Aleksandr Prokhanov and Post-Soviet Esotericism E-Book

Edmund Griffiths

• Herausgeber: ibidem
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Serie: Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 351

Beschreibung

Aleksandr Prokhanov (born 1938) is a prize-winning novelist and also, as editor of the weekly newspaper Zavtra, a leading figure in Russian ‘imperial patriotism’. Ever since 1991, when he signed (and reputedly wrote) the manifesto for the failed putsch against Mikhail Gorbachev, he has been an influential voice in Russian political culture—helping to turn the ‘irreconcilable opposition’ of the 1990s towards Empire, grappling with whether to endorse Vladimir Putin as a saviour or expose him as a fraud, and promulgating a bewildering series of ‘conspiracy theories’ in which Russian and international affairs are explained in the most extravagant terms. He has also been a remarkably prolific writer; and the best of his novels are real works of literature, at once muckraking and lyrical, interweaving Moscow scandal so tightly with the mystical yearnings of ‘cosmism’ that the reader can hardly prise them apart. The same themes flow backwards and forwards between Prokhanov’s fiction and his non-fiction. World conspiracies, space exploration, the resurrection of the dead, Stalin as a supernatural redeemer—these and other preoccupations recur again and again, in his leading articles as well as in his novels. This book, the first on Prokhanov, offers an account of his writing and of the ‘red-brown’esotericism he expounds. It will be of interest to anyone concerned with modern Russian literature or politics, and also to students of ‘conspiracy theories’, esoteric belief systems, or the conspiracy novel.

Leseprobe

ibidem Press, Stuttgart

For my brother Rupert

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

I Dabbling in the Ultranational

II The Second Cult of Stalin

III An Imperial Centre

IV Nothing Is What It Seems

V Old World Symphony

VI The Insurrection of the Dead

VII The Uses of Hyperbole

Conclusion

Works Cited

Preface

This book is derived from my doctoral thesis (University of Oxford, 2007). A certain amount has happened in Russia and in the world over the intervening fifteen years, however, and Prokhanov has published a considerable quantity of new material; it would anyway probably not speak well of me if I had not changed my mind on some points. The text has therefore been substantially revised and reorganized, and large parts rewritten entirely. Prokhanov’s latest novel, The Swordbearer [Mechenosets], did not appear in time for me to look at it for this book. Given his prodigious output, however, something of the sort would probably always have been true; and I already discuss novels of his from five different decades (1980s to 2020s).

Russian names and words are transliterated according to British Standard BS 2979:1958, omitting the diacritics; this is neither the most scientific system nor, always, the likeliest to give non-Russophones a reliable idea of the pronunciation, but it has the great advantages of familiarity and simplicity. Spellings that are already firmly established—because the people in question are very well-known, or because they lived outside Russia and wrote their names a particular way—are retained even when they differ from the system: Yeltsin not El’tsin, Trubetzkoy not Trubetskoi. Translations from Russian (and occasionally from other languages) are mine unless noted otherwise. The Bible is quoted in the Authorized Version of 1611.

Now that literary works are disseminated in electronic formats, as well as on the printed page, it is no longer always possible to identify the source of a quotation by giving a page number. Paragraph numbers would be the obvious solution; but existing software does not seem to offer a way of finding them. Where I have quoted a book from an electronic edition, therefore, I provide the chapter number and also the first two or three words—only enough to find the passage unambiguously—in the original Russian in square brackets.

I am writing these lines at a time of war in Europe (a war that Prokhanov welcomed1*). The purpose of this book is not primarily to expound my own political views; but I should like to say that my solidarity is with those people (in Russia and in all countries) who are working towards a peaceful, democratic, and socialist world, in which empires will be a thing of the past.

1* Aleksandr Prokhanov: ‘Raskaty russkoi istorii’, in Zavtra 8 (1496) for March 2022, p. 1.

Acknowledgements

My first debt is to Michael Nicholson, who supervised the doctoral thesis on which this book is based, and whose unfailing support and wise advise enabled me to hear my contemporaries’ occasional horror stories with Schadenfreude and scepticism rather than active sympathy. I am deeply grateful to my examiners, Catriona Kelly and Geoffrey Hosking. It was a privilege to begin the study of Eurasianism under G. S. Smith. I would not have been able to pursue a doctorate at all if I had not received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (a UK public-sector body). The librarians of the Taylor Institution and Sackler libraries were always helpful and efficient. Sections of the book were read in draft, at various stages, by Jennifer Baines, Ghayur Bangash, Paul Chaisty, Julie Curtis, Brendan George, Vladimir Vava Gligorov, J. S. Kennedy, David Paterson, Christopher Walton, and James Womack: I thank all of them for their kind and perceptive comments. Any errors of fact or interpretation that I have still failed to put right—in spite of having received so much help—are nobody’s fault but my own. The series editor, Andreas Umland, together with Jana Dävers and Jessica Haunschild at ibidem-Verlag, showed infinite patience while I was hanging fire with the manuscript, followed by utter professionalism and speed as soon as I wasn’t. The debt I owe my parents is one that, in the nature of things, I can never really repay; but it is possible they will feel I have made a start over the years by telling them quite a lot of things about Prokhanov.

