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The Time of Troubles in Alexander Dugin's Narrative

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The Time of Troubles in Alexander Dugin's Narrative European Review, Vol. 27, No. 1, 143–157 © 2018 Academia Europæa doi:10.1017/S1062798718000650 The Time of Troubles in Alexander Dugin’s Narrative DMITRY SHLAPENTOKH DW 332, Indiana University South Bend, 1700 Mishawaka Avenue, South Bend, IN 46615, USA. Email: [email protected] Alexander Dugin (b. 1962) is one of the best-known philosophers and public intellectuals of post-Soviet Russia. While his geopolitical views are well-researched, his views on Russian history are less so. Still, they are important to understand his Weltanschauung and that of like-minded Russian intellectuals. For Dugin, the ‘Time of Troubles’–the period of Russian history at the beginning of the seven- teenth century marked by dynastic crisis and general chaos – constitutes an expla- natory framework for the present. Dugin implicitly regarded the ‘Time of Troubles’ in broader philosophical terms. For him, the ‘Time of Troubles’ meant not purely political and social upheaval/dislocation, but a deep spiritual crisis that endangered the very existence of the Russian people. Russia, in his view, has undergone several crises during its long history. Each time, however, Russia has risen again and achieved even greater levels of spiritual wholeness. Dugin believed that Russia was going through a new ‘Time of Troubles’. In the early days of the post-Soviet era, he believed that it was the collapse of the USSR that had led to a new ‘Time of Troubles’. Later, he changed his mind and proclaimed that the Soviet regime was not legitimate at all and, consequently, that the ‘Time of Troubles’ started a century ago in 1917. Dugin holds a positive view of Putin in general. Still, his narrative implies that Putin has been unable to arrest the destructive process of a new Time of Trouble. Introduction Many nations appeal to the history of foreign countries to define their own national identities. Russia, whose elite has been perplexed about their nation’s civilizational position for generations, is one of these. For more than a century, the Russian elite has been fascinated with the French Revolution. Interest in the French Revolution as an explanatory model was not due to external similarities between events in Russia in the twentieth century, and especially the first half of that century, and those in France in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Rather, a considerable segment of the Russian elite, increasingly Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 02 Oct 2021 at 02:09:35, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1062798718000650 144 Dmitry Shlapentokh westernized in outlook and behaviour in the last years of the tsarist regime, wished to see the country following the West, broadly speaking. These views were espoused not just by liberals but also by radicals. As a matter of fact, the creed of the latter, Marxism, was of Western origin. Belief in the West was the cornerstone of most Russian intelligentsia, especially those of a dissident or semi-dissident streak in the big cities. And it was they who hailed the Gorbachev reforms and the final collapse of the regime. Situating Russian and Soviet history in the context of a final and irre- versible ‘Thermidor’, they had a variety of expectations. It would be naïve to assume they actually believed in the triumph of democracy as the final sign of Russia’s incorporation into the Western order. Very few actually professed ‘Fukuyamianism’, so popular in the West in the early 1990s. Most of them deeply despised the masses – disgusting ‘sovki’ who either acted in cahoots with the Soviet regime in persecuting the intellectual elite or were absolutely foreign to intellectuals. They saw no problem in the Soviet authorities dealing harshly with the populace, a tradition going back to the early nineteenth century when Russia’s seminal poet Alexander Pushkin com- pared the masses with sheep that were oblivious to any sense of honour (chesti klich). Therefore, they should be either fleeced or slaughtered for meat. While democracy was not the expected fruit of the new ‘Thermidor’, might and prosperity were expected. Westernized Russia, in this narrative, would join the concert of Western powers and retain its equality with the USA. It would be a rich country with speedy economic progress. The imperial inheritance was seen as a liability that prevented Russia from achieving all this in the new ‘Thermidorian’ era. These things did not happen. Consequently, non-Western paradigms re-emerged; it is worthwhile remembering that these had never been completely absent from official and dissident/semi-dissident discourse. With the increasing economic and geopolitical crises they became increasingly competitive with Thermidorian and other Western historical models, albeit they never eliminated the Western