The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Alexander Nikolaevich's rhetoric, if not necessarily in his thinking, this premise appeared inviolate: almost any time he wrote a letter or gave a speech on the state of things in the Soviet Union, he made note of Western efforts to undermine the country and Western plots to sabotage perestroika itself. So if one strove to be, first and foremost, un-Soviet, as Evgenia did, one did well to embrace any number of political positions, from libertarianism to pacifism, one more Western than the next. Gay rights, the legalization of drugs, and the abolition of the death penalty, the lifting of all state controls in favor of the reign of the unfettered free market—everything fell naturally into line.

As for Dugin, who had lost the woman he loved, his son, and his life of intensive open-ended learning, he was bound to look for and find the position that was the opposite of everything. First he drifted into Pamyat ("Memory"), an organization that in the mid-1980s was emerging from the underground. It had long trafficked in antisemitic rhetoric, from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to contemporary world-Zionist-conspiracy theories. Now it allied itself with Gorbachev's perestroika on the one hand and with an imagined Russian nationalist revival on the other.⁸ The combination was fairly intuitive: Soviet internationalist rhetoric was just one of the aspects of hollow ideology that were being deflated. While official Soviet media pre-glasnost doled out their own regular servings of antisemitism framed as anti-Zionism, the system had generally subdued outright Russian-nationalist voices. Now this lid was lifted and hatred emerged in many stripes, of which Pamyat was the brightest. The Soviet leadership was either unsure about how best to react or unwilling to react, but Alexander Nikolaevich raged privately and publicly. "I am not Jewish," he said during a talk at the Higher Party School in March 1990, "yet every day I get fliers from Pamyat in which I am called 'the head of the Judeo-Masonic lounge of the Soviet Union.' There is only one reason for this, as far as I can tell: I really do speak out publicly, in writing and in speaking, everywhere and anywhere I can, against all manifestations of nationalism, including antisemitism. And I consider it to be the shame of any

member of the Russian intelligentsia and any Russian person at all who subscribes to this kind of ideology of racial hatred."⁹

After decades of amorphousness underground, Pamyat had acquired a charismatic leader, a former photographer named Dmitry Vasilyev, who railed against all the world at once: the Holocaust was a Jewish conspiracy (Eichmann was a Jew); rock music was a Satanist plot (slowed-down vinyl records sounded out chants to Satan); and yoga was a Western scourge (all the West wanted to do was contaminate Russian culture).¹⁰

Between its Soviet conservatism, as manifested by its avowed allegiance to Gorbachev, and its anti-Western, anti-everything-foreign stand, Pamyat was indeed the perfect opposite to the Democratic Union. Like Evgenia, though, Dugin soon parted ways with his first political organization. But while she became, briefly, a serial founder of radical groups, Dugin set out on a new intellectual project.

He now found inspiration in the writing of Rene Guenon, a long- dead Frenchman who had published more than a dozen books on metaphysics. A couple of volumes focused on Hindu beliefs, but he also wrote on Islam, cosmism, and "the esoterism of Dante." Dugin perceived a coherent worldview in this eclectic collection, or at least a coherent quest: the search for a tradition, or, rather, Tradition. He wrote a book—his first—The Ways of the Absolute. It was a dense text, parts of which no one but Dugin himself would be able to understand, but it contained one clear proposition: put aside all existing belief systems, all things learned, in favor of what he called "total traditionalism," a sort of meta-ideology that contained the cosmos. Indeed, it contained so much that it was probably better defined by what it decisively rejected: "the 'modern world' as such." Modernity was the opposite of Tradition, so the essential tradition Dugin was seeking could be located only by stripping away all views and things contemporary and working backward. Another word for "modern" might be "Western." By using a French philosopher obsessed with Hinduism and Islam to get at this idea of Tradition, Dugin was coming full circle to an earlier, newly forgotten idea held

by Russian thinkers who argued that their country should be turned away from Europe and toward Asia.¹¹