State Ideology, Science, and Pseudoscience in Russia: Between the Cosmos and the Earth 1666905682, 9781666905687

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART I: STATE IDEOLOGY 11
1 Ideology
2 Soviet Ideology
PART II: PSEUDOSCIENCE
3 Russian Cosmism
4 Eurasianism
PART III: KALMYKIA
5 Kalmykia and Its History
6 Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, The Nebulous Savior
PART IV: STATE IDEOLOGY OF KALMYKIA
7 Ideology of Wisdom
8 Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, The Fallen Angel
9 Why Do People Still Need Ideology?
PART V: FUTURE IDEOLOGY
10 What’s Next?
11 Digital Ideologies?
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

State Ideology, Science, and Pseudoscience in Russia

Between the Cosmos and the Earth

Baasanjav Terbish

State Ideology, Science, and Pseudoscience in Russia

State Ideology, Science, and Pseudoscience in Russia Between the Cosmos and the Earth Baasanjav Terbish

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2022 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Terbish, Baasanjav, author.   Title: State ideology, science, and pseudoscience in Russia : between the     cosmos and the Earth / Baasanjav Terbish.   Other titles: Between the cosmos and the Eart   Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2022] | Includes bibliographical     references and index. | Summary: "Russia is defined by its past     legacies, including Soviet state ideology and the intellectual movements     of Russian cosmism and Eurasianism. This book recounts the histories of     these legacies and the ongoing search for a unifying state-controlled     narrative in contemporary Russia, drawing on the evolution of ideas     across time and space"-- Provided by publisher.   Identifiers: LCCN 2021059710 (print) | LCCN 2021059711 (ebook) | ISBN     9781666905687 (cloth) | ISBN 9781666905694 (ebook)   Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy, Russian--History. | Eurasian     school--Philosophy. | Cosmology--Philosophy. | Pseudoscience--Soviet     Union. | Pseudoscience--Russia (Federation)--History. |     Ideology--Political aspects--Soviet Union. | Ideology--Political     aspects--Russia (Federation) | Kalmykii︠ a︡ (Russia)--History--21st     century.  Classification: LCC DK49 .T47 2022  (print) | LCC DK49  (ebook) | DDC     947.086--dc23/eng/20220118  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021059710 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021059711   The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

List of Figures

vii

Acknowledgments ix Introduction xi PART I: STATE IDEOLOGY 1‌‌: Ideology



1



3

‌‌2‌‌‌‌: Soviet Ideology



23

PART II: PSEUDOSCIENCE 3‌‌: Russian Cosmism 4: Eurasianism



77



79



111

PART III: KALMYKIA ‌‌5: Kalmykia and Its History



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147

‌‌6: Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, The Nebulous Savior



PART IV: STATE IDEOLOGY OF KALMYKIA ‌‌7: Ideology of Wisdom





191 193

8‌‌: Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, The Fallen Angel 9‌‌: Why Do People Still Need Ideology? PART V: FUTURE IDEOLOGY ‌‌10: What’s Next?

171







207 223 241 243

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11‌‌: Digital Ideologies? Bibliography Index



263

271

281

About the Author



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List of Figures

Each part is prefaced with an image from the collection of cosmic paintings by the Kalmyk artist Dmitry Sandzhiev depicting what he terms “fantastic realities.” All images are copyright of Dmitry Sandzhiev and are used with his generous permission. Figure 1 “Eden.” Figure 2 “Zeus-Bastet-Pasiphae.” Figure 3 “The super wise bachelors from the constellation of the Big Fish.” Figure 4 “The procession of the gold-bearing ants.” Figure 5 “The cradle of the Universe.”

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Acknowledgments

This book project began as a PhD in social anthropology at the University of Cambridge but gradually expanded into something more eclectic. I wrote this book while at the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit of the University of Cambridge. I wish to thank all my colleagues who made it such a stimulating and productive place to do research. I would also like to thank Edward C. Holland and Richard Armstrong for reading and commenting on the manuscript, which substantially improved the arguments and chapters. I have felt privileged to work with my acquisitions editor Eric Kuntzman, acquisitions editor Jasper Mislak, and production editor Anne Cushman who have been encouraging and helpful throughout. Very special thanks must go to all my cultural informants in Kalmykia who kindly shared their time and knowledge with me and without whom this book would not have been possible. And finally, my biggest thanks go to my wife, Elvira, and son, Leo, to whom I dedicate this book and who have been an inspiration to me ever since they entered my life.

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This book recounts the entangled stories of state ideology, science, and pseudoscience in Russia, in the pre-Soviet, Soviet, and post-Soviet periods, encompassing the past 100 or so years of Russian history. The central topic—Soviet state ideology and the search for its substitute in the postSoviet period—is narrated as part of a broader Russian tradition aimed at obtaining a kind of “super knowledge” capable of transforming the world and turning Russia into a universal superpower. Characterized by a synthesis of the sciences, spiritual ideas, and social utopias and having come of age in the closing decades of the 19th century and the opening decades of the 20th, this peculiar tradition gave birth to a trio of distinctly Russian missionary movements—Soviet state ideology (gosudarstvennaya ideologiya), Russian cosmism (Russkiy kosmizm), and Eurasianism (Evraziystvo)—each propagated by their followers as a “universal science,” despite harboring pseudoscientific and spiritual ideas specific to Russia. Since their birth, the trio never co-existed peacefully for long. On the one hand, they undermined each other and vied for “scientific” supremacy and universal acceptance. On the other, each nourished the other’s impulse for authoritarian domination. Suppressed by Soviet state ideology as “unscientific” in the 1920s, Russian cosmism and Eurasianism led an esoteric underground existence during the Soviet period, feeding into counterculture. It was only following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ensuing repudiation of Soviet state ideology that these two movements emerged to reclaim their “scientific” status. Since then, both have flourished in post–Soviet Russia. Much has been written on the Soviet Union and its unexpected disintegration in 1991. The ensuing demise of Soviet state ideology, however, changed neither popular perceptions nor those of political elites concerning the importance of an all-encompassing state ideology in their country; and this topic largely evaded the attention of scholars and political analysts outside Russia. Not only did the nostalgia for a state ideology simmer beneath the surface of Russian consciousness, but Russia’s first post-Soviet President, Boris Yeltsin, xi

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attempted to propose a new state ideology, but without success. This book relates the search for a state ideology at both the federal and regional levels, based on the Kremlin’s projects and the case of the Republic of Kalmykia in south-west Russia. Besides being one of Russia’s least researched but arguably most interesting ethnic republics, Kalmykia is the only place in Russia where local elites officially promulgated a state ideology, nominally in force until 2010. If we return to the fateful years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a genuine belief both in the West and in the newly independent Russian Federation that the country would irreversibly embrace liberal democracy, join the league of Westernized nations, and purge the remnants of its old system and ideology for good. Despite this expectation, Russia took a different path, returning to an authoritarian place which today resembles less the West and more the Soviet Union, where the state is allergic to domestic critics and hypersensitive to foreign, i.e., NATO’s incursion into the geopolitical spheres of Russia’s influence. Russia’s road to reviving its old institutions and ideals, however, was bumpy and its search for a post-Soviet identity has been chaotic, decentralized, and complicated by opposing instincts to accommodate both democratic values and authoritarian tradition. Russia’s move in this direction should not be seen as merely driven by widespread yearning for the past but should be explored, as this book seeks to do, in the context of such events as the traumatic disintegration of the Soviet Union, the ensuing chaos and national humiliation, and a sense of unaccomplished mission that were skillfully repackaged by the Kremlin, not to mention the geographical and cultural remoteness of Russia from Western democracies. Vladimir Putin’s accession to power marked not only the beginning of a new millennium but was also a turning point in Russia’s recent history as the Kremlin set out to restore a paternalistic state propped up by the security services and authoritarian nationalism, and revive certain Soviet ideals. Whilst Putin has not officially announced any state ideology for Russia so far, a system of ideas and practices reminiscent of the Soviet period are already in place. One can be forgiven for misreading today’s Russia as an ideologically run state for in the Soviet sense the building blocks of a state ideology are already there. Now in the third year of his fourth presidential term, and having amassed power the like of which has not been seen since the Soviet era, Putin is already engineering his next term by changing Russia’s constitution. A highly choreographed move was spearheaded by a member of the Russian State Duma, Valentina Tereshkova, 83, the first woman to go into space on a solo mission, when she proposed at a Duma session on 10 March 2020 a constitutional amendment that removes the barrier to Putin staying in office beyond 2024. Both Putin and parliamentarians backed the proposal in unison, which allows Putin to participate in future elections and remain in power until

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2036 (by which time he will be 83). From 25 June to 1 July 2020, Russia held a referendum for constitutional amendments, and the majority of voters (78 percent) supported the initiative. Putin’s victory in the referendum not only propped up his regime but also gives him ample time to further his ideologybuilding project. He first captured the attention of both Russian and foreign political analysts with his strong ideological statement given during his annual address to the Federal Assembly in 2006. Putin began to show serious interest in the concept of state ideology and the possibility of reviving it in Russia at the beginning of his third presidential term in 2012. In Russia recentralization of state structures, which is a prerequisite for a state ideology, however, began in the provinces long before Putin. Whilst under President Yeltsin the country was disintegrating at the federal level, in Russia’s provinces some leaders proved to be more forceful in promoting old-style centralization at a regional level. In Kalmykia, a republic situated in the European part of Russia whose titular population is of Asian origin, its first president, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov (in power from 1993 to 2010), promulgated a so-called “ideology of wisdom,” the official state ideology of Kalmykia until his resignation. In his state ideology, Ilyumzhinov sought to marry the ideas behind Russian cosmism with Eurasianism and Kalmyk folk beliefs, thus creating a chimera which was supposed to fill the perplexing vacuum left by the disintegration of state socialism and its globally oriented ideology. Ilyumzhinov also proved to be a harbinger in other respects. Among regional leaders, Ilyumzhinov was one of the first to use “political technology” (polittekhnologiya) and promote a form of Eurasian nationalism in his state ideology. A new way of doing politics in Russia, consisting of adopting Western-style political messaging techniques and managing elections, but with an authoritarian twist, “political technology” was later perfected in Moscow, bringing the virtually unknown Putin to power in 2000, while Eurasianism has been adopted by Putin in Russia’s foreign policy and geopolitical projects since the mid-2000s. Emboldened by his ideological vision, in the late 1990s Ilyumzhinov even flirted with the idea of running for Russia’s presidency. While ultimately unsuccessful, Ilyumzhinov’s ideological experiment, which lasted until Putin’s emerging interest in a state ideology, was possible due as much to Ilyumzhinov’s initiative as to the federal structure that permitted it. Renewed interest in a state-sponsored ideology in Kremlin circles should only precipitate, in my view, an equally revived enthusiasm in analyzing ideologies and their possibilities. To understand Russia means understanding its regions. Far from being a monolithic entity, Russia is a multi-ethnic Federation encompassing eleven time zones and comprising eighty-five subject territories that are home to over 100 ethnic minorities with different histories, identities, and religions. This adds another, ethnic or regional, dimension to the complexity of studying

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current developments in the largest country in the world. Whilst all regions in Russia are similar in the ways in which their political and economic institutions are organized, many ethnic republics are unique in the way their titular culture and histories shape not only their relationship with the federal center but influence local agendas, dynamics, and visions. Kalmykia, for example, is a space which not only registers hidden fantasies and phobias, however bizarre, that may proliferate beneath the surface in Russia, but it also often amplifies them. This was particularly true under Kirsan Ilyumzhinov when, until the mid-2000s, the Kalmyk government operated without checks and balances. Ideas about Russia’s spiritual superiority, new global mission, and non-European identity that are becoming increasingly popular in the Kremlin have long been part of Kalmykia’s official rhetoric and state ideology. IDEOLOGY, SCIENCE, AND PSEUDOSCIENCE As mentioned, to better understand ideology in Russia, we need to look at a wider Russian tradition of cosmosophical and historiographical movements aimed at transforming the world. Not only is this tradition descriptive (why the world is the way it is), but it has a strong prescriptive element (what needs to be done to change it). Rooted in the Slavophile philosophy of the 19th century, this tradition has several distinctive features. First, it combines national distinctiveness with universalist claims about the global destiny of the Russian nation. According to this view, Russia is a keeper of universal wisdom, blending the best achievements of Europe and Asia. Second, this tradition is eclectic in the sense that it represents a mixture of ideas derived from various sciences, pseudosciences, religions, and occultism. This tradition has been closely connected with specifically Russian history, yet it has also striven to encompass global history. Third, this tradition has a cosmic dimension. Not only human society but the Earth itself is considered too small to realize the great visions of Russian prophets—hence space must be colonized, and a multiplicity of worlds and dimensions must be conquered.1 Despite its scientific pretensions, Soviet state ideology (gosudarstvennya ideologiya), known as Marxism-Leninism, belongs to this quasi-scientificquasi-spiritual tradition with a strong emphasis on action. Whilst based on the teachings of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, Marxism-Leninism was developed and transformed by Russian/Soviet intellectuals to reflect characteristics specific to Russia. It was a movement that sought to establish global communism while actively opposing capitalism and Western democracy. Perceived as a system of “scientific” knowledge that purported to explain everything there is, Soviet ideology emerged at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries in competition with other pseudoscientific movements,

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Russian cosmism (Russkiy kosmizm) and Eurasianism (Evraziystvo), that also positioned themselves as “scientific systems.” More or less simultaneous, their emergence was not a fluke of history. The period in question was characterized by deep transformations in the country resulting from the ongoing scientific, technological, and cultural progress that had injected into Russian society unprecedented dynamism, new aspirations, and revolutionary optimism, offering the idea that the social order was not only flexible but that it could also be engineered and even improved at will. Referred to as “Russia’s Silver Age,” this period also witnessed deep soul-searching, on the one hand, when a generation of intellectuals and artists across the country extensively questioned Russian national identity and character; on the other, when they experimented with modernity and avant-garde aesthetics. Amid this creative energy, artists like Marc Chagall and Kazimir Malevich produced remarkable paintings, writers Nikolay Gumilev and Andrey Bely wrote their best poetry, composers Igor Stravinsky and Sergey Rachmaninov revolutionized music, and scientists Dmitry Mendeleev and Ivan Pavlov made scientific breakthroughs. The pace of change was so rapid that the new order of things seemed barely able to contain radical changes without spilling over into violence. The revolutions of 1905 and 1917 reflected this intellectual turmoil. On the waves of such scientific, cultural, and social revolutions, all three movements—Russian cosmism, Soviet state ideology, and Eurasianism— proclaimed themselves “sciences” or “scientific systems.” Russian cosmism positioned itself as a science of truth about the Universe, aimed at engineering an immortal human race and bringing about cosmic order and peace. Soviet ideology established itself as a scientific endeavor for a revolutionary transformation of society to usher in scientific communism, the final stage of social evolution. Based on geographical determinism and seeing Russia as a unique landlocked civilization, Eurasianism was trumpeted by its proponents as a new kind of meta-science about the terrestrial totality of Russia-Eurasia. In analyzing these three embodiments of “science”— state ideology, Russian cosmism, and Eurasianism—this book recounts what constitutes “science” or “scientific system” in Russia and seeks to unpack the Soviet/Russian notion of state ideology and reveal its underlying links to pseudoscience and the occult. The Russian word for science is nauka which derives from the word uk meaning “teaching, instruction.” Its derivatives are the verb uchit’, which can be translated into English as both “to teach” and “to learn,” and the noun uchennyi “scholar, an intelligent and experienced person.” In contrast with the modern Western understanding of science as “knowledge acquired by study,” nauka denotes pre-existing, natural knowledge that people can either teach others, or learn from others or from one’s own life experience. This

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idea is clearly discernible in Russian sayings, such as zhizn’ nauka, ona uchit opytom (“life is nauka, it teaches people through experience”) or nauka uchit tol’ko umnogo (“nauka teaches only smart people”). That is, to do nauka one does not need to be a scientist in the Western understanding of the term but can be anyone deemed “smart and experienced” such as peasant elders, priests, or particularly adept horse thieves. Another popular meaning of nauka is “organized knowledge,” which is close to the Western definition of science. Having several overlapping meanings, nauka is far broader than “science,” with the implication that it allows any authoritative teaching, dogma, or pseudoscience to be presented as nauchnyi “scientific.” THE FUNCTIONS OF IDEOLOGY IN RUSSIA Let me elaborate on the term “ideology.” Most people in the West have a rough idea of what they think ideology is. For some, ideology is associated with political parties and government: it is an overarching narrative by which politicians decide on society’s goals and devise methods and policies. An alternative view is that ideology can be found beyond narrow political spaces in broader social environments and circles: among football teams, literary circles, religious groups, London taxi drivers, and other associations dedicated to a particular interest or activity. Ideology, therefore, can be understood narrowly and more broadly. Given that ideology is a widely circulated and often used term, one may assume that it must have a more or less universally accepted definition. Yet this is not the case, for ideology has been understood differently by various groups in different societies at different times. Since the term ideology was first coined by Destutt de Tracy in his work Eléments d’idéologie (1817–1818), its meaning has undergone a dramatic change and bewildering proliferation. If ideology originally meant the scientific study of human ideas, it soon came to denote systems of ideas themselves. With the contribution of scholars such as Holbach, Rousseau, Mannheim, Marx, and others, the term rapidly developed other subtle abstract meanings, such as a teaching, a belief, a philosophy, a practice, a critique of ideas, and so on. Today, as Terry Eagleton points out, ideology has a number of meanings, not all of which are compatible with each other. In Ideology: An Introduction (2007), Eagleton gives sixteen different definitions of the term that are currently in circulation in the West alone.2 Eagleton’s study of Western traditions opens up the possibility that ideology may be understood yet differently in other parts of the world. This is the case in Russia. What this means is that a Russian person who hears the word ideologiya (“ideology”)

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may imagine something different to what Westerners may imagine when they hear the word. Unlike in Western democracies, in Russia state ideology embodies the highest form of the political for it is not supposed to emerge from the masses but has to be within the purview of a tiny minority of political elites and experts. The Russian concept of ideologiya (“ideology” or “state ideology”) is often misunderstood in the West because it conveys meanings that are not necessarily present in Western definitions of the term. In the Soviet Union/ Russia, ideology has in general been understood as a positive thing that serves two important functions. Domestically, it is believed to be indispensable for national unity and orderly running of society, and thus is both seen and practiced differently to how people in the West perceive ideology. Internationally, a state ideology is supposed to have planetary scope and inspire those nations that seek ways of development that differ from Western models. As an overarching system of ideas and ideals that guide both domestic and foreign policy, a state ideology is also a belief system that defines the meaning of people’s lives and explains their country’s place in the world. That said, ideology is not supposed to be a set of ideas invented by political elites, or any humans for that matter, but should reflect the immutable eternal truth of the nature and the Universe itself. The role of political elites is to seek out and translate this truth for the people. Whilst almost three decades have passed since the collapse of state socialism and the repudiation of Soviet ideology, this positive attitude is still prevalent, and many people wish their country had a state ideology akin to the centralized Soviet model. One of the propositions of this book is, therefore, to move away from the conventional Western understanding of ideology as something negative and artificial, if one is to understand contemporary Russia because ideology in that country is perceived as something that is natural, brings order, offers guidance to the future, and gives meaning to people’s lives. Owing to ideology’s widely understood association with positive things, today many Russian citizens, who may see historical Marxism-Leninism as an experiment-gone-wrong, if asked about how order and prosperity should be brought about, would reply that they need “a better state ideology.” This is certainly the case among many middle-aged and older people in Kalmykia, as in other parts of Russia, who remember the Soviet Union and feel unhappy about the current situation in their country.

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KALMYKIA: HISTORY AND POLITICAL ORGANIZATION More detailed information on Kalmykia and the Kalmyks is provided in chapter 5. Here I provide general information to set the scene, which is helpful in understanding Kalmykia as a case study of a republic in which certain ideological projects were tested in the aftermath of the collapse of state socialism (part IV). The Republic of Kalmykia is a small place, roughly the size of South Dakota. Located in southwest Russia near the right bank of the lower Volga River and north of the Caucasus Mountains, it extends along almost 100 km of Caspian coastline in its eastern part. Its population is less than 300,000, more than half of whom are Kalmyks, a people of Oirat-Mongol origin who came to Kalmykia in the first half of the 17th century from an area that today corresponds to Western Mongolia and northern half of China’s Xinjiang province. Geographically speaking, the Kalmyks are the most western of all Mongol groups. Until the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Kalmyks had been predominantly nomadic, adhering to Buddhism. During the Soviet period, they underwent a series of tremendous changes, such as Russification, secularization, collectivization, national unification, and other shifts, that left a deep imprint on their social organization and identity. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991 it was decided to create the post of president in Kalmykia, but owing to scandals the election failed miserably. During the next attempt in 1993, the main struggle broke out between General Valeriy Ochirov, a hero of the Afghanistan War, and Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, a young self-made millionaire who promised to turn the impoverished Kalmykia into a “second Kuwait.” Ilyumzhinov won the election. During the Yeltsin era (1991–1999), Kalmykia, like other subject territories of the Russian Federation, not only enjoyed unprecedented freedom in domestic affairs, enabling Ilyumzhinov to initiate an ideological experiment, but also underwent significant political and social changes and distress. Among the first initiatives carried out by Ilyumzhinov was the dismantling of the local soviets, the proclamation of “economic dictatorship,” and control of the media. With his business partner, he also set up an investment fund called Kalmyk i Ya (“Kalmyk and I”) to collect privatization vouchers. Around 1994 Ilyumzhinov established an off-shore zone in Kalmykia, one of the first tax havens in Russia to attract thousands of Russian firms that sought to evade taxes. These two operations are said to have brought Ilyumzhinov substantial income. In a few years, with the National Bank of Kalmykia and the entire economy under his firm control, Ilyumzhinov was acting more like the CEO of a company called “Kalmyk and I” rather than the president of a republic. Another important development that Ilyumzhinov presided over was

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the revival and spread of both traditional and nontraditional religious movements, among which Buddhism benefitted the most. Today the overwhelming majority of Kalmyks regard themselves as Buddhist, which makes them the only Buddhist people in Europe and one of the three Buddhist peoples of the Russian Federation, the others being the Buryats and the Tuvans in Siberia. In total, Ilyumzhinov was at the helm of his republic for seventeen years. His position as president of the International Chess Organization (FIDE), which he held from 1995 to 2018, gave him access to the international press and more business opportunities. During his time in power, he captured the attention of both Russian and foreign press with his self-promotion, colorful personality, and controversial meetings with troubled Middle Eastern dictators, including Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, and Bashar al-Assad. Ilyumzhinov is also a self-professed UFO abductee with a taste for expensive cars and eccentric projects. Putin’s election as Russia’s president, marked by centripetally shifting power toward Moscow, however, changed the dynamic of Ilyumzhinov’s rule in Kalmykia. Wishing to keep Russia’s regions politically stable, inactive, and economically dependent on Moscow, around 2002 the Kremlin ordered that Ilyumzhinov shut down his profitable off-shore business, thus depriving him of the goose that laid the golden eggs. When the institution of local presidency was abolished at the end of 2004 by Putin, from 2005 to 2010 Ilyumzhinov worked as the head of Kalmykia (glava Kalmykii), a post created by Putin. Whilst Putin’s recentralization project pulled Kalmykia back into Moscow’s orbit, Ilyumzhinov’s state ideology was ignored by the Kremlin. Rather than a project inciting regional separatism, Ilyumzhinov’s ideology was seen as one of his oddities. Aside from his ideological experiment, the Ilyumzhinov years were marked by the following. Free press and political opposition were suppressed; the government of Kalmykia was dissolved eleven times at Ilyumzhinov’s whim; the republic regularly ranked as one of the poorest regions in Russia; chess was made a compulsory lesson in most secondary schools; and at least one-third of the Kalmyk population is said to have migrated to Russian cities in search of work. Venerated at the beginning of his presidency as an exceptionally talented politician and the pride of the Kalmyk nation, Ilyumzhinov’s ideas, personality, and his ideology of wisdom came to be ridiculed by the majority of the population in the context of the republic’s deteriorating economic situation. In 2010 Ilyumzhinov had to resign, not because of his cosmic mismanagement of Kalmykia but owing to a new law passed by then-President Dmitry Medvedev prohibiting regional leaders from staying in power for too long. Alexei Orlov, a Kalmyk who had been Ilyumzhinov’s representative in Moscow, was appointed head of Kalmykia, a post which he held until March 2019 when he was told to resign by Putin in light of a growing corruption

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scandal in his administration. Elderly looking and sickly Orlov, 58, known for his political impotence and drinking bouts, was replaced by younger and fitter Batu Khasikov, 39, a kickboxer and former policeman. Despite Khasikov’s pledge to kick start Kalmykia’s revival and bring order to its finances, no visible improvements have taken place, and the republic remains an underdeveloped rural region with high levels of unemployment, corruption, alcoholism, and economic criminality. FIELDWORK IN KALMYKIA AND RESOURCES This book is the outcome of a series of fieldwork carried out in Kalmykia, the first and most comprehensive of which was done from August 2009 to September 2010. I subsequently travelled to Kalmykia for shorter periods annually. From 2014 to 2019, I worked on a project entitled the Kalmyk Cultural Heritage Documentation Project (KCHDP) to video-document Kalmyk culture which entailed frequent trips to Kalmykia and other parts of Russia. During my first stay I was attached to Kalmyk State University in Elista, the capital city, where I took classes in history, language, and folklore. I also frequented the Kalmyk branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Many of my informants, therefore, are university lecturers and researchers. Another substantial group of informants are bureaucrats, from secretaries to clerks to former ministers. Among my acquaintances were also entrepreneurs, laborers, kindergarten and secondary school teachers, artists, musicians, cattle breeders, the unemployed, and pensioners. One group of people who most openly and critically shared their knowledge and thoughts on local politics were oppositionists, a small group of mainly middle-aged or elderly Kalmyk men. I also had the good fortune to have friendly relationships with a number of Kalmyk monks, traditional healers, and psychics. In terms of age, the majority of my informants are people of middle age or older who remember the Soviet Union. In this sense, this book should be seen as an ethnography of this age group who are power holders in today’s Russia. To collect ethnographic data, I employed a methodology consisting of what in anthropology is termed “participant observation,” supplemented with hundreds of hours of interviews on a voice recorder. Thus all quotes reproduced in this book are based on recorded interviews. I also conducted some archival research in the Central Library in Elista, especially concerning matters pertaining to pre-2009 Kalmykia. I wish to draw attention to the important fact that during my initial fieldwork Ilyumzhinov was still in power and people avoided saying anything controversial about his personality or his management style, even off-record, not least because such statements were punished. Not only were critics of

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Ilyumzhinov labelled “oppositionists,” sacked from their work, and harassed by the FSB (Federal Security Service, successor to the KGB), but their close relatives were also widely rumored to have shared the same treatment at the hands of the authorities. To be curious about the workings of the local government, or to criticize it, or be associated with people who did so were all considered dangerous activities. The situation has worsened both under Orlov and Khasikov and the state’s surveillance of ordinary people became even more pervasive and intrusive (although people still enjoy religious freedom, provided it is either Buddhism or Orthodox Christianity). In light of this situation, to protect the identity of my informants, I will not use their real names, except for those who agreed otherwise. Apart from interviews and participant observation, other sources of information that I used in my analysis are newspapers, books, online sources as well as conferences and seminars. In Kalmykia I attended dozens of conferences mainly on Kalmyk studies and Buddhism, and even one on “creative cognitive technologies” funded by the local government where the participants discussed the paranormal and pseudoscience. The local newspapers that I read on a regular basis were the state-controlled Khalmg Unn (“Kalmyk Truth”) and the opposition newspaper Sovetskaya Kalmykia (“Soviet Kalmykia,” which was printed outside Kalmykia and smuggled into the republic). Other local newspapers that I read occasionally were Elistinskiy Kur’er (“Elistinian Deliverer”), Stepnaya Mozaika (“Steppe Mosaic”), Izvestiya Kalmykii (“Kalmyk News”), and Parlamentskiy Vestnik Kalmykii (“Parliamentarian Messenger of Kalmykia”). Online sources that I used were vkontakte, YouTube, Instagram, and lately Facebook. THE STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK This book consists of five parts divided into eleven chapters, each illuminating the central questions from a different angle. The three embodiments of “science” in Russia are examined in the first two parts, including state ideology (chapters 1 and 2), Russian cosmism (chapter 3), and Eurasianism (chapter 4). In part I, dedicated to the topic of state ideology, chapter 1 opens with a bird’s-eye view of state ideology and merges into chapter 2, which examines how state ideology was constructed, implemented and experienced in the Soviet period and what constitutes an ideology in Russia. In part II, dealing with pseudoscience, chapters 3 and 4 look at how Russian cosmism and Eurasianism offer alternative visions of “science” from both cosmic and terrestrial perspectives and how these two movements were imbricated with Soviet ideology; the current situation regarding Russian cosmism and Eurasianism is also discussed in these two chapters.

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Part III analyzes Kalmykia, including its history (chapter 5) and the idiosyncratic personality of its first post-Soviet leader, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov (chapter 6), topics that shed light on the cultural foundations on which Kalmyk state ideology was constructed. Focusing on state ideology in Kalmykia, part IV recounts a so-called “ideology of wisdom” aimed at uniting all earthlings and nature into a single, global ecosystem (chapter 7), the downfall of its proponent Kirsan Ilyumzhinov (chapter 8) and finally, rejection of the ideology in a climate of political, economic, and social uncertainty in the republic (chapter 9). The question of popular nostalgia for a state ideology in the post-Soviet period and the topic of post–Ilyumzhinov Kalmykia are also dealt with in chapter 9. Part V concerns future ideology. Its constituent chapter 10 examines Russia’s structural vulnerabilities and asks whether it is possible to revive a Soviet-type ideology in 21st century Russia. This book is not simply a narrative of Soviet-type state ideologies of the recent past. Emerging new-generation technologies, social media, and advanced artificial intelligence are likely to change not only our daily lives but also how state ideologies function, posing great risks to democratic institutions in the coming century. These potential dangers are discussed in chapter 11. NOTES 1. Epstein, “Daniil Andreev and the Mysticism of Femininity,” 32‒26. 2. Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction, 28‒31.1. Epstein, “Daniil Andreev and the Mysticism of Femininity,” 32‒26.

PART I

State Ideology

Figure 1. “Eden.” Source: Dmitry Sandzhiev

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Ideology

Without the shepherd, sheep are not a flock. (Russian proverb)

Humans differ from other intelligent species by our ability to cooperate on a large-scale thanks to the cognitive skill to create and share common myths and concepts that endow us with collective identities and worldviews. This cooperative skill not only underpins human society but has also made us the undisputed masters of the natural world, for we are smarter and more creative together than we are as individuals. Chimpanzees, our closest relatives with whom we share around 99 percent of our DNA, live in groups consisting of no more than 150 individuals that are close kin, for that is the limit of intimate relations that each chimpanzee can form. Whilst humans are no different in this regard—we also cannot have intimate relations with more than 150 individuals—we live in much larger communities and can cooperate with a limitless number of other unrelated humans without ever having to be personally acquainted. What renders this possible is our ability to invent unifying myths and structures that exist in our shared imagination. Unlike chimpanzees that cannot concoct invisible bananas, we humans have, from time immemorial, created religions, money, and civilizations existing in imagined reality that nevertheless exert tangible and unifying force on our lives as long as we hold to our collective beliefs. In this sense, humans live in a dual reality— in the reality of our biological existence among nature and physical laws and in the imagined reality of social structures, rituals, gods, and histories. Nation-states, capitalism, socialism, and political ideologies are only a few recent additions to our long list of imagined realities—or “invisible communal bananas,” if you will—that clue us together. For any imagination or story to become an imagined reality what is needed first is to teach and indoctrinate people, constantly reminding them of the imagined order by incorporating 3

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it in their daily activities and embedding it in the material world. Humans think as much with their bodies as with their brains, and cognition is deeply embodied. This is how religions, for example, operate. Religious myths are incorporated into rituals, diet, architecture, art, clothing, morality, sexuality, and so on, dictating the believer’s life from the cradle to the grave. In the eyes of believers, such things as gods, angels, prayers, salvation, and Hell turn into immutable laws of nature or the truth itself. Any imagined order has a systemic logic and mechanisms of self-replication which do not depend on individual members and which makes the order resilient. Change of any significant magnitude in a short period of time, to the point of abolishing the existing imagined order itself, can be achieved only by creating an alternative imagined order with the help of complex organizations, such as new religious cults, revolutionary movements, or powerful conspiratorial groups, that introduce new myths and rituals, rallying adherents around them. The Bolshevik movement that abolished Tsarist orthodoxy by replacing it with communist secularism is one example. In order to create a new imagined order, or communist society, the first thing the Bolsheviks did was to control the production and dissemination of a new set of myths and stories, which they did with great efficacy through state-sponsored ideology. What the Bolsheviks offered was the communist paradise here on earth and universal salvation through modern science and technology. Like the Tsarist order propped up by the Orthodox Church it set out to replace, the communist myth united its followers and gave them consolation and comfort; it served as the source of absolutist morals of what is right or wrong; it gave meaning to people’s lives and provided structure to their thoughts; it encouraged group cooperation; it compelled citizens to die and kill and to endure hardships all in its name. As far as the Soviet people were concerned, communist stories reflected the immutable laws of nature, rather than being simply invented myths. This book is about imagined realities or orders—political ideologies and revolutionary intellectual movements in Russia. This opening chapter addresses, in general terms, the following questions: How are stories related to imagined reality? What kind of stories? What is ideology? From what angles can we study ideology? How do ideologies operate? Here I use methods borrowed from behavioral psychology, network studies, and anthropology, a discipline devoted to immersing itself in strange places, inspecting “weird” practices, poking around corners, and studying local cultures and beliefs around the world. Stories that unite us and govern our lives come in many shapes and forms. Stories not only tell us “where we come from,” “who we are,” and “what we should do in the future” but also explain “how the world works around us” and “how we are related to one another.” Since stories shape our beliefs,

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expectations, and self-images, it is important to look at how human psychology works and how we acquire our worldview. The Prospect Theory, co-founded by Daniel Kahneman, offers one way of looking at behavioral psychology which can be used in a study of storytelling in general and ideologies (a form of storytelling) in particular. His theory is underpinned by the idea that human cognition uses two different, but interconnected, selves within us, namely the experiencing self and the narrating self which Kahneman terms as “System 1” and “System 2,” respectively. The experiencing self (System 1) is a fast, intuitive, automatic, and energy-efficient system verging on reflex which is indispensable for our dayto-day existence. Not only does the experiencing self coordinate small and not so small decisions—how to walk, where to turn, which food to choose, which story to believe, and so on—that we make countless times a day, but it is also responsible for our habits, impulses, and intuition. The experiencing self is our moment-to-moment consciousness, and it uses substitution, short cuts, and other mental mechanisms that are fundamentally irrational and of which we are unaware. Known in psychology as “cognitive biases” (or in simple language as “gut feelings”), System 1-derived judgments are not only systematic mistakes, but they are deeply ingrained in our psyche. The experiencing self remembers nothing. Retrieving memories, devising strategies, and telling stories are within the remit of the narrating self (System 2), which we identify with consciously. Despite being logical and deliberate, the narrating self is a slow, lazy, high energy-consuming, and limited system which is also duration-blind. As such, it does not narrate everything but weaves stories using only peak moments (of pleasure or pain) and end results (how was it in general), while forgetting the vast majority of mundane experiences of our daily lives. In weaving stories, the narrating self assesses past experiences according to their average—that is, it does not add up experiences but averages them—with the implication that such recollections are inevitably distortions of the past. However, the division of labor between our two selves is highly efficient since it minimizes effort and optimizes performance. Most of the time we put on our experiencing self hat, because it is generally good at what it does: its models of familiar situations, short-term predictions, and intuitions are accurate. For example, we are all good at recognizing signs of hostility in the faces of our interlocutors, or detecting anger in the first word of a phone call, or picking up signals of friendliness. Whilst normally operating in a comfortable low-effort mode in tandem with the experiencing self, the narrating self takes over when things become difficult and we need more computational power for the task at hand, which often involves long-term predictions and analysis. But as we become skilled or familiar with the task, we adopt the experiencing self hat again.

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The experiencing self and the narrating self are interconnected in the following fundamental way. Despite its computational capacity and rationality, the narrating self is not as efficient as we might think, not only because of its slowness or laziness but because it uses its limited energy (which can be seen and measured in brain scans) to rationalize our cognitive biases or gut feelings, in the process perpetuating the dominance and power of the experiencing self over our decision-making. What this means is that what we think or do (i.e., what the narrating self thinks or does) originates in the experiencing self, and many beliefs that we think we have arrived by rational thinking may have irrational bases. By rationalizing our intuitions, irrational beliefs, and impulses and weaving them into coherent stories, the narrating self serves as our inner storyteller.1 This is all relevant to the topic at hand not only because it reminds us that we are partly rational mammals with big adrenal glands and small prefrontal lobes, but also because our stories are intrinsically unstable units prone to change as the narrating self continually assesses and re-assesses the past by averaging our past experiences as we progress through life. What might have seemed an intolerable situation or a failure at one time may be recollected differently later on, only to be re-evaluated yet again under new conditions. As far as the narrating self is concerned, it does not matter that it misrepresents the experiencing self as long as our life story is continuously updated with meaning. After all, humans are great storytellers with powerful imaginations, and the function of our stories is to give meaning to our lives as members of imagined communities. Since we experience, due to our psychology, only a fraction of the social world, which fraction we are presented with makes a huge difference to our stories. Not only do our stories reflect what we know, but they also determine what we feel, what we want, therefore how we behave. This opens up the possibility that other actors can manipulate our stories or worldviews (such as the state, discussed in the next chapter). All stories can be roughly divided into “personal” stories and “communal” stories, the former being autobiographies and family stories and the latter comprising national or group narratives. This division, however, is not absolute or rigid in the sense that both types may encompass myriad smaller stories that overlap, absorb, or influence each other. The category of stories that I label “personal” are usually produced by individuals for personal consumption whereas the role of “communal” types is to keep communities together by synchronizing personal stories and beliefs, hence communal identities. Seen in this light, ideologies can be characterized as “communal” stories or myths, and, in this sense, are not dissimilar to religions. In fact, one can easily find many similarities between communism and the Tsarist orthodoxy that Bolsheviks set out to replace. As in Orthodox Christianity, communism embodied a belief in immutable universal laws and gave meaning to its

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adherents’ lives; it had its martyrs and saints and pilgrimage sites; it had its schisms and heresy hunts. No wonder then that offering a belief system that was a coherent alternative to Marxism-Leninism, traditional Russian religions—Orthodox Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism—not only persisted throughout the Soviet period but commanded a high level of public confidence so that following the collapse of the Soviet Union the religions filled much of the resulting gap, especially in the spheres of moral guidance and ritual. Elaborate stories, in particular communal types such as political ideologies or religions, can be taught explicitly (which falls within the purview of the narrating self). They can also be inculcated implicitly through culture by means of public rituals and daily arrangements (which is picked up by the experiencing self). I will return to this topic later on. If we sum up its contemporary uses and offer a general definition, “ideology” basically means a storytelling embedded in rituals, practices, values, and the material world. There exist myriad definitions of ideology because the content of each story (capitalism, communism, liberalism, etc. and their variations) can be different, and because methods by which these stories are embedded in rituals, practices, values, and the material world differ in terms of intensity, scope, methods, and purpose. During the Cold War period, the main difference between ideologies on both sides of the Iron Curtain was that, while in the Soviet Union there was only one official definition of ideology which was communally oriented, in Western democracies people enjoyed myriad ideologies as they did their individual rights. This book, however, does not elaborate on various definitions of ideology articulated by Western scholars, not least because there already exists a vast literature on this topic.2 Instead, and more pertinent to the aim of this book, in chapters 1 and 2 I discuss how people in the Soviet Union themselves understood and performed ideology. In chapter 7 I narrow this down to the case of post-Soviet Kalmykia. As a distinct form of storytelling, ideologies help us see, experience, and construct social reality around us in specific ways. By harnessing fictional aims and interests, ideologies also serve as a basis for large-scale human cooperation. With societal shifts, ideological stories change too, offering us new interpretations of what is unfolding around us. Hence the importance of contextual analysis which studies what certain concepts meant in the context in which they were conceived, and how their meaning has changed over time. In my contextual analysis of the development of Soviet ideology, I propose to approach this topic from five interconnected angles, namely: (1) the role of actors, (2) actors’ embeddedness in networks and hierarchies, (3) fields (as defined by Pierre Bourdieu) in which networks and hierarchies operate, (4) ideas as memes, and (5) the connection between ideology and technology. This approach is justified by my belief that, rather than describing from a single angle, multiple angles offer a better understanding of the

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topic under investigation. When combined, multiple angles not only provide more information than any single angle could generate alone but can also be illuminating in that they reveal that ideologies operate and change in more than one way. ACTORS Historically, ideas either go “viral” or fizzle out in obscurity, not because of their content but because of those who adopt, transform, and spread them. In Russia there was a group of early revolutionaries—Gregory Plekhanov, Julius Martov, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinovyev, Joseph Stalin, and others—who through their personalities, rivalries, and friendships were instrumental in shaping communist ideas. Among them, Vladimir Lenin deserves special attention, not least because he was the founder of the Soviet state. As a child of the Empire, Lenin embodied diverse ancestries on both his paternal and maternal sides. His paternal grandmother, Anna Smirnova, was a baptized Kalmyk woman from the lower Volga region who married the Russian Nikolay Ulyanov. Lenin’s maternal grandparents, Moisha and Maryam Blank, were both Jews. Vladimir Lenin’s original surname was Ulyanov. Lenin was his pseudonym as many revolutionaries at the time had pseudonyms. Vladimir Ulyanov identified himself as Russian, despite being a quarter Kalmyk, a quarter Russian, and a half-Jew. Many of his contemporaries commented on his “Mongol” looks—his “high cheekbones,” “dark narrow eyes,” “big head,” “small stature.”3 A noble by birth, Lenin was radicalized in his teens following the execution of his elder brother, Alexandr, for an assassination plot against the Tsar after which the whole Ulyanov family was shunned by their respectable friends and neighbors. Lenin would never forget this betrayal and would go on to passionately despise the bourgeoisie for the rest of his life. Lenin’s revolutionary career followed a usual pattern whereby after a spell of exile in Siberia an aspiring revolutionary would flee to some liberal European country where he would compose inflammatory material and have it smuggled back to Russia. In January 1897, after having spent fourteen months in jail in St. Petersburg for anti-regime activities, Lenin was sent for three years into exile in Siberia. His exile ended in January 1900, and in July he obtained permission from the authorities to leave Russia for Germany, where he would launch himself as the energetic revolutionary leader that we know today. During this period abroad, he first used the name Lenin and published Iskra (“Spark”), which became the most successful underground Russian newspaper. The money used to send Lenin to Germany and finance the newspaper was provided by Alexandra Kalmykova, the well-to-do widow of the late D. Kalmykov, a senator of the Civil

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Cassation Department who had Kalmyk roots. In his political career, Lenin was instrumental in splitting the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party into two factions, the Bolsheviks (“Majority”) and the Mensheviks (“Minority”), becoming the founder of the former.4 In 1912 the Bolsheviks formed a separate political party with its own ideology or story of how to bring about communism. Ironically, despite being a revolutionary leader, Lenin spent much of his time in foreign exile, in London during the 1905 Russian Revolution and in Zurich during the 1917 February Revolution (which led to the abdication of the Tsar and the establishment of the Provisional Government, an event which took Lenin completely by surprise). Busy as a bee squabbling with the Mensheviks on European soil and growing increasingly unpopular among his own party members, Lenin would probably have remained abroad had it not been for the outbreak of World War One during which the German government hatched an ingenious plan to make their rival Russia withdraw from the war. The most successful German subversion operation, supported by the Kaiser himself, it consisted of transporting Lenin from Switzerland to Russia through Germany in a special train in the spring of 1917. In return for the train trip and lavish funds,5 the Germans hoped that Lenin and his Bolshevik radicals would topple the Provisional Government in the capital Petrograd (formerly St. Petersburg) and stop the war. In fact, Lenin never concealed his view that Russia should either lose or withdraw from the war, and he never seemed to stop talking about it. When Lenin boarded the train, the Bolsheviks were a small radical party, and if someone had suggested that they would take over Russia in the autumn that person would have been ridiculed. On 16 April Lenin arrived to a stormy reception at Petrograd’s Finland Station, staged by his Bolshevik followers, where he issued a call for worldwide revolution. He immediately moved into a new headquarters (a mansion that belonged to ballerina Mathilde Kshesinskaya, the royal courtesan), bought an expensive, state-of-the-art printing press, and literally handed out money to get people to join his demonstrations. Never one to mince words, Lenin publicly denounced those of his fellow revolutionaries who cooperated with the Provisional Government, under Prince Georgy Lvov, as “cunts” and “traitors.” Rumors that Lenin was a German spy dancing to the Kaiser’s tune soon spread in Petrograd which led the Provisional Government to issue on 7 July an order for his arrest on a charge of high treason. The army raided the Bolshevik headquarters and its press office only to miss Lenin by a few minutes. Instead of fighting for his Party and appearing at a public trial, Lenin shaved off his trademark beard and fled to Finland in disguise. Many members of the revolutionary network were outraged by Lenin’s seeming cowardice, and several Bolsheviks even openly condemned their leader by pointing out that: “the flight of the shepherd could not but deliver a heavy blow to the sheep. . . what kind of general abandons the army, his comrades,

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and seeks personal safety in flight?”6 With a 200,000-ruble price tag on his head, which was a small fortune, Lenin the disgraced shepherd changed safe houses in Finland several times. On one occasion, he was nearly caught by Russian army cadets at a train station and got away only by a stroke of luck, when his two local guides were arrested for interrogation, which gave Lenin time to slip past the distracted cadets and hop onto the rear of the train. Back in Russia, in the aftermath of widespread demonstrations in Petrograd between 16–20 July 1917, many remaining Bolshevik leaders, who were suspected of organizing the unrest, were arrested, including Trotsky, Kamenev, and Lunacharsky. The Provisional Government appropriated the Bolshevik headquarters, and newspapers ran stories claiming that the Bolsheviks had held communal debauchery and orgies with the Kaiser’s money in their mansion. Bolshevik prospects looked very gloomy indeed. Known in Russian history as the time of Dual Power (dvoevlastie), this period saw two power-holding bodies, the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet, operating in forced coexistence reminiscent of an unhappy arranged marriage. The Provisional Government consisted of ministers representing newly formed liberal and moderate socialist parties—including the Kadets (Constitutional Democrats), Progressists, Popular Socialists, Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries—which rendered the government dysfunctional and riddled with political factionalism and infighting. The Petrograd Soviet (in Russian soviet means “council”) was a revolutionary city council of workers and soldiers founded by the Mensheviks, joined by Socialist-Revolutionaries, but soon overwhelmed by a flock of Bolsheviks. Consisting of barely literate delegates, the Petrograd Soviet was also a chaotic and disorderly organization. Existing in perpetual antagonism and trying to overpower and undermine each other, the Provisional Government and the Soviet together dragged the country into a political and economic paralysis, which resulted in elderly Prince Georgy Lvov’s resignation from the government on 21 July in favor of his much younger minister of war, Alexandr Kerensky, 36, who happened to be a Socialist-Revolutionary and also a member of the Petrograd Soviet. In his childhood, Vladimir Ulyanov was tutored by Alexandr Kerensky’s father, Fyodor Kerensky, in Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk), and both families were friends. Following the Ulyanovs’ fall into disgrace after their son Alexandr’s execution, Fyodor Kerensky continued to visit the family and even secured a place for young Vladimir at the prestigious University of Kazan. When Lenin returned from European exile, Alexandr Kerensky welcomed his arrival, hoping to secure Bolshevik support for the Provisional Government. Despite this, Lenin loathed Alexandr Kerensky as a bourgeois liberal, and Kerensky’s appointment as prime minister did not end hostilities between the Provisional Government and the Bolshevik faction of

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the Soviet. Lenin saw Kerensky as the biggest enemy of the Bolsheviks and the greatest threat to him personally. Seeing the situation with the Petrograd Soviet and errant revolutionaries as a destabilizing and conspiratorial mess, the newly appointed commander-in-chief of the Provisional Government’s armed forces, General Lavr Kornilov, forced Prime Minister Kerensky to act more firmly against the Bolsheviks. In response, Kerensky accused the general of an attempted coup and ordered his arrest. “With the heart of a lion but with the brain of a sheep,” as he was described by one of his associates, General Kornilov reacted by declaring martial law and moving troops to Petrograd on 10 September 1917. Whilst the Provisional Government sought a plan to avert the oncoming attack, the Soviet and Bolshevik groups were allowed to rearm themselves against General Kornilov’s advancing troops. To assist the city’s defense, Kerensky also released Trotsky from prison. Not that weapons and Trotsky’s organizational skills were needed to fight off Kornilov’s army, since by 13 September the plotters had lost most of their soldiers due to mass desertion, and the movement came to a bloodless end. Following the unsuccessful coup, Kerensky had General Kornilov arrested alongside thirty other officers. Later, on 24–25 October (according to the old Julian calendar) 1917, the Bolsheviks, organized by Trotsky and shepherded by Lenin, would launch the “October Revolution” with guns that they had kept. Meanwhile, in Finland the fugitive Lenin followed developments in Russia closely. From mid-September, Lenin became convinced that the time to strike the Provisional Government was ripe and that if the Bolsheviks missed their chance another may never come. So he hastily returned to Petrograd to drag his reluctant and frightened comrades toward an uprising that most of them did not want. Still fearing for his safety, Lenin changed safe houses, settling in a flat in the working-class Vyborg district. On the eve of the October Revolution, Lenin’s troops and general staff, overseen by Trotsky, were based in the Smolny Institute, formerly a school for daughters of the nobility, situated on the other side of the city. Cut off from his followers and without a reliable line of communication, Lenin was desperate to get to the Smolny, anxious that his undisciplined and reckless comrades may postpone or even give up on storming the Winter Palace, seat of the Provisional Government, altogether. On the evening of 24 October, Lenin, accompanied by his bodyguard, left his safe house and set off on a perilous journey laden with government control points to reach his revolutionary headquarters. On the way, the two evaded government troops on several occasions and slipped past control points by sheer luck. Close to the Smolny, Lenin, wearing a wig as a disguise, and his companion were stopped by cadets who reached for their pistols. Hanging by a thin thread, the fate of the Revolution was now literally in the hands of the young cadets. But deciding that they were just a couple of

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harmless old drunks, the cadets did nothing and let them through. Had Lenin not been returned to Russia by the Germans, or had he not managed later to sneak back to Petrograd, or not reached the Smolny, the Revolution would have taken a different course. What might Russia have become if Lenin had been arrested, or shot, or not been present in Petrograd, leaving Trotsky in charge of the Party? The second most influential Bolshevik leader in 1917, Trotsky had an answer to this question: “There would have been no October Revolution.” There is a whole literature of “what ifs” focusing on Trotsky and other less radical Bolshevik leaders. Although these thought experiments fall into the realm of fantasy, they are interesting in that they underline the role of individual actors in the unfolding of history. A recurrent topic in this book is that luck plays a large role in historical stories. On the day of the Bolshevik coup d’état, most people in Petrograd did not know a revolution was occurring. The date of the Bolshevik attack on the Winter Palace was one of the worst kept secret in Russian history, and some Petrograd newspapers even published more or less the correct date. Despite this, city dwellers and many members of both the Provincial Government and the Soviet simply ignored the news or refused to believe that the Bolshevik faction would go ahead with this illegal and reckless plan. So the Provisional government made no real effort to prevent the coup, inadvertently turning itself into a sitting duck for any group willing to attack it. After all, did the government and the Soviet not already share power? In deposing the monarchy, had the revolutionaries not achieved what they always dreamed of and were the government and the Soviet not already headed by the revolutionaries themselves? As on any other day, the restaurants were packed, the shops and banks were open, and prostitutes lined the side streets around the Nevsky Prospect, close to the Winter Palace. While before the coup d’état both Bolshevik Red Guards and the defenders of the Winter Palace attempted to cut each other’s phone lines, the timing and number of armed supporters decided the outcome. The Provisional Government was defended by the Women’s Death Battalion, but the plotters had more men and bigger guns. At 9:40 p.m., no sooner had the cruiser Aurora fired a blank shell signaling the start of the Revolution than the entire company of the Women’s Death Battalion fell into such a panic that they had to be taken inside to calm down. Despite their spine-chilling name, the battalion consisted mainly of girls from the provinces who were not ready to die for the capricious and privileged men in the Provisional Government. Annoyed with how Kerensky had dealt with the Russian Army, the officer corps refused to come to the Provisional Government’s defense. A group of sailors and Red Guards, who stormed the Winter Palace, could as well have walked into it freely. The most challenging moment in the entire operation was when the attackers became stuck in the Tsar’s wine cellar, one of the finest in the world. Guard after guard was sent

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into the cellar to rescue their comrades, only to get drunk themselves. In a last-ditch attempt to save the Revolution, the Petrograd fire brigade was called to flood the cellar with water, but the firemen too succumbed to the wine. Despite everyone’s belief that Lenin’s revolutionary dream was nothing more than a wild goose chase, Lenin proved to be a lucky hunter by killing two birds with one stone—with his successful coup, he established the Bolshevik rule and got rid of his revolutionary rivals. Following the coup, on 25 October the Congress of the Soviet was convened in the Smolny where many revolutionary delegates, including few Bolsheviks—much to Lenin’s dismay and fury—denounced the “criminal takeover” and walked out of the Soviet cursing and shaking their heads in disbelief, never to return to a position of influence, thus failing to prevent Lenin and his inner circle from building a dictatorship. The story of the “glorious October Revolution” as an anti-monarchy operation meticulously planned and skillfully carried out by a group of highly disciplined revolutionaries supported by the rising masses as a historical inevitability was one of the greatest founding myths of the Soviet state. Against all odds, the October Revolution was made possible only thanks to Lenin’s dyed-in-the-wool stubbornness, German assistance and money, and a fair amount of luck. It goes without saying that Lenin was a flesh-and-blood mortal who experienced moments of luck, misfortune, and many human weaknesses. Like the myth of the “glorious October Revolution,” the image of Lenin as the prophet of communist utopia was also a myth invented by the Communist Party which skillfully imposed it on generations of Soviet people. Whilst the foundation of the Soviet state was laid by Lenin, there was nothing predestined about how it came about or indeed how it would develop. The new Soviet polity could well have turned into a protracted version of North Korea, or collapsed long before 1991, or transformed into Chinese-style socialism, or gone in any number of directions. As the saying goes, the Owl of Minerva always flies at dusk, and it is only with the wisdom of hindsight that we can construct coherent accounts of how individual actors and personal circumstances influenced the unfolding of history. That said, Lenin nevertheless paved a direction for his country to proceed. He established the Communist Party, and by extension the Soviet state, as a militant entity that saw itself engaged in “battles,” “defense,” “attacks,” “terror,” using “tactics,” “maneuvers,” and always “on the look-out” for “enemies” and “traitors.” Violent language and an uncompromising worldview inevitably translated into physical violence directed at “the enemies of the state.” With the political opposition exterminated and without checks on its power, the Soviet state degenerated into an autocratic regime in many ways similar to the Inquisition. Embedded in notions of ceaseless struggle and social evolution, the system also produced a succession model whereby each new leader of the country

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had to come up on their appointment with new ideas and practices aimed at improving the previous order, which would in the process not only mark their period of leadership but change socialism in the Soviet Union. Hence the terms “Stalin’s Totalitarianism,” “Khrushchev’s Thaw,” “Brezhnev’s Stagnation,” and “Gorbachev’s perestroika.”7 These Soviet leaders, of course, did not change the system single-handedly but were assisted and deeply influenced by their political allies and teams of special advisors whose arrival at the heart of power was individually shaped as much by chance encounters, lucky circumstances, or political machinations as by professional credentials. NETWORKS AND HIERARCHIES Adoption of a given idea by influential actors, however, does not guarantee its successful spread and implementation, for there are countless other variables that may influence the outcome. One is whether these actors are embedded in networks or hierarchical structures. In The Square and the Tower (2019) historian Niall Ferguson elaborates on networks and hierarchies from a global historical perspective. In his view, networks are varied and: “come in all shapes and sizes, from exclusive secret societies to open-source movements. Some have a spontaneous, self-organizing character; others are more systematic and structured.”8 Despite this variety, all networks consist of connections of various values that connect different actors (or “nodes”) in various ways (directly or indirectly, formally or informally, strongly or weakly). Whilst the elimination of nodes will affect the overall functioning of the network in various ways, it will continue to exist. By contrast, Ferguson envisages a perfect hierarchy as a vertical structure characterized by centralized and top-down command, control, and communication, the implication being that the elimination of the top nodes will cripple the whole architecture. This said, networks and hierarchies, according to Ferguson, should not be seen as absolute dichotomies, for not only are networks hierarchical in some respects, but hierarchies are simply a special type of network. What the two also have in common is that both hierarchies and social networks serve as transmitters of ideas. As a transmitter, the denser and more clustered the network or hierarchy is, the more resistance it tends to evince before a change of production of rules and communication protocols. This does not mean, however, that networks and hierarchies do not change. Often when networks and hierarchies are transposed from one context and re-functioned in another, structural change and innovation occur. Networks and hierarchies not only transmit ideas, they can also be sources of new ideas themselves. Since any society consists of a diversity of networks (professional, regional, political,

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military, and so on), the point of contact between networks may be the place to look for novelty. Some of Ferguson’s ideas can be applied in the analysis of Soviet society and ideology. Founded by a group of comrades, who often quarreled among themselves, the Russian revolutionary movement, which consisted of the Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks, the Socialist-Revolutionaries, and the Left-Socialist Revolutionaries, certainly resembled a network in the way it spread. Furthermore, it was a small component of a growing global web of socialist networks encompassing myriad revolutionary movements, ranging from anarchists to radical nationalists to women’s liberation activists. Having abolished Tsarist rule in Russia, the Russian revolutionary network, however, ended up consolidating around the Bolsheviks and their Communist Party and producing a hierarchical system, in many respects stricter than the old Tsarist one, to the point at which in Stalin’s Soviet Union participation in unofficial networks, or suspected participation, became a mortally dangerous undertaking. Whilst the Communist Party hierarchy had extensive control over information flows and exhibited a resilient structure, it was not dissimilar to other hierarchical networks. Not only did the Party encompass various internally networked circles, but it was also structurally predisposed to change once it was transposed from one context to another, which was possible on condition of a change of leadership (chapter 2). The Communist Party controlled the government and, by extension, the Soviet state. In this hierarchical state organization, communication between agencies was not horizontal but vertical, which meant that various ministries and state organizations did not exchange information with each other and had a narrow administrative vision that rendered them totally dependent on information and orders fed them from above. The strictness of its hierarchy was the Soviet state’s strength as well as its biggest weakness for it made the whole system vulnerable from the top, rendering the country prone to disintegration with astonishing rapidity through bad decisions made by the few (which eventually occurred under the Communist Party leader Mikhail Gorbachev). Apart from the state-sanctioned hierarchy and official networks, there were myriad mundane networks (in the form of friendships, football club memberships, hobby groups, circles) as well as underground, dissident networks that crisscrossed Soviet society (chapter 2). Eurasianism and Russian cosmism were two such dissident movements that spread through underground channels, subject to the laws of hierarchies and networks. As will be discussed (chapter 3), at the outset Eurasianism developed a centralized, hierarchical structure in some ways similar to that of the Communist Party. That its leaders were eliminated by the Soviet state not only crippled the entire movement but also brought Eurasianism to the verge of extinction. It was thanks to sheer

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historical luck and serendipity that the movement was revived from oblivion by the dissident historian Lev Gumilev in the Soviet Union. Resembling a loose and self-sustaining network, Russian cosmism, by contrast, proved to be more resilient, and it survived the Soviet period without really facing the danger of being eradicated (chapter 4). Ideas spread through the networks, both official and unofficial, with varied velocity and success. The spread of ideas through the networks, however, is not haphazard but has a structural component, which can be called “fields.” FIELDS “Fields” denote arenas of production, circulation, and appropriation of ideas, practices, and knowledge and the competitive positions held by actors in their struggle to accumulate and monopolize different kinds of capital. Fields are spaces that can be visualized as structures on which networks are superimposed. Fields are organized around struggle over specific types of capital that are seen as significant by actors. Field struggle for the French anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu has two distinct dimensions: struggle over the distribution of capital and struggle over the definition of the most legitimate form of capital for a particular field.9 If we assume the existence of the ideological field—i.e., a specific space in which philosophers, intellectuals, politicians, and other actors engage in the production, exchange, and imposition of ideas about how best to develop the country, attain certain political goals—and define the type of knowledge that it deals with as ideological capital, we can assert the following. The ideological field is organized around a struggle to define and accumulate the most legitimate form of ideological capital. Although this definition may seem somewhat mechanistic and forceful, it accurately describes what the Bolsheviks achieved in the ideological field. Thus the entire ideological field in the Soviet Union was not only quickly consolidated but was monopolized by a small group of Communist Party leaders who excluded all rival forms of thought by exerting their own vision of the truth. This is not to say that divisions never occurred in the Party’s ranks. Following the death of Lenin, his Party was split into three major factions or internal networks, all struggling for political dominance. This struggle was eventually won by the Centrists, led by Joseph Stalin, whose circle came to dominate the ideological field with their radical ideas. The defeated Rightist and Leftist groups, represented by Leon Trotsky, Nikolay Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, Mikhail Tomsky, and others, were side-lined and pushed out of the ideological arena with fatal consequences. The absolute centralization of the ideological field is not the only achievement of the Communist Party. Under Stalin, all official fields and

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subfields—including the economic field, the cultural field, the artistic field, the university field, the administrative field, the scientific field, and so on that were embedded in state institutions—were forcefully aligned with the ideological field which was given the exclusive power to dominate throughout the social order. In this process, whilst the religious field (controlled by the Church) was demolished, the ideological field, imbued with Marxist-Leninist ideas, came to reshape the entire society in its own image, politicizing such deep psychological layers as the aesthetic, moral, and other tastes of Soviet citizens. The impacts of all official fields being subordinate to a single ideology led to a visible standardization and politicization across society. It also created a systemic silo effect whereby information did not flow, indeed was impeded, between state institutions and, by extension, throughout Soviet society. The ensuing horizontal information gap, as will be discussed, was filled to a certain extent by unofficial means such as conspiracy theories, subversive ideas, and unsanctioned activities peddled through fields invisible to the state (chapter 2). Contrary to what the Communist Party asserted, Soviet ideology that fueled the state’s intellectual machinery was neither constant nor infallible. As any human-produced knowledge, Soviet ideological capital was inevitably riddled with internal contradictions, not to mention its propensity to change and modify under new Party leadership. On the one hand, as a teaching inscribed in textbooks and political proclamations, Marxism-Leninism embodied a claim to immutable universal truth. On the other hand, as a system of action and practice that required practical solutions to maintain social structure and order, Soviet ideology allowed compromise and flexibility. This fundamental inner contradiction was one of the motors that led to change. Hence throughout the Soviet period the Communist Party leaders and ideologists had to continuously tweak “the truth” in the ideological story to match the evolving social reality, never quite managing to synchronize the two. IDEAS AS MEMES We have argued that humans are good at imagining things and that societies are essentially imagined orders that structure our thoughts and actions in tangible ways. In this sense, any society can be seen as a marketplace of imagination, where diverse ideas, new and old, are continually produced and reproduced, silenced and amplified by all sorts of actors attached to networks and embedded in fields. Whilst ideas are initially generated by people, they have a curious ability to acquire a life of their own by being copied from one person to another and from one generation to the next. Thus ideas spread through conversations at dinner tables and social events, through printed

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materials and broadcasting, through laws and judgments, through arts and rituals, and nowadays through digital platforms. Once unleashed, ideas cannot simply be erased from social memory. Another way of describing this process is to say that ideas spread, evolve, and cooperate with other ideas to form “pools of ideas,” which are dynamic ecosystems. The term meme was coined by Richard Dawkins10 and is a shortened form of the ancient Greek mimema, meaning “an imitated or copied thing.” The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as: “a cultural feature or a type of behavior that is passed from one generation to another, without the influence of genes.” Dawkins was also the first to contend that religious ideas behave like memes. According to him, memes are organized into meme pools that constitute what he calls a “memeplex.” Whilst some memes do not necessarily survive well on their own, they do survive well in the presence of other members of the meme pool. Memes that form a meme pool behave in self-normalizing ways in that they are copied and reproduced down the generations close to the original form. Similarly, Dawkins continues, religious ideas that are good at surviving in a pool of ideas endure well regardless of the other ideas that surround them. Some religious ideas also survive because they are compatible with other ideas that are already numerous in the pool (as part of a memeplex). Dawkins writes: Roman Catholicism and Islam, say, were not necessarily designed by individual people, but evolved separately as alternative collections of memes that flourish in the presence of other members of the same memeplex. Organized religions are organized by people: by priests and bishops, rabbis, imams, and ayatollahs. But . . . that does not mean they were conceived and designed by people. Even where religions have been exploited and manipulated to the benefit of powerful individuals, the strong possibility remains that the detailed form of each religion has been largely shaped by unconscious evolution.11

Dawkins’s view of religious ideas behaving like memes12 can be applied to a wider set of ideas, including political or politicized ones, not least because religions and political ideologies have many things in common. Analytically speaking, the smallest units are ideas (memes) that constitute pools of ideas (meme pools such as ideologies, myths, and other kinds of coherent stories) that make up a larger unit, which I wish to term “the marketplace of imagination” (a memeplex) that encompasses a given society. This marketplace of imagination can also be described as an intellectual and moral environment specific to a particular country. Thus Russia has a specific “marketplace of imagination,” so does the United States, as does any other country.

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Some ideas survive individually and would flourish in any social environment. For example, the idea “obey your father” has a strong survival value in any (patriarchal) society. Ideas that encourage people to act together or have shared values are likely to spread more effectively. But for many contextualized ideas it is vitally important that they be part of a pool composed of compatible ideas. For example, the idea “obey the Communist Party and its teachings more than you would your father” has a good survival chance only within a communist movement; this is similar to the idea “obey Prophet X and his teachings more than you would obey your father” having a good chance of survival in religions. By way of social copying and cross-pollinating, ideas evolve and replicate. An example, popular patriotism (i.e., the maxim “be loyal to your motherland”) was first introduced in Russia by the Communist Party. This particular idea of loyalty to the modern nation-state and its institutions was copied and replicated in a variety of ways by all sorts of actors, producing similar ideas such as “be loyal to the Communist Party,” “be loyal to the teachings of Marx and Lenin,” “be loyal to your collective,” and so on that these ideas became part of the Soviet understanding of what it means to be patriotic. Communally adopted ideas also have a peculiar quality: the more you invest in them, the more psychologically motivated you will be to protect these ideas, not least because rejecting your convictions will be tantamount to acknowledging that you were wrong, and nobody wishes to admit this. At the societal level, not accepting popular ideas or repudiating them is sanctioned to the point at which either action incurs high social costs for the non-conformist. Just as individual ideas evolve, in the same way pools never remain fixed but change and mutate over time. Despite their commonality, the behavior of pools is different from how individual ideas operate because pool behavior cannot be predicted from that of its constituent elements or ideas. The branch of mathematics that studies this topic employs the chaos theory, which postulates that small changes in constituent elements can have a disproportionate impact on the whole system. This partly explains why, throughout the Soviet period, the content of the same state ideology continually transformed in often unexpectedly practical ways, usually following leadership change that introduced new ideas into society. Ideas, both individual and those clustered in pools, spread through networks and are exposed to competition or cooperation in Bourdieusian fields. This process is not unidirectional but can work in a converse manner in that certain pools of ideas can attract and organize actors into networks and create new fields. This allows various autonomous groups that are predisposed to respond to the same ideological signals or cues to function without centralized control and clear leadership, irrespective of whether they live in an authoritarian state or not. The cacophony of individual ideas and pools of ideas that

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cooperate and compete with one another compose the marketplace of imagination, which under normal circumstances allows for plurality of expression. In Russia following the establishment of Bolshevik power, this plurality was increasingly stifled at the expense of Marxism-Leninism that came to dominate the whole market of imagination. Oppositional ideas were muted, driven underground, or incorporated into the official melody, as it were. I mentioned that at different levels, both individual ideas and pools of ideas are subject to change. At a still higher level, so is any “marketplace of imagination” in the sense that each epoch, which represents a particular configuration of intellectual and moral values in a given society, is succeeded by another epoch with new sets of values. Each such epoch is also referred to by philosophers as zeitgeist, a German term meaning the “spirit of the age.” People subject to different zeitgeists have different mental world models, which they use to deal with the social reality around them. Feudal subjects living in Medieval England needed a different kind of world model from their capitalist descendants in 20th century England. Similarly, 20th century communist citizens in the Soviet Union needed a different kind of world model from American citizens. Hence good anthropologists do not judge ideas from other societies or times by the standards of their own culture and time. What this implies is that to understand Soviet ideology better one has to try to judge it as Soviet citizens would have. IDEOLOGY AND TECHNOLOGY Ideas spread at differing velocity and range depending on many social, political, and personal factors. But what technology does is that it makes information move faster and in more controlled ways, which often leads to political and social change. Emerging in the 19th century, modern technology is a progeny of the marriage of the Scientific Revolution to the Industrial Revolution. Mass media, technologized transportation, the telegraph, photography, cinema, and radio not only ushered in a new era of industrialized capitalism and made people’s lives more enjoyable, connected, and easy but also brought about modern regimes with high surveillance, propaganda, and disciplining capabilities, of which the Soviet Union was one. Without these technologies, Lenin would probably have not arrived in Petrograd on time to instigate a revolution, the Bolsheviks would not have communicated with each other and their military units as efficiently during the ensuing civil war, the Communist Party would not have centralized the state and dominated the fields as effectively, and communist myths and stories would not have spread as quickly and efficiently as they did among the population. The Party also would not have implemented its ethno-engineering projects as

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comprehensively which required the transportation of entire populations from one corner of the vast country to another. Until the beginning of the 20th century, methods of surveillance and control that states employed were largely inefficient. Aside from ordinary people, high-priority suspects and even convicts often slipped through the fingers of security services unnoticed. For example, despite spending more of the period between 1902 and 1916 in Tsarist prisons or internal exile than at liberty, Stalin managed to escape exile six times, which allowed him to travel abroad for revolutionary congresses, including the 1906 Stockholm and 1907 London events. In Stalin’s Soviet Union, equipped with the newest technologies of surveillance, communication, and transportation, evading the state’s gaze would become increasingly difficult. Modern technologies of surveillance and scrutiny, as Michel Foucault observes, also have a disciplinary function whereby people who are, or think they are, under constant scrutiny develop self-discipline, which makes them less likely to do things perceived to be illegal or wrong. According to Foucault, self-discipline is more effective than the use of or threat of physical force. Not only does technology render things faster or make people make things in new ways, but it also influences people’s perception of the world. We tend to be open, according to Kahneman, to news and stories that confirm our beliefs and intuitions, while filtering out what we deem irrelevant or false. By filtering information, the technologies of filtering—the mass media, radio, television, cinema, and lately online social media—shape the way we think, what we know, and therefore determine how we act. Jamie Susskind terms this technique “perception control” and contends that: “A good way to get someone to refrain from doing something is to prevent them from desiring in the first place, or to convince them that their desire is wrong, illegitimate, shameful, or insane.” By influencing people’s shared sense of right and wrong, true and false, perception control shapes norms of behavior, and those who breach the norms are subjected to law or worse—ridicule, shame, isolation, even excommunication. According to Susskind, perception control gives controllers of this technology—in this case the state—power over people, without subjecting them to scrutiny or force.13 It can be said that it was by controlling people’s perception of the world, imposing self-discipline, surveilling their lives, and improving communication and connectivity between state institutions and the population, that modern technology enabled the kind of state ideology that prevailed in the Soviet Union. The next chapter concerns the Soviet state ideology.