Introduction

In a novel of 1957, Nabokov remarks of a couple of minor characters—people the reader is not supposed to like very much—that

[o]nly another Russian could understand the reactionary and Sovietophile blend presented by the pseudo-colorful Komarovs, for whom an ideal Russia consisted of the Red Army, an anointed monarch, collective farms, anthroposophy, the Russian Church and the Hydro-Electric Dam.1

Oleg and Serafima Komarov are obscure émigrés attached to an obscure liberal arts college, and they are fictional; it is possible that few observers, Russian or otherwise, have ever made very much of an attempt to understand the way they see the world. Today, when a strikingly similar ‘blend’ (albeit with Steinerian anthroposophy supplemented or replaced by a spreading diversity of historiosophical, mystical, and esotericist doctrines) enjoys widespread support in Russia and has even had some influence on the way the Kremlin presents its decisions, we should probably all be trying a little harder.

This book seeks to describe and analyse ‘red-brown’ Russian patriotism through the work of one of its pre-eminent literary exponents, the novelist and newspaper editor Aleksandr Prokhanov (born 1938).2 Prokhanov has been a central figure in imperial-patriotic and neo-Stalinist3 political and cultural life since the end of the 1980s. In 1991 he co-signed (and by all accounts wrote) the document that was regarded as the manifesto for the unsuccessful putsch against Mikhail Gorbachev in August of that year; he went on to hold senior positions during the 1990s in the anti-Yeltsin National Salvation Front, and then in the People’s Patriotic League grouped around the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. As editor-in-chief of the weekly newspaper Zavtra [Tomorrow] (founded in 1990 as Den' [The Day], but banned under that title in 1993), Prokhanov has been in a position to influence the patriotic and red-brown opposition—and his influence has consistently been exerted to glorify Stalin, to promote Russia’s imperial destiny, and to damn Gorbachev and Yeltsin as traitors. (His attitude to Vladimir Putin has fluctuated.) Prokhanov and Zavtra have played a central role in the emergence of what is here characterized as an esotericist belief system, where the more narrowly political concerns merge—amid a constant fizz of conspiracy theories—with ideas of universal resurrection and the war between cosmic good and cosmic evil. Prokhanov is also a genuine writer with a distinctive literary voice, and the prize awarded to his 2002 novel Mr Semtex was not wholly undeserved, although (partly because he is very prolific) he is apt to reuse similar effects, characters, and episodes from one book to the next. His novels dramatize and express the central doctrines of esoteric red-brown patriotism, and constitute a unique phenomenon in the literary life of post-Soviet Russia. To the extent, finally, that Russia’s media operations for overseas audiences (which rarely aim to encourage respect for the existing authorities) tend to offer a diet of nationalist grievance, anticapitalism, and esoteric mystery, the question even arises of whether Prokhanov in the 1990s inadvertently helped to shape their editors’ mental image of what a radical opposition ought to look like.

Some or all of the beliefs treated here are likely to strike readers as exotic and unappealing, as indeed they strike me; they are not, however, incomprehensible. We can trace the logical connections between the various doctrines put forward by Prokhanov and others, and arrive at a reasonable account of how it is possible for people to see the world that way. We can even begin to understand where the attraction lies. That, at least, is my aim in the present book. It is not to condemn Prokhanov (or to exculpate him); and I have tried to avoid interspersing the analysis with my own political or philosophical judgements (‘Prokhanov wrongheadedly asserts that...’).

Figures other than Prokhanov—some quite well-known in Russia and internationally (Gennadii Zyuganov, Aleksandr Dugin), others (Konstantin Petrov, Vladimir Sidnev) less so—are discussed at various points in the book, when their ideas are relevant to the general exposition; the sketches of those ideas offered here should not, of course, be regarded as complete.

