266-1

196 Anke Giesen | „Wie kann denn der Sieger ein Verbrecher sein?“ Eine diskursanalytische Untersuchung der russlandweiten Debatte über Konzept und Verstaatlichungsprozess der Lagergedenkstätte „Perm’-36“ im Ural | ISBN 978-3-8382-1284-5

197 Alla Leukavets | The Integration Policies of Belarus and Ukraine vis-à-vis the EU and Russia. A Comparative Case Study Through the Prism of a Two-Level Game Approach | ISBN 978-3-8382-1247-0

198 Oksana Kim | The Development and Challenges of Russian Corporate Governance I. The Roles and Functions of Boards of Directors | With a foreword by Sheila M. Puffer | ISBN 978-3-8382-1287-6

199 Thomas D. Grant | International Law and the Post-Soviet Space I. Essays on Chechnya and the Baltic States | With a foreword by Stephen M. Schwebel | ISBN 978-3-8382-1279-1

200 Thomas D. Grant | International Law and the Post-Soviet Space II. Essays on Ukraine, Intervention, and Non-Proliferation | ISBN 978-3-8382-1280-7

201 Slavomír Michálek, Michal Štefansky | The Age of Fear. The Cold War and Its Influence on Czechoslovakia 1945–1968 | ISBN 978-3-8382-1285-2

202 Iulia-Sabina Joja | Romania’s Strategic Culture 1990–2014. Continuity and Change in a Post-Communist Country’s Evolution of National Interests and Security Policies | With a foreword by Heiko Biehl | ISBN 978-3-8382-1286-9

203 Andrei Rogatchevski, Yngvar B. Steinholt, Arve Hansen, David-Emil Wickström | War of Songs.

Popular Music and Recent Russia-Ukraine Relations | With a foreword by Artemy Troitsky | ISBN 978-3-8382-1173-2

204 Maria Lipman (Ed.) | Russian Voices on Post-Crimea Russia. An Almanac of Counterpoint Essays from 2015–2018 | ISBN 978-3-8382-1251-7

205 Ksenia Maksimovtsova | Language Conflicts in Contemporary Estonia, Latvia, and Ukraine. A Comparative Exploration of Discourses in Post-Soviet Russian-Language Digital Media | With a foreword by Ammon Cheskin | ISBN 978-3-8382-1282-1

206 Michal Vít | The EU’s Impact on Identity Formation in East-Central Europe between 2004 and 2013. Perceptions of the Nation and Europe in Political Parties of the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia | With a foreword

by Andrea Petö | ISBN 978-3-8382-1275-3

207 Per A. Rudling | Tarnished Heroes. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists in the Memory Politics of Post-Soviet Ukraine | ISBN 978-3-8382-0999-9

208 Kaja Gadowska, Peter Solomon (Eds.) | Legal Change in Post-Communist States. Progress, Reversions, Explanations | ISBN 978-3-8382-1312-5

209 Pawel Kowal, Georges Mink, Iwona Reichardt (Eds.) | Three Revolutions: Mobilization and Change in Contemporary Ukraine I. Theoretical Aspects and Analyses on Religion, Memory, and Identity | ISBN 9783-8382-1321-7

210 Pawel Kowal, Georges Mink, Adam Reichardt, Iwona Reichardt (Eds.) | Three Revolutions: Mobilization and Change in Contemporary Ukraine II. An Oral History of the Revolution on Granite, Orange Revolution, and Revolution of Dignity | ISBN 978-3-8382-1323-1

211 Li Bennich-Björkman, Sergiy Kurbatov (Eds.) | When the Future Came. The Collapse of the USSR and the Emergence of National Memory in Post-Soviet History Textbooks | ISBN 978-3-8382-1335-4

212 Olga R. Gulina | Migration as a (Geo-)Political Challenge in the Post-Soviet Space. Border Regimes, Policy Choices, Visa Agendas | With a foreword by Nils Muižnieks | ISBN 978-3-8382-1338-5