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NOTES 1. Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow. 2. Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction. 3. Sebestyen, Lenin the Dictator, 30–31, 71. 4. Following the split, the Mensheviks in fact always outnumbered the Bolsheviks among revolutionaries not only abroad but also inside Russia. 5. It has been estimated that fifty million gold marks (now equivalent to $800 million) were channelled to Lenin and his associates. Ferguson, The Square and the Tower, 213. 6. Sebestyen, Lenin the Dictator, 327. 7. Exceptions were three Soviet leaders who did not remain in power long enough to leave any significant mark, including Georgy Malenkov (who succeeded Stalin but was quickly forced to resign), Yuri Andropov (who died after fifteen months in power), and his successor Konstantin Chernenko (who died after just thirteen months). 8. Ferguson, The Square and the Tower, 17. 9. Bourdieu, Sociology in Question. 10. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene. 11. Dawkins, The God Delusion, 233. 12. If the word “meme” is an uncomfortable term, one can call it a “cultural variant” as Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd do in their book Not by Genes Alone (2005), which refers essentially to the same idea. 13. Susskind, Future Politics, 142–44.

2‌‌‌‌ ‌‌

Soviet Ideology

The winter’s passed, the summer’s here.

For this we thank our Party dear! (Soviet humorous song)

In this chapter, I shall first briefly elaborate on how ideology was understood differently by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels and later by the Bolsheviks who drew on their ideas. Then I will approach the topic of Soviet ideology in a top-down fashion and describe how this ideology was constructed, how it operated, and how it was implemented by the state. After that, I will produce a bottom-up analysis of how it was perceived, internalized, and resisted by the population. Due to the centrality of state ideology in this book, this chapter is the longest and most detailed, although I try to limit my discussions to topics which in the ensuing chapters shed light on pseudoscience and nostalgia for a state ideology in post–Soviet Russia. To understand Marx and his intellectual protégé Engels, both of whom served as inspiration for Bolshevik ideologists, one needs to consider the time during which these two men lived and wrote their seminal works. The 19th century was a period of deep economic, social, and cultural transformation in Europe when, spearheaded by British-led Industrial Revolution, countries one by one were rapidly transforming from feudal societies, where power was vested in feudal landlords, into industrial capitalist formations, where the new power-holders were bankers and capitalists who controlled the means of industrial production. This transformation played out against the backdrop of colonial expansion when European powers annexed territories in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere. It was also a time of revolutionary ideas—Darwinism, materialism, and social evolution—that challenged centuries-long dogma, conventions, and values. In order to make sense of the evolving present and, 23

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more importantly, predict the future, intellectuals turned their attention to the colonies of their respective countries and set out to study “primitive” societies (that they saw as the mirror image of their past selves) by using the new “scientific methods” at their disposal in the hope of discerning laws that propelled human groupings to evolve. Influenced by the zeitgeist of the period, many intellectuals and philosophers came to see societies as being akin to organisms, governed by internal laws of change and transmutation. This gave birth to anthropology, a discipline studying “exotic” human groups and their cultures (the term anthropology derives from the Greek word anthropos, meaning “human”). It was in this intellectual environment that Marx, who saw himself as a natural philosopher, developed his theory of “primitive communism” and theorized that societies evolve in much the same way as species do and predicted that social evolution—which he envisioned as progressing from primitive to higher forms by leapfrogging through the stages of slave society, feudalism, and capitalism—would culminate in “developed communism.” Just as constant competition for survival was said to drive species to change in the natural world, in the same way intrinsic class conflict between the oppressed and oppressing classes, orchestrated by invisible economic forces, was seen as a primary impulse that pushes social evolution forward. This conflict that, according to Marx, humans have perpetuated since the dawn of civilization was made possible thanks to ideologies which he saw as systemic rather than intentional products of ruling elites. Marx’s critical view of ideology stemmed from his philosophical conception of society according to which the essence of society never coincides with its appearance. That is, the idea that society has an appearance, which is not the same as its essence, is central to his discussion of ideology. This contradiction between the essence and the appearance, Marx argues, is intrinsic to any classed society consisting of exploiting and the exploited classes. What any ideology does is either hide or regulate this contradiction by creating an illusion or mystification. For instance, in a feudal society, Marx argues, where exploitation is blatant and not concealed, in order to avoid uprisings, ideology takes a religious form—or becomes “the opium of the people”—by preaching servitude which guarantees a successful after-life, thus creating “the illusory happiness.” In a capitalist society, by contrast, exploitation is concealed by the capitalist mode of production with its commodity fetishism wherein workers appear to be paid for their labor but in fact are subtly exploited. This is central to understanding how concealment works. In either case it is ideology that allows society to persist, despite intrinsic contradictions and inequalities brought about by the exploitation of one class by another. In this way, ideology which promotes false and deceptive beliefs helps legitimize the interests of the ruling class.1 As Marx understood ideology narrowly in the



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context of class exploitation and inequality, for him a classless society devoid of exploitation could exist only beyond the reaches of any ideology. In this ideal society where essence is equal to appearance there is neither need nor place for ideology. Witnessing the workings of capitalism in a 19th century Europe which enriched capital owners and bankers, while pushing workers, including child laborers, into abject poverty and misery, Marx was appalled by the situation, pointing an accusing theoretical finger at ideology. Son of a wealthy industrialist, Engels contributed to Marx’s theory by documenting ethnographically the disastrous condition of the working class in England, aided by his working-class lover Mary Burns who took him on tours of the city slums, factories, and cotton exchanges. In his influential The Conditions of the Working Class in England (1845) Engels described in detail the precarious life of the proletariat in large industrial cities such as Manchester and Liverpool, including the slum conditions, high mortality rates, frequent outbreaks of epidemics, and addiction to alcohol and opium. That said, Marx’s and Engels’s derision of capitalism as an intrinsically oppressive system did not match the facts. The fledgling capitalism was a transformative system that was so flexible and reproduced on a global scale that it produced not only human miseries, cycles of painful economic bubbles and busts but also ushered in a new age of global progress, technological innovations, plenty, and productivity hitherto unseen in history. The Bolshevik revolutionaries, however, neither saw it in such terms nor believed that the ugly capitalist duckling could one day transform into a gracious swan (so that one day hunger would be overtaken by global obesity, absolute poverty by general affluence, ignorance by education, and illness by longevity, which became a global reality today2). For the Bolsheviks who set out to strangle industrial capitalism in its infancy, ideology was not merely a critique of class-based societies but a call for action. Ironically, the revolutionaries, who embarked on the building of a classless society as described by Marx, came to believe their goal was achievable not by ridding society of ideology but by constructing another powerful scientific ideology capable of unmasking the lies and conspiracies of “bourgeois ideology,” defeating it, and regulating the workings of a communist society. To beat a bad monster, the revolutionaries set out to create a good monster. Whilst communism was prophesized to be a society without the state, money, or indeed ideology, the construction of a counter-ideology was justified according to the understanding that societies evolve through stages and ideology was a necessary tool to push social evolution to its logical end. Unlike “bourgeois ideology,” which was believed by the Bolsheviks to be employed by the bourgeoisie to take advantage of the gullible toiling masses, Soviet ideology was supposed to reflect not human-made laws, greed, or superstition but the immutable eternal truth of the Universe itself. As such, it was meant to be founded on enduring

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scientific truth and technology and ultimately bring about a worker’s paradise on Earth devoid of inner contradictions. Armed with such a powerful intellectual tool, practitioners of Soviet ideology were meant to see reality as it is, objectively and without bias. Of course, ideas about perfect societies are nothing new in the history of human thought or storytelling, and in fact many religions preach that their laws are not the result of human whim but ordained by supernatural powers and as such reflect an immutable truth that should guide human actions and values. Whilst both are imagined orders, the main difference between religion and the Bolshevik worldview lies in the fact that whereas the former is based on tradition and worship of the supernatural, the latter uses science and humanism (i.e., the worship of humans who serve as a source of meaning and admiration) as its key legitimizing strategy. In contrast with religion, another important characteristic of Soviet ideology was a futurist orientation embodied in its aim of engineering a new type of person, guided by reason and logic, who was supposed to bring about and populate a perfect society where there was no place for irrational beliefs and impulses. Since the molding of a new socialist identity was believed to be achievable, first and foremost, through correct socialization, the Bolsheviks paid special attention to the “cultural sphere,” so much so that it was identified as a key site of revolutionary change and seen as indispensable to economic development. Returning to Bourdieu’s scheme, the first sphere to be aligned with the ideological field was “Soviet culture,” encompassing literature, education, and arts. To imbue the citizenry with new cultural norms, the Bolsheviks prioritized the establishment of people’s universities (in the first two years of the Revolution there were already over 100 operating across the country) and promptly opened agitation stations (agitpunkt), reading houses, and clubs where agitators gave lectures, held discussion evenings, and spread the new knowledge. They also reorganized and repurposed theaters, museums, and cinemas. The post-revolutionary cultural campaign was inevitably highly interventionist and politicized and would remain so throughout the Soviet period. The merger of the state ideology with cultural propaganda to form an ideological-cultural nexus was as theoretically motivated as it was dictated by the fact that the Bolshevik leaders always had personal opinions on literature and could say a thing or two about art, whilst they did not necessarily have sufficient knowledge regarding purely scientific matters. In a hierarchical society such as the Soviet Union, it was not unexpected that Bourdieusian fields would be subjected to hierarchization whereby all fields were ranked according to their importance, which allowed the Communist Party to prioritize diverse fields and deal with them accordingly. As a rule of thumb, the more “social” the field, the more importance it was accorded. Conversely, the less “social” the field, the less it was directly controlled by



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a Party leadership which preferred to leave such matters to scientific organizations. Hence such “hard” sciences as physics, chemistry, mathematics, and others could reproduce their research as long as scientists cloaked their theories in terms of Soviet ideology. That said, since scientists are not twodimensional persons confined to laboratories but are members of society, the overall politicization of Soviet life did expose them, like the rest of the population, to the dark powers of ideological institutions. As will be discussed, under Stalin scientists were persecuted as much for their social views and connections as for their “wrong” scientific theories. The foundation of Soviet ideology, or Marxism-Leninism, was laid by Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) who developed his own interpretation of Marx’s ideas and wrote extensively on Marxist philosophy, economy, and the ways in which communism could be achieved. Lenin’s ideas on core positions were established long before the October Revolution, and as early as 1905 Julius Martov, Lenin’s early comrade in arms, coined the term “Leninism.” But unlike Marx, who predicted a revolution initiated and led by the workers themselves as a historical inevitability, Lenin insisted that only a vanguard party comprised mainly of proletarian intellectuals rather than uneducated workers could and should foster a revolutionary consciousness in the working masses to violently overthrow the capitalists. Guided by the ideals of socialist humanism, a form of worship of humans as a group but not as individuals, Lenin legitimized in his Party the idea of individual sacrifice for the sake of the common good. Hence well-attested disregard for individual human life and sufferings on the part of the state throughout the Soviet period. Not only did Lenin defend the necessity to use any means available to seize power and establish “proletarian dictatorship,” but he also defended the leading role of the Communist Party in determining what was good for the toilers, whether they liked it or not. The initial phase of the development of Soviet ideology, which lasted until the late 1920s, was a period of revolutionary utopianism influenced by Lenin’s thinking during which the leaders of the Communist Party zealously pushed the idea of proletarian internationalism and class-consciousness which envisaged worldwide revolutions. THE EARLY SOVIET PERIOD AND STALINIST TOTALITARIANISM On the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution, Russia was a backward, predominantly agrarian society governed by patriarchal rules and values. With a rudimentary system of public education and print culture, it was also a multiethnic empire where various groups were nominally united by their allegiance to the Tsar and not by an imagined national identity as was increasingly the

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case in Europe. Whilst ideas of otechestvo (“fatherland”) and rodina (“motherland”) existed, the very notion of patriotism and a sense of national identity were virtually absent among the general population, except for a relatively small educated elite. Having no unifying identity to rally around, various communities at the grassroots level were divided along regional, religious, linguistic, social, and other lines. For example, in the Russian regions, rather than thinking of themselves as “Russkiy” (“Russian”), people described themselves as “Viatskiy” or as “Tul’skiy,” that is natives of Viatka or Tula provinces. Aside from the peasantry or the nascent working class, even soldiers who were at the forefront of expanding the borders of the Empire, as some Russian generals complained, lacked a sense of patriotism and belonging to one and the same country.3 The disastrous performance of the Russian Empire in World War One was a turning point, leading to the abdication of Nicholas II and the establishment of an impotent Provisional Government that, as mentioned, had to share its power with the Petrograd Soviet. The Provisional Government’s pledge to continue the unpopular war, however, provided the Bolsheviks, instigated by Lenin, with a perfect opportunity to overwhelm the guard at the Winter Palace on 24 October 1917. In a virtually bloodless coup, the plotters seized power in a country which had been divided, dispirited, hungry, out of control, and spiraling into an economic and social abyss. The collapse of the regime led to anarchy, civil war, thence to tyranny. Determined to radically change society and create a new Soviet consciousness, at the outset the Bolsheviks introduced a series of measures aimed at undermining the economic, social, and political power base of their rivals, including the Orthodox Church, the aristocracy, the merchant class, and land owners, by abolishing the Church’s privileges, imposing bans on Tsarist imagery and rituals, nationalizing foreign trade and public utilities, and so on. Nourishing a deep distaste for both the national past and traditional culture, and devoid of an articulate sense of national identity and patriotism, the Bolsheviks formulated their vision of the future in the framework of global proletarian internationalism and class conflict, dreaming of world-engulfing revolutions. Inscribed in The Communist Manifesto in terms such as “the workers do not have a fatherland,” the ideological vision of the Bolsheviks emphasized the primacy of class consciousness over national consciousness. However, it failed to inspire the population to mobilize for industrialization and war. Falling on the deaf ears of the uneducated masses, this unadulterated global appeal not only failed to secure popular loyalty to the regime but proved to be a hindrance to state-building, which was crucial for the nascent regime’s survival. Besides the illiterate citizenry, the majority of members of the Academy of Sciences, the dignified center of learning founded by Peter



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the Great, regarded the Bolshevik power grab and their global revolutionary fictions as a national disaster. Unable to rapidly build a new world but equally undeterred by setbacks, the revolutionaries, nevertheless, were adamant that their country should become the world’s first scientifically run state permeated with progressive “Soviet culture,” which was supposed to be defined by science. Lenin’s idea of culture was also linked with his vision of a technically enhanced civilization in which electrification, personal hygiene, mechanized transportation, and radio systems all served as aspects of culture. The primary means of achieving these goals were education as well as cultural and aesthetic enlightenment. Hence from the early days, the Bolshevik leadership invested a great deal of resources and effort in popularizing science, importing technologies, and setting up cultural institutions. To centralize power and decision-making processes, Lenin also extended the nomenklatura, the Communist Party’s bureaucratic system, to all branches of the government and state institutions, helping to facilitate the channeling of the Party’s initiatives, policies, and propaganda to the target audiences. The Bolshevik idea of establishing their state ideology as a scientific project was influenced by the founding fathers of communist theory. Like Marx, Engels, who considered himself a natural philosopher, or scientist, and whose writings had a profound influence on the Bolshevik leaders, believed that, at some point in the future, all sciences would fuse to form one unified science that would bring with it huge benefit to humankind.4 The Soviet project of constructing an all-encompassing ideology progressed according to Engels’s teachings insofar as Soviet state ideology was envisioned by Bolshevik leaders as nothing less than a “universal science” or a grand story about the infallible and timeless laws of the Universe. From its inception, this ideology was not meant to be confined to the walls of research institutions and centers but be out there regulating every aspect of Soviet society. Since good politicians were supposed to be good scientists, science, which was equated with state ideology, was inevitably politicized, trivialized, and turned into the cornerstone of political action. This led to personal political ambitions soon becoming cloaked in scientific terms, and given that the Bolshevik leaders and their bureaucrats were no better scientists than the uneducated masses they presided over, the result was catastrophic. In the early days of Soviet rule when the fledgling state was experimenting with all sorts of ideas—from free sexuality5 to Lenin’s New Economic Policy (that allowed private enterprise) to avant-garde art to a scientized occult—the ideological field was dispersed and largely contained in itself. Not only did various theoreticians and politicians have their own ideas as to how to bring about communism or raise the cultural level of the population, but leaders within the ruling party openly engaged in all sorts of ideological

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and policy-related debates. The Bolsheviks known as Left Communists, or Leftists, for example, opposed Lenin’s economic policies which they found too moderate. Seeing a “temporary dictatorship of the proletariat” as the first necessary step in putting the Soviet house in order, Lenin silenced the voices of “the class enemies” by banning the “bourgeois press”—a move which was criticized by other factions of the Communist Party as undemocratic—and established revolutionary tribunals to deal with counter-revolutionary crimes. Things only got worse following the unsuccessful assassination attempt against Lenin by Fanny Kaplan, a female member of the rival Socialist Revolutionaries network, on 30 August 1918. In September, with a seriously injured Lenin refusing to leave the Kremlin walls out of fear of a further assassination attempt, the Soviet government passed a decree that inaugurated the Red Terror (1918–1922), a system of repression and mass executions of anti-Bolsheviks orchestrated by the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, better known by the abbreviation “Cheka,” the Soviet secret police. Its spies were referred to as “chekists,” and this term was used to describe secret police throughout the Soviet period. The most powerful organization in the country, exerting influence over all other branches of state apparatus, the secret police under Lenin also became the main tool to impose ideological control over the population, and it remained so until the collapse of the Soviet system in 1991. This point justifies discussion of the Soviet secret police, which I shall focus on in some detail throughout the book. Since its inception, with practically no restraint and under Lenin’s personal protection, the Cheka was entitled to do more or less what it wished, without repercussions. One event that occurred in a circus in Moscow during the height of the Red Terror is representative. In a state of intoxication, a group of off-duty chekists attended the clown act Bim-Bom, performed by a duo of famous circus clowns. At one point during the show, the chekists went on stage and began reprimanding the clowns for their “counter-revolutionary” performance. The audience thought that it was all part of the act until one of the chekists pulled out his revolver and shot the clown known as Bom dead. Killing “counter-revolutionaries” in droves in basements was one thing, but murdering a famous clown in cold blood in front of the audience was no laughing matter, and it provoked a public outcry. The deputy head of the Cheka, Yakov Peters, defended his subordinates by saying that they were merely showing a little too much zealous revolutionary vigilance.6 The Red Terror, coinciding with the Russian Civil War, turned the Communist Party into a militarized, brutal force driven as much by cynical pragmatism and barbarism as by ideological conviction. In 1920 Lenin explained his understanding of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” as follows: “Dictatorship means nothing more nor less than authority untrammeled by



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any laws, absolutely unrestricted by any rules whatever, and based directly on force. The term dictatorship has no other meaning but this.”7 The Red Terror subsided in 1922, and the Cheka was downgraded to a department of the NKVD, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, which assumed its policing role. Whilst restructuring itself, the Soviet government continued its repressive measures, albeit on a smaller scale. Lenin justified his authoritarian methods by pointing at the general disorder and the civil war that raged across the country well into 1923, at which point, suffering from ill health, he had a fourth stroke, which deprived him of his ability to write or indeed speak properly. Recuperating at his Gorki dacha, staffed with seven personnel, including the cook Spiridon Putin (whose grandson Vladimir Putin would many years later become Russia’s leader), Lenin was placed under the watchful eye of Joseph Stalin, who was in charge of his protection and also happened to be general secretary of the Communist Party, a post specifically created for him by Lenin. Bedridden and isolated from his Party, Lenin had a personal row with Stalin when the latter subjected Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda, to a storm of the coarsest abuse. Lenin did not suddenly discover Stalin’s true nature but knew all along that he was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, which earlier proved useful in Lenin’s political projects. Now frail and worried, Lenin even dictated his last political will to his secretary in which he wished Stalin stripped of his powers. But this was too late, and his will was duly ignored. Lenin created Stalin “the man of steel heart,” and it was his greatest legacy to leave the country with Stalin who had the prospect of becoming the Soviet dictator. Considering a verbal assault against his wife as an assault against his own persona, Lenin demanded an apology from Stalin,8 who conceded half-heartedly by sending a note. On 10 March 1923, three days after receiving Stalin’s note, Lenin suffered from another major stroke. Spending the last months of his life in a vegetative state, the Father of the Revolution died on 21 January 1924. On assuming power, Stalin (1878–1953), who saw himself as the country’s Principal Scientist and Main Ideologist, not only scaled up his predecessor’s revolutionary methods but also monopolized the ideological field and obsessively centralized power, paving the way for the spread of the Communist Party’s ideology across society. But unlike Lenin, whose time was characterized by utopian proletarian internationalism and sloganeering that failed to instigate worldwide revolutions, Stalin implemented a major theoretical reversal by abandoning the idea of immediate global revolutions and grounding the fledgling Soviet ideology on more pragmatic, domestic soil. In 1926 Stalin had his policy endorsed by the Party and orchestrated the charismatic Trotsky’s expulsion from the Politburo, the hub of the ideological field. An old comrade of Lenin’s and the founder of the Red Army, Trotsky not only argued for the doctrine of permanent global revolutions but also defended the

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idea of more democracy in the Soviet Union. In 1929 Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union altogether. Whilst acknowledging Marx’s and Engels’s position that “in the past we did not have and could not have had a fatherland,” Stalin during his major speech in 1931 pointed out that: “Now that we have overthrown capitalism and power is in our hands, we have a fatherland, and we will defend its independence.”9 To secure popular mobilization, loyalty to the regime and promote state-building, from the late 1920s Stalin and his inner circle implemented the concept of “socialism in one country” and deployed russocentrism by selectively rehabilitating Tsarist heroes and historical imagery that were used to popularize the Party line. Mass arrests and the infamous troika tribunals—first introduced in Moscow military okrug in 1929 and which were politically biased and used torture to retrieve confessions—were soon expanded throughout the country, establishing political terror as an everyday method of government. Stalin justified the intensification of dictatorial methods that he had inherited from Lenin by arguing that the revolutionary achievements were still in danger of being sabotaged by counter-revolutionary elements and spies. The difference between Lenin’s and Stalin’s methods, however, was that, whereas the former used pinpointed terror during the Civil War, the latter used mass terror during peacetime. Hardly surprising that at the height of Stalin’s ideological reforms many spheres of knowledge production and consumption—including the economic field, the political field, the artistic field, the university field, the administrative field, and so on—were forcefully grounded in Stalin and his inner circle’s “scientific” interpretation of Marxist-Leninist principles that sometimes even contradicted Lenin’s views. In the economic field, for example, Stalin scrapped Lenin’s New Economic Policy and replaced it with five-year plans controlled from the top. One point is worth making clear. Whilst Stalin was a prolific writer and wrote extensively on a wide range of topics (including the laws of the Soviet economy, nationalism, linguistics, literature, history, music, philosophy, agriculture10) and had strong convictions about architecture, the arts, and cinematography, many of his ideas that formed the core of the Soviet ideological field were often shaped during his interaction with Soviet academia and his advisors. The Institute of World Economy and World Politics in Moscow, headed by Eugene Varga, for example, had a profound influence on Stalin’s shift from aggressive strategies toward more cautious international policies which contradicted the views of early Comintern (Communist International) theorists.11 Varga was also instrumental in dogmatizing and institutionalizing the theory of capitalism’s imminent decline that the Soviet state adopted. As Stalin’s power grew, representatives of many more professions were subject to strict ideological control and punishment. It was no coincidence that mass arrests went hand-in-hand with the inauguration in 1928 of the first



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five-year plan, which produced legions of “saboteurs” (who were blamed for the many economic problems caused by collectivization and the Soviet leadership’s policy failures), and the launch in 1929 of a massive project—the gulag system in which slave labor was used in the settlement and exploitation of Siberia. Whilst originally a Tsarist project, the settlement of Siberia was also scaled up under Stalin. In 1934, less than five years after its establishment, the Soviet prison population of around 23,000 exploded to half a million gulag inmates who were seen as an essential tool in the Soviet push to industrialization. Stalin’s dark genius consisted in pouring old wine into new bottles and scaling up repressive old Russian institutions in the new Soviet context. Groundbreaking policy changes in the Soviet Union often began following attempted assassinations or murders. The turning point in Stalin’s thinking and policies was the murder of his close friend Sergey Kirov, the Leningrad (formerly Petrograd and St. Petersburg) party boss, in a hallway of the Smolny Institute in December 1934, which deeply shocked Stalin. The murder not only led to Stalin changing his own security arrangements, but also resulted in the Central Committee passing, on Stalin’s insistence, a resolution in the summer of 1936 that gave the NKVD extraordinary powers to destroy “all enemies of the people.” In September 1936 Stalin pressed the Politburo to sack the outspoken NKVD chief Genrikh Yagoda and replace him with more docile Nikolay Ezhov, who turned the country’s secret police into Stalin’s personal squad. Until then, Stalin was the Communist Party’s leader and controlled the government’s oligarchs, but he was far from an autocrat. His decisions not infrequently challenged by self-opinionated comrades, Stalin had to build and break political alliances. Now granted total power over the lives of millions of Soviet citizens and demanding that they surrender their privacy to the state (or to his persona), Stalin established totalitarianism in the Soviet Union and became its absolute ruler. This escalation of personal power, which Stalin justified using the idea of an imminent invasion of the Soviet Union by Western countries, coincided with Stalin’s growing obsession with Trotsky, who had become his most outspoken critic abroad. In fact, dealing with the “Trotsky problem” became for Stalin not only the main objective of his foreign policy but provided an ideological justification for domestic repression. Insisting that the Party and the Soviet armed forces were infiltrated by Trotskyites, the NKVD—now unaccountable to any institution, even to the Communist Party—launched operations against “German-Japanese-BritishTrotskyite agents” and “enemies of the people,” also known as the Great Purge (1936–1938). During the Great Purge, about eight million people were arrested on mostly trumped-up charges and at least a million executed. To put this number in historical perspective, between 1930 and 1941 twenty million people were convicted in the Soviet Union.

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The story of one Andrey Arzhilovsky, a peasant activist in Tyumen Province, is representative of that period. A prolific writer writing for small local newspapers, he was arrested twice by the secret police in 1919 and 1929 respectively and developed a distaste for the coercion, hypocrisy, and injustice of the Soviet regime. Against his better judgment, following his second release he kept a diary in which he recorded his feelings and dreams, however dangerous or heretical. One of his dreams involved Stalin. In the dream, Arzhilovsky, along with a fellow peasant “with a black beard,” came to see Stalin in a small room. “Drunk as a skunk,” the Father of the Nation, without a word, knocked the peasant with the black beard down and raped him brutally. “I am next,” thought Arzhilovsky in despair. . . After waking up, Arzhilovsky dutifully recorded his dream and put the date – 18 December 1936. In July 1937 Arzhilovsky was arrested again, and this time his dairy was used as evidence of his thought crimes. He killed no one, stole nothing, incited nobody to overthrow the regime; what he did was privately record his thoughts and dreams. Since totalitarianism demands complete subservience of each and every soul to the state, Arzhilovsky was judged based on his counter-revolutionary dreams, and seven days later he was executed by the NKVD.12 Ironically, even the almighty NKVD did not get through the Purge unscathed. Its leadership was purged twice, not to mention thousands of rank and file chekists, who were treated by Stalin as no more than guard dogs whose sole function was to assault whomever their master ordered them to and then die. Yagoda was shot as a Trotskyite in 1938, and all eighteen of his Commissars of State Security were executed under Yezhov. Only twenty-one of Yezhov’s top 122 officers survived their chief who himself was tried and executed in 1940. Yezhov was found guilty, among other crimes, of sexual promiscuity and of simultaneous conspiracy with Britain, Germany, Poland, and Japan.13 Let alone the chekists, even the omnipotent members of Stalin’s inner circle were not immune from persecution. Stalin had many of his old comrades eliminated. The wives of Vyacheslav Molotov, Mikhail Kalinin, Semyon Budenny, and Alexandr Poskrebyshev were either executed or languished in the gulag. Movements seeking to change the world often begin by inventing not only conspiracies but also rewriting history to enable people to reimagine their past, the present, and the future. If a government wishes to imbue people with patriotism, a sense of common purpose and communal spirit, the first step is to tell them “who they are” by recounting “who they were.” This could be achieved by retelling their glorious history with sacred names, places, events, and dates. In this sense, histories, especially those which serve ideological needs, are the highest form of fiction that nevertheless enable people to cooperate on a large scale more effectively by serving common fictional aims



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and myths. Whilst in Russia the writing of history was always a somewhat marginal and amateurish discipline verging on folklorism, under Stalin historiography was monopolized and standardized by the state and made a scientific priority. In the mid-1930s Stalin and his inner circle set out to rewrite Russia’s national history, which was part of the project of state-building. By overlooking their class background, medieval warrior kings and Tsarist military leaders, such as Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Alexandr Suvorov, and others, were brought back from oblivion with the stroke of a pen and celebrated through Soviet mass culture, films, and public education as those who contributed to the consolidation and the defense of the Russian state. Among these historical figures, Stalin’s favorite was Ivan the Terrible who carried out barbarous purges of his subjects and spent all but three years of his reign at war consolidating his power. Under Ivan the Terrible, the most common form of executing people was the so-called “bear execution” whereby a convict was eaten alive by a hungry bear. Sometimes bears were used indirectly—an offender would be sewn up into a bear skin and thrown to vicious dogs that would tear apart the bear skin along with its screaming human content. To suppress and terrorize all groups that opposed him, Ivan the Terrible established a bodyguard corps called oprichniki who were Russia’s first organized security servicemen, clad in black monastic garb and mounted on black horses, each carrying a severed dog’s head attached to their saddles. Whilst in Russian history oprichniki were always depicted as ruthless cut-throats, Stalin was the first modern leader to try to whitewash their bloody image by characterizing them as a “progressive force.” No wonder, Stalin likened his NKVD to oprichniki. With the sanctity of the Soviet state now rendered incontestable, one’s service to its greatness was considered the highest and noblest action, whatever the means used to achieve it. Soon not only was history rehabilitated as an independent classroom subject and offered at universities, but all primary schools were provided with Stalin’s approved textbook The Short Course on the History of the USSR (1937) by Andrey Shestakov and The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1938) written by a team headed by Stalin himself. Disseminated through the Party’s propaganda machine, the new myths of common national origin, its pantheon of historical heroes, the idea of common fate, and the threat of foreign invasion were key to the formation of a shared sense of collective identity and belonging across the Soviet Union. This shift in the Party’s master narrative was the catalyst for the emergence of a new, popular sense of Soviet patriotism—a powerful and complex feeling encompassing one’s love for the common motherland, one’s need to protect it, and faith in the Party leadership—that was harnessed and superimposed on state ideology.14 Forged by propaganda, Soviet patriotism

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and collectivism would soon be wrought into steel during World War Two. Following Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, Stalin initially used antiNazism for domestic propaganda but soon decided to side with fascism by signing a non-aggression treaty with Nazi Germany on 23 August 1939 in Moscow where they divided Europe into spheres of influence. Apart from affording Soviet ideology the opportunity to revert to its globally oriented Leninist roots of spreading worldwide revolutions (if seen from the Soviet perspective), this treaty also enabled the two signatories to divide up Poland between them, in the process triggering World War Two. Germany invaded Poland from the west on 1 September 1939, which was followed by the Soviet invasion of Poland from the east on 17 September. Whilst Germany got on with launching an offensive against France, the Soviet Union annexed Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, parts of Romania and invaded Finland, which also presented the NKVD with the opportunity to fill and expand its labor camps with a new work force transported from the annexed territories.15 SOVIET INTELLIGENTSIA Treatment of the scholarly community by Stalin’s regime is revealing insofar as it enables us to look from a particular angle at the inner workings of Soviet ideology which, after all, justified itself through science. The Soviet leadership saw this community as consisting of roughly two groups, namely “technical intelligentsia” and “creative intelligentsia,” the former encompassing scientists, engineers, technical specialists, and economists, while the latter was represented by writers, filmmakers, musicians, artists, historians, and other “creative” professionals. Whilst tasked with resolving technical and economic problems, the technical intelligentsia was seen as important for the country’s material base, the creative intelligentsia was crucial for spreading Party propaganda and shaping public opinion. As those who were responsible for the country’s economic and moral well-being, the intelligentsia were supposed to stick close to the Party line and hold correct ideological views fed to them via the nomenklatura system. Originally designed to serve as a way of hierarchically organizing the Communist Party, the nomenklatura spread as the Party’s influence spread across the country. Consonant with this thinking, to enforce conformity with the Party line, in 1930 all scientific societies and institutes were placed under the control of the NKVD, which resulted in further politicization of an already bureaucratized scientific establishment. Not only did debates, including the purely technical kind, come to be set by politicians and the military, but the state-run institutes soon turned into militant camps engaged more in hunting down ideological heresy, catching conspirators, or settling a score with each other than doing proper science.



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Inevitably, scientific discussions came to acquire a performative form that had little to do with the scientific topic at hand and more to do with showing who was boss and who owed loyalty to whom. The beginning of the Great Purge worsened the situation when Party luminaries were denounced one by one, dragging their affiliations to their doom. As far as the state was concerned, purges were not about separating the sheep from the goats, but punishing entire networks. This policy of collective punishment affected not only accused individuals or their colleagues but also their entire families. The main idea behind the Party’s absolute domination of the scientific and intellectual communities was, as Soviet academician Dmitry Likhachev explains, that “In the sciences an understanding was imposed that from the very beginning of any research, correct could be only one method, one scientific school, and, of course, only one Principal Scientist, the Leader.”16 As a result, not only were scientific and cultural theories and methods arbitrarily dichotomized along ideological lines—“bourgeois” vs “proletarian”—but whole disciplines were suppressed or banned at the whim of Party leaders. The most high-profile victims were genetics and psychoanalysis, both despised by Stalin. To safeguard the Soviet scientific and intellectual communities from foreign influences, in 1934 the exchange of reprints, articles, and correspondence with foreign scholars was put under the control of the secret police, and by 1939 the Soviet scholarly establishment’s international contacts were almost completely severed. Reflecting the Party’s total influence over scientific and cultural issues, in 1939 the supreme patron of Soviet science established a prize in his own name for scientific and artistic achievements, the Stalin Prize, a Soviet alternative to the Nobel Prize. The invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany in June 1941 was a turning point for the battered intelligentsia. Arrested scientists who had specialist knowledge which could contribute to the war effort were spared Siberian exile but locked inside special NKVD research camps—called sharashka—where in contrast with ordinary labor camps the inmates were fed well, treated with respect, and were entrusted with conducting scientific experiments under ideologically unrestricted working conditions. Soon new rocket launch systems, guns, improved tanks, and airplanes rolled out of the sharashka board rooms. The rocket engineer Valentin Glushko, the space pioneer Sergey Korolev, and the aircraft designer Alexei Tupolev, who would after the war spearhead the Soviet space exploration project and airspace domination, all achieved recognition within the sharashka system. An extraordinary situation necessitated extraordinary measures. In a state of war, which threatened the very existence of the regime, the coercive methods of governance were moderated and the Party made wide concessions not only inside the sharashka system but on the outside as well by overlooking political unreliability, “wrong” views, alliances and affiliations that previously had

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the power to save or ruin one’s life. This period of general de-ideologization of the sciences and society at large, saw Party functionaries and nomenklatura bureaucrats lose their elevated status, while professionals and scientific researchers found themselves increasingly valued by the very state that had persecuted them.17 The creative intelligentsia, whose service was called on to uplift general morale and the fighting spirit in the Red Army, also benefitted and many hitherto denounced writers, poets, and composers achieved national fame. One of them was the poet Anna Akhmatova whose son Lev Gumilev would achieve stratospheric fame during the last years of the Soviet Union with his theory of Eurasianism (chapter 4). In the post-war period when the country was virtually bankrupt, in accordance with their improved status, administrators, scientific workers, and famous writers were given access to priority housing and food and enjoyed high salaries, not to mention such perks as beds in special hospitals and seats at swanky restaurants that were previously reserved for Party officials. Eager to recover from the war, the Soviet government pursued a policy of unprecedented thaw in its relations with the Western powers. The exchange of scientific literature was soon revived, which even included the exchange of banned genetics publications. In 1947 Stalin, however, abruptly reversed the thaw by announcing the renewal of ideological struggle with the West. In the international arena, the Soviet government pledged to protect the newly liberated Eastern European states from imperialist encroachment. Domestically, it was followed by an order to Soviet scientists and intellectuals to resign from all foreign societies while “honor courts” were set up in government organizations, including the Academy of Sciences, to re-discipline the “laid-back” intelligentsia. It was high time to prop up the ideology. The Party leadership, however, did not go on a killing spree but resorted to a much milder, though tried and tested, method to single out exemplary targets, thereby defining the limits of the permissible. After all, the existing intelligentsia were either the children of Stalinism, having grown up under Stalin, or Sovieticized citizens. Killing them en masse would be tantamount to rejecting the achievements of Stalin. It was during this campaign that members of the intelligentsia, including Anna Akhmatova, were punished but not exterminated. Akhmatova was expelled from the Writers’ Union on charges of paying excessive attention to her personal matters and emotions of love and loss rather than on social issues or the collective experiences of the toiling masses. She was also rebuked for painting too gloomy a picture of Soviet reality which contradicted Socialist realism, an official style personally approved by Stalin. Whilst Russia had a long tradition in which writers and artists employed autonomous techniques of observing and describing the world, Socialist realism insisted on a uniform vision offered from the Party’s perspective. Moreover, despite its name,



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Socialist realism was not supposed to portray reality as it is in the present but an idealistic, imaginary reality in revolutionary transformation, which fitted the future-orientedness of Soviet ideology. It was in this charged political climate that, as part of the propaganda effort to distinguish Soviet science from Western science, in 1948 Stalin saw to it personally that his favorite scientists—including agronomist Trofim Lysenko, president of the powerful V. I. Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, who fraudulently reported on various plants miraculously transforming into superior species—were celebrated in songs and stories. In conjunction with this, the Michurin campaign—named after Ivan Michurin (1855–1935), a Russian scholar who worked on the hybridization of plants and was another of Stalin’s favorites—was set in motion to cleanse Soviet agricultural science of the so-called “Mendelians” who were supposed to be followers of Gregor Mendel (1822–1884), a German scholar recognized as the founder of genetics. Convinced of the power of Soviet science to transform not only human societies but the planet itself, in the same year Stalin launched his Plan for the Great Transformation of Nature which foresaw the creation of six million hectares of new forest territories to protect the Russian mainland against corrosive winds and deserts of Central Asia. The country’s most famous agronomist, Trofim Lysenko, offered his help by devising an idea that when planted in a nest formation in the shape of a cross (+) the peripheral seedlings work together to protect the central seedling and pool their energy for the benefit of that one, in the process sacrificing themselves. The implication of this quasi-religious method was that trees planted in this formation could grow wherever the gardener chooses to dig his shovel. This idea of individual plants sacrificing themselves for the common good appealed to Stalin who, apart from styling himself as an ethno-engineer (under Lenin he served as People’s Commissar for Nationalities), had a special interest in plant engineering. By 1952 not only had between twenty and twenty-five million Soviet citizens fallen victim to Stalinism, but more than half of the newly planted forests were already dead, and the health of the Great Nature Transformer was fast deteriorating. As ever suspicious of the Soviet intelligentsia, in the final year of his life the now frail Stalin, who was increasingly losing touch with reality, preoccupied himself with another conspiracy, this time directed against Jewish doctors as supposed agents of the West, whom he accused in a 13 January 1953 Pravda article of setting “themselves the task of cutting short the lives of prominent public figures by administering harmful treatments.” Only Stalin’s sudden death prevented yet another purge.

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KHRUSHCHEV’S THAW Following the death of Stalin, there was growing demand in certain circles for the liberalization of society, which was eventually supported by Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971) in his famous 1956 speech at the 20th Party Congress where he denounced Stalin, heralding a new era. Traumatized by Stalin’s persecutions, the Party leadership was adamant that the security agency, renamed KGB (Committee for State Security) in 1954, was reined in and permanently remained under the collective control of the Party and not of individual leaders. To facilitate liberalization in society related to processes of de-Stalinization, Khrushchev not only expelled most of his old colleagues from the Politburo,18 who comprised Stalin’s inner circle, but also arranged the removal of Stalin’s embalmed corpse from the Lenin Mausoleum. Whilst setting in motion a process of toppling the dead dictator’s statues and renaming streets and cities all over the Soviet Union, Khrushchev established a special Committee for Ideology, Culture, and International Party Relations in the Central Committee on 3 January 1958. The Committee’s task was to monitor international propaganda and supervise the Soviet press, science, culture, sport, literature, and arts in the transitional period and beyond. The Committee was also put in charge of such seemingly mundane, but politically sensitive, tasks as inviting foreigners to the Soviet Union and sending Soviet citizens abroad.19 As its modus operandi, the Committee, headed by Mikhail Suslov, however, did not undertake theoretical work but discussed individual, exemplary cases, thus producing “general ideological directives” that were supposed to guide the bureaucracy on the ground. Unlike his predecessor, Khrushchev did not style himself as a scientist nor did he try to micro-manage the ideological field. Tellingly, when he was made leader of the Communist Party, the Soviet Academy of Sciences elected him an honorary member which he refused to accept, saying that he had no pretensions to being a scientist.20 From the beginning, he let the scholarly community know that he would leave scientific and philosophical issues largely to professionals. Whilst showing little interest in initiating new philosophical debates in Soviet ideology and having limited enthusiasm for science in general, Khrushchev nevertheless reshaped state ideology and Soviet society at large by introducing changes in both domestic and foreign policies. By loosening the stifling state control and denouncing the terror aspect of Stalin’s rule as a “perversion,” Khrushchev proclaimed the end of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and argued that the Soviet Union had evolved into an “all-people’s state,” a concept which envisioned wider participation in political processes. He also abolished the special tribunals run by the security services, closed the gulag camps, allowed modest freedom in the arts,



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supported the space exploration project, and opened a dialogue with Western powers, which he believed were in decline, losing their imperial colonies in Asia and Africa one by one. According to Soviet economic theory, “imperialism” was the highest stage of capitalism, and it was apparent to the Soviet leadership, or so it seemed, that the octopus of capitalism had reached its full life-cycle and was doomed to retreat and release its planetary tentacles. Confident that the Soviet Union would soon not only match but outperform the “ailing” West’s living standards, Khrushchev was not afraid to allow Soviet citizens to see Western achievements or let Westerners visit the country. Political terror as an everyday method of government was replaced by administrative means of control. The scientific establishment was one of the biggest beneficiaries of this change. Hungry for information, Soviet scholars set out to absorb foreign scientific literature that was quickly translated into Russian. Special attachés were appointed at Soviet embassies to gather the latest scientific and technological news. Scholarly exchange was partially restored, contributing to the enrichment and development of new scientific directions.21 The retreat of the paralyzing Stalinist terror also stimulated the creative intelligentsia to assert their views more openly without fear of being arrested or executed. In 1956 a group of writers even attempted to establish an independent organization of Moscow writers outside the state-controlled Soviet Writers’ Union, which led to the publication of a literary collection Literaturnaya Moskva (“Literary Moscow”). In a climate of relaxation, the Party tentatively began to publish hitherto banned literary works. Vladimir Dudintsev’s Not by Bread Alone (1956), Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), and Sergey Zalygin’s On the Irtysh (1964) are a few well-known examples. This change, known as “Khrushchev’s Thaw,” not only had a positive institutional effect but also changed the lives of individual scientists and intellectuals. Banned following the war, the poet Anna Akhmatova, like many others, reappeared in public, to renewed acclaim. In 1965 she was even allowed to travel to England in order to receive her honorary degree from Oxford University. Nominally in charge of the ideological field by virtue of his high position, Khrushchev, himself not a professional ideologist, acknowledged the Party’s monopoly in the realm of ideology and understood well the importance of its widespread acceptance. Unlike Stalin, he genuinely tried to win the hearts of the creative intelligentsia—who he believed had the ability to “intrude into the sphere of politics and enrich people in general with outstanding models, works of literature and art, and in other realms of the humanities.”22 This encouraged Khrushchev to make public statements concerning questions of culture. Some did not go well, however. In 1962 several Soviet artists and sculptors, including Ernst Neizvestny, who were experimenting with abstract

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art, set up an art exhibition in the Manege Gallery in Moscow. The exhibition was a fiasco when Khrushchev, horrified by the paintings on display, characterized them as “shit” and called the artists “pederasts.” Abstract art was denied open expression and driven underground. While liberalizing some areas, Khrushchev suppressed others, among which the most notable was the Orthodox Church,23 which had been partially restored by Stalin in 1943 as a foreign policy effort to soften British and American public opinion, the Soviet Union’s allies against Nazi Germany. Guided by his wish to instill a uniform socialist belief system among the citizenry, Khrushchev launched an all-out assault on religion, closing or destroying the surviving or reopened churches. It was also during this period that the first comprehensive scientific approach to Soviet ideology was finally formulated. A textbook entitled The Fundamentals of Marxist Philosophy (Osnovy Marksistskoy Filosofii) was published in 1958, followed in the same year by The Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism (Osnovy Marksizma-Leninizma). Unlike Stalin’s monographs, these two textbooks were produced by a collective of leading Soviet theoreticians and scholars as part of a strategy to repeal the “cult of personality.” The new textbooks purported to explain the general laws of motion and development in nature, society, and human thought through Soviet ideology (a mix of selected or reinterpreted works by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and others), which was presented as a comprehensive scientific doctrine consisting of three main parts—philosophy, political economy, and theory of scientific socialism. The engine of the philosophy consisted of two powerful theories of dialectical and historical materialism that were regarded as the foundations of the entire doctrine. Dialectical materialism teaches that all events, ideas, and movements change because of internal contradictions inherent in themselves. Historical materialism maintains that social structures derive from economic structures and that these are transformed as a result of class struggle, which will cease to exist with the emergence of a communist society. Based on the idea of inherent struggle between progressive and regressive forces, dialectical and historical materialism were conceived as being applicable to all scholarly disciplines, from the sciences to the humanities, along with politics and the economy. Seen in this light, the “regressive forces” that existed in Soviet society were identified either as remnants of the previous order or an influence from the capitalist world, while “progressive forces” were believed to reach maturity under scientific communism. In short, Soviet ideology, as Engels had once dreamt, was presented by the Party as a universal science capable of providing a unified explanation of everything. The seeming simplicity and elegance of this universal science—based on a simple black-and-white story of progressive elements fighting regressive elements in the background of social evolution that moves forward through



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pre-determined stages—matched the conviction of Soviet ideologists that science was difficult only because it had been made so by capitalists who divided it into countless elitist, self-serving specialties. Merged into a single super-science in which everything becomes explainable in terms of everything else, the simplicity of Soviet ideology was not seen as a weakness but declared its greatest strength. But the irony was that this superficial simplicity disguised the complexity of, and internal contradictions inherent in, ideological arguments in each scientific discipline. At the heart of this dilemma was not so much intrinsic incoherence among scientific disciplines resistant to reduction to a single formula, but the opposite claim that they were uniformly united under one “super-science” of Marxism-Leninism. In the new environment of mass enthusiasm, fueled by rapid growth in the post-war economy and Yuri Gagarin’s virgin space flight, Khrushchev’s liberalizing move not only unleashed creative thinking and stirred the nation’s blood but ensured popular support for the Party’s ideology and management style. This celebratory mood was reflected in the 1961 Party Program which asserted that capitalism was doomed and defined communism as an immediate goal. On the path to scientific communism, it was prophesized, all significant social divisions would be eliminated and the patriotic multi-ethnic citizenry would merge into a homogeneous nation under a single ideology. Inspired by grand visions for his country, Khrushchev was known to be a complex man with both totalitarian tendencies and comradely values. He was also an impulsive person with a mentality of “fixing things quickly” on the largest possible scale, often unceremoniously overruling other Politburo members. During his de-Stalinization speech at the 20th Party Congress in 1956, Khrushchev had ridiculed Stalin’s knowledge of agriculture, asserting that: “He (Stalin) knew the country and agriculture only from films. And these films had dressed up and beautified the existing situation in agriculture. Many films so pictured kolkhoz life that the tables were bending from the weight of turkeys and geese. Evidently, Stalin thought that it was actually so.”24 The fact was that Khrushchev himself, who happened to have a special interest in the practical aspects of botany among his rare hobbies, was no less delusional. Advised by the unabashed daydreamer Trofim Lysenko who promised to solve all problems at a stroke, Khrushchev single-handedly launched disastrous “virgin land” campaigns, mostly in Central Asia, which led to a decrease in agricultural output and the country’s growing dependence on wheat imports from the United States and Canada, the Soviet Union’s arch rivals, which turned into a source of embarrassment for the Soviet leadership. It also tainted the prestige of Soviet science and ideology. To make things worse, in defense of Lysenko’s ill-fated theory the emotional and increasingly erratic Khrushchev even launched an attack on the Timiryazev Academy of Agriculture, one of the oldest agrarian educational institutions in

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Russia founded in 1865, by closing it, although he had to reverse his decision. Khrushchev also almost single-mindedly pushed the world, it seemed at the time, to the brink of nuclear Armageddon during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. With his reckless actions and failed plans, he reaped a significant harvest of discontent among the Politburo leadership. Not long after that, Khrushchev was deposed in a coup by a group of conservatives who had lost confidence in their leader, accusing him of economic incompetence, voluntarism, and immodest behavior. The controlled shift of Soviet society into one marked by general liberalization and tolerance over which he had presided may well have saved Khrushchev’s own life. On the day of the coup on 12 October 1964 in the Kremlin, Khrushchev was verbally attacked by a trio consisting of his protégé Leonid Brezhnev, Mikhail Suslov (head of the Committee for Ideology), and Alexandr Shelepin (former KGB head who had a decisive influence in the secret services) who demanded his “voluntary” retirement. The ousted leader was not executed but allowed to spend the rest of his retirement peacefully in a dacha in the countryside. Following Khrushchev’s downfall, Lysenko was quickly demoted and a new textbook on agriculture was prepared to provide the correct ideological update on the subject. The case of Lysenko and the discipline of agriculture is only one of many cases indicative of a discrepancy between the essence of Soviet ideology and its representation. Whilst presented as final and absolute wisdom, in practice Soviet ideology was anything but. Its theories mutated and changed throughout the Soviet period. Nevertheless, relatively freed of the whims of state leaders, under Khrushchev, Soviet ideology not only attained theoretical sophistication but was pushed to the limits of bureaucratization. The task of spreading and maintaining the state ideology was distributed among a host of organizations including: the Department of Propaganda and Agitation at the Central Committee of the CPSU; All-Union and republican ministries of culture; educational institutions; the Soviet Academy of Sciences; the Institute of Marxism-Leninism; the Academy of Social Sciences; the Higher Party School at the Central Committee of the CPSU; editorial offices of newspapers, radio, and television stations; All-Union societies to spread political and scientific knowledge; the unions of writers, journalists, artists, and composers, not to mention the KGB. What this meant was that ideological censorship was delegated to low-ranking officials who often made decisions based on their personal convictions and agendas. In November 1962, the Committee for Ideology, Culture, and International Relations was stripped of its executive functions, given advisory status and its name was accordingly shortened to Ideological Committee.25 In May 1966, the Committee was abolished altogether, although the post of Secretary for Ideology, de facto the second most powerful position in the country, was always preserved at the Politburo.



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STAGNATION UNDER BREZHNEV In contrast with Stalin’s extermination of the cadres and Khrushchev’s constant reorganization, Leonid Brezhnev’s (1906–1982) tenure began with the notable stability of cadres, which won him bureaucratic support at all levels and was indicative of the coming era. Whilst supporting the Party line taken after Stalin, Brezhnev, a land manager and engineer by training, was also concerned with the instability that Khrushchev’s liberalizing reforms had introduced to the Soviet system. Hence Brezhnev’s accession to power was marked by tightening the screws on society, which effectively halted de-Stalinization on the domestic front. By contrast, in the international arena some East European satellite states continued de-Stalinization by further liberalizing their rule and strengthening their ties with the West, which created tension leading to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, supported by other Warsaw Pact countries. In the east, socialist China, which was cultivating Mao Zedong’s cult of personality, also posed serious problems when the Chinese leader openly denounced Soviet policies as “revisionist” and launched a competition for influence in third world countries. To reassert the Soviet Union’s leadership among world communist parties and bring them into line, in his 1967 speech dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution Brezhnev announced that the Soviet Union had spearheaded the rest of the world by entering the historical stage of “developed socialism” (razvitoy sotsializm), a second stage in the transition from socialism to communism. In 1971 this concept, regarded as Brezhnev’s main contribution to the theory of Soviet ideology, was officially approved at the 24th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In 1977 Brezhnev received the Gold Medal of Karl Marx, the highest award of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, for his “outstanding contribution” to Marxist-Leninist theory. The adjective “developed” to describe the condition of Soviet socialism was fair game, at least in the beginning. The first several years of Brezhnev’s rule were indeed marked by a dynamic increase in the standard of living in the Soviet Union due to the perpetuation of industrial and technological progress. Having one of the most progressive social security programs, the Soviet Union was also a global superpower with the second largest economy and military firepower in the world after the United States. Whilst capitalism exploited accelerating technology to improve the living conditions of ordinary people and to raise productivity, Soviet socialism diverted the country’s limited resources and technology into ideological projects aimed at bolstering state power. Central planning, which had worked well by providing basic needs during extreme conditions of war and during the post-war period,

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proved unfit to meet the growing demand for diversity and consumption in times of peace. Unreformed, inefficient, and riddled with chronic consumer goods shortages, the Soviet economy, underpinned by state ideology, stagnated and living standards soon sharply belied official propaganda. Here is how Soviet ideology, or Marxism-Leninism, is defined in the 1974 Big Soviet Encyclopedia: Marxism-Leninism is a scientific system of philosophical, economic, and social-political views that comprise the worldview of the toiling class; [it is] a science about perception and revolutionary change of the world, about the laws of the development of society, nature, and human thought, about the laws of revolutionary struggle of the toiling class to bring down Capitalism . . . According to Marxism-Leninism, society has for the first time been understood as a single social organism, in the structure of which it is possible to distinguish productive forces and productive relations that influence [all] spheres of social life: politics, jurisprudence, morality, the state, as well as philosophy, science, art, and religion . . . Development and change [in these spheres] is [essential for] progressive movement of society toward Communism . . . Marxism-Leninism is a great means not only of thinking but also of changing the world. It is one of the most important forces of socialist and communist building, of the formation of a new person.26

As we see, as a “scientific system” devised to manage every aspect of Soviet society, Marxism-Leninism was understood to be many things at once: it was a theory of constructing a new world and bringing about a new person, a science, a belief, a unifying force, a political plan of action, a philosophy, a norm of behavior, and a critique (of bourgeois society) all in one. This definition of ideologiya reflected as much the centralized political, cultural, and social environment in the country as it described the reach of the state ideology. By outgrowing the ideological field, Soviet ideology became a self-sustaining cancer-type entity that entered the bloodstream of society and spread throughout the social body, embedding itself in Soviet thought and imposing ideological narrow-mindedness. Despite its noble Enlightenment beginnings of respecting science, reason, humanism, and progress, Soviet ideology turned into a dogmatic, stifling institution demanding complete submission to authority. Respect for and obedience to the Communist Party became the noblest of a citizen’s duties exceeding all other priorities, if need be at the expense of their own family. The cult of Pavlik Morozov, a Soviet boy hero and martyr who denounced his father to the authorities and was in turn killed in 1932 by his morose family, was the epitome of loyalty to the state that had a huge impact on the moral norms of generations of Soviet children.27 Furthermore, Soviet ideology was not merely a set of dogmas but an “omnipresent power” in the Foucauldian sense in that it was everywhere,



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diffused and embodied in institutions, practices, discourses, feelings, and emotions that pervaded society. By influencing all means of scrutiny and perception-control, the ideology was the only game in town. In this sense, it was also creative, dynamic, and capable of self-replication. The case of the Soviet concept of ideology also shows that when some concepts become super-stretched they lose their capacity to describe the full reality. Before continuing with the chronological story of Soviet ideology under different leaders, in the following two sections I wish to elaborate in some theoretical detail on how ordinary citizens may have experienced this complex ideology in the context of the Soviet world under Brezhnev, which is helpful in illuminating how Soviet ideology operated. HOW IDEOLOGY WAS EXPERIENCED AND UNDERSTOOD BY THE POPULATION Broadly speaking, any ideology can be experienced from two positions—the inside and the outside. Positionality is important because the experiences and beliefs of those who are inside can be very different from those who are outside a given ideology. Furthermore, when people change their ideology they also change their beliefs and—more bizarrely—cannot remember their previous beliefs or accept that they ever thought or felt differently. In other words, when people exit ideology, their memories are substituted for another set of memories. According to anthropologist Ernest Gellner, to people outside—for example, Westerners looking at Soviet ideology—ideologies are offensive for they are demanding, difficult, authoritative, and different. By contrast, for people inside, the same ideology is tempting in that it offers a unifying idea, often with some kind of salvationist promise attached, which illuminates what had previously been obscure and disconnected.28 Ideologies create a coherent world out of incoherence. In this sense, they are not very different from religions and conspiracies. Indeed, these different systems of thought often overlap. I will return to the topic of the outsider’s view in chapter 9. Meanwhile, I would like to elaborate on what an insider’s view may look like. Generally speaking, Soviet ideology operated at two levels, visibly and invisibly. It was visible in the sense that its tenets were openly popularized through what Jamie Susskind terms “technologies of perception control” (print culture, radio, television) and taught at Party meetings, in educational establishments, in the army, at workplaces, wherever people could study and rationalize the tenets by using what Daniel Kahneman calls “System 1 thinking” (i.e., the narrating self). Once a positive attitude has been formed and confirmed, it does not require “System 2” (i.e., the experiencing self) to

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process the same information again. Every new input or information just reinforces one’s self-narrative. When someone—a Soviet person, in this case— makes other decisions concerning the Party and its teachings, he remembers his previous decisions as if those decisions were good ones and just repeats the same decisions but with some modification each time. Embedded in Soviet institutions and incorporated into rules and procedures, the state ideology also operated invisibly by subjecting people’s “System 2 thinking” to experiences whereby they were subtly subjected to the manipulation of language, mind and the discipline of the body. For example, many commonly used words such as patriotism, morality, and solidarity were used only in expressions such as “Soviet patriotism,” “Soviet morality,” and “Soviet solidarity,” and not in “bourgeois patriotism” and so on, implying that capitalists were unpatriotic, amoral, and did not enjoy genuine solidarity. The realm of high culture did not escape its effects either, and ideology was woven into art, fashion, and music, delicately influencing people’s tastes and norms. It is not surprising that many Soviet citizens involved in activities deemed to be “anti-ideological” or “bourgeois” felt guilt and shame. Human cognition, as shown by Kahneman, uses myriad cognitive biases (processed in intuition-driven “System 2”) in various combinations and situations. At present, there are more than 180 cognitive biases known to psychology and behavioral economics, including conformity bias, confirmation bias, availability heuristic, egocentric bias, attribute substitution, and so on. This means that, when constantly exposed to ideology—or other forms of systematized beliefs and conspiracy theories which are intuitive by design—people tend to replicate and endorse many political views without ever having to give them a deep thought. This explains why people’s beliefs often have a strong emotional or intuitive dimension underpinned by myriad feelings and anxieties, making it very difficult for them to change their beliefs. In order to operate the way it did, Soviet ideology had to be embedded in a society which was hermetically sealed against foreign influences and information so that various stories and myths supportive of the regime could be regularly produced, updated, or rewritten. In relation to this, Gellner argues that ideologies do not pop out of nowhere and do not exist in vacuum but have to be embedded within some “outer world” from which they derive rules, conventions, and norms.29 Although Gellner does not elaborate on what he means by “outer world,” it can be understood—for the sake of argument—to be a “marketplace of imagination” characterized by diversity that we have discussed above (under the heading “Ideas as Memes”). The hermetic isolation of Soviet society resulted in Soviet ideology becoming so ubiquitous and forceful that it left no room for the Gellnerian “outer world” of diversity to exist in the Soviet Union, driving all other knowledge systems deep underground. Rather, the “outer world” was generated internally by creating



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a double reality into which the West was placed. A Soviet version of the West, supposedly controlled by an equally overarching “bourgeois ideology,” existed not in real time and space but in another temporal dimension. Its main function was to juxtapose Soviet ideals with bourgeois ideas. In the Soviet Union under late socialism, the “West” was as much a real geography as it was a fictional place imagined by Soviet citizens with the help of the concept of zagranitsa (“abroad”). This concept, Alexei Yurchak contends, “was disconnected from any ‘real’ abroad and located in some unspecific place—over there (tam), with them (u nikh), as opposed to with us (u nas).”30 Produced domestically, zagranitsa existed because the real West could not be encountered and because it was the creation of the state ideology itself. Whilst Western music, clothing, consumer goods, and household appliances penetrated the Soviet Union, these Western objects were reinterpreted through the lens of Soviet ideology and culture by using Soviet (mis)conceptions about the West, which were based on the works of such historical figures as Marx, Engels, Lenin, and others. Whilst the West of the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s, with its welfare programs, improving living standards, liberties, and human rights, barely resembled what it had been like at the end of the 19th century when Marx was toiling on his Capital, in the Soviet imagination the West remained unchanged, a caricature of depravity and pollution which was embedded in an abstract past. Anchoring of the image of the West in an imaginary past was not a separate phenomenon but rather the most important characteristic of how Soviet ideology operated as a whole. Hyper-normalized and frozen in time, in Soviet official discourse all types of information, both new and old, were presented as knowledge already asserted and commonly known. This temporal organization of knowledge production made it possible to convey new ideas and facts only by coding them in terms of prior ones.31 Hence Soviet leaders from Stalin to Khrushchev to Brezhnev frequently quoted Lenin and Marx with a zeal verging on religious devotion. The era coinciding with the lives of the founders of communist theory, which was used as an important reference point, was an abstract past because it not only defined the present (for example, the content of official speeches, state plans, ritualized practices, knowledge, etc.) but was changed by the present itself. No wonder, the continuous rewriting of the history of everything from wars to individual photographs throughout the Soviet period. This is well encapsulated in a Soviet saying that “the past is always unpredictable.”32 Paradoxically, whilst the Soviet Union was an overtly future-oriented society in that it was building a future communism—hence the imaginary future was another important reference point—the very mechanism of knowledge production that propelled it toward its goal was past-oriented. In this structure with two changing reference points, the role of the Communist Party was to bridge various pasts and

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futures. The implication of this was that knowledge controllers could create alternative times and spaces and shift whole imaginary worlds back and forth, creating what Mikhail Epstein calls “hyper-reality.”33 CONFLICTING VIEWS AND EXPERIENCES AMONG THE POPULATION Given what has been asserted so far, it would be, however, far-fetched to argue that most people in the Soviet Union under Brezhnev were ardent Marxist-Leninists or that Soviet ideology was the only way of life available to the citizenry. Internal conflicts and dilemmas are an inevitable part of any imagined order, and Soviet society was no different in this regard. Soviet citizens—not so paradoxically—never comprised a homogeneous species of Homo Sovieticus with a single outlook. Rather, Soviet people had multiple identities, complex behaviors, and adaptation mechanisms and engaged in activities that could have been deemed incompatible with the official doctrine of the day.34 Here I offer six interconnected explanations—although there are more—as to why Soviet people held seemingly conflicting views and their behavior could have had “anti-ideological” elements. First, this could boil down to personal interpretation of particular topics. Whilst accepting the spirit of the Soviet doctrinal package, citizens could disagree with some of its tenets. For example, people could agree with the state ideology’s scientific precepts but disagree with its methods (that changed under different leaders). Broadly speaking, believing in some tenets of Soviet ideology did not rule out the possibility of partly believing in alternative explanations. It was a widespread practice that potentially anti-ideological views were often expressed in the safety of friendship circles at kitchen tables. In an atmosphere of relaxation fueled by alcohol, people engaged in songs, rumors, political anecdotes, and profanity that were often at odds with the norms of the official outside world. While privacy and secrecy were discouraged in general, these individuals, who created temporal milieux in which to share their ideas and interests, neither saw their activities as explicitly anti-regime nor ceased to believe in many Soviet ideals. Second, Soviet ideology not only operated in similar ways to conspiracy theories by simplifying complex social facts and seeking secret puppeteers, but it consistently generated myths about the West as a means of propaganda. As such, paranoid social thought reached into every dimension of mainstream culture and politics. The state’s encouragement of a conspiratorial way of thinking in a society notorious for secrecy and suppression also led many Soviet citizens to come up with their own, unsanctioned explanations i.e., conspiracy theories and suspicion about what was going on inside their



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country, which also sustained a belief among the population in the hidden, the unknown, and the paranormal (chapters 3 and 4 on pseudoscience). Third, the country’s economy was experienced from within as a political economy, imbued at every level with policies and ideology. Hence both consumption and production of goods were suffused with deep moral and ideological significance. As the command economy began to falter, generating chronic shortages and distribution failures, the underground economy grew to compensate it by providing both domestically produced and imported goods. In this political economy, many citizens who enjoyed Western consumer goods had to sift the meanings attached to these goods through a Soviet cultural prism. Whilst wearing Western brand clothing, collecting pictures of Western cars and empty whiskey bottles, they did not necessarily see these activities as anti-regime or anti-ideological as such.35 Russian anthropologist Alexei Yurchak’s explanation of such behavior is that symbolic meanings attached to such activities or objects were negotiable in different contexts.36 Western products, such as home appliances, cars, and so on, that were regarded as objects of superior quality, hence highly desirable and sought after, were disassociated from the image of the West as an inferior place. This way of thinking is also called “doublethink” and human mammals are good at it. Whilst the term refers to the act of simultaneously accepting two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct, hence it is perceived as a failure of human reasoning, doublethink should, in fact, be seen as one of the most important strengths of human cognition which enables us to conjure up invisible communal bananas and maintain imagined orders. Fourth, rapid urbanization, growing affluence and the cultural thaw initiated by Khrushchev led to a burst of youth activity, especially in urban centers. On the other hand, the failure of the Soviet state under Brezhnev, both to readjust the economy to meet the growing demand in consumption and to acknowledge the changing cultural needs of youth, not only resulted in a permanent deficit of consumer goods but also poor provision of leisure and entertainment facilities. In this situation, Soviet children had to entertain themselves with whatever they could get hold of. One source of endless fun for children was Soviet condoms, which could hold up to 1.5 liters of liquid, and children filled them with water and threw them from balconies onto the heads of unsuspecting passers-by. Many children and teenagers also congregated in non-sanctioned groupings to engage in dubious hobbies that nevertheless provided meaningful forms of experience and expression for their members—such as experimenting with rock music, parading provocative hairstyles, dressing up in Western-style clothes, and even developing their own slang (drawing on English words, criminal jargon, and Russian obscenities). Typically, the authorities attributed these kinds of behavior to the orchestrated, subversive tactics of the decadent West aimed at undermining