I hope this book will find some readers who are interested in conspiracy theories, red-brown politics, or other phenomena from a comparative perspective, as well as those whose focus is specifically on Russian affairs. There are undoubtedly parallels to be drawn between post-Soviet esotericism and a variety of belief systems or movements in Western countries and elsewhere, but I have not attempted to draw them here: it seems more useful to set out the facts about the Russian case, together with whatever understanding I have been able to reach, than to attempt a broader survey that would inevitably be spotty and impressionistic. Comparative treatment of other belief systems has therefore been almost entirely excluded from what follows. The only substantial exceptions are the discussions of Gnosticism in Chapter IV and of reactionary socialism in Chapter V, which are necessary to develop the account I am offering. (The former is not, in fact, purely comparative, since Prokhanov has quoted some of the Gnostic literature himself.) Similarly, questions of theory and general methodology are not addressed here at all; I have written about such topics elsewhere.4

Among Russianist readers, meanwhile, it seems plausible that some will be interested in Prokhanov primarily as a novelist, others as a journalist and a political activist. Perhaps neither group will be wholly satisfied with the balance I strike between talking about his politics and talking about his prose; but, if there are any politically engaged writers whose literary activity can be sharply and cleanly divided from their political commitments, Prokhanov is not one of them. His fiction deals insistently with current political controversies and with ideas drawn from the spectrum of red-brown politics; and his political non-fiction is consciously writerly, incorporating themes and images from his novels and often couched in a similarly extravagant style. It would not always be possible, presented with a page of text by Prokhanov, to tell whether it came from a leading article or a work of fiction. I have therefore treated his novels and his articles as a single body of work, expressing a single view of the world.

The book consists of seven chapters and a brief conclusion. Chapter I (‘Dabbling in the Ultranational’) introduces Prokhanov, and the wider ideological world of which he is a part, by looking at themes from Mr Semtex. It includes a brief account of his literary and political career, concentrating on the formative 1990s.

Chapter II looks at what is here called ‘the second cult of Stalin’—a cult whose excesses of praise outdo the first by a wide margin. Some attention is paid to what might be called Stalinist literalists: people like Viktor Tyul’kin or the late Nina Andreeva, who take the once-official depiction of Stalin broadly at face value and would ideally like to restore the Soviet political system of the 1930s (as they conceive it to have been). But when Stalin appears on an Orthodox ikon of the Mother of God (and Prokhanov has been involved in commissioning such an ikon), when he is deliberately bracketed with Tsar Nicholas II (and Prokhanov has so bracketed him), when a newspaper article declares that he will return from the dead (and the newspaper Prokhanov edits has carried an article saying exactly that), then we have moved far beyond anti-revisionist Marxism-Leninism. The chapter maps out where we have arrived.

It has perhaps once again become a cliché, or a statement of the obvious, to describe Russia as an empire; but its political and intellectual leaders have frequently maintained that it was nothing of the kind. After 1917, and again after 1991, the imperial legacy was supposed to have been consigned to history. Chapter III (‘An Imperial Centre’) describes how the idea of empire re-emerged among the red-brown opposition (thanks not least to Prokhanov), and examines the uses to which this idea has been put.

In Chapter IV (‘Nothing Is What It Seems’), the esotericist and conspiracy-spotting logic of Prokhanov’s worldview is explored through the parallel with esotericist religion, chiefly the Gnosticism of the early centuries CE.

The next two chapters examine central influences on Prokhanov’s thought. Chapter V (‘Old World Symphony’) looks at Eurasianism, a theory of politics and of Russian history that was originally proposed by émigré writers in the 1920s and that has been widely and variously drawn upon in post-Soviet Russia, including by Prokhanov. This chapter is somewhat longer than the others, because the diversity and cloudiness of the uses to which Eurasian slogans are now put makes it necessary to go into the émigré sources in some detail before we can say with confidence which ideas count as properly ‘Eurasian’.

Chapter VI (‘The Insurrection of the Dead’) is devoted to the nineteenth-century philosopher Nikolai Fedorov, a major influence on Prokhanov, who argued that there was a moral obligation to concentrate all available resources on resurrecting the dead and settling them on other planets. Both of Fedorov’s core themes—resurrection and space exploration—are strongly represented in Prokhanov’s writing; the chapter provides an account of the uses to which Prokhanov puts Fedorovian ideas, and shows how these ideas fit into the wider logic of red-brown esotericism.

Chapter VII (‘The Uses of Hyperbole’) characterizes Prokhanov’s prose style as based on a very rapid alternation both between sharply different levels of rhetorical hyperbole and also between moments of mystical lyricism, harsh political satire, and the gleefully appreciative evocation of technocratic expertise and high technology (especially military).

The conclusion sets out the central propositions that make up Prokhanov’s red-brown esotericism in summary form, so as to exhibit the logical connections between them. It is obvious that no conclusions can count as quite final, when we are talking about a living and very productive writer and one who is actively engaged with a complex, changing political context. Prokhanov’s next book could be a condemnation of Stalinism and empire, written throughout in tones of sweet reasonableness or cutting understatement; but I do not expect it to be.

1 Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin, New York: Avon, 1969, p. 71.

