The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

In the fall of 2007, the department cracked down. A half-dozen leaders of the protests were expelled.²⁸ The following June, the department hosted an international conference titled "Societal Norms and the Possibilities of Societal Development." Dean Dobrenkov opened the conference by warning against the dangers of homosexuality:

Issues of virtue and morality have to be at the forefront today.

Without that, Russia has no future How can we talk about the

rights of homosexuals and lesbians in light of this? All these attempts to organize gay parades, the introduction of sex education in schools—all of this aims to defile our young people, and we must say a clear and definitive "no" to that! Otherwise, we will lose

Russia.²⁹

"All these attempts" referred to a single effort, by a young Moscow lawyer, to force a public conversation on LGBT rights by applying for a permit to hold a Pride march in Moscow. The permit was denied, and the lawyer was taking his case through the courts. The handful of people who showed up for Pride in Moscow in May 2007 were first beaten and then arrested; among the detainees was an Italian member of the European Parliament who had come to lend his support.³⁰

The star of the conference was American Paul Cameron, who urged Russia to learn from American mistakes. "It is the homosexuals who are bringing about a demographic catastrophe," he said.

They cause huge and immeasurable harm to society. According to our data, one third of inmates in the state of Illinois are sexual predators or their victims. And twenty to forty percent are

homosexuals or their victims According to official data, thirty to

fifty percent of Illinois residents have had sexual relations with children, primarily as a result of their homosexual proclivities. Twenty percent of such crimes take place in adoptive families.

Cameron was citing Illinois because it was his home state and, he pointed out, the home state of then presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Russia has every chance to avoid the sad fate of Western countries, which have accepted homosexuality as morally normal, and to choose its own traditions and moral values. I want to ask you: Do

you want to be as stupid as we have been?³¹

Introduced in Moscow as a prominent American academic, Cameron had been expelled from the American Psychological

Association in 1983 and the American Sociological Association in 1986. The latter organization gave the following reason: "Dr. Paul Cameron has consistently misinterpreted and misrepresented sociological research on sexuality, homosexuality, and lesbianism."³² In September 2008, the sociology department inaugurated a new research project, to be headed by a new member of the permanent faculty: Alexander Dugin would run the Center for Conservative Studies. Launching the center, Dugin explained what it was not: "It is not a liberal intellectual group, but also not a Soviet-Marxist one." Both the Soviet idea and the liberal idea that had followed it in Russia had failed, he explained. "And yet there is no conservative intellectual or academic center in Russia in the American or the European sense of the word. This despite the fact that both the people and the regime feel conservatively." Now the country's most important university would take on the mission of generating ideas to fit those feelings:

The goal of the Center for Conservative Studies is to become the

center of development of conservative ideology in Russia We

also need to train a conservatively minded academic and government elite, there is no reason to hide this fact. They must be conservative ideologues. And we must place people in power and in

positions of authority in the academy.³³

The college dropout had worked hard to get to this point. He had long ago achieved public prominence and apparent political influence, but he wanted academic credentials. He defended his dissertation in December 2000 in Rostov-on-Don, in southern Russia, and his second dissertation—it is Russian convention to obtain first a sort of junior doctorate and then a senior one—in 2004, at another Rostov- on-Don institution. A German political scientist, Andreas Umland, noted in 2007:

For an understanding of the Dugin phenomenon, Dugin's eagerness to become a fully accepted member of academia is particularly revealing. It speaks about both, how he understands himself as well as what the long-term prospects of his role in

Russian society might be. Whether Dugin will be in a position to enter the Ivory Tower, make his pamphlets into textbooks and become accepted in scholarly circles are major issues in assessing

his project as he himself understands it.³⁴