213 Sanna Turoma, Kaarina Aitamurto, Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover (Eds.) | Religion, Expression, and Patriotism in Russia. Essays on Post-Soviet Society and the State. ISBN 978-3-8382-1346-0 214 Vasif Huseynov | Geopolitical Rivalries in the “Common Neighborhood”. Russia's Conflict with the West, Soft Power, and Neoclassical Realism | With a foreword by Nicholas Ross Smith | ISBN 978-3-8382-1277-7

215 Mikhail Suslov | Geopolitical Imagination. Ideology and Utopia in Post-Soviet Russia | With a foreword by Mark Bassin | ISBN 978-3-8382-1361-3

216 Alexander Etkind, Mikhail Minakov (Eds.) | Ideology after Union. Political Doctrines, Discourses, and Debates in Post-Soviet Societies | ISBN 978-3-8382-1388-0

217 Jakob Mischke, Oleksandr Zabirko (Hgg.) | Protestbewegungen im langen Schatten des Kreml.

Aufbruch und Resignation in Russland und der Ukraine | ISBN 978-3-8382-0926-5

218 Oksana Huss | How Corruption and Anti-Corruption Policies Sustain Hybrid Regimes. Strategies of Political Domination under Ukraine’s Presidents in 1994-2014 | With a foreword by Tobias Debiel and Andrea Gawrich | ISBN 978-3-8382-1430-6

219 Dmitry Travin, Vladimir Gel'man, Otar Marganiya | The Russian Path. Ideas, Interests, Institutions, Illusions | With a foreword by Vladimir Ryzhkov | ISBN 978-3-8382-1421-4

220 Gergana Dimova | Political Uncertainty. A Comparative Exploration | With a foreword by Todor Yalamov and Rumena Filipova | ISBN 978-3-8382-1385-9

221 Torben Waschke | Russland in Transition. Geopolitik zwischen Raum, Identität und Machtinteressen | Mit einem Vorwort von Andreas Dittmann | ISBN 978-3-8382-1480-1

222 Steven Jobbitt, Zsolt Bottlik, Marton Berki (Eds.) | Power and Identity in the Post-Soviet Realm. Geographies of Ethnicity and Nationality after 1991 | ISBN 978-3-8382-1399-6 223 Daria Buteiko | Erinnerungsort. Ort des Gedenkens, der Erholung oder der Einkehr? Kommunismus-Erinnerung am Beispiel der Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer sowie des Soloveckij-Klosters und -Museumsparks | ISBN 978-3-8382-1367-5

224 Olga Bertelsen (Ed.) | Russian Active Measures. Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow | With a foreword by Jan Goldman | ISBN 978-3-8382-1529-7

225 David Mandel | “Optimizing” Higher Education in Russia. University Teachers and their Union “Universitetskaya solidarnost’” | ISBN 978-3-8382-1519-8

226 Mikhail Minakov, Gwendolyn Sasse, Daria Isachenko (Eds.) | Post-Soviet Secessionism. Nation-Building and State-Failure after Communism | ISBN 978-3-8382-1538-9

227 Jakob Hauter (Ed.) | Civil War? Interstate War? Hybrid War? Dimensions and Interpretations of the Donbas Conflict in 2014–2020 | With a foreword by Andrew Wilson | ISBN 978-3-8382-1383-5

228 Tima T. Moldogaziev, Gene A. Brewer, J. Edward Kellough (Eds.) | Public Policy and Politics in Georgia. Lessons from Post-Soviet Transition | With a foreword by Dan Durning | ISBN 978-3-8382-1535-8 229 Oxana Schmies (Ed.) | NATO’s Enlargement and Russia. A Strategic Challenge in the Past and Future | With a foreword by Vladimir Kara-Murza | ISBN 978-3-8382-1478-8