2 See, e.g., Charles Rougle and Elisabeth Rich: ‘Aleksandr Prokhanov’, in South Central Review, vol. 12, No. 3/4 for 1995, pp. 18–27; Vladimir Bondarenko: ‘Imperskii geroi Aleksandra Prokhanova’, in Real'naya literatura. 20 luchshikh pisatelei Rossii, Moscow: Paleya, 1996, pp. 175–184.

3 For the present, these terms (and various others used in the Introduction) should be accepted as convenient labels gesturing in the general direction of Prokhanov’s thinking; the themes of Stalin and of empire will each receive chapter-length treatment in what follows.

4 See Edmund Griffiths, Towards a Science of Belief Systems, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. A few pages of that book do refer to the Russian material, but the direct overlap with issues covered in the present study is not enormous.

I Dabbling in the Ultranational

§ 1. Readers who take up a copy of Mr Semtex,1 surprise winner of the National Bestseller literary prize for 2002, are likely to be struck first by Andrei Bondarenko’s grotesque cover design. A human face, in the advanced stages of decay, stares out through empty eye sockets above an immaculate collar and tie; remnants of a bald pate and what must once have been a goatee reveal that the face is that of Lenin, dressed in one of the succession of formal suits he has worn in the mausoleum since his death in 1924.2 And the action of the thriller does indeed take its protagonist, a retired intelligence officer by the name of Belosel'tsev, into the government lab where a team of specialists still work to prevent Vladimir Il'ich’s body from succumbing to historical inevitability. But before he is confronted with the hideous state of the corpse, Belosel'tsev has a chance to hear Dr Mertvykh,3 the mausoleum’s chief scientist, explain how he sees his work:

There are many people in the world working on the problem of immortality: in India, in China, in the Arab countries. We know about one other’s work. The resurrection of Lenin will take place in spring, in Russia, on Orthodox Easter, or the First of May, or Victory Day. The weather will be wonderful, a blue sky, trees and flowers in blossom. The bells will ring out and a prayerful cry will rise from the crowds gathered on Red Square, beneath the sacred walls of the Kremlin. The sun will play and sparkle in the sky, wondrous rainbows will flow around it, and he will step forth from the doors of the Mausoleum: Lenin, alive, bearing light, ‘by his death having trampled down death’.4 Emperors and princes will arise from their white stone sarcophagi. Resurrected pilots, cosmonauts, and heroes will step forth from the Kremlin wall. Across the world, billions of people restored to life will rise from the grave. The universal miracle of resurrection will be accomplished. The ‘red meaning’ will return to our lives, and the Soviet Union will be restored.5

§ 2. It will have become clear long before this point, though, that Mr Semtex is anything but a conventional political thriller. The novel’s author is Aleksandr Andreevich Prokhanov (born 1938), who—despite a prolific fictional output going back to the 1970s—had for much of his career been best known as a journalist. His reports from Afghanistan in the 1980s earned him the soubriquet ‘the nightingale of the General Staff’ [solovei genshtaba],6 and he greeted Mikhail Gorbachev’s reform programme with undisguised hatred: in 1988, indeed, he was praised by name in Nina Andreeva’s famous attack on the direction perestroika and glasnost' were taking. Readers of Prokhanov’s later work will be surprised to learn that the particular pronouncement with which he had attracted Andreeva’s attention was a declaration that the attitudes of ‘neo-liberals’ and ‘neo-Slavophils’ were equally dangerous because equally opposed to ‘the socialism we have built in struggle’.7 It was not a view he was to hold for long; with the benefit of hindsight, Andreeva’s rebuke to Prokhanov for exaggerating the differences between the two anti-socialist blocs seems a first hint of what was to come. And some among what Prokhanov was still attacking as the ‘neo-Slavophil’ underground recognized in him a potential ally—that is, if Aleksandr Dugin’s subsequent recollections are to be believed:

Mamleev said to me at the end of the 1980s, in his classic whisper: ‘You know, Sasha, Prokhanov is “one of us” [Prokhanov «nash»]…’

I was surprised: ‘What do you mean, he’s “one of us”?’ I had thought he was on the other side of the barricades—that he was a cadre man, someone who loyally and unquestioningly served the System, which was rotten to the core. And in my eyes, at that time, that was a total disqualification.

