The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

in the absence of political institutions such as parties or established electoral preferences, and in the absence, too, of political experience, the new elite came to rely heavily on people who called themselves "political technologists." They were like Western political consultants magnified to the point of caricature. They created presidents, parties, and platforms from scratch. They employed small armies of people who produced logos and websites, photo ops and miles of political jargon. Many, though not all, of the soldiers and officers of these armies were very young—often still at university. Together and separately, they made a lot of money.

Neither the political technologists nor the politicians they represented had many—or sometimes any—ideas of their own, and part of the technologists' task was to find and incorporate ideas generated by others. The top political technologist of them all, Gleb Pavlovsky, a former Moscow editor who manufactured Putin's public persona in advance of his election, found Dugin and promoted his ideas. Dugin had a knack for putting the generalized anxiety of the elite into words, and these words sounded smart. After September 11, he said on television, where he was part of a political round table with six other men:

A deep crisis of the liberal democratic system has been exposed, a crisis of values. The liberal-democratic complex consists of two components: liberalism and democracy. We usually perceive them as synonyms. But if we look at the history of the West, we will see that the democratic component was used actively in the battle against the Soviet Bloc, as a tool of opposition to totalitarianism. But when the Soviet system collapsed, democracy lost its fundamental strategic function. Liberalism retained its function. I believe that liberalism does not have to be combined with democracy. It can mean simply free trade, market mechanisms, which, as we know, can exist perfectly well in the strictest of authoritarian regimes, even in almost totalitarian ones.

He went on to predict that the United States, in the wake of September 11, would abandon its democratic experiment.⁴ Dugin was misusing the term "liberalism"—as though it existed solely to denote the opposite of a command economy—and it was not clear what he meant by "democracy" when he claimed that America was on the verge of disposing of it. But his statement perfectly encapsulated the worldview Gudkov's surveys were reflecting. In this picture, the United States defined itself by its relationship to Russia, just as Russia defined itself in opposition to and in comparison with America. In this picture, it made sense for America to give up on democracy now that the Soviet Union was no more. Most important, this picture affirmed the idea that building a market economy and an authoritarian—"almost totalitarian"—regime at the same time was not just possible but also right.

A few months earlier, in April 2001, Dugin had held the founding congress of a new political movement. He had long since split with the National Bolshevik Party; as a political technologist he had helped to shape Putin's Unity Party and a short-lived Kremlin-backed spoiler party called Russia, but now he decided to start a movement of his own. The congress was held at a supper-club-like establishment called Honor and Dignity, which belonged to the counterterrorism shock-troop arm of the FSB, called Alpha. Several Alpha veterans were elected to the new movement's board, and many more men from the uniformed services were in attendance at the congress.

Dugin called the new movement Eurasia, and the event stressed its ties to the Kremlin. There were two large banners in the room. One said, "Russia Is a Eurasian Country. V. V. Putin." The other said, "Eurasia Above All." Predictably, one of the newspaper reports on the congress—all the papers wrote about it—was called "Eurasia uber Alles."

"Eurasia above all," repeated Dugin at the conclusion of his address to the congress. His speech had been devoted to the idea that the world, or at least Russia, was being pulled apart by opposing forces: Eurasian and Atlanticist. Even Yeltsin had started to see the futility of the Atlanticist way back in the 1990s, said Dugin, but "it was the rule of Putin that spelled the true victory of Eurasianist ideas." For that reason, he said, "We support the president totally, radically. That places us at the total and radical center."

It was an incomprehensible and mesmerizing phrase, like the "violets blooming on the lips" line he had used on Evgenia a decade and a half earlier. The new movement's youngest member, Igor Nikolaev, from remote Yakutia, spelled out the Eurasian self- perception more clearly in his presentation, which he said had started out as a high school essay. "Individualism and the independence of opinion are traits characteristic of Europe, where we don't belong," he said. "Obedience and love for one's leader are the traits of the Russian people."⁵