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a susceptible Soviet youth. Since much of the Cold War was waged in the cultural sphere, the Soviet government responded by suppressing these cultural expressions. This created enmity toward the system as part of a youth counter-culture, especially during late socialism, which positioned itself against the conformity, strictness, and boredom of Soviet life. In extreme cases, fueled by hormones and the spirit of rebellion, some radical teenagers and young people congregated in circles to engage in overtly anti-Soviet activities, including singing fascist songs, performing black magic on Soviet authorities, reading banned poetry, indulging in debauchery, and so on. Fifth, in the Soviet Union there were always dissidents and skeptics who for one reason or another felt alienated and disillusioned with the Soviet experiment. The most conscious and organized among them were dissident “liberal” writers, poets, composers, and musicians who were driven underground by Brezhnev’s policy. These circles wrote samizdat novels, published underground journals, and composed protest songs exposing the shortcomings of Soviet life. Whilst the most famous and vocal dissidents were locked up in psychological hospitals, internally exiled, expelled from the country, or sent to prison, cultural dissidence was never eliminated. Sixth, apart from disillusioned individuals and dissident intellectuals, there existed an organized criminal underworld which positioned its members outside mainstream society. The epitome of alienation and suppression by the state and shaped by the principle of hostility toward the Soviet regime, this underground world represented the darkest side of Soviet dogmatism, but turned upside-down. Being a mirror image of Soviet apparatus and tracing its origins to the Stalinist gulag, this underworld, referred to as vorovskoy mir (“thieves’ world”), demanded that all vor thieves sever all existing ties with their families, relatives, or indeed mainstream society. Clustered around moral authorities—referred to as vory v zakone (“thieves in law” or “thieves within the code”) whose pledge was “never to cooperate with the state in any form or shape”—criminals had their own rituals, common funds, hierarchical networks, language (fenya), and a code of behavior that contradicted Soviet values. Needless to say, this underworld was a breeding ground for all sorts of conspiracies against the state and its secret police. Their defiance was not only marked by their actions, way of thinking, or language, but it was imprinted on their very bodies. Thieves paraded tattoos that were supposed to be explicitly anti-regime and sacrilegious, depicting Nazi swastikas, obscene caricatures of Communist leaders, church roofs, or angels enjoying oral sex or salaciously staring at an eroticized Virgin Mary. Whilst ordinary citizens and vor criminals did not mingle, swear words, blatnoy or criminal songs, and values freely traveled from the underworld to the upper world, becoming incorporated into the language and norms of the streets.37 In particular, despite being banned and driven underground, slang and obscene vulgarisms



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with underworld pedigree that contrasted with the civilized, austere, official language became so normalized that KGB spies and policemen, who were tasked to keep the “thieves’ world” under control, embraced vor jargon and mannerisms as their own. This endures to this day, and even President Putin has been caught on camera using them to reassert his professional background, toughness, and his closeness to the people. “Whacking the Chechen terrorists in the outhouse,” “hanging one by the balls,” or “circumcising one’s private part” are just a few well-known examples in his long list of blatnoy vocabulary. As can be seen in these six intertwined examples, despite official propaganda, the Soviet world was a conglomeration of myriad enclosed worlds (the underworld of vory thieves, the world of corrupt Party elites, the KGB world, the mainstream, the world of underground entrepreneurs, youth counter-cultures, temporary milieux in kitchens, etc.) that crisscrossed with official and unofficial networks. The state ideology was packed with subversion and internal contradictions, accumulating both in doctrine and practical failures. But this does not mean that the phenomenon of Soviet dissidence and non-conformism was anti-regime as such and that people disgusted with certain aspects of the state wished to see it overthrown. In the same vein, the fact that they strongly opposed the regime and indeed mainstream society did not make the vory thieves liberal heroes ready to declare allegiance to a democratic system; on the contrary, vory would gladly have become new dictators of the country. Devoid of any deep or genuine belief in liberal values, Soviet dissident culture epitomized the power of simultaneous popular loyalty and resistance to the system. Soviet citizens were good at adapting to what was required of them in order to survive. Hence the distinct Soviet world. Various attempts to reconcile these contradictions generated ideological changes throughout Soviet history. In the late Brezhnev era, the biggest problem was a widening discrepancy between propaganda and the reality of a stagnating economy, which translated into low quality of life and widespread corruption and apathy. This was encapsulated in a Soviet joke of that period: “We (the people) pretend to work, and they (the Party and the state) pretend to pay.” The problem became so prominent that it could no longer be swept under the carpet, but required some resolution. In 1981, during the final year of Brezhnev’s rule, the Party organized a six-day ideology conference which hosted an unusually large number of Politburo members, demonstrating the importance of the task at hand. As expected, the conference revealed a growing split in the Politburo ranks regarding the need for change. The reformist camp, headed by Konstantin Chernenko, pushed for widespread reforms, while the conservatives, led by Mikhail Suslov (Secretary of Ideology who was one of the conspirators in Khrushchev’s downfall), opposed changes. A breakthrough came the following year when, in the wake of the deaths of

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elderly Suslov and Brezhnev, the newly appointed leader of the Soviet Union, Yuri Andropov, decided to allow discussions around reform to continue by maintaining that the existing socialist system needed to creatively adapt to contemporary conditions. THE LEGACY OF YURI ANDROPOV Yuri Andropov (1914–1984) was the first former head of the Soviet secret police to become leader of the Soviet Union. Appointed to the KGB directorship in 1967, Andropov resigned from his post in May 1982 when he was promoted to succeed Suslov as Secretary of Ideology. In November 1982 Andropov chaired the committee in charge of Brezhnev’s funeral, and the following day he was again promoted to assume the leadership of the country. Born in Stavropol’skiy krai into a Don Cossack family, Andropov was orphaned at 13, spending his teenage years as a laborer in various places. At 16 he became a member of the Komsomol, a Communist youth organization, and steadily climbed up the Party hierarchy. A turning point in his career was 1954 when at the age of 40 he was appointed Soviet ambassador to Hungary, a position that he maintained during the 1956 Hungarian uprising, which left a deep impression on him, as historian Christopher Andrew writes, when he: Watched in horror from the windows of his embassy as officers of the hated Hungarian security service were strung up from lamp-posts. Andropov remained haunted for the rest of his life by the speed with which an apparently all-powerful Communist one-party state had begun to topple. When other Communist regimes later seemed at risk, in Prague in 1968, in Kabul in 1979, in Warsaw in 1981, he was convinced that, as in Budapest in 1956, only armed force could ensure their survival.38

On his return from Hungary in 1957, Andropov was appointed a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and in 1967, on recommendation by the all-powerful Mikhail Suslov, became head of the KGB. Paranoid about dissident movements ever since the Hungarian uprising, Andropov created a special unit, the notorious Fifth Directorate of the KGB, to deal with dissidents and carry out political investigations both inside and outside the Soviet Union. Seeing the West’s propagation of human rights as part of the imperialist plot to undermine the foundation of the Soviet Union, in 1968 he issued an order “On the tasks of state security agencies in combating the ideological sabotage by the adversary” and defined Soviet dissidents as Western-linked spies, based on his belief that dissident movements in the Soviet Union could not survive without the West’s support. Andropov’s spy



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paranoia was as much a figment of his imagination as it was reflective of the fact that from the early 1960s onward the KGB’s global spying activities had surpassed that of its main adversary, the CIA. Consonant with this development, the main initiatives in Soviet foreign policy came to be increasingly taken by the KGB rather than the Soviet Foreign Ministry,39 which created among Soviet diplomats a penchant for foreign interventions, subversions, and operations based on intimidation. With his judgment distorted by his personal and professional experience, it did not occur to Andropov that Soviet citizens might be dissatisfied with various aspects of Soviet life or government policies without Western meddling. When on 22 January 1969 Viktor Ilyin, a Soviet man disillusioned with the Communist Party’s policies, carried out an assassination attempt on Brezhnev by shooting at his motorcade, Ilyin was interrogated by Andropov himself, pronounced insane, and sent to Kazan Psychiatric Hospital on the basis that no Soviet person in sane mind could possibly have committed such a heinous crime. Deeply influenced by the incident, Andropov launched a campaign to eliminate all forms of opposition by locking up political dissidents in psychiatric wards, sending them to camps, or, in some cases involving internationally acclaimed individuals, expelling them from the Soviet Union. Declaring dissidents insane was a Tsarist practice going back at least to the 1830s when the Russian philosopher Petr Chaadaev was proclaimed insane and put under informal house arrest. But, unlike their Tsarist-era predecessors, Soviet dissidents were subjected to powerful psychotropic drugs, muted, and straitjacketed for years on end in special institutions. Any political order is built on cooperation, coordination, and control, and no collective can be organized without at least one of the three. In the Soviet Union cooperation was provided by state ideology, coordination was the purview of the Party nomenklatura system, and control was imposed by the secret police. Its primary role being to control society, the KGB under Andropov grew into a sophisticated modern bureaucratic establishment which combined dozens of intertwined functions—silencing dissent, monitoring the country’s moral and ideological climate, counteracting foreign ideology, protecting borders, gathering foreign intelligence, protecting Soviet leaders, carrying out deception operations and assassinations—and maintained a presence in all organizations and institutions across the Soviet Union. Within each factory, educational and research institute, and army regiment was a KGB department known as the “first section.” Apart from its fundamental role of controlling the population through monitoring and repressing dissent, the KGB’s other important function was to assist the Soviet defense industry and science by stealing scientific and technological intelligence from the West, and from the U.S. defense industry in particular. The fact that the gap between Soviet and Western weapon systems

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was small was due as much to the priority the Communist Party gave this industry as to successful KGB intelligence gathering. According to a KGB report in 1979, over half of the projects run by the Soviet defense industry were based on intelligence stolen from the West,40 which helped the Soviet Union sustain its superpower status. Embedded in Soviet society and immune from criticism, the KGB, however, suffered from the same inefficiencies and corrupt practices that characterized Soviet bureaucracy and society at large. The highest positions within the KGB were often occupied not by people with the right qualifications but by those with the right connections. With the majority of its agents based in its rural offices and appointments made on a rotation basis, even its Moscow headquarters, which was staffed with rural officers, was an inward-looking organization riddled with provincialism, jealousies, and internal rivalries between various directorates and departments. That said, the KGB was also a cohesive and unified world in which the homogeneous occupation of the secret police and social isolation of their community, not to mention powerful internal sanctions, created a closed circle of mutual dependence. All aspects of communal life, including work and leisure, served to amplify a shared way of looking at the world. Thus, the secret police had their rituals, standards, codes, myths, heroes, and jargon. The only other group that had the same rigid structure and isolated existence was the underworld of vory thieves which was in many ways a subterranean, shadow version of the KGB. Indeed, both groups used the same slang, sang similar sentimental songs, were equally ruthless, and nourished the same dogmatic loyalty to their respective organizations. Hence both were virtually interchangeable. Any vor criminal would have been suited to the role of a KGB spy, and any spy deserved a prison term. While mainstream Soviet society was not extremist in itself, such social values as unconditional loyalty to the state and discouragement of critical questioning did sustain powerful extremist organizations, such as the KGB and the underworld of vory thieves. That said, not all KGB spies were evil, sadistic maniacs with black hearts or pathetic bleating sheep oblivious to independent thinking. Many saw themselves as patriots and were motivated by what they perceived to be righteousness and honor, actively pursuing what the KGB hierarchy told them to do. They spied on their compatriots and punished “the enemies of the state” with approved methods not out of some perverted personal idiosyncrasy but because they were trained and socialized to have a near-religious faith in their organization and its warped, paranoid ethos. The most idealistic or brainwashed among them were ready to sacrifice themselves, along with their victims, on the altar of the Fatherland. Like many Soviet organizations, the KGB, or its first incarnation as the Cheka, had its roots in a Tsarist institution. Before World War One, the Tsarist Okhrana was the most active European spy organization both at home



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and abroad. Whilst other European police forces operated under the law, the Okhrana was a law unto itself and had extensive rights to search, imprison, and execute. However, the Okhrana—if seen from a Soviet perspective— never used its vast resources and potential to the fullest, and Tsarist Russia never became a fully-fledged police state. Rarely resorting to capital punishment, the Okhrana instead preferred surveillance, keeping files on subversives and sending them into exile in remote Siberian villages where the exiled were not always subject to imprisonment or forced labor. In fact, some had a relatively comfortable existence. For example, between 1897 and 1900, Lenin was sent into exile to Siberia where he shared a house with his wife and mother-in-law and even had a monthly allowance on which he could employ a serving maid, a young girl whom he kept in a cage under the stairs. In exile Lenin spent his time, as he wrote in correspondence with his mother and fellow revolutionaries, ice skating and shooting. For personal amusement, Lenin was allowed to keep a shotgun along with plenty of cartridges. A serial exile fugitive, Stalin also had a relatively easy time in Siberia under the eyes of the Okhrana, which had a file on him containing over 100 volumes.41 The dissolution of the Okhrana in 1917 coincided with the establishment of the Cheka on 7 December, which was supposed to work hand-in-hand with a special commission launched to combat the “wine pogroms” when the masses began to loot wine cellars, liquor stores, and warehouses throughout revolutionary Petrograd. But the Cheka’s remit was always intended to be wider, and the organization soon became central to the functioning of the world’s first one-party state in a way in which intelligence organizations never were to the government of Western countries. Its founder was the secretive Felix Dzerzhinsky, described by one of his colleagues as having “a jutting moustache and satanic pointed beard.”42 Like many revolutionaries, Dzerzhinsky had first-hand experience of the Okhrana, whose techniques his organization copied, but in much more brutal, dehumanizing, and murderous ways. Reflecting ideological changes and uncertainties during World War Two and the post-war years, the organization changed its name several times: in 1941 the NKVD was renamed the NKGB, then changed back to NKVD, only to revert in 1943 to NKGB; following the war, it was renamed MGB in 1946, MVD in 1953 and, finally, following Stalin’s death, the KGB in 1954. Whilst Soviet society gradually liberalized under Khrushchev and began to lose its sheen of paranoia, the KGB—whose propensity to totalitarian violence was curbed domestically by placing it under the firm control of the Party—remained an incubator of the old ethos and values, always on the watch for heretics. The KGB’s proclivity to oversimplify the otherwise excellent supply of information from both domestic and Western sources by treating it with an assumption of hostility and conspiracy, according to historian Christopher Andrew, was the organization’s major weakness, not

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only degrading its intelligence assessment but perpetuating its institutional narrow-mindedness.43 To improve the tarnished image of the Soviet intelligence services, Andropov launched a PR campaign through technologies of perception control and sponsored films, radio programs, songs, and novels glorifying secret agents. Among the many films funded by the KGB, one of the most successful was Seventeen Moments of Spring, a twelve-part television series released in 1973 about a Soviet spy operating in Nazi Germany under the name of Stierlitz that would inspire generations of young Soviet men and women to patriotism. Among them was the law student Vladimir Putin who, inspired by the film and the heroic character of Stierlitz, dreamt of getting a job at the KGB after graduating from university. On his appointment as leader of the Soviet Union, Andropov, the longest-serving KGB chairman in Soviet history, adopted the strict methods of the intelligence services to govern the entire country. Openly admitting for the first time the economic stagnation and corruption in Soviet society, he introduced harsh penalties for absentee employees and started an anticorruption campaign targeting high-ranking apparatchiks. Unheard of under his predecessor, Andropov, himself an ascetic who lived modestly, sacked eighteen ministers and dozens of high-level officials across the country on embezzlement and corruption charges. The campaign even affected Brezhnev’s immediate family. Brezhnev’s son Yuri lost his ministerial seat in the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Central Committee membership, and Brezhnev’s son-in-law Churbanov lost his post as first deputy interior minister. On the ideological front, Andropov’s most important contribution was his article “The teachings of Karl Marx and some questions of socialist construction in the USSR,” published in the Party theoretical journal Kommunist, where he insisted that the country was only at the beginning of the long historical stage of developed socialism thus setting the ultimate goal of communism still further in time.44 On the other hand, to lift the public mood, Andropov reversed the harsh alcohol law and introduced a new, cheap vodka, dubbed “Andropovka.” Under Andropov, the KGB expanded into other fields, including the economy, which had been outside its remit since Stalin. In his memoirs, Mikhail Gorbachev recalled that when he, then a Politburo member, and Nikolay Ryzhkov, chairman of the State Planning Committee, asked Andropov for access to real budget figures, Andropov responded: “The budget is off limits to you.”45 The godfather of Soviet deception and disinformation operations, Andropov carefully nurtured the idea that the KGB was made up of intelligent people with economic and managerial know-how, and not by ruthless, narrow-minded secret police. Popularized as the most patriotic, incorruptible, efficient, and ideologically loyal segment of Soviet society, KGB agents were supposed to save the country from stagnation. Although Andropov, who had severe health problems, spent most of his



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tenure in a hospital bed and died after only fifteen months in power, the myth of the KGB’s greatness lived on. More than three decades later, amid post-Soviet chaos and misery, a Kremlin-sponsored poll showed that ordinary people still cherished this positive image of the intelligence services and trusted spies—epitomized in the fictional character of Stierlitz clad in a SS uniform—most of all professions. The poll also showed that, disillusioned by Yeltsin’s years of anarchy and poverty, many wanted a strong and young authoritarian leader to put the country in order. In preparation for the 2000 presidential election, Yeltsin’s spin doctors initiated a project code-named Successor in which a spy with a stern, cold face, steely blue eyes, and a thuggish gait was to play the main role. A virtually unknown former KGB agent Vladimir Putin’s rise to power owed as much to Andropov’s legacy as to his own luck of being in the right place at the right time with the right professional background. Following the election, Russian newspapers celebrated Putin’s victory by running adverts entitled “Stierlitz—Our President!” (chapter 4). GORBACHEV’S PERESTROIKA Andropov was succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko, another elderly Politburo member with failing health. Entrusted to carry on the reforms interrupted by the death of his predecessor, Chernenko, who was the oldest general secretary ever to have assumed office at 72, died after just thirteen months in power. Following a leadership crisis prompted by a succession of elderly and sick Soviet leaders’ deaths, when the young and healthy Mikhail Gorbachev, 54, the youngest member of the Politburo and a newly appointed Secretary of Ideology, took over the reins of the Soviet Union in March 1985, this was in itself a considerable change. As a Soviet joke put it: “What support does Gorbachev have in the Kremlin?” Answer: “None—he walks unaided.” Not only did Gorbachev walk unaided, he introduced a significant and rapid shift in the direction of the Soviet Union’s development by launching the so-called policy of “new thinking” (novoe myshlenie) in opposition to the previous period that he famously dubbed “stagnation period” or “Brezhnev’s stagnation.” Whilst Gorbachev’s election reflected a general agreement within the Politburo that some innovations in ideological thinking were needed and more flexible policies necessary, few anticipated the lengths and speed the new General Secretary was willing to go. Like Andropov, Gorbachev was born in Stavropol’skiy krai, a lucky circumstance that later helped him forge a good relationship with the KGB chief who became his important patron. At the height of Stalin’s power, in 1950 Gorbachev entered the prestigious Moscow State University to study law

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where he joined the Communist Party. His friendship with Czechoslovakian student activist Zdenek Mlynar had a deep influence on Gorbachev’s political thinking about the possibility of a different socialism in the worker’s paradise on earth.46 Zdenek Mlynar was to become one of the main leaders of the Prague Spring in 1968, which was suppressed by Brezhnev on Andropov’s recommendation. Like many people of his generation, the socalled reform-minded “1960ers,” Gorbachev was inspired by the 20th Party Congress in 1956 and by the ensuing process of de-Stalinization. Bustling with new ideas and enthusiasm, on his return to Stavropol’, Gorbachev quickly rose through the Party ranks. In 1961 he became First Secretary of the regional Komsomol, in 1968 First Secretary of the Stavropol City Party Organization, and in 1970 head of the Stavropol region. In 1971—coincidentally, the year when Khrushchev died in his dacha under the watchful eye of the KGB—Gorbachev was called to Moscow and offered a membership of the Central Committee of the Communist Party to represent the Central Committee in Stavropol’. In charge of the Soviet Union’s “spa region” frequented by the Communist Party’s high priesthood, Gorbachev hosted Politburo members and had the opportunity to impress Andropov, Suslov, Kosygin, and others. Soon Gorbachev and his family moved to Moscow where in 1980 he was promoted to full membership of the Politburo. Among many perks that his meteoric status rise offered were prized trips to Western countries—Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, West Germany, France, Britain, Canada—where he could witness technological progress and social development at first-hand. Curious and well-read, Gorbachev’s hobbies included history, philosophy, literature, cinema, music, theater, physics, and mathematics. By the time of his election as leader of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev already had a firm conviction about the importance of implementing some wideranging reforms. Guided by his belief that the Soviet Union had been stagnating economically, socially, ideologically while losing its prestige internationally, Gorbachev was adamant to revitalize the ailing economy, improve performance, and start a genuine, popular awakening in the minds of his fellow citizens. A far cry from Stalinist and later years when the business of running the country was conducted by Communist bosses at night over elaborate dinners with plenty of vodka and wine, Gorbachev banned alcohol-fueled official meetings. That he launched an All-Soviet anti-alcohol campaign, reminiscent of Prohibition in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, by closing down distilleries, destroying wine yards, and introducing receptions served with mineral water, made for a bad start to his career as general secretary. He was mockingly dubbed “Mineral-Water Secretary.” Recognizing the West’s achievements in various fields, Gorbachev was also willing to learn from, and open a friendly dialogue with, the capitalist world by acknowledging



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that capitalism and communism may peacefully co-exist. This coincided with a period during which the Cold War had become progressively glacial, after U.S. President Ronald Reagan famously denounced the Soviet Union in 1983 as “an evil empire” imbued with “aggressive impulses.” Unlike the previous doctrines of opposing imperialist encirclement and fighting capitalism, which had been used to consolidate the Soviet people and ensure loyalty, Gorbachev’s policy of rapprochement with the West was so controversial that some Western scholars described it as “an alternative ideology” (Steven Kull) or “a counter-ideology” (John Gooding).47 The fact is that Gorbachev and his inner circle did not use a different language either by asserting that their revitalization plan was inconceivable without “breakthrough” in ideological and theoretical work, thus signaling a major revision of Soviet ideology. But as early as the summer of 1985, it became clear that the Party leadership was not singing the same tune, with some advocating a more measured pace and others pushing for more radical reforms. The two opposing camps were led this time by the radical reformist Alexandr Yakovlev, who was Gorbachev’s senior advisor and a newly appointed head of the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee, and the conservative Yegor Ligachev, Secretary for Ideology. To tip the power balance in favor of the reformists, in 1988 Gorbachev demoted Ligachev along with other powerful conservatives, including the KGB chief Viktor Chebrikov. Dubbed the “godfather of glasnost” and the intellectual force behind Gorbachev’s reform program, Yakovlev played a key role in perestroika. In history, many social orders had moments of self-doubt when they initiated reform movements to restore “original purity of thought and practice.” This can be seen in religions, and there is practically no world religion that did not attempt it. Protestantism in Christianity and Buddhism as well as Wahhabism in Islam are well-known examples. Gorbachev’s “new thinking” bears a similarity to such puritan movements whereby he wished to wipe clean the tainted history of the Soviet regime and begin with a fresh slate. What he attempted was to return to the original source and to “correctly” reinterpret Lenin’s prophetic teachings in order to find the right path from which he believed the Party had strayed since Stalin. By moving away from the official history enshrined under Stalin, Gorbachev called for a revision of history and a reexamination of the relationship between capitalism and communism by arguing that these two systems do not have to compete with each other and that capitalism may not be inherently militaristic. Gorbachev also expressed his dissatisfaction with the biased way in which the KGB reported to the Central Committee and other ruling bodies, putting the KGB on the back foot. This led its chief Chebrikov to summon a meeting in December 1985 of his top officers to discuss the General Secretary’s damning indictment.48 With his

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radical reforms, Gorbachev opened a Pandora’s box that would trigger the fall of the system. Having taken off his thick ideological spectacles, Gorbachev passionately criticized the Soviet press for its distorted coverage of both international events and domestic issues, blamed the political choices of his predecessors, and complained that the theoretical concepts of scientific communism remained at the level of the 1930s and 1940s, while the world had moved on. Admitting that the Party had been misguided by “distorted” theories of the post-Lenin era, he challenged Soviet intelligentsia to think outside the box and come up with new ideas about the application of “true Marxism-Leninism” to contemporary circumstances. Gorbachev’s call did not fall on deaf ears, and historians, journalists, writers, and economists of a liberal bent who saw themselves as devout Leninists carried the fight to the Stalinists, who dominated Soviet organizations. The main logic behind the “new thinking” was the idea that each country should be free to choose its own road of development and that the form of government should be dictated by the will of the people and not by political elites or dictators. In contrast with orthodox Soviet teachings, the “new thinking” dismissed belief in the inevitability of (immediate) socialism for all nations and claimed that social evolution was simultaneously spawning more diverse social forms and directing them toward greater harmony and integration. Rather than emphasizing the interests of the proletariat, the “new thinking” also proposed a new moral order based on human or universal values. In accordance with this ideological shift, the Kremlin inaugurated a policy of de-escalation with the West, signed bilateral agreements with the United States to cut nuclear arsenals, reexamined its commitment to revolutionary and communist movements abroad, launched a doctrine of non-intervention in the affairs of Warsaw Pact states, and withdrew Soviet troops from Afghanistan and Mongolia. Domestically, the Kremlin reduced the state’s coercive influence by reining in the KGB and the police apparatus, rehabilitating Stalinist victims, and releasing political prisoners. Believing in the main predictions of Soviet ideology concerning the inevitability of a harmonious and unified world, the new thinkers let history take its course by minimizing state control that they dubbed unnecessary and even a hindrance to social evolution. Consonant with this “harmonizing” policy, Gorbachev acknowledged the need to restructure Soviet society by instilling the citizenry with a greater awareness of the real state of affairs as well as by strengthening “control from below” and not from above. Given that every major change in the Soviet Union began with controlling and innovating the state ideology, it was no surprise that at the height of his reforms, in 1988 Gorbachev set up two supervisory bodies, namely the Commission for Ideology which was directly answerable to the Politburo, and



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the Ideology Department at the Central Committee of the Communist Party that incorporated the former propaganda, science, and culture departments. In the same year, Gorbachev introduced glasnost’ (“freedom of speech”), passed a law permitting private ownership styled on Lenin’s New Economic Policy, reduced the Party’s control of the government, and created a new Congress of People’s Deputies, the highest body of state authority, whose members were to be elected in free elections. Consonant with ideological changes, the country’s chief ideologist, Vadim Medvedev, the newly appointed head of the Commission for Ideology, admitted that thorough restructuring was needed in all spheres of society while contending that the ideological foundation of the system was firm and robust. Contrary to Medvedev’s assurances, the ongoing democratic changes had a destructive effect on Soviet society and its ideology for the loosening of Party censorship coupled with the sidelining of the KGB, followed by weakening of the centralized system of knowledge production and social control, dangerously threatened the integrity of the hermetically sealed environment where a Soviet-type ideology could securely function and reproduce itself. For many citizens, Soviet ideology was a belief system about the Soviet Union’s vanguard position in the world, a moral guide, and a tool of political activism. Guided by such a superior doctrine, the country was meant to be a shining beacon to humanity, which many Soviet citizens genuinely believed the Soviet Union was. When glasnost’, followed by the complete abolition of press censorship in 1990, exposed the Soviet state to be many things it never was, the scale of hitherto hidden facts—including the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the faults of successive Soviet leaders, KGB trials and abuses, Stalinist mass graves, false histories, and many other ills of the Soviet system— became common knowledge overnight for all to see on television, read in newspapers and journals, and hear at public meetings. Unmentionable and denied in the previous period, contemporary social problems such as violent crime, prostitution, and drugs also began to receive extensive and sensational media coverage. What Gorbachev’s policies achieved was disenchantment or de-mystification of society, a process by which ideologically induced mystique and unfounded beliefs were exposed, and the state lost its sacral qualities. With its technologies of perception control, mass surveillance, and discipline blown out of the water, the state was not only held responsible for human misery but was also blamed for destroying the beautiful land of the Soviet Union. The Party’s acknowledgement of the extent of ecological degradation became a particularly toxic issue when whole areas were turned into industrial wasteland, rivers were reduced to zones of pollution, and deforestation coupled with desertification threatened entire regions. Russians like the saying ryba gneyot s golovy (“a fish rots from the head down”). With the sanctity of the

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Party and its leaders undermined and with the tide turning against the regime, some voices went even further by questioning the holiest of the holy—the legitimacy of Lenin himself. To exacerbate the situation, by the end of the 1980s Gorbachev’s economic policy pushed the country close to economic disaster and severe shortages in basic food supplies led to reintroduction of the war-time food stamps system.49 Things went from bad to worse when the nationalities problem, which had been effectively suppressed by the Party, erupted into open inter-ethnic riots and bloody confrontations across the Soviet Union from the Baltic states to the Caucasus to Central Asia. What occurred during these fateful years is that perestroika irreparably undermined the Soviet world, revealing that the Soviet story had been a fictional tale invented by the Communist Party. Not only was Soviet ideology discredited, but the ideological field also quickly lost ground and its control over many other fields. To use Kahneman’s theory of behavioral psychology, this societal shift represented a sea change in public mood, exposing people’s experiencing self (responsible for intuitions and deep-seated beliefs) and narrating self (responsible for rationalizing intuitions) to new, radical deliberations that previously escaped many people’s perceptions. Sensing the downfall of the system and out of his element, Premier Nikolay Ryzhkov, head of the Soviet government, vehemently criticized the Party’s ideology chief for not doing his job properly and lamented the “de-ideologization” of Soviet society.50 In a hectic rush to salvage the situation, the Soviet leadership set out to develop a legitimizing set of new myths and stories to replace the old ones. In 1990 in this environment the Experimental Creative Center was established in Moscow, under the patronage of Politburo member Yuri Prokofyev, with the aim of writing up the script of a “post-perestroika program” for the ideological resuscitation of the country. In 1990, when the Soviet communal house was on fire and society in turmoil, Gorbachev was elected by the Congress of People’s Deputies the first president of the Soviet Union. The presidency, however, did not give Gorbachev much anticipated levers and soon he found himself in a situation when the little control that he managed to retain was fast slipping through his fingers. To keep up with breakneck developments in society, he pushed to accelerate the pace of change. He even admitted the possibility of a multi-party system in the Soviet Union, which he had previously denied. This led to the creation in 1991 of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR) headed by Vladimir Zhirinovsky. To bolster his authority, in March 1991 Gorbachev held a referendum in which nearly 70 percent of the voters expressed their will to give the country another chance by supporting the preservation of the Soviet Union. The fact that the majority of people voted to preserve their country despite the exposed lies not only shows the power of human will to remain united and preserve common identity but also testifies to human



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incredulousness in that many Soviet citizens simply refused to believe all the revealed truths. If the Soviet Union was going to collapse it was not coming from the masses—not in 1991 anyway—but from the decisions made by a few at the very top. Given the people’s voices were never really taken into account in the Soviet Union, the people’s referendum was too little too late, and things were falling apart faster than they could be remedied. In June 1991, the Russian Republic (one of fifteen republics comprising the Soviet Union) held elections in which, despite Gorbachev’s opposition, the independent candidate Boris Yeltsin, who had resigned from the Communist Party a year before, won 58 percent of the popular vote to become president of Russia. Democracy and glasnost unleashed by Gorbachev became the two sticks with which Yeltsin successfully beat the Party’s crumbling hierarchy. As if that was not enough, Gorbachev agreed to support a new Union Treaty that envisioned turning the Soviet Union into a new democratic federation of equal Soviet sovereign republics, which seemed to many Communists to be a leap in the dark, to say the least. To put a halt to perestroika, the Communist Party struck back. In August 1991, the self-appointed State Committee on the State of Emergency, which consisted of hardline Party apparatchiks, the KGB, and the military, staged an unsuccessful coup, which was so badly organized that the key plotters spent most of the time drinking like fish. Had they followed Gorbachev’s dry law and stuck to mineral water, the outcome could have been different. The failed coup not only unintentionally undermined the Committee’s legitimacy and that of the siloviki establishment (the intelligence services, the police, and the army) but also triggered the three Baltic Soviet republics, annexed by Stalin, to secede from the Soviet Union. In Moscow, a crowd of angry protesters pulled down the statue of “Iron Felix” Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police, from its pedestal outside the KGB headquarters in Lubyanka. Narrowly surviving the fallout, Gorbachev hastily resigned from his position of general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, disbanded its Central Committee, and dissolved Party units within the army and security services, in effect ending the Communist Party’s rule in the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union authorities liked to make lethally important decisions in trios: after Lenin’s death, an unholy trinity of Stalin, Kamenev, and Zinovyev was in charge of the country until Stalin had the others executed; Stalin’s hated troika courts consisted of three members; Khrushchev himself was deposed by a trio of conspirators; and three Baltic republics seceded following the putsch in Moscow.51 Sensing Gorbachev’s wobbliness and the changing mood across the country, in December 1991 the emboldened leaders of yet three more Soviet republics—Russia’s President Boris Yeltsin, Ukraine’s President Leonid Kravchuk, and Belarusian Parliament Chairman Stanislav

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Shushkevich—met at a hunting lodge in Belovezhskaya Pushcha where they signed an agreement to dissolve the Soviet Union, delivering a mortal blow to the system. With the stroke of a pen the Soviet Union ceased to be a geopolitical reality. With the wisdom of hindsight, we can now better analyze what happened during perestroika. Structurally speaking, the Soviet Union was set up as a hierarchical society in which the Party monopolized the narrative and presided over myriad worlds and networks. Whilst dissident and nonconformist views were spread across society, the Party hierarchy dealt with this issue more or less effectively as long as the subversive ideas were confined at the grassroots level and did not affect the Party super-elites. What Gorbachev did differently to his predecessors was that he himself spread anti-status quo views from the very top all the way down through the omnipresent nomenklatura system. As a result, the ensuing 1991 presidential elections in the fifteen Soviet republics, when republican presidents were elected by the people and not appointed from above, further undermined the Party hierarchy to the point that these newly elected super-officials were, as far as the Party was concerned, “loose cannons” attuned more to public opinion or their personal whims rather than being loyal to the country’s leader. With Gorbachev having no real leverage over them, these individuals could choose to remain doggedly dedicated to the Union or, conversely, conspire against its leader, which they did eventually. The secession of the three Baltic republics followed by another troika established a domino effect that saw the Soviet Union come crumbling down. Gorbachev played Russian roulette with the whole system in which the stakes could not be higher. And he lost spectacularly. The demise of the Soviet Union was so rapid and sweeping that many people were inclined to explain it in terms of Western conspiracy and not simply mismanagement on the part of the Soviet leadership.52 With no country to preside over, the first president of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev—now the sole guarantor of the Soviet state and its new ideology in the making—was left jobless out in the cold. He resigned as Soviet president on Christmas Day. While the corpse of the Soviet Union was still lying around lukewarm, the jubilant Yeltsin, who forged his political career by dethroning Gorbachev, hastily dismantled the vestiges of the old regime and alienated siloviki from state power. Yeltsin dissolved the KGB and split it into several mutually competitive, cannibalistic organizations ready to prey not only on their own but on wider society. To add insult to injury, he even created a personal Presidential Guard that would reign supreme over all intelligence and military organizations in the newly seceded Russian Federation. Downgraded, underfunded, understaffed, and without ideological compass or role, the security services, or what was left of them, had to fend for themselves, prompting many secret policemen



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to partner with the criminal underworld with whom they shared common history, methods, and values, in the process turning the country into a vast criminal gangland. AFTER THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET UNION Up until the collapse of the Soviet Union, the internal political struggle in Moscow took place as much around certain policies as among political factions rather than around the concept of state ideology. After all, most politicians and ordinary people alike believed till the very last in the possibility of saving the Soviet Union. Homo Sovieticus was a species that had appeared as a result of the Soviet Union’s grand ethno-experiment. Nourished by the paternalistic and totalitarian state, this person grew up not only dependent on but also grateful to the state. Despite his outward enthusiasm and loyalty to the regime, this figure accommodated a multiplicity of hidden identities, political passivity, subversion, and adaptation mechanisms. Following the demise of the Soviet system, it was expected that Homo Sovieticus would similarly disappear, or at least evolve into a more democratic person by shading away his instinctive obedience to the state and abandoning fear, powerlessness, and the dogmatic need for a state ideology. The expectation was that he would emulate the stereotypical Westerner. Reflecting this popular expectation and eager to relegate communism to the dustbin of history, Yeltsin included in a new Russian Constitution, adopted in 1993, a liberal article forbidding “any state or obligatory ideology” in Russia. The historic collapse of socialism and the new Russian Constitution may have purged the terms “Marxism-Leninism, Marxist-Leninist ideology, Soviet ideology” that had close association with the discredited Soviet regime from the political jargon of the democrats, but it never changed ordinary people’s attitudes toward the importance of living in an ideologized society nor did it instill in them—as the sociologist Yuri Levada observed—deep or genuine belief in liberal democratic values.53 There is no doubt that for most Soviet people, the demise of the Soviet system was a spiritually transformative experience, akin to witnessing the end of the world as they knew it. Although this experience generated renewed hope and new visions of the future, people clung to their old habit of needing state protection and worshipping the state, while trying to adjust their behavior to new realities as they had always done. As the idea that any society has to be united by a strong state with a “set of unifying principles” remained largely intact in the political imagination of not only political parties but also of the majority of the population, it is no wonder that on the eve of the 1996 presidential election, Yeltsin’s long-time adviser, Georgy Satarov, admitted

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that the Russian people never ceased to miss the idea of ideology. Yeltsin supported his adviser by asserting in his speech on June 12, 1996 that "the most important thing for Russia is the search for a national idea, or national ideology" because “there were different periods in Russia's twentieth century history—the monarchy, totalitarianism, perestroika, and the democratic path of development. Each era had its ideology. We do not have one.”54 To understand Satarov’s and Yeltsin’s announcements, one has to recall Russia’s situation at the time. On the political front, divided into more than two dozen national republics, each led by an elected president, some of whom were more independently minded than others, democracy in Russia was more than Yeltsin had bargained for. For Yeltsin, trying to keep all his governors and regional leaders in line must have been like herding cats. In 1992 Tatarstan, Russia’s largest Islamic republic, had an independence referendum which passed with 62 percent of the votes. Whilst the republic was never granted full independence, it was barely maintained as part of Russia by a special treaty of 1994, which permitted extensive autonomy. Thus the president of Tatarstan established independent diplomatic ties with Iran and Iraq. The president of Kalmykia, one of Russia’s three Buddhist republics, established a diplomatic relationship with the Tibetan Government-in-Exile and offered Chinese subjects Russian citizenship by by-passing Moscow. The governor of the Krasnoyarsk region threatened to take control of nuclear missiles located in the province. Taking advantage of weakness in Moscow, the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria went even further by declaring in 1993 full independence from Russia, which led to Russian forces invading Chechnya the following year. On the economic front, after “shock therapy,” Russia was in free fall, its industries in rubble, and the Russian ruble depreciated, in the process wiping out the life savings of millions of citizens. It was a time of soaring poverty and unemployment, when people did not receive their salaries for months on end. The former superpower had been reduced to a banana republic where all fell prey to racketeering, physical attack, or worse, and everybody deplored their low national self-esteem. The fact that as early as the 1995 parliamentary elections communist and nationalist candidates achieved dramatic success was a clear sign of the growing nostalgia for the strong, paternalistic state and discontent with Yeltsin’s policies and performance. His popularity measured in single digits (6 percent), Yeltsin began the campaign season of 1996 as the underdog. To turn the tables, his team focused on negative aspects of communism, scaremongering the population by using the prospect of social horrors should the communists win the election. Yeltsin’s main adversary, Gennady Zyuganov, the leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), focused on the achievements of the Soviet state and the disastrous shortcomings of the current government. While blaming



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former Communist Party leaders Yeltsin and Gorbachev for bringing the old regime down from within, Zyuganov voiced ideas that were in tune with the people’s mood; he promoted a traditional imperial vision of Russia as the center of Slavic and Orthodox civilization and equated the West with vulgar materialism, extreme individualism, and sexual permissiveness, which corrupts Russia. But bankrolled by a group of Russian oligarchs and foreign donors and orchestrated by Kremlin spin doctors and media barons, Yeltsin’s campaign created an illusion that the state had been resuscitated in the midst of national chaos and disintegration. Yeltsin paid all state employees their long-overdue salaries, announced the launch of social projects, and promised to strengthen the state further. The election was won by Yeltsin in the second round (with 53.8 percent of the vote). Just a few weeks after his re-election President Yeltsin officially reiterated that Russia needed a “National Idea” (reminiscent of a state ideology) and set up a special team of consultants under the supervision of Georgy Satarov. Whilst the Duma Committee for Geopolitics organized parliamentary readings in October 1996 on the need to provide Russia with new ideology, the major government newspaper, Rossiyskaya Gazeta, took on the main task of opening a public forum by initiating in January 1997 a year-long contest for readers to identify a set of principles capable of inspiring Russian citizens to unite as a nation. As part of a democratic strategy, both the president’s consultants and Rossiyskaya Gazeta’s editors avoided offering their own suggestions as to what might unite citizens. Rather, they cast the spotlight on society, hoping that people across the country could themselves discover, rather than invent, some all-encompassing ideas capable of both binding together and energizing society. The assumption was that this “National Idea” already existed in nature and only awaited articulation by someone who was perceptive and close to the people and the native land. At the end of the first six months of the contest, an essay entitled “six principles of Russianness” by one Gury Sudakov was chosen in which the author praised his countrymen and countrywomen for, among other characteristics, collective spirit, moral conscience, sociability, and striving to serve their country rather than merely achieving individual wealth. Having singled out Sudakov midway through the contest, however, Rossiyskaya Gazeta never followed up on their promise to declare a grand winner at the end of the year. Frustrated with the quality of suggestions, the president’s advisors also soon gave up on the search, although they organized the publication of an anthology of articles on the topic.55 Recuperating from a series of recent heart attacks, Yeltsin retreated into his presidential residence only to emerge in public from time to time like a bear from hibernation, often intoxicated and roaring. He did not follow up on the project either, letting the “National Idea” fizzle out.

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While the Kremlin initiated unsuccessfully the search for a “National Idea” to bolster the Russian state and unite the people, in some rural parts such as Kalmykia discussions regarding the need for a new state ideology were independently initiated in the early post-Soviet days by various high-ranking bureaucrats and individuals who saw themselves as belonging to intellectual elites. For them, the ideological vacuum was problematic and dangerous precisely because it indicated the absence of collective values, morality and the weakness of the state. In an article entitled “Today’s ideology: Ecology” published in Izvestiya Kalmykii on 7 August 1993, the interviewee, a woman called Emma Gabunschina, head of the Kalmyk Committee for the Preservation of the Environment, warned that Kalmykia was in a critical situation and urged readers to send their “ideas” to her committee to avert an impending catastrophe. In response to a question about the aims of the Committee, the interviewee stated: The main tasks are the concentration of financial and material resources to solve the ecological problems, the ecologization (ekologizatsiya) of the economy and the implementation of complex activities aimed at the improvement of the health of both environment and human beings.

Soviet ideology was predicated on an idealistic belief in science and the power of technologically equipped humankind to conquer and tame nature. That the state’s activities, on the contrary, degraded the ecological balance was officially acknowledged only with the advent of perestroika. Approaching the topic of post-Soviet state ideology from this new ecological angle, what Emma Gabunschina proposed was in essence improvement of both environment and society (including the economy and human beings) by implementing an overarching “ecologization.” Her proposal was prompted by the fact that, while Kalmykia has a continental climate prone to hot and dry summers, its unique pasture ecosystem, which has sustained life and biodiversity from time immemorial, had in the Soviet period been assaulted by aggressive overgrazing and mechanized agriculture as occurred in many regions of the former Soviet Union. This resulted in rapid soil erosion, loss of flora and patches of expanding desertification detrimental to both the local ecology and people’s livelihoods, which Gabunschina sought to sort out with a new “ecological” ideology. Yet in another article, “Open ideology: Understanding cosmic self-programing,” published in the same newspaper on 24 August 1995, the author argued from the cosmic perspective that: Every one of us wants to achieve perfection, new heights, and harmony both with ourselves and the environment. The principles of cosmic self-programing,



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which is discussed in this article, allow many people to understand the laws of nature and cosmos as well as human physical abilities which in the past were accessible only to the elitist schools that controlled the people . . . In Kalmykia, there are people who by intuitively learning self-programing have already attained a higher level of self-control and obtained unique knowledge . . . The Universe is a system containing massive flows of energy . . . The energetic body of the Universe has its physics, mathematics, laws of beauty, and creativity that we, the mortals, even cannot imagine. But most importantly, this massive energetic realm . . . already exists within All of Us as a potential.

Further along, the author asserts that, by truly understanding the self through “scientific-spiritual methods,” humans can correctly understand the Universe and its “ideology.” According to him, Russia, a country of talented, educated, and intuitive people, is not only quickly self-healing from its post-perestroika trauma but is emanating massive super energy which gives structure to other parts of the world. Also, on 10 January 1997 in the article “The epic Jangar—our ideology” published in Izvestiya Kalmykii, the author Kim Shovunov, director of the Kalmyk Institute of Humanitarian and Applied Studies, interpreted the president of Kalmykia’s decree as follows: The decree No 152 of 23 September 1996 of the President of the Republic of Kalmykia about “state support for the study of the epic Jangar” has given a new impetus to study it, to transform the ethical norms of the [legendary] country of Bumba into the ideology of contemporary Kalmyks. In the course of thousands of years this brilliant work of the nomadic people has been an organic part of the spiritual life of many generations of Kalmyks. It has absorbed patriotic, freedom loving, heroic, aesthetic, and ethical traditions of the Oirats and their close relatives—the Kalmyks.

From these three articles alone, it is clear that in Kalmykia in the 1990s the respective authors understood ideology each in their own way, which reflected their different professions, agendas, and degrees of experience of Soviet ideology. This was true perhaps of all former Soviet citizens who were exposed to the same state ideology in their own ways. But again, no matter how people may have individually understood the situation, they agreed that ideology, in whatever shape or form, had to be state-imposed and powerful enough to affect the lives of every individual in a given society. As an action-oriented set of ideals and beliefs aimed at uniting and improving the society, including the economy, environment, and human beings themselves, each of the above-mentioned post-Soviet “ecological,” “cosmist,” and “legendary” ideologies are reminiscent of Soviet ideology in terms of its all-encompassing nature. These cases also illustrate that the death of Soviet

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ideology did not result in state ideology becoming obsolete but sparked a remarkable resurgence of ideological aspirations which both competed with and complemented various nationalist, religious, and developmental visions in Kalmykia. Of course, merely discussing the blueprint of a state ideology in newspaper articles is insufficient in itself because for a system of ideas to be referred to as ideologiya it is imperative that the state gets fully involved— i.e., these ideas should be systematized, theorized, and disseminated in a top-down fashion through state apparatus so that the ideology can dominate social order. While these proposals by the intelligentsia to implement “ecological,” “cosmist,” and “legendary” ideologies did not materialize in their original forms, Kalmykia’s president offered his own ideology, which included ecological concerns, ideas about cosmic energy, and reverence for Kalmykia’s legendary past, topics that were becoming increasingly popular among the population. Emboldened by Yeltsin’s “take as much sovereignty as you can swallow” approach to local leaders and encouraged by Yeltsin’s search for a new “National Idea,” Kirsan Ilyumzhinov propounded a new Kalmyk-centric state ideology that reflected his vision of a new cosmic order not only for Kalmykia but for Russia as a whole (chapter 7). For his ideology, Ilyumzhinov proposed to revive not discredited scientific atheism but to use spirituality and “new scientific systems” which he found in the pseudoscientific movements of Russian cosmism and Eurasianism that emerged from the Soviet esoteric and pseudoscientific underground during perestroika. The next Part looks at pseudoscience in Russia. NOTES 1. Markus, “Concepts of Ideology in Marx,” 87–106. 2. Hans Rosling, Factfulness; Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now. 3. Brandenberger, National Bolshevism, 1–15. 4. This view has its origin in the 18th century French Enlightenment in Jean le Rond d’Alembert and Denis Diderot’s Encyclodepie where they predicted a unified science in which the Universe would only be one fact and one great truth. 5. Naiman, Sex in Public. 6. Sebestyen, Lenin the Dictator, 418–19. 7. Harding, Leninism, 162. 8. For Lenin’s letter to Stalin, see Žižek, Lenin 2017, 167. 9. Stalin, Problems of Leninism, 454–58. 10. Stalin’s work includes: Marxism and the National Question (Marksizm i Natsional’nyi Vopros, 1913), Dialectical and Historical Materialism (Dialekticheskiy i Istoricheskiy Materializm, 1938), Selected Works (Sochineniya, 1946), Falsifiers of History (Fal’sifikatory Istorii, 1948), Marxism and the Problems of Linguistics



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(Marksizm i Problemy Yazykoznaniya, 1950), The Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR (Ekonomicheskie Problemy Sotsializma v SSSR, 1952). 11. Roh Kyun-Deok, Stalin’s Economic Advisors. 12. Paperno, Stories of the Soviet Experience, 166–70. 13. Ings, Stalin and the Scientists, 244; Andrew, The Secret World, 602, 621–23. 14. Brandenberger, National Bolshevism. 15. Ahonen, People on the Move, 73–82. 16. Likhachev, “Predislovie: Repressivnaya nauka,” 5. 17. Ings, Stalin and the Scientists, 315. 18. The Politburo was known as the Presidium from 1952 to 1966. 19. Aimerhamer, Kul’tura i Vlast’ ot Stalina do Gorbacheva. 20. Ings, Stalin and the Scientists, 400. 21. Cybernetics was one such scientific direction that benefited from Khrushchev’s Thaw. Whilst initially promoted by early Soviet scientists, cybernetics fell into disrepute under Stalin, being denounced as a “bourgeois pseudoscience” only to be rehabilitated under Khrushchev. This time grounded in mathematics and propagated as a theory of information and automatic control systems, cybernetics mimicked Soviet ideology and went on to subsume more than a dozen disciplines from “cybernetic linguistics” to “biological cybernetics” to “legal cybernetics.” 22. Khrushchev, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, 545–46. 23. Chumachenko, Church and State in Soviet Russia. 24. Congressional Record, 9398. 25. Aimerhamer, Kul’tura i Vlast’ ot Stalina do Gorbacheva, 5–29. 26. Bol’shaya Sovetskaya Entsiklopediya, https://bse.slovaronline. com/18494-MARKSIZM-LENINIZM. 27. Later research showed that the tale of Pavlik Morozov sacrificing his father to the Bolsheviks was a fictional story fabricated by the state, as were many Soviet stories of a similar genre. See Kelly, Comrade Pavlik. 28. Gellner, “Notes towards a Theory of Ideology,” 69. 29. Ibid. 30. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 158–59. 31. Ibid., 1–76. 32. The constant rewriting of history throughout the Soviet period resulted not only in widespread scepticism among people in post-Soviet Russia toward “official historiography” but also paved the way for the open proliferation of alternate histories that today fill the shelves of all major bookshops in the country, ranging from paranormal histories (about Atlantis being located in Russia, about Ancient Slavs receiving wisdom from UFOs) to histories of “what ifs” (what if the Bolshevik Revolution did not happen? What if Lenin lived longer to reshape the Soviet Union?) to new conspiracy theories against Russia. 33. Epstein, “Postmodernism, Communism and Sots-Art,” 5–6. 34. In the 1960s Soviet sociologists, including Boris Grishin and Yuri Levada, carried out surveys which suggested that Soviet people were not as closely aligned with the Party’s doctrines as the slogans suggested. Following the Prague Spring of 1968, the study of public opinion was effectively banned in the Soviet Union.

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35. Western consumer goods penetrated the Soviet Union via three main routes, namely Soviet specialists and diplomats returning home from postings in the West; Western tourists who came to the country; and special Berezka shops in major Soviet cities that sold Western goods for hard currency. On Western tourists, Americans in particular, visiting the Soviet Union through the Soviet Intourist agency, see Jacobs, “Contact and Control: Americans Visit the Soviet Union, 1956-1985”; on Berezka shops, see Ivanova, Magaziny “Berezka”. 36. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 226. 37. Galeotti, The Vory, 61–81. 38. Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive, 7. 39. Andrew, The Secret World, 689–90. 40. Ibid., 691–92. 41. While less brutal than the Soviet gulag would be, the Tsarist penal regime was not a holiday camp. Thousands of subversives died of disease and exhaustion in Siberian exile and jail. See Beer, The House of the Dead. 42. Sebestyen, Lenin the Dictator, 368. 43. Andrew, The Secret World, 693–95. 44. Andropov, Izbrannye Rechi i Stat’i, 245–46. 45. Gorbachev, Memoirs, 147. 46. Gorbachev and Mlynar, Conversations with Gorbachev. 47. Kull, Burying Lenin, 25; Gooding, “Perestroika as revolution from within: an interpretation,” 42–43. 48. Andrew, The Secret World, 698. 49. Not all of these economic difficulties were the result of the mishandling of domestic policies. External circumstances also contributed to the situation, including a fall in the price of oil and raw materials, which were the main Soviet exports, on world markets. The Chernobyl nuclear explosion in 1986 also cost the struggling economy billions. 50. Pravda, July 21, 1989. 51. The first Baltic state to declare independence was Lithuania when its newly elected parliament passed an independence law on 11 March 1990. This provoked Moscow to impose economic sanctions, and amid growing tensions on 11 January 1991 Soviet troops opened fire on a crowd in the capital Vilnius, killing fourteen and injuring hundreds. Several days later, five people were shot dead in a similar incident in Riga, the capital of Latvia. In the aftermath of the failed coup in Moscow in August 1991, the parliaments of Latvia and Estonia declared their countries’ independence. On 6 September 1991 the Soviet Union officially recognized the three Baltic republics’ independence. 52. A common feature of conspiracy theories of that period is the notion of “agents of perestroika” or “subversive agents” who allegedly collaborated with Western intelligence services to corrupt Soviet institutions and ideology. This idea was mainly propagated by authors with a siloviki background. Yablokov, Fortress Russia, 50–78. 53. Levada, Sochineniya; Yaffa, Between Two Fires, 10. 54. “Yeltsin o natsional'noy idee,” Nezavisimaya Gazeta, July 1, 1996, p. 1.



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55. Smith, Mythmaking in the New Russia, 148–64; Laruelle, In the Name of the Nation, 122–25.

PART II

Pseudoscience

Figure 2. “Zeus-Bastet-Pasiphae.” Source: Dmitry Sandzhiev

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Russian Cosmism

“The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot remain in the cradle forever.” Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935)

Russian cosmism emerged in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a period during which idealistic belief in the omnipotence of science was spreading fast among scientists, writers, religious philosophers, political elites, and the general public. Marked by groundbreaking scientific discoveries, such as radioactivity, the theory of special relativity, continental drifts, the discovery of new galaxies, not to mention breakneck developments in technology, this period also saw social unrest and revolutions that swept across Europe and beyond including three Russian revolutions in 1905 and 1917 that paved the way for political parties and new ideas to spread, ushering the transition of Russian society into socialism. On the waves of such scientific, cultural, and social revolutions that opened up new horizons and expanded the Universe out of all recognition, Russian cosmism emerged to deal with a host of scientific-philosophical questions, among which those concerning the cosmos and the fate of technologically advancing humankind were of central importance. This chapter charts the history of this movement from pre-revolutionary to Soviet through to the post-Soviet period. Discussing the movement’s entanglement with Soviet state ideology, the chapter covers the following topics: the pioneers of the movement; its suppression under state socialism; the first alien abductions in post-Soviet Kalmykia; the status of the movement in contemporary Russia. Like other movements in Russia, cosmism continuously changed during its history, but what distinguishes it from other movements is its fixed interest in science and its unrelenting search for a unifying story of cosmic order. Hence, what the early cosmists did was to try to make sense of a new emerging reality and systematize major scientific discoveries—from the tiniest particles such 79

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as atoms to the largest such as galaxies and everything between—and to offer a new unifying story. Russian cosmism was the Russian answer to new systematizing efforts undergone in Europe since the Enlightenment. This answer, however, played out in the peculiar context of Russia during that period. The Tsarist industrialization drive of the 1890s transformed the country at a pace unprecedented in Europe, creating dislocations and undermining social structures. Russia’s humiliating defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, the ensuing Revolution of 1905, and the assassination of the prime minister, Petr Stolypin, in 1911 only heightened the sense of an all-encompassing crisis and the imminent end of the old world. This period of upheaval and cultural disorientation undermined long-established values and beliefs. Apart from its effort to systematize and unify diverse phenomena, Russian cosmism offered cosmological stability, expansion of Russian thought, and a comforting idea of universal salvation and eternal life here on earth with the help of science and technology. Without a centralized structure, cosmism was sustained by a loose network of philosophers, scientists, writers, poets, artists, politicians, and individuals with various “scientific” beliefs—known as Biocosmists (biokosmisty), Biocosmists-Immortalists (biokosmisty bessmertniki), God-builders (bogostroiteli), Fedorovians (fedorovtsy)—who interacted with other networks and movements, appropriating, cross-pollinating, and producing new ideas. Hence cosmism’s influence, as will be discussed, on practically all aspects of pre-revolutionary and early post-revolutionary Russian life. The relationship between Russian cosmism and the mainstream scientific community, and the Russian state in particular, has always been fraught with controversy. Despite the cosmists’ claim that their ideas were “scientific,” from the late 1920s when the Communist Party’s hierarchy, equipped with fledgling Marxism-Leninism, set out to impose its strictly materialistic understanding of science, many ideas propagated by cosmists, especially those related to the occult that were incompatible with Soviet science, were denied expression. Nevertheless, some of the movement’s less controversial ideas concerning scientific progress and collective intelligence were incorporated into Soviet art, literature, science, and politics. Purged for most of the Soviet period, cosmism as a body of ideas, however, survived in the shadows in many guises: in the secretive healing practices of psychics who used cosmic and telepathic energies; in stories about UFO sightings; in underground circles in which the paranormal was discussed and practiced; in samizdat manuscripts; in futuristic art works; in the names of the movement’s pioneers who happened to be the leading philosophers of the Soviet space exploration project. The research methods associated with Russian cosmism are based on a claim that it unites science with dukhovnost’. Whilst dukhovnost’ is often

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translated into English as “spirituality,” in Russian this term has several overlapping meanings. First, it connotes what is intangible or invisible, that is, what lies in one’s psyche or thoughts. Hence the expression dukhovnaya kul’tura is translated into English as “intangible culture” (which includes folklore, music, and so on). Second, dukhovnost’ implies one’s eagerness to learn the truth about the workings of the Universe and to live accordingly. Such people are said to be anxious about existential questions such as “Who am I? What is the meaning of life? and How should I live?” This search does not necessarily lead to god. Hence a dukhovnyi chelovek is not necessarily a religious person but one who thinks about existential questions, seeks the truth, and wants to improve themselves. The third meaning is religious—it connotes a “moral” life believed to be guided by the Holy Spirit. The term dukhovnost’ derives from dukh meaning “soul.” Whilst Russian cosmism is not a religion in the conventional sense of the term—hence it lacks the concepts of Hell, Paradise, angels, and so on—its dukhovnost’ component, or ceaseless search for the ultimate cosmic truth and morality (which at the same time legitimizes mystery and the idea of the unknown), attracts soul-searching people who are not difficult to find among politicians, artists, poets, religious practitioners, or simply curious individuals in a country which has a tradition of ideas about “soul-searching” and the “eternal spiritual journey,” as attested to in the works of famous Russian writers, musicians, and artists, such as Lev Tolstoy, Fedor Dostoevsky, Sergey Rachmaninov, Andrey Sokolov, and others. Encompassing a wide variety of research concerning humanity and its dukhovnyi well-being, Russian cosmism employs a host of methods of analyzing reality. Having developed, as Olga Kurakina points out, various levels of attaining sensual reality through “biocosmism,” “energocosmism,” “anthropocosmism,” “astrocosmism,” “teocosmism,” “sofiocosmism,” “hierarchocosmism,” and “sociocosmism,”1 Russian cosmism today offers a planetarian concept to address global threats and challenges that humanity faces including economic, political, and spiritual crises, ecological catastrophes, and terrorism.2 Despite its ambition to create a comprehensive “scientific” paradigm reconciling modern science with dukhovnost’, the movement, however, does not present a single coherent system of ideas, theories, or methods. The term “Russian cosmism,” in fact, was coined retrospectively in the Soviet Union in the 1970s to describe a collection of beliefs and practices related to futurist thinking in Russia. Once conceptualized, as a system of ideas, Russian cosmism not only evolved into more branches but also incorporated various schools of thought and sects under its umbrella. Owing to cosmism’s expansive and eclectic nature, today many adherents do not agree with each other on a host of issues—some even argue that cosmism is myshlenie “a way of thinking” and not dvizhenie “a movement”—and the movement

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is prone to generate bizarre offshoots, some of which will be briefly discussed in the context of Kalmykia. In fact, retrospective conceptualization and naming of systems of knowledge are nothing new in the history of human thought. The term “Confucianism,” for example, was coined by 16th century Jesuit missionaries to China, although the philosophy of Confucius had been known in China since the 5th century BC. Another well-known example is Hinduism, which was coined only in the 19th century to encompass a wide array of beliefs and practices observed in India since time immemorial. A modern construct or a way of viewing Indian religious traditions, “Hinduism” was coined in opposition to other religions.3 Russian cosmism presents a similar case of what can be called “the invention of a tradition.” Unlike spiritual movements that emphasize inner well-being and passive commemoration, Russian cosmism which positions itself as dukhovnaya nauka—which can be translated as “science of the truth, of soul-searching”— places strong emphasis on thought as a call for collective action to radically transform humanity on a global scale. Russian cosmism’s ambition to provide answers to all that is out there, both visible and invisible, by uniting all “legitimate” explanatory methods is nothing new in Russia, given the Soviet experience of trying to establish a single super-science that purported to explain everything there is. It is worth noting that some of the most prominent early Soviet scientists, politicians, and intellectuals were cosmists. Concerned about the fate of humankind in the cosmos, the peculiarity of Russian cosmism is its holistic and anthropocentric view of the Universe in which human beings appear destined to become a decisive force in cosmic evolution, that is, a collective cosmic self-consciousness, active agent, and potential perfecter.4 Filled with an endless variety of life forms, evolution in the Universe is dependent on human action, and by failing to fulfill its fated cosmic role, humankind dooms the world, as well as itself, to catastrophe. Cosmism, which reflects an idealistic belief in science and the power of humankind to tame and change nature, has deeper and older roots in traditional folk cosmology, superstition, and the occult. As in folk cosmology, cosmism offers its own explanation of the workings of the Universe and astral objects from a perspective in which humans are of central importance. Both traditions are also moralistic in the sense that they teach morality and duty. Whilst both assume the world to be a rational entity, they differ. Whereas in folk cosmologies supernatural beings—gods, angels, spirits, and demons—control everything (and demand offerings, rituals of subordination, and so on), in cosmism, in its secular techno-utopian branch in particular, these supernatural powers are replaced by physical laws, cosmic energies, vibrations, extraterrestrial beings, and collective human intellect that render the world a meaningful, interconnected, and controllable place. Since, according to cosmism’s secular

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mechanistic vision, the Universe lacks a divine plan for salvation, secular cosmists acknowledge the threat of humanity’s self-destruction and strive to define the role of humankind in this profane cosmos. Even cosmism’s Fedorovian quasi-spiritual-quasi-technological branch seems startling by its emphasis on physical phenomena, energies, and human technology at the expense of god. Similar to deism, this spiritual branch sees god as a passive power, which does not intervene in the Universe, having relegated his active duties to humans with their powerful technology. By appointing itself the “perfecter of the Universe” and endowing itself with powers of creation and destruction, humanity—the “cosmic duty” of which is to pursue scientific progress by eradicating disease, freeing itself from biological limitations, and attaining immortality—takes up the role ascribed in folk cosmologies to gods. By worshipping humanity and its growing technology (rather than gods), cosmism is essentially a humanistic movement in the age of modernity. Yet this is not to say that cosmism is a science, as the term is generally understood in the West, for not only does it not utilize experimental methodology involving control groups, equipment, and the like, but its underlying belief in the omnipotence of science and technology, as Hagemeister points out,5 is rooted in the idea of the magic power of occult knowledge. The cosmist idea of the realization of immortality and the revival of the dead with the help of science, for example, has a long occult and Gnostic heritage in which death is seen as a technical problem, aside from the fact that cosmist conceptions contain theosophical and pan-psychic influences. Whilst cosmism encompasses many Russian folk superstitions, and many cosmists trace the genealogy of cosmic views to Russian sources—hence cosmism’s self-propagation as an otechestvennyi “domestic, patriotic” movement—during its formative years in the early 20th century, the movement was influenced by many foreign sources, including Western occult, esoteric, and spiritualistic literature that began to influence Russian thought in the 18th century as a result of Peter the Great’s westernizing project. Not only did the Russian intelligentsia become increasingly proficient in European languages, but extensive translation of Western works made much of the popular occult literature that swept through Europe in the second half of the 19th century available to educated Russians.6 Among later Western esoteric imports, the theosophical writings of Madame Blavatsky and her followers had a special place among Russian cosmists. Theosophical works were translated into Russian by the Russian Theosophical Society based in Kaluga, a provincial town where some of the early cosmists lived. No wonder then that the main theosophical tenets—its aim of creating the universal brotherhood of humanity, its encouragement to study both science and spirituality/religions, its exploration of unexplained laws and powers, its speculations about latent

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human abilities—were in one form or another incorporated into cosmist ways of thinking. But most importantly, theosophy’s attempt to create a single science by bridging the abyss between science and religion, between reason and faith, was in tune with cosmism’s own mission to establish a universal science of the truth that is total and transdisciplinary. According to cosmism, humans, who constitute a wholeness with the cosmos, are interconnected with each other and outer space via all sorts of intelligent energies, waves, and rays that permeate the very fabric of the Universe, a claim that many cosmists say is supported by modern quantum physics, astronomy, and related disciplines that they hold in high regard. THE PIONEERS The fundamental ideas of Russian cosmism can be traced in the works of the pioneers of the movement who were all polymaths, many of them with odd personalities, including Nikolay Fedorov, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Vladimir Vernadsky, and Alexandr Chizhevsky, on whose theories and speculations cosmists have built their explanatory models. These pioneers’ ideas should be understood in the context of the late 19th and early 20th centuries when great discoveries were made in many fields, the full significance of which was at the time far from clear. Also, startling discoveries, including X-rays, wireless telegraphy, evolution unfolding over generations, galaxies spiraling millions of light years away, elements forming out of dying stars, and continents shifting over millions of years, which are all but invisible to the human eye, only intuitively convinced the early cosmists that there is more out there than the eye can see. This period, characterized by the growing cult of science in Russia, was also a time of diminishing belief in traditional religions on the one hand, and increasing occultism, paganism, humanism, belief in telepathy, revolutionary sentiments, and millennial intellectual outpourings on the other. The genius of the pioneers of cosmism was that they offered seemingly rational, systematized answers to these diverse phenomena from a particular global or cosmic angle. In place of diminishing religious morality and god’s authority and the crumpling Russian Empire, the movement also offered its own—to build an ideal society and give the super-interconnected Universe a new meaning by means of upgrading humanity to godly status. By disarming god with their mighty technology and new knowledge, humans were believed to be poised to acquire more powers and solve every problem, including death itself. Russian cosmism was born from these complex encounters, hopes, and systematizing stories in which the appeal to science and technology was its primary legitimizing strategy. In this sense, cosmism can be seen as a techno-philosophy or even a techno-religion in the making.