230 Christopher Ford | Ukapisme – Une Gauche perdue. Le marxisme anti-colonial dans la révolution ukrainienne 1917-1925 | Avec une préface de Vincent Présumey | ISBN 978-3-8382-0899-2

231 Anna Kutkina | Between Lenin and Bandera. Decommunization and Multivocality in Post-Euromaidan Ukraine | With a foreword by Juri Mykkänen | ISBN 978-3-8382-1506-8

232 Lincoln E. Flake | Defending the Faith. The Russian Orthodox Church and the Demise of Religious Pluralism | With a foreword by Peter Martland | ISBN 978-3-8382-1378-1

233 Nikoloz Samkharadze | Russia’s Recognition of the Independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Analysis of a Deviant Case in Moscow’s Foreign Policy | With a foreword by Neil MacFarlane | ISBN 978-38382-1414-6

234 Arve Hansen | Urban Protest. A Spatial Perspective on Kyiv, Minsk, and Moscow | With a foreword by Julie Wilhelmsen | ISBN 978-3-8382-1495-5

235 Eleonora Narvselius, Julie Fedor (Eds.) | Diversity in the East-Central European Borderlands.

Memories, Cityscapes, People | ISBN 978-3-8382-1523-5

236 Regina Elsner | The Russian Orthodox Church and Modernity. A Historical and Theological Investigation into Eastern Christianity between Unity and Plurality | With a foreword by Mikhail Suslov | ISBN 978-3-8382-1568-6

237 Bo Petersson | The Putin Predicament. Problems of Legitimacy and Succession in Russia | With a foreword by J. Paul Goode | ISBN 978-3-8382-1050-6

238 Jonathan Otto Pohl | The Years of Great Silence. The Deportation, Special Settlement, and Mobilization into the Labor Army of Ethnic Germans in the USSR, 1941–1955 | ISBN 978-3-8382-1630-0

239 Mikhail Minakov (Ed.) | Inventing Majorities. Ideological Creativity in Post-Soviet Societies | ISBN 978-3-83821641-6

240 Robert M. Cutler | Soviet and Post-Soviet Foreign Policies I. East-South Relations and the Political Economy of the Communist Bloc, 1971–1991 | With a foreword by Roger E. Kanet | ISBN 978-3-8382-1654-6

241 Izabella Agardi | On the Verge of History. Life Stories of Rural Women from Serbia, Romania, and Hungary, 1920–2020 | With a foreword by Andrea Pető | ISBN 978-3-8382-1602-7

242 Sebastian Schäffer (Ed.) | Ukraine in Central and Eastern Europe. Kyiv's Foreign Affairs and the International Relations of the Post-Communist Region | With a foreword by Pavlo Klimkin | ISBN 978-3-8382-1615-7

243 Volodymyr Dubrovskyi, Kalman Mizsei, Mychailo Wynnyckyj (Eds.) | Eight Years after the Revolution of Dignity. What Has Changed in Ukraine during 2013–2021? | With a foreword by Yaroslav Hrytsak | ISBN 978-3-8382-1560-0

244 Rumena Filipova | Constructing the Limits of Europe Identity and Foreign Policy in Poland, Bulgaria, and Russia since 1989 | With forewords by Harald Wydra and Gergana Yankova-Dimova | ISBN 978-3-8382-1649-2

245 Oleksandra Keudel | How Patronal Networks Shape Opportunities for Local Citizen Participation in a Hybrid Regime A Comparative Analysis of Five Cities in Ukraine | With a foreword by Sabine Kropp | ISBN 978-3-8382-1671-3

246 Jan Claas Behrends, Thomas Lindenberger, Pavel Kolar (Eds.) | Violence after Stalin Institutions, Practices, and Everyday Life in the Soviet Bloc 1953–1989 | ISBN 978-3-8382-1637-9