model com- pletely, at least through the late 1980s and 1990s. Several historical models coexisted and occupied their particular intellectual niches. The ‘Time of Troubles’ model emerged as one of the most popular. The historical ‘Time of Troubles’ was a series of turbulent events in the beginning of the seventeenth century, marked by dynastic crises, foreign interventions, civil war and general chaos. This model addressed or explained many aspects of late Gorbachev/Yeltsin Russia that neither a ‘Thermi- dorian’ nor any other Western model could explain: the sociopolitical meltdown, economic collapse, and extreme geopolitical weakness that made Yeltsin’s Russia almost a failing state. The model not only provided an explanation for Russia’s misery but also held out at least some hope for those that espoused it. It implied that the country’s misery was not permanent and did not necessarily lead to its demise. Actually, it could be a peculiar precondition for a new rise. This model, which implies humiliation and death as prerequisites for a new rise, has deep cultural roots in Orthodoxy as it regards suffering as beneficial for the individual and essential for spiritual elevation. One should note that this tradition can be traced back not just to the beginnings of Christianity but also to ancient agricultural civilizations (e.g. ancient Egypt), where death and burial were clearly related to planting seeds; the Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 02 Oct 2021 at 02:09:35, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1062798718000650 The Time of Troubles in Alexander Dugin’s Narrative 145 Egyptian myth of Osiris is a good example. The popularity of the ‘Time of Troubles’ in public discourse attracted a variety of Russian intellectuals. Alexander Dugin, prolific and seminal Russian publicist and philosopher, was one of them. Dugin and the Time of Trouble: Philosophical Framework Dugin’s views have been studied in the West for a long time, but they have often been simplified in attempts to lock him into one convenient ideological box. Observers have found his views contradictory, a point usually elaborated on by those who present Dugin as just a reactionary intellectual curiosity, where the label ‘reactionary’ serves as not just a sign of Dugin’s particular political or philosophical views but also as a means of denigrating him as an intellectual. Attempts to locate the sources of Dugin’s views invariably look at European ‘New Right’ philosophy and Eurasian- ism. Without an analysis of Dugin’s social or sociocultural upbringing, though, nei- ther his philosophy in general nor his views on the ‘Time of Troubles’ can be properly understood. Dugin is a child of Soviet society, and the latter’s nature – or at least the external manifestations of the late Soviet state – must be properly understood. Most important – at least for our narrative – was the state’s approach to ideology. Its policy and the images it projected were contradictory. On the one hand, the state was sceptical of society and did not rely much on ideological indoctrination. Fear, coercion, and economic incentives were the major tools of rule until the Gorbachev era, and the weakening of state control immediately led to the collapse of the regime. Ideological postulates were not much internalized by the majority of Soviet citizens, or at least played little if any role in shaping their behaviour. This explains why the regime collapsed with such extraordinary speed and ease; the end of the USSR was abso- lutely bloodless, at least in Russia itself. On the other hand, and quite different from the modern West, where the major ideological shibboleth of the elite is internalized by considerable segments of society, the Soviet elite were ideologized and various forms of National Bolshevism, with its imperial messianic quest for endless expansion, remained present in their minds up to the very end of the USSR. Contrary to the Western elite, they did not worry about elections and had only limited opportunities for corruption. Absolute power and its application was a goal in itself, not just a means to get special shops and dachas, which were basically only major incentives for the lower level bureaucracy. Needless to say, the dissidents were also ideologized in the extreme. For them, the struggle against the regime had a deep metaphysical meaning as the regime was the embodiment of almost cosmic evil. This shows the great role of ideology, the peculiar cultural spiritualization, of both the upper echelon elite and its most dedicated ene- mies; one might add that the semi-dissidents’‘dissida’, as it was often contemptuously called, paralleled the low-level bureaucracy. Remember also that intellectual/cultural and social trends in the regime were contradictory and there were many layers, as in any society. Still, the degree of idoleogization or spiritualization of certain segments of society should not be discounted.
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