‘No, you’re making a mistake,’ Mamleev continued to assure me. ‘He’s “one of us” all the same, but he’s “undercover”, “isolated”…’

I decided to believe Yurii Vital'evich, and I went to see Prokhanov at the Sovetskaya Literatura journal. After our meeting I had the dim feeling that Mamleev had been right.8

In 1991 Russia’s first presidential elections were held, and Prokhanov became a campaign worker for General Al'bert Makashov in his unsuccessful bid for office. The general, hostile both to Boris Yeltsin and to the ‘official’ Communist candidate Nikolai Ryzhkov, sought the votes of those who regarded the latter (Soviet premier 1985–1990) as fatally compromised by association with Gorbachev; his somewhat Spartan blend of anticapitalist austerity with fervid patriotism and frequent appeals to the military virtues won him the support of three million voters against more than thirteen million who backed Ryzhkov, leaving him fifth in a field of six candidates. Despite his lack of electoral success, the general remained active in radical politics—and continued to attract Prokhanov’s admiration. In 1999, for instance, Prokhanov would make the columns of his newspaper Zavtra available to him for a friendly conversation with David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, regarding the need for unity to fight the ‘world financial elite’. Duke felt obliged to question the USSR’s national-patriotic credentials; but Makashov was keen to reassure him:

D. D.: My dear general, I agree one hundred percent with the picture of the future you have sketched [...] At the same time, being an anti-communist, I hold the view that the same kind of experiment began on the Russian people as far back as 1917.

A. M.: Of course, for White Russian patriots the February and October revolutions did seem like that kind of experiment. The destruction of churches and the uprooting of traditions—all that did happen. But the Russian people and the national elements in the party managed to defeat this Trotskyist-Zionist line. The Trotskyists wanted to build their temple here;9 but there was a patriotic leader in their way, one who put the interests of the Russian people above the schemes of the ‘world conspirators’. Between 1927 and 1937, Stalin carried out a patriotic coup and shattered the plans to destroy Russia. The great Russian people, just as in the years of the Mongol yoke, managed to grind the adversary down, and a new patriotic elite emerged.10

And in a novella published comparatively recently, in 2019, Prokhanov introduces Makashov in the possibly unexpected role of the Lord God. The hero (named Viktor Belosel'tsev, as he is in Mr Semtex and a number of Prokhanov’s other works) finds himself in the Kingdom of Heaven. He keeps trying to tell the Almighty about the horrors he has witnessed, and those he has inflicted, from Nicaragua to Ethiopia and from Angola to Karabakh, in the spirit less of a soul making his confession to his Creator than of an intelligence officer delivering his report to his superior; but the Lord—who always takes the form of people the protagonist has known and loved: an aunt, a favourite teacher—prefers calmer or at least more personal memories.

Belosel'tsev was not surprised that the Godhead wore many faces. If God was in the burning bush, in the meteor falling like a heavenly emerald, he could still more easily appear before Belosel'tsev in the image of people who were dear to him.

And one such dear person, one person who took on the image of God, was General Al'bert Mikhailovich Makashov [...] He was in his field uniform with the green general’s stars, in the famous black beret he had worn when he stood on the balcony of the House of Soviets and ordered the defenders of the barricades to storm Ostankino.11

§ 3. One very sympathetic critic has written of Prokhanov at this stage of his career that ‘if certain of his friends had an inferiority complex, or an envy complex, or an ambition complex, then Prokhanov had a complex of his own: military-industrial…’12 It was a complex that would find its next expression in the manifesto A Word to the People, of which Prokhanov was one signatory and the reputed author.13 The document called for patriotic unity among all opponents of perestroika, and urged drastic action to save the state from ruin: and the appeal seemed to bear fruit within a month of its publication, when a group of senior officials—including several of Prokhanov’s co-signatories—seized power and rolled tanks onto the streets of Moscow. Dubbing themselves the State Committee for the State of Emergency (GKChP), they detained Gorbachev on the pretext of illness and proclaimed Vice-President Gennadii Yanaev acting president of the USSR in his stead. The ‘GeKaChePists’ pledged to preserve the crumbling Union’s integrity;14 but their rule was itself to disintegrate in a mere three days (19–21 August), leaving Yeltsin—whom the junta had unaccountably failed to arrest—in what seemed an unshakeable position. Already armed with a landslide victory in the first presidential election, he was now the hero who had slain the most formidable dragon the old apparatus could unleash.15 It is perhaps ironic that the act by which Yeltsin consolidated his victory—a decree banning the Communist Party on Russian territory16—should if anything have added to the influence enjoyed by those, like Prokhanov, who had been the GKChP’s strongest supporters: the initiative in what was emerging as Russia’s opposition passed from the Communist Party of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic to an assortment of street orators, small ad hoc parties, anti-Yeltsin intellectuals, individual members of the two Congresses of People’s Deputies and the two Supreme Soviets,17 and such interest groups as the Union of Soviet Officers. Prokhanov, as editor of the opposition newspaper Den' (initially an organ of the USSR Writers’ Union), was well placed to help decide the direction in which this new movement would evolve.