247 Leonid Luks | Macht und Ohnmacht der Utopien Essays zur Geschichte Russlands im 20. und 21.

Jahrhundert | ISBN 978-3-8382-1677-5

248 Iuliia Barshadska | Brüssel zwischen Kyjiw und Moskau Das auswärtige Handeln der Europäischen Union im ukrainisch-russischen Konflikt 2014-2019 | Mit einem Vorwort von Olaf Leiße | ISBN 978-3-8382-1667-6

249 Valentyna Romanova | Decentralisation and Multilevel Elections in Ukraine Reform Dynamics and Party Politics in 2010–2021 | With a foreword by Kimitaka Matsuzato | ISBN 978-3-8382-1700-0

250 Alexander Motyl | National Questions. Theoretical Reflections on Nations and Nationalism in Eastern Europe | ISBN 978-3-8382-1675-1

251 Marc Dietrich | A Cosmopolitan Model for Peacebuilding. The Ukrainian Cases of Crimea and the Donbas | ISBN 978-3-8382-1687-4

252 Eduard Baidaus | An Unsettled Nation. State-Building, Identity, and Separatism in Post-Soviet Moldova | With forewords by John-Paul Himka and David R. Marples | ISBN 978-3-8382-1582-2

253 Igor Okunev, Petr Oskolkov (Eds.) | Transforming the Administrative Matryoshka. The Reform of Autonomous Okrugs in the Russian Federation, 2003–2008 | With a foreword by Vladimir Zorin | ISBN 978-3-8382-1721-5

254 Winfried Schneider-Deters | Ukraine’s Fateful Years 2013–2019. Vol. I: The Popular Uprising in Winter 2013/2014 | ISBN 978-3-8382-1725-3

255 Winfried Schneider-Deters | Ukraine’s Fateful Years 2013–2019. Vol. II: The Annexation of Crimea and the War in Donbas | ISBN 978-3-8382-1726-0

256 Robert M. Cutler | Soviet and Post-Soviet Russian Foreign Policies II. East-West Relations in Europe and the Political Economy of the Communist Bloc, 1971–1991 | With a foreword by Roger E. Kanet | ISBN 978-3-83821727-7

257 Robert M. Cutler | Soviet and Post-Soviet Russian Foreign Policies III. East-West Relations in Europe and Eurasia in the Post-Cold War Transition, 1991–2001 | With a foreword by Roger E. Kanet | ISBN 978-3-8382-1728-4

258 Paweł Kowal, Iwona Reichardt, Kateryna Pryshchepa (Eds.) | Three Revolutions: Mobilization and Change in Contemporary Ukraine III. Archival Records and Historical Sources on the 1990 Revolution on Granite | ISBN 978-3-8382-1376-7

259 Mikhail Minakov (Ed.) | Philosophy Unchained. Developments in Post-Soviet Philosophical Thought. | With a foreword by Christopher Donohue | ISBN 978-3-8382-1768-0

260 David Dalton | The Ukrainian Oligarchy After the Euromaidan. How Ukraine’s Political Economy Regime Survived the Crisis | With a foreword by Andrew Wilson | ISBN 978-3-8382-1740-6

261 Andreas Heinemann-Grüder (Ed.) | Who are the Fighters? Irregular Armed Groups in the RussianUkrainian War in 2014–2015 | ISBN 978-3-8382-1777-2

262 Taras Kuzio (Ed.) | Russian Disinformation and Western Scholarship. Bias and Prejudice in Journalistic, Expert, and Academic Analyses of East European and Eurasian Affairs | ISBN 978-3-8382-1685-0

263 Darius Furmonavicius | LithuaniaTransforms the West. Lithuania’s Liberation from Soviet Occupation and the Enlargement of NATO (1988–2022) | With a foreword by Vytautas Landsbergis | ISBN 978-3-8382-1779-6

264 Dirk Dalberg | Gegenwartsbeschreibungen und Zukunftsvorstellungen im tschechoslowakischen Dissens (1968-1989). Das politische Denken von Egon Bondy, Miroslav Kusý, Milan Šimečka und Petr Uhl | ISBN 978-3-8382-1318-7

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