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Nikolay Fedorov (1829–1903), regarded as the father of the Soviet space project and a precursor of transhumanism, was one of the most enigmatic cult figures in pre-revolutionary Russia. An illegitimate child of a Gagarin prince and an unknown neighbor, Fedorov, a deeply pious person, grew up on both sides of the Russian social divide. He might have been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but after leaving his paternal house Fedorov lived his life as a lonely ascetic bachelor renting small rooms often without furniture, wore the same shabby clothes winter and summer, ate poorly, and strangers easily mistook him for a tramp on the street. Well-read, erudite, having a phenomenal memory, always rejecting promotion, and eccentric, he was known among a small but influential circle of Russian intellectuals, including the writer Lev Tolstoy who admired his ascetic lifestyle. Fedorov began his career as a school teacher and worked in various locations in central Russia, endlessly moving from one place to the next after quarrelling with schoolmasters. Through an acquaintance, he got a job at the Rumyantsev Museum in Moscow (later renamed Lenin State Library in the Soviet period) where he worked as a librarian for many years. A self-professed Orthodox Christian, Fedorov’s religious impulse and his insatiable quest for knowledge, however, found expression not in God and the hereafter but in a sense of reverence for human ancestors, lost ancestral wisdom, and his focus on this world and nature. Fedorov’s main philosophical idea is as follows. This world is a false and faulty place because everything is disconnected and unrelated. The remedy lies not only in reconnecting and controlling it via shared knowledge, scientific methods, and hard work, but also in restoring universal kinship in its totality. By controlling “all atoms and molecules of the world” and mastering “the forces of decay and fragmentation,” the human race will resurrect all its dead ancestors down to Adam and Eve, recover their knowledge, and colonize the cosmos (to accommodate the resurrected dead), in the process uniting the whole of humanity, bringing universal peace, and changing the cosmos itself. This particular totalitarian vision of the future—resembling the Last Judgment ushered in not by God but by all-encompassing human technology—was as much the expression of Fedorov’s worship of science as it was influenced by his idea of “common task.” Whilst the role of science and technology is of paramount importance in Fedorov’s vision, the most important “common task” of humanity is to use human knowledge collectively to subdue the laws of nature and to attain immortality by perfecting human intelligence and the body. The perfect human of the future in Fedorov’s imagination is a deity-like being: a scientifically upgraded, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, immortal organism. Fedorov did not deny the existence of the Orthodox God. On the contrary, he saw human self-deification and perfection through technology as part of God’s plan. Believing that humankind was heading toward what he

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called “pornocracy,” driven by lustful, parent-forgetting individuals, Fedorov propagated the abolition of messy procreation and childbirth and the establishment of a disciplined brotherhood and sisterhood of humanity united by their moral endeavor to resurrect their deceased forefathers and control the world. Fedorov’s unorthodox combination of science, technology, morality, anti-sexuality, and Christianity is what unites and inspires proponents of various stripes of cosmism, from secular techno-utopianists to Christian techno-worshippers to science fiction enthusiasts. Opposed to the idea of ownership of books and intellectual ideas, Fedorov rarely published during his lifetime, and the little he did publish was written either anonymously or under pseudonyms. His main articles were published posthumously by his followers, and his concept of “common task” and “universal salvation through science and technology” had a long-lasting influence on early Bolshevik leaders. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935), regarded as the founder of Soviet rocketry and astronautic theory, was the first to use the term “cosmic philosophy.” His work served as the foundation of the Soviet science of rocketry and space exploration, influencing the leading Soviet spaceship builders Sergey Korolev and Valentin Glushko (both of whom made their names in Stalin’s sharashka prison system) as well as cosmonauts, including Yuri Gagarin whose flight marked the beginning of Space Age. A recluse by nature and seen as a strange figure by the townsfolk, Tsiolkovsky spent most of his life in poverty and oblivion in Kaluga. One of the rare occasions when he ventured outside his home town was when with a group of his classmates the young Tsiolkovsky traveled to the library of the Rumyantsev Museum in Moscow where he met the elderly Nikolay Fedorov. During his lifetime, Tsiolkovsky published more than ninety works on aerodynamic and rocket theory, space travel, intelligent forces of the Universe, and related subjects. Despite his hearing problems, as a result of scarlet fever caught in his childhood, Tsiolkovsky even wrote on music. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was a turning point in his life. For his support of the Revolution, in 1918 Tsiolkovsky was elected a member of the Socialist Academy and in 1921 was even given a lifetime pension. In the 1930s, the Soviet propaganda machine turned the Kaluga eccentric, who conveniently happened to have a proletarian background, into a national hero—an ordinary man ignored by the Tsarist regime, spent his life in splendid isolation, set up a new field of scientific research, and was finally found and recognized by the Bolsheviks. In 1932 Tsiolkovsky was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor. Apart from achieving great accomplishments as a scientist and serving as a cult figure in the promotion and popularization of space-related topics, Tsiolkovsky was also engaged in speculations that did not comply with the fledgling Soviet science and ideology. He speculated extensively about man’s

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relationship to the cosmos and believed that humanity was spiritually and biologically connected to an outer space supposedly teeming with extraterrestrial forms of life. He also defended the idea that all matter in the Universe is not only interconnected but has a mental aspect and sensibility.7 In his article “Cosmic philosophy” Tsiolkovsky writes: At least a million billion planets have life and intelligence not less advanced than that on our planet . . . In a thousand million years nothing imperfect such as contemporary fauna, flora, and human beings will be existing on Earth. Only the best will remain, [and] our intelligence and its power will ultimately bring us [to this perfect state] . . . On [other] developed, mature planets, evolution goes a million times faster than on Earth. By the way, this is regulated according to will: if a perfect population is needed—it is produced quickly and in any number. Visiting neighboring infantile worlds with primitive life forms, they (i.e. developed civilizations) destroy them as painlessly as possible, and replace them with their own perfect species. Is it good, and not cruel? If it was not for their intervention, then the painful self-destruction of animals [on various planets in the Universe] would have continued for millions of years, just as it is happening on Earth . . . What does it mean? It means that in the cosmos there is no place for imperfect, suffering life: intelligent and advanced planets annihilate such life forms.8

Tsiolkovsky, who called himself a “Biocosmist,” referred to the cosmos as a “living being” and saw it as an enormous, soul-endowed organism. Believing in the human-controlled evolution of all organisms, Tsiolkovsky predicted humanity would engineer itself into a species of super-humans and then gradually turn into a kind of radiation (luchistoe chelovechestvo), immortal and infinite in space. Given humanity’s godly potential, he derided sexual reproduction as something based on “low animal passions” and advocated the prevention of humanity’s spiritual decay by implementing artificial fertilization and parthenogenesis.9 He also propagated the totalitarian idea that all nations on Earth should become a single political system governed by the most advanced specimens of humanity, which was interpreted by the Bolsheviks as meaning Soviet scientists. Tsiolkovsky’s idea of the conscious Universe is complemented by the notion of the noosphere (noosfera) developed by cosmist Vladimir Vernadsky (1863–1945), another intellectual giant of the early Soviet scientific establishment who was assistant minister of education in the Provisional Government and later founded the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Lectured by such great Russian minds as Dmitry Mendeleev and Alexandr Butlerov at St. Petersburg University, Vernadsky began his career as a mineralogist. Having acquired from his lecturers the idea that Earth is in constant flux, its elements flowing and spiraling through its crust, he came to the realization that minerology, as

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a science of change and energy transfer, could connect cosmic history with the history of life itself.10 According to him, Earth’s initial stage is characterized by an inanimate stage, which he calls the geosphere. In the second stage, this inanimate matter developed into biological life or the biosphere. Today Earth is entering its third stage called the noosphere, characterized by the emergence of human civilization and powerful technology that is fundamentally transforming the planet’s ecosystem. In this sense, human cognition is a geological force ushering the planet into a new state of existence. The noosphere, according to Vernadsky, is a state in which humanity has total power over nature and is able to control the weather, change landscape, and manage the evolution of all living organisms, including humans, on a global scale. The chaotic evolution of life on Earth will be replaced by an orderly one controlled by human intelligence, and humans themselves will evolve into organisms with a perpetual mode of energy exchange with the environment, nourished by light or chemical energy. In Vernadsky’s noospheric view, not only are such natural phenomena as “life,” “matter,” “radiation,” and “energy” all interconnected, but humans, an important part of Earth’s ecosystem, are responsible for all that is happening on the planet, including earthquakes and droughts. Although hunted by Soviet secret police on suspicion of counter-revolutionary activities and having escaped the firing squad by sheer luck, in 1943 Vernadsky was awarded the Stalin Prize. Subsequently, his notion of the noosphere in its strict materialist sense was successfully integrated into mainstream Soviet philosophy. In his foreword to Vernadsky’s collection of articles entitled Works on the Comprehensive History of Science (1988) the influential Soviet academician Alexandr Yanshin wrote: The teachings of V. I. Vernadsky about the ultimate transformation of the biosphere of Earth into . . . the noosphere—a sphere rebuilt by collective intelligence and labor of humanity to satisfy all its needs—fits in its scientific-historical aspect the teachings of Marxism-Leninism about the ultimate construction of the communist society on Earth.11

Apart from the official Soviet interpretation, the notion of “collective intelligence” has several metaphysical meanings, one of the most popular being the idea that the noosphere is a higher “intelligent” energetic field or sphere that floats around Earth and absorbs human thoughts, memories, and other information. Some cosmists also argue that the noosphere is where “universal wisdom” (razum) dwells. According to this view, people who are connected to this boundless source of collective wisdom tend to be geniuses. Whether or not connected to the noosphere, Vernadsky was a genius. He was also one of the first scholars to write about a theory of “bioenergy” in

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Russia. In his Chemical Composition of the Earth’s Biosphere (1908) he identifies solar energy as a source that makes plants grow and ends up in humans via their digestive systems. This energy from the sun also affects the behavior of animals. The biophysicist, painter, and poet Alexandr Chizhevsky (1897–1964), regarded as the founder of solar-Earth research, pushed Vernadsky’s idea of bioenergy further and established another branch of cosmist enquiry. Throughout his life, Chizhevsky was noted not only for his many talents but also for an exceptional sensitivity to the weather, vibrations, and fluctuations in the natural and social atmosphere. According to his autobiography, he had a constant sensation of fever, a burning as if of an inner sun, which he directed outward in a never-ending passion to learn about society, including the study of solar and other cosmic influences on human behavior.12 Born in the town of Tsekhanovets, Chizhevsky spent his childhood and teenage years in Kaluga where he met Tsiolkovsky and went on to edit and publish Tsiolkovsky’s works. Chizhevsky’s main contribution to Russian cosmism was his theory of the influence of cosmic solar radiation on the behavior of organized human masses as well as on universal historical processes. In 1918 Chizhevsky presented his doctoral thesis in Moscow on universal history where he defended the idea that the sun’s activity has an effect on many phenomena in the biosphere, including not only changes in crops or diseases but on human psychology. The idea that various cyclical events, such as economic growth and downturns, are linked to sunspots was earlier proposed in scholarly circles in the West. The British economist William Stanley Jevons (1835–1882) suggested that commercial crises and depressions were caused by sunspots. He reasoned that sunspots affect weather which, in turn, affect crops.13 Crop changes could then trigger economic shifts. Chizhevsky went one step further. In his “sunspot cycle” theory, the change in solar activity was identified as the main trigger of historical events, including political and economic crises, wars, and revolutions. Chizhevsky later published his theory in the book Physical Factors of the Historical Processes (1924) which brought him fame. But as his ideas contradicted Soviet theories of the reasons for the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, Chizhevsky was denounced under Stalin and in 1942 sent to the gulag. After spending sixteen years in prison camps and exile, he was released and never wrote on solar cycle theory again but made a name by means of other theories, the most important being that of aeroionization and hemodynamics.14 Cosmic concepts such as the noosphere, cosmic philosophy, the evolution of cosmic life, and solar-Earth unity opened up a space for several important ideas to develop including cosmic energy (kosmicheskaya energiya that transfers various miraculous properties, defines human lives, and connects

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them both with each other and the Universe), cosmic ethics (kosmicheskaya etika that defines humanity’s collective role and moral duty in controlling and perfecting the Universe, not destroying or harming it), and the unity of humans with both Earth and the limitless expanses of outer space inhabited by innumerable alien civilizations. As a system of beliefs that affects the ways in which its believers think and act, cosmism constitutes a form of imagined reality (chapter 2), just as Soviet ideology does. Simply because these two belief systems are each an imagined reality, this does not mean that they are necessarily mutually invalidating or that believers in one system cannot accept the other. In the early decades of the Soviet Union when the Bolsheviks were openly experimenting with all sorts of ideas to usher in the communist paradise through steam engine and electricity, it is not difficult to imagine that cosmism’s activist approach to all life’s problems and its way of thinking, full of futurism, idealism, energy, and metaphysics of technology, along with its spirit of communality and the quest for a new mankind, offered a source of inspiration to early Soviet literature, philosophy, art, science, and politics. Great poets, including Anna Akhmatova, Maxim Gorky, Alexandr Blok, Andrey Bely, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Sergey Esenin, Marina Tsvetaeva, Andrey Platonov, Nikolay Zabolotsky, and Boris Pasternak, all exhibited, to one degree or another, cosmist concerns in their works.15 Some Bolshevik leaders were cosmists themselves. Alexandr Bogdanov, an early political rival of Lenin’s, wrote a cosmist novel entitled Red Star (1909) in which the protagonist, a member of the Bolshevik movement, flies to Mars on a spaceship. On the Red planet, the Bolshevik encounters communism, a society without money or a shortage of goods. Not only are all Martians socially equal, but they also shape-shift between male and female sexes and live an enriched cultural life. Bogdanov’s imagination of future communism on Earth was reflected in his novel’s outline of the development of communism on Mars: Mars had been a technologically advanced capitalist society, which was peacefully transformed by educated workers into a communist utopia. The implication of this idea—consonant with Marx’s theory—was that backward Russia was simply not ready for a revolution. Falling foul of Lenin’s view that the working class did not need to become better educated and that a revolution should be forced on Russia at the first opportunity by a tiny group of Bolshevik activists, Bogdanov was expelled from Lenin’s party, although he headed Proletkult and was a leading figure in early Soviet cultural development. His Red Star served as an inspiration for the Bolsheviks till the 1930s. Along with Anatoly Lunacharsky, the People’s Commissar for Education, Bogdanov also proposed a program of God-building (bogostroitel’stvo) which, he hoped, would replace the rituals and myths of the Orthodox Church through the creation of an atheistic religion based on cosmist ideas.

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A polymath and a theorist with a special interest in the sciences, Bogdanov experimented with the possibility of achieving eternal youth and super-human state (sverkhchelovechestvo) through blood transfusion—Lenin’s sister Maria Ulyanova was among the guinea pigs in his experiments—and wrote about blood transfusion in Martian society. However, Bogdanov’s experiment in blood transfusion cost him his life when it went fatally wrong. Even Lenin could not escape cosmism’s influence, if not in life then in death. The Soviet Immortalization Committee that was set up to organize his funeral decided to preserve his body, a settlement which was influenced by the Committee’s key decision-maker, Leonid Krasin, Soviet Minister for Trade and a devout follower of Fedorov. This decision was met with approval by cosmists and like-minded people who saw in it not only the potential of Lenin’s body serving as an inspiration to the proletarian cause but also the possibility that his body could be resurrected by future science. Lenin’s tomb was shaped like a cube which, according to Kazimir Malevich, the cosmist artist who proposed this shape, enabled one to escape death.16 The celebration of the cosmist spirit continued after Lenin’s death, when in August 1924 theaters in the Soviet Union screened an animated propaganda film, Interplanetary Revolution, in which the Red Army warrior Coninternov vanquishes the bourgeoisie of Mars and brings justice and peace to oppressed humanoids of the solar system. The film was followed by the release in September 1924 of Aelita, another Biocosmist-Immortalist film about the Soviet engineer Los’ who arrives on the dying planet of Mars in the midst of a revolution and falls in love with a Martian queen. Nevertheless, this honeymoon period in cosmism-Bolshevik relations began to wane during Stalinist “great turn” of 1929 as scientific disciplines quickly consolidated under the umbrella of Soviet ideology, and pseudoscientific side of cosmism was suppressed by the state, although some of its aspects were quietly incorporated into Soviet science, art, literature, and politics. Its Godbuilding mission in particular influenced the creation of the Lenin cult and the Stalin cult. Whilst Lenin discouraged cult-building during his lifetime, Stalin, who had trained to be a priest in a seminary in Georgia, orchestrated his own cult. Promoting himself as Lenin’s faithful disciple and chosen heir, Stalin advocated the idea of collective miracles through Soviet science and technology, and ended up being himself described in divine terms—the all-powerful, all-knowing, and benevolent Father of Nations. Any criticism of Stalin was heretical by definition, and millions of people across the country lived and died in fear of the absolute ruler who could select anyone for a sacrifice on a whim. The Stakhanovite “shockworkers” contended that the very thought of Stalin inspired them to work harder; many homes had corners devoted to the worship of Stalin; during World War Two Soviet soldiers charged into battle shouting, “For the Motherland! For Stalin!” In agronomy, the Stalin cult

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made possible the rise of such individuals as Trofim Lysenko, who purported to be able to miraculously transform plant species. If Stalin was the Almighty, his engineers and technocrats came to be seen as wizards of a newly emerging earthly paradise imbued with expectations of man-made miracles by means of science and the subjugation of nature. Nowhere was this expectation more highly manifested than in the establishment in the early 1930s of the Soviet agitation-squadron consisting of more than thirty airplanes that carried state propaganda to all parts of the Soviet Union. Like angels spreading the good news, the squadron organized, within a decade of its existence, more than 3,000 rallies and 5,000 talks and lectures. The squadron mainly consisted of light airplanes, but its flagship was a gigantic Maxim Gorky ANT-20, with a length of thirty-three meters and a wingspan of sixty-three meters, then the world’s largest aircraft. Carrying a printing machine onboard which could print up to 10,000 leaflets an hour, the flying propaganda factory crashed in May 1935 during a demonstration flight over Moscow after colliding with a fighter performing aerobatics. With the beginning of World War Two, the squadron was disbanded, and it was never revived following the war since agitation and propaganda were then more efficiently disseminated by the rapidly developing technologies of radio and television broadcasting. When Stalin died, many contemporaries described his death as reminiscent of the Nietzschean moment of the death of god, an event met with disbelief and shock. People across the country, those who worshipped Stalin and those who hated him, sobbed and cried and many were reported to have collapsed. The writer Ilya Erenburg, who saw Stalin’s coffin in the Hall of Columns during the state funeral, succinctly expressed the public mood in his memoir Men, Years, Life by describing Stalin’s corpse as: “The god who died from a stroke at the age of 73, as if he were not a god but a mere mortal.”17 UFO SIGHTINGS, GAGARIN, AND THE REVIVAL OF COSMISM In his influential book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (1958) Carl Gustav Jung argues that the UFO phenomenon is a myth in the making and a projection of modern technological and salvationist fantasies. The UFO phenomenon which, according to Jung, is connected with universal anxieties generated by the mechanized conflicts of World War Two and the Cold War, became a psychological substitute for god in secular Western societies in which belief in god has diminished or lost. People in these technological societies became skeptical about supernatural beings as depicted in traditional myths and holy books and have been inclined to interpret the new signs in the sky as machines from a world with technology more advanced

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than ours. Jung also notes that the first “flying saucer” stories appeared in 1947 in the United States, two years after the end of World War Two and the beginning of the atomic era. Perhaps not incidentally, the most important of the early UFO stories emerged near Roswell, New Mexico, not far from Alamogordo where the first atomic bomb was tested. Such stories intensified in America as tension between the United States and the Soviet Union grew and the fear of war became greater. In the first UFO stories from the early Cold War period, the extraterrestrials were usually benevolent. There was the hope that they might bring peace to our troubled world. Meanwhile on the other side of the Iron Curtain, in the Soviet Union—a country which had the best funded scientific establishment in history and was undertaking huge strides in developing rocket technologies—news about unidentified flying objects or apparatuses rarely leaked in the state-controlled mass media. Rather, various redacted stories about extraterrestrial contacts were invariably confined to novels or journal pages publishing “scientific fantasy” (nauchnaya fantastika), a genre which had been subordinated since the mid-1930s to the realm of children’s and popular scientific literature, therefore beyond the realm of “serious” literature for adults. Khrushchev’s Thaw, turbocharged by the launch of Sputnik in 1957, however, was a turning point after which cosmic encounters and space travel became the central theme of Soviet scientific fantasy and propelled the image of an interplanetary spaceship onto the front pages of the mainstream press.18 This spurred popular interest in space-related themes and the masses began to experience a powerful “premonition of space,” an anticipation that someone would travel to the stars. This foreboding materialized on 12 April 1961 when Soviet radio broadcasted the first space flight by Yuri Gagarin in near real-time, which made the whole experience of listening to the broadcast emotionally overwhelming. People huddled around radio receivers, tears of joy streaming down their faces, strangers hugging and kissing.19 Given how the Soviet system operated, the Soviet space program was concerned not merely with sending people into space but was a part of the much larger project of the construction of scientific communism. Just as the country was building a new social utopia, the cosmonaut was propagated as a model for the New Soviet Man while the Soviet rocket was supposed to showcase the superiority of Soviet science and technology.20 Hence Gagarin’s flight was interpreted by many Soviet citizens as a sign that communism was imminent. The success of the space program also catapulted rocket engineers to a position where they became an elite within the Soviet technical intelligentsia. Even the country’s First Son, Khrushchev’s son Sergey, was caught up in this space mania, dedicating himself to the space industry where he designed spacecraft, rockets, and moon vehicles.

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Magic cosmic dust launched whomever or whatever it touched into stardom. Unlikely beneficiaries of the hyper-masculinized Soviet drive to conquer the cosmos were two diminutive stray bitches, Strelka (“Little Arrow”) and Belka (“Squirrel”), who made history by becoming the first Earth-born creatures to survive space travel when in August 1960 they spent a day aboard the Korabl’-Sputnik 2 capsule before safely returning to Earth. In six months, Gagarin followed in their paw-steps into the cosmos. Like their human counterparts, the canine pair enjoyed enormous fame during their lifetimes. Not only did portraits of the dogs appear in newspapers, magazines, on postcards, postage stamps, and chocolate bars, but they were chauffeured to celebratory meetings with distinguished Soviet citizens and international guests. Strelka went on to have six puppies, one of which, Pushinka (“Fluffy”), was presented to President John F. Kennedy by Khrushchev in 1961. At the White House, Pushinka gave birth to four puppies that JFK referred to jokingly as “pupniks.” Following their deaths, the Soviet canine heroes Strelka and Belka were “preserved” and put on display in separate glass tombs at the Museum of Cosmonautics in Moscow. Whilst the nation basked in the glory of Soviet space exploration and people ruminated about alien civilizations that could be revealed by future space explorers, in the Soviet media occasional stories about “flying saucers” and “flying pans” spotted in the skies were mockingly treated as bourgeois propaganda, or explained away as atmospheric phenomena, or folklore-based mass fantasies.21 That said, with differing degrees of scrutiny, the Soviet authorities always kept an attentive eye on such reports. During Khrushchev’s Thaw, marked by the general relaxation of censorship, scientists felt relatively free to discuss various topics. For example, in 1955 Felix Zigel, a professor at the Moscow Aviation Institute, was permitted to set up a group consisting of top Soviet scientists and cosmonauts who were interested in UFOs. In November 1967 Zigel appeared on state TV urging viewers to report sightings of strange phenomenon in the skies, which yielded an astonishing response when the UFO Study Group received letters from eyewitnesses from all parts of the Soviet Union. The group was abruptly disbanded. Censorship was reintroduced with the beginning of the Brezhnev era and in the ensuing years UFO sightings were mentioned in the media only to debunk the possible extraterrestrial origin of the flying objects.22 But this does not mean that the authorities did not study the phenomenon behind closed doors, having various theories in mind. The first Soviet state-sponsored program to study “paranormal phenomena in the skies” was approved in 1977 at the level of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union and was included in five-year research plans. Special teams were set up at the Soviet Ministry of Defense and the Soviet Academy of Sciences to study this phenomenon according to three major lines of inquiry including (1) the possibility of UFOs

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being a product of human activity and technologies (enemy aircraft, rocket launches, etc.), (2) of atmospheric processes, and (3) of extraterrestrial origin. Whilst this research was highly classified, public interest in UFOs and in esoteric cosmic topics in general did not diminish, not least because of how information was collected in the Soviet Union. In the case of Soviet military intelligence gathering, every personnel who witnessed an inexplicable phenomenon in the skies was obliged by a directive from the Ministry of Defense to write a report to the head of their unit, and in some urgent cases such reports bypassed normal bureaucratic procedures, ending up on the table of the Chief of General Staff himself. Stationed in all parts of the Soviet Union and beyond, and with conscription being obligatory, the Soviet armed forces not only provided a large-scale observational capability but also proved to be a significant source of various cosmic rumors and conspiracy myths once soldiers left the army and settled in civilian life. The Academy of Sciences also cast a wide net, gathering information from meteorological stations dotted across the country, research institutes, eyewitness accounts, and various publications, thus unwittingly feeding into public interest in the paranormal in general, and UFOs in particular. During the thirteen years of the program, which was closed down in 1990, the Academy of Sciences, for example, had independently collected 3,000 related reports, of which 400 were labelled “extraordinary” and “paranormal.”23 Another source of inspiration for cosmic topics came from Soviet art. Despite its emphasis on Socialist realism, Soviet art was infused with spirit celebrating speed, dynamism, machinery, human domination of the cosmos and its awakening. Influenced by Soviet success in space exploration, cosmic themes were a popular tool of expressing one’s innermost thoughts and ideas, widely used by artists, painters, sculptors, and composers. Whilst some artists made their name by extolling the prescience of the Soviet government and toeing the official line, the ambiguity of cosmic signs and images also enabled subversive thoughts to thrive under the Party’s nose. By questioning the ideals of the Soviet system, painters and writers often depicted the powerlessness and insignificance of Soviet man by picturing him lost in an alien world or floating alone in the endless expanse of the Universe. By definition, power does not exist without or apart from resistance which shapes its contours. Resistance or subversion can take a multitude of forms. In Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990) James Scott writes about “hidden transcripts” (in the form of speeches, practices, gestures, prejudices, etc.) that both subordinate groups (serfs, peasants, laborers, untouchables, and prisoners) and power-holders hold in regard to each other. Unlike public roles (i.e., the official transcript) that both subordinates and the dominant display in the presence of each other in power-laden situations, “hidden transcripts” are performed off-stage in the comparative safety of in-groups. The hidden

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transcript of subordinates, however, is qualitatively different from that of the power-holders in that it is subversive and resistant to power. In the case of the Soviet Union, “hidden transcripts” were prevalent during the first decade of the Bolshevik Revolution and subsequently under Stalinism when society was divided into two antagonistic classes of revolutionaries (power-holders) and anti-revolutionaries (subordinates). In this situation, the kind of hidden transcript that was kept by subordinates was widespread not only among gulag inmates or deportees in Siberia but also among a wider population afraid of speaking truth to power. As a survival strategy, people simply generated credible performance, spoke the lines, and made the gestures they knew were expected of them. However, during Khrushchev’s Thaw, marked by the end of totalitarianism and growing solidarity among all groups and social classes in the Soviet Union, the “hidden transcript” of ordinary people came to be increasingly superseded by what Caroline Humphrey calls “the evocative transcript.”24 Drawing on Scott, Humphrey coined this narrower definition to refer to ambiguous stories, oral and written, that convey official and oppositional meanings simultaneously. This allowed people at large to hide things in plain sight, creating an illusion that they had nothing to hide from the authorities in the first place. Whilst Humphrey used “the evocative transcript” to describe what people told each other in socialist Mongolia, the term can be expanded back to the Scottian dimension to encompass not only other socialist contexts but also wider practices including all kinds of activity, performances, and art. In the Soviet Union under Brezhnev, cosmic art and scientific-fantastic literature were two such venues where the “evocative transcript” was deployed by artists, painters, and writers who wished to express subversion, not openly but by rendering it indistinguishable from the official transcript. For example, the defeatist image of an aimlessly floating Soviet cosmonaut against the backdrop of the Universe could also be explained away as the victory of the Soviet space program in sending a man to the cosmos. In the skillful hands of writers, such as Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky, scientific-fantastical novels that depicted fictional settings and elaborated on secret desires served as a means of veiled social criticism. It was in this atmosphere of double-reading, double-writing, and doublethink that in the 1970s Fedorov’s name and legacy resurfaced in the Soviet Union. Soviet-era enthusiasts unveiled a whole genealogy of futurist thinking that they would label “Russian cosmism” and the “active evolutionary tradition.” Late 19th-century and early 20th-century philosophers and scientists such as Tsiolkovsky, Varnadsky, Chizhevsky, as well as religious philosophers such as Vladimir Solovyev, Pavel Florensky, and Sergey Bulgakov were included in the membership of this tradition, which was seen to share common themes with Fedorov.25 This in turn set in motion a new underground direction in cosmist philosophizing and samizdat publications.

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Whilst the UFO phenomenon was secretly studied by Soviet scientists in two state organizations and discussed in closed circles of cosmists, UFOlogists (following the closure of the official UFO Study Group, Felix Zigel formed an unofficial group of UFO investigation enthusiasts in 1979), artists, sci-fi writers, psychics, and other interested parties, the first serious works chronicling extraterrestrial visits only appeared on the shelves of bookshops with the beginning of Gorbachev’s perestroika. Glasnost’ was soon accompanied by mass sightings of UFOs in many parts of the Soviet Union that were duly reported by the liberalized press. As in the United States, UFOs seemed most likely to be sighted near military bases, atomic electricity plants, and other strategic locations. Spectacular landings of UFOs in Voronezh near a major Soviet military installation in 1989, a UFO sighting over Leningrad’s Sosnovy Bor nuclear power station in 1991, a similar sighting over the Chernobyl atomic plant in 1991, and a report of UFOs flying over Chelyabinsk, a Soviet military bomber training base, are probably the most celebrated incidents disseminated through central news agencies and newspapers across the Soviet Union. TASS (the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union) reported on the Voronezh incident in its 9 October 1989 issue in sensational terms: Aliens visited the place [a park in Voronezh] after dark, at least three times, locals report. A large shining ball or disc was seen hovering above the park. It then landed, a hatch opened, and one, two, or three creatures similar to humans and a small robot came out. The aliens were three or even four meters high, but with very small heads.

In fact, sightings in small and not very strategically important localities were also reported in increasing numbers in many local newspapers. According to a survey conducted in the early 1990s, 70 percent of respondents replied that they believed in UFOs,26 which was not surprising because whatever was printed in the Soviet press or broadcast on television was taken at face value by the population. The inauguration of perestroika was also a turning point for hitherto suppressed ideas and movements, including Russian cosmism, that underwent revival and openly proliferated. Whilst cosmist ideas had invariably circulated in various underground circles, during perestroika these ideas in all their diversity resonated with a wider audience. Given the popularity of cosmic topics, art, literature, and projects in the Soviet Union—not to mention the general susceptibility of Soviet citizens to conspiracies due to their Cold War experiences—Russian cosmism fell on fertile soil and rapidly captured the public imagination. Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” initiative,27 which caused widespread anxiety in the Soviet Union, only poured oil on a fire. During

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this period, when the state’s hold on religion was relaxed and a revived spirituality swept across the country—meanwhile science as such was broadly respected—cosmism came to be propagated as dukhovnaya nauka, a “science of soul-searching and the truth,” purporting to address hitherto suppressed psychic, spiritual, and paranormal issues and anxieties from a global, cosmic perspective. The fact that the movement was also propagated as a unique product of the Russian mind—hence the label “Russian cosmism”—only helped sustain its popularity against the backdrop of growing nationalism that swept across the Soviet Union. Beginning in 1988, conferences and seminars on Russian cosmism became regular and a substantial literature has emerged since. Cosmism’s activist, universalist, and humanist ideals were even incorporated in Gorbachev’s policy of “new thinking.” Politburo members from Mikhail Gorbachev to Eduard Shevardnadze to Alexandr Yakovlev, as well as other high-ranking Party members, stressed the fundamental importance of the unity of the world and universal values in their speeches, announcements, and writings, thus further popularizing cosmism. Gorbachev, for example, called for the “formation of an integrated universal consciousness,” something he described as “a form of spiritual communication and rebirth for mankind.” Yakovlev, an intellectual force behind Gorbachev’s reforms, asserted by using cosmist rhetoric that “the world is becoming ever more aware of itself as a single organism.” Pointing out that “the biosphere recognizes no division into blocs, alliances, or systems,” Soviet Foreign Minister Shevardnadze contended that all nations “share a place where individual national efforts unite into a single energy field.” Adamashin, the Soviet deputy foreign minister, supported his superior by drawing attention to the fact that “physicists have long realized the unity not only of the world but of the entire Universe. It is now politicians’ turn.”28 THE FIRST ALIEN ABDUCTION AND COSMISM IN KALMYKIA Many people in Russia claim to have seen or been abducted by aliens, if newspaper articles are to be believed. Such witnesses usually have extraordinary stories to relate. Most could be explained away in terms of optical illusions when people see visions and faces where there are none. The human brain is prone to this due to mechanisms that simplify and generalize, which must have had an evolutionary advantage for our ancestors. Rather than thinking twice about whether a slinking shadow in the bushes was a tiger or not, it was safer to assume that it was a tiger and flee. Our ability to imagine and visualize things is called dreaming when we sleep; it is called imagination when we

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are awake. In exceptional cases, it can be hallucination when people see and experience things that are not there as if they are real. More than a mere physiological-neurological function of the brain, our dreams, imagining, and hallucinations as well as their content are often shaped by cultural norms and pressures. People see what they are expected or culturally predisposed to see. To use Daniel Kahneman’s theory, many seemingly irrational beliefs that people hold about ghosts, angels, and other spiritual beings are rationalized by the experiencing self and the narrating self whereby our intuitions and instantaneous visions fed to us by the social environment (processed by the experiencing self) are validated by logic and reasoning (by the narrating self), turning these intuitions into firm beliefs. Thus, in Buddhist societies, such as Kalmykia, people often see, hear, and communicate with Buddhas, bodhisattvas, and certain spirits. In Christian communities, by contrast, the pious report of their experiences with Christian gods and angels. It is not only religions that do affect our visions and beliefs, but other systems of ideas and popular anxieties also play tricks on us. Cosmism is one of them. Like a religion, cosmism places a high premium on personal or subjective experiences of “reality,” which may include one’s visions of aliens or extraterrestrial apparatuses. Cosmism also acknowledges a distinction between matter and mind. Verging on dualism, this worldview leads many cosmists to believe that the mind is some kind of disembodied energy that inhabits the body, and therefore it could leave the body. Hence cosmists readily interpret dreams as valid and true experience and not as figments of imagination. This partly explains why many religious people in Russia find cosmist ideas appealing, and conversely many cosmists tend to be spiritually inclined. One evening in May 1992 an extraordinary event occurred in the 8th micro-district of Kalmykia’s capital Elista, which was allegedly witnessed by several people. One of them was Valeriy Dorzhinov, a Kalmyk man in his mid-30s, a construction worker by profession. Here is his account: It was the third week of May 1992, Friday. It was calm. May was nearing its end. I came home after the working day, changed my clothes, and looked into the kitchen. My wife was preparing dinner. While waiting for dinner I laid down on the bed with a newspaper in my hand. From the open window came the voices of neighbors . . . All of a sudden, my daughters—thirteen-year-old Tanya and seven-year-old Toma—rushed into the flat. “Papa, papa! Hurry up, let’s go outside,” called out Tanya, “there, aliens have arrived!” “Hurry up, hurry up! Quickly put on clothes and let’s go, otherwise you’ll miss them, they will fly away,” my youngest was urging me.

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Having put on a shirt, I rushed out of the flat into the street. Once on the street, I lifted my head and started looking for the alien guests. And above five-storey residential house number 31 I saw a huge globe of yellowish-greenish-bluish color. At that moment, the globe started moving away, gradually disappearing, and in six or seven minutes it completely disappeared. I could only see it off with my eyes . . . I turned to look at the reaction of my neighbors. They had already come to their senses from the shock and started a discussion. One of them, Gera, recalled that the globe, before lifting, had released a beam of blue light in the direction of the train station . . . Ivan straight away recalled a newspaper article about how at one American military base the aliens paralyzed a colonel with a similar beam in response to his aggressive actions. I looked at my watch—8:25 pm.29

According to Dorzhinov, after this extraordinary event he began travelling while in a state of half-dream with the aliens to different galaxies and receiving important information about the origin and the future of humanity. He shared his revelations with his friends and co-workers. This story would probably have been forgotten sooner or later, had Dorzhinov not begun publishing articles about his telepathic intergalactic journeys and about imminent physical contact with the alien ancestors in the local state-controlled newspaper Khalmg Unn (“Kalmyk Truth”). The next year, he even wrote a best-seller entitled Visits to the Motherland of Ancestors: A Myth or Reality. Not surprisingly, excited citizens soon began sighting UFOs all over Kalmykia. Thus, in the article “Did the aliens visit us?” published in Izvestiya Kalmykii (“Kalmyk News”) on 7 June 1995 the journalists wrote: In response to our article “In the Night Sky Above Elista” published on 2 June, all of a sudden our newspaper office was flooded with telephone calls from the readers. In order to process all the incoming information, our workers had to wait at the phone machine in turns. Being in a hurry to share what they saw, people phoned us not only from Elista but also from the remotest corners of Kalmykia. And this in spite of the high cost of intercity calls! Thank you, dear friends! From all the stories we have recorded so far, we tried to select the most, in our view, interesting and colorful ones.

The article published 25 eyewitness accounts of UFOs. This mass excitement, no doubt induced to a large extent by Dorzhinov’s sensational publications, which occurred against the backdrop of the growing number of reports on UFO sightings across Russia, affected not only ordinary citizens but the leaders of Kalmykia as well. Having discussed the situation with Dorzhinov, on 11 November 1995 in his interview with Izvestiya, President Ilyumzhinov announced that the world was on the eve of meeting with aliens. Two years later, Ilyumzhinov was literally over the moon when his prophecy was

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fulfilled—he was abducted by extraterrestrials while on a business trip in Moscow and taken on a tour of another planet. The incident occurred when he, as Dorzhinov, was half-asleep. Here is Ilyumzhinov’s account of the abduction as he reiterated it later to the popular Channel One Russian television host Vladimir Pozner on 26 April 2010: In September 1997, I was planning to go back to Kalmykia and in the evening returned to my flat, it is on the Leontevsky Alley, here in Moscow. That evening I read a newspaper, watched TV, went to bed. And later on, perhaps, I had already fallen asleep and felt that the balcony opened and somebody was calling me. I approached and saw a half transparent tube. I went into the tube and saw humanoids in yellow spacesuits. I am often asked, “What language did you speak?” Perhaps telepathically for I felt an oxygen shortage . . . Then they showed me around the spaceship. They even told me, “We’ll have to take samples from one planet.” Then we had a conversation. [I asked] “Why don’t you appear on live channels and tell that you are here? Look, [you should] communicate with us.” They replied that, “We are not ready for the contact,” and then returned me [to Earth].

According to Ilyumzhinov, as he relayed it to the press following the incident, he approached President Yeltsin to be advised that he should keep the story low profile and keep working. Despite his superior’s advice, Ilyumzhinov communicated his story to Russian and foreign journalists, including those from the British Independent, The Guardian and the American TIME magazine, drawing worldwide attention to his persona. When Ilyumzhinov appeared on Pozner’s television program in April 2010, a concerned Russian MP, Andrey Lebedev, wrote a letter to then-president of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, urging him to investigate Ilyumzhinov’s claims and look into the possibility that Ilyumzhinov revealed state secrets to the aliens. The letter also inquired about official guidelines for what high-ranking officials should do if contacted by aliens. During the perestroika period one of the first cosmism-related groups to emerge in Kalmykia was the so-called Eurasian Academy of Life, established in Elista in 1990 by enthusiasts consisting of cosmists, Eurasianists, historians, philosophers, psychics, and fortune-tellers. Soon a discussion club called Aribut was founded by Valeriy Dorzhinov following his famous encounter with aliens. He also later organized a series of exhibitions of his cosmic paintings, contributing to the proliferation of cosmism in Kalmykia. Other notable names are the famous Kalmyk artist Dmitry Sandzhiev who paints cosmic art, Zoya Boschaeva, professor of economics at Kalmyk State University, who writes on solar-Earth theory, and the architect Jangar Pyurveev who has written several books on cosmism.30 Like many cosmists, these individuals claim to be connected to the noosphere from where they say

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they receive novel ideas, visions, and the truth about the Universe. Dmitry Sandzhiev, who claims to have been abducted by aliens while in a state of dream, explained to me: There is cosmic energy and there is the noosphere about which Vernadsky talked, right? I think that all ideas that I receive [from the cosmos] come from the noosphere. It is where all human thoughts have been deposited for many centuries. I have a small antenna in my head and that is how I receive the information. [As a result] I have no problems whatsoever with coming up with new ideas regarding my artwork. All [novel] ideas come to me momentarily.

Today, Russian cosmism is a diverse and eclectic movement with increasingly blurred boundaries, producing strange offshoots in various places across Russia. Posing as a movement to unite science with dukhovnost’, it attempts to mimic Marxism-Leninism in terms of its all-encompassing vision, ambition, and readiness to act. Fields in which cosmism is said to be applicable range from economy to arts, from the sciences to politics and ecology, albeit with no guaranteed success. Having a firm footing in the realm of the intangible, Russian cosmism, which positions itself as a non-religion, even influences religions. In Kalmykia many folk healers who practice Buddhism mixed with folk beliefs use various energies extensively in their healing practices, including “cosmic energy” which they claim to absorb from their environment or receive from Buddhist gods. Some even claim to receive this energy directly from the cosmos or extraterrestrial beings. The most prominent belong to a community called Vozrozhdenie (“Revival”), led by a charismatic folk healer named Galina Muzaeva, who appropriately describes her religion as Kosmicheskiy Buddizm (“Cosmic Buddhism”).31 Apart from healing sick people by means of traditional methods—such as reading Buddhist mantras, using herbs, and so on—the community, which consists of 16 cosmic Buddhists, carries out cosmic projects in collaboration with extraterrestrial powers. Members of this community communicate with the cosmos and receive celestial maps, diagrams, and instructions on how to create “energy corridors” for UFOs to beam down cosmic rays. Once these spots have absorbed enough cosmic energy, Galina Muzaeva assures, they begin to radiate with power enough to turn the entire planet into an earthly paradise where diseases would be eradicated and all religions and nations become united in a cosmic union under the leadership of the spiritually powerful Kalmyks. In the early 2000s, Galina even performed a series of “cosmic rituals” for President Ilyumzhinov in order to connect his body to “intelligent” energies, or the noosphere, floating in outer space. Galina told me that the rituals went

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successfully,32 which seems hardly surprising, given Ilyumzhinov’s subsequent cosmic claims and projects. SCIENCE AND COSMISM TODAY Scientifically speaking, it is an established fact that our planet is closely connected with the cosmos. Few would deny the benevolent effects of solar warmth on life, or the influence of the moon on the tides, or the harmfulness of cosmic radiation for living organisms. The list can be easily expanded. Whilst such cosmos-Earth connection may not be very obvious to the naked eye, most of us believe in these pronouncements because that is what modern science teaches us. In Kalmykia, as in other parts of Russia, many take one step further and believe that the Universe, with its countless galaxies and life forms, is more interconnected than mainstream science acknowledges or is capable of verifying. According to this view, the Universe consists of energy and data flows, and humans are intimately connected not only with their planet but with the endless expanse of the Universe through myriad cosmic energies and waves that transfer not only heat but many other miraculous qualities such as collective intelligence, memories, wisdom, healing powers, and even sensibilities. Some even believe the Universe to be a gigantic living organism. Whilst the majority of such energies and connections are yet to be discovered by science, according to cosmists we need to use all available methods and sources at our disposal, including controversial ones, and even personal experience in this endeavor. In Kalmykia, as elsewhere in Russia, believing in “alternative” ideas, however, does not necessarily contradict what one learns from mainstream science. Furthermore, many in Kalmykia even say that these two paradigms complement each other. Today this favorable attitude toward “alternative” knowledge stems partly from a particular Soviet experience of science when the state ideology failed in its promise to construct a super-science that explains everything. The repudiation of Marxism-Leninism as a dominant explanatory paradigm resulted not only in the blurring of the line delineating science from its alternatives but also shattered a firm belief in the omniscience of the mainstream science with which Soviet ideology tried so hard to associate itself. As a result of this paradigm shift—which led to creative reinterpretation of science itself, not to mention the opening up of hitherto banned areas to “scientific” investigation—a variety of alternative belief systems emerged to assert their “scientific” credentials. In popular understanding, science is what correctly describes reality. A strategy to enhance legitimacy by appealing to the authority of modern science is peculiar not only to religious movements33 but also to a wider range of alternative knowledge systems

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that purport to describe reality in all its manifestations, both visible and invisible, known and unknown. One of them is Russian cosmism, a movement which emphasizes that throughout the cosmos much more is unknown than known, more is invisible than visible. According to cosmism, in this super-interconnected Universe nothing happens for no reason. Hence the movement’s openness to all sorts of explanations and research methods, both pseudoscientific and modern. There is no doubt that modern science has changed the rules of the game, and many religions and spiritual movements attempt to derive their legitimacy from it. Yet science did not simply replace myths with testable facts but made some myths more durable, as is the case with Russian cosmism. Rather than destroying cosmism’s fundamental ideas, science and modern technology only seem to reinforce them by blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality. Humans—as the founding fathers of cosmism once dreamt—have already reached the cosmos and set foot on the moon. Like the noosphere, cloud technology stores human feelings, thoughts, and memories. With our information technology and global web of communication, humans are not only becoming interconnected as never before but are also creating new cyberspaces in which we interact, create, and even wage wars. Furthermore, it would not be too far-fetched to assert that, as envisioned by cosmist pioneers, we are becoming more and more like self-made gods: with our computers and smart phones we know more than Athena, the goddess of wisdom, could have ever known; with our jumbo jet we fly faster than Hermes, the messenger of the gods; with our hydrogen bombs we would have scared the daylights out of Deimos, the god of dread and fear, while with the help of modern genetics we are already modifying organisms, including our bodies, and changing the pace of evolution. Where natural evolution used geological time stretching over aeons, modern scientists use technological-computational power to speed it up, and cosmism takes credit for predicting, or rather speculating on, it. In the 3.5-billion-year history of evolution on Earth, life has been subject to natural selection, a process which has no apparent purpose or goal. But equipped with ever-improving technology, today we stand at the dawn of a new, cosmic era in which life will be controlled by intelligent design. In fact, we may end up engineering ourselves in this hyper-accelerated future, as Fedorov and Vernadsky once imagined, into omniscient and omnipresent immortal beings who neither breed nor feed but implement a perpetual mode of energy exchange with the environment. We may even shed our carbon bodies and, as Tsiolkovsky predicted, travel like radiation or transmission or data. Having all the time in the world, these god-like entities will build superior civilizations, reach the furthest corners of the Universe, and discover all that is out there to be discovered. Indeed, this ultimate specimen will be as different from us as we are from amoebas.

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Cosmism serves as a source of inspiration and pride for many Russians for its truly global influence. Vladimir Vernadsky developed the concept of the noosphere34 to denote an idea that we live in a new epoch marked by human activities on the planet, long before Eugene F. Stoermer proposed his “anthropocene” era in the 1980s, denoting essentially the same idea. Whilst the anthropocene, or the Age of Humans, connotes the transformation of the global ecosystem by human activity since the dawn of the Agricultural Revolution (about 10,000 years ago), the theory of the noosphere argues that humans became a true ecological force with the advent of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, which produced machines that allow fossil fuel to be turned into mechanical energy in the service of humankind. Later, in his eighties, Vernadsky played an indirect role in the development of the Soviet nuclear program when in 1941 he assembled a Uranium Commission for the Soviet Academy of Sciences, bringing on board a group of brilliant physicists consisting of Peter Kapitsa, Igor Kurchatov, and others, who went on to detonate the first Soviet atomic bomb in 1949, thus catapulting the Soviet Union into its role as the second atomic superpower in the world. Nikolay Fedorov is regarded as a precursor of transhumanism, which is today an international intellectual movement which aims to enhance human physiology with the help of modern technologies and ultimately to attain immortality. Inspired by developments in genetic engineering, nanotechnology, regenerative medicine, and similar fields, ambitious life-extending projects are gaining pace, with Alphabet/Google alone investing millions of dollars in this vision. In Russia itself, the first cryonics company, KrioRus, in 2006 carried out a cryopreservation (process of freezing the dead in liquid nitrogen with hopes of future resurrection). 2045 Initiative, a non-profit organization funded by the Russian billionaire Dmitry Itskov, pursues another route to achieving immortality by “mind uploading,” hypothetical technology enabling the transfer of an individual’s personality into a non-biological carrier, i.e., silicon robots or the internet itself, with the implication that it will open access to a collective memory repository. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky not only put the foundations in place for the Soviet space exploration program, but he also influenced Wernher von Braun who is acknowledged as the father of space science and rocketry in the United States, a country whose rivalry with the Soviet Union pushed space exploration forward. Ideas similar to those put forward by Vernadsky and Chizhevsky concerning cycles of solar energy influencing plants (rice, wheat, potatoes), animals (cows, pigs, sheep), and humans (that eat these plants and animals) are gaining popularity in scholarly circles. Until modern times, characterized by industrialized food storage and improved transportation, cycles of social activities across societies followed natural rhythms and were dependent on

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energy that humans extracted from staple crops or meat. During seasons of scarce sunlight and a lack of crop plants, when granaries were empty and livestock thin, humans usually enjoyed peace. Wars and raids were launched when the sun was high, granaries full, and livestock fat. It was ultimately solar energy that fueled human aggression and enterprise. Given cosmism’s wealth of topics and predictions which could be traced back to the movement’s pioneers who displayed varying degrees of religiosity and each had their own research agenda, it is no wonder that today the Russian cosmist scene resembles more an ecosystem encompassing diverse and fluid groups and networks, including self-proclaimed cosmists, transhumanists, posthumanists, immortalists, futurologists, and Fedorovians (followers of Fedorov), whose beliefs overlap in some areas but contradict in others. Nevertheless, united by a common belief in the possibility of attaining immortality, many cosmist-minded individuals not only contend that their movement has great potential, but some even call for cosmism to be developed into a “universal ideology” of the future. As we know, such an attempt was already made in 1990 with the establishment of the Experimental Creative Center in Moscow, which came up with a “cosmic philosophical religious social idea” to replace Marxism-Leninism.35 More recently, in 2012 a group of Russian cosmists established a political party called the Longevity Party whose aim is to achieve immortality through life extension. Another major factor that makes cosmism attractive is its association with the names of its pioneers who happen to have acquired celebrity status. Fully rehabilitated, Fedorov, Tsiolkovsky, Vernadsky, Chizhevsky, and others are more popular in Russia today than ever before. Many of their works and ideas—especially those related to the occult and pseudoscience—that had been suppressed during the Soviet period have become popular knowledge and institutes, funds, organizations, and museums are named after them. For example, the Fund of V. I. Vernadsky, established in 1995, is one of the biggest charity organizations in Russia to support ecologically oriented educational projects. The Fund organizes competitions, study groups, and seminars, often in collaboration with the Ministry of Education and the Russian Academy of Sciences. The Russian Academy of Cosmonautics, named after Tsiolkovsky, was also founded in 1991. In Kaluga, Kaluga State University bears his name, and the annual Tsiolkovsky Lectures have become a platform not only for discussions of his ideas but also of theories connected with pseudoscience and the occult. In 2008 Tsiolkovsky was posthumously awarded the Symbol of Science medal for: “The creation of the basis for all projects related to the exploration of new cosmic spaces.” Chizhevsky and Fedorov have also been honored in Russia, and a science center bearing Chizhevsky’s name and a museum-library named after Fedorov were opened in Kaluga

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and Moscow, respectively. Conferences, lectures, and exhibits are regularly organized to popularize their ideas. As mentioned earlier, the pioneers of Russian cosmism should, first of all, be understood in the context of the late 19th and early 20th century. Given the circumstances of that period, their knowledge, explanations, and predictions were bound to be speculative as they were emotional. No wonder then that Russian cosmism emerged as a cultural-intellectual movement that propagated speculative ideas about the nature of humanity, its projected evolution, and its place in the Universe; and this trend continues to this day. It can be argued that the current popularity of cosmism—as strange as it may sound— was to some extent precipitated by Soviet ideology with its futurism, space exploration, and ethno-engineering projects extending into the future. Russian cosmism first emerged as a set of idiosyncratic ideas purporting to explain, transform, and bring universal order to a world in which the power of gods was diminishing. Owing to the socially transformative period in which an idealistic belief in science, humanism, and utopian expectations of social justice prevailed, in the early 20th century cosmists in Russia focused more on ideas of (r)evolutionary transformation and human’s domination of the cosmos. Having been consolidated into a tradition and surviving an esoteric and pseudoscientific underground existence during the Soviet period, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union cosmism became more fixed in its ideas about maintaining cosmic order, harmony, and averting catastrophes and regression. As the country is still undergoing deep transformations, this trend continues to this day. This particular cosmist outlook has been wedded to two recent developments, namely (1) growing anxiety about impending ecological disaster, global warming, widespread pollution, and the mass extinction of species and (2) futurism spurred by the latest advancements in AI, robotics, genetic engineering, and digital technologies. The Kalmyk cosmist Jangar Pyurveev reflects this mixed spirit of urgency and renewed hope, maintaining that: Humanity is changing the face of the planet because the actions of people, which are full of anthropocentrism, are already affecting the Solar system, pushing it to catastrophe . . . Perhaps we still underestimate our link with the universal wisdom (razum), with the universal cosmic space, which tries to help us out, to make us correct the pace of evolution on Earth which we have distorted ourselves.36

His solution to this existential problem is: Humankind, burdened by its past, has to set itself free from the past and take on a new body—not a local geopolitical but a planetarian-noospheric body . . .

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to integrate itself into a single planetarian system . . . In order to get out of the [current] deadlock, what is urgently needed are constructive ideas on a planetary scale as well as leader-countries capable of uniting the whole of humankind for the collective and purposeful realization of these ideas.37

While thinking globally Russian cosmists employ local concepts. Attaining immortality is seen as a “common task” of humanity, but this communal endeavor has to be managed by strong leaders—in Federov’s vision this leading role is assigned to “a Russian autocrat,” in Tsiolkovsky’s and Vernadsky’s views to “a team of leading scientists,” and yet according to other cosmists it has to be “the Russian godman” himself to direct the global masses—a view consonant with the political preferences of many Russians. Promoted as an original product of the Russian mind, as opposed to the “Western” one, cosmism also has the capacity to trigger strong nationalistic feelings and sentiments. Staunchly nationalist, many cosmists of different ethnicities in Russia indeed share a conspiratorial mindset and are openly anti-Western. By positioning itself as a “universal science,” Russian cosmism has parallels with other ambitious, all-embracing, collectivist movements that are rising from the ashes of Soviet science and ideology. Among them is Eurasianism which offers a systematized explanation of the fate of a large territory which coincides with the borders of the former Soviet Union and which is inhabited by myriad sedentary and nomadic peoples. Whereas during the Soviet period this political-geographical union was legitimized by the Marxist-Leninist theory of evolutionary merger by stages, today its most promising substitute is Eurasianism which postulates not social evolution but the idea of fixed primordial civilizational clusters that exist in opposition to one another. The next chapter looks at Eurasianism. NOTES 1. Kurakina, “Russkiy kosmizm i nookosmologicheskiy vzglyad v budushchee.” 2. Sazonova, “Mirovozrenie Russkogo kosmizma i global’nye problemy sovremennosti,” 49–55. 3. Jensen, Manufacturing Confucianism; Fuller, The Camphor Flame. 4. Hagemeister, “Russian Cosmism in the 1920s and today,” 185–86. 5. Ibid., 187. 6. Ryan, “Magic and Divination: Old Russian Sources,” 58; Carlson, No Religion Higher Than Truth. 7. Golovanona and Timoshenkova, Tsiolkovsky, 1–18, 485–502; Sazonova, “Mirovozrenie Russkogo kosmizma i global’nye problemy sovremennosti,” 49–55. 8. Golovanona and Timoshenkova, Tsiolkovsky, 260–68.

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9. Hagemeister, “Konstantin Tsiolkovskii and the Occult Roots of Soviet Space Travel,” 139. 10. Ings, Stalin and the Scientists, 14. 11. Vernadsky, Trudy Po Vseobschey Istorii Nauki. 12. Young, The Russian Cosmists, 163. 13. Jevons, “The Periodicity of Commercial Crises, and Its Physical Explanation.” 14. Gagaev and Skipetrov, Filosofiya A. L. Chizhevskogo. 15. Young, The Russian Cosmists, 214–15. 16. The mummification of Lenin’s body established a tradition across the socialist world. Following his death in 1953, Stalin’s embalmed corpse was placed in the same mausoleum next to Lenin’s where it lay until 1962 when it was removed under Khrushchev. Supreme leaders of other socialist countries who were embalmed by specialists from the so-called “Lenin lab” in Moscow included Bulgaria’s Georgi Dimitrov in 1949, Mongolia’s Khorloogyn Choibalsan in 1952, Czechoslovakia’s Klement Gottwald in 1953, Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh in 1969, Angola’s Agostino Neto in 1979, Guyana’s Lindon Forbes Burnham in 1985 and North Korea’s Kim Il-Sung in 1994 and his son Kim Jong-Il in 2011. See Quigley, Modern Mummies, 27–43, 139; Bernstein, The Future of Immortality, 13. 17. Erenburg, Lyudi, Gody, Zhizn’, 230. 18. Schwartz, “Guests from Outer Space.” 19. Jenks, “Conquering Space: The Cult of Yuri Gagarin,” 129–49. 20. Gerovitch, Soviet Space Mythologies, 48–67. 21. Saranov, “On the Nature and Origin of Flying Saucers and Little Green Men,” 163–67; Ramet, “UFOs over Russia and Eastern Europe,” 82–87. 22. Ramet, “UFOs over Russia and Eastern Europe,” 82–87. 23. Platov and Sokolov, “History of UFO State Research in the USSR,” 507–27. 24. Humphrey, “Remembering an ‘enemy’: The Bogd Khaan in Twentieth-Century Mongolia.” 25. Grechishkin and Lavrov, “Andrey Bely i N. F. Fedorov”; Bernstein, The Future of Immortality, 64–66. 26. Stephens, “The Occult in Russia Today,” 359. 27. Formally known as the Strategic Defense Initiative (STI), this project envisaged advanced ground- and space-based systems to protect the United States. 28. Kull, Burying Lenin, 25–28. 29. Dorzhinov, V Gosti na Rodinu Predkov, 15. 30. Pyurveev, Arkhitektura Mirozdaniya; Pyurveev, Cosmoplanetarian Integration of Earth; Pyurveev, Velikoe Sokrestie Kontinentov. 31. On Cosmic Buddhism in Kalmykia, see Terbish, “I Have My Own Spaceship: Folk Healers in Kalmykia, Russia.” 32. Personal communication, August 2010, Elista. 33. Zeller, Prophets and Protons; Lewis and Hammer, Handbook of Religion and the Authority of Science. 34. The term noosphere was coined in the 1920s by the French mathematician Bergsonian Edouard Le Roy (1870–1954), but reconceptualised by Vernadsky

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shortly before his death in 1945. Hagemeister, “Russian Cosmism in the 1920s and Today,” 200. 35. Kurginian, Postperestroika. 36. Pyurveev, Arkhitektura Mirozdaniya, 27. 37. Ibid., 35, 45, 55.

4

Eurasianism

Bears are bad neighbors. (Russian proverb)

Any discussion of science, state ideology, or cosmism in Russia would be incomplete without an account of the idea of Eurasia popularized by the dissident Soviet historian Lev Gumilev. Gumilev’s idea has its roots in the theory of Eurasianism, first proposed by Russian émigrés in Sofia, Bulgaria, in the 1920s. The first proponents of this theory who fled Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution and rejected Europe’s “individualistic and materialistic spirit”1 argued that Russian civilization does not belong to the European category but is a unique civilization in its own right. It is neither European nor Asian but something in between—Eurasian. By rejecting European values, the founding fathers of the movement—referred to as “classical Eurasianists”—also rejected “atomistic” European scholarship and attempted to explain RussiaEurasia by constructing a new meta-science that would render it possible to understand the world in its totality. This desire to create a coherent and harmonious system of ideas or universal myths resembles the early cosmist project to unify all sciences and to recount the story of life from a cosmic perspective. But unlike cosmism, Eurasianism’s analytical angle was embedded in terrestrial geography, or more precisely in its interpretation of terrestrial geography laced with Europhobia. In comparison with human-centric cosmism, Eurasianism is nature-centric in that nature is seen as the source of all truth. Hence the disciplines classical Eurasianists attempted to synthesize were geography, climatology, botany, minerology, time-geography theory, ethnography, psychology, linguistics, historiography, along with teleology and anti-European conspiracy theories. Whilst aiming to explain the Earth in its totality, Eurasianists focused attention on Russia-Eurasia and sought to demonstrate the existence of a meta-science peculiar to Eurasia, which 111

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they saw as a territory embodying “a structural totality, explicable through its own internal elements and not in terms of its interaction with the outside.”2 This was due as much to early Eurasianists’ anti-European stance as to their practical knowledge of Russia’s situation about which they felt entitled to speculate. The movement had a paradoxical relation to science, as Marlène Laruelle contends, “seeking simultaneously to derive inspiration from it, while at the same time criticizing its supposedly European character.”3 Fascinated by law and the regularities of nature, the founding fathers of Eurasianism proposed arguments that were metaphysical, conspiratorial, and verged on geographical or environmental determinism, which was gaining acceptance among scholarly circles in Europe and beyond.4 In their metaphysical conception of geography, Eurasia was a “closed circle” and a “living organism” that shaped human collectives, their culture, psychology, language, history, and politics. Among the founders of the movement were such prominent names as Prince Nikolay Trubetskoy, Petr Savitsky, Georgy Vernadsky (son of the cosmist Vladimir Vernadsky), Erenzhen Khara-Davan, and others. Among them Prince Trubetskoy elaborated a view of Eurasia as an ethno-cultural unity, Savitsky worked on the uniformity of landscape and climate, Vernadsky studied Russia’s history from the perspective of the East, and Khara-Davan focused on the role of Chingis Khan as the first emperor of a united Eurasia. This chapter recounts the story of Eurasianism through the personalities of its founding fathers, the Soviet-era protagonist Lev Gumilev, and post-Soviet philosophers and politicians such as Alexandr Dugin and Vladimir Putin, and concludes with a discussion of popular Eurasianism in Kalmykia. THE FOUNDING FATHERS Prince Nikolay Trubetskoy (1880–1939) was one of the most well-known aristocrats in Russia and a gifted linguist. His forebears, the Trubetskoys, were intellectual luminaries who traced their roots to the 14th-century Gedinimid princely family. His paternal grandfather, Prince Nikolay Petrovich (1828– 1900), chamberlain of the Russian Imperial Court, was a co-founder of the Moscow Conservatory, and after retirement was appointed vice-governor of Kaluga, the “capital” of Russian theosophy and cosmism. Prince Nikolay Trubetskoy himself, along with his fellow Eurasianist Roman Jakobson, pioneered the structural analysis of language and established the science of phonology. As his family were close to the Tsar’s court, Prince Nikolay Trubetskoy grew up in splendid privilege and was surrounded by the best Russian minds of his time, dubbed Russia’s Silver Age, when society was bristling with new ideas in the arts, poetry, philosophy, not to mention

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science. As mentioned, it was also a period of transformation, spiritual disorientation, and profound soul-searching when a generation of intellectuals and artists began to seriously question their European identity which had been imposed on Russia from the time of Peter the Great. This inquisition first emerged when Russia’s successful absolutist project of Europeanization began to depart from new progressive European ideas of rationalism, liberty, and equality launched by the French Revolution against the backdrop of the accelerating Scientific and Industrial Revolutions. In response, in search of a new identity some Russian intellectuals increasingly looked to the East, to Russia’s encounters with the steppe people and its own Orient. Having absorbed a myriad of Asiatic tribes in Central Asia, by the mid-19th century Russia had reached its geographical zenith spanning over 7.7 million square kilometers. This search for identity divided Russian intellectuals into two camps—“Slavophiles” and “Westernizers.” The former regarded Russia as a unique place that should seek its own way of being, while the latter saw Russia as part of a wider European community. The terms of the debate were set by philosopher Petr Chaadaev (1794–1856), a forerunner of the “Westernizer” movement, who expressed his doubts about the greatness of Russia, ridiculed the Orthodox Church, while extolling the achievements of (new) Europe in science, logical thought, and its progressive spirit, which he called on fellow Russians to emulate. The Slavophiles countered Chaadaev’s heresy by declaring him insane, putting him under house arrest, and by denouncing the “Latin West” as an alien and degenerate place that had nothing to offer Russia’s unique, collectivist, spiritually oriented traditions. Imagined as a single undifferentiated entity, the West was cast as the ultimate “Other” conspiring to undermine and destroy Russia. That European countries later provided shelter to Russian revolutionaries and various anti-monarchist plotters was seen by Slavophiles as a further proof of the West’s malign intentions. In an attempt to define and reinforce a distinct Russian identity, the Slavophiles not only showed a renewed interest in native myths and folklore but also set out to synthesize Orthodox Christianity and peasant beliefs, which led to the creation of the modern concept of dvoeverie or “double belief.”5 The peasant beliefs were permeated with ancient spirits, including rusalka “mermaid,” vodianoy “malicious water spirit,” domovoy “house spirit,” leshiy “wood spirit,” not to mention an origin myth that the Slavs were descended from the bear. There were also in Slavophile ranks some philosophers who attempted to reconcile the two hostile camps. One was the spiritual cosmist Vladimir Solovyev (1853–1900), a close friend of Sergey Trubetskoy, who was Prince Nikolay Trubetskoy’s paternal uncle. Guided by his all-encompassing cosmic vision, Solovyev sought to develop a single Russia-centric system of knowledge by fusing all conflicting concepts and

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religious ideas around the Slavophile concept of sobornost’. He also worked on his theory of Pan-Mongolism, the idea being that Asiatic peoples, headed by rapidly modernizing Japan, were poised to invade and humiliate Great Russia. A homeless pauper toward the end of his life, Solovyev died at the princely estate of Sergey Trubetskoy. With the beginning of Russia’s Silver Age, this search for Russia’s identity only intensified, now played out in the context of an all-Russian effort to systematize and explain the world from the Russian point of view. This intellectual debate did not escape the young Prince Nikolay Trubetskoy’s attention. The Bolshevik Revolution was a turning point that led many people, predominantly the aristocracy, intelligentsia, and participants in anti-Bolshevik movements, to flee for their lives, often empty-handed, to Europe and China where they ended up destitute, in poverty, and at the mercy of others. Accustomed to the best that life could offer, many of these aristocrats found themselves waiting on tables, doing manual jobs, working as courtesans, or begging in the streets. Vulnerable, stateless, disdaining their situation, and fervently believing that the Bolshevik regime would soon collapse, the émigrés patiently, almost with religious dedication, waited for the right time to triumphantly return to their homeland. This partly explains why the majority of emigrants remained in countries close to Russia, such as Bulgaria, which was one of the biggest centers of Russian emigration. While struck by personal misfortune those who stayed in Europe witnessed another calamity of continental proportions—the collapse of empires like dominos across Europe. It was in such circumstances that Prince Trubetskoy, who was in Sofia and struggling to feed his family, began to question whether humanity advances at all and whether Europe is progressive. In 1920 he published his seminal work Europe and Mankind which attracted to Eurasianist circles several important thinkers that would contribute to Eurasianist theory, including a minor aristocrat Petr Savitsky (1895–1968), the historian Georgy Vernadsky (1887–1973), and the Kalmyk doctor Erenzhen Khara-Davan (1883–1942). The Eurasianism of the émigrés was a system of ideas based on the argument that Russia is a unique civilization shaped by its “homogeneous” geographical location and unique climate.6 Eurasianists maintained that the topography of Russia-Eurasia was unified by a cluster of three massive lowland plains—the East European lowland, the West European lowland, and the East Siberian lowland—that made the whole region, as Petr Savitsky put it, a “closed circle” and a “complete geographical world.”7 Owing to this geographical closure, Eurasia, which encompassed myriad peoples with different languages, cultures, and histories, was historically predestined by nature itself to form a single civilization, a single state unit in opposition to Europe. In this light, the Bolshevik Revolution was reimagined as Russia’s natural reaction

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to rapid Westernization and the ensuing bloody civil war was seen as a divine force to cleanse Russia-Eurasia of its cultural corruption and bring its inner vitality and essence to the fore. With its anti-European stance verging on revolutionary radicalism, the Eurasianist movement offered an early critique of Eurocentrism and its science, suggesting that European notions of progress and civilization were nothing more than a cover for colonialist designs woven into European scholarship in history, philosophy, anthropology, and so on. Seeing Eurasia as a colonial victim, the Eurasianists saw Russia-Eurasia as a potential leader of the colonized world against a colonial Europe.8 The main weapon in this struggle was Eurasian meta-science, a new system of knowledge that would, as Savitsky put it, enable humans to overcome the apparent chaos of the world. It is important to note, however, that Eurasian civilization was envisaged not as a monolithic and undifferentiated entity but as a multinational amalgam consisting of Slavic, Mongol, Finno-Ugric, and Turkic elements. The Eurasianists’ primary interest, however, rested on the integrated totality of Eurasia as a whole.9 This idea that the various constituent groups comprising Eurasian commonality deserve recognition attracted several non-Slavic thinkers into the ranks of Eurasianists. One of them was Erenzhen Khara-Davan. Born on the Kalmyk steppe of the lower Volga, Khara-Davan initially supported the Bolsheviks but later joined the White movement during the Russian Civil War. When the White Army was defeated, he fled to Europe where he joined the Eurasianist movement. Along with other prominent Eurasianists he popularized the idea that Chingis Khan, his distant ancestor, was the first emperor of a united Eurasia who succeeded in carrying out the historic task set by nature itself. In 1929 Khara-Davan crystalized his ideas in his book Chingis Khan as a Military Leader and His Heritage. Rethinking Russia as an organic continuation of Chingis Khan’s Empire, Prince Trubetskoy also wrote extensively on Russian identity, linking its propensity to authoritarianism and violence to the “legacy of Chingis Khan.” His friend, the historian Georgy Vernadsky, dedicated his whole career to rehabilitating the negative image of Mongol invasion.10 Besides politically uniting Eurasia, the Mongol role was perceived to have been crucial in saving Russia and its Orthodox identity from Catholic Europe by invading Russia and putting it to the sword. In this, the Bolsheviks appeared to be similar to the Mongol Horde, and the Eurasianists expected a new, rejuvenated order to emerge out of the Bolshevik bloodbath. Despite acknowledging, on the surface, the multinational composition of Russia-Eurasia, Eurasianism was essentially a Russocentric worldview based on the idea that supra-national Eurasian culture is founded on ethnic Russian culture. For this reason, it did not succeed in attracting a wider following