§ 4. The two years that followed the GKChP’s defeat saw the opposition’s standing transformed. The dissolution of the USSR at the end of 1991 was followed by 1992’s economic disaster, in which millions lost their savings and their livelihoods. Gross domestic product fell by 14.5%; inflation stood above 1,000%.18 Anti-government demonstrations grew in size and in frequency; and the combination of Orthodox regalia with portraits of Stalin, retired Soviet Army political officers with atamans of re-founded Cossack troops, appeals to proletarian internationalism and to the darkest antisemitism, ceased to surprise. The USSR Congress of People’s Deputies had been wound up, although a handful of its members had gathered in early 1992 to elect (without a quorum) a standing committee whose chair—the Chechen deputy Sazhi Umalatova—thus became something akin to a legitimist pretender to the title of Soviet head of state;19 but the balance of opinion in the Russian Congress was shifting fast, as hundreds of deputies who had once backed Yeltsin drifted into the opposition camp. And, from late 1991 onwards, loose alliances were growing into organized political groups. First in any list must be Viktor Tyul'kin’s Russian Communist Workers’ Party, whose mass front organization Labour Moscow (led by Viktor Anpilov; later reorganized as Labour Russia) played a key part in the capital’s street rallies. But this was also the period when Nina Andreeva (1938–2020) transformed her Bolshevik Platform into the Communist Party of the Soviet Union/Bolshevik,20 and when a host of smaller groups took definite shape. In early 1993, finally, Aleksandr Dugin came together with the returned émigré novelist Eduard Savenko (1943–2020, much better known under his nom-de-plume, Eduard Limonov) to found the National Bolshevik Party. Prokhanov, as he had in A Word to the People, advocated Russian patriotism as the basis on which the opposition could unite; and the formation in late 1992 of the National Salvation Front, joining ‘red’ (communist) and ‘white’ (Orthodox Christian) patriots, represented a triumph for this approach. Supporters of the NSF tended to call themselves simply ‘patriots’; their foes dubbed them ‘red-brown’ [krasno-korichnevyi], the colour of Soviet communism linked with that of Hitler’s brownshirts. Prokhanov served as one of the Front’s co-chairs from July 1993 until April 1994: his colleagues during this turbulent period of Russia’s history included such luminaries of the opposition as General Makashov, the RCWP’s Richard Kosolapov, and—perhaps most significantly—Gennadii Zyuganov. When a 1993 ruling by the Constitutional Court overturned the ban on the Communist Party of the RSFSR, now renamed with the country as the CP of the Russian Federation, it was Zyuganov (one of the signatories to A Word to the People) who emerged as its leader: and the direction in which he led the relaunched party of Lenin was a distinctly patriotic one. Prokhanov became a close political ally of the CPRF leader, to whom his relationship can usefully (albeit at the risk of upsetting all concerned) be compared to that of Aleksandr Yakovlev to Mikhail Gorbachev: he was at once the culture specialist, the media contact, the link with non-Party radicals, and the voice always urging his leader to move further and faster from the Brezhnev-era verities.

§ 5. As the standoff intensified between President Yeltsin and the newfound opposition majority in the Supreme Soviet and the Congress of People’s Deputies, Prokhanov and Den' swung what support they could behind the parliamentary side—ably coordinated by the Congress’s speaker,21 Ruslan Imranovich Khasbulatov. Khasbulatov, a Chechen economist, had been a Yeltsin ally during the struggle against the GKChP; the same passion for opposition unity that has led Prokhanov to embrace undoubted fascists also moved him on this occasion to overlook past enmities. Emboldened by victory in a plebiscite, Yeltsin issued a decree dissolving the Congress and the Soviet: to which the parliamentarians responded with a counter-decree ejecting him from office and installing Vice-President Aleksandr Rutskoi as Acting President. The Constitutional Court found Yeltsin’s action to be unconstitutional; it could hardly have found otherwise. The security forces, however, were of a different opinion. The House of Soviets (Russia’s parliament building, since renamed Government House) was besieged, and supporters of the NSF rallied to its defence. They were joined there by the whole spectrum of the Russian radical opposition, from libertarian leftists to activists with Aleksandr Barkashov’s far-right Russian National Unity. Sergei Biets, who in 1990 had been a founder member of the first expressly Trotskyist organization to exist on Soviet soil since 1929 (the Committee for Workers’ Democracy and International Socialism), recalled many years later how in 1993 he had found himself on the same side of the barricades as Barkashov supporters who ‘basically wanted to shoot me because I was an internationalist communist, a Trotskyist’.22 General Makashov coordinated the building’s defence, and Moscow was plunged into momentary civil war when some of the parliament’s supporters seized vehicles abandoned by government forces and tried to take the state television centre, Ostankino; many still believe the vehicles were left for them as a deliberate provocation. On 4 October 1993 the Congress of People’s Deputies was stormed with the use of tanks and special forces. Several hundred people lost their lives.23Den'—along with certain other opposition papers—was closed by decree (although it soon reappeared under the title Zavtra). Sergei Biets’s Trotskyists were among the few groups who managed to bring out a newspaper giving the pro-parliamentarian side’s account of what had happened. As Biets wrote afterwards:

