The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Dugin made his own pilgrimages to Western Europe. In 1990 he went to Paris, where he met Belgian New Right thinker Robert Steuckers. Here was an intellectual from the West who was as radical in his thinking as Guenon, but he was living right now and speaking to Dugin. Steuckers introduced him to the concept of geopolitics and, more broadly, the concept that Dugin's ideas could have practical implications in a changing world. He also suggested to Dugin that his ideas might combine into something called National Bolshevism. Within a year, Dugin met a number of other Western European New Right intellectuals, was welcomed to the conferences of the ethno- nationalist think tank Groupement de Recherche et d'fitudes pour la Civilisation Europeenne in Paris, and was published by an Italian New Right house.¹²

Dugin's book about Guenon was published in Russia in 1990, among many books—some of them better-written, but few by a better-read person—that attempted to find a metaphysical, esoteric, supernatural, or, on the contrary, ultrarational, mathematically argued way of explaining all of life and the world, which had so suddenly become so complicated. Dugin himself, meanwhile, found the Tradition he wanted in the Orthodox faith—not in the contemporary church but with the Old Believers, a faction that split off in the seventeenth century and had since attempted to maintain its ways in spite of the modern world.

the clich6 of the era was "floodgates." Everyone in every field was claiming that the floodgates had opened. To Arutyunyan, it felt more like the fortochka opened wider, then wider still, and then the entire window swung open. A friend who worked at the Moscow cardiology center told Arutyunyan that a doctor there was teaching a seminar on administering the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. The world's most popular personality test, in use since the 1930s, had been studied by a few Soviet psychiatrists and psychologists in the 1970s.¹³ They had tried to adapt it to Russian, which proved an

infinitely difficult task. For one thing, Russian is a thoroughly grammatically gendered language: most first-person statements have a feminine and a masculine form. The MMPI consisted of 566 first- person statements. The first adaptation efforts, therefore, created two versions of the test—one for women and one for men.

More important, the original test was rooted in American reality— and had been empirically tested for years before it was finalized and came into wide use. The Soviet psychiatrists and psychologists had very little opportunity to test their clinical reality. Now, in the late 1980s, one of them was allowed to include outsiders in his work, turning them into students, collaborators, and testers at once. How were they going to apply this foreign test? The Russian language, gendered or not, was the least of their problems. The test contained statements like number 58: "Everything is turning out just like the prophets of the Bible said it would." The Soviet person's reality included no prophets, and no Bible. The original adapted version of this statement read, "A person's future has been predetermined."¹⁴ Testing showed this to be a poor substitute, though. A better fit, as it turned out, was, "I am more cheerful when the weather is good." Question 255, "Sometimes at elections I vote for men about whom I know very little," became "Sometimes I positively appraise people about whom I know very little," and question 513, "I think Lincoln was greater than Washington," sidestepped possible disagreements about history by turning into "I prefer working with a supervisor who gives clear instructions to working with one who gives me greater freedom."

By 1989, the original MMPI was being retired in the United States in favor of an updated version, adjusted for changes in American society and clinicians' understanding of it. The "men" in the elections question became "people," and Lincoln and Washington were dropped altogether.¹⁵ In the Soviet Union, the adapted version of the first test was coming into use just as the reality to which it had been adapted was changing drastically—possibly making the effort to delete from the test all references to elections not just superfluous but counterproductive. Still, the very fact that more than a few psychologists, newly trained in using the MMPI, were going to start administering the test to a large number of apparently regular people —not psychiatric patients or criminals but previously unpathologized, untreated, and unstudied ordinary Soviet citizens—was groundbreaking.