The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

"can eurasianism save russia?" was the title of a political round table that aired on television in June 2002. Dugin had graduated from discussant to headliner, and Eurasianism from a fringe political movement to a universal solution. It offered an alternative view of Russian history, in which a century and a half of Mongol-Tatar rule had been not an age of destruction but, on the contrary, a vital cultural infusion that set Russia on a special path, distinct from Europe's. Explaining Eurasianism to the broad public, Dugin referred to a 1920 book by Nikolai Trubetskoy, a Russian prince in exile. Trubetskoy, a linguist (he was one of the founders of structural linguistics), focused on what he called "the magic of words." He

argued that by using words like "humanity," "universality," "civilization," and "progress," Europeans—or, more precisely, Germans—had fooled the world—or, more precisely, Slavic nations— into buying the cosmopolitan idea. In fact, argued Trubetskoy, by "humanity" Germans meant themselves and those who were like them, and their concepts of "universality," "civilization," and "progress" were equally solipsistic—or, as Trubetskoy put it, "egocentric." By buying into the cosmopolitan idea, therefore, Slavs risked losing their identity and culture.⁶

Trubetskoy's book was called Europe and Humanity,

and summarizing it for a television audience eighty-two years later, Dugin said that the prince had deemed Europe a threat to humanity. Since then, he explained, things had changed: Europe was not a threat to humanity any longer, but the United States was. "The Western- society project is being forced onto all other nations," said Dugin. "The Eurasianists will continue to oppose the West as long as the West persists in its pretensions to the universality of its own values, in forcing those values onto people, and in attempting to dominate, whether by means of colonization or by means of neo-colonization, which is what globalization is."⁷

This rang true to the broad television audience. The West was expanding. Even as Russia grew disillusioned with all things American, its neighbors began, unexpectedly, to edge westward. In 2003, a bloodless revolution led by young Western-oriented political activists brought down the government of Georgia. There was no love lost between Putin's Kremlin and the ousted Georgian president, Eduard Shevardnadze, who had once served as Gorbachev's foreign minister, but the revolution was nonetheless disturbing for Moscow. Putin dispatched his foreign minister to the Georgian capital to help negotiate the transfer of power, but he, and the Russian media, insisted on calling the events there a "coup" rather than a revolution. Speaking to his cabinet, Putin issued an indirect warning to the new Georgian leadership by stressing, "Russia has had a brotherly relationship with the people of Georgia for many centuries."⁸ In fact, Georgia had been a part of the Russian Empire for centuries, except for three years of independence between 1917 and 1920, and the dozen years since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The phrase "brotherly relationship" harked back to the Soviet "friendship of the peoples" rhetoric, as it was meant to. It was also meant to remind the Georgians that Russia was still "first among equals" on its old stomping ground.

Twelve years after the end of the USSR, Russia still perceived its former subjects as parts of itself. Unlike clearly distinct foreign countries, former Soviet republics were referred to as the "near abroad" (Helsinki and Vienna are closer to Moscow than Kiev and Tbilisi, but the designation referred to psychic and political rather than physical distance). Relations with the "near abroad" were not even part of the foreign ministry's purview: they were handled by the presidential administration itself. This was perhaps the most striking example of a Soviet institution that had been claimed by Russia in 1991 and preserved against the logic of time and space. "In essence, this maintained the Soviet system in which the Union republics reported to the Central Committee of the Communist Party," Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar has written. "And since the presidential administration occupied the very same building in Staraya Square as the Central Committee of the Communist Party had, it so happened that the tradition had been maintained for decades, even though the Soviet Union no longer existed."⁹ The tradition was one of exerting control over the nominally independent constituent republics (which were no longer constituent) and of appointing their leadership from Moscow.