Labour Russia militants helped us raise money for the issue, and everyone distributed it, even RNU members! I vividly remember one incomparable dialogue with an old granny from Labour Russia, outside the Lenin Museum. She was selling our paper, and at the same time she was telling everybody about how after Anpilov was arrested 'Yids and Trotskyists have seized control of the movement’. ‘So why are you flogging that paper?’ we asked her. And she said, ‘Well, nobody else writes the truth any longer’. You’ve got to laugh, haven’t you?24

For Prokhanov (as for the granny) it was probably less of a laughing matter; he writes the events up in fictionalized form in his novel The Red-Brown, where the central character—modelled on the author—is killed in the fighting,25 and we should hardly be surprised that the defence of the House of Soviets has remained a persistent reference point in his writing ever since. The nominal objective may have been to uphold parliamentary government in the person of a Chechen professor of economics—but for those few days, with radicals of right and left joining hands against the common enemy, the red-brown revolution seemed to glimmer in the streets of Moscow. It has never again felt as close. And the bitterness of the defeat has done little to make the memory less potent.

§ 6. These events are also memorable, of course, because the definitive victory of the Kremlin and the military created the ultra-presidential system of government that has characterized Russian political life ever since. Yeltsin called elections for a new bicameral legislature, the Federal Assembly (State Duma and Council of the Federation), whose much-reduced powers were enshrined in a new constitution to be endorsed by plebiscite on the same day. Political parties deemed to have supported the Congress’s resistance to the dissolution decree were barred from contesting the election; but the results still did not represent the clear victory Yeltsin and his supporters had sought. Over eight million voters backed the Kremlin’s electoral vehicle, Russia’s Choice; but a shade under eleven million voted instead for one or other of the two ‘patriotic’ parties (Communists and Agrarians) that were cleared to contest the election, while more than twelve million plumped for Vladimir Zhirinovskii’s Liberal Democratic Party of Russia. Zhirinovskii, until his death in 2022, was a unique presence in Russian politics: believed by many to have been launched into late-Soviet public life as part of a KGB attempt to create a managed multi-party system, he invited comparisons with the French neo-fascist leader Jean-Marie Le Pen26 and issued calls for the Russian military to fight its way as far as the Indian Ocean.27 Many saw in the Zhirinovskii of the early 1990s a fascist dictator in the making, an idea the LDPR leader did nothing to dispel; and the ferocity of his rhetoric led observers and supporters alike to overlook the circumstance that he had stood aside from the defence of the parliament, and that his bloc in the new State Duma tended (once the shouting had subsided) to vote with the government. The strength of the LDPR vote in 1993 can probably be attributed in part to the fact that the Liberal Democrats were the only party with a strongly ‘patriotic’ appeal not to be covered by the temporary restrictions imposed on the opposition after the dissolution of parliament. Whether or not the KGB conspiracy theory is accepted, the LDPR has in fact served to direct potentially radical opposition votes into a safe channel. Its late leader, meanwhile, can best be understood as a court jester in the purest Shakespearian tradition. As with a court jester, his apparent clowning could sometimes reveal—in the most penetrating fashion—the foolishness or venality of those in power. But, as with a court jester, Zhirinovskii was ultimately a part of the system; his sallies could embarrass the powerful, but they represented no threat.