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among representatives of national diasporas, including the Kalmyks who lived in small groups in Sofia, Belgrade, and Prague as well as in Paris, Nantes, Lyon, and Grenoble. Seeing themselves as culturally distinct from the Russian people, the Kalmyk émigré in general opposed Eurasianist ideas as “imperialist,” and even those who had deep respect for Khara-Davan evaded the movement. Being Buddhist, Kalmyks also did not approve of the Eurasianist view that all Eurasian nationalities should be united under the banner of Orthodox Christianity, and to that effect they actually criticized Eurasianism in their magazines Kovylnye Volny (“Waves of Feather Grass”) and Ulan Zalata (“People with Red Tassel”). Notwithstanding their limited popularity among national diasporas in particular, the Eurasianists argued, using the notion of geographical causation, that geography and psychology not only were interlinked but moved human history forward, thus they preferred to dwell on the larger picture. Based on this insight, they set out to explain the past or the character of Russia-Eurasia as a whole and also attempted to predict its future. Opposed to militant atheism and Bolshevik ideas, the Eurasianists came to believe that soon nature with its immutable laws would correct itself and the Bolshevik power would organically evolve into a new national, Orthodox-Christian government. Unlike the cosmist movement, Eurasianism had an organized and centralized structure. By 1925 the Eurasianist movement had two centers, one based in Paris, led by Petr Suvchinsky, and the other in Prague, led by Petr Savitsky. Both centers networked with each other and organized congresses, meetings, seminars, and published almanacs and books. Beyond Europe, Eurasianist views were also current among Russian émigré circles in Harbin, China. A prominent figure of the Russian community there, Vsevolod Ivanov, even published a book entitled We: Cultural-Historical Features of Russian Statehood (1926) about Eurasianism, written not from a European but an Asian perspective. Witnessing the rise of the Japanese pan-Asianist movement in that part of the world, Ivanov claimed that Russia-Eurasia and the Japanese pan-Asianist Empire should establish an alliance in opposition to the West. His acquaintance Shimano Saburo, a Japanese specialist on Russian affairs and a committed pan-Asianist who also happened to be acquainted with the Kalmyk Eurasianist Khara-Davan, translated several Eurasianist works by Trubetskoy, Khara-Davan, and Savitsky into Japanese. But being far from the European centers, the Harbin Eurasianists not only played a minor role in the movement, but some were sidelined by their Europe-based brothers-in-arms. Appalled by Ivanov’s open support of Japanese colonialism, in 1932 Savitsky wrote an article in a Harbin newspaper undermining Ivanov by pointing out that Ivanov had no formal affiliation to organized Eurasianism. The end of the Russian Civil War that saw the Bolsheviks emerge as absolute victors, however, created a split between the two European centers.11

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Staunchly anti-Western, the “left wing” Parisian Eurasianists sympathized with Bolshevik policies, seeing them as a revolution against the West, whereas the “right wing” Prague-based Eurasianists rejected any idea of cooperation with the Bolshevik state. This, however, did not prevent some Eurasianists, headed by Savitsky, from establishing the Eurasian Party in 1932 with the aim of overthrowing the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union and transforming the country into Eurasian Union. The active politicization of the movement coincided with, and to some degree precipitated, another development when the Cheka/NKVD, which had orchestrated the Red Terror during the Russian Civil War, infiltrated the Eurasianist organization, turning it into a trap to lure “counter-revolutionaries” into the open. The movements leaders were pitted against each other, discredited, and finally some “left wingers” were lured back to Soviet Union to their doom. This was one of the most successful operations in the history of the Soviet intelligence services so that by 1937 the Eurasianist movement self-dissolved, an event which was also facilitated by the fact that, having a vertical structure, the movement was bound to be crippled provided its leaders were eliminated or compromised. The fact that some “left wing” Eurasianists cooperated with the Bolsheviks also damaged the movement’s reputation beyond repair among the émigré communities. Disillusioned and depressed following the collapse of the movement, its co-founder Prince Trubetskoy, who had left the movement some years before, died in Vienna in 1939, making his friend Savitsky the last bearer of the Eurasianist flame in Europe.12 At the end of World War Two, in 1945 the Red Army marched into Prague and rounded up former Russian monarchists. Savitsky was taken to Moscow, interrogated in the Lubyanka, headquarters of the Soviet intelligence services, and sent to the gulag. It was only in 1956 that he was allowed to return to Prague. The Soviet government’s eradication of the Eurasianist movement had some irony in that many Soviet policies and values were not dissimilar to those held by Eurasianists. The Soviet state was staunchly anti-Western, conspiratorial, totalitarian, promoted narratives of the Soviet Union’s exceptionalism, and unleashed russocentrism by upholding the Russian people as “the first among equals” and the “vanguard nation” in Soviet society. Mirroring Eurasianist values, the cultures of non-Russian peoples in the Soviet Union were also taught to be historically tied to that of the Russians. LEV GUMILEV Despite being eliminated as an organized movement, Eurasianist ideas in various incarnations were perpetuated in the Soviet Union. The revival of Eurasianism as a theory of geographical determinism is linked to the dissident

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Soviet historian Lev Gumilev (1912–1992). Like his predecessors, Gumilev saw the Soviet Union, successor to the Russian Empire, as neither a European nor an Asian country but a unique Eurasian civilization. Having produced fourteen works on Eurasia’s history, Gumilev described Russians as a “super ethnos” and wrote about the positive role of the Mongol Horde in Russian history, while de-emphasizing Russia’s link to European culture and portraying European peoples as historical foes of Russia. Lev Gumilev was the son of a couple who were the most famous poets of Russia’s Silver Age, Nikolay Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova. The co-founder of the All-Russia Union of Writers and a charismatic artist, Nikolay was arrested and executed at the height of Lenin’s Red Terror in 1921 when his son was 9. The fates of the surviving mother and son were to become inextricably linked henceforth, and when one fell the other would follow. Unlike his parents, Lev Gumilev did not choose poetry but took history as a hobby. On the completion of his secondary education, he wished to study history at university, but since this topic had not been offered by Leningrad State University since the Bolshevik Revolution, he had to take a course on “the history of world grain markets.” In 1934, however, the University opened a history course, as a result of Stalin’s new policy of instilling patriotism in the masses via rehabilitating Russia’s imperial history, which enabled Gumilev to pursue his passion. During the next wave of mass executions—Stalin’s Great Purges—Anna Akhmatova’s poetry was banned, and in 1938 her son was arrested for counter-revolutionary offenses and sent to the gulag. In 1939 Gumilev spent some time in a prison infirmary as a result of an accident while felling trees. Feverish and delirious, he was struck by a vision that would haunt his history writing for the rest of his life. It dawned on him that people have an inner impulse which he would term passionarnost’ (“passionarity”) that drives them to heroic deeds, however irrational, in the process changing history and creating new ethnoses (i.e., peoples) and civilizations. Some individuals have more passionarity than others, which makes them leaders. In his book From Rus to Russia (1993) Gumilev explains “passionarity” as follows: Usually, people, like other living organisms, have as much energy as is needed for sustaining life. If a person is able to “absorb” energy from the environment more than is ever needed, then that person forms bonds with other people, which allows him/her to use this energy in any direction he/she chooses . . . Using this excessive energy in organizing and managing their compatriots at all levels of social hierarchy, they (i.e. passionarians, or people who have “super-abundant” energy), though with hardship, set up new stereotypes of behavior, forcing others to adopt it, and in this way bring into existence a new ethnic system, a new ethnos.13

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In Gumilev’s view, history does not develop in a linear advance but consists of cycles when passionarity—absorbed by both ordinary folk and leaders alike—gives birth to new ethnoses and civilizations, and ultimately when the impulse is depleted the ethnos dies out, giving way to the next. The gulag experience, saturated with raw violence when inmates were degraded to bare animal existence, also taught Gumilev that societies were not bound by a civilizing humanism but by a natural, unconscious sense of what he would later term “complementarity” (komplementarnost’), a feeling of attraction among a group’s members toward each other. Having spent five years in the gulag, in 1943 Gumilev was released, an event which coincided with his mother Anna Akhmatova regaining fame. In 1945 Gumilev joined a Red Army unit that marched to Berlin. After the horrors of the gulag, as he would reminisce later, army felt like a holiday, with warm clothes and rationed food to recuperate his malnourished body. This expedition also provided food for thought because it reinforced his ideas when he observed the victory of his relatively backward country over its technologically and culturally superior enemy. The only logical explanation to him was the existence of raw, primordial energy that drives some people to great deeds and sacrifices while others stick to each other and follow their leader. In the post-war years Gumilev published articles and defended his doctorate dissertation on the history of the First Turkic Khanate (546–659), a nomadic polity that established its power on the Mongolian Plateau and rapidly expanded its territories in Central Asia. In 1946 at the beginning of Stalin’s ideological re-discipline of the intelligentsia, Akhmatova fell from grace, interrupting her son’s peaceful life yet again. Accused of counter-revolutionary activities and of holding anti-Marxist-Leninist views, in 1949 Gumilev was arrested and sent back to the gulag. When following the death of Stalin in 1953 the situation in the camps was relaxed and the convicts were allowed to have books, Gumilev set out to work on his book draft about the Xiongnu, who reigned on the Eurasian steppes long before the First Turkic Khanate, thus digging deeper into pre-history. In July 1956, a few months after Khrushchev’s famous speech at the 20th Party Congress, Gumilev was released thanks to his mother’s long-lasting effort to secure his freedom. The long-awaited reunion of mother and son was not a happy occasion, however. The tension between the two, which had grown over the years, turned into estrangement. Gumilev’s increasing resentment toward his mother, whom he accused of being the reason for his lengthy incarceration, paralleled his growing attraction to the founding fathers of Eurasianism. Gumilev’s formal introduction to old Eurasianists occurred at this time. Through his former gulag contact, Gumilev was introduced to Petr Savitsky. The two kindred souls, who against all the odds had survived the gulag,

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quickly bonded and engaged in correspondence. Had one of them perished, there would have been no Eurasianism as we know it today. In 1966 Gumilev visited Savitsky in Prague, his first and only trip outside the Soviet Union. Through Savitsky, Gumilev was also introduced to the Eurasianist Georgy Vernadsky who by that time was teaching Russian history at Yale University. Gumilev first encountered Eurasianism in the 1930s, but he did not grasp the movement’s philosophy or significance. It was only through  correspondence that Gumilev became aware of and willing to research Eurasianism. Whilst his previous works on the First Turkic Khanate and the Xiongnu were politically neutral, following his acquaintance with the old school Eurasianists Gumilev’s writings took on a staunchly anti-Western (which was the official dogma of both the Soviet Union and Eurasianism) and pro-Mongol tone (Gumilev was open to the influence of Eurasianism also due to previous research on the Mongolian Plateau). By networking with old Eurasianists, Gumilev was also influenced by Georgy Vernadsky’s father, the famous cosmist Vladimir Vernadsky, whose work helped Gumilev to formulate the question of the origin of the passionarian energy. Drawing on Vladimir Vernadsky’s theories about “bioenergy,” Gumilev began to contemplate the connection between geography, human activity, and cosmic radiation. His acquaintance with Nikolay Timofeev-Ressovsky, also a former gulag inmate who had by then become the Soviet Union’s leading geneticist working on radiation and space medicine, proved to be useful in Gumilev’s endeavor. Like Gumilev, TimofeevRessovsky was an admirer of Vladimir Vernadsky so much that he called the field of radiation ecology that he had pioneered “Vernadskology.” Under the influence of the cosmists, Gumilev established the origin of passionarity in cosmic rays which, he argued, are absorbed by a landscape. In other words, cosmic energy from outer space ultimately shapes terrestrial human civilizations. In Gumilev’s view, the distribution of passionarity is not equal across the globe. The highest concentration of this energy is in the territory of the Soviet Union-Eurasia and the Middle East, with the implication that these territories contain the highest number of “passionaries.” By contrast, Western Europe and the United States not only have a low level of passionarity but are constantly losing this vital energy. By anchoring anti-Western sentiments to Eurasia’s landscape, Gumilev saw Cold War animosity between the Soviet Union and the West not as a fight between communism and capitalism but as a fight that has deeper natural and even cosmic roots. What Gumilev did was to “energize” human history and trace the energy stored in the landscape (that brings about civilizational clusters) back to its cosmic origin. The role of leaders, or “passionaries,” is to serve as a bridge between cosmic and social

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phenomena. Gumilev not only established a new link between the cosmos and the Earth but he elevated geography into an alternative ideology. “Ethnos” is another central theme that runs through many of Gumilev’s works. Whilst the term ethnos was first used in Russia in the early 20th century by the Russian anthropologist Sergey Shirokogorov, who fled Russia for China in 1922, it was Gumilev who reintroduced it in the Soviet ethnographic lexicon. But it fell on Yulian Bromley, Chair of the Institute of Ethnography of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, to popularize the term, which led Gumilev to accuse Bromley of plagiarizing his theory. According to Gumilev, an ethnos is not simply a conglomeration of individuals with different religions and languages who happen to share common historical experiences, but it is a human grouping with a common psychology and goal whose members are willing to sacrifice themselves for it. With his theory of ethnogenesis (birth of ethnoses), Gumilev also unwittingly developed a form of antisemitism in the context of Eurasianism, which enabled Russians to blame their own failures on the Jews and the West at the same time. The concept used for this purpose was that of the “chimera,” or false nation, which, according to Gumilev, draws life not from cosmic rays but from other groups. It required a small step to apply this concept to the West and argue that the Atlanticists, who run on low bio-cosmic energy, also suck it from those who have it in abundance. In its broadest definition, religion does not need to have gods as long as it is an all-encompassing story that confers “natural” legitimacy on human norms, values, and actions. Religion, in this sense, legitimizes human laws and worldviews by arguing that they reflect universal or cosmic laws that humans did not invent and which they cannot change. Denied agency, humans have no choice but to obey and follow these laws. Whilst Gumilev never identified Eurasianism with a religion but saw it as a “science,” Eurasianism shares characteristics with religious dogmas in that it is portrayed as a system of “natural” laws that define human communities, their common goals, shared psychology, and developmental trajectories. Gumilev wrote beautifully which would have made his poetic parents proud, but his works hardly withstood peer review. Rather than drawing on historical or scientific facts, Gumilev invented peoples and events, connected cosmic energies with social phenomena, and came up with universal laws, as he himself admitted, by using his imagination and logic. Whilst Gumilev’s pseudoscientific theories about the birth of ethnoses, bio-cosmic energy, and fixed civilizational clusters were plainly un-MarxistLeninist, he was tolerated. Given his political unreliability and tainted past, for many it was a puzzle that a person like him should ever be allowed to teach at the Institute of Economic Geography and give, albeit rare, public lectures which were almost always crammed with audiences keen on fresh

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ideas and alternative explanations. Gumilev’s position, which attained some legendary status, was due as much to the names of his famous parents and his own dissident past as to his new powerful protectors. Gumilev’s gulag contacts proved to be indispensable and even life-changing throughout his career. Lev Voznesensky, Gumilev’s one-time inmate friend, who was also rehabilitated under Khrushchev and later joined the all-powerful Central Committee of the Communist Party, was one of his patrons. But Gumilev’s most powerful sympathizer in the Communist Party was Anatoly Lukyanov, a high flier who would become the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union and who also happened to be an admirer of Anna Akhmatova’s poems. Gumilev met Lukyanov through Voznesensky. But even given such powerful patrons, who were enough to keep him out of trouble, Gumilev was consigned to the fringe of the Soviet scientific establishment, having no access to wider public fora and important journals. He was, however, no lone voice crying in the wilderness, and his views gradually spread and gained popularity among the intelligentsia and underground networks. This partly explains his stratospheric rise to popularity during the perestroika era. With Soviet ideology then in tatters and the whole society in search of alternative thinking while anxious to preserve the Soviet Union, Gumilev’s civilizational ideas and his theory of ethnogenesis gathered support from politicians, philosophers, and scholars from a wide political spectrum from liberals to conservatives to nationalists and imperialists. Not only did Eurasianism provide an alternative vision of ideology, but it also justified the existence of the multi-ethnic Soviet Union as a single political entity. Despite having suffered most of his life under the Soviet regime, Gumilev was embittered by the dissolution of the Soviet Union into independent states in late 1991. He died six months later, following a second stroke. Gumilev’s works were especially well received not only in ethnic regions of Russia but in some newly independent states of Central Asia, including Kyrgyzstan14 and Kazakhstan.15 Having developed his own version of Kazakh-centric Eurasianism, extolling the role of the Kazakh people in Eurasian history, in 1994 Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbaev proposed a Union of Eurasian States, and in 1996 he opened the Gumilev Eurasian National University in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, which has the Department of Eurasian Studies and houses a museum named after Gumilev. In Russia itself, Eurasianism developed in various regions where local philosophers, scholars, and writers offered interpretations of Eurasianism which valorized indigenous peoples.16 In some places, such as the republics of Tatarstan,17 these ideas were actively supported by regional governments.

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THE NEO-EURASIANIST ALEXANDR DUGIN Whilst Eurasianism swept across some national regions, in Russia’s metropolis, the seat of power, its popularization is closely linked to Alexandr Dugin (born 1962), a prominent Russian conspiracy theorist, far-right nationalist, occultist, and political analyst who founded the Eurasian Party in 2001 which later morphed into the international Eurasian Movement. The most published of all contemporary Russian Eurasianists, Dugin began his nationalist career in Moscow’s occult underground in the late Brezhnev era.18 Around 1979–1980, then a student at the prestigious Moscow Aviation Institute specializing in preparing Soviet engineers in aerospace technology, Dugin was taken under the wing of the notorious Yuzhinsky circle, which consisted of eccentric young people engaged in all sorts of anti-ideological activities, including occultism (based mainly on the readings of Western esoteric philosophy), fascist rituals (Sieg-Heiling, singing songs glorifying fascism), anti-Soviet poetry, and sexual mysticism. Proving the deep connection between repression and perversion, the circle’s members were referred to by its leader, Evgeniy Golovin, as “perverted angels.”19 Aimed at experimenting with the dark side of human nature beyond all moral and social norms, facilitated by alcohol and drugs and fornication, the Yuzhinsky circle was an extreme case of a counterculture. The “perverted angel” Dugin was expelled from the Aviation Institute, not that he cared one fig about aerospace technology, after which he threw himself into a more earthly and occult vocation. At the beginning of perestroika, he joined Pamyat’ (“Memory”), which initially began as a movement to preserve Russian culture but fast developed into an anti-Semitic and virulently nationalist organization that would serve as a platform for many patriotic youth movements in today’s Russia. Witty, gifted, erudite, and with a high alcohol tolerance, Dugin was rapidly promoted in the organization and taken under the protection of its schizophrenic leader Dmitry Vasilyev. Infiltrating movements was nothing new in the history of the Soviet intelligence services, and this time it was Pamyat’s turn. According to Alexandr Yakovlev (Gorbachev’s right-hand man), Pamyat’ was a KGB front organization to control new political developments and dissident movements on the street. Inevitably, Pamyat’ was also the first independent political movement in the Soviet Union that was allowed to organize public demonstrations. Dugin’s time in the organization, however, was brief, ending in 1988, after which he founded the Historical-Religious Association Arktogeya and wrote on an idiosyncratic mix of metaphysics, the occult, absolutism, and conspiracy theories that he had been engaged in. Dugin published his first book, The Ways of the Absolute, via samizdat in 1989.

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Unbeknownst to Dugin at that time, Pamyat’, which turned him from a bohemian thinker and hooligan into a political activist, was not the only project of the intelligence services and powerful groups that tried to control the democratic process unfolding in the country. At the height of perestroika, elite groups in the Central Committee and the KGB ran parallel projects that could furnish the crumbling system with alternative ideologies. The most prominent of such pet projects was the inappropriately named Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR), established in 1991 as the first “independent” political party in the Soviet Union, which is to this day led by its eccentric leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky known for his signature fire-and-brimstone rhetoric. Another pet project was the Experimental Creative Center, established in 1990 under the patronage of the Politburo member Yuri Prokofyev, which was led by Sergey Kurginian, a former theater director and an admirer of the cosmist movement. The Center’s task, staffed with hundreds of researchers, was to write a post-perestroika program for the ideological and spiritual renewal of the Soviet Union. Kurginian proposed a “cosmic philosophical religious social idea” based on Russian cosmism, communism, nationalism, and Christian theology. Defining “real communism” as a mixture of science and meta-religion, Kurginian and his colleagues argued that Marxism-Leninism, which was incapable of providing solutions to the country’s current problems, should be replaced by a new post-perestroika ideology founded on “collectivistic Russian tradition” that was “incompatible with the individualistic traditions and institutions of the West.”20 What the Experimental Creative Center offered the Soviet state was essentially re-mystification of society through pseudoscience and religion against the backdrop of the simultaneous ideological de-mystification initiated by Gorbachev’s perestroika program.21 Desperate for new ideas, the Central Committee approached individual after individual, organization after organization. It was in this manic search that the Central Committee also agreed to fund Dugin’s project—the Eurasianist journal Continent Russia. The year 1990 was also notable for Dugin for other reasons. He went to Paris, his first ever trip abroad, to meet two important people—Alain de Benoist and Yuri Mamleev. The former is a French radical philosopher known for his opposition to democracy, egalitarianism, the United States, and free markets. The latter is a Russian underground occult writer and the founder of the Yuzhinsky circle (where Dugin began his nationalist-occultist career) who in 1974 emigrated to the United States where he taught at Cornell University and later moved to Paris. These contacts proved extremely useful for Dugin. Inspired by the French radical (who was similarly struck by Dugin’s remarkable knowledge of Western far-right literature), Dugin published books glorifying Russia’s exceptionalism, its “sacred geography” and mystic character while demonizing the West—including Mysteries of Eurasia (1991) and Continent Russia

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(1992)—and went on to edit the journals Dear Angel (published in 1991) and Elements: Eurasian Review (published in 1992–1998), establishing himself as a rising intellectual star within the Russian far-right movement. Mamleev in his turn introduced Dugin to his contacts among siloviki which would be fateful for Dugin when in 1992 he landed, without academic credentials, a prestigious academic job—an adjunct professorship in the Department of Strategy at the Frunze Academy of General Staff in Moscow, the leading officer-training establishment in the country. A breeding ground of reactionary anti-establishment sentiments, the Academy was Dugin’s first ideological laboratory involving the military. Dugin’s first encounter with the siloviki was not a happy one though when he, then a member of the underground bohemian circle, was briefly detained by the KGB in 1983, leading to Dugin’s expulsion from the Aviation Institute. Little did he know that in less than a decade he would be elevated at the very heart of the establishment, lecturing future spies and officers on patriotism. While at the Academy Dugin had no difficulty finding time to combine his lectureship and political activism. In 1993 President Yeltsin and the Russian Parliament were like two bears in a lair, vying for power and ready to tear each other to shreds, which resulted in the Black October confrontation during which Yeltsin literally shelled the Russian Parliament into submission. This cost the lives of 147 people and 437 were wounded, according to official sources, though human rights organizations and opposition accounts cited much higher figures. Being in the thick of the battle but escaping without a scratch, Dugin was one of the ideologists of the Parliament side. In the same year, Dugin, an admirer of Heinrich Himmler and the Waffen-SS, co-founded the neo-fascist National Bolshevik Party (NBP) along with Eduard Limonov, a political dissident of extreme persuasion who proudly called Dugin the “St Cyril and Methodius of Fascism.” Later, Dugin joined the Old Believer’s sect—which maintains that it is the original and purest form of the Eastern Orthodox Church—and grew his trademark beard and stopped drinking. Let alone loving his neighbors and turning the other cheek, Dugin espoused hateful views against gays, feminists, Jews,22 and atheists. While undergoing personal spiritual transformation and still attached to the Academy of General Staff, in 1997 Dugin published his seminal Foundations of Geopolitics which brought him fame not only among siloviki but a wider spectrum of Russian hard-liners. It became a textbook at the Academy and other military universities in Russia. In Foundations of Geopolitics, presented as an academic work, Dugin reiterates Gumilev’s pseudoscientific position that the clash between the Soviet Union and the West was never a dispute between communism and capitalism but one between land-based Eurasian and Atlantic sea powers. But unlike Gumilev, Dugin, deeply influenced by his exposure to the military

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establishment and its conservative mentality, expounds on the game of geopolitics which, according to him, is based on raw competition, conquests, alliances, covert operations, conspiracies, and spheres of influence. He also argues that Western notions such as “democracy” and “human rights” are nothing more than window dressing and propaganda to conceal the real intent which is to encircle and destroy Russia. What Dugin did was to create a militarized and geopoliticized version of Eurasianism fit for post-Soviet conditions by combining Eurasianism with the siloviki outlook and fascism. By preaching that Russia’s post-perestroika humiliation was the direct result of Western conspiracies, the book’s prescription for Russia’s revival is to improve the country’s defensive position by counteracting the conspiracy of “Atlanticism” led by the United States. The tactical plan is to put the Soviet Union back together, bring about the Eurasian Empire, and push the Atlanticists back by using canny geopolitical alliances with regional powers, including Germany, Japan, and Iran. With regard to the Russia-German alliance, the book dictates that the two countries must divide Eastern Europe into spheres of influence and create a direct border with each other (reminiscent of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact), which would shift Europe away from “Anglo-Saxon” (i.e., American and British) influence and toward Russia. Russia-Eurasia has to simultaneously pursue proactive international politics by means of annexations and covert operations, including but not limited to, spreading separatism and instability in the United States, cutting Britain off from Europe, annexing Ukraine, and incorporating Georgia’s South Ossetia and Abkhazia regions into Russia. The key to the construction of the Eurasian Empire, according to Dugin, lies in rejecting narrow nationalistic agendas and accepting the fundamental principle of the common enemy, which is the United States with its liberalism.23 As a devout Eurasianist, Dugin also argues that communal values, conservatism, harshness, and the strict legal regulations which characterize Russian society originate in “the hardness of the land” of Russia-Eurasia which, according to him, should also absorb Mongolia whose legendary Chingis Khan laid a foundation for the Eurasian Empire. By clearly formulating Russia’s civilizational foes, propagating the idea of collective victimhood, and proposing global geopolitical actions against Atlanticist puppeteers, this book about inevitable civilizational clash was like soothing music to the ears of the increasingly dissatisfied and angry officer class. It was disorienting to the siloviki that the old foe, the West, had been transformed into a friend overnight and President Yeltsin, even when sober, seemed to be happy to dance the West’s polka to the detriment of his country’s national interests. Foundations of Geopolitics also opened many important doors for Dugin who was soon invited by the speaker of the State Duma, Gennady Seleznev, to work as his geopolitical advisor. But the most

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powerful politician who shares Dugin’s views of Eurasianist geopolitics is Vladimir Putin, a former spy who brought to the Kremlin with him “the St. Petersburg chekists,” a group of friends with KGB background, many of whom shared a feeling of collective victimhood and who also happened to have heard of Dugin thanks to Foundations of Geopolitics. A still marginal figure until mid-2005, known mainly among siloviki and far-right nationalists, Dugin has become one of the most recognizable geopolitical thinkers in Russia today. Foreign Policy journal’s 2014 issue listed him as among the top 100 global thinkers.24 Having constantly evolved over the course of the century since its inception, today Eurasianism serves as an umbrella term that accommodates a variety of ideas. Like a Russian matryoshka doll that consists of wooden dolls of decreasing sizes placed one inside the other, Eurasianism encompasses civilizational, ethno-psychological, geographical deterministic, geopolitical, anti-Western, nationalistic, militaristic, economic, imperial, and mystical ideas, which are all united by an overarching theme of a strong Russian state. That said, not all constitutive ideas are compatible with each other, and indeed many are mutually contradictory. For example, the idea of a “united Russian-Eurasian civilization” does not explain how the indigenous cultures of ethnic minorities, such as Kalmyks, Chechens, Yakuts, and many others, are supposed to unite to form a single “civilization” against the Atlanticists. However, despite its esoteric origins and internal contradictions, as a civilizational and ethno-psychological doctrine celebrating Russia’s uniqueness Eurasianism has, under Putin, been appropriated by the Russian state and inaugurated as a science of culturology and historiography, lending it the legitimacy to be used not only in classrooms but also in wider political projects. Thus in secondary schools, according to the Russian historian Victor Shnirelman, Russian “students are injected with a hefty dose of racial prejudice,” which correlates with “growing xenophobia among young people today.”25 Furthermore, Eurasianism as a doctrine which studies ethnoses as “primordial collective organisms imbued with fixed characteristics” has been developed into scientific-philosophical schools verging on “scientific racism” and as such it is taught at university level at some institutions, from the Volgograd Medical Institute on the Volga River to Altai State University in Siberia, giving birth to weird pseudoscientific notions and theories such as the “life force” (a form of passionarity), “social virology” (study of “foreign” ideas and values as viruses), and the like.26 Dreamt up by a group of homesick émigrés, as a political dogma Eurasianism has, beyond the walls of educational institutions, found its material incarnation in Russia’s foreign policy concerning former Soviet territories. Following Kremlin-backed geopolitical and economic projects such as the Eurasian Economic Community (2000–2010) and the Eurasian Customs Union (2010–2014), today the

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Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), which came into effect in January 2015, has five members that are all former Soviet republics including Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. At the inception of the EEU, President Putin stated that his goal was to enlarge the organization to all post-Soviet territories, excluding the three Baltic states (which are NATO and EU members).27 As a theory and philosophy of restoring and protecting the “Russian world” and “Eurasian identity,” which presupposes flexible borders, Eurasianism also serves as a powerful tool that underpins geopolitical plans of action. Some of the proposals put forward in Dugin’s Foundations of Geopolitics (1997) proved to be truly prophetic. The year 2008 saw the Russo-Georgian War over South Ossetia, whose leader, Eduard Kokoity, has been on Dugin’s international Eurasianist movement’s board of directors since 2005. In 2014 Putin annexed the Crimea from Ukraine and expressed his support for the self-determination of rebellious Donetsk and Luhansk regions in eastern Ukraine. This conventional military incursion was followed by the broadest cyber-offensive in history when Russian hackers brought down the Ukrainian power grid, attacked the Ukrainian ministries, seaport, and infrastructure. A new type of covert, frozen, and hybrid warfare that Russia pursues today evokes Dugin’s ideas (which he borrowed from the siloviki establishment) about conducting geopolitical games based on covert operations, subversion, alliances, disinformation, and economic pressurizing with energy resources. While the president was waging “hybrid war” by deploying his hackers and infamous “little green men”—not cosmic aliens but Russian special forces without insignia—for the glory of Russia, this period also proved to be inspirational and prolific for Dugin who churned out one conspiratorial book after another, including Eurasian Revenge of Russia (2014), The New Formula of Putin: Basics of Ethical Policy (2014), Ukraine: My War (2015), Russian War (2015), and War of Continents: The Modern World in the Geopolitical System of Coordinates (2015). In all his latest books Dugin reiterates his anti-U.S. position, defends the idea of the unification of the “Russian world,” stresses the importance of the revitalization of Eurasian civilization, and glorifies sacrifice and death in the name of the national cause. In 2015 the United States Treasury Department added Dugin to its list of sanctioned Russian citizens in relation to their involvement in the Ukrainian crisis. In 2016 the United States itself was rocked with allegations of Russian-led interference in the country’s presidential election.28

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VLADIMIR PUTIN Vladimir Putin was born in 1952. Following secondary school, Putin studied law at the local Leningrad State University, and after graduation joined the KGB. Never managing to rise above the modest rank of Lieutenant-Colonel in his sixteen years of service, during the dying years of the Soviet Union he was stationed in Dresden, East Germany, where he—according to Masha Gessen, one of Putin’s biographers—did paper-pushing and was “reduced mainly to collecting press clippings, thus contributing to the mountains of useless information produced by the KGB.”29 He also did some agent recruitment work for the KGB.30 After the fall of the communist regime in East Germany, in 1990 Putin returned to his native city and worked as the KGB rezident at his alma mater, monitoring political activity among faculty and students, reporting to the university rector and, crucially, cultivating friendship with his former Professor Anatoly Sobchak, which proved to be a lucky move when Sobchak was elected mayor of the renamed St. Petersburg and hired Putin as an advisor on international affairs on account of his time spent in East Germany. In 1991 Putin became deputy mayor, then first deputy mayor overseeing a large portfolio, including the gambling industry, which involved money laundering and prostitution. In 1996 Sobchak lost his bid for re-election after which Putin landed a comfortable job in the Presidential Property Management Department in the Kremlin in Moscow. Always a fly on the wall and slavishly attentive to the whims of his political masters—Putin even had the nickname Mol’ (“Moth”) from his St. Petersburg days—Putin’s rise in the corridors of power was nothing short of meteoric and dazzling. After being promoted to deputy chief of the presidential staff, in July 1998 the young political newcomer was appointed director of the FSB. At that time, with failing health and increasingly intoxicated, Yeltsin struggled to hold on to power. Not only did the Parliament open an impeachment case against President Yeltsin, but Sergey Skuratov, prosecutor general of Russia, also initiated a criminal investigation into Yeltsin’s corruption links to a Swiss construction company. This incident provided Putin with the opportunity to demonstrate his loyalty to Yeltsin. In a special FSB operation, in March 1999 Putin arranged the airing on the state-controlled RTR channel of a video that showed a naked man similar to Skuratov in bed with two prostitutes. In April, Putin organized a televised press conference where he confirmed that Skuratov was the amoral man on the tape. His reputation tarnished and under continuous pressure from Yeltsin’s team, Skuratov resigned, and the federal investigation was dropped. Putin’s blind loyalty and ruthless efficiency was duly acknowledged by Yeltsin and when the Kremlin poll showed that the population cherished the

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image of a spy most of all professions, Yeltsin quickly promoted Putin as his prime minister to be fast-tracked to the post of acting president. A figure unknown to the larger public, Putin, however, had a major problem—his approval rating stood at 2 percent. In September 1999 a series of bombs exploded in Russian cities under suspicious circumstances, implicating some members of Yeltsin’s inner circle and the FSB.31 Killing 301 people and injuring almost 2,000, the explosions also furnished Putin with the perfect opportunity to initiate the Second Chechen War, resulting in his rating soaring to 45 percent in November. With Russian generals breathing down his neck and under massive pressure that came with his new role, the nervous-looking Putin promised in front of cameras to “whack the Chechen terrorists in the outhouse.” Thanks to carefully orchestrated media manipulation amid an atmosphere of terrorism and war, Putin, who was portrayed as the savior and defender of Russia from fanatical and externally funded foes, won the 2000 presidential election with an absolute majority. A lower-level KGB officer without exposure to high-level ideological coaching, President Putin—according to the former Kremlin spin doctor Gleb Pavlovsky—is a person with a simple Soviet mentality for whom the lessons of the collapse of the Soviet Union were very pragmatic: He (Putin) understood the coming of capitalism in a Soviet way. We were all taught that capitalism is a kingdom of demagogues, behind whom stands big money, and behind that, a military machine which aspires to control the whole world. It’s a very clear, simple picture which I think Putin had in his head—not as an official ideology but as a form of common sense. His thinking was that in the Soviet Union, we were idiots; we had tried to build a fair society when we should have been making money. If we had made more money than the Western capitalists, we could have just bought them up, or we could have created a weapon which they didn’t have. That’s all there is to it. It was a game and we lost because we didn’t do several simple things: we didn’t create our own class of capitalists, we didn’t give the capitalist predators on our side a chance to develop and devour the capitalist predators on theirs.32

A former Soviet dissident and a pioneer of political technologies in post– Soviet Russia, Gleb Pavlovsky was the main political strategist who turned Yeltsin’s seemingly hopeless 1996 presidential campaign into victory, after which he went on to mastermind Putin’s election victory in 2000. Admitting that he knows more about the history of Stalinism than any other period of Russian history,33 Pavlovsky, a historian by profession, is known for his employment of narratives and symbols from the Stalin era in political campaigns. Pavlovsky, who created Putin’s image of a security hawk and had the privilege of working with him closely, contends that during his first two presidential terms Putin had no grand strategy or ideological vision but was

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reactive and used intuition. Like many people of a formerly great country who felt humiliated and downgraded in the post-Soviet world, Putin was looking for revanche or, as Pavlovsky explains: “the resurrection of the great state in which we had lived, and to which we had become accustomed.” Surrounding himself with his core team consisting of ex-KGB, GRU (the Main Intelligence Directorate), and childhood friends he had gathered during his years as deputy mayor in St. Petersburg, Putin set out to implement his revanche in the only way he knew or was trained to do. Like Yuri Andropov, former head of the KGB who combined disinformation and attention diversion techniques, fake image and narrative creation, and brute force in his leadership of the Soviet Union, Putin adopted the same methods used by the KGB, in the process turning Russia into an FSB paradise. Seeing the intelligence services as the only force capable of saving Russia from internal and external enemies—whether real or imaginary—Putin resurrected the FSB into an all-powerful organization devoid of parliamentary oversight or political control; clamped down on free media; appointed spies to all important posts in the public sector, education, business, and media; subjugated judiciary and legislature; modernized the army. He also raised the specter of “a fifth column” (internal enemies intertwined with external forces poised to destroy Russia from within) and targeted both Russian NGOs and private persons, including independent journalists and bloggers, as “foreign agents,” thus suppressing genuine dissent. According to some authoritative estimates, during the Gorbachev period no more than 8 percent of those who held leadership positions had a siloviki background, whereas by the end of Putin’s second term in 2008 that number had shot up to 42 percent.34 Over time, KGB mentality filtered through the country’s bureaucracy from Moscow to all corners of the country. It was also under Putin that in the 2000s cooperation between Russian scientific organizations and their foreign counterparts was halted on the pretext that many state secrets had been leaked as a result of liberal reforms during the Yeltsin period.35 In international affairs, Putin proceeded with the task of reviving Russia’s prestige, as Pavlovsky informs, by tentatively using the old Soviet language of geopolitics. Putin began his presidency by paying a state visit to Kazakhstan in October 2000 during which he put a wreath in front of Gumilev’s statue at the Gumilev Eurasian National University. In Astana, he also signed an agreement for the establishment of the Eurasian Economic Community aimed at the economic reintegration of former Soviet Republics of Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. The 9/11 tragedy in the United States, however, was a turning point for war hawk Putin, which led to his short-lived dovetailing with Western democracies during which time he openly denied Russia’s Eurasian identity. An admirer of President George W. Bush and his campaign of waging “a big war in the world arena,”36 Putin rushed reactively

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to aid the United States in combating global terrorism, offering the Americans assistance in acquiring an airbase in Kyrgyzstan. In response, the White House expanded its military bases in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, giving no indication that its military presence in that post-Soviet region, regarded by the Kremlin as Russia’s backyard, was temporary. In 2003 and 2004 the prodemocratic Rose and Orange revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine, believed by the Kremlin to have been orchestrated by U.S. intelligence organizations, further soured the relationship between Putin and the West. In 2004 NATO expanded eastward to include the three former Soviet Baltic states, thus reaching Russia’s northwestern borders. Still believing in the benefits of European integration, in 2004 Putin spoke in favor of EU membership for Ukraine, saying that it would be in Russia’s economic interest. In 2005 the Tulip Revolution broke out in Kyrgyzstan, toppling another post-Soviet authoritarian regime. Threatened by further Western expansion and the spread of color revolutions in Russia, the Kremlin reacted by drumming up patriotism and reinforcing its control over the citizenry. From his St. Petersburg days under Sobchak, Putin paid lip service to the democratic views of his superiors. Overtly deferential, he proved, however, to be covertly subversive in the best tradition of KGB spies. Pledging to defend democracy, he secretly admired authoritarian designs.37 Putin’s covert subversiveness, combined with his disappointment with the United States, partly explains why during the mid-2000s he reversed his position and began to show renewed interest in theories of global conspiracy against Russia and the idea of Eurasian consolidation. In his 2006 annual address to the Federal Assembly, in which he set out the basic directions of Russia’s domestic and foreign policies for the coming decades, Putin reiterated that Russia’s relations with CIS countries (which includes ten post-Soviet republics) were the most important part of his foreign policy; warned that “conflict zones” were expanding and “spreading into the area of our vital interests”; pledged to modernize Russia’s armed forces against “those out there who would like to see Russia become so mired in these problems that it will not be able to resolve its own problems and achieve full development.”38 On the domestic front, 2006 also saw important legislative changes aimed at strengthening the Russian president. In July 2006 the Russian Parliament passed a series of laws designed to combat extremism in Russia and abroad. Not only was the definition of “extremists” dramatically widened—for example, “those slandering the individual occupying the post of president of the Russian Federation” were defined as “extremists”—but the law also gave the president exclusive power to use military intelligence services to “combat extremism” i.e., a euphemism for conducting assassinations outside Russia’s borders (targeting mainly Russian activists, oppositionists, former KGB/ FSB agents). According to this law, the president of Russia is not obliged to

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disclose the location of the operation, which units are involved, or the timescale of the operation. Put simply, individuals seen by Putin as slandering his good name or carrying out other “extremist” activities are now subject to extra-judicial killing, a notion which conveys a powerful message to Putin’s political adversaries. If the president can order his opponents assassinated abroad, there is no question as to whether he can do the same inside Russia away from prying foreign eyes. As soon as the law came into force, two of Putin’s most outspoken critics, the journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the former KGB/FSB officer Alexandr Litvinenko, were murdered in Moscow in October 2006 and London in November 2006, respectively. The former was gunned down in the lift of her apartment and the latter was lethally poisoned using radioactive polonium-210, making it the first officially recorded nuclear assassination.39 The law on extremism also allowed the government to initiate a further crackdown against NGOs and the independent media and impose more restrictions on civil society. Putin’s conservative policies and his increasingly conspiratorial pronouncements should be seen not only in the context of the traumatic disintegration of the Soviet Union coupled with the enduring idea of Russia’s greatness, but also as a result of his unsuccessful attempt to court Western democracies, which has since the mid-2000s elicited a strong anti-Western response in Putin’s inner circle verging today on paranoia. After becoming president, in an interview Putin told a story about a lesson of survival that he learned in his childhood when he was living in a debilitated kommunalka flat in Leningrad. One day he chased a rat into a corner. Having nowhere to run, the rat jumped at him in desperation. The young Putin concluded that people naturally behave the same. When in 2007 the U.S. government began negotiations with Poland and the Czech Republic concerning the construction of a missile shield on their soil against future attacks from Iran, Putin strongly opposed the project, believing that the warheads were in fact directed against Russia and by extension his regime. Feeling cornered and helpless, Putin retaliated by threatening to go nuclear and place nuclear missiles on Russia’s western borders. Putin’s grievances concerning the Western powers, the United States in particular, culminated in a speech he delivered at the annual Munich Conference on Security Policy in February 2007 when he, smelling a rat, accused the West of seeking world domination. Whilst at the beginning of his presidency Putin entertained the idea of Russia joining the U.S.-led NATO alliance, he now criticized NATO’s expansion and argued that the United States had “overstepped its national borders in every way” and been seeking to impose its economic, political, cultural, and educational policies on the rest of the world. Putin warned that “no one feels safe” in this situation.40 According to Pavlovsky, Putin’s improvised and emotional speech caused the Kremlin to expect “punishment” from the United States

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for misbehavior.41 The 2008 financial crisis was not only met with relief in Kremlin circles but also exposed the West to be a paper tiger. When President Obama scrapped the missile defense system in 2009, Putin held out an olive branch by allowing American planes to fly through Russian airspace to supply American forces in Afghanistan, apparently not fearing a NATO invasion of Russia. On 25 November 2010, Putin published an article in the German daily Suddeutsche Zeitung, arguing that the EU should integrate with Russia without expecting Russia to change in any way. During his tenure as prime minister (2008–2012), Putin fell into a depression, which Pavlovsky noticed in the spring of 2010.42 Increasingly paranoid about power and loyalty migrating from his persona to that of his protégé President Medvedev, whose ratings alarmingly reached the same level as his, Putin developed an urge to reconsolidate his position which he saw to be synonymous with strengthening Russia itself. To make things unbearable, Medvedev, meaning “bear” in Russian, was becoming popularly associated with the bear logo of the ruling United Russia Party, a portent of things to come. Among the conceptual tools that brought clarity to Putin’s muddled pronouncements and mindset, Eurasianism, with its notion of Russian messianism and its insistence on Russia’s greatness, holds a prominent place. In his article published on 27 February 2012 in Moskovskie Novosti, Putin signaled the resolution of his dilemma by arguing that Russia could never become a member of the EU because of “the unique place of Russia on the world political map, its role in history and in the development of civilization.” At the beginning of his first presidential term Putin had repeatedly insisted that no one should serve as Russia’s president for more than two terms as stipulated in the Russian Constitution. Putin’s comments came back to bite him when he announced of his decision to run again for president by brushing Medvedev aside. It triggered widespread resentment, which manifested in an unprecedented protest of 50,000 people in Bolotnaya Square near the Kremlin following the parliamentary elections on 4 December 2011, marred by fraud, which was seen as a prelude to the upcoming presidential election. When U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton raised the issue of Russia’s elections, Putin made the accusation that she gave “the signal” to Russia’s opposition leaders to begin “active work” to seed chaos in the country. Blaming the West for “paying young people to come out” on the streets, Putin also had a quip for the white ribbons the protesters wore, saying that they looked like “condoms.” On 24 December around 100,000 people gathered to protest against the Kremlin in Moscow. Other big cities across Russia—St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Rostov-on-Don, Tambov, Krasnodar—also saw sizeable protests. Probably the most memorable moment was when on 21 February 2012 singers of the band Pussy Riot sang a prayer-song “Mother God, Drive Putin Away” at the Moscow Cathedral of Christ the Savior.

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Despite a mass movement against his persona, Putin won the presidential election on 4 March 2012, amid accusations of vote-rigging. In celebration of his victory, Putin, overly emotional and unable to hold back his tears, passionately addressed his supporters in Red Square: “We have won!”43 In September 2013, in his address to the Valdai forum of journalists and experts, Putin firmly reiterated the idea of Russia as a “civilization-state” and described his proposed Eurasian Union of former Soviet countries as “a project for the preservation of identity of peoples of historical Eurasia in the new century and a new world.” In other words, in Putin’s understanding, Eurasianism is as much a program of economic and political rapprochement between the countries of the former Soviet Union as it is a project about the resurrection of “common” identity. The concept of the civilization-state refers to a super-institution which, in the minds of its protagonists, unites peoples and protects common history and ways of life. Eurasianism, as it has been interpreted by the Kremlin, also places Russia in opposition to the West and its values, giving Russia the right not only to pursue its unique historical mission but also to engage in global geopolitics stretching deep into “Atlanticist” territories. Given the takeover of state structures by the security services since the 2000s, this entailed reviving old but proven KGB methods to play geopolitical games including, but not limited to: stealing scientific and technological intelligence from the West; counteracting foreign “ideology”; infiltrating foreign governments and organizations; influencing public opinion and elections in target countries.44 Many “Atlanticist” countries, including the United States, France, Britain, and others, have since produced well-documented reports on Russia’s interference in their domestic political processes. In the Soviet Union, Lev Gumilev promoted Eurasianism as a research subject emphasizing ethno-psychology, nature, bio-cosmic energies, and history. As a doctrine highlighting ethnic or collective bodies, Eurasianism disregarded human rights and, like Soviet ideology, saw individuals as cogs in a collective bio-machine. In its contemporary incarnation in Russia, Eurasianism theoretically supports the status quo where the interests of the collective (as defined by the state) trump those of individuals and their rights, which suits the current regime. In contrast with the Soviet period, in Kremlin circles today Eurasianism, in its most pragmatic sense, is a doctrine that sits firmly at the heart of the Russian state, influencing a host of fields—the political, the economic, the military, the moral. In the Soviet Union people were ruled by state propaganda, television, coercion, and the country’s self-imposed isolation. In the Digital Age, however, the state’s control of the population is ramped up by new technologies of myth-creation involving television, social media, and the internet, not to mention spin doctoring. In this pseudo-democracy in which dissidence is managed rather than crushed outright and where “reality” is magically

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created, as Gleb Pavlovsky confesses, “just by saying so,” the role of the Kremlin-backed patriotic youth movements is of vital importance in sustaining the regime’s legitimacy at the grassroots level. To prevent color revolutions and control opposition demonstrations, the Kremlin, shaken by the participation of young people in the revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia, has backed several projects associated with Dugin. Established in 2005, the Eurasian Youth Union, a wing of the Eurasianist movement, is the first and most successful street gang-type unofficial organization in Russia, which operates without centralized control and clear leadership. Consisting of young idealists, hooligans, neo-fascists, and patriots on high testosterone, who are tuned in to the Kremlin’s “dog whistle” politics or nationalistic signals, the Eurasian Youth Union has staged pickets at Western embassies, harassed diplomats, and confronted oppositionists on the streets. Its tactics and method of organization have been adopted by other similar movements that sprang up across the country with the Kremlin’s involvement or blessing, including Nashi, the Young Guards of United Russia, and Young Russia. Today, Eurasianism’s popularity in Russia is inextricably linked to Putin and his inner circle. Peddled by state-controlled mass media and popular culture, the idea that Russia has no choice but to defend itself is shared not only by power holders or the siloviki but by a wider spectrum of re-enchanted society. In this situation, every accusation against Russia or Putin has the potential to be misread by Russians as a threat or harmful intent. Whilst anti-Western sentiments always lay simmering under the surface of Russian society, they erupted following Russia’s annexation of the Crimea in 2014 against the backdrop of state-propelled propaganda of possible NATO invasion of Russia. Without doubt, scaremongering and patriotism also serve another important political purpose. A KGB technique widely employed in the Soviet period, blaming of the country’s failures on the West is a red herring that the Putin administration uses today to divert public attention from pressing domestic problems, such as endemic corruption, widespread poverty, grotesque inequality, poor human rights, malfunctioning services, and ecological disaster. If Mother Russia is under imminent attack by the Atlanticists, who cares about small domestic inconveniences? In its modern history, Russia has twice had a national anthem without words. First after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin, when lyrics praising the late leader proved an embarrassment. Then in 1991, when under Yeltsin a new melody for a “new Russia” was chosen but suitable words could not be found. The voiceless Yeltsin-era anthem (The Patriotic Song by Mikhail Glinka), according to the writer Vladimir Voinovich, was appropriate for Russia of that period because the country did not know what it was.45 Putin restored the Soviet anthem articulated with new lyrics and revived the siloviki institutions. A buzzing “Moth” at the start of his presidency, Putin also

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learned how to roar like a real Eurasian bear. Under Putin, the state may have found its voice, but it lost its touch with reality by dealing with the world according to an assumption of conspiracy and hostility. Putin cannot be pinned down using a particular label. Apart from being a proud chekist and a Eurasianist, he is, as he confessed, also “the biggest nationalist in Russia.”46 Putin’s nationalism stems from several sources which can be traced both to movements and particular individuals. Among such individuals, the philosopher and lawyer Ivan Ilyin holds a prominent place. Born into a noble family in Moscow in 1883, Ilyin was expelled from Russia in 1922 and died in obscurity in Switzerland in 1954. He only became popular in Russia following the Soviet collapse, and today Putin not only refers to him in interviews but also cites him in his annual presidential address to the general assembly of the Russian Parliament. In 2005 Putin organized Ilyin’s reburial in Moscow, and in 2015 the Kremlin sent Ilyin’s political publications to members of United Russia. Reflecting the cultural climate of the early 20th century, when religion in Russia was in decline and intellectuals sought totalizing designs, Ilyin energetically argued, similarly to cosmists, that God was absent from the world and saw the world as a sinful place which bore a memory of “God’s totality.” Using a mixture of Christian, folk, and sexual rhetoric, Ilyin—in the spirit of Eurasianism—also pinpointed the source of universal decadence in the West, which “seduced” Russia with communism. In Russian folk imagination and language, the words Rossiya and Rus’ are of feminine gender, which leads to such expressions as matushka Rossiya (“Mother Russia”) and Rus’ nevesta (“Rus Bride”) that conjure up and unite the images of a young virgin, a mother, and a protectress. In this sinful and flawed world, Ilyin contended, the only “innocent” and “pure” place was Mother Russia. Knowing little about Russia’s actual past, Ilyin simplified and occultized Russia’s history as a perpetual defense against the threat of Western, demonic penetration. The fantasy of an eternally victimized, innocent, feminine, and exceptional Russia included the patriarchal idea of Russia’s resurrection which was supposed to be led by a champion (who must have testicles and) whose rise would be instantaneous. Known under different names, such as “head of state,” “democratic dictator,” or “national dictator,” this Promethean champion would be “sufficiently manly” and draw all of Russia’s virile energy to himself and guide its symbolic release by leading others to bloodshed, redeeming and invigorating Russia. This very act would turn Russia from being someone’s victim into Holy “Rus Bride.” Whilst the West was an inherently decadent and chaotic place, there was a glimpse of hope that it, too, could be disciplined and saved from itself—according to Ilyin—by fascism. Seeing fascism as the politics of the world to come, Ilyin admired Benito Mussolini and, having lived in Berlin from 1922 to 1938, was similarly attracted to

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Adolf Hitler’s masculine charisma. A worshipper of conservative patriarchal values and communal spirit, Ilyin anticipated that the Soviet Union would be transformed in time into a Christian fascist dictatorship that would be in permanent war against the sinful, non-fascist West. While overseeing a revival of Ilyin’s work, Putin blissfully ignored both Ilyin’s criticism of the Soviet Union and his admiration for fascism. Nevertheless, Putin enthusiastically adopted Ilyin’s idea that Russia is a producer and exporter of harmony which must be allowed to bring its specific variety of peace to its neighbors. Slightly modified, Ilyin’s views allow Russian nationalists to imagine communism not as an external imposition on Russia but as Russia’s essence itself; therefore, the Soviet Union also becomes, according to this view, a “pure” and “innocent” victim. After all, as the former imperial center, Russia cannot easily attribute the shortcomings of Soviet-style socialism to other external nations. Furthermore, the Soviet system can be reformulated as an innocent and incorruptible Russian reaction to the hostility of the Western world,47 which is also a Eurasianist idea gaining currency among the Russian political elites. Seen in this light, the Russian Federation, successor to the Soviet Union, is being reimagined as a country imbued with exceptionally “virginal” and “immaculate” essence, which entails its citizens to be vigilant against Western notions of human rights and democracy which are nothing but a fig leaf concealing the West’s true intent to harm and seduce Russia (by spreading sexual promiscuity, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, pornography, prostitution, drugs, liberalism, feminism, “pussy riots”). According to this worldview, not only should all geopolitical projects be pursued along the lines of the enemy-friend dichotomy, but Russia’s annexation of the Crimea, its incursion into eastern Ukraine, and its military operations in the Middle East are nothing more than “self-defense,” an attempt to protect its civilizational integrity, way of life, and spheres of influence. Following the West’s efforts to isolate Russia in the wake of the Ukraine crisis, Putin’s decision to initiate Syrian adventures was influenced as much by his wish to bring Russia back to the league of geopolitical superpowers as by his aversion to anything that looked like regime change by the West. Framed in this way, Western sanctions against Russia are propagated by the Kremlin-backed media as a proof of their country having taken a virtuous and righteous path against the malign intentions of gay-dominated Western capitals. POPULAR EURASIANISM IN KALMYKIA In 1991 Gumilev gave one of his last video interviews to the Kalmyk cosmist Jangar Pyurveev, his friend and admirer. Gumilev predicted that the Kalmyk

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ethnos will exist at least for another 500 years and contended that the Gelug Buddhism to which the Kalmyks adhere is in fact a form of Christianity, thus trying to use an old Eurasianist trick of reconciling Buddhism (or any other religion in the Soviet Union) with Christianity.48 The interview was broadcast on Kalmyk television, creating excitement among viewers who felt honored by the attention paid to their small nation by the great Gumilev himself. Unlike their predecessors in post-revolutionary European emigration, this time Kalmyks embraced Eurasianism enthusiastically because it gave them a new and dignified history and also offered them a conceptual tool to deal with the cultural and identity crisis that engulfed the Kalmyk ethnos following the demise of the Soviet system. Victor Turner is helpful in the analysis of what the Kalmyks have been through in terms of identity change. According to Turner, rites of passage imply a transition between two “states,” each of which is “a relatively fixed or stable condition” prior to and after the transitional period. Transition is a process, a becoming, a transformation, and individuals who undergo it are “transitional beings.” Examples of such rites are circumcision in some cultures, coming of age rites, and many others. Although Turner coined the term “transitional beings” in relation to rites of passage, it can also be used, as Turner himself points out, in broader contexts such as when people undergo identity change.49 In the last century alone, the Kalmyks have undergone two major identity changes. In the early Soviet period, several hitherto dispersed and diverse groups with various territorially informed identities were made to believe by Soviet ethno-engineers that they belonged to a united and unique Kalmyk nation (more on this in the next chapter). Imbued with a new myth of a shared past, shared interests, and a common future within the family of Soviet nations, the Kalmyk nation was supposed to gradually merge under communism with all other socialist peoples into a homogeneous species of Homo Sovieticus. The collapse of the Soviet Union, however, exposed many Soviet aims and values to contestation by other, sometimes opposing, ones that are often backed by the regional government. Thus, when becoming a Soviet person ceased to be the aim, the Kalmyk government set itself the goal of reproducing a new type of people—“genuine Kalmyks” who are native to the Eurasian steppe. The Kalmyk situation fits Turner’s definition in that in both Soviet and post-Soviet cases there is a transitional period that bridges two separate “states.” In the case of the Soviet identity change, the initial “state” from which Kalmyk groups embarked on a path of transformation was represented by their diverse territorial identities and the destination “state” was marked as a condition when they became a united Kalmyk nation. Whilst the Soviet transformation into nationhood was a success, the post-Soviet transformation proved to be problematic not least because the

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“transitional beings” (Kalmyks), who left the “state” of being Soviet, have not reached the destination “state” of becoming genuinely Kalmyk. Since a transitional period involves identity decomposition, neutrality, ambiguity,50 and disorientation, it is essentially a cognitive crisis. This crisis is understood to be temporary and structured and ceases when the transitional beings reach the second state, or their destination. However, the blurring, or, still worse, the disappearance of, the destination state once a transition has been initiated, will not only perpetuate this crisis but may lead the transitional beings into a limbo-like psychological condition. Whilst such a scenario is rare in religious settings, in identity-construction projects that involve uncertainty for entire populations for an indefinite period of time this may occur more often than one may expect. In the case of Kalmykia today, the impossibility of returning to their Soviet identity and the unsuccessful negotiation of what it means to be “genuine Kalmyk”—one may argue—has created limbo in the minds of many Kalmyks, especially of the middle-age or older generations. Hence widespread complaints in Kalmykia about feeling uncomfortable for being “incomplete” Kalmyks in the sense of not knowing the Kalmyk language and traditions. A limbo state, however, need not last forever, and communities eventually find a way out. After decades of manipulation and ethno-engineering, Kalmyks not only have developed flexibility but became susceptible to pro-Russian ideas. In the current age of unleashed nationalisms and growing spirituality in Russia, Eurasianism proves particularly attractive in that it presents an opportunity for Kalmyks to overcome the cultural crisis by realigning the benchmarks of Kalmyk identity closer to Russian values. Whilst this may sound like a new route, in fact it is a well-trodden one. Reflecting on this history, Kalmyk scholar Lyubov’ Chetyrova writes of the Eurasian identity of the Kalmyks as follows: The Kalmyks not only have been a part of the Mongol world but that of the Russian as well. The Kalmyks are truly Eurasian people . . . 400 years of living in Russia, without doubt, have influenced their culture, changed psychology, values, and the mentality of these formerly nomadic people . . . The Russian Kalmyk is a cultural phenomenon which reflects the centuries-long acculturation of the Kalmyks within the Russian cultural space. On the one hand, the Kalmyks are a part of the European world, but on the other they retain characteristics of their Mongol origin.51

The popular self-narrative among Kalmyks asserting that they are a unique, hybrid people of Asian origin integrated into the European cultural world and who serve as a bridge between Europe and Asia makes the Kalmyks an epitome of a Eurasian (Euro-Asian) ethnos. As such, the Kalmyk ethnos, according to Kalmyk scholars Valeriy Badmaev and Mergen Ulanov, has the

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following characteristics: tolerance, openness to neighboring cultures, the ability to creatively absorb the best from other cultures, and readiness to share their own culture with others.52 Given the existence of such Eurasianist discourses focused on the "symbiotic" relations between Russia and the Kalmyk ethnos, today it is not rare to meet Kalmyks, especially among the younger generation, who say, with a sense of pride, that they are “people with Asian faces, Buddhist faith, and Russian soul.” According to Eurasianism, geography and climate determine human groupings who derive energy and psychological dispositions from the environment. Believing in the immutability of nature, neither the founding fathers of the movement nor Gumilev himself elaborated on the possibility of human-made ecological disasters and their repercussions for communities. The Soviet experience of ecological degradation in Kalmykia, however, initiated a new direction in Eurasianist thinking, which has become increasingly ecology-oriented among Kalmyk Eurasianists, and many came to link the survival of Kalmyk national identity with the preservation of the steppe ecosystem. Reflecting this anxiety, in the 1990s the Kalmyk government, for example, introduced a new national holiday called the “Festival of Tulips” with the aim of uniting ecology with Kalmyk cultural heritage. Celebrated by the Kalmyk government, not only did Gumilev’s book achieve great popularity, but the fact that Kalmyk Khara-Davan was among the founding fathers of Eurasianism is a source of immense pride. In Elista a street was named after Gumilev and a monument dedicated to Eurasianism was erected in 1996 in front of the Government House. The establishment of the Eurasian Academy of Life in 1990 in Elista attests to the early popularity of Eurasianism among local intellectuals who were instrumental in popularizing the expectation of a “passionarian push” (passionarnyi tolchok) that was supposed to initiate the development of the Kalmyks into a powerful ethnos in Russia-Eurasia. In tune with the historical precedent of the Soviet Union’s anti-Western stance, this ethno-development in the post-Soviet period was supposed to materialize in the context of “non-Western” or “alternative” modernity which would distinguish Russia-Eurasia from the West. In the strict Gumilevian interpretation, for a passionarian development to occur what was needed was a leader with “super-abundant cosmic energy” or passionarity. That, at least, was how many Kalmyk Eurasianists and cosmist thinkers imagined the situation. This leader was found in the person of Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, a self-confessed Eurasianist, cosmist, and spiritualist, who was elected the first president of post-Soviet Kalmykia in 1993 on a wave of popular Eurasianist-cosmist euphoria. In the next part, Kalmykia is a key case study. Part III examines Kalmykia’s history, its self-image, and President Ilyumzhinov, who joined with members

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of the Eurasian Academy of Life to formulate a new state ideology for Russia-Eurasia. NOTES 1. Glebov, “The Mongol-Bolshevik Revolution: Eurasianist Ideology in Search for an Ideal Past,” 113–15. 2. Laruelle, “Conceiving the Territory: Eurasianism as a Geographical Identity,” 69. 3. Ibid., 74. 4. Among early proponents of geographical determinism was the German ethnographer and geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904), who elaborated on the concept of Lebensraum (“living space”) to describe geography as a factor that influences human activities in developing into a society. Lebensraum was later appropriated by Hitler’s National Socialist Party in its ideological justification for the territorial expansion of Germany. Ratzel’s student Ellen Churchill Semple (1863–1932), the first female president of the Association of American Geographers, translated Ratzel’s works into English and was a key promoter of the theory of environmental determinism in the United States. Another notable figure was Ellsworth Huntington (1876–1947), Semple’s successor as president of the Association of American Geographers and president of the Board of Directors of the American Eugenics Society, who contributed to the theory of environmental determinism by coining the concept of “climatic energy” to explain the effects of climate on diverse peoples and communities. 5. Whilst the term dvoeverie has medieval origins, its modern definition of “a double-belief in Orthodox Christianity and paganism” can be traced to the Slavophiles, which was later perpetuated as a propaganda tool during the Soviet period. See Rock, Popular Religion in Russia. 6. Savitsky, “Geograficheskiy obzor Rossii-Evrazii,” 29, 57. 7. Ibid., 57. 8. Bassin and others, Between Europe & Asia, 10. 9. Bassin, “Nationhood, Natural Regions, Mestorazvitie: Environmentalist Discourses in Classical Eurasianism,” 51, 52, 58. 10. Vernadsky, “Mongol’skoe igo v Russkoy istorii,” 153–64. 11. The split between the two centers was also precipitated by the fact that the Prague-based Eurasianists who were more interested  in intellectual and religious pursuits found refuge in scholarly careers whereas the Paris-based Eurasianists paid more attention to contemporary political problems and were open to activism. This cleavage paralleled the political division between the two centers regarding their approach to the Soviet Union. See Laruelle, Russian Eurasianism, 12. 12. Clover, Black Wind White Snow, 54–73. 13. Gumilev, Ot Rusi do Rossii, 16–17. 14. Gullette, The Genealogical Construction of the Kyrgyz Republic, 140–45. 15. Laruelle, Russian Eurasianism, 171–87. 16. Shnirelman, Porog Tolerantnosti, 328–60. 17. Laruelle, Russian Eurasianism, 162‒69.

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18. Dugin has more than thirty monographs in Russian. 19. Dugin, “Auf, o Seele! (Esse o Evgeniy Golovine),” 76. 20. Kurginian and others, Postperestroika. 21. Following the Soviet collapse, Kurginian went on to blame what he called Russian “anti-elites” consisting of pro-Western political elites and liberal intelligentsia, for corrupting Soviet politics during perestroika and robbing the Soviet Union of its greatness. A supporter of Putin, Kurginian has since 2010s co-hosted political shows, including The Court of Time and The Historical Process in which he promotes the idea of a messianic Russia, on state-owned television channels. 22. On Dugin's esoteric and idiosyncratic views of Jews and anti-Semitism, see Laruelle, Russian Eurasianism, 135-38. 23. Dugin, Osnovy Geopolitiki. 24. Despite making a name for himself as a geopolitical guru, Dugin is neither close to Kremlin circles nor has he  personal influence in the presidential administration which appropriated some of his main geopolitical ideas. A proponent of esoteric fascist theories and Western-inspired occultism, he is, in fact, a convenient outsider who can be used or rejected by the authorities when circumstances require. 25. Shnirelman, Porog Tolerantnosti, 330.  26. Ibid., 337–38. 27. “Armenia to Join Russia’s Union, Surprises EU,” EUObserver, September 3, 2013, https://euobserver.com/foreign/121304. 28. There is also a growing body of evidence implicating Russia-sponsored and Russia-based actors in meddling in Britain’s Brexit (meaning “Britain exiting from the EU”) referendum in 2016. RT UK, the major Russian television channel broadcasting in Britain, supported a vote to leave the EU in the weeks before the referendum. But a more persuasive campaign was waged in cyber-space where Russian Twitter bots, internet trolls, and computer programs sent out millions of targeted messages on behalf of the Leave campaign. Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom, 106. 29. Gessen, The Man Without a Face, 60. 30. Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy, 51–53. 31. Felshtinsky and Pribylovsky, The Age of Assassins; Dunlop, The Moscow Bombings of September 1999. 32. “Gleb Pavlovsky: Putin’s World Outlook. Interview by Tom Parfitt,” New Left Review, July/August 2014, https://newleftreview.org/issues/II88/articles/ gleb-pavlovsky-putin-s-world-outlook. 33. Pavlovsky and Filippov, Tri Doprosa po Teorii Deistviya. 34. White, Understanding Russian Politics, 328–29. 35. In August 2019, the rules were further tightened when the otherwise limited contact between Russian scientists and their foreign colleagues was banned outside work hours unless special permission is granted by the applicant’s supervisor. The new rules also require that all such meetings be attended by two additional Russians besides the applicant. 36. “Putin Files: Gleb Pavlovsky, Former Adviser to Vladimir Putin,” Frontline, interview with Gleb Pavlovsky, July 13, 2017, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/ interview/gleb-pavlovsky/.

