The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Moscow State University, also a mathematician, idolized Fomenko and by the mid-1990s had promoted him to the top of the university's mathematics hierarchy, lending his theories ever more credibility.²⁴ This was yet another reason for family fights: Masha's grandmother held forth on ethnogenesis, Masha's mother screamed at her about the math that proved that everything was something else, and Masha's grandfather shouted the loudest that all of it was a Jewish conspiracy. Sometimes he also mentioned the queers, but then Masha's mother invariably pointed out that Tchaikovsky had been a homosexual and yet a great Russian composer. To Masha, she added that Freddie Mercury had been gay too.

dugin absorbed all of Gumilev as his foundational science. Gumilev's language became his language, and he used Gumilev's premises to launch his own new ideas. He was writing nearly as fast as he was reading, firing off articles for the patriotic press and then compiling them into books at the rate of one or two every year. Now that he had access to a nearly unlimited number of publications, he was finding ideas he could use everywhere. The German theorist Carl Schmitt, Hitler's favorite legal scholar, became a source of inspiration, but so did Karl Popper, the Austrian-British philosopher who created the concept of an "open society." George Soros, the Hungarian-born American billionaire who was opening foundations and learning institutions throughout the disintegrating Eastern Bloc, had been taken with Popper for decades and included the words "open society" in the names of most of his organizations. Popper's ideas represented everything that Russia was now declaring it wanted to be, and the philosopher himself had once suggested a dichotomy: the open society on one hand, and its enemies on the other. Dugin wanted to be the enemy of the open society.

In 1994, Dugin published The Conservative Revolution. In this book, he envisioned a movement that would resist what he called "extremist humanism"—the idea that all humans everywhere have rights—and the concept of a law-based society. He explained that these ideas, imported from the West, were wrong precisely because

they were fundamentally foreign to Russians, whose ethnos developed in accordance with its own destiny and whose geography made it the natural enemy of the United States and Britain.²⁵

Dugin teamed up with two men who were older and much better- known than he: a rock star named Yegor Letov and a writer named Eduard Limonov. Both were leather-jacket-wearing bohemians who had spent their lives in opposition to any establishment they encountered. Limonov had been an underground poet in the Soviet Union, a gay-identified hobo in 1970s New York, an avant-garde writer in 1980s Paris, and he had returned to Russia by way of Yugoslavia, where he had spent time traveling with the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and firing at Bosnian Muslims for fun. Now Limonov was looking for a way to be heard in the cacophony of post- Soviet Russia. Together, the three men took the idea proposed to Dugin by Robert Steuckers, the Belgian, three years earlier, and launched the National Bolshevik Party. For Limonov, Letov, and another avant-garde musician who immediately joined the group with the shocking name, the National Bolshevik Party was primarily an artistic exercise. Dugin took it more seriously as a long-term project, both a political and a philosophical one. After nearly four years of shuttling back and forth to Europe to take part in New Right gatherings, Dugin stopped traveling to concentrate on working in Russia. He penned the party's manifesto, which read in part:

The best and most complete definition of national-bolshevism would be the following: "National-bolshevism is a superideology common to all enemies of open society." It is not merely one of the ideologies hostile to an open society but specifically its complete conscious total and substantive opposite. National-bolshevism is a worldview that is built on the total and radical negation of the

individual and his centrality.—

Neither the Bolsheviks nor the Nazis had stated it quite so explicitly.

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