§ 7. The NSF broke up in 1995, but the rise in support for the ‘patriotic’ opposition continued. That year’s State Duma elections saw further gains: more than twenty-two million people cast their votes for ‘patriotic’ candidates, while the LDPR’s vote fell below eight million and the new pro-Yeltsin party Our Home is Russia took only seven million.28 The following year saw the launch of the People’s Patriotic League of Russia, a new umbrella organization built around the CPRF; Prokhanov was elected as one of the PPLR’s co-chairs. It also brought presidential elections, the first since Russia’s independence from the Soviet Union. Zyuganov stood, in the CPRF interest but with PPLR support and on an essentially PPLR manifesto: he took 32% in the first round against 35% for Yeltsin. The LDPR’s downturn continued, with Zhirinovskii achieving only 6% and fifth place. A runoff between Yeltsin and Zyuganov led to the incumbent’s re-election with forty million votes, while thirty million were recorded for the challenger;29 Zyuganov’s supporters alleged fraud but did not take to the streets. The remainder of the Yeltsin years saw the ‘patriotic’ vote hold steady around 30%. The transition from Yeltsin to Vladimir Putin brought a noticeable decline, but the CPRF’s status as Russia’s second party remains unchallenged: the most recent legislative elections, in 2021, saw it take 19% of the vote. A further 7.5% supported Sergei Mironov’s pro-Kremlin bloc, Equitable Russia30—For Truth, which also presents itself as socialist and patriotic and seeks to appeal to a similar electorate. (As with all previous elections in post-Soviet Russia, questions were raised about the integrity of the count.) On the other hand, not everyone who voted for the CPRF’s candidates necessarily agreed with too much of what they may have read in its manifesto; the party’s status as the only non-government force large enough to be ensured representation at federal level has allowed it to attract ‘tactical’ votes from people with an exceedingly wide range of views (including liberal and conservative as well as socialist and red-brown). Some of this diversity has even found expression among the party’s elected representatives: in line with an electoral strategy that goes back at least as far as 1937, when the ruling party chose to fight that year’s elections to the first Supreme Soviet ‘in a bloc, an alliance with non-party workers, peasants, office workers, and intellectuals’,31 the CPRF has always liked to include a scattering of independent notables among the candidates it puts before the electorate. (This habit on the part of the CPSU, of course, explains the seeming oddity that the legislature produced by 1989’s contested elections actually had a higher percentage of paid-up party members among its deputies than the Supreme Soviet elected in 1984, when there had been only one candidate per district.) The result is that the CPRF’s voters are probably at least as diverse, politically and philosophically, as are those of large mass parties in other countries—and indeed those of the main pro-Kremlin party, United Russia32—while the federal, regional, and local deputies elected under its banner are if anything more so. Election results (even if they can be taken at face value) are crude and unreliable as a way of assessing the strength of ‘patriotic’ sentiment in Russian society.

§ 8. Readers aware of some of this political background, and unfamiliar at first hand with Prokhanov’s voluminous writing, might well approach Mr Semtex with a reasonably clear expectation of what they would find there. This is, after all, a political thriller written by a highly political journalist, and set in what was then the very recent past; and many of the characters are based on real figures, easily recognizable even though the names are altered. It is a characteristic of Prokhanov’s fiction, in fact, that he incorporates current scandals and the public figures of the moment, in anonymized and exaggerated form but (to the novels’ likely readers) instantly identifiable. Naming the objects of these caricatures any more explicitly than he does would spoil the fun; it would seem gauche, or at best it would resemble those ancient newspaper cartoons where a man with ‘Prussia’ written across the skirt of his frock coat shakes his fist at a biretta’d clergyman labelled ‘The Church of Rome’. The price to be paid is that these facets of the books quite quickly become less readable as the particular headlines fade from memory: a time is probably foreseeable when younger readers of Mr Semtex will want notes.33 Many of the events in the novel, at any rate, are transparently to be read as versions of real events in the runup to Vladimir Putin’s accession to the Russian presidency. It would scarcely be extravagant to anticipate a thinly camouflaged presentation of some (real or imagined) secret information on how Putin’s meteoric rise had been achieved. Given the title’s reference to explosives, indeed, it would seem plausible that the plot would centre upon the widely rehearsed conspiracy theory that Putin himself was responsible for the 1999 bomb attacks in Moscow and Volgodonsk. And the novel does depict the entourage of ‘the Chosen One’ organizing those outrages; while its tone is certainly one of unremitting contempt for Russia’s post-Soviet elite. One reviewer will doubtless have caused Prokhanov a certain degree of innocent pleasure by writing that

I know of no better instrument for destabilizing society than this kind of literature. The ‘direct action’ we hear so much about is simply what young people do after reading books like this one.34

But it is less clear exactly what ‘action’ Gavrilov expects Russia’s radical youth, inflamed by Mr Semtex, to take. And this is indicative of something slightly unexpected about the novel. Most conspiracy thrillers open with the reader and the protagonist in the dark as to the conspiracy, which is ultimately unmasked after a series of adventures: Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code35 can stand as a representative example. Even in thrillers of this type, the anticipation is frequently more pleasurable than the consummation; many of Brown’s multitude of readers will perhaps have felt some vague disappointment at discovering that the whole exciting machinery of secrecy and conspiracy has been thrown up around a rather dull series of speculations in dynastic history. Mr Semtex deviates somewhat from the usual pattern. A plausible enough conspiracy is unveiled not at the end, but in the second chapter out of 34: a group of retired state security officers aims to restore Soviet power. Electoral fraud rules out the ballot box; a popular uprising would be powerless against a modern military; and divided opinions within the officer corps mean a putsch