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37. Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy, 224, 251–56. 38. “Annual Address to the Federal Assembly,” President’s website, May 10, 2006, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/23577. 39. The 2016 British Home Office inquiry into Litvinenko’s death concluded that Litvinenko was poisoned by two Russian nationals that were “probably” acting under the direction of the FSB and: “found that the FSB operation to kill Mr. Litvinenko was probably approved by Mr. Patrushev, [the then head] of the FSB, and by President Putin.” By contrast, Politkovskaya’s murder on 7 October 2006, coincidentally Putin’s birthday, was probably not orchestrated on Putin’s direct orders. Rather, the idea of “executing Putin’s critics” or “punishing Russia’s enemies” can be better explained as a meme that spread through social copying among far-right nationalists and Putin loyalists, who might have wished to give a “birthday present” to their leader, in the context of the cult of Putin. 40. “Speech and the Following Discussion at the Munich Conference on Security Policy,” President’s website, February 10, 2007, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/ transcripts/24034. 41. “Putin Files: Gleb Pavlovsky, Former Adviser to Vladimir Putin,” Frontline, interview with Gleb Pavlovsky, July 13, 2017, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/ interview/gleb-pavlovsky/. 42. “Gleb Pavlovsky: Putin’s World Outlook. Interview by Tom Parfitt,” New Left Review, July/August 2014, https://newleftreview.org/issues/II88/articles/ gleb-pavlovsky-putin-s-world-outlook. 43. Whilst blaming Hillary Clinton for orchestrating an anti-Russia movement internationally, Putin—according to Pavlovsky—for a long time suspected Medvedev of being the mastermind behind this mass movement against his persona on the domestic front. “Putin Files: Gleb Pavlovsky, Former Adviser to Vladimir Putin,” Frontline, interview with Gleb Pavlovsky, July 13, 2017. 44. On similar KGB operations to influence elections in Europe, Latin America, the United States, and other countries during the Cold War, see Shimer, Rigged. 45. Smith, Mythmaking in the New Russia, 183. 46. “Meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club,” President’s website, October 24, 2014, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/46860. 47. Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom, 17–61. 48. Unlike Gumilev, classical Eurasianists disparaged Buddhism. Prince Trubetskoy, for example, considered the concept of "nirvana" as nothing more than "spiritual suicide." Laruelle, Russian Eurasianism, 45. 49. Turner, “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage.” 50. Ibid., 237. 51. Chetyrova, Kalmyki, 303. 52. Badmaev and others, Kalmytskiy Etnos, 11.

PART III

Kalmykia

Figure 3. “The super wise bachelors from the constellation of the Big Fish.” Source: Dmitry Sandzhiev

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Kalmykia and Its History

It’s better to survive 300 years as a (wise) crow rather than live 30 years as a (reckless) eagle. (Kalmyk proverb)

The Republic of Kalmykia, an area covering 76,100 square kilometers, is situated in southwest Russia on the western part of the lower Volga Basin. In its eastern part the republic has a Caspian coastline stretching for almost 100 km. Kalmykia has a continental climate, with hot, dry summers and cold winters. The prevailing landscape, especially in its central and eastern parts, is arid steppe with scarce vegetation. By contrast, its western part has fertile soil suitable for agriculture. Hence this region, covered with seemingly endless fields of crops, where the annual rainfall is 350–430 mm, is described by the local people as “the breadbasket of Kalmykia.” Kalmykia belongs to the Southern Federal District of Russia which includes the following republics and oblasts—the Republic of Adygea, Astrakhan oblast, Volgograd oblast, Krasnodar territory, Rostov oblast as well as the newly annexed Republic of Crimea and Sevastopol, and Kalmykia itself. Kalmykia consists of thirteen rayons, each of which has an administrative center. There are three towns in all including Elista (the capital), Gorodovikovsk (the administrative center of Gorodovikovskiy rayon), and Lagan’ (the administrative center of Laganskiy rayon). The population of the largest town, Elista, is around 100,000.1 Its economy mainly reliant on the agricultural sector and livestock breeding, Kalmykia is a rural place. Whilst the largest producer of sheep wool in the Soviet Union, today the republic has neither enough livestock nor infrastructure to revive its wool production. In fact, today Kalmykia’s economy is one of the weakest in Russia, and, according to Russian federal statistics, the republic has persistently ranked as one of the least developed parts of the country. Traditionally, Kalmyks have kept four kinds of livestock—sheep, 147

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cattle, horses, and camels. Considered “evil animals,” not least because of their “diabolical” looks endowed with horns and a goatee beard, goats are rare. The most endangered among livestock species, however, are camels. Once the main supplier of camels to the Russian army, today in the whole of Kalmykia there are only several families that keep these animals, mainly for symbolic reasons. Kalmykia also has a small food processing industry, construction industry, and an equally small-scale oil industry. The level of religiosity among Kalmyks is high. The majority of the population adhere to Tibetan Buddhism mixed with folk beliefs and the cult of ancestors. Banned for most of the Soviet period, institutional or monastic Buddhism only began to revive in the perestroika years. Following the opening of the first Buddhist prayer house in Elista in 1988, monks from Buryatia were invited to Kalmykia to assist in a Buddhist revival. Since then, Kalmyk students have been sent to pursue religious studies in Buryatia, Mongolia, and India. According to the Shajin Lama (the Supreme Lama) of Kalmykia, Telo Tulku Rinpoche, as of 2017 the number of temples in Kalmykia stands at thirty, and there are more than 150 Buddhist stupas across the republic. Geographical imagination, which is a holistic way of thinking about one’s place and identity, plays an important role in how Kalmyks conceptualize themselves as a nation. The steppe republic of Kalmykia, surrounded by different geographical zones and landscapes—the Caucasian mountains in the south and the richly vegetated plains of the neighboring Russian regions in the southwest, the west and the north—has the self-promoted image of a peaceful and orderly place as opposed to the allegedly violent and problematic Caucasus. The supposedly tranquil, obedient character of the Kalmyks, according to Kalmyks themselves, is organically connected with the landscape of Kalmykia which is flat and monotonous. By contrast, various peoples inhabiting the neighboring Caucasus are generally believed by Kalmyks to be wild and flamboyant. As one informant of mine, Dmitry, put it: “The mountainous people are wild and too emotional because they are disconnected. They live by the rules of the mountains and on every mountain each tribe probably has its own rule.”2 Communication, supposedly hindered by mountains and hills in the Caucasian case, is said to be carried out without interruption across the flat Kalmyk landscape, thus ensuring connectivity and calmness. A cognitive mapping of geography in this way provides people with an analytical tool to think about themselves as well as about other places and peoples. In Senses of Place (1996) Keith Basso points out that: Places possess a marked capacity for triggering acts of self-reflection, inspiring thoughts about who one presently is, or memories of who one used to be, or musings on who one might become. And that is not all. Place-based thoughts

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about the self lead commonly to thoughts of other things-other places, other people, other times . . . When places are actively sensed, the physical landscape becomes wedded to the landscape of the mind, to the roving imagination.3

A sense of place, it can be said, makes sense only when there is something to compare it with. In other words, a sense of place cannot be constructed in isolation. On the contrary, it has to be done in the company of other people and places so that native views of the physical world can be shaped in opposition to other places. In the Kalmyk case, the other places/peoples that shape the contours of the Kalmyk self-imagination are first of all the neighboring places inhabited by Russians and Caucasian peoples. In contrast with “wild” Caucasians, the Russians in general are seen as more sophisticated and fluid people. Many of my Kalmyk informants, who responded to my question and compared themselves to the Russians, made it clear that “it is difficult to describe Russians for there are so many types of them.” Many Kalmyks assured me that Russians from different places have varied characters and dispositions. The presumably mysterious, multi-sided, and fluid character of the Russians is attributed by many of my Kalmyk informants to the vast and varying geography of Russian dispersal. The Russians, explained another Kalmyk friend of mine, Sandzhi, “could be both kind and cruel, brave and cowardly, lazy and hardworking, smile and then stab you in your back.” This characterization, however, is not a Kalmyk invention. The idea of the “ambiguous” (ne ponyatnye) and “mysterious” (zagadochnye) Russian character or soul, in fact, is a notion popularized by great Russian writers, such as Dostoevsky, Tyutchev, Berdyaev, and others. Nevertheless, due to their presumably flexible character, the Russians who live in Kalmykia are widely believed by many Kalmyks to have adapted to both Kalmyk mentality and the steppe geography. Every time I asked Kalmyks to describe the local Russians, my respondents would give me more or less the same answer, contending that “the overall character of the Russians in Kalmykia is very similar to that of the Kalmyks,” which could not be heard said about the local Caucasian diasporas. Kalmyk ideas about their place are also influenced by folk cosmology in which the worship of land has an important function in people’s lives. In the traditional Oirat-Mongol worldview, small hills and ponds are assigned mystic qualities and are believed to be the seat of local spirits of nature who protect the patch of the steppe with which they are associated from trouble and misfortune. Venerated by the local people, such spots serve as religious spaces where people perform clan rituals, thus rendering the whole region controllable, orderly, and “animated” in the Kalmyk cosmological imagination.

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In fact, in Kalmykia there are many folk explanations of “Kalmykness” or of “what it means to be a Kalmyk.” For example, some of my informants connected the presumed calm and obedience of the Kalmyks with the traditional religion of Buddhism; others said that being obedient was a genetic trait, a “thing in the blood”; and yet there were plenty of people who assured me that the Kalmyks are neither tranquil nor docile. I also heard it said that the Kalmyks can quickly switch from one state to another, the idea being that in some situations the Kalmyks tend to be obedient, in others violent and rebellious. The existence of different, sometimes contradictory, discourses about the attributes of the Kalmyk national character implies that, aside from the geographical imagination, many other factors such as religion, memory, social structure, economic competition, and nationalism are involved in the construction of identity-related discourses that can be deployed in various situations. My point, however, is that the majority of my Kalmyk informants, in answer to my question What impact do you think the Kalmyk landscape has on the Kalmyk people? gave me similar answers, highlighting the importance of the steppe landscape in instilling placidity and perseverance in the inhabitants of the steppe. Such pacifying ideas among a large portion of the population not only fits Kalmyk folk cosmology but are also reinforced by Eurasianist discourses disseminated by the state-controlled mass media. The popular idea linking the presumed flexibility and inclusiveness of Russian character/culture with Russia’s geography is consonant with Eurasianist idea about a supra-national Eurasian culture presumably founded on “super” Russian culture. So in Kalmykia today popular explanations about the presumed bond between landscape and human character are as much folk-derived ideas as they are based on state-disseminated propaganda. EARLY HISTORY I first arrived in Elista at the end of August 2009 just in time to immerse myself in an atmosphere of seemingly endless celebration. As I was soon to discover, all sorts of competitions, exhibitions, and concerts, both secular and religious, had been organized throughout Kalmykia for the celebration of the 400th anniversary of Kalmykia’s voluntarily joining Russia. Construction sites of various state-funded buildings dedicated to the anniversary—the Palace of Sport, the School for Wrestlers, and the extension of Kalmyk State University—were scattered all over Elista. Even such holidays as the Day of the City and others, which are celebrated in September and October, were incorporated into the anniversary, creating an illusion of endless jubilation, enhanced with generous amounts of alcohol. The culmination of the anniversary was an international conference entitled “United Kalmykia in United

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Russia: Through Centuries into the Future,” which began on 13 September and lasted for six days followed by yet another celebration, the Jangar Games, where the submission of the Kalmyk nobles to the Russian Tsar in 1609 was theatrically enacted by dozens of singing and dancing actors. What all these activities achieved was not only enhanced awareness among the general population of the anniversary but also the (re)creation of a collective memory in order for people to “remember” what the official history wants them to remember. Little wonder that many Kalmyks with whom I socialized told me time and again about the presumably centuries-long loyalty of the Kalmyk nation to Russia. After all, the evidence of this statement was all too audible and visible. Celebrations, dances, songs, and objects (monuments, souvenirs, paintings, history books, and so on) that give materiality and substance to abstract concepts such as “the nation” and memory are important since the construction of social memory and the construction of history do not take place in isolation. For Rubie Watson: We may “remember” an event—have a shared understanding that is represented as a “memory”—that we ourselves did not experience. Many Americans “remember” the American Civil War and many Jews “remember” the Nazi Holocaust, but not because they have read master narratives written by professional historians detailing the great battles or the sufferings in the camps. Rather, they “remember” because they share with others sets of images that have been passed down to them through the media of memory—through paintings, architecture, monuments, rituals, storytelling, poetry, music, photos, and films.4

In modern Russia the science of historiography, or national storytelling, plays an important role in coordinating the creation of memories and identities. Neglected in the Tsarist period, the power of historiography was harnessed, as mentioned above, under Stalin, becoming an integral part of state indoctrination. The Soviet historiographical tradition teaches the history of the Kalmyks as an uninterrupted evolutionary process which resulted in the transformation of several Oirat tribes into a new nation, or ethnos, called Kalmyk. This evolutionary process, which supposedly began as soon as the Oirat tribes voluntarily joined with the Russian state in 1609, gave them impetus to grow into a separate ethnic body. In this sense, Russia is seen as a kind of motherly presence and the Kalmyks as a nation that matured by suckling Russia’s nourishing cultural teats. As such, Kalmyks are characterized as people whose fate is inseparably connected with that of Russia. This version of history, which is understood as an ever Russia-oriented experience, consists of several phases of development, the common feature or theme of which is the prevailing loyalty of the Kalmyk people toward Russia.5 Seen in this paternalistic Marxist-Leninist light, various anti-Russian sentiments and

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movements which were abundant in Kalmyk history were narrated as a struggle between the progressive and the regressive forces within the Kalmyks in which the progressive forces prevailed. Post-Soviet Kalmyk historiography is essentially a continuation of the Soviet tradition. The difference between the two is that, whilst in the Soviet period most Kalmyk historians literally interpreted 1609 as the date Kalmyks joined Russia, in post-Soviet Kalmykia many historians tend to see this date symbolically as the beginning of the process of joining. Like any history, the history of Kalmyks is not a single narrative but consists of myriad alternative narratives, some recounted others silenced. Here I would like to present a somewhat critical account encapsulated in the works of two Russian historians, Vladimir Kolesnik and Michael Khodarkovsky. The former was professor of history at Kalmyk State University, while the latter was educated in Kalmykia and is now professor of history at Loyola University, Chicago. The essence of their argument is that the ancestors of the Kalmyks never joined Russia voluntarily, a view which is suppressed by Kalmyk government but widely known among ordinary Kalmyks. The Kalmyks are related to the Oirats, a Mongol group whose historical homeland today corresponds to Western Mongolia. Oirats were first mentioned in the Secret History of the Mongols, a 13th century document chronicling the life and career of Chingis Khan and his legendary genealogy. According to the Secret History, the Oirats were a “forest people,” whose leader, Qutuqa Beki, submitted peacefully to Chingis Khan’s eldest son, Jochi, around 1207. Warmly accepting their submission, Chingis Khan wedded his progeny to Qutuqa Beki’s two sons and daughter. Unlike those tribes that did not submit peacefully and were dispersed among other military units, the Oirats, intertwined with the Chingisids through dynastic marriages, were permitted to retain their units under their own leaders. Under Chingis Khan and his descendants, the Oirats served the Mongol Empire in Mongolia, China, Russia, and Persia. In 1368 Togon-Temur, the last Emperor of Mongol Yuan dynasty in China, hard-pressed by rising Ming forces, retreated from China to the Mongol ancestral land north of the Great Chinese Wall. On the steppes, the Mongols split into two large warring factions—the Oirats in the west and the Mongols in the east. Geographically, the Oirats occupied Western Mongolia and Jungaria (today the northern half of China’s Xinjiang province). By the beginning of the 17th century some Oirats were nomadizing across a vast tract of land, the northern end of which bordered Russian territory. The first known contact between the Oirats and the Russian authorities took place in 1606 in the Siberian settlement of Tara. In 1607–1608, Oirat envoys traveled to Moscow where they were received by Tsar Vasiliy Shuiskiy.6 Contrary to general belief in Kalmykia today, nothing occurred in 1609 between the

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Oirats and the Russians, according to the known historical documents. Nor are there oral tales or legends suggesting that the two sides engaged in anything notable. The next important event in bilateral relations occurred in 1616 when Russian envoys who stayed with the Oirats reported back that their hosts were divided into four main groups: the Torghuts were led by Kho Urlyuk; the Derbets were under the lordship of Dalai Taiji; the Khoshuds’ lord was Baibagas; and the Jungars (who remained in their homeland of the Jungarian steppe) were led by Khara Khula. These four groups were not monolithic entities but each was a conglomerate of sub-groups. Whilst Baibagas was called “khaan” and was the leader of the assembly of Oirat nobles (chulgan), he had no real power over the other lords for all the four main groups were fiercely independent, often fighting with each other even in the face of a common enemy.7 Let alone submitting to the Tsar, the Oirat lords often fell into the temptation of raiding Russian border settlements. In 1622, for example, Oirats raided the town of Kuznetsk for weapons that they wished to use against their powerful Mongol rival, Altan Khan. In around 1618, the Torghuts under Kho Urlyuk set off from the Upper Irtysh to the lower Volga, a region which had traditionally been used by the Mongol-Oirat army as a pathway to launch attacks on Europe and where previously stood the capital of the Golden Horde (1241–1502), a state established by Chingis Khan’s grandson Batu. Upon their arrival there around 1630, the Torghuts established a khanate (1630–1771), known in Russian sources as the Kalmyk Khanate and in Chinese sources as the Torghut Khanate. The first khan of the Khanate, Kho Urlyuk, did what other Oirats did customarily: he continued to plunder Russian settlements. The Torghuts were followed by other Oirats, including the Derbets, the Jungars, the Khoshuds, and their various constituent sub-groups, who arrived in the lower Volga in succession.8 The last of these groups came in about 1760. On the Volga, these four groups were organized into the following eleven uluses or “fiefdoms”: Derbet ulus, Khoshud ulus, Jungar ulus, as well as several uluses of Torghut affiliation, such as Kereit, Tsatan, Bagut, Erketen, Tsokhur-Khabuchin, and Abun-otok ulus. Apart from these, there was also an ecclesiastical ulus that belonged to the Buddhist establishment (shabiner).9 Consisting of a multitude of fiefdoms, throughout its history the Kalmyk Khanate resembled more a network of fiefdoms led by a Torghut khan rather than a hierarchical union with the autocrat at the top. Like other Mongol groups, the Oirats emphasized military training for all men from childhood, which gave the nomads the advantage of total mobilization in case of war, instantly turning their tribes into military machines. Constantly on the move and possessing great striking power, the Oirats were akin to medieval “terminators” that would appear on the steppes out of the blue like a flash storm or a whirlwind. Not only did they strike fear into the

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hearts of their neighbors, but even battle-hardened Mongol tribes in Mongolia had to think twice before engaging Oirat cavalrymen. When some of the Oirat fiefdoms and their sub-groups crossed the lower Volga to its western bank, the Tsarist government, irritated by the territorial violation but unable to drive the powerful nomads back, demanded that the intruders retreat to their previous position. For instance, in 1649–1650, during a series of negotiations between a Russian envoy called Onuchin and the Oirat lord Daichin, the latter refused to accept the Russian ultimatum, saying: “The soil and water are all god’s. The land where we, Kalmyks and Nogays, nomadize today never belonged to the Tsar, it belonged to the Nogays.”10 The Nogays with whom Daichin said he shared the land were a conglomeration of Turkic-speaking tribes who had been united by Nogay (died in 1299) and took his name as their identity. An illegitimate great-grandson of Chingis Khan’s eldest son Jochi, Nogay was not only the most powerful general in the Golden Horde but also co-ruled the state. The Nogays were eventually driven off their land by the Oirats; some were incorporated into the Oirats. The ethnonym “Kalmyk” was not immediately used by the Volga Oirats who identified themselves by their traditional names. Derived from the Turkic word “kalmak” meaning “to stay behind, to be left behind,” this ethnonym was first mentioned in Tarikh-i-Rashidi, a mid-16th century work by Mirza Muhammad Haidar Dughlat (born around 1500), a Turco-Mongol general, ruler of Kashmir, and a first cousin of Babur the founder of the Mughal Empire in India. In Tarikh-i-Rashidi, which is styled as a memoir combined with the history of the Central Asian region, Mirza Muhammad uses the term “kalmak” several times in connection with “Moghuls” (referring to Mongols populating the eastern part of the Chingisid Chagatai state of Central Asia) and their land. He writes that “kalmak” is a kind of name which was “probably applied to the Moghuls by their more cultivated neighbors, on account of their barbarous manner, lawless character, and unsettled habits generally.”11 That is, Mirza Muhammad opines that “kalmak” was initially a derogatory name for the “Moghuls” who were seen by their neighbors as “people that stayed behind (culturally and were uncivilized).” In Russian documents the ethnonym “Kalmyk” first appears in a 30 May 1574 edict by Tsar Ivan the Terrible ordering that taxes be collected on trade with several tribes, including the Kalmyks,12 which probably refers to the same people as in Tarikh-i-Rashidi. Since the 17th century, however, the Russians used the ethnonym “Kalmyk” to designate those Oirats who settled on the lower Volga. This ethnonym, as mentioned, was not immediately accepted by all Volga Oirats. For example, as late as 1761 the Khoshuds referred to themselves and the Torghuts as “Oirat.” The Torghuts, by contrast, used the name “Kalmyk” for themselves as well as for the Khoshuds and the Derbets.13 That said, even after accepting

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this ethnonym all these groups continued to use their old names—“Torghut,” “Derbet,” and “Khoshud”—which they do to this day. As various Volga groups gradually adopted their new umbrella name, from the second half of the 17th century, the Tsarist government softened its policy toward the Kalmyks. A more pragmatic concern became to try to prevent the barbaric newcomers both from plundering Russian border settlements and allying themselves with their Turkic and Caucasian neighbors who were Russia’s foes. This softening of relations was marked by a series of bilateral agreements. At that time, in their dealings with various steppe peoples, Russian officials used special shert’ agreements that were executed as oaths of submission to the Tsar. Whilst the two sides were known to have made more than a dozen oral agreements between 1607 and 1648,14 the first written shert’ between the Russians and the Kalmyks was made only in 1655, according to which the Kalmyks vowed loyalty to the Tsar, promised to participate in Muscovy’s military campaigns, and not to assault Muscovy’s subjects. Despite being offered gifts, weapons, and the right to trade in Russian settlements and nomadize on Russian land in return, the Kalmyks breached the agreement repeatedly. In order to make the Kalmyks behave, the Russians made more shert’ agreements with them in 1657 and 1661. Given the Kalmyks’ actions, one may dismiss them as unruly nomads who did not honor their commitments. As the devil is said to be in the detail, on closer inspection one can also see that these early documents were not only executed solely in Russian but also did not include Muscovy’s obligations. Before jumping to conclusions, one has to consider the following circumstances in which these agreements were made. First, the lack of Kalmyk translations implies that the Kalmyks endorsed the agreements orally, which fits a wider Mongol tradition of that time that prioritized oral forms of agreement and message transmission over written ones.15 Second, throughout the 17th and 18th centuries translations from Russian to Kalmyk and vice versa were made in Tatar—the word shert’ derives from the Tatar word shart, meaning “condition or a clause in an agreement”—by baptized Tatars or Cossacks who had learned Kalmyk while in captivity. With no professional training, these translators could not be trusted to convey subtleties from one language to another.16 Being Muscovy’s subjects, these individuals were also inclined to take Muscovy’s side which could involve nodding to or endorsing whatever style their masters used, which was a shert’ style at that time. Furthermore, one can argue that these Russian documents were produced for internal use only as records of the Kalmyks’ obligations and not as documents to remind the Russians of their own obligations. The agreement of 1661, the first known bilateral document written in both languages, supports this hypothesis in that the Kalmyk translation of the

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document was now accompanied by Muscovy’s obligations.17 Once in such a format, the 1661 document can be discerned more or less as an agreement between two allies, except for one stylistic detail. For despite its content, the title of the document was still executed as an oath of allegiance. This semantic “inconsistency,” however, can be explained in terms of tradition, given that all the previous documents had been executed under the same heading. There is no doubt that this specific style was an initiative from a Russian side that saw its nomadic neighbors as inferiors, although the same could be said of the Kalmyks, too. Kalmyk Ayuka Khan (1669–1724), for example, in his letters to a Russian general-governor, which are kept in Kalmyk State Archives in Elista, referred to the Russian Tsar as khan (“small khan”), while describing himself as khaan (“great khan”),18 reflecting a long-standing Mongol tradition of seeing the Tsar as inferior. Monolingual documents studied selectively and outside of historical context are prone to ideological fact-twisting, and it is easy to conclude that the Kalmyk lords were vassals to the Tsar, which is an old Russia-centric view based to a great extent on the headings and the linguistic style of these first shert’s. It should also be added that the Kalmyk case is not unique in this respect since many native peoples of Russia, such as the Buryats, Bashkirs, Chuvashs, and many others, have been held by the Russian state to have joined Russia voluntarily. Whatever the title and phraseology of the first bilateral documents, in real life, as the mutual obligations dictated, the Kalmyks not only did not pay tributes but were accustomed to getting annuities and gifts from the Tsar.19 The Kalmyk cavalry participated in Russian campaigns mainly either as mercenaries, or driven by the prospect of gaining booty, or both. In terms of foreign policy, the Kalmyk Khanate had diplomatic relations not only with its close neighbors, such as the Ottoman Empire and various small principalities in the Caucasus, that were Russia’s enemies but with remote countries as well, including Tibet, Jungaria, and China.20 That said, Kalmyk history also abounded with princes and nobles who used the Russians as arbiters in their domestic political struggles, gradually giving the Russians the privilege to confirm Kalmyk khans, which had traditionally been an authority vested in the Dalai Lama alone.21 Paid, bribed, or otherwise motivated, the Kalmyk cavalry, nevertheless, played an important role in Russian history. Especially during the reign of Peter the Great, who transformed the Tsardom of Russia into the Russian Empire, the Kalmyk cavalry participated in many of Peter’s wars,22 thus contributing to the consolidation of Russia. Ironically, Russia’s rapid rise to power inevitably put the Kalmyks in a weaker position. After the deaths of the two leaders—Kalmyk Ayuka Khan died in 1724 and Peter the Great in 1725—the new Russian government, empowered by a modernized army and booming economy, furthered its expansionist, oppressive policy toward its

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weaker neighbors, including the Kalmyk Khanate, which was effectively a “state on horseback” equipped with archaic bows that were no match for rifles and artillery. Whilst the Tsarist government historically used both carrots and sticks in its dealings with the Kalmyks, the new policy came to rely on big sticks alone. The situation gradually became so miserable and undignified for the Kalmyks that they decided that their prospects would improve if they returned to their historical homeland of Jungaria (which by then had been conquered by the Manchu Qing in 1757). On 5 January 1771, the majority of the population—over 47,000 tents comprising about 212,000 people—led by Ubashi Khan, set out on a disastrous 3,300-kilometers-long journey back to the Jungar steppe through hostile Kazakh territory during which an estimated 100,000 migrants perished on the way.23 Besides a bloody outcome brought about by constant Kazakh attacks and ambushes, the exodus entered history books as the last long-distance nomadic migration in world history. Beset by dissatisfaction, those Kalmyks who remained on the Kalmyk steppe—about 106,000 nomads24—actively participated in Pugachev’s Rebellion of 1773– 1775 that raged between the Volga and the Urals. Following the exodus, the territory of the Khanate, along with the remaining Kalmyks, was put under the direct jurisdiction of a newly formed Office in Charge of Kalmyk Affairs (Kalmytskoe Pravlenie). In light of what has been discussed so far, it can be argued that the Kalmyks never voluntarily joined the Russian state en masse. If there was any mass joining it was not voluntary but forced, taking place after 1771, not in 1609. From 1771 to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, life for the Kalmyks in Russia passed uneventfully. Their territory was pacified and divided among the neighboring Russian provinces, the bulk of which, the Kalmyk steppe, was annexed to Astrakhan Gubernia and used as a cattle-breeding region. Those Kalmyks who had previously moved to the Don region and stayed there with the Cossacks were officially incorporated in 1789 into the Don Cossack regiments. Kalmyks also served as hereditary soldiers in Cossack regiments in other places, including Terek in the North Caucasus, Ural, Orenburg, and Astrakhan (Astrakhan Kalmyk Cossacks constituted a different social class from lay Kalmyks). Only Cossacks were permitted to carry weapons among the Kalmyks, but during the Napoleonic War in Russia lay herdsmen from Astrakhan Gubernia were recruited to form a Kalmyk cavalry that triumphantly entered Paris on their Bactrian camels in 1814, alongside the Russian forces, to the amazement of Parisians. Fragmentation among the Kalmyks continued when in 1860, a faction of the Astrakhan Kalmyks— Ikiderbetovskiy ulus—was annexed to Stavropol Gubernia and put under the jurisdiction of another Russian governor. As we see, during this period, Kalmyk groups were dispersed over a large territory from the Don to the Urals. Not only were these diverse groups

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geographically separated (partly to avoid inter-Kalmyk contacts, conspiracy, and possibly another attempt at mass exodus), but they were also culturally fragmented and subjected to varying degrees of Russification, sedentarization, and levels of economic development. As a result, they acquired distinct territorially informed identities. Those who lived in Astrakhan Gubernia came to be known as “Astrakhan Kalmyks” (Lenin’s paternal grandmother, Anna Smirnova, was an Astrakhan Kalmyk), those in Stavropol Gubernia as “Stavropol Kalmyks,” and so on. Being of relatively high social status, Kalmyk Cossacks also differentiated not only among themselves but also from the rest of their lay brethren who were of lower status. Thus, Kalmyk Cossacks on the Don came to be collectively known as “Buzava.” These diverse groups did not necessarily see themselves as belonging to the same “nation.”25 By the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century the dispersal of the Kalmyk groups was as follows. The most populous was Astrakhan Gubernia (with about 146,500 Kalmyks), followed by the Don Cossack regiments (about 31,500), Stavropol Gubernia (8,500), and the Terek Cossack regiment (4,100). Kalmyk populations in the Kubansk regiment, in Ural, and Orenburg were small.26 1917–1991 The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 brought about dramatic changes in Kalmykia. The Russian Civil War, famine, and destruction that followed did not pass through Kalmyk lands without inflicting social and demographic cataclysms. During this period, the total number of Kalmyks in Russia diminished by one third, and according to the 1926 census it stood at 129,300 people.27 Many Kalmyk Cossacks fought for the Whites, others for the Reds, and some supported bands of every shade. But the majority of the nomads took no side and just tried to survive the war. Toward the end of 1920, when the White movement was suppressed in the western part of Russia, a large group of defeated White Army personnel, including Kalmyk Cossacks and their family members, were driven by the Reds to the Crimean Peninsula from where they fled on boats to Constantinople. Among the Kalmyk fugitives was the doctor and writer Khara-Davan, one of the founders of the Eurasianist movement in Europe. From the capital of the Ottoman Empire these Kalmyks dispersed to Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and France. Out of a total number of 150,000 refugees, around 2,000 were Kalmyks.28 In Russia, following the end of military conflict on the Kalmyk steppe, the Bolsheviks gathered all major groups—the Don Kalmyks, Astrakhan Kalmyks, Stavropol Kalmyks, and Terek Kalmyks—into one territory, which was given in 1920 the status of Kalmyk Autonomous Oblast to be elevated

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in 1935 to Kalmyk Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. This territorial unification served as the foundation for the ethnic unification of the Kalmyks. Apart from this positive development, the Kalmyk population was subjected, as in other parts of the Soviet Union, to forced secularization, murderous collectivization of farms, and other Stalinist atrocities. The beginning of World War Two heralded another major socio-demographic cataclysm in the history of Kalmykia. After Kalmyk men were sent off to the front, in August 1942 a small regiment of the Wehrmacht crushed a badly equipped Soviet defense line and occupied western and central parts of Kalmykia. In an attempt to gain the loyalty of the local population, the German command reversed key Soviet policies by reopening Buddhist prayer houses, disbanding local soviets, and promising wider freedom after the war while treating the Kalmyks with relative dignity. Soon the Germans established a military unit—known as Kalmücken-Kavallerie-Korps in German (Kalmyk Cavalry Corps) that would become one of the most exotic foreign units in the Wehrmacht—consisting of Buddhist nomads mounted on ponies and Bactrian camels and armed with sabers and Russian rifles. Composed of volunteers, prisoners of war who were released from German captivity, and teenagers, the Cavalry Corps was put under the command of one Dr. Rudolf Otto Doll, a charismatic Kalmyk-speaking German officer who quickly gained the trust of his soldiers. The Cavalry Corps’ main task was to guard warehouses, communication lines, and the German flanks against partisans that operated in the eastern part of the republic. The Cavalry Corps also proved to be invaluable in reconnaissance and scout work. The occupation, however, ended abruptly a few months later with the rapid advance of the victorious Red Army from the Stalingrad area which took Kalmykia under its control in December 1942. This caused Kalmyks enlisted in the Cavalry Corps who were afraid of Soviet reprisal to retreat with the German Army to Europe, in many cases with their family members who were recruited as livestock attendants. There were also forced laborers among them. The total number of cavalrymen was about 3,000,29 and the remaining—about 2,000 people—were civilians. Ponies and camels totaled 4,600. Resembling more a large nomadic encampment on the move filled with livestock, women, children, the elderly, and cavalrymen, the Kalmyk Cavalry Corps played some role during the German withdrawal, mainly engaging with partisans and covering the retreat of the German Army. After the war, the majority of the surviving members of this group, both military personnel and civilians, were repatriated by the Allied forces to the Soviet Union where they languished in the gulag or were executed for treason. The remaining Kalmyks were mainly placed in DP (displaced persons) camps in Bavaria, the U.S. zone of occupied Germany, where they met Old Kalmyk emigrants from the first wave of emigration who had fled Eastern Europe in the face of the advancing Red Army.

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In 1951, Kalmyk DPs were granted asylum in the United States. As of 1958, the total population of the Kalmyk American community, which had settled around Philadelphia and New Jersey, stood at 675.30 As for the Kalmyks who remained in Kalmykia, they were all forcibly deported to Siberia in December 1943 on charges of betraying the Soviet motherland by collaborating with the Nazis. The official number of Kalmyks deported from Kalmykia stood at 93,139. Small contingents of Kalmyks who lived in the neighboring Rostov and Stalingrad oblasts were deported in March 1944 and June 1944, respectively. The entire Kalmyk contingent of the Red Army—between 1941 and 1943, some 43,000 men from Kalmykia, that is almost a third of the population, served in the Red Army—was called out and sent to a labor camp to build the Shirokovsky hydro-electric station where the death rate was sickeningly high. Those who survived the ordeal joined their families later in the places of exile. In Kalmykia the civilian population transfer, which occurred in the dead of winter, was violent and brutal. Poorly clad, in some cases half-naked, people were rounded up in trucks and crammed into cattle carriages, which took weeks to reach the peripheries of the vast country, eventually dumping their human cargo in the middle of the frozen Siberian wasteland. By a conservative estimate, at least 10,000 people, mainly the very young and the old, died of cold, malnutrition, or disease either en route or in the first two months of exile alone.31 Deprived of their citizenship rights and subject to institutionalized humiliation and abuse, many Kalmyks in Siberia lived in dugouts, sick, cold, and starving. The remaining war and immediate post-war years proved to be exceptionally hard. The year 1946–1947 saw the third Soviet-era mass famine when, desperate for foreign currency to purchase modern machinery, the state sold grain on the international market, creating an artificial famine that affected 100 million people across the country, resulting in at least two million deaths. Many Kalmyks ended up committing a range of “crimes,” from stealing food leftovers to arriving to work late, for which they were sent to the gulag. It was not until 1956, following the death of Stalin, that the Kalmyks, like other exiled peoples of the Soviet Union, were pardoned by Khrushchev and allowed to return to their native land, which they did en masse in 1957–1958. In 1958 Kalmykia was reinstated as an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Having been scattered in small numbers all over Siberia and Central Asia,32 the Kalmyks returned from exile not only bilingual, tamed, and physically deteriorated but eager to reconnect with each other and—perhaps, not so surprisingly—to adjust to the ideals of the Soviet regime. Partly due to Kalmykia’s small population (which made it easy to control and surveil them effectively) and to the Kalmyks’ eagerness to readjust, post-exile Kalmykia never produced political dissidents nor nurtured anti-regime sub-cultures, which was the case in large Soviet cities.

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This, however, does not mean that life was good and that all Kalmyks were happy. Feeling that they had been treated unjustly but unable to respond in kind, some young Kalmyk men resorted to aggressive behavior as a way of releasing tension as opportunities arose. Soon the streets of Elista turned into a site of brawls between Kalmyk and Russian teenagers. Only the intervention of the police and KGB operations put a stop to this. Alexei, a Kalmyk man in his late 70s, recalls: After we returned to Kalmykia, we began to beat up the local Russian boys. My friends and I would go out and whack every Russian boy we came across. They called as “traitors” and we whacked them even harder. The Park of Friendship was the place where we, groups of youngsters, would clash with each other. During one such brawl I badly injured a Russian boy. Later the police came to arrest me. I spent a time in prison.

But whatever the reaction of the Kalmyks toward the Soviet state and its doctrines, it should be pointed out that the very experience of exile not only left a deep psychological scar on Kalmyk society but became a defining point in the shaping of the post-exile society itself. A widespread sense of national humiliation and communal guilt mixed with an enduring obsession with restoring the ethnic pride and honor is the result of Stalinist exile. All these factors made the readjustment period successful, if seen from a Soviet perspective. During this time, the history of the Kalmyk people was rewritten on the initiative of Kalmyk historians themselves, not without the help of Russian advisors, as that of voluntarily joining Russia and eternal loyalty to the common motherland. Consonant with this Russia-oriented mood, it was decided in 1959 to celebrate the 350th anniversary of joining Russia voluntarily. The reason for this celebration was purely political, the aim being to prove to the Communist Party that in general the Kalmyks had always been loyal to the Russian state. Pavlina, a former high-ranking apparatchik, explained the rationale used to choose the date for the celebrations as follows: We came back from Siberia in 1957. In 1957, we were not up to any celebration. In 1958 also not up to any celebration. But in 1959, somebody at the top said “let’s celebrate this and that anniversary”—it was important to somehow uplift people’s morale, you see—and we celebrated. I vividly remember like yesterday, people were so happy. It was a real holiday, after so many years of hardship and humiliation.

Once officially approved, the myth about the 1609 event turned into a historical fact and was reproduced in history books, official speeches, and celebrations. Receiving strict directives from above to carry out research to

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prove the theory of voluntary joining, the historians struck gold when they recovered a little-known fact that in 1909 a Kalmyk delegation headed by Prince Danzan Tundutov traveled to St. Petersburg to see the Tsar on the pretext of celebrating “the 300th anniversary of the Kalmyks living in Russia.”33 The Soviet policy of nation-building was riddled with paradoxical inconsistencies. Whilst instilling among the Kalmyks an idea of eternal loyalty to Russia on the one hand, on the other the paternalistic Soviet state was always ready to remind the Kalmyks that there were traitors among them. This treatment was analogous to a sadistic step-mother praising her children only to punish them publically the next moment. Thus, between 1966 and 1983, the state staged eight trials of former “Nazi collaborationists,” which were initially supported by some local Russians who felt that the Kalmyks, especially their youth, were becoming too unruly. The first trial was carried out behind closed doors, and the rest were all public show trials. During the first show trial, held in the Kalmyk State Theater in Elista in 1968, four Kalmyk men were charged with wartime “collaborationism.” The ideological absurdity of the whole show orchestrated by the KGB was highlighted by the fact that all the accused had already served time in prison for the crime they were charged with. Reminiscent of “strange theater,” the court hearing, which sentenced all the men to death, was transmitted on live radio across Kalmykia. Even today, many Kalmyks who witnessed the trial still remember with unabating anger how the Russian prosecutor publicly denigrated not only the accused but all the Kalmyks present in the audience. The last show trial in 1983 involved a Belgian citizen of Kalmyk origin, Lukyanov, 79, a former member of the Kalmyk Cavalry Corps, who came to his native republic as a tourist after 40 years, hoping that the motherland had forgiven or forgotten his past. He was arrested and sentenced by the Soviet court to death by firing squad. POST-1991 The collapse of the Soviet Union, however, did not bring conflict to the republic based on ethnic differences, i.e., Kalmyk versus Russian, which can be attributed both to the success of Soviet interpretation of Kalmyk history and the popularization of (Kalmyk) Eurasianism that extols the Kalmyks as the heart of Eurasia while flaunting their loyalty to Russia. Unchallenged in terms of its foundational ideas, today the official history has been supplemented with two details. First, it includes the hitherto banned topic of the mass exile, the blame for which has been put on “wrong decisions” of the Stalinist regime and not on anything else. To address hidden grievances and psychological traumas related to the experience of exile and to channel its potentially destructive energy in

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a positive way, in 1993 the Kalmyk government organized the so-called “trains of memory” along the route Elista-Tyumen-Omsk-NovosibirskKrasnoyarsk-Omsk-Barnaul-Elista with the aim to consolidate the friendship between Kalmyks and peoples of Siberia and to lay the ghosts of the past. Carrying monks, former deportees, correspondents, and cultural workers, the train stopped at each location where the servants of Buddha read prayers, the former deportees met with their old friends, and dancers and singers staged concerts. Widely publicized by Kalmyk media, the train journey is said to have had a somewhat soothing effect not only on the passengers but on the entire Kalmyk nation. To mark the memory of the deportation, in 1996 the Kalmyk government also unveiled on Khrushchev street in Elista Exodus and Return, a monument by the sculptor Ernst Neizvestny (whom Khrushchev publicly rebuked in 1962 for organizing a “shit” art exhibition). Set up on top of an artificial mound and cast in bronze, it is a monolithic object embodying “circles of Kalmyk hell” that, according to its sculptor, “expresses the united sorrow and united suffering of the Kalmyk people.” To reach the monument, which seems to hover between land and sky, one has to take a path that spirals upwards around the hill toward the top, which, besides allowing pilgrims to see the monument from all sides, invokes the Buddhist way of making circuits of a shrine. At the foot of the hill stands a replica of a freight carriage used to transport the deportees to Siberia. Each year on 28 December the monument complex turns into a site of public remembrance of Stalinist exile. Second, there has been a shift in history writing in which Kalmyks, previously characterized as “loyal subjects,” are increasingly described as “loyal defenders of Russia.” The famous Kalmyk historian Kim Shovunov proselytizes: “Without exaggeration and fake modesty, we can say today that no other national minority has contributed to the strengthening of the greatness of the Russian Empire as did the Kalmyks.”34 This view is indeed very popular among Kalmyks of all ages and genders. Khoshun-Bator, an elderly man, whom I interviewed in June 2011 in Elista: [Among all nationalities in Russia] the Kalmyks contributed the most for the consolidation of the Russian state because we defended Russia’s southern, western, and northern borders. The best among the Kalmyks died. The population did not grow because we did not have time to replenish our people. It was only under Ayuka Khan that the Kalmyk population finally grew. Russia should never forget whom it owes.

Yevgeniy, a Kalmyk man in his 40s: In comparison with all other Mongol peoples, the Kalmyks found themselves in the leading position (Kalmyki okazalis’ na peredovoy) because we are closer

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to Europe. For Russia, we fought with the Swedes, the French, and we went through Siberian exile with dignity. It is our fate to overcome difficulties. The supernatural powers get us moving . . . Our uncontrollable, brave character finds its expression in active aggression.

All histories, be they official or folk, are reconstructions. “Historical events” are not only distorted and idealized versions of the past but are also inherently unstable stories prone to change depending on the political regime. Despite being so, as a practiced and semiotized reality, histories affect the ways in which believers think, feel, and act. Whilst the shift from (mere) “loyal subjects” to “loyal and glorious defenders” may seem subtle, it is important in that this particular reading of history addresses the inferiority complex in the Kalmyk psyche and allows the Kalmyks to exert their loyalty to Russia, their military superiority, and Eurasian uniqueness in one stroke. It also solicits ethnic pride and self-congratulatory mood. Hence many Kalmyk men, young and old, like to describe themselves as patriotic and brave, if not the most patriotic and the bravest in the whole of Russia. What this self-promoted image also does is to encourage men to express their masculinity, often in exaggerated and aggressive ways, as seen from the excerpts of following interviews. Anton, a Kalmyk man in his 30s, who works in St. Petersburg: Kalmyks like fighting. I remember fights, terrible fights when boys would beat each other without mercy whatsoever. When men fight they use whatever they can get hold of—knives, forks, bottles. In St. Petersburg, young Kalmyk guys fight with Buryats and Tuvinians. They are really afraid of us. We usually do not quarrel with Russians though.

According to Batr, a Kalmyk man in his late 40s, the explanation for this bravery lies in warrior genes: There were times when the Kalmyks literally lived on their saddles, continuously participating in various wars. Of course, this life-style has been passed on in our genes . . . During the Great Patriotic War (i.e., World War Two) we produced 40-something Heroes of the Soviet Union. That is, we, Kalmyks, were the second in the whole of the Soviet Union in terms of the number of heroes relative to population. Had we been allowed to fight until the end of the war, we would have produced even more heroes.

As loyal and brave subjects, the Kalmyks, according to Batr, served Russia as no other nationality did: We helped Russia become the biggest country in the world. . . We helped them defeat the Poles. We helped them win many, many wars. Because of our

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stupidity we used to go and conquer land for Russia. The history books do not even mention that we rescued Peter the Great from the Ottomans.

This popular feeling of inborn bravery, unwavering loyalty, and the Kalmyks’ centrality in Russian history not only incentivizes men to indulge in mundane brawls, but it also has the potential to be channeled as a political weapon to rally Kalmyks behind the idea of patriotism. The self-image of Kalmyks as defenders of the motherland parallels another image which re-emerged in public consciousness following the collapse of the Soviet state—the romanticized figure of the Cossack. Notwithstanding embarrassing footage of Cossack militia whipping defenseless Pussy Riot band members at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympic Games, which made rounds on the internet across the world, Cossacks are widely respected in Russia as defenders of its sovereignty, hardy and disciplined men who do not shy away from a good fight. Their active participation in almost all of Russia’s recent military conflicts, from the Russo-Chechen Wars to the Russo-Georgian War to the current War in Donbas, only sustains this image. Whilst historically not all Kalmyk groups served in Cossack regiments, today many Kalmyk men, irrespective of their ancestry and tribal affiliation, eagerly embrace Cossack identity as a proof of their patriotic heritage. Various ideas about bravery, patriotism, and uniqueness coupled with heightened sensitivity to potential humiliation, play out in strange ways in different contexts. Following the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the ensuing armed conflict in the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts of Ukraine, all Russian television channels broadcasted pervasive state propaganda about “fascists in Ukraine” “murdering and torturing civilians,” supplemented with dramatic footage from the conflict zone. At that time, I was in Elista in a taxi driving past a long military convoy which was heading to Rostov-on-Don when comments by the driver, a middle-aged Kalmyk man, made my ears prick up. He could barely hide his excitement at the prospect of a full-blown war with Ukraine, pointing out that it presented an opportunity for Russia not only to “teach a good lesson to Ukrainian fascists” but also for Kalmyk boys to show “what they are made of.” He was not alone in thinking this way. On the domestic front, mirroring internal divisions along ethnic, cultural, and regional lines in Russia, many Kalmyks not only like to imagine Kalmykia as a kind of buffer zone between the Islamic Caucasus and Orthodox Christian regions but also see themselves as modern protectors of common Russian values against the “encroachment of Islam.” Ethnic self-elevation also raises the importance of Kalmykia as a territory. Many Kalmyks indeed see their barren steppe as an important geopolitical fault line, a tectonic plate where battles of civilizational proportion take place between the forces of order and chaos, Christianity and Islam, progress and

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backwardness. No wonder such an exaggerated juxtaposition leads to ethnic tensions between the Kalmyks and local Caucasian diasporas. According to Sergey Belousov, researcher at the Kalmyk branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, from 1989 to 2009 alone, in Kalmykia there were at least fiftytwo conflicts based on ethnic premises between Kalmyks and Caucasians as opposed to only four between Kalmyks and Russians.35 In other words, about 98 percent of all ethnic conflicts that Belousov managed to identify were between Kalmyks and local Caucasians.36 Despite Kalmyks’ eagerness to extol their patriotism, masculinity, and military past, many local Russians, however, ascribe a humbler role to the Kalmyks in Russian history. Here is a part of my interview with the historian Vladimir Kolesnik whose views are representative of many of his fellow Russians in Kalmykia: Question: There is a widespread opinion here in Kalmykia that the Kalmyks have defended Russia for four centuries and that they have participated in all Russia’s wars. I also heard that the Poltava battle, for example, was won thanks to the Kalmyk cavalry. Kolesnik: Kalmyks did not participate in the Poltava battle because they arrived three days after the battle had been finished. Until the mid-17th century they did not fight on the Russian side against her Caucasian enemies, for they had not even crossed the Volga. Besides that, they did not live on the territory of Russia as such. Therefore, they could not have fought for Russia as her subjects. When they came here (i.e., to the territory of today’s Kalmykia) they drove away some people, such as the Nogays. That’s it. The most important battles for Russia did not take place in this place, but in the region of the Black Sea. . . Question: Many Kalmyks say that without the Kalmyks, Russia would have been a different country and that the Kalmyks have shaped Russia as we know it today. What is your opinion on this? Kolesnik: It is an exaggeration. As I told you, in the beginning they fought only for themselves, either for or against Russia. After the exodus of 1771, they were exempt from military service, although the Kalmyk Cossacks were allowed to continue to serve.

Any historical occurrence in the past can be narrated from at least three different positions, namely as an Event, an Experience, and a Myth.37 The Bolshevik Revolution, for example, can be recounted as an Event by providing important names, dates, and activities. As an Experience, the Revolution involves the reconstruction of the attitudes, feelings, thoughts, and beliefs of those involved. The Revolution as Myth serves the political, ideological, and emotional needs of various groups. Broadly speaking, all three positions tend to offer different, sometimes contradictory, accounts of the same occurrence.

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While all involve the subjective interpretation of the narrator, who by definition cannot fully recount or recreate the past event in question, the most unstable position is when an event is recounted as a Myth which mirrors the contemporary political and cultural regime in power. Not only are particular events recounted from these three positions but whole historical periods can also be subjected to these narrating methods. For example, in Kalmykia today the “voluntary joining of the Kalmyks in 1609” or the Kalmyks being “the most loyal and patriotic defenders of Russia” are myths recounted by the Kalmyks as Events interwoven with other historical events into a single historical narrative. By contrast, for many Russians in Kalmykia, who do not necessarily share the same idealized hopes and convictions as their Kalmyk neighbors, Kalmykia’s history may be imagined in a different, less flattering, light as attested in Professor Vladimir Kolesnik’s narrative. In post-Soviet Kalmykia, mythologization and glorification of Kalmykia’s past go hand-in-hand with the idealization of the present through the personas of some leaders, both secular and religious. The next chapter looks at Kalmykia’s first post-Soviet leader, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, during the height of his popularity. NOTES 1. The last census in Kalmykia was held in the summer of 2010. According to figures released by the Census Committee, the population of the republic was 289,481. A total of 44.1 percent of them were urban dwellers and the remaining 55.9 percent lived in rural areas. In terms of ethnic composition, more than half the population were Kalmyks (57.4 percent) followed by Russians (30.2 percent), and the remaining (12.4 percent) were of other ethnic groups, including Chechens, Avars, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Ahiska-Turks, and Koreans. In recent years many Kalmyks and Russians alike have left the impoverished republic in search of work. Today, an estimated 50,000–70,000 Kalmyks, that is about a third of the entire Kalmyk population, are believed to be working in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and the Russian Far North. 2. Personal communication, March 2010, Elista. 3. Basso, “Wisdom Sits in Places: Notes on a Western Apache Landscape,” 53. 4. Watson, Memory, History, and Opposition, 8. 5. Erdniev, Kalmyki; Batmaev, Kalmyki v XVII-XVII Vekakh; Moiseev and Moiseeva, Istoriya i Kul’tura Kalmytskogo Naroda. 6. Ochirov, “Rasselenie i etnicheskiy sostav v XVIII–XX vekakh,” 38; Batmaev, Kalmyki v XVII-XVII Vekakh, 26. 7. Baibagas was called “khaan” because he was believed to be a direct descendant of Khasar, Chingis Khan’s brother, whereas the leaders of the other groups including the Torghuts, Derbets, and Jungars did not trace their genealogy from Chingis Khan.

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See Miyawaki, “The Legitimacy of Khanship among the Oyirad (Kalmyk) Tribes in Relation to the Chinggisid Principle,” 327. 8. Apart from the Kalmyk/Torghut Khanate on the Volga, the Oirats established the Jungar Khanate on the Jungar steppes and the Khoshud Khanate. Following the death of Baibagas, his younger brother Guushi succeeded him as leader of the Khoshuds. Whilst some Khoshuds remained in their ancestral land, a large number moved to Konenuur (Qinghai) under the leadership of Guushi who established the Khoshud Khanate there (1642–1686). Some time after 1645, Guushi Khan’s brother took his own subjects and migrated to the lower Volga to join the Kalmyk Khanate. Among other Oirat groups that arrived in the Volga region, the Derbets, according to the Kalmyk scholar Mitirov, comprised the following sub-groups: Tugtun, Burul, Shabiner, Abganer, and Jun (including Chonos, Buhus, Hashhaner, and others). The Volga Torghuts consisted of the following sub-groups: Kereit, Tsatan, Bagut, and Erketen. See Mitirov, Oiraty-Kalmyki, 321; Bakaeva, “Kalmyks, Oirat Descendants in Russia: a Historical and Ethnographic Sketch,” 40–41. 9. Bakaeva, “Kalmyks, Oirat Descendants in Russia: A Historical and Ethnographic Sketch,” 40. 10. Batmaev, Kalmyki v XVII-XVII Vekakh, 97. 11. Mirza Muhammad, A History of the Moghuls of Central Asia, 75. 12. This edict is mentioned in the anonymous “Stroganov story,” which was written in the first half of the 17th century. Bakaeva, “Kalmyks, Oirat Descendants in Russia: A Historical and Ethnographic Sketch,” 32. 13. Khodarkovsky, Where Two Worlds Met, 8. 14. Kolesnik, Poslednee Velikoe Kochevye, 48–49; Ochirov, “Rasselenie i etnicheskiy sostav v XVIII-XX vekakh,” 39. 15. Ochirov, “Rasselenie i etnicheskiy sostav v XVIII–XX vekakh,” 39. 16. Khodarkovsky, Where Two Worlds Met, 63–64. 17. Ibid., 95–97. 18. Gedeeva, “O pis’makh Kalmytskogo khana Ayuki,” 208–12. 19. Khodarkovsky, Where Two Worlds Met, 161. 20. Ibid., 193–95. 21. The Dalai Lama began to confer the title of Khan on Oirat and Mongol aristocrats from the late 16th century, when these groups were converted to, or greatly influenced by, Tibetan Buddhism. Jagchid and Hyer, Mongolia’s Culture and Society, 272. 22. Baskhaev, Kalmyki. Pod Ratnym Znamenem Rossii. 23. Kolesnik, Poslednee Velikoe Kochevye, 241; Khodarkovsky, Where Two Worlds Met, 234. 24. Kolesnik, Poslednee Velikoe Kochevye, 241. 25. More on the development of Kalmyk national identity, see Terbish, “Kalmyk Identity from a Historical Perspective.” 26. Ochirov, “Bor’ba Kalmytskogo naroda za natsional’noe samoopredelenie v period revolyutsii 1917 g. i grazhdanskoy voyny,” 74. 27. Ochirov, “Rasselenie i etnicheskiy sostav v XVIII-XX vekakh,” 60. 28. Adelman, “Kalmyk Cultural Renewal,” 2.

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29. Munoz, “Followers of the ‘Greater Way’: Kalmyck volunteers in the German Army (1942–1945),” 149–68. 30. Churyumova and Holland, “Kalmyk DPs and the Narration of Displacement in Post–World War II Europe.” 31. Ochirova and Baskhaev, “Kalmyki v Velikoy Otechestvennoy Voyne (1941– 1945),” 161. 32. Following the mass deportation of the Kalmyks to Siberia in 1943, many individuals were later deported further to other places. By 1948 Kalmyks had been scattered across fifteen oblasts and krais in Siberia and the Russian Far East, thirteen oblasts in Kazakhstan, as well as in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. See Bakaev, “O demographii tragedii.” 33. Today, Kalmyk historians, who regard 1609 as the date marking the beginning of the Kalmyks’ voluntarily joining Russia, like to refer to an internal Russian document of 1609 that the Kazan Palace sent to Mosalsky, the commander of Tara settlement, instructing him to let Kalmyk lords travel to Moscow and trade horses in the settlement. Ochirov, “Rasselenie i etnicheskiy sostav v XVIII–XX vekakh,” 39. 34. Shovunov, “Istoricheskie istoki programmy pervogo Prezidenta Respubliki Kalmykia,” 10. 35. Personal communication, December 2009, Elista. 36. Whilst I did not follow up on this topic, during my research in Kalmykia since 2009 almost every year I heard stories of ethnic conflicts between the Kalmyks and Caucasian diasporas, which were not reported in the local press. 37. Cohen, History in Three Keys.

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Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, The Nebulous Savior

If you don’t deceive, you can’t sell. (Russian proverb)

On May 2012, amidst the turmoil of the Syrian Civil War, an Asian-looking man with a boyish grin on his face flew to Damascus to see troubled President Bashar al-Assad. Newspapers all over the world published articles with photographs of the Asian guest sitting next to the leader of Syria. Revealing the man’s identity, The Independent, a British newspaper, reported: The head of the World Chess Federation, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, meets Bashar al-Assad in Damascus . . . Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad, may have a lot on his mind at the moment, but he found time this week to discuss an important policy: the teaching of chess in schools . . . Mr. Ilyumzhinov said after the meeting that he would sign an agreement with Mr. Assad on the compulsory teaching of chess in Syrian schools, and also mentioned the pair had discussed a plan to hold a conference of Nobel Peace Prize laureates in Damascus in the near future.1

This visit was not the first controversial trip of the chess supremo to catch the attention of the world press. A year earlier, during the civil war that had been raging in another Arab country, Libya, he held talks in Tripoli with the country’s leader Colonel Gaddafi. In its 14 June 2011 issue, TIME published an article with a photograph of Gaddafi and Ilyumzhinov playing chess: When the U.S. and France asked Russia last month to help mediate the war in Libya, they were probably not expecting a self-proclaimed emissary of alien life to show up in Tripoli for a meeting with Muammar Gaddafi. But on Sunday evening, as NATO air strikes continued on the Libyan capital, the besieged Colonel 171

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took the time to entertain a Russian politician named Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, best known for his claims that extraterrestrials took him on a mystical tour of the galaxy in their spaceship in 1997. Far from convincing Gaddafi to step down, the visit seemed geared toward giving him a confidence boost and an unlikely lesson in the game of kings.2

In 2010 Ilyumzhinov also made international headlines when he wrote to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, offering him $10 million to build a World Chess Center in the Ground Zero district. These and similar examples recounted in this chapter suggest that Ilyumzhinov is something of an eccentric. His eccentricity, however, is as much a matter of personal characteristics as it can be explained as a product of the society into which he was born, brought up, and socialized as an adult. When Ilyumzhinov was born in 1962 in Elista, the Kalmyks had recently returned to their native land from exile. Not only did life improve gradually, but the republic made some achievements, becoming an important producer of wool and caviar in the Soviet Union. Despite this economic progress and growing self-confidence, as a nation Kalmyks never overcame the trauma of the Stalinist exile and struggled to come to terms with it. Unable to resolve the trauma, many Kalmyks tried to bury it deep in the subconscious, hoping that it would be soon banished from the national memory. Equally, many Kalmyks secretly fantasized about a savior who would come and vindicate their nation. Ilyumzhinov was a child of the 1960s, and his worldview was shaped by this national mentality, harboring extreme forms of shame and pride, despair and hope, secrecy and transparency. For Ilyumzhinov, the only way his nation could manage to survive the exile, or indeed life in Russia in general, was by being flexible and adapting to the flow of the times. As will be discussed, from his childhood Ilyumzhinov repeatedly displayed flexibility and eclecticism, absorbing from the environment what he deemed beneficial to his career. Styling himself as a genius and savior of the nation, during his presidential campaign in 1993 Ilyumzhinov adopted the slogan “I Can Live Without Kalmykia But Kalmykia Can Not Survive Without Me” and promised to turn Kalmykia into a “second Kuwait.” This chapter attempts to describe Ilyumzhinov’s worldview and his public image at the height of his popularity, based both on interviews that Ilyumzhinov gave to the media and on the reminiscences of my Kalmyk informants. It recounts his background, his interests, his ascent to power, and his management style, which are essential if we are to understand not only Ilyumzhinov’s state ideology (chapter 7) but also the dynamics playing out in Kalmyk society following the collapse of the Soviet regime.

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A PRODUCT OF PERESTROIKA Kirsan Ilyumzhinov’s childhood, according to his own account, passed in diligent study, and in the 9th grade he became a chess champion in Kalmykia. After graduating from secondary school, he did not enroll at university but instead, as was fashionable among young Komsomol members at that time, spent a year working as a laborer in the local Zvezda (“Star”) factory and then served in the Soviet Army from 1980 to 1982. In 1983 he entered the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO). During his student years while working as an aide to the secretary of the Party Bureau for Ideology at his Institute, the communist Ilyumzhinov, like many young intellectuals of his generation, became interested in alternative ideas and the occult. During the final year of his studies, in 1988, he found himself in a precarious situation. He was arrested by the KGB and expelled from the Institute and the Communist Party. Eight months later Ilyumzhinov was reinstated both in the Institute and the Party. It took the personal intervention of the famous Kalmyk writer David Kugultinov, a member of the Russian Parliament in Moscow, to negotiate Ilyumzhinov’s case. In his 5 May 1993 interview with Federatsiya newspaper, Kugultinov confided that young Ilyumzhinov “had such twists in his life that once I had to leave my work and rescue the student (Ilyumzhinov) here in Moscow.” Had Kugultinov not saved Ilyumzhinov from the KGB, the latter would probably never have finished his course, never found a well-paid job in a Soviet-Japanese firm in Moscow upon graduation, never made quick money, and never entered the presidential race in Kalmykia. Crushed by the KGB, Ilyumzhinov’s life would have been very different indeed. Following ups and downs in life, Ilyumzhinov’s star began to shine when after graduating from the Institute in 1989 he immersed himself in commerce and then in politics. If Gorbachev’s perestroika generated masses of losers and a small minority of winners, Ilyumzhinov was now on the winning side. Unlike thousands of Muscovites who meekly lined the pavements all the way from the KGB headquarters in Lubyanka down to the Kremlin selling whatever they could get hold of—chewing gums, Chupa Chups lollipops, old shoes, chocolate bars, light bulbs, rusty padlocks—Ilyumzhinov sold used cars and became manager of a commercial Soviet-Japanese firm. Following in the footsteps of his savior, in 1990 Ilyumzhinov was elected in Kalmykia to represent his native republic at the Russian Parliament in Moscow. Driven by his salesmanship instincts, in 1992 Congressman Ilyumzhinov became president of the Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, an NGO that represents the interests of Russian businesses.

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Attuned to changes in social environment and social expectations, Ilyumzhinov’s personality and career path were in many ways influenced by the perestroika years, and his activities resembled those of the new elites in a violent and corrupt new Russia that was emerging from the cracks of the old system. Influential and well-off by the age of 30, Ilyumzhinov’s ascent was nothing short of a miracle, when society reverberated with youthful entrepreneurial spirit and raw violence, and the mainstream culture flooded with the paranormal and the occult. The heroes of the age of chaos in a world turned upside down were not pioneer-heroes, Stakhanovite shockworkers, or elderly statesmen. New exemplars that people increasingly modelled their behavior and beliefs on were messiahs, psychics, gangsters, glamorous prostitutes, and a strange breed of people called “new Russians,” or nouveau riche, of whom Ilyumzhinov was an ambitious aspirant.3 Consonant with the changing times, the Communist Party newspaper Pravda (“Truth”) ran horoscopes, published articles about UFO sightings, and state TV prime-time viewing slots that had once screened propaganda were replaced by psychic sessions featuring men with soothing voices and owlish eyes promising to cure the country of its ailments and foretell the future. The first psychic to attain celebrity status was Anatoly Kashpirovsky, a Ukrainian psychiatrist who came to prominence after a televised broadcast of his healing session in Kiev in October 1989 was watched across the Soviet Union. Soon Kashpirovsky began to “cure” millions with his telepathic powers via the blue screen, and whenever he was on, the streets would be empty. At the height of his fame, Kashpirovsky was voted the most popular person in the Soviet Union, eclipsing Yeltsin. His great rival was Allan Chumak, an eccentric Russian faith healer, who occupied an early morning television spot. During his sessions, Chumak charged with healing cosmic energy the jars and bottles of water that millions of his followers would place next to their televisions. It was in this hectic and surreal climate that, anxious to harness new psychic-cosmic powers in order to gain the upper hand, famous politicians, big time gangsters, and business people began to take fortune tellers, faith healers, and psychics under their patronage. Even Russia’s president was gripped by this mania. Yeltsin’s Presidential Guard, charged with protecting his life, was transformed by its chief, General Alexandr Korzhakov, into an agency that employed psychics and clairvoyants who prepared analytical reports for the country’s leadership.4 Not to be outdone by his competitors or superiors and eager to access the wisdom of the gods through divination, Ilyumzhinov was in the thick of the action, surrounding himself with all sorts of seers, psychics, and fortune tellers. Among them was one Baba Vanga (1911–1996), a blind Bulgarian clairvoyant and a firm believer in cosmic aliens who rose to immense popularity in post–Soviet Russia and whose guests included Yeltsin’s press secretary.5

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Ilyumzhinov gives several conflicting accounts of how he befriended Baba Vanga. According to one, he met her on his own initiative as follows: [In 1992] we arrived [at Baba Vanga’s house], and I talked to her. Since then, we became friends. She said, “You will become president and rule a country.” I replied, “What country, I am [only] 30!”6

According to another version, published in Krymskaya Pravda on 10 June 1998, Ilyumzhinov claims to have first met Vanga after becoming president of Kalmykia when he was 31: In 1993 she (i.e., Baba Vanga) found me herself. Once in the evening she told her assistant, “Bring me the young President!” Her assistants were at a loss, “What young President?” That was the end of 1992. They set out to look for this president all over the world. Vanga was insisting, “Bring me him, I need to tell him something!” When at the end of April 1993 I was elected President of Kalmykia, her niece arrived in Moscow and telephoned the Kalmykia Representative Office and explained what Vanga wanted . . . I arrived in Petrich in the evening and checked in to a hotel. But Vanga said to her assistants, “Kirsan should stay with me.” Her assistants phoned me and advised that I bring a bottle of whiskey with me because she drinks some before she starts talking. Since then, we became friends.

These two interviews in which Ilyumzhinov makes two contradictory claims about his first meeting with the celebrated oracle are reflective of the boastful and flexible style of his storytelling for which he came to be known in Russia. The 1990s was also a period when the country’s entire economy hinged on criminality and massive fraud, which calls for some detailed discussion here. Links between criminality, the economy, and state power were nothing new in Russia, and it can, in fact, be traced back to the early years of the Soviet regime. Stalin himself was a gangster with links to the criminal underworld who methodically turned the Communist Party, which he first bankrolled and then presided over, into the biggest gang-like structure in the country with its hierarchy, violent culture, economy, symbols, language, and rituals.7 Given the power and ruthlessness of the Party, the real criminal underworld, however, was always in a position of subordination, and as early as under Stalin it even developed a culture of self-imposed alienation from mainstream society, as exemplified in the notorious code of vory criminals who prospered in the gulag system (chapter 2, section “Conflicting Views and Experiences among the Population”). The two worlds—the upper world of mainstream society overseen by apparatchiks and the underworld of vory criminals—did not crisscross under normal circumstances, and this continued even after the

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vory were released from the gulag following Stalin’s death. Under Brezhnev, an era marked by a deepening economic crisis, growing corruption both within the Party and wider society, and the burgeoning black market, vory criminals found themselves a new niche, serving as middlemen between corrupt bureaucrats (who were cash poor but protection rich) and underground entrepreneurs (who were cash rich but protection poor) by moving ill-gotten money and protection favors between the two. Whilst gangsters did well for themselves in this environment of economic and social stagnation, they remained dependent on both corrupt Party functionaries for protection and underground entrepreneurs for cash.8 The shackles were loosened when during Gorbachev’s perestroika the Party retreated and private entrepreneurship was officially permitted. But it was not until the collapse of the Soviet state itself and the beginning of privatization in earnest that gangsters, having supplemented their muscle power with Afghan War veterans, former policemen, sportsmen, and thugs, rushed to penetrate political structures and the legitimate economic sector, on their way turning the streets of towns and cities into a bloody battleground in their struggles for turf, influence, and markets. In the 1990s not only were whole industries virtually stolen or sold at a fraction of their real price, but contract killings were commonplace, with hit men advertising their services in the local press. Once the ugly outcasts of the gulag camps, under Yeltsin the gangsters found themselves in bed with the country’s political and business elites, becoming inseparably intertwined with official society. As if it were a matter of national pride, Russian newspapers even began to publish league tables of the country’s gangs.9 The Tambovskaya Bratva, the biggest gang in St. Petersburg, often topped the national table, and its leader Vladimir Barsukov-Kumarin, dubbed “the night governor of the city,” was intimately involved with the city’s daytime deputy mayor, the chekist Vladimir Putin.10 Between them, the two Vladimirs managed the city, interbreeding the shadow economy with the official economy to produce bandit capitalism. And this symbiosis repeated itself not only in countless towns and cities across Russia but in the beating heart of the state itself—the Russian Duma. Whilst some deputies were themselves gangsters, many who were not hired assistants with a criminal background who were better informed and could “get things done” when more conventional methods had proven unproductive. The tangle of networks of politics, business, criminality, and secret services enabled an individual to simultaneously become a politician, a businessman, a gangster, and a spy, for none of these four professions had any problem with this setup. With the boundaries between various institutions now blurred, criminal mannerisms, methods, and fenya lexicons rapidly spread throughout the social order. After all, the emerging bandit capitalism not only entailed a whole new

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vocabulary and phrases to describe new, criminalized social reality but also new practices and values to embody the experience. As Viktor Erofeev put it candidly: “the syllables blia-blia-blia and yob-yob-yob echo[ed] through the air above Russia like the bleeps of a sputnik. Decode these sounds and you have a general distress signal, the SOS of national catastrophe” (blia and yob derive from Russian swearwords for “whore” and “fuck”).11 Whilst the criminalization and profanation of youth counter cultures and siloviki structures—the KGB, the police, and the Soviet armed forces12—all occurred under Brezhnev, following the collapse of the Soviet state and its ideological values such characteristics as being eccentric, ostentatious, rapacious, and deadly pragmatic became aspirational qualities for the ambitious young, and not so young, people. This dog-eat-dog environment of lawlessness, corruption, and banditry exposed everyone to the black forces of extortion, racketeering, attacks, or worse. The salesman Ilyumzhinov was both a beneficiary and victim of the new system. As soon as he began to make some money and show off, it did not take him long to get noticed and kidnapped, according to his account, by a group of racketeers who took him to a forest on the outskirts of Moscow where they subjected him to rituals of intimidation.13 THE YOUNGEST REGIONAL PRESIDENT Whether with or without Baba Vanga’s encouragement, Ilyumzhinov made up his mind and threw his hat in the ring to run for president of Kalmykia. When young, handsome, wealthy, and energetic Kirsan Ilyumzhinov appeared in the political arena of Kalmykia, he was received by the impoverished and disoriented people as a symbol of prosperity and social stability, a harbinger of national revival, and for some he even was god-sent. Thus, a Kalmyk man called B. Salsky in his note “Miracle,” published in Elistinskie Novosti on 3 April 1993, accounted with pride and admiration: Frankly, I am surprised every time when I hear about talented [Kalmyk] businessmen. I think it is a miracle that after all these repressions that have destroyed the golden [genetic] pool of the [Kalmyk] nation our land is still capable of giving birth to talented people. One of them is Ilyumzhinov, to create whom Mother Nature must have worked so hard . . . Have you noticed that he remembers everything perfectly? His head works like a super computer. Sometimes I have an impression that he did not finish MGIMO, but several Western universities. He is so smart! Our “jewel” shines and will shine for the well-being of the people.

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High-class salesman and showman Ilyumzhinov did not make people wait too long for more miracles. At the very outset, during his campaign, as if with a wave of a magic wand he created an atmosphere of ever-lasting jubilation against the backdrop of universal poverty. He temporarily reduced the price of certain essentials, such as bread and milk, and organized a month-long show with Soviet show idols. Never shy in blowing his own trumpet, the presidential candidate enthusiastically traveled in his Lincoln limousine up and down the republic, flaunting his wealth and eccentricity. His selling point was his promise to turn Kalmykia into a “second Kuwait” and to hand out a $100 banknote to every citizen in Kalmykia if he became president.14 In the 1993 election Ilyumzhinov, 31, won with a majority vote. What followed was even more astonishing. Ilyumzhinov gave interview after interview boasting about his meetings with the world’s richest people and powerful elites who, according to him, were queuing up to invest in Kalmykia. Here is an extract from a representative interview published in the 23 April 1993 issue of Izvestiya Kalmykii: Ilyumzhinov: Western journalists call it (i.e., my successful election as President of Kalmykia) “the Ilyumzhinov phenomenon.” In two days [when I was in Switzerland] . . . I gave a talk at a club of the 100 wealthiest people in the world, whose HQ is in Geneva. The majority of them had heard about Kalmykia for the first time only on 12 April. Dr Moss, a member of that club, even requested information about Kalmykia from the British Library itself. Son of the king of Saudi Arabia,15 he is the owner of 450 banks and is worth $60 billion. Dr Moss is a citizen of 15 countries. He helped to revive the economies of 15 countries, including China, and as a commission he only took citizenship of these countries . . . With him I discussed the possibility of establishing a financial center in Elista. Dr Moss is ready to build it, from putting its foundation down to providing equipment, computers, satellite communication systems connected with Swiss banks to train staff in Switzerland. Journalist: By the way, I heard that Cyprus is ready to invest $30 billion in Kalmykia. Ilyumzhinov: Now we can talk about hundreds of billions of dollars. Many are ready to cooperate with us. This time I could have brought $50 million in cash from Zurich, but I did not.

Having mesmerized the poverty-stricken nation with his incredible stories and promises, sealed with a gentle grin and a wink, Ilyumzhinov had no difficulty in aggressively privatizing all state-owned enterprises in Kalmykia and collecting privatization vouchers from the population to co-establish an investment fund aptly called Kalmyk i Ya (“Kalmyk and I”), an operation which verged on criminality and massive fraud. Ilyumzhinov also facilitated

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tax evasion on a massive scale by opening an off-shore zone in Elista, along with his Moscow-based business partners, to attract thousands of Russian firms, including household names, that paid a nominal sum per quarter to Ilyumzhinov’s special fund, in the process depriving the Russian federal tax base of much needed income. Needless to say, these firms never physically moved to Kalmykia, nor did they engage in any commercial or productive activity on the steppe, but all were registered at a single address, like sardines squeezed in a tin. Having cut his teeth in the wilderness of Russia’s capitalism and having learned a lesson in “a forest outside Moscow,” following the election President Ilyumzhinov gathered all criminal authorities in his native Kalmykia to show them “who’s the boss.” Talking tough and acting like a mobster, Ilyumzhinov warned them to behave on pain of getting “taken to a forest and shot dead.” When he recounted this story, he sounded almost proud of it.16 For sure, Ilyumzhinov did not alienate or purge the gangster networks but established a new pecking order and let others understand that he was not going to tolerate opposition to his persona, be it on streets or in the political arena. Guided by his “eat what you kill” approach, now he was the alpha dog at the top of the local food chain, and others had to adjust to the new situation. Ilyumzhinov had a lot of killing to do. From the outset, while rapaciously privatizing the entire republic, Ilyumzhinov suppressed the free press, curbed the political opposition, and called for the establishment of an “economic dictatorship.” Those who did not fall into line were dealt with unceremoniously. In Elista in 2010 I interviewed a former Kalmyk businessman who made a small fortune by producing a vodka labeled “Kirsan” replete with the image of Kirsan Ilyumzhinov. The businessman had his proverbial ass badly bitten when he tried to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds by financially supporting the fledgling opposition movement with the proceeds from his distillery. As if that were not enough, he had the tenacity to assault one of Kirsan Ilyumzhinov’s brothers during a business dispute. Soon his distillery was stormed by “a group of men clad in black and brandishing automatic rifles.” The ensuing shoot-out lasted for several hours. Following the incident, the businessman fled Kalmykia, feeling in his bones all the indignity he had been subjected to. He was on the run for several years—at some point, he stayed with his friends at the Russian consulate in Mongolia—before deciding to sneak back to Elista “to finish some unfinished business.” I interviewed the man in his car, driven by a bodyguard. An undercurrent of anger flowing through his story, the disgraced businessman insisted that Ilyumzhinov and his cronies did nothing good or productive for Kalmykia except for “terrorizing small businesses, stealing, sucking each other’s cocks.” At the beginning of his presidency, in an interview with a correspondent of Trud (“Labor”) newspaper, Ilyumzhinov justified the

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necessity for tough measures and economic dictatorship by arguing that, “in a transitional period there should be no talk about democracy whatsoever,”17 echoing Lenin’s “proletarian dictatorship.” When asked how he came up with his ideas, Ilyumzhinov replied: “By reading the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin and my ability to turn the theory into practice.” While displaying signs of a typical sovok, or “a Soviet person” permeated with the Soviet mindset and paying lip service to anti-Western ideological rhetoric, Ilyumzhinov was not interested in undermining the West, but in enjoying the opportunities it provided. Not only did he buy a fleet of Rolls-Royces and travel across the world, but he also adopted such Western values as capitalism and religious freedom in his management of Kalmykia, but with a cosmist twist. In 1993 he outlined his vision of economic reform as follows: I want more goodness [on Earth]. I want goodness to outweigh evil. Then we will have fewer tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanoes . . . Humans and Earth are one united whole, one living organism. Earth reacts to what is happening on it, to what people are doing. We have too much evil, sorrow, tears, and blood today, and all this is being absorbed by Earth. Earth cannot bear this anymore. Therefore, my main task is to create more positive emotions, more goodness. When people start smiling at each other, they can achieve anything, and then the economic reforms will succeed.18

“To make goodness outweigh evil,” in 1993 Ilyumzhinov reunited religion and state in the Steppe Codex, the new Kalmyk Constitution, and established the Department of Religious Affairs, enabling himself to do realpolitik with the help of supernatural powers. No wonder that, in his decisions Ilyumzhinov placed as much faith in his diviners and oracles as he did in his economic or political advisors. An interview he gave to Moskovskiy Komsomolets in 1995 is revealing: Correspondent: Do you have astrologists? Ilyumzhinov: Both in Moscow and here [in Kalmykia] I have dozens of them. All come to me: communists, anarchists, and those who are connected with the cosmos. I always receive them. Baba Vanga is an honorary citizen of Kalmykia. She foretold how many factories we would build. She also showed where would be a petrol-processing plant. She is blind, but like this she was drawing with a pen on the map and put a dot. Later on, scientists discovered that she got it right. Baba Vanga’s niece is a professor-parapsychologist, she opened the biggest windmill here. Correspondent: Who is that strange man who has just left your office?

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Ilyumzhinov: He is Aizen, a French offspring from Chechnya, and he is a new Messiah. In a month or two he will announce about himself to the world.19 Over there is Ivan Yakovlevich from Rostov oblast. Would you like to see him? (Correspondent’s observation): Ivan Yakovlevich, a man with a mysterious, drunken look, is laying out on the table some shabby papers on which are drawn circles and arrows. He confides that this system was given to him from above. “He is enlightened, a teacher descends on him from the skies,” explains the President. Mid October, according to the clairvoyant, is an auspicious time for elections.20

On the advice of Ivan Yakovlevich, Ilyumzhinov—to the people’s puzzlement—announced a new presidential election to be held on 15 October 1995, although he had two more years until the end of his first term. Making sure that he was the only candidate to run for the post, Ilyumzhinov effectively reelected himself for another seven years,21 thus securing his presidency until 2002. In the year of his reelection in 1995, Ilyumzhinov became president of FIDE, the World Chess Federation, which, according to him, was also foretold by Baba Vanga: Everything that she had foretold was realized. For example, half a year prior to my being elected President of FIDE, in April 1995 she said to me, “I see two Kirsans,” and laughed. [Then] she said, “so tiny, thin, but you are sitting on two arm-chairs, two presidents, [you] became double.” I asked, “Where did I become double?” She did not reply. But in November I became President of FIDE, and now, as an exception, occupy two posts at the same time.22

Two years later, he announced in TIME that the Earth was set to collide with the planet Nebiru, killing everyone on Earth, unless people cleansed their aura by playing chess. He made chess a compulsory subject in secondary schools in Kalmykia. His presidential status came with perks and opened the kind of doors that are usually shut to ordinary mortals. One of the first initiatives that Ilyumzhinov took as president of Kalmykia was to pay an official visit to the Patriarch of Russia, the Dalai Lama, and the Pope, news of which was trumpeted by Kalmyk media to the skies. To publicly assert his privileged links to the divine, Ilyumzhinov also made gifts to religious institutions and opened new prayer houses. Following his visit to the Vatican in February 1994, Ilyumzhinov even established the first and only Catholic prayer-house in Elista while bragging that they had only one Catholic believer in the whole of the republic. In his interview with Pravda on 20 June 1994, Ilyumzhinov

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confessed his dream of building in Kalmykia a gigantic shrine to unite all religions. The idea of a Universal Church, reconciling all religions both Western and Eastern, official and pagan, old and new, is nothing new in Russian thought, and some great philosophers of the Silver Age—including the spiritual cosmists Vladimir Solovyev, Sergey Bulgakov, and others—speculated about its possibility. As mentioned, these speculations unfolded in a period that witnessed the diminishing of Orthodox God’s authority which went hand in hand with scientific and social progress on the one hand, and on the other with a crisis of the Russian Orthodox Church which began in the second half of the 19th century when the seminaries became a shambles: “afflicted with poverty and pedagogical disarray; the parish clergy had become a virtual castle, impoverished, isolated, and disparaged.”23 The Russian intellectual turn to moral sources beyond the official church and society’s flirtation with Western occultism, Spiritualism, Theosophy, Anthroposophy, and revolutionary ideas generated the phenomenon known as the Russian religious renaissance, which was anti-Church and anti-establishment in essence. This intellectualoccult renaissance generated more than thirty Russian journals and well over 800 books dealing with occult topics in the period between 1881 and 1918 alone.24 Interrupted in Russia following the establishment of Soviet power, it resurfaced, along with cosmism and Eurasianism, during the late perestroika years and went into supercharged hyperdrive following the collapse of state socialism. Not only did religion and spiritualism come to dominate the moral sphere, but religious parties entered political contestation. The 1993 and 1995 Russian parliamentary elections saw the participation of several such parties, including the Party of the Orthodox, the Russian Christian Democratic Party, and the Christian Democratic Union. Ilyumzhinov’s attempt to holistically interpret all aspects of human existence, including politics, economy, and culture, in spiritualist-cosmist terms should be seen in the context of this specifically Russian tradition which strives for an all-embracing synthesis and a universal worldview, which is at the same time a deeply personal undertaking. Whilst Ilyumzhinov’s eclectic spirituality owes much to this Silver Age tradition, his urge to find the missing link and to reveal the “hidden” has also been shaped by the Soviet Union’s Cold War legacy of conspiracy and paranoia, which accommodates both respect for facts/evidence and a high tolerance for speculative views. In the absence of the Soviet ideological compass, these entanglements of old and new ways of thinking enabled both the rational and the irrational to co-exist in the same individual, hence the example of Ilyumzhinov. Furthermore, eclecticism suited Ilyumzhinov’s general disposition, and he was happy to mix various religions with politics. Acknowledging that his spiritual activities fitted his cosmist vision of running Kalmykia, Ilyumzhinov explained to Rossiyskaya Gazeta in 1996:

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Our official doctrine says: “Citizens of Kalmykia are responsible for everything that is happening on Earth.” The ideology that we preach in schools, to all people in the republic, is that “We are children of one Earth. We have one god—Christ, Mohammed, Buddha.” With this task (i.e., improving life through preaching), I think, we are managing well.25

Ilyumzhinov did not restrict himself to supporting traditional religions, which he sees as indispensable to strengthening the moral fabric of society, but went further. He opened the doors of his small provincial republic, which became an arena for all sorts of strange occult events, to Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Salvation Army, Adventists, and Moonies, among whom Moonies present an interesting case, not least because of their influence on Ilyumzhinov’s thinking. The Moonies are followers of Sun Myung Moon, a Korean-born founder of the Unification Church—officially named the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity—which is best known for organizing mass marriages. At the age of 16, Moon was allegedly contacted by god who asked him to bring the Kingdom of God to mankind. In 1950 Moon fled from North Korea to South Korea where in 1954 he founded the Unification Church. In the early 1970s, having set up his multimillion-dollar empire, Moon began full-scale missionary operations in the United States and in 1992 he officially confirmed that he is the Messiah or the Lord of the Second Advent. Central to Moon’s doctrine is his prophecy that the world will have “humanity as one family” and be governed by a single world government. On their arrival in Kalmykia in 1993, the Moonies, directed by their convention that God works through designated central figures, established a close relationship with the leaders of the republic. Soon the coordinator of the International Fund for Education of the Unification Church in Kalmykia, an American citizen called Enrique Ledesma, rented a room on the sixth floor of the House of Government26 just above Ilyumzhinov’s office on the fifth floor. In his 11 November 1995 interview with Izvestiya Ilyumzhinov announced: “I am revealing some secrets to you. In the third millennium, there will be a single world government and the world will be ruled in succession by the representative of the various signs of the Zodiac: 12 years the Tauruses, 12 years the Arieses, and so forth!”27 Having found a common language with the president, the American missionaries were quick to implement in many schools a new subject called “My world and I” to educate youth in the spirit of the “planetary family.” In conjunction with this, the Ministry of Education of Kalmykia simultaneously organized a series of methodology courses for secondary school teachers to prepare them for the subject.

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Ilyumzhinov was also one of the first regional leaders to appreciate the power of “political technology” (polittekhnologiya), a new way of doing politics in Russia which consists of adopting Western-style political messaging techniques and managing elections, but with an authoritarian curve. As early as March 1995, in one of his interviews Ilyumzhinov boasted: “As a person who is acquainted with the technology of power, I now can do whatever elections I want to. The outcome of the percentage will be exactly as I set it to be.”28 Image conscious as ever, between 1993 and 2000 Ilyumzhinov gave more than 130 interviews to Russian newspapers alone, appeared on dozens of television programs, and published books with such messianic titles as The President’s Crown of Thorns (1993), Kalmykia in the Course of Radical Reforms (1995), Kalmykia the Land of Spirits (1995), and For the Power of Wisdom in Greater Russia: Ideology of Wisdom (1998). He also announced a series of media-savvy projects, one more ambitious than the next, including the construction of a spaceship launching facility in Kalmykia, the reallocation of Lenin’s mummy to Elista, and the digging of a geographically transformative canal to connect the Black and Caspian Sea, just to mention a few. He also invited the Dalai Lama to live permanently in Kalmykia, asked Michael Jackson and Madonna to perform in Elista, and offered a job to the legendary Argentinian football player Diego Maradona to coach the Kalmyk football team (none of these projects materialized). As in a Rorschach test, Ilyumzhinov could appear to be anything an observer wanted to see. He was a capitalist, an anti-Westerner, a chess master, a witch, an eccentric, a gangster, a visionary, a cosmist, an Eurasianist, a Buddhist, the youngest regional leader, among many other things. THE ENLIGHTENED AMORPHOUS BEING Many Kalmyks describe Ilyumzhinov’s leadership in the 1990s as kharizmaticheskiy or “charismatic.” The label makes sense, not only because Kalmyks themselves saw him as such, but also because Ilyumzhinov mixed political and religious leadership in his activities. According to Max Weber, charisma refers to the attribution of a supernatural gift of the body and spirit. Charisma, by its very definition of a “divine gift,” cannot be learned or taught; it can only be born or bestowed on. By virtue of charisma, the possessor, who is likely to have an enthusiastic, zealous, charming, and fearless personality, is distinguished from others and treated as an extraordinary, exemplary person and a natural leader. People attracted by the power of charisma join the group of followers in a state of excitement and dedication.29 Whilst the Christian notion of charisma predates Weber, what he did was to secularize this notion by applying it to modern secular

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leaders in the context of the sociology of authority and obedience. Weber distinguishes three pure types of obedience to authority, namely charismatic obedience (when people obey their leader’s personal charisma), traditional obedience or obedience to traditional authority (when people obey because obedience is perceived as a tradition, i.e., something that has always been done), and legal-rational type of obedience (when people obey the law and bureaucracy). In Weber’s scheme, the first type stands in opposition to the other two types of authority for these two types can be temporarily overridden by a charismatic movement, although the charismatic movement itself transforms into the legal-bureaucratic type of organization, which Weber describes as “the routinization of charisma.” If we recall Gumilev’s “passionarity” (passion or cosmic energy that some people possess, which makes them attractive to others) and “complementarity” (a feeling of mutual attraction among members of the same group), it can be argued that these two concepts are similar to Weberian “charisma” in the sense that they all seek to explain why some people are more attractive than others. But here is where their similarities end. Gumilev’s and Weber’s explanations differ from each other both in terms of political agendas and the topics they cover. Aimed at analyzing the birth and death of ethnic or collective bodies, “passionarity” and “complementarity” presuppose for collectives two diametrically opposite outcomes (either glory/birth or downfall/death), rendering these concepts highly politicized. By contrast, Weber’s “charisma” deals with general questions of authority and obedience among members of society; thus it is more suitable to the analysis of individual cases. One also needs to remember that these diverse concepts are the ideas of scholars representing differing intellectual traditions, who lived under different political regimes, and who had different research agendas. This does not mean, however, that these three concepts cannot be used concurrently in the analysis of dislocated societies that undergo deep social transformations. In fact, for Weber, charisma is the key source of authority at times of distress, when traditional and legal structures have collapsed, as was the case in the aftermath of the demise of the Soviet Union. Whilst Weberian charisma is also useful when analyzing charismatic movements in the secularized European context, there already exists a body of literature from other parts of the world suggesting that in many societies the three Weberian types of obedience may exist not in pure but in mixed states.30 The example of post-Soviet Kalmykia presents a distinctive case. Many of the Weberian characteristics of charisma were present in Ilyumzhinov during his presidential campaign and during the first several years of his presidency. In 1993 the people of Kalmykia belonged to a republic which was undergoing tremendous economic, political, social, and ethical distress (in other words, when the traditional and legal-rational types of authority were in crisis). People were

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excited by Ilyumzhinov and saw in him a panacea for the disturbed situation. As many Kalmyks recall, people followed their presumed savior in a state of dedication that seemed to have little rationality. Following the election, by virtue of his new bureaucratic post, Ilyumzhinov also acquired the other two types of Weberian obedience to authority, traditional and legal-rational, which enhanced his charisma. His control of public obedience, however, did not end there. As a man persistently claiming to be connected to the supernatural—thus positioning himself in a purely religious context—Ilyumzhinov also possessed what is known in theology as religious charisma, which makes people follow their leader out of religious considerations. As a person with super-abundant cosmic energy, Ilyumzhinov also fitted the Gumilevian type of Eurasian leader who is expected to initiate a “passionarian push” to transform backward people into a powerful ethnos. Whilst, from sociological and Eurasianist points of view, one’s charisma can be seen to encompass all these characteristics, there are other angles from which one can examine charisma. First, from a psychological point of view, charisma can be defined as a “cognitive bias” for it displays all signs of being such. Like other biases, charisma appeals to human feelings, is ingrained in our psychology, and is fundamentally irrational. This does not mean that charisma is inherently bad, for it may have an evolutionary advantage for society in that obedience to authority (be it in the case of children trusting their parents or individuals admiring an authority figure) sustains hierarchies that are indispensable for in-group loyalty and unity. Thus, psychologically, we cannot but be influenced by charisma. Charisma is, to invoke Daniel Kahneman’s theory, a value processed by “System 1 thinking” (i.e., the experiencing self, which is a sense-making machinery in our brains that helps us navigate the world by simplifying and generalizing information at the level of the subconscious). Second, from an anthropological point of view, we recognize that it is not only the set of qualities that a person possesses that makes them charismatic. Rather, as a social phenomenon, charisma is a relationship in which engaged observers recognize qualities they admire, which are often highly culture-specific. What is admirable for one group may not be so for another; or what is admirable for one group at one time may not be so at another time. If a Westerner today earnestly claims that he communicates with the cosmos, people would only laugh at him and wonder whether he is on medication. But in Kalmykia in the 1990s, such a claim was likely to elicit, if not outright admiration, then at least careful consideration, especially if it came from a figure of authority. This is exactly what Ilyumzhinov did. He claimed that he was connected with the cosmos and practiced divination and hypnotism. “You know, no matter what I say to local people, I hypnotize them at the unconscious level. I do the same with Russians from other regions.

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Around the republic, I create a positive extra-sensorial field, and it helps me in all I do,” Ilyumzhinov confided to an Izvestiya correspondent in 1995.31 Ilyumzhinov, of course, not only talked about cosmism or pseudoscience, but he also pushed the buttons of such sensitive feelings as national humiliation (cultivated during the Soviet period) and millennial fantasies in which the last shall be the first and the lowest be the highest. Ilyumzhinov openly articulated what was hitherto suppressed but shared by many. In this, he seemed to speak for the entire nation and many identified with him. Recognizing in Ilyumzhinov’s pronouncements, posture, and deeds their innermost dreams and wishes, large numbers of Kalmyks followed their “savior,” imitating his energy and optimism. B. Ubushiev’s complaint, published in Elistinskie Novosti on 3 April 1993, is indicative of the pre-election euphoria in Elista, which would only be amplified thereafter: What is really happening now? You are walking on the street, and an acquaintance bumps into you, asking, “Why are you not voting for Kirsan?” When you answer, “Good day! I have my own head [and opinion]”—he rushes up as if he wants to beat you up, and sometimes this happens as well.

At the height of his popularity, Ilyumzhinov was recognized as a bodhisattva (an enlightened being who postpones his Buddhahood in order to save others) by members of the local Buddhist Kagyu-pa school and as one of the embodiments of Tsagan Aav (a local deity in charge of the Kalmyk nation, animals, and land) by the Kalmyk neo-Buddhist community Vozrozhdenie. Their minds clinging to the vanishing Soviet world, their feet uncertainly grounded in the ever-changing post-Soviet reality, many saw Ilyumzhinov as akin to a Messiah, the restorer of their national pride, and a blessed one with the Midas touch who could turn everything into gold and good fortune. Ilyumzhinov’s self-promotion fueled the myth—in interviews he described himself as an amorphous high entity that freely floats through space-time, reincarnating as Attila or as Chingis Khan, in his wake building and destroying civilizations.32 Able to induce simultaneously several kinds of obedience, Ilyumzhinov attracted a devoted following of every taste, belief, and conviction. As befits a charismatic leader, Ilyumzhinov had a mission (to turn Kalmykia into a “second Kuwait”), a vision (to strengthen the Russian state and fix the world with the help of Kalmyk razum or universal wisdom), and a claim that he was guided by the supernatural. His seemingly easy mingling with both Russian and world religious and political leaders as well as his subsequent election in 1995 as president of FIDE were further proof for his followers that he indeed possessed extraordinary qualities. Ilyumzhinov is an example, albeit

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extraordinary, of how in Russia today “charisma” and “passionarity” in tandem can turn a mortal into a nebulous savior. I have been to Ilyumzhinov’s public talks on several occasions in Elista. I also met him twice in the summer of 2018 in Moscow—the first time at the Ritz Carlton Hotel on Tverskaya Street, and the second time when the next day I went to interview him in his office. What immediately caught my eye about him during our first meeting was his wrist watch covered with dozens of small diamonds glittering playfully under the chandelier. That evening, I had a quick introductory chat with Ilyumzhinov following a meeting he had with a group of entrepreneurs, including a delegation from an African country. Late in the evening, I heard later, the African delegates were treated to the services of high-class prostitutes in the best tradition of Russian nouveau riche hospitality. During both meetings, I was impressed, and at some moments even awe-struck, with Ilyumzhinov’s unabashed optimism and incredible stories. The master in the art of charm and seduction, Ilyumzhinov changes his color with the ease of the chameleon: one moment he is like a Delphic oracle, sitting and throwing out impenetrable prophecies; the next moment he resembles a passionate storyteller of pie-in-the-sky dreams; and in no time he turns into a character from Kalmyk folklore called Kedya Ovgn “Kedya, the old man,” a ruthless trickster who plays the fool to beat the powerful and wealthy; as soon as the camera is off, his once lively and grinning face morphs into a cold, uninterested surface. At the beginning of 2019, I had the opportunity to talk to one exiled Russian oligarch, once Russia’s wealthiest man, who ran afoul of Vladimir Putin, at a conference on Russia at Oxford University. He admitted that he had similar feelings about Ilyumzhinov: In the 1990s in Moscow we did not have many Rolls-Royces around. One day I was looking out of the window into the street to see a Rolls-Royce parked [in front of my office]. Curious, I asked whose car was it. I was told that it belonged to one Kirsan Ilyumzhinov. That is how I came to know him . . . What is interesting about him is that he would tell me incredible things with a dead serious face. But as soon as he left, I could not help thinking that he was making fun of me. Ha, ha, ha.

NOTES 1. “More Than Just a Pawn in a Game: Chess Chief's Bold Move to Visit Assad,” The Independent, May 1, 2012, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middleeast/more-just-pawn-game-chess-chief-s-bold-move-visit-assad-7704393.html.

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2. “Space Oddity: Russian Chess Chief (and Ufologist) Visits Gaddafi,” TIME, June 14, 2011, http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2077498,00.html. 3. According to Ilyumzhinov, he earned $10,000 a month at a time when the average salary in Russia was lower than $100 per month. See Ilyumzhinov, Ternovyi Venets Prezidenta, 140. 4. Soldatov and Borogan, The New Nobility, 14. 5. According to the Russian writer Svetlana Kudryavtseva, among Vanga’s guests were many prominent Russian politicians as well as aides to the leaders of various political parties, such as Zhirinovsky (Liberal Democratic Party of Russia), Zyuganov (Communist Party of the Russian Federation), and Yavlinsky (Yabloko Party). See Kudryavtseva, Fenomen Yasnovideshchey Vangi. 6. Vzglyad, August 4, 2009. 7. One of the best-publicized robberies that Stalin pulled off was the 1907 Tiflis bank robbery. On 26 June 1907 Stalin and his associates carried out an armed robbery using bombs and guns in the city of Tiflis (today Georgia’s capital Tbilisi). The robbers got away with 341,000 rubles (the equivalent of more than $4 million in 2020), leaving behind forty dead and fifty injured. Other activities that Stalin and his gang carried out to raise funds for the Bolshevik cause included minor robberies, running a protection racket, counterfeiting currency, and kidnapping the children of wealthy figures for ransom. On young Stalin, see Montefiore, Young Stalin. 8. Galeotti, The Vory. 9. White, Understanding Russian Politics; Galeotti, The Vory; Varese, The Russian Mafia. 10. Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy, 104–62. 11. Viktor Erofeev, “Dirty Words,” New Yorker, September 15, 2003. 12. The Soviet army had brutal dedovshchina practices whereby junior conscripts were systematically bullied, both physically and sexually, by senior conscripts. Dedovshchina continues to this day. 13. “Kirsan Ilyumzhinov: Mne naplevat’ na narod,” Krymskaya Pravda, June 10, 1998. 14. Ilyumzhinov never gave the promised $100 banknotes to anyone. 15. The King of Saudi Arabia does not have a son with this name. 16. “Kirsan Ilyumzhinov: Mne naplevat’ na narod,” Krymskaya Pravda, June 10, 1998. 17. “Kirsan Ilyumzhinov: Ya za diktaturu ekonomiki,” Trud, March 3, 1995. 18. “Kirsan Ilyumzhinov: Suverenitet—tot zhe natsionalizm, kotoryi ottalkivaet natsii drug ot druga,” Chelovek & Kar’era, no. 2, September 1993. 19. Later that day, Aizen, barefooted and on horseback, made the following announcement in front of the Government House to the astonished public: “Soon will start the Third World War. European cities will be lying in debris. Moscow will cease to be the capital of Russia, St. Petersburg will be flooded. Wars and cataclysms will spare some oil-poor parts of the globe: Canada, England, Australia, and some regions of Russia, including Kalmykia.” In “Astral’nye opyty kalmytskogo prezidenta,” Izvestiya, November 11, 1995. 20. “Mirazh,” Moskovskiy Komsomolets, September 6, 1995.

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21. Ilyumzhinov personally reveres the number 7. In his book For the Power of Wisdom in Greater Russia he writes: “Seven Buddhas, Seven Creators, Seven Spirits. ‘7’ is the beginning of the world. Therefore, people of the first epoch of humanity revere 7.” See Ilyumzhinov, Za Vlast’ Razuma na Velikoy Rusi, 59–60. 22. Vzglyad, August 4, 2009. 23. Deutsch Kornblatt, “Russian Religious Thought and the Jewish Kabbala,” 76. 24. Carlson, No Religion Higher Than Truth, 152. 25. “Kirsan Ilyumzhinov: Ya provozglasil diktaturu zdravogo smysla,” Rossiyskaya Gazeta, April 25, 1996. 26. “Kalmykia: Vpered, k pobede munizma!” Izvestiya, June 8, 1997. 27. “Astral’nye opyty kalmytskogo prezidenta,” Izvestiya, November 11, 1995. 28. Oglaev, Kirsanovshchina, 167. 29. Weber, Max Weber: Selections in Translation, 226–50. 30. See Feuchtwang and Mingming, Grassroots Charisma. 31. “Astral’nye opyty kalmytskogo prezidenta,” Izvestiya, November 11, 1995. 32. “Kirsan—khan, ili pochemu v Kalmykii vse lyudi schastlivy,” Komsomol’skaya Pravda, November 13, 1997.

PART IV

State Ideology of Kalmykia

Figure 4. “The procession of the gold-bearing ants.” Source: Dmitry Sandzhiev

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Ants are tiny, but they dig mountains. (Kalmyk proverb)

Cosmology is generally understood by anthropologists to be a synthesis consisting of the “native’s” thought, narratives of sky and earth, gods and people, and morality.1 In other words, cosmology refers to people’s worldviews about nature, sky, Universe, and the ways humans should live and behave in the vast expanse of space. Stephen Toulmin’s evaluation of cosmology is revealing: Ever since human beings first began to reflect about, and to discuss, their situation within the world of natural things, their most comprehensive ambition has been to talk sense about the Universe as a Whole. In practical terms, this ambition has reflected the need to recognize where we stand in the world into which we have been born, to grasp our place in the scheme of things, and to feel at home.2

In its broadest definition, cosmology does not only refer to traditional cosmological knowledge but encompasses any system of knowledge and belief through which humans seek to understand the natural world. In this sense, it also incorporates modern cosmologies and worldviews. In the case of Kalmykia, there are myriad contemporary cosmologies and worldviews consisting of both traditional knowledge and the most modern ideas about cosmic energies and forces that affect the lives of humans. Unlike traditional cosmologies per se, modern cosmological ideas explain the connection between humans and nature by using “scientized” concepts (such as passionarity, the noosphere, universal wisdom, energy) that serve to connect energies in nature with human energy. Analytically speaking, no modern cosmology, including Kalmyk ones, is a single narrative that is fixed but is rather a fluid and overlapping set of concepts. 193

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In chapter 1 we discussed the Soviet/Russian marketplace of imagination, which can be visualized as an overarching intellectual and moral environment where various “pools of ideas” in the form of movements, ideologies, cosmologies, conspiracies, and myths continuously interact and compete with each other. Like all other pools, cosmologies behave in two ways: externally, they interact with other pools; internally, they have diverse branches, some new, others old, that operate on an evolutionary scale whereby various ideas and concepts wax and wane in popularity, transform but never entirely disappear. This allows various networked individuals or groups to choose and construct what we might call private cosmologies. If we examine the Russian marketplace of imagination, it is possible to argue that, whilst obviously different, a traditional cosmology and a political ideology have two important features in common that make them potentially interchangeable, under the right conditions. Both cosmology and ideology refer to “bodies of ideas forming the basis of concrete actions and decisions” and both imply “universal or cosmic laws” that govern human life. This special status given to action-oriented or world building philosophies—i.e., systems of knowledge that enable an idealized conception of the world to be applied to concrete actions with a view to building that idealized world— has its roots, as discussed above, in a Russian tradition which strives for an all-encompassing synthesis and a holistic worldview (chapters 2, 3, 4, and 6). The possibility of a cosmology becoming a political ideology becomes more feasible under the following condition. In Russia the production of ideologiya (“ideology”) has since the Bolshevik Revolution been the privilege of a tiny minority consisting of political elites and expert ideologists representing the state, whereas the production of cosmologies as such has never been clearly monopolized by any group of people. This means that any system of knowledge purporting to hold “the universal truth” and aimed at changing the world, be it a cosmology or whatever, may potentially become a state ideology, provided this knowledge is processed according to an established procedure: it should be appropriated by political elites; legitimized by/ as a “science”; branded as ideologiya; communicated to the masses through state-controlled channels; and sustained by intense media exposure and propaganda. This is what President Ilyumzhinov and his State Ideologist Alexei Nuskhaev attempted to do—despite their ideas being cosmological in a folksy sense, they branded their worldview an ideology and not a cosmology. This chapter discusses the content, analysis, and implementation of Ilyumzhinov’s ideology of wisdom—a system of ideas aimed at restoring a “cosmic order” and ushering in the Golden Age to Russia-Eurasia and the world—which can also be described as a “cosmological” ideology. Assembled from seemingly incompatible, but popular, ideas derived from diverse sources—such as cosmism, Eurasianism, ecological anxiety,

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neo-paganism, local beliefs, and a millennial fantasy of a world turned upside down—this cosmological ideology extols the Kalmyks as a tiny, but wise, ethnos destined to lead Russia-Eurasia and humanity as a whole. Its teachings are outlined in the textbook For the Power of Wisdom in Greater Russia: Ideology of Wisdom (1998), according to which, the Golden Age, or the “lost paradise,” can be restored by Kalmyks through diligently self-inculcating the so-called “ethno-planetary way of thinking” (etnoplanetarnoe myshlenie), the idea being that the Kalmyk ethnos has to rid itself of narrow provincialism and learn to think long-term on a planetary scale, if it is to fulfill its bright cosmic destiny. This way of thinking can either be learned from “the wisdom of elders” or absorbed from the landscape of Kalmykia where it has been deposited in the form of invigorating cosmic energy. Devised by a group of Kalmyk and Russian philosophers led by Ilyumzhinov and Nuskhaev, it was officially the state ideology of Kalmykia until Ilyumzhinov’s resignation in 2010. ALEXEI NUSKHAEV Alexei Nuskhaev, the main proponent of Kalmykia’s state ideology, was born in Altai krai, Siberia, in 1945. In exile, the Nuskhaevs’ life was riddled with hardship and passed in extreme poverty. When Alexei was only a year old, his father died. After the Kalmyks were pardoned, his family returned to Kalmykia where Nuskhaev completed secondary school and went on to study at Volgograd Medical Institute. Afterward, he worked as an anesthetist at the reanimation unit in a hospital in Elista. In 1978 he received a candidate degree from the All-Soviet Scientific Research Institute of Normal Physiology of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR, in Moscow. During his student years, Nuskhaev started writing poems and short stories. Later, when he became a member of the Union of Writers of Kalmykia, two of his stories were turned into plays and performed at Kalmyk National Theater. In 1991, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Nuskhaev was laid off work, at which point he decided to practice alternative healing in Elista. To supplement his income, he also engaged in humiliating petty trade on the street, which made him value the spiritual over the material. Being a curious, spiritually tormented, and poetically inclined man interested in the paranormal, ethno-psychology, and theater, Nuskhaev became fascinated by many hitherto suppressed movements and pseudosciences, including Eurasianism, cosmism, Theosophy, and especially Russian neo-paganism.3 When the Eurasian Academy of Life was established in Elista, Nuskhaev joined its team in the capacity of Great Teacher and Doctor of Vedic Studies to conduct research into the history of two Eurasian

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peoples—the Russians and the Kalmyks. In the best tradition of Russian neopaganism, in which personal spiritual experience is considered an important technique to study the world, Nuskhaev spiritually researched dark, unknown pre-history by using his lively imagination and shedding light on “glorious facts” in Kalmyk and Russian folklore. Influenced by Gumilev’s theory of ethnogenesis, Nuskhaev concluded that the Russians and the Kalmyks are the two most superior, intellectually progressive, and “genetically passionarian” peoples on Earth. During his search, Nuskhaev claimed to have come into contact with cosmic aliens. Nuskhaev soon caught the president’s eyes, too. Impressed by his Eurasian patriotism, occult knowledge, subtle intuition, and cosmic ideas, in 1995 Ilyumzhinov invited Nuskhaev to become his personal advisor and for this purpose created the post of State Secretary for Ideology (Gossekretar po Ideologii). The former anesthetist accepted the offer and set about resuscitating this time not unconscious bodies but the spiritual energy of the Kalmyk ethnos itself. Ilyumzhinov tasked his state ideologist with helping him formulate a new state ideology, a new social compass for humanity, that would transform the Kalmyks from a peripheral people into the banner holders of Russia-Eurasia and humanity. In his article “Our task—the formation of a new way of thinking” (1995), Nuskhaev wrote: In my view, the ideology [that we are working on] is new and it works . . . on completely new principles . . . The generator of this ideology is the President himself . . . [If] the task of the previous ideology was to enslave the brain of the masses (massovyi mozg), the task of this new one is the opposite: to free it, to give a breath, oxygen of ideas, and imbue contemporary people, the youth in particular, with the ability to have a normal worldview . . . Lately the President has often talked about the planetary way of thinking (planetarnoe myshlenie). This is the approach of the politicians of world class . . . Further economic development, its perspectives, viability as well as a modern way of thinking cannot progress in a state of territorial borders. The final phase of this process will be the liquidation of all borders all over the world . . . A thought is a stream of energy. The energy of thought does not accept limited space; therefore, our thoughts are what the planetary energetic space—i.e., the [noo]sphere of Vernadsky—consists of. The thoughts of the Kalmyks, who live in Kalmykia, but who think in the united energetic space, automatically enter the planetary energetic space through “energy carrying arteries” and become its structural component. In other words, planetary thinking will inevitably lead any leader to achievements in economy, information, politics, and culture at the global level.4

Guided by divine cosmic revelations, during his career as state ideologist, Nuskhaev produced a long list of works—about twenty-four short books in total—which pleased Ilyumzhinov, who often boasts of his own ability to

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utilize “planetary thinking.” What is also peculiar about Nuskhaev’s writing style is that he continuously generated and experimented with new words, ideas, and concepts, which rendered many of his writings not only conceptually vague but often unintelligible to the uninitiated. Whatever some people might have thought or said about Nuskhaev’s writing or his job title, Ilyumzhinov fully supported his state ideologist. On 22 July 1998, in an interview with a correspondent of Khalmg Unn (“Kalmyk Truth”), Ilyumzhinov explained: I have entrusted the theoretical part of this job to the State Secretary for Ideology A. L. Nuskhaev. Some people still cannot understand why I have created this post, which does not exist anywhere except in our republic. I needed a man who can think and summarize. Therefore, the post was created specifically for him. The ideologist is busy writing projects which are recognized by international scholars, and we are putting them into practice step by step.5

THE STATE IDEOLOGY The textbook of Kalmykia’s state ideology authored by Ilyumzhinov was published in 1998 with the title For the Power of Wisdom in Greater Russia: Ideology of Wisdom (Za Vlast’ Razuma v Velikoy Rusi: Ideologiya Razuma), the target audience being, as the cover of the book states, “scholars, philosophers, the intelligentsia, the youth, and also bureaucrats and politicians.” In the foreword, signed by fifty-six members of the Eurasian Academy of Life, it is pointed out that: “spiritual and peaceful Kalmykia has persistently been creating the worldview and ideology of the third epoch of humanity and managed to achieve a lot in this respect.” The book indicates that Ilyumzhinov’s main collaborators are a group of philosophers from the same Academy: The President of the Eurasian Academy of Life, Petr Andreev, is ready to change the global financial system. Another member of the same Academy, Viktor Yanitsky, is working on the Veda-physics of global processes, not to mention that the Teacher of the Eurasian Academy, Alexei Nuskhaev, who is working on the description of the creation of the world, has revealed the truth about the [flying] Great Pyramids and has been writing about the philosophy of the Golden Age.6

The book indicates that the scientific editor is “Alexei Nuskhaev—the State Secretary for Ideology of Kalmykia, Academician of the International Informatization Academy UN,7 Teacher, Doctor of Vedic Studies of the Eurasian Academy of Life.”

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In the book the author explains the reason why he proposed this ideology: Since we do not have [today] any ideology in Russia, the country has been as if without wings, “crawling” . . . [for] ideology systematizes human life and makes it whole. . . [For some time] I have been vividly seeing the contours of an approaching universal chaos, and [I know that] it is impossible to overcome it without ideology . . . First of all, what I needed was wisdom or a philosophy. Intuitively, I understood that I had to turn to the wisdom of my ancestors . . . I also understood another thing. Based on this wisdom I needed to create only one ideology, that of life and about humans. Speaking in modern terms, I needed an adequate theoretical basis that is essentially different to all those that have been out there so far. Therefore, naturally I needed a suitable person who could think, analyze, and has experience in scholarship and [his own] worldview.8

Later, Ilyumzhinov admits that, after finding such a man in the person of Nuskhaev, he gave Nuskhaev the following directives regarding the construction of a new state ideology: I gave the ideologist three important research tasks: (1) to investigate the problem of worldview (problema mirovozreniya), (2) to try to carry out spiritual research (dukhovnoe issledovanie) on the entire history of humanity, and (3) to comprehend the wisdom of our people as well as that of others.9

As is clearly indicated, Ilyumzhinov not merely required a new state ideology to replace the obsolete Soviet one but proposed an entirely new approach to history and human life. By describing his ideology as “natural,” Ilyumzhinov argues that it reflects the immutable “laws of life of the Creator.”10 The notion of razum, or universal wisdom, underpins this ideology. Unlike the cosmist Vernadsky’s interpretation, Ilyumzhinov’s understanding of razum is that it is a universal, self-sustaining, intelligent energy of divine origin which flows through the noosphere and has the capacity to be handed down through generations as “the wisdom of ancestors.” In Ilyumzhinov’s view, razum has an absolute quality without inner contradictions and it exists in, so to speak, a timeless, unchangeable form. What was true at the dawn of civilization is equally true today and will be so in the future. Having said this, Ilyumzhinov’s noospheric eternal razum operates almost as a substitute for an interventionist and demanding god in that it regulates the lives of mortals on Earth. Hence when humans forget about razum, it harshly reminds them by sending earthquakes, natural calamities, misfortunes, and economic disasters. Given its cosmological or quasi-religious character, one should not be surprised at the egocentricity of the doctrine preaching that earth-shaking events, at the tectonic level, have a human connection. Seen in this light, the

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entire human history, including its achievements, triumph, and decline, is the history of the relationship of humans with the noospheric razum. In Ilyumzhinov’s understanding, time, which underpins human history, is essentially cyclical, an idea which fits the Kalmyk traditional view, which derives from an era when society did not experience innovation across generations and it made sense to understand time as a circle going backward and forward forever. This also fits the Buddhist philosophy of the cycle of rebirth and reincarnation. According to Ilyumzhinov, the dawn of civilization, the Golden Age, was followed by the Silver Age (when people began to alienate themselves from razum, which led them to perdition), and then the Copper Age (when people lost razum and became corrupt and materialistic, drowning in greed, alienation, and sin), before returning to the Golden Age. In this circle, the wisdom of ancestors is timeless, and people do not need to invent anything new but to hold on to what they already have. The textbook’s version of natural history and of humanity is even more metaphysical. The Universe did not evolve from simpler elements but was created by the seven stars in the constellation of the Great Bear. Humans did not evolve from toiling primates either but from dew-like energetic beings that first appeared in the noosphere. Having spent millions of years in incubation, these beings descended on Earth about 47,000 years ago by passing through flying Great Pyramids. Unable to suppress his excitement at this groundbreaking revelation, the author exclaims: I find it necessary to point out that the truth about Great Pyramids has been revealed . . . What an interesting time for Russia and Kalmykia, oh dear! The eternal razum of the Creator has descended on human consciousness in Greater Russia. This is what is happening, dear compatriots!11

Paying homage to Eurasianism, the book asserts that the first humans to descend to Earth in energetic flying pyramids were, in succession, the Russians, the Kalmyks, and the Indians. When the first humans stepped on the land, the Creator gave each razum, or universal wisdom, so that they lived in harmony with each other and nature. The first two peoples, the Kalmyks and the Russians, settled in Greater Russia, which is “the heart of Eurasia.” These two peoples together established the first great civilizations, as described in the Russian epos The Tale of Igor’s Campaign and in the Kalmyk heroic epic Jangar,12 and contributed to the noosphere which derives most of its energy from Russia’s great rivers, seas, forests, and the barren Kalmyk steppe. By handing down razum from one generation to the next, the first people lived by egalitarian principles “according to the laws of the Creator” until they gradually lost razum around 1 AD. Fortunately for the Kalmyks, however, the loss of razum was only partial for this cosmic energy

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was absorbed and preserved by the Kalmyk steppe for posterity. This explains why the Kalmyks are the smartest people in the world. Ilyumzhinov proudly points out in this regard that: The Kalmyk steppe emanates invisible rays of eternal razum. A person who lives in the Kalmyk steppe, sooner or later, him/herself or through his/her grandchildren, is destined to become wise.13

Whilst the Russians were once the first and “the most important people to inhabit Earth,” today it is time for their younger siblings, the Kalmyks, who also happen to have grown wiser and smarter, to revive the common ancestral wisdom and unite Russia-Eurasia under a single ideological umbrella. As Ilyumzhinov indicates, he created this ideology as much for Greater Russia as for Kalmykia. Despite its natural and spiritual superiority, Russia-Eurasia today lags behind the West in material terms. In contrast with wise Eurasian peoples, the Westerners—Ilyumzhinov asserts—were never present at the beginning of humanity, which can be inferred from their inclination to neglect their ancestral wisdom. Although “naturally stupid Europeans and especially even more stupid white Americans” may have hugely benefitted from materialistic attitudes that encourage the collection of objects, technology, and money, Western civilization is destined to degrade and self-destruct at the beginning of the third millennium: The development of humanity has already stopped—so to speak pulled over—by the end of the twentieth century. The technical leap of the USA which outpaces the rest [of the world], for example, has ended, according to the confession of Clinton, by the fact that 40 percent of 8-year-old Americans cannot read . . . half of the students in New York and Washington do not know who the President of America is, the institution of the family barely survives on financial contracts, the Americans neither know nor are interested in the wisdom of their ancestors. The ideal of a young American is tons of muscle, money, and a pistol at the hip. The only effective “instrument” in human relationships in American society is dollars, mutual responsibility based on dollars, mutual love based on dollars.14

In fact, due to the universal loss of razum, it is not only the West but the rest that became entrenched in a developmental deadlock which will plunge the world economy into global recession and eventual collapse. The reason for this is that, having forgotten razum, governments all over the world generated a variety of faulty worldviews, ideologies, and corrupt social orders, such as “capitalism, communism, socialism, and social-democracy,” that brought nothing but moral regress. The ultimate implication of this degradation is that it will instigate the “revolt of the eternal razum” which manifests itself in the

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more frequent occurrence of natural disasters and cataclysms. In connection with this prospect, the writer confesses his personal mental agony: Before my very eyes, like in a video screen, flash tragic pictures of transcontinental floods, falling down airplanes, piles of trains turned upside down, a Moscow house falling into an abyss, the Afghanistan earthquake, forests and fields being devoured by fire, collapsed mines, and everywhere—corpses, of children and grown-ups alike, crying elderly people, mothers and sisters . . . The revolt of the eternal razum is a disastrous, natural revolt on Earth.15

The only way to prevent global cataclysms and degeneration is to formulate a true ideology that explains “the laws and the meaning of life.” If the spiritually and mentally superior Kalmyks follow their fate and accomplish it, history will lead humanity back to the Golden Age. Produced primarily for Russia-Eurasia, the ultimate goal of Ilyumzhinov’s ideological doctrine is to unite all earthlings and nature into a single, global ecosystem, governed and protected by the power of universal wisdom. Whilst in his textbook Ilyumzhinov does not explicitly discuss who shall form this global razumnyi government, it is not difficult to infer for whom this role is reserved in the new millennium. Whether one likes it or not, the future role of Kalmyks is already predestined. When the Kalmyks are ready, the following will happen: The Seven Buddhas have created three sons for the future humanity. One of them is Jangar. After uncountable cosmic years, having passed through the Milky Way many times, and having multiplied himself while in the [noo]sphere of V. I. Vernadsky, Jangar will undergo a century-long transformation in the Great Pyramids. Then he will appear on Earth among the spiritually strong and wise Kalmyks.16

HOW THE IDEOLOGY WAS PROMULGATED Historically, mass education was of paramount importance in the dissemination of state ideology in the Soviet Union. Ilyumzhinov’s vision of producing new generations of young Kalmyks who, transformed by “the wisdom of ancestors” would flood into Russia-Eurasia to inspire and reinvigorate that land, led him to introduce a special curriculum in several experimental schools in Elista. A new pedagogical methodology called “ethno-pedagogy” (etnopedagogika), developed on a teaching technology known as UDE (Ukrupnenie Didakticheskih Edinits, “The Enlarging of Didactic Units”), was applied in the teaching of virtually all subjects. The main idea behind UDE,

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formulated by Kalmyk scholar Purvya Erdniev, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, is that all subjects, including mathematics, literature, grammar, history, and so on should be taught based on paired units consisting of opposites. That is, in mathematics subtraction should be taught together with addition, in grammar lessons words should be taught with their antonyms. According to Ilyumzhinov, UDE is the key to reviving razum: “The teaching technology of the Academician P. M. Erdniev is the real key to the revival of the natural intellect of humanity, natural spirit of humanity, and natural razum of humanity.”17 Among the experimental schools, secondary school No. 8 in Elista was singled out to align its curriculum to “the ethno-planetary way of thinking,” although it did not include the ultra-fantastic concepts of flying pyramids and human evolution from energetic droplets. In Nuskhaev’s words: The experimental secondary school—complex No. 8 named after Nomto Ochirov in Elista—works on the most promising program. Having spent about five years on it, the school already shows good results. The experience of this school lays a foundation for the development of a systematized model of education and upbringing of children which can be scaled up across the republic.18

Whilst ideologies are configurations of ideas, the ideas that make up ideologies are not necessarily accepted by target audiences as a package; they are often internalized in bits and fragments through storytelling and rituals. In Kalmykia outside the experimental school walls, the state ideology was also disseminated by bits and fragments through mass media, public-information campaigns, and new festivals19 in the context of cultural, religious, and linguistic revival. Whilst general topics—such as a call to respect “ancestral wisdom,” revive the Kalmyk language and religion, study the national epic Jangar, be proud of being Kalmyk, be ready to lead Eurasia—were met with universal approval, some of Ilyumzhinov’s unadulterated cosmist-Eurasianist-spiritual ideas were never fully appropriated by the populace, at least as an economic strategy to revive the republic. They were not challenged either, not least because these ideas were part and parcel of Ilyumzhinov’s ideological vision and charisma and were already popular among certain segments of the population. Those who were not interested in purely esoteric topics, or the way in which Ilyumzhinov synthesized them, preferred either to remain silent or delegate responsibility for understanding these hard-to-comprehend ideas to professional ideologists. Tatyana, a Kalmyk woman who says she understood the ethno-planetary message from the outset, derided some of her compatriots during our interview in the summer of 2010:

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When the ethno-planetary way of thinking was first proclaimed, many people did not understand it. Some even made fun of it. But if you analyze, it is a good idea: we need to start thinking differently, if we are to solve global problems. We should not think using only local categories but have to rise above that and become earthlings (zemlyane). That is the idea. And this way of thinking suits the Kalmyks, not least because we are a really smart people in general. I am saying this to you not to brag, but because it is a fact. Statistically speaking, many Kalmyk children study at the best universities in the country, and Russian professors themselves acknowledge this. That there is a saying that the Kalmyks are the smartest people in Russia only second to the Jews has a foundation.

In answer to my question regarding the ethno-planetary experiment in secondary school No. 8, Tatyana, who is the director of a less prestigious secondary school in Elista, replied: Back then the school was on everyone’s mind. Indeed, good teachers were assigned there. I know that the ethno-planetary way of thinking is related to the fact that we are now entering the phase of post-industrial development and globalization. You understand that, right? In principle, the idea is that you need to learn to think not locally, not at the level of your culture, but at the global level . . . Whether we want it or not, in principle we will all arrive at this point.

According to Tatyana, Ilyumzhinov’s ideology should be evaluated not as “people think of it today,” but in the context of the 1990s: Back then it was [considered to be] normal. Do you know why? Because it was a time of post-perestroika, when the Soviet Union had collapsed, when people were left to fend for themselves, when nihilism was spreading. At that time [the fact that the Kalmyk leaders came up with] the ethno-planetary way of thinking was a form of self-defense [for Kalmykia], a strategy of survival, and a way of declaring ourselves. I think it was the time when we had to announce our existence loudly. At least I thought so.

In the 1990s faith in Ilyumzhinov was so strong that those who openly questioned his ideas and conspiracies, however ridiculous, were not only frowned on but in some cases ostracized. Mocking the national leader and his ideas was tantamount to mocking the Kalmyk nation itself. Svetlana, a Kalmyk single mother who lived in a small village during the years of Ilyumzhinov’s popularity, is one of such non-conformists. During our interview in Elista in 2011, where she had moved, she told me about her life in her native village in the 1990s: I did not accept him (i.e., Ilyumzhinov) from the very beginning. I was against him because his promises were too good to be true. Out of nothing how can

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you possibly build all these factories, plants and make Kalmykia a “second Kuwait”? It is just impossible. Do you understand this? People were so taken by his promises that they refused to see the reality. People in my village used to say to me, “You should not talk loudly in this manner, be quiet and reasonable.” They thought that I went crazy and started to keep distance from me. They made up all sorts of nasty allegations about me. I was not the only one who suffered. My boys were also subject to horrible treatment . . . They were just schoolchildren. They used to come home and tell me how some of their teachers had mistreated them.

Svetlana criticized Ilyumzhinov’s populist promises and openly ridiculed his ideology of wisdom. Bullied by her co-villagers for insulting the national hero, she gradually became politicized and drifted toward the oppositionists. NOTES 1. Barth, Cosmologies in the Making. 2. Toulmin, The Return to Cosmology, 1. 3. Russian neo-paganism is a branch of contemporary Russian nationalism which glorifies the pre-Christian past and accuses Christianity of the brutal destruction of the legacy of the Great Ancestors. Advocates of Russian neo-paganism assert that the misfortunes of the last millennium in Russia are the result of the betrayal of the “original” pre-Christian Slavic treasury of ancestral wisdom. Russian neo-paganism is also distinguished by the imperialistic goal of rescuing and restoring the Russian Empire. Shnirelman, Russian Neo-Pagan Myths and Anti-Semitism. 4. Nuskhaev, “Nasha zadacha—Formirovanie novogo myshleniya,” 52–56. 5. “Ya zhivu ne radi vlasti,” Khalmg Unn, July 22, 1998. 6. Ilyumzhinov, Za Vlast’ Razuma na Velikoy Rusi, 109. 7. Established in 1990, the International Informatization Academy is an NGO, and has a branch at the UN headquarters in New York. 8. Ilyumzhinov, Za Vlast’ Razuma na Velikoy Rusi, 86–87. 9. Ibid., 90. 10. Ibid., 91. 11. Ibid., 26. 12. The Tale of Igor’s Campaign is an anonymous epic poem written in the Old East Slavic language. The poem gives an account of a failed raid by Igor Syatoslavich (1151–1202) against the Polovtsians of the Don River region. Jangar is an epic about the adventures of a mythical hero named Jangar, the ruler of the paradisiacal land of Bumba. 13. Ilyumzhinov, Za Vlast’ Razuma na Velikoy Rusi, 40. 14. Ibid., 10. 15. Ibid., 19. 16. Ibid., 25. 17. Ibid., 64.

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18. Nuskhaev, “Nasha zadacha—Formirovanie novogo myshleniya,” 54. 19. For example, in the 1990s Ilyumzhinov introduced a new national holiday called the Festival of Tulips with the aim of “uniting ecology with Kalmyk cultural heritage.”

8‌‌

Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, The Fallen Angel

Not every glittering thing is gold. (Russian proverb)

In preparation for my first trip to Kalmykia in 2009, I spent a year conducting online research on the republic as part of my graduate course at university in England. Influenced by my readings, I expected to find a modern place, an oasis of prosperity in the middle of nowhere, presided over by a charismatic leader who was universally admired by his progressive and happy people. Little did I know that I would find just the opposite. I traveled from Moscow by bus for twenty hours and arrived in Elista at midday. My first impression of Elista was the sandy wind, the ferocious sun, and windows in the Khrushchev-era boxy apartment blocks covered in silver foil to protect the interior from the soaring temperature. In the middle of the steppe, Elista was a sleepy, provincial, Soviet-era town with no swanky restaurants, shinning shopping malls, innovative technology centers, or buzzing business districts that one may expect to find in a “second Kuwait.” The town was littered with decaying apartment buildings, small kiosks, debilitated dining halls, and dozens of small and medium-sized monuments celebrating legendary heroes, Buddhism, and folkloric themes. The central boulevard accommodated an open-air market consisting of rows of makeshift stalls and pavilions, some roofed with rotten boards, scrap metal, and old rags. Amongst these signs of underdevelopment and poverty towered billboards of grinning Ilyumzhinov posing with the Dalai Lama or holding Pope John Paul II’s hands. This chapter recounts the story of Ilyumzhinov’s fall from grace and contrasts the discrepancy between the reality of Kalmykia’s underdevelopment and Ilyumzhinov’s self-promoted image of a genius and a world-class salesman who made Kalmykia prosperous. Topics covered in the chapter 207

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include the rigged presidential election in 2002, the ensuing unrest, and Ilyumzhinov’s public disgrace in Kalmykia. Let me now return to my trip to Elista in the autumn of 2009 and relay what I encountered. Three flags—those of the Russian Federation, Republic of Kalmykia, and FIDE—fluttered on top of the House of Government, locally known as Belyi Dom or “White House.” The central square in front of the White House, named Lenin Square, was adorned by a towering statue of Lenin facing the Buddhist Pagoda of the Seven Days. Not far from the square I had lunch at Sputnik Café, which served unworldly poor quality food. Unimpressed with my initial findings and with high expectations dashed, on my first day in Elista I asked students for advice about the best place for a night out, anticipating a more uplifting time. I was advised to go to a site locally known as pyanaya ulitsa (“street of drunkards”), which was a dark street lined on both sides with half-empty makeshift dining halls with neon signs flickering on the roofs. Inside were sitting men with dull, menacing faces served by timid young waitresses. The next morning, I continued on my sightseeing tour of the city and visited several “Oriental” structures that were meant to reflect both national heritage and Kalmykia’s aspirations to a spiritual future, including the Temple of the Golden Abode of the Buddha Shakyamuni, the Golden Gates, and the Temple of Holy Refuge (known also as Sakyusn Sume) on the southwestern outskirts of the town. Despite the initial setback, I quickly came to enjoy my time in Elista. I rapidly made good friends and even got myself a street pet—a short-legged mongrel with a long body whom I named Sosiska (“Sausage”) that lived with a pack of stray dogs in the city center near the White House. On seeing me on the street, Sosiska would run up to me, the fur on his underbelly lightly touching the ground, to receive his much-deserved food award consisting mainly of a belyash (pancake with meat) or a hot dog. There were inconveniences, too. As soon as I settled in my dormitory, I found out that the whole building was infested with tarakany, or cockroaches, despite the fact that the building had recently been renovated. Apart from the small agile brown type that give away their presence by protruding vibrating tentacles or bottoms from every crack or gap or pipe, the most disgusting were the black ones that were so big and clumsy that not only did they not climb the wall, but in the dead of night I could literally hear them hitting each other on the floor. By day, some of the pests even chased students. Horrified and appalled, when I complained about the situation to the International Office of my host university, a woman told me, with a note of sarcasm, that tarakany zdes’ kak domashnie zhivotnye (“cockroaches are like domestic pets here”). Little did I know that I was soon to be chased by bigger and more sinister “stalkers.” I was put under the surveillance of the FSB that, as I found out later, assigned a couple of agents in dark trousers to monitor my movements.

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The fact that in 2004 all regional branches of the FSB were placed under the direct jurisdiction of the First Section, the FSB’s main spy-hunting section headquartered in Moscow, made spy-hunting an important activity of agents in rural Russia. Obsessed with finding spies and traitors, which was also seen as a quick way to promotion, Kalmyk FSB agents were willing to go hunting for proverbial flies with an elephant gun and jumped at every chance to expose foreign visitors. Not that I was an important figure worth watching. My sudden appearance in Elista, I suspect, must have provided local spies with much-needed work in an otherwise remote and obscure region where foreigners rarely venture. In fairness, my affiliation with a British university and my “hanging out” with a wide range of locals must have made the FSB doubly suspicious so that when I visited my acquaintances in their offices in one of the local research institutes, the entire research staff was later rounded up and interrogated by intelligence officers. In fact, espionage-related paranoia, reintroduced to society by Putin and normalized by the media, was so widespread that many ordinary people also suspected me of being a spy working for the British MI6. In Elista, where I spent most of my time, people were as paranoid about Western-linked spy infiltration as they were afraid of the FSB, and many—especially activists and journalists—assumed that they were constantly watched, their internet browsing monitored, and their phones tapped by the secret services. Nevertheless, what people in Elista and its environs complained about most were poverty and unemployment. On average, wages were 6,000–8,000 rubles ($200–270) a month. Other common complaints included the lack of cultural activities, the poor quality of medical services, the high level of outward migration, and the bad condition of public buildings. According to a survey conducted in 2009 by the local Institute of Complex Studies in Arid Zones, the top four social problems that respondents said most worried them were: poverty (76.8 percent of respondents said this), unemployment (72.4 percent), inflation (56 percent), and corruption (47.4 percent). In fact, by the early 2000s, when Russia’s overall economy began to improve, fueled by the country’s enormous petroleum reserves and soaring oil prices, it had become clear that Ilyumzhinov’s way of doing local politics was running into trouble. Ilyumzhinov, who had campaigned in 1993 on his managerial and salesmanship skills, came to be seen, with his cosmist outlook on world’s problems, as a disastrous leader. Without down-to-earth political beliefs or backbone, and cocooned in his privileges, it seemed as if Ilyumzhinov inhabited a parallel upside-down reality. By parroting their leader, his cabinet resembled a roost of liars, thieves, and incompetents. Despite Ilyumzhinov’s continuous announcements of economic triumph, the Kalmyk economy was on the verge of collapse. The Corporation “Kalmyk and I” was liquidated. The traditional manufacturing and cattle-breeding

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sectors had been dissipated at the expense of ill-fated speculative operations. Convinced that trusting Ilyumzhinov was no longer worth the candle, people in their thousands were leaving the impoverished republic for good. Not only did Elista lack drinkable tap water but it was plunged into electricity blackouts. Ilyumzhinov had promised to turn Kalmykia into a shining beacon of modernity and an oasis of plenty and prosperity; yet he even could not keep the lights on nor provide the people with basic clean water. Ilyumzhinov and Nuskhaev were like two peas in a pod, but gradually grew apart until one day, disillusioned and embittered, the latter resigned from his post on the grounds that the former was not closely following his advice. In order to turn things around, Ilyumzhinov soon approached one of his cultural advisors to offer him the vacant position of state ideologist. The cultural advisor told me in the summer of 2010: [In 1995] I had a meeting with the President [and told him that] . . . people cannot exist without ideology, without morale, without values. I said that this was very important, if we wanted to preserve our culture. We had an amazing opportunity [to formulate a new state ideology] when there was no ideology in Russia anymore. There was an empty space. Everybody was busy grabbing during the privatization. I told the President that we had the opportunity to bring order, to have a national ideology . . . Otherwise we would perish . . . Having listened to me, Kirsan Nikolaevich appointed me as his [mere] cultural advisor for he did not know me well. He appointed Nuskhaev [as state ideologist] . . . Nuskhaev was interested in global, ambiguous themes. In four years he understood that he was a “plug in the barrel” (i.e. an unnecessary person), wrote an angry letter, and resigned. At that time, I was a [cultural] advisor. The President offered me the position [of state ideologist], but inside I was a bit discontented because when in 1995 I had proposed this topic [of ideology], he did not appoint me [as state ideologist] and had already spoilt the ideology . . . I simply replied that this topic had long been annihilated, worn out, and falsified. He said, “It is a pity. We have created such a post, even announced [that somebody will soon be appointed].” I asked him a question, “What do you think this post is for, Kirsan Nikolaevich?” He replied, “I am tired of this mess. You yourself once said that the people need culture, traditions, order, morality, and discipline.” I asked, “Have you really realized this now?” He said, “I am tired of this mess. Yes, we need to do this.” I said, “In that case I cannot say ‘no’ to your offer.”

On his appointment, the (former) cultural advisor was appalled with how corrupt and disorganized things were in Ilyumzhinov’s administration. But determined not to look a gift horse in the mouth, let alone complain, he set out to work, trying to convince himself that he could single-handedly fix the republic with his new state ideology. Filled with arrogance and a feeling of omnipotence, but ultimately vulnerable because of his dependence on

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Ilyumzhinov, the new state secretary for ideology proposed a radically new ideology based not on futuristic cosmic ideas but on more down-to-earth notions drawn from Kalmykia’s mythical past. He wanted to revive Kalmyk clan names, introduce polygamy, open public kitchens, and turn Kalmykia into a nomadic utopian society, as depicted in the heroic epic Jangar. But rather than making important decisions and talking to powerful people behind closed doors in expensive hotel rooms, the state secretary for ideology soon found himself downgraded, collecting the crumbs from the table. His role was to entertain Ilyumzhinov’s guests by raising toasts to his glory and throat-singing which entails the singer generating two pitches simultaneously, both high and low. The state secretary resented his job and often felt low, but it was the last straw when Ilyumzhinov failed to keep his other promise to support the state secretary’s candidacy in the local election to the State Duma in Moscow. Outraged by the regime’s irredeemable lies and not wishing to keep flogging a dead horse, the state secretary for ideology swiftly made his side move and openly backed the oppositionists. He was sacked and unceremoniously thrown out of his state-subsidized cottage. Badma is another man who worked close to Ilyumzhinov but later ran afoul of him. A former member of Ilyumzhinov’s 1993 presidential campaign team and an ex-minister, Badma blames Ilyumzhinov for “sucking in all the wealth from Kalmykia” and “turning it into the poorest and most corrupt region in Russia.” Driven by insatiable greed for money, power, and fame, Ilyumzhinov, according to him, is like “the devil”: I know Ilyumzhinov quite well, we used to meet on a daily basis . . . He is interested in the paranormal. Strange ideas come to his mind just like that. They come to him spontaneously . . . He is inexplicably lured toward fame, which he will try to attain by any means, even by wrongdoing. For him, the most important thing is to “crow out” (kukareknut’, i.e., draw attention to himself), to say something odd like “I’ve been to outer space.” He constantly thinks of how to say something shocking. He wants people to talk about him, to admire him, to worship him. More, more, and more . . . I personally think that he must have developed this syndrome because of a childhood trauma when he was chased by other boys who wanted to beat the shit out of him.

This does not, however, mean that all those who were close to Ilyumzhinov demonized or turned against him. A small circle consisting of his relatives, former classmates, and friends who benefited from his rule remained loyal to him. Forming a mutual admiration society, these individuals spent time together, shared food, and supported one another in protecting their privileges. In Kalmykia there is even an anecdote. One day a man catches

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a wish-granting goldfish who asks what his wish is. The man says bluntly: “Make me Ilyumzhinov’s former classmate.” THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION In 2002, on the eve of the presidential election in Kalmykia, Ilyumzhinov commissioned a survey of his popularity which showed that a bedevilingly low 4 percent of those surveyed were willing to vote for him. But what was truly astonishing was the outcome of the election itself. As if by magic, Ilyumzhinov’s popularity rose overnight from 4 percent to 47.2 percent during the first round and to a further 57.2 percent in the second round, winning him the presidency. The magic was “political technology,” which had, in fact, been used by Ilyumzhinov on a limited scale in previous elections in 1993 and 1995. The experimental center of this “technology,” however, was Moscow where it had been perfected, securing the seemingly hopeless Yeltsin’s 1996 election and bringing the virtually unknown Vladimir Putin to power in 2000. The stars of the new era were spin doctors, the unseen puppet masters behind the scenes, who could create post-modern pseudo-democracies, manipulate public opinion, and manage elections. Masterminded in the Kremlin’s corridors of power—not without the help of a team of American political strategists who were deployed to secure Yeltsin’s 1996 victory against the popular Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov—the “technology” consisted of endless polls, surveys, focus group studies, image remaking, and “administrative resource.” Developed to assist Yeltsin’s failing democracy by devising undemocratic means, the “technology” ensured that there would be no possibility of a serious challenge to incumbents, at both the federal and regional levels, at any time in the future. Kirsan Ilyumzhinov’s “gray cardinal” was Batr Elistaev, who shares similarities with Kremlin spin doctors Gleb Pavlovsky and Vladislav Surkov.1 Fresh-faced, handsome, and playful with words, Elistaev, like Surkov, studied in a theatrical school and, like Pavlovsky, is a historian by profession. Guided by his interest in psychology and spirituality and seeing social life as a theatralized drama, during perestroika years Elistaev received religious education in Leningrad and Buryatia, and later participated in the revival of Buddhist rituals in his native Kalmykia. In 1991 he set up the Youth Buddhist Center in Elista, which later evolved into the Dharma Center. From 1992 to 1996, he was aide to the Shajin Lama (the Supreme Lama) of Kalmykia. Afterward, he was hired by Ilyumzhinov as an advisor on religious matters and was later put in charge of newspaper and media propaganda. According to Elistaev, whom I interviewed in July 2011 in Elista, “Kirsan is a post-modern man (chelovek post-moderna)” for whom “all concepts, including religions, are

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elements of a game.” Elistaev assured me that it is never possible to pinpoint Ilyumzhinov’s true religion nor describe Ilyumzhinov’s political position as being that of “a democrat, or a radical, or a Stalinist, or whatever” for postmodern people have their own closed circles and “live in their own world, somewhere up there” apart from ordinary mortals who only think inside the box. By contrast, Elistaev likes to think of himself as someone who thinks outside the box. Specializing in “political technology,” the new religion of power, Elistaev, aided by a PR team appointed from Moscow, came up with an ingenious plan to secure victory for his unpopular boss in the 2002 election by inviting the Dalai Lama to Kalmykia and artificially popularizing the Tibetan topic for the sake of the election. Throughout the late Soviet period, Soviet theater had two official directions, depending on the regime of the day. During the Brezhnev period, the official line was to create on stage the perfect illusion of a perfect society. During Gorbachev’s perestroika, the theater functioned as a tool for propaganda to improve citizens’ behavior in a socialist society. Well-versed in the art of theater, Elistaev used both of these functions in his new “political technology” project where the main role was given to the Dalai Lama. Like a theatrical director with a magnifying glass, Elistaev set out to create his fantastic vision of society by enhancing certain fragments of reality in which the electorate was considered participants and not just passive spectators. Having visited Kalmykia in 1991 and 1992, the Dalai Lama was already popular among the population, and Elistaev set up a stage of smoke and mirrors where he could harness this popular sentiment by associating Ilyumzhinov with the institution of the Dalai Lama. For the election campaign, Elistaev launched a patriotic youth movement called “Forward, Kalmykia!” (Uralan Kalmykia!) and organized public projects involving Buddhism, such as a hugely popular mantra-reading campaign “Let’s meet the Dalai Lama by reading the mantra um mani padme hum 100 million times” across the republic. To add more color, visuality, and symbolism to his projects, Elistaev staged rituals of the building of mandalas (geometric figures from sand representing the Universe in Buddhist symbolism) by Tibetan monks whom he whisked in from India and had all settlements decorated with posters of the Dalai Lama holding Ilyumzhinov’s hands as if symbolically giving his blessing to Kalmykia’s leader. In May 2002, a two-day historical conference, “Material and Spiritual Foundations of Kalmyk Statehood within Russia,” was organized under the aegis of the Kalmyk Ministry of Education. The conference discussed such topics as the historical role played by the Dalai Lamas in conferring a mandate on Kalmyk leaders. As can be expected in an authoritarian place, whilst denying media coverage to all other candidates, the local TV, radio, and newspapers competed with each other to out-praise Ilyumzhinov, often misinforming readers. The

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names of articles published in Izvestiya Kalmykii in this period alone give the flavor: “The world’s leading chess countries support Ilyumzhinov’s candidacy” (9 August); “The chess players of Arab countries for the current President of FIDE” (21 August), “Mongolia is rejoicing with Ilyumzhinov’s achievements” (30 August) among them. To pull the wool over the electorate’s eyes, Ilyumzhinov also resorted to tried and true tricks. He announced a series of media-oriented projects, including his plan to build a joint Kalmyk-Italian wool processing plant, a new electricity station in Elista, new petrol and gas pumping rigs, and an international port on the Caspian Sea to connect East with West (none of these projects were realized). He also organized mass shows with Russian music and sport stars, gave away cars to veterans, and held a popular competition called “My grandmother” whose winners were sent on romantic holiday to Paris. To galvanize the elderly electorate to vote for him, Ilyumzhinov revived his “trains of memory” to transport former exiles to the places of their youth. By using several techniques simultaneously, consisting of extensive ballot-box stuffing, supplemented by religious manipulation, misinformation, bribery, patriotic appeal, and administrative coercion of state employees, Ilyumzhinov won the election. The majority of the vote came from state employees, Caucasian diasporas (where elders decide whom their communities should vote for), and elderly citizens.2 By contrast, the majority of Kalmyk youth, middle-aged people, and local Russians (who constitute a considerable force if united, and provided their votes are counted truthfully) voted for the other eleven candidates, splitting their votes. A product of Russian political technology, this type of election rigging has become a standardized practice across Russia. THE DOWNFALL Ilyumzhinov’s victory, however, was short lived. Accusing him of rigging the election, the oppositionists decided to put their differences aside and unite against their common adversary. Rallies and hunger strikes demanding a rerun of the election soon swept across Kalmykia, culminating in the establishment of the Emergency Congress of the People to demand Ilyumzhinov’s unconditional resignation. On 10 September 2004, during its second conference, the Congress appealed to the people of Kalmykia: The future of our republic depends on each of us. By cynically disregarding constitutional rights and obligations, Ilyumzhinov’s regime has been clinging on to power by any means for the past 11 years. Concerned only with their own enrichment, the authorities are oblivious to the interests of the people and

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republic. The regime is riddled with corruption and is deprived of professional skills. Its activities lack prospect, strategy, or wisdom.3

An all-republican anti-Ilyumzhinov demonstration held in Elista on 20–21 September 2004 was the climax of the movement. On the morning of 20 September, Elistinians awoke to see their town teeming with unknown Russian policemen and soldiers. Semyon Ateev, a Kalmyk lawyer, describes that day in his book Cruel Punishment (Rasprava, 2005) as follows: On the day of the demonstration, the movement of oppositionists [from rural areas] to Elista was hindered by soldiers holding automatic guns. . . Particularly strict measures were taken in Elista, where soldiers of the Internal Ministry and the OMON (i.e., special police forces) from Astrakhan, Rostovskiy, Kemerovskiy oblast, and Stavropol krai were posted. The main roads were blocked with school buses carrying armed policemen. Particularly large forces were deployed near the House of Government and in the central square of V. I. Lenin . . . But despite these measures, by 3pm about 1,500 people managed to gather for a demonstration. By 5pm about 2,000 more people arrived from rural areas, skipping through the police barricade.4

A protest was staged in front of the central Elista Hotel. The next day demonstrators moved to Lenin Square in front of the House of Government. As evening drew in, fearing for his security and taken aback by what was unfolding outside his office, Ilyumzhinov sneaked off to the one-room bungalow of one of his most trusted psychics. Rather than the comfort of his guarded home, he preferred to entrust his life to divine protection. While the humiliated president licked his wounded pride on the sofa of his psychic protector, what happened next in Lenin Square caught even the most seasoned oppositionists off-guard. At around midnight, the Russian police hastily marched on peaceful demonstrators from all sides, encircling them, and set out to beat everyone to the ground. Svetlana (who was ostracized by her co-villagers for mocking Ilyumzhinov in the 1990s) recalls her experience that evening: It was really scary to be there. Although we were without weapons, without knives, without sticks, they (i.e., government-controlled newspapers) wrote later that we had. Our hands were bare. When the police advanced people laid down on the asphalt. This means that we would not resist, right? Regardless, the police started to beat people, including the women.

Here are the blow-by-blow accounts of other participants who relayed their stories to Sovetskaya Kalmykia.5 Konstantin:

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After the demonstration, the policemen that were standing behind the iron bars stopped to let people in or out of the square. Since there was nowhere to go in Elista for the night, we, around 400 people, decided to spend the night in the square. All of a sudden, soldiers in helmets began to push us away . . . To avoid bloodshed, we laid down on the asphalt. The women began to read prayers. Cries and groans [of the protesters] were soon blotted out by the noise of police batons landing on the people. I only understood that I had had my arm broken and my back bleeding when inside [the police] car I saw others who had more serious wounds than me. Vasiliy: After I did not vote for Ilyumzhinov [in the 2002 election], I was sacked from my work. It was not only me who ended up without work, but my son and daughter were also laid off. This unlawful act made me come out to the square and participate in the protest “Kalmykia against Ilyumzhinov.” When they (i.e., the policemen) started to beat us, I crouched on the asphalt. But they just carried on. I saw how an old man, who was lying next to me, was beaten up by a policeman who was screaming “Take it, you bitch!” Then the policeman stepped over and went on beating others. Now I hate Kirsan even more!

Those who managed to stand up and escape were chased by the police and beaten on the streets, as one participant described, like “stray dogs.” Many more were alleged to have been taken to the outskirts and tortured. In his Cruel Punishment Ateev gives 179 names out of possibly hundreds who “were subject to cruel, inhumane and humiliating treatment at the hands of the law enforcement organs.”6 The unprecedented cruelty of this crackdown on a peaceful demonstration irreparably tarnished Ilyumzhinov’s reputation and credibility in the eyes of many people who blamed him for “sending Russian troops against his own people.” Overnight, in their eyes he turned from the “Dalai Lama’s approved leader” into the biggest national traitor and a dictator. Kalmykia was boiling over like a samovar, its lid poised to explode any moment. The tension, however, quickly subsided due to a development in Moscow at the end of 2004, when Putin, who had just started his second term, abolished the local institutions of the presidency along with republican presidential elections in all territories of Russia. Leaders of the republics, according to the new law, were degraded from “presidents” to “heads of republics” (glava respubliki) who had to be appointed by the Kremlin. In the hope that Putin would finally help Kalmykia get rid of corrupt and unpopular Ilyumzhinov, opposition leaders collected signatures—74,000 in total, according to Valeriy Badmaev, the main editor of Sovetskaya Kalmykia—against the incumbent and sent the petition to Moscow. In 2005 Putin, however, appointed Ilyumzhinov head of

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Kalmykia, giving him a mandate until 2010. Ilyumzhinov’s stay in power— interpreted by the people as Moscow’s approval of Ilyumzhinov’s style of governance—not only created an atmosphere of fatalism but also channeled the popular anger and frustration from Kalmykia to the federal government in Moscow, and—strangely—not to Putin himself who was increasingly regarded by the Kalmyks as the savior of the Russian state. Seeing no point in fighting Ilyumzhinov, the opposition dissolved like a sugar lump in hot tea, and many activists soon left Kalmykia in search of work, rendering the movement hopelessly divided. The fall of Ilyumzhinov from near messianic status was brutal. Whilst the power of charisma initially depends on beliefs in revelation, heroism, and popular expectations, ultimately it depends on the level of satisfaction of its followers. The mission of the charismatic leader must subsequently prove itself by showing that those who follow fare well. If the mission fails to benefit the followers—either materially, or spiritually, or both—it is obvious that the person endowed with charisma is not the one. Then it is likely that their charismatic appeal will falter in the eyes of their followers. Furthermore, the unrealistically high standards that the charismatic politician might once have embodied will drag his image to the opposite extreme. Max Weber studied charisma in the context of the sociology of authority and obedience. As mentioned before, charisma can also be researched from other perspectives, including that of behavioral psychology. In psychology there is a well-known phenomenon called the “halo effect,” which is a widespread cognitive bias when people evaluate others based on limited information—attractive looks or voice, for example—and generalize it to other unrelated, personal qualities of those under evaluation.7 The “halo effect” is based on such cognitive mechanisms as substitution, short cuts, and intuition, which create coherence where there is none. A simple example of this powerful effect is when someone slim and attractive can be judged by others as also being intelligent, trustworthy, successful, and so on. Attractiveness, however, does not have to be necessarily physical but can be influenced by prejudices and ideologies. Since charismatic people are seen as very attractive in this sense, they are often abundantly imbued with the “halo effect.” During the first years of his rule, Ilyumzhinov enjoyed this effect and was perceived by many as an enlightened being—for some he was a Buddhist bodhisattva, for others a divine embodiment of the national god Tsagan Aav. Just as attraction and affection cause people to depart from rationality, fear and repulsion produce a similar effect. The opposite of the “halo effect” is the “horn effect” when people allow what they see as an unattractive trait in someone to influence their overall judgment of that person. That is what happened to Ilyumzhinov when he lost his charisma. In the eyes of his followers, his “halo” turned into exceptionally long “horns,” and he came to be widely

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perceived as nothing but: “a pathological liar, a homosexual, a crook, a coward, an impotent, a drug addict, and the devil himself.” During my initial stay in 2009–2010, I was astounded by the scale of Ilyumzhinov’s unpopularity across Kalmykia. Here are several extracts from my interviews. Tsagana, Emeritus Professor at Kalmyk State University: Our “radiant” one (luchezarnyi, i.e., Ilyumzhinov) lies openly, and nobody dares to say that he is lying. Everybody is afraid for themselves. My husband and I have recently read an article where Kirsan says that he alone lifted the entire republic and that before him we had nothing. We were simply in shock. We felt as if he was denying what we have built, what we have worked for all our lives. And it is so sad! Our lives seemed as if erased altogether . . . Before Ilyumzhinov we had proper industry. I am not an economist, but I can say that we had a brick factory, a cement factory, two sausage factories, and so on. Many, many factories. None of them are left today! We used to travel to Moscow by train, every day there were flights from Elista airport to other parts of the country.8 Vladimir, a Kalmyk artist: We Kalmyks of course love the story of The Teller of 72 Lies (a Kalmyk fairy tale about a liar who earns his living by telling lies), but Ilyumzhinov, if you pardon me, lies just too much. . . Recently, I read a newspaper article saying that Ilyumzhinov proposed to bury the stuffed carcasses of the first Soviet dog-astronauts, Belka and Strelka, in the territory of the Central Temple. These carcasses are kept in a museum somewhere in Moscow . . . How could he say it? He must be crazy or something. The ground of the Temple is sacred, and he is proposing to desecrate it?! In the past, he also wanted to transport Lenin’s mummy to Elista. Instead of being obsessed with the mummies, he’d better think of the living. Valeriy, a Russian scholar: In 1995, after the presidential election, the Khural (i.e., Parliament of Kalmykia) wanted to make him a life-long President of Kalmykia. Thank god, they did not carry out this plan . . . In 2003, for example, according to the opposition newspaper, he spent only 12 days in the republic. He spends more time abroad than in Kalmykia. He flies all over the world, “vibrates his tongue” (treshat’ yazykom, i.e., speaks empty words), and promises a bright future. But we cannot see any bright future as of yet. Villages are dying out, people migrating. . . Over the years he has completely ruined the republic.

I would like to point out that not all people were critical of Ilyumzhinov. I interviewed several such individuals, ranging from sympathizers to active

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supporters to defenders. They were a minority, however, mainly high-ranking bureaucrats, relatives, or friends of Ilyumzhinov. One of them is Dmitry: Ilyumzhinov did not ruin the economy. It collapsed along with the Soviet Union. On the contrary, he implemented many measures to try to revive the economy, such as the establishment of an off-shore zone in Kalmykia. Chess City,9 temples, and other projects were financed with the money that he earned from the off-shore zone . . . But since the off-shore was closed by Putin, the republic was deprived of its main source of income. Today it depends totally on the federal budget. Due to developments beyond his control, Ilyumzhinov found himself deadlocked. It is easy to single out someone and say he is to blame.

There is another category of people worth mentioning who either supported or sympathized with Ilyumzhinov on religious grounds. They were a number of Kalmyk monks and lay Buddhists who appreciated Ilyumzhinov’s contribution to the revival of Buddhism. A Kalmyk woman called Dayana, a devout Buddhist, is a typical representative. A single mother of three children, she works as a cleaner in a kindergarten and barely makes ends meet. Whilst she never personally met Ilyumzhinov, Dayana is grateful to him not only for organizing the Dalai Lama’s belated visit to Kalmykia in 2004 but also for “supporting Buddhism” and “building temples all over Kalmykia,” especially the Central Temple in Elista where she is a frequent visitor. According to her: Kirsan Nikolaevich is an honest human being, a proper Buddhist, and a wise politician. Here he built the temples, laid roads, brought gas pipes to villages, built Chess City. By the way, do you know that Elista is the chess capital of the world? He is also a friend of the Dalai Lama for whom we have deep reverence. If one compares today’s Kalmykia to what was happening in the early 1990s under Yeltsin, it is as different as earth from heaven. Back then we did not receive salaries for months on end. Today, thank god, we get it on time.

When I began conducting interviews about Buddhism, I noticed that Ilyumzhinov’s appearances at Buddhist ceremonies and his effort to associate himself with the Dalai Lama had long been noted with suspicion, especially by those who remained close to the Buddhist establishment. In fact, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s refusal to give the Dalai Lama a visa since 2004 was a topic that Ilyumzhinov often brought up in his public speeches. Svetlana, a Kalmyk woman in her 50s who is a lecturer at Kalmyk State University and a practitioner of Buddhism in the Central Temple, confided to me in 2010: Buddhists whom I socialize with and who are more advanced [in Buddhist practices] say that Kirsan is more of a hindrance to [the development of] Buddhism

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than its promoter. They say that they have doubts about Kirsan. Maybe he does not want the Dalai Lama to come to Kalmykia after all? Maybe he is doing something so that the Dalai Lama doesn’t come? Who knows! If the Dalai Lama comes to Kalmykia, Kirsan can take credit for it. If he cannot, Kirsan can keep blaming the Russian Foreign Ministry. Either way he is a winner.

Fatalism was so widespread that, although I often heard people disparage Ilyumzhinov, time and again I heard the same people say that they “don’t care about Kirsan anymore.” Many people also told me that they were annoyed (on nam nadoel) by Ilyumzhinov as if he was an unavoidable inconvenience with whom one had to suffer. When I asked whether they would consider supporting opposition activists, many people replied that “there is no alternative to Ilyumzhinov,” a message disseminated by local media outlets. On 26 April 2010, Ilyumzhinov appeared on the Russian Channel One talk-show hosted by Vladimir Pozner to talk about uninterrupted economic successes in Kalmykia, the positive sides of Stalinism (when the Kalmyks were exiled), and to reiterate the story of his abduction by cosmic aliens (for transcript, see chapter 3). The next day, whomever I talked to about the program told me that they were ashamed of their leader. Gena, whom I interviewed in the morning, commented on the program: It’s a pity, of course. Now all people in Russia will think that we, Kalmyks, are all like him. Why does he not just shut up? To be honest, I am so ashamed of him . . . I hope one day the aliens will take this dickhead away for real and never return.

In October 2010, Ilyumzhinov was made to resign from his leadership position not because of his cosmic mismanagement of Kalmykia but because Russia’s President Medvedev passed a law prohibiting regional leaders from staying in power for too long. Retaining his FIDE presidency, globetrotting Ilyumzhinov drew international attention in June 2011when he flew to besieged Tripoli in the middle of Libya’s civil war to play chess with Colonel Gaddafi in front of the cameras. But it was his headlines-grabbing trip in 2012 to another troubled Middle Eastern dictator, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, that landed Ilyumzhinov in real trouble after the U.S. Treasury Department put his name on its 2015 blacklist of individuals charged with assisting or acting for Assad’s government. FIDE’s Swiss bank accounts were duly frozen, making Ilyumzhinov’s position precarious. His ego bruised, his wings clipped, and losing money, Ilyumzhinov threatened to sue the United States for $50 billion in personal damages. But more embarrassingly, during his 2018 reelection campaign for the FIDE presidency, Ilyumzhinov was caught red-handed faking his vice-presidential choice, an American chess player named Glen Stark,

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who turned out to be a fictional character. The FIDE Ethics Commission quickly suspended its former boss, putting a cross on his campaign. Ilyumzhinov’s FIDE career demise, however, was not squandered by the Kremlin which under Putin saw to it that sport again became a state affair and an instrument of international propaganda.10 Putin, himself not a chess player, raised many eyebrows when he personally intervened in FIDE’s presidential election by supporting Ilyumzhinov’s replacement—Arkady Dvorkovich, deputy prime minister of Russia. Not only did Putin lobby heads of state—on 11 July 2018, during Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Moscow, he asked Israel’s prime minister to make the Israeli Chess Federation support his political protégé—but he also used his ambassadors and the CEOs of Russia’s biggest banks and companies, who sit on the Board of Trustees of the Russian Chess Board (RCB), to influence the outcome of the election. Chaired personally by Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov, the RCB Board has the following impressive names among its members, who together control Russia’s entire defense infrastructure, economy, and media: Russia’s Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu; the Mayor of Moscow Sergey Sobyanin; the Chairman of the Management Board of Gazprombank Andrey Akimov; the Chairman of the Management Board of Gazprom Neft Alexandr Dyukov; the Chairman of the Russian Accounting Chamber Alexey Kudrin; the Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Alfa Group Consortium Mikhail Fridman; the CEO of Channel One Russia Konstantin Ernts; and the CEO of Nezavisimaya Gazeta Konstantin Remchukov. Even the gun-toting kitten-hugging psychopathic head of the Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, was involved in the game of kings by lobbying royals in some Middle Eastern countries to influence Arab chess federations. Putin’s planetary operation paid off and Dvorkovich has been elected president of FIDE, a post which he holds to this day. NOTES 1. An amateur writer and martial arts enthusiast, Vladislav Surkov (born 1962) is one of the most influential and ingenious political technologists in post–Soviet Russia. In 1999 he joined the presidential administration where he worked as deputy head for twelve years. From 2011 to 2013, Surkov was deputy prime minister and later served as Putin’s personal advisor. Surkov is credited with a postmodernist novel entitled Zero (2009) in which the protagonist is a ruthless gangster and amateur poetry scribe who manipulates the truth and bribes everyone in the service of corrupt politicians. Published under a pseudonym, Zero is believed to be part dystopian fiction, part personal confession. 2. Lidzhi-Goryaeva and others, “Sotsial’nye ozhidaniya naseleniya nakanune vyborov prezidenta Respubliki Kalmykia.”

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3. 4.Sovetskaya Kalmykia, September 16, 2005. 5. Ateev, Rasprava, 25. 6. Sovetskaya Kalmykia, October 11, 2004. 7. Ateev, Rasprava, 103–10. 8. Rosenzweig, The Halo Effect. 9. The railway line between Moscow and Elista was closed in 1998. Today an airplane flies to Moscow once or twice a week. The main transport connecting Elista with other Russian cities is buses. A bus journey from Elista to Moscow takes about twenty hours, to St. Petersburg thirty-five hours. 10. Hastily built to accommodate the 1998 World Chess Olympiad, Chess City is a fenced complex on the outskirts of Elista. Mired in corruption scandals, it was never fully completed and is to this day scattered with half-built cottages and unfinished earthworks. 11. In modern Russia, the popularity of chess goes back to the early post-revolutionary years. As Lenin was an avid chess player himself, the Bolsheviks utilized this game to raise the general cultural and intellectual level of the toiling masses. But it was not until the end of World War Two and the beginning of the Cold War that the Soviet state upgraded the ancient game of kings into new soft power and a propaganda tool in international politics, in which Soviet chessboard victories were meant to showcase to the world the superiority of Soviet ideology and people. Thus the state devoted vast resources to chess’ popularization and development. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the economy was in tatters and the country was in no mood for games with its former capitalist rivals, chess slipped from Yeltsin’s list of priorities only to be reinstated under Putin.

9‌‌

Why Do People Still Need Ideology?

Habit is a shirt that we wear till death. (Russian proverb)

For most of the 20th century, Soviet society was subjected to a ubiquitous state ideology. Amenable to all-encompassing doctrines and projects, many citizens in post–Soviet Russia have either embraced or look favorably at Eurasianism, cosmism, and other collectivist movements that they see as having potential to fill the perplexing vacuum left by the demise of state socialism. In the Soviet Union, the unrestricted intrusion of the state ideology into all spheres of social life resulted in it being subject to adaptation in each environment into which it intruded (e.g., science, art, literature, politics, the economy, youth culture, and so on). In so doing, the ideology created a multitude of positions from where it could be experienced in different ways. This not only attests to human ingenuity in creating complex worlds and imagined orders but also explains why in post-Soviet Kalmykia elites from different professional backgrounds proposed different versions of a state ideology— “ecological,” “cosmist,” “legendary,” and “cosmological” versions—as a substitute for the Soviet version. This chapter discusses the following topics: what happens when people abandon ideology; the enduring nostalgia for a Soviet-type ideology; and post–Ilyumzhinov Kalmykia. FROM INSIDE TO OUTSIDE IDEOLOGY The previous chapters examined people’s experiences of ideology—Soviet ideology and Ilyumzhinov’s ideology of wisdom—from the inside. Now let 223

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us look at what happens when people exit ideology and position themselves beyond it. According to Ernest Gellner, ideologies are systems of ideas and beliefs. Whilst ideologies are systems of ideas, not all systems of ideas are ideologies. In his opinion, ideologies are: Hypotheses full of both menace and . . . “appeal.” They threaten and they promise; they demand assent with menaces; they reclassify the morality of the believer and the skeptic; and they generate a somewhat new world. The world is different according to whether one looks at it from within or without a given ideology.1

From a psychological point of view, Gellner contends, ideologies evoke simultaneous feelings of temptation and revulsion (for believers of a given ideology, temptation overweighs revulsion). In order to be, any ideology has to exist inside some other and wider world, some other set of rules and ideas that shape the contours of the ideology. In this process, whilst ideologies claim to reveal the truth, at the same time they accept the rules, conventions, and norms of the outer world within which they operate and from which they attract clients, or believers.2 Drawing on Richard Dawkins, in chapter 1 I argued that ideas behave like memes that make up “pools of ideas” (i.e., meme pools in the form of ideologies, worldviews, conspiracy myths) that populate “a marketplace of imagination” (i.e., a memeplex). Whilst Gellner does not use these terms, his “outer world” effectively connotes what I call “a marketplace of imagination.” For the sake of argument, let us assume that every country has its own “marketplace of imagination,” i.e., an intellectual and moral environment specific to that country. Anthropologists also call it “culture.” Russia has a specific “marketplace of imagination” or “culture,” as does any other country. In the Soviet Union, this “marketplace,” however, was monopolized by a single “pool of idea” (i.e., Soviet ideology), driving all other pools underground. Under normal conditions, a culture does not impose on people what to think, but one’s embeddedness makes it difficult to think outside the culture. In comparison with Western countries, Soviet culture told citizens precisely what to think. It was only following the collapse of the Soviet system that the “marketplace” was again replenished with diversity and choice, which expanded people’s worldviews and exposed them to new ideas and stories. What this also means is that no “marketplace” is static but changes over time. As mentioned, in time, each configuration of a given “marketplace” can be seen as what philosophers call the zeitgeist (“spirit of the times”). According to this model, the demise of the Soviet Union represented a particular moment when one zeitgeist was succeeded by another.

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Among other things, what is notable about the post-Soviet zeitgeist in Kalmykia is that President Ilyumzhinov sought to revive the spirit of the previous age. Invoking Dawkins’s and Gellner’s ideas, Ilyumzhinov’s ideology of wisdom can be described as a separate “pool of ideas” (meme pool) in the form of a cosmological world that Ilyumzhinov hoped would grow and dominate the entire post-Soviet space. It derived most of its ideas from the post-Soviet marketplace of imagination. Of course, this statement becomes credible only when one detaches oneself from Ilyumzhinov’s ideology and looks at it from outside. This detachment not only gives the observer the relative freedom to analyze the subject of study from a different angle (using more what Daniel Kahneman calls slow “System 2 thinking”) but also provides a doxa-free environment in which the observer is emotionally detached from the ideology’s hidden effects (i.e., when one’s fast and emotional “System 1 thinking” is not exposed to the ideology). Hence people who lived inside Ilyumzhinov’s ideological world will have described and experienced the ideology of wisdom differently from how an outsider could describe this ideology. From an outsider’s perspective, Ilyumzhinov’s ideology offends the “outer world” against which it stands in symbiotic opposition (i.e., it both derives its ideas and opposes the “outer world”). For example, Ilyumzhinov’s “scientific” argument about the origin of humanity from dew-like energetic beings may offend those Russian citizens who believe in Darwinian evolution. To attract clients from “outside,” Ilyumzhinov’s ideology offered a vision of a new and different world order with the promise of salvation while demanding observance of his rules. To use Gellner’s words, it both attracted and repelled. Believers in Ilyumzhinov’s ideology did not necessarily share all his ideas to the same degree of conviction and dedication; many followers will have believed in some ideas, and yet not others, as was the case in the Soviet Union. In the Soviet period most Soviet people perceived the Soviet Union and its state ideology as something akin to a natural order. Just as there was no chance that gravity would cease to function, Soviet citizens similarly believed that their country would exist forever. However, like any other society, the Soviet Union was only an imagined order based on an ideological myth, and when people stopped believing in it, the country ceased to exist. Many Kalmyks might not have entertained the same level of trust in Ilyumzhinov’s ideology that they once had in Soviet ideology, but when in Kalmykia the overall promises and expectations failed to materialize and Ilyumzhinov himself became unpopular, his ideology of wisdom lost its attraction, compelling his ideological world to collapse under the pressure of the revulsion of former believers and offended outsiders. When former followers emotionally detached themselves from the bubble of Ilyumzhinov’s

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ideological world, what they saw was that the world they used to live in was different from what they thought. In Elista in October 2009 I arranged to formally interview a high-ranking bureaucrat from the press office of the head of Kalmykia, to talk about ideology. Admitting that Ilyumzhinov’s ideology of wisdom was the official state ideology of Kalmykia, the bureaucrat relayed a story: Recently, we were discussing [in the House of Government] an issue related to Tunisia, as far as I remember. We wanted to make a business deal of some sort. I asked “Why? Isn’t Tunisia far away?” to which Ilyumzhinov handed me the Steppe Codex (i.e., Kalmyk Constitution) and said that the answer was in the book. In the Steppe Codex it is written that we, the Kalmyks, are responsible for everything that is happening in the world. You see, globalization has made everything interconnected. I was so ashamed of myself for asking such a stupid question.

For any “outsider,” the bureaucrat’s question seems a fair and reasonable inquiry. However, for “insiders,” this line of questioning may appear a stupid and shameful act, as said bureaucrat himself acknowledged. Apart from a small number of people, the majority of my informants, however, did not take Ilyumzhinov’s ideology seriously. Denied the image of a reasonable leader, Ilyumzhinov’s ideology of wisdom was widely ridiculed as one of his “controversial projects” at best and as “a diary of a madman” at worst. In fact, many people, even those close to Ilyumzhinov, did not refer to it as ideologiya. When I asked Batr Elistaev, Ilyumzhinov’s former spin doctor, whether in post-Soviet Kalmykia they had any ideology, he firmly said “No.” Despite being skeptical about the suitability of cosmism or the heroic epic Jangar for the construction of a state ideology, Elistaev, nevertheless, holds a conviction similar to Ilyumzhinov that people of Russia-Eurasia, Kalmyks in particular, are destined to lead humanity. But unlike his former boss, Elistaev sees the key to global Kalmyk domination in Kalmyk Buddhism. Basan from the Union of Writers of Kalmykia, of which Nuskhaev was a member, had this to say about Ilyumzhinov’s ideological experiment: We had an ideologist, Alexei Lidzhievich Nuskhaev. He wrote a series of books on this subject . . . In his books there are global, cosmic themes, everything is linked to the cosmos, to archaic history, to gods, to semi-gods. Everything is explained from this angle.

We had a meeting in his office, a dark room fitted with shelves bulging under the weight of books. Soft-spoken and bespectacled, Basan gives the impression that he is a cautious man, more so when he sees a voice recorder. He chooses his words carefully and frowns slightly when asked

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an inconvenient question. According to Basan, Nuskhaev died of oedema of the brain not long after his resignation. To my question as to whether after Nuskhaev’s death the Kalmyk government introduced a new state ideology, he replied in a frustrated tone: “I shall put it this way. They (i.e., Ilyumzhinov and his close circle) haven’t got any ideology. Under Nuskhaev, they did not have an ideology either. They had just a declaration . . . In my view, we should have a single, I mean all-Russian, ideology, and not local ones.” Several months later, during our next audio-recorded meeting, we found ourselves again talking about a state ideology. After a long discussion, Basan concluded: Today, we do not have a single, unifying ideology that would unite the whole country. We have only “embryos” of local ideologies. In those economically powerful republics where leaders are respectable and popular, ideology works. But in Kalmykia, in my view, ideology is absent . . . It is popular leaders who should implement ideology because people listen to their respectable words, to their respectable opinions. In the past we had such leaders. They worked out the [Soviet] ideology. They themselves were exemplars. People followed them, listened to their advice. But unfortunately, we do not have such leaders today. Therefore, to say that we have an ideology would be premature.

With the confident and confrontational demeanor of a seasoned oppositionist, Konstantin, a reporter for the opposition newspaper Sovetskaya Kalmykia, made the following observation about Ilyumzhinov’s ideology: It is a nonsense. I do not believe a word of it. They (i.e., Ilyumzhinov and Nuskhaev) are crazy motherfuckers. What kind of ideology is it? Nuskhaev was a creative man, I don’t deny it. When he gained Kirsan’s confidence—perhaps, Kirsan was looking for such people anyway—Nuskhaev wanted to shock Kirsan with something . . . And he managed to shock Kirsan! Kirsan liked it . . . We were against that ideology, we ridiculed it in our newspaper. But most importantly, it was clear that there was total indifference on the part of the masses [toward that ideology]. The masses simply did not care. As for the intelligentsia for whom it was designed, they ridiculed it. They did not accept it, they laughed at it mainly because they knew who Nuskhaev and Ilyumzhinov were.

My interviews, however, suggest that Konstantin is wrong in that the population did not care, at least in the beginning. As discussed before, at the height of Ilyumzhinov’s power his ideology of wisdom was widely circulated in Kalmykia. Many people read his books and articles, and equally many found some of his cosmist-Eurasianist-spiritual ideas inspiring because cosmism, Eurasianism, and occult topics were already popular. Furthermore, with its idea of god-like razum which listens to human prayers and whims,

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parts of the ideology appealed to many religious people. Finally, but no less importantly, Ilyumzhinov’s ideology was part of his charisma and his pledge to save Kalmykia, which many Kalmyks believed he would succeed in doing. However, most of my informants whom I interviewed post-2010 not only said that they did not believe in Ilyumzhinov’s ideology but even denied that they had once found it somewhat attractive. What I witnessed was widespread memory alteration. People in general are bad at remembering their former beliefs and cannot believe that they ever felt or thought differently. This limitation is connected with human cognition in that when our worldview changes we lose much of our ability to accurately reconstruct our past state of knowledge and to recall what we used to believe before we changed our mind. Our memories become substituted with new memories3 as soon as we exit an ideological world and position ourselves on the outside. It is no secret that humans often change their beliefs, and since the narrating self continuously reevaluates and rewrites our stories, our memories (which are constructs) tend to be memories of memories (that is, constructs of constructs). With time, our memories may become so distorted that we end up “remembering” a world that never existed in the first place. “Remembering” goes hand-in-hand with “forgetting” which is a reverse operation—we may forget a real world that we once inhabited, or at least some of its aspects. Based on my interviews, I shall point to several interconnected reasons why Ilyumzhinov’s ideological project failed and people en masse changed their views, or rather their memories, of it. First, whilst Ilyumzhinov’s ideology of wisdom was designed to fill the void left by Marxism-Leninism, in theoretical terms it was never fully developed. His ideology also lacked elaborate rituals, not to mention historicized myths about Kalmyk ancestral figures that might inspire the population. Due to its incompleteness as well as the lack of any powerful hierarchical organization (for example, a political party) to systematically disseminate it, Ilyumzhinov’s ideology could not be properly institutionalized and politicized so as to create an environment where people are constantly exposed, consciously and unconsciously, to the same type of information. Hence, apart from its appearance in newspaper articles, seminars and lessons in secondary schools, his ideology never managed to monopolize enough fields (in the Bourdieusian sense) to be called a state ideology in classical Soviet understanding of the term. Second, after Nuskhaev’s resignation and subsequent death, Ilyumzhinov had neither a suitable ideologist nor an organization specifically established to further develop Nuskhaev’s vision. Half-implemented, the ideological project remained, as Basan characterizes it, a “proclamation.”

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Third, in terms of its “theoretical” content, rather than offering concrete global geopolitical strategies or economic policies for the country as a whole, the ideology of wisdom was more dedicated to scrutinizing occult and millennial fantasies and speculating on mystical knowledge through which it aspired to make a developmental breakthrough. This ideology also had a psychological dimension stemming from a feeling of collective guilt and national humiliation that subtly permeates the whole ideological text, which is not surprising given Kalmykia’s experience of socialism. One can even argue that a hidden Kalmyk fantasy of making the wrong right and redressing hurt feelings provided the basis of the entire ideological endeavor. Imagining the Kalmyks leading the Russians and Kalmykia becoming a spiritual center of Russia represents a total reversal of the existing distribution of status and power. In this vision, it is not Russia that embraces Kalmykia but Kalmykia that unites Russia under its cosmological umbrella. In this context, the assertion of spirituality also offered Ilyumzhinov, and Kalmyks in general, the opportunity to discursively turn the disadvantage of being marginalized and underdeveloped into an advantage by equating the idea of spiritual superiority with the argument that, somehow, being on the margins (which implies being more spiritual and wiser) allows people to avoid the more brutalizing aspects of modernity (associated with the metropolis). This position, harnessed by Ilyumzhinov’s ideology, explains why he defended the idea that revival in Russia-Eurasia has to begin in rural areas. This millennial-Eurasianist fantasy of revenge, however, is not unidimensional but two-dimensional in that it also sought vindication in the name of Russia-Eurasia presumably mistreated by the West. Whilst there were some kernels of truth, much of Ilyumzhinov’s ideology was false and based on faulty assumptions. Hence when the ideology proved to be worthless for improving the economic reality, its script came to be perceived more as a folk cosmology, or even a fairy tale, rather than a political plan of action based on scientific knowledge. For this reason, Ilyumzhinov’s ideas could not be effectively processed by secular institutions that verify and implement ideology. Finally, as discussed, there is a direct link between Ilyumzhinov’s popularity and the credibility of his ideas. All these reasons hindered his ideas from being incorporated within systems of domination and power without which no ideology can effectively operate. To this should be added external factors such as the recentralization of the Russian state since the 2000s, which by design does not allow any (viable) regional ideology. But this does not mean that Ilyumzhinov himself had any reason to abandon his ideology, not least because his “planetarian” way of thinking served him well by giving some sort of structure to his thoughts and actions that are truly world-spanning. As president of FIDE his lifestyle involved globetrotting, which both enriched him and earned him powerful friends in the Kremlin and worldwide.

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Inaugurated for the Kalmyk people, the ideology gradually ended up being at the service of Ilyumzhinov and his close circle, before fading away altogether out of the public eye following Ilyumzhinov’s resignation in 2010. NOSTALGIA In its modern history, Kalmykia has repudiated a state ideology twice. This, however, has not deterred Kalmyks, and many still retain a positive attitude toward an all-encompassing ideology. The key to explaining this phenomenon lies in memory, both personal and social, as well as in people’s expectations, which should be studied in connection with the concept of loss. People need a state ideology not merely for the sake of having one, but also because owning an ideology is tantamount to having a strong state and, along with it, order, protection, and confidence in the future. The real question here is about how people perpetuate this idea, given that toward the end of the Soviet Union the same people were unhappy with communism and held Soviet ideology responsible for spoiling and ruining the country. As discussed, each of us has two selves—the narrating self and the experiencing self. The experiencing self does the living and is embedded in activities of the now. By contrast, the narrating self (what we identify ourselves with) keeps scores, weaves our life stories, and makes choices based on our memories. Memories that we use to construct our life stories, however, are not reliable because the narrating self operates by retrieving only the most intense moments (of pleasure or pain) from a past episode and registering our feelings when the episode was at its end (i.e., registers whether it was a good or bad experience overall). The narrating self is blind to both duration and feelings that occurred between peak moments. In other words, we (the narrating self) do not remember what we (the experiencing self) felt most of the time in the past, and a moment that seemed painful at one time could be downgraded or invalidated later on when we are overwhelmed by a more painful or intense moment. An example: today many Kalmyks personally remember the Soviet Union as a happier place than when they thought about it on the eve of the collapse of the Soviet system because after the ensuing years of more misery and pain under Yeltsin their previous memories could have been altered. The retrieval of memories, however flawed, is not haphazard but follows a pattern in the sense that retrieved memories form associated and metaphorized ideas. What the narrating self does is to weave associated and metaphorized ideas together that come to represent the structure of events, not only in our lives but also in a society where we once lived. These narrative structures, or self-told stories, determine our interpretation of the past and the present

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and define our expectations of the future. Such memories constitute what we call “social memory.” Examples of social memory include memories of late socialism, Gorbachev’s perestroika, and the Yeltsin years, each of which can be imagined in myriad ways by different individuals as periods when their country stagnated (or did well), revived (or declined), and collapsed (or freed itself from the yoke of communism). Among peak moments from past episodes that the narrating self is tuned to register, the feeling of loss looms large. What we feel as a “loss” acquires such exaggerated importance that other considerations are easily pushed into the background. Often, even improved living conditions, new material plenty, more freedom, and other niceties cannot offset the feeling of loss, and people can still feel sad. It is no wonder, humans are loss-averse creatures. Loss, however, is not an absolute thing but a relative judgment in the sense that one and the same outcome can be framed as either a “loss” or a “gain,” and not only by different people but by the same person at different times depending on changing personal circumstances, mood,4 or ideological convictions that we are exposed to. What this also means is that the feeling of loss does not have to be based on personal memories alone but can be influenced by social memory as well as discourses produced by other people, institutions, or the state. What we call “nostalgia” is closely connected to the feeling of loss. Nostalgia can be described as selective activation of compatible memories, both personal and social, that form a sentimentality for the past which has happy associations. In this sense, nostalgia is a feeling about what is “lost” or in the process of being “lost.” In the context of today’s Russia, reminiscing or thinking positively about a state ideology becomes normal because those who have had real experience of living in the Soviet Union perform at least two cognitive operations simultaneously: (1) they retrieve certain happy episodes from memory and interpret them in association with what they believe shaped their “happy” Soviet past (for example, people may think that their happy childhood and the formative years of youth were made possible by the paternalistic Soviet state) and (2) they downgrade or forget bad memories from the Soviet period by comparing them with those of the Yeltsin era or their current circumstances. Nostalgia is an ever-evolving feeling which plays tricks on people’s minds. In recent Kalmyk history, given the situation has been deteriorating since Orlov’s coming to power, some Kalmyks, who vehemently criticized Ilyumzhinov to me in 2010, today say, with a hint of nostalgia, that they find the Ilyumzhinov era as a “more interesting, entertaining, and fulfilling time.” In other words, they remember the past as being less painful than when they were actually experiencing it in 2010.

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Apart from being a personal sentimental and cognitive undertaking, nostalgia, as mentioned, is also subtly impacted by the state-controlled media and social institutions that offer people suggestions as to what to think (for example, the media may remind people of the positive side of Soviet life), how to think (for example, “the Soviet Union was a great country because it had a state ideology”), and therefore how to act (“if you want your country’s greatness back, revive what made it great in the first place”). Nostalgia does not necessarily instigate action to restore the past. People may passively deploy nostalgia to seek a reason for their present identity (or lack of it) or to celebrate particular aspects of past regimes, unless they are strongly suggested by powerful people or organizations otherwise, as is the case in contemporary Russia. Continuous exposure to the same message not only induces a cognitive bias or a feeling of familiarity, but it can make false stories seem true, reshape people’s priorities, and provoke them to action. Despite what many may “remember,” the Soviet Union was not a land of milk and honey permeated with virtue and morality. On the contrary, the sheer scale of the atrocities and human rights abuses perpetrated by the Party and its secret police was revealed in the perestroika years (chapter 2). Rather, when people associate the Soviet period with elevated principles and high morality what they most emphasize are their memories not of how life was in reality but how propaganda portrayed Soviet life. By definition, Soviet propaganda operated by omission whereby negative information undermining the regime was selectively omitted. Simultaneously, the type of information that bolstered the state’s prestige—such as the social security program guaranteeing universal education and health care—was highlighted and amplified, creating distortions in how citizens perceived the world around them. For example, the fact that the Soviet press, radio, or television did not report crimes, corruption, industrial accidents, or human-made disasters contributed to an illusion that the country was the epitome of virtue, order, progress, and security. Since memories are in essence representations, and not exact copies of past events, imagination is often mistaken for memory. To this should be added two other well-documented cognitive biases—(1) “fading affect bias,” when people tend to forget unpleasant memories quicker than those associated with positive events5 and (2) “positivity effect,” when middle-aged and older adults tend to favor positive over negative information in their memories6—which explains why middle-aged and older people in Russia, the main age group focused on in this book, remember the Soviet past in a more positive light than it was in reality. Apart from nostalgia, underpinned by myriad cognitive biases and state-imposed manipulation, today the positive attitude harbored by many toward a state ideology is also informed by their conscious and strategic decision stemming from a sense of vulnerability and practical dependence on

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the state. This is especially true in Kalmykia, a region which has always been economically and politically dependent on Moscow. Today, the majority of Kalmyks still depend on the state, and by supporting the state they support their livelihoods. Historically, due to state-imposed exile, many Kalmyks have developed a fear of, as well as a psychological commitment to, the colossus of the state and its projects, which resulted in their willingness to adjust to Soviet ideals. The idea that life can be made either miserable (as in the case of mass exile under Stalin) or dramatically improved by the state (as in the post-exile period under Khrushchev), but not by other sections of society, was deeply entrenched in the minds of most Kalmyks during the Soviet period. Given that during Ilyumzhinov’s tenure no other group was allowed to accumulate political capital or become an alternative source of inspiration, it is no wonder that when he and his ideology fell out of favor, people turned their gaze toward the federal government, hoping that Moscow would provide what Ilyumzhinov had promised but failed to deliver. What my interviews suggest is that Kalmyks, especially those who still “remember” the Soviet period, now want not a local ideology but a federal one which the Kremlin has yet to produce. Hence the ineffectiveness of the current political system—manifesting itself in widespread intolerance and xenophobia in Russia, the degradation of morality, widespread corruption, and poverty—is readily attributed by many informants to the absence of a Moscow-centric state ideology. In light of this understanding, the ridiculed local ideology of wisdom is seen retrospectively by many as a factor contributing to the fragmentation of Russian society and the weakening of state control. Many people of a certain age in Kalmykia, as elsewhere in Russia, are adamant that the state should be strong and, if need be, authoritarian. This idea is juxtaposed with the Yeltsin period when a weak state released a flood of chaos, leaving the population to sink or swim and causing unbearable social anxiety. Whilst today many approve of Putin’s policies of strengthening the state, the same people often say that they are deeply dissatisfied with the huge gaps in wealth distribution and the widespread lack of unconditional Soviet-style devotion to the motherland. Hence many people in Kalmykia contend that Russia is not ready for a new state ideology. Therefore, “disorder,” “immoral acts,” and poverty are believed to continue. This does not mean that all people in Kalmykia want a political system “as it existed in their country before perestroika.” Whilst many Kalmyks support Putin’s style of management, and thus approve, in principle, of the current system, what they really wish for is a hybrid system—they say they want to live and consume as if under capitalism but have job security, order, social guarantees, and more equality as if under communism. All these, in their view, are possible only if they have a strong state underpinned by a new, all-encompassing ideology fit for modern Russia.

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Here is what some of my informants had to say about the importance of a state ideology and their frustration over its absence. Sergey: There won’t be prosperity, unless we have a state ideology. Russia has not come up with a new ideology yet. The search is still going on. . . In the last decade, somehow, the idea about patriotism and the revival of statehood (derzhavnost’) became more popular. But no foundation is being laid for these ideas. . . [In the mass media] they just talk about patriotism. But why should we love our motherland? The basic concepts have not been formulated yet. Basan: Ideology connotes moral principles which unite a society as a whole. That is, they are principles for which people fight to the end. Any ideology is based on concepts such as patriotism, which is its foundational principle. Today, in Russia it is impossible to build such principles because, if you pardon me, there exists a huge gap between the rich and the poor. The rich suck in all the country’s wealth, turn it into money, and send this money abroad. There is no patriotism because an ordinary guy who is called today to serve in the army says, “Who shall I defend? What country shall I defend? The country of these oligarchs who own all the land? Then let them pay me money for I am defending their wealth! All this petrol and gas do not belong to me. It belongs to them (i.e., oligarchs).” And he is right, this young recruit . . . Today everybody fends for themselves. There is no unifying ideology that would—hypothetically speaking, if an enemy crosses the border—bring, say, [the billionaire] Abramovich and an ordinary worker together in defense of the country. Such an ideology does not exist yet. Therefore, I am saying that in this country, as of now, an ideology is impossible. Sandzhi: In the Russian language we have the word mir. It has at least two meanings. The first meaning is “peace and tranquility” and the second is “world” as in “Earth.” So in Russian understanding, the world, especially the Russian world, is supposed to be a place of peace and order; and order can be achieved by various means, including violence . . . People in Russia are different—if you give them freedom and democracy, they wouldn’t know what to do with it. They will quarrel with each other and completely screw up the country . . . We need a strong hand. Whoever provides order in Russia, be it a tsar or a president, will be venerated . . . In modern Russia at least, the only way to bring about proper order and peace is by means of ideology.  

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Gilyana: In Russia we need a state ideology, not least because there are still many people around who lived in the Soviet period. They are used to living in this (i.e., an ideologized society). They are like balls that need to be tied to something, otherwise they will roll all over the place. You have to understand that people themselves want to be directed and be told what to do because they are used to receiving orders. Maybe in the West people are accustomed to being free, but here in Russia the fact that someone has always taken decisions on behalf of others makes the situation different . . . If you don’t control people, they will be angry that you don’t control them or that you control them in the wrong way. This is our mentality.

POST–ILYUMZHINOV KALMYKIA In October 2010 Ilyumzhinov was succeeded by Alexei Orlov who was appointed leader of Kalmykia by President Dmitry Medvedev. In comparison to Ilyumzhinov, Orlov was never a heroic figure and there is nothing electrifying about him. Orlov’s rise to power depended on his political patron Ilyumzhinov who retained him as Kalmykia’s permanent representative to the Russian president in Moscow since 1995. On his appointment, having inherited myriad social problems and a failing economy, Orlov promised to carry out reforms and conduct a policy of reconciliation with the political opposition. But unlike his predecessor, Orlov said nothing about implementing a new state ideology, not least because such independent initiatives are now strongly discouraged by the Kremlin. Public joy and heightened expectations generated by the change of power-holders, however, were short-lived and Orlov was soon confronted with widespread distrust when his beautiful promises failed to materialize while he enriched himself. Like a fox put in charge of the chicken house, Orlov came to be perceived as a selfish and corrupt leader deaf to the pleas of his struggling people. To attract the attention of both local and federal bureaucrats to the grievous conditions and corruption at a children’s hospital in Elista, a group of Kalmyk parents even resorted to writing a letter to U.S. President Barack Obama pleading for help. The appeal caused embarrassment in Kalmykia, especially among the bureaucrats, when The Washington Post published an article on 8 September 2011 about the letter,7 which was picked up by Russian newspapers. A bad political situation became worse when the next year, guided by his wish to build his own team, Orlov fell out with Ilyumzhinov over the sacking of a number of high-ranking bureaucrats with close ties to the latter, in the process inadvertently unleashing rivalry across the post-Ilyumzhinov

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political landscape. Backed by Kalmykia’s first president, these bureaucrats blatantly ignored Orlov’s orders, choosing to remain in their posts, inevitably creating parallel structures in some organizations where the same post came to be held by two people at the same time. Despite officially resigning in 2010, Ilyumzhinov clung on to power by maintaining links with business, local media, and bureaucrats, turning Kalmykia into a virtual duopoly. To teach the disrespectful Orlov a lesson, in 2012 Ilyumzhinov launched a smear campaign in the Kalmyk media. Not a day passed without local newspapers putting out damning articles questioning Orlov’s leadership skills, habits, and morality. Orlov’s wobbly appearances at public events were attributed to both his drinking bouts and bad health. The grandfatherly-looking Orlov was also portrayed as a childish figure tied to his mother’s apron strings, and his mother was alleged to have run Kalmykia on his behalf. The smear campaign achieved what it was designed to do. In March 2013, an internet survey was conducted asking respondents who they would support for Kalmykia’s leader if elections were held the next day. A total of 10.8 percent of respondents replied they would vote for Orlov, 17.8 percent for Ilyumzhinov, and an overwhelming 71.4 percent replied that they would vote against both Orlov and Ilyumzhinov.8 In Russia incumbents have an extraordinary capacity to bounce back, assisted by extensive administrative methods, security agencies, and spin doctoring. Tapping into vast state resources by virtue of being leader of the Kalmyk branch of the ruling United Russia Party, Orlov quickly recovered. In 2012 President Medvedev passed a law bringing back local presidential/ gubernatorial elections in Russian regions, abolished by Putin in 2004. During the September 2014 elections in Kalmykia, Orlov received an impressive 83 percent of the vote, retaining his position as head of Kalmykia. Unimpressive, however, was the fact that the election was manipulated, as elsewhere in Russia. Following the election, nothing changed, and Kalmykia continued to be at the bottom of the list of Russian regions in terms of economic indicators. Whilst a tiny minority of wealthy local businessmen are intertwined with the incumbent, the rest of the republic survives on state subsidies and remittances, which breeds widespread resentment and envy among the population. It is no mystery then why Kalmykia—which lacks natural resources, industry, or workforce but hosts sizeable local FSB apparatus—is also one of the most securitized republics in Russia. This situation makes life stressful and competitive. Under the strict control of the FSB, not only do all government branches, from ministries to research institutes, display dogmatism and institutional hostility to foreigners, but people at large are suspicious and prone to conspiracy theories. Vying for the state’s favor and competing for limited resources, all research institutes are in perpetual feuds with each other; people write denunciations to the authorities; and Westerners

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who show research interest in the local situation are promptly arrested and deported from Kalmykia, hence Russia, under various pretexts. Corruption is so rampant that even positions in the local FSB, tasked with combating economic crime, are said to be bought and sold at fixed prices. Unsurprisingly, many young and middle-aged people who live outside Kalmykia—I have interviewed hundreds of Kalmyks in Moscow and St. Petersburg since 2009 – do not want to return to Kalmykia for they do not see any future for themselves or their children there. In March 2019 President Putin asked Orlov to resign and awarded him the Order of Friendship for his service to the country. On the same day, Putin posed before the cameras with the kickboxer Batu Khasikov, Orlov’s replacement. In the September 2019 elections, Khasikov confirmed his position by winning the local elections with the overwhelming majority of 82.9 percent of the vote. The change in power was met with renewed hope that things may finally change in Kalmykia, not least because Khasikov also personified a new type of “genuine” Kalmyk—a warrior-type individual unconditionally loyal to the Russian state—an image which has been promoted in the post-Soviet period. Born in Moscow in 1980, Khasikov grew up in the town of Lagan’ on the Kalmyk shores of the Caspian Sea. Being an active child, he went fishing, danced in the local children’s dance troupe, played soccer, wrestled, and attended a karate club. From his father—Khasikov likes to repeat—he learned a maxim: “We never back down!” At 17 he went to Moscow to pursue a career in martial arts, eventually becoming a world champion in kickboxing. After serving in the police in Elista (2003–2008), Khasikov was a member of Kalmykia’s Parliament (2008–2012), and then represented his republic in the Federation Council in Moscow (2012–2014), where he purportedly spent more time at the gym than at the Council meetings. He fought his last professional fight in 2014. Khasikov is also co-founder of Eurasia Fight Nights, a mixed martial arts tournament in Russia. While in Moscow he was engaged in youth politics, which involved working with street gangs. A sportsman, a politician, a businessman, and a former officer with extensive links to the FSB, Khasikov—a quintessential silovik doggedly loyal to his political masters—was, in a way, a perfect candidate to replace the old fox Orlov, who following his retirement ended up a senator from Kalmykia at the Federation Council in Moscow, which grants him immunity from persecution. In 2014, amid the Maidan protests unfolding in Kiev, Ukraine, Russia’s State Duma passed a law prohibiting unauthorized demonstrations in a bid to stifle opposition movements in Russia. By depriving the people of a platform from which they could openly express their grievances, the law only radicalized the population across Russia. With no other way to influence the power-holders, people no longer believe in gradual dialogue with

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the authorities to resolve their problems but came to trust swift and revolutionary actions aimed at achieving immediate results. In this environment, protests are bound to be spontaneous and lack formal organization, being driven mainly by mounting popular grievances, fears, and anxieties prone to erupt at opportune moments. Once underway, such protests are also likely to mutate into something more radical. This is what occurred in Kalmykia when Khasikov spoilt his promising start as head of Kalmykia by appointing Dmitry Trapeznikov, former leader of the self-proclaimed separatist Donetsk People’s Republic in Ukraine, as acting head of Elista, the de facto second most profitable post in Kalmykia. Despite receiving a personal congratulatory note from Putin’s spin doctor Surkov, revealing the Kremlin’s fingerprints, Trapeznikov’s appointment sparked extensive protests in Elista. After an initial protest involving about 150 people, on 1 October 2019 more than 300 people took to the streets, and on 13 October the number grew to between 2,500 and 4,000 people, turning into the largest anti-establishment protest in Kalmykia since the 2004 anti-Ilyumzhinov protests (chapter 8). Unhappy with Trapeznikov’s shadowy and corrupt past, the protesters demanded that a local person with proper managerial credentials be appointed to such an important post.9 To make their point, people even invented a nickname for Trapeznikov—“Señor Tomato”—which was supposed not only to mock his plump, reddish face but also his foreign origin. Soon the protesters’ demands included a popular appeal to Putin to dismiss Khasikov from his post, accompanied by placards saying “Sportsman go back to the ring! Señor Tomato go back to the vegetable garden!” Rather than attempt to negotiate with the protesters and calm them down, Khasikov, who is known for his limited ability to explain ideas clearly, took the issue personally, awakening the kickboxer and policeman in him. On 5 October 2019, during a closed meeting with a group of activists representing the protesters, Senior Lieutenant Khasikov singled out a young activist who was standing. Stopping mere inches from the man, Khasikov, in a pose reminiscent of a fighter ready to kick his opponent’s butt during a televised stare-down performance, menacingly stared into the man’s eyes. Later Khasikov claimed: “We never back down!” The bizarre episode reminded Kalmyks of an incident in September 2018 when General Viktor Zolotov, Putin’s bodyguard and director of the National Guard of Russia, publically challenged Alexei Navalny, the Kremlin’s main critic, to a duel where he promised to beat up Russia’s main opposition leader by turning him into “a nice, juicy steak” (whilst Zolotov never proceeded with his threat to batter Navalny physically, the latter was poisoned with a new type of military-grade novichok nerve agent in a Siberian town on 20 August 2020). Anxious to show his loyalty to those who support Trapeznikov in the Kremlin, Khasikov decided to keep Trapeznikov in post come hell or high water. This is one of the biggest tests in his new career so far and Khasikov

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knows well that those who gave him a gubernatorial chair can take it back as swiftly and that elections are just a charade in Russia. At the level Khasikov operates now, politics in Russia becomes hugely personalized. Like anyone with a siloviki background, Khasikov values dogmatic loyalty and discipline above all characteristics in his subordinates. He also believes he has these qualities himself with regard to his superiors. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic laid bare systemic vulnerabilities in Kalmyk society. With the crumbling healthcare system and a chronic shortage of medicine, ventilators, and PPE (personal protective equipment), Kalmykia started off as one of the worst COVID-hit regions in Russia relative to population. A video of Khasikov bragging to someone that “we have won coronavirus,” which made the rounds on Kalmyk social media in August 2020 during the peak of the pandemic, did nothing but infuriate the citizens of Kalmykia.10 The situation became so critical and Khasikov’s managerial inexperience so obvious that leaders of all political factions in Kalmykia’s Parliament, including the United Russia Party, felt compelled to send a letter in September 2020 to President Putin complaining about Khasikov’s incompetence and the catastrophic situation with the pandemic in the republic. In response, the Ministry of Health in Moscow sent an expert commission to Elista. Having organized a tour for the commission in a Potemkin village at the Children’s Hospital in Elista, Khasikov proudly reported on his Instagram account: “The experts noted. . . a good material and technical base, good provision of PPE, good logistics and management, and the high level of readiness at the Republican Children’s Hospital. The experts also drew attention to the low percentage of seriously ill patients here, which, in their opinion, indicates the timely hospitalization of patients.” Soon the local MPs who wrote the letter of complaint to Putin received an official reply from the presidential administration noting that life in Kalmykia is improving and the health system is working well. To support its claims retroactively, Moscow sent equipment and funds to fight the pandemic, which led to a sea change in local fortunes. This example also exemplifies how things work in Russia whereby the Kremlin operates like a lighthouse emitting beams of pinpointed federal assistance appearing from the mist, as it were, and how the Kremlin’s attention is attracted to local issues as regional elites compete by appealing to Putin directly. Whilst the good news of incoming federal aid was trumpeted by Kalmyk media, the “traitor” inside the United Russia faction in Kalmykia’s Parliament, Saglar Bakinova, one of the signatories to the letter which had embarrassed Khasikov, was sacked from her post of secretary of the Kalmyk branch of United Russia, of which Khasikov is leader thanks to his status as head of Kalmykia. The case of Saglar Bakinova shows that, let alone vulnerable whistleblowers, even powerful politicians who swim against the official tide and find themselves on the opposite side of the incumbent’s agenda are

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quickly dealt with and that there is no mechanism in place to counter-balance power holders. To make things worse, in March 2019 the State Duma passed a law imposing fines for insulting officials, which already resulted in several court cases in Kalmykia. This situation only discourages self-criticism and breeds a culture of corruption, complacency, and back-scratching in the corridors of power. What is true for the region is also true at the federal level. NOTES 1. Gellner, “Notes towards a Theory of Ideology,” 69. 2. Ibid., 70–75. 3. Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow, 202. 4. Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow, 123–74, 333–74. 5. Ritchie and others, “A Pancultural Perspective on the Fading Affect Bias in Autobiographical Memory.” 6. Reed and Carstensen, “The Theory behind the Age-Related Positivity Effect.” 7. “A Russian Region to Obama: Help Us,” Washington Post, September 8, 2011, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/a-russian-region-to-obamahelp-us/2011/09/02/gIQA8REZBK_story.html. 8. Churyumova, “Why Do Kalmyks Want a New National Leader?” 9. Holland, “Leadership Change and Protests in Russia’s Kalmykia: Moscow’s Corruptive Meddling and Its Discontents.” 10. Later, Khasikov explained the video in his Instagram by arguing that by “we” he did not mean Kalmykia but himself personally. He was infected with COVID but recovered.

PART V

Future Ideology

Figure 5. “The cradle of the Universe.” Source: Dmitry Sandzhiev

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These are just flowers; berries will come soon. (Russian proverb)

In Putin’s Russia, the state already controls the old technologies of perception control in the form of the press and television, the main sources of information for the majority of the population. Not only does the state attempt to restrict freedom of action, but it also curbs freedom of thought. Thus, writing and speaking are censored; marches and demonstrations are suppressed by restrictive laws, administrative measures, or brute force. There is popular faith in god and the Orthodox Church (similar to former faith in the idea of communism and the Communist Party). The government pursues a foreign policy based on Eurasianism, a view legitimizing the “civilizational unity” of a territory coinciding with the border of the former Soviet Union. Patriotism, which is associated with the cult of the leader and fear of the West, is on the rise. Authoritarian figures and methods are once again becoming acceptable, and Stalin’s appeal is surging among the population.1 Despite the Western image of Putin as a pariah and a dictator, Russians see and sense something in their leader that people in the West seem unable to, and his popularity is high.2 All these developments indicate that Russia is being reorganized in a centralized fashion on a massive scale. Whilst this reorganization may lack Marxist-Leninist content or an all-embracing narrative, it certainly takes a similarly authoritarian form. This chapter discusses resurgent interest in a state ideology in Russia, the country’s structural vulnerabilities, and whether it is possible to revive a state ideology.

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RESURGENT INTEREST IN A STATE IDEOLOGY Article 13 of the Russian Constitution, adopted in 1993, stipulates that: “No ideology may be established as a state or obligatory one.” This is the legacy of President Yeltsin who was guided by his impulse to relegate communism to the junkyard of history. This, however, did not prevent him in 1996 from trying to come up with a National Idea reminiscent of a state ideology (chapter 2). Despite Yeltsin’s failure, followed by a period of ideological inaction, an enduring dream of a powerful ideology, or National Idea, capable of uniting and reviving the spiritual, cultural, political, and economic landscape of the country has never been repudiated by the Moscow elites, awaiting clearer articulation. Having spent his first presidential term (2000–2004) consolidating his power, during his second term (2004–2008) Putin was preoccupied with pulling Russia’s subject territories back into Moscow’s orbit. During his subsequent prime ministership (2008–2012), Putin flirted with the idea of Eurasianism, deciding to commit himself to it toward the end of his tenure. With the beginning of his third presidential term in 2012, he began to show serious interest in the concept of state ideology and the possibility of implementing such in Russia.3 On 12 September 2012, during his televised meeting with representatives of the public, Putin said that people should stop being ashamed of entertaining the idea of having a centralizing state ideology in Russia and expounded its benefits. His endorsement was not only met with approval among ordinary people in places such as Kalmykia but has encouraged Moscow-based public figures to back the idea. In September 2014, an inter-factional group in the State Duma called “Russian Sovereignty” proposed a bill to remove Article 13 from the Constitution, publishing the text of the bill on the group’s website. On 9 July 2016, in his speech at an all-Russia youth forum, Sergey Mironov, leader of the parliamentary party Just Russia, suggested that Article 13 be abolished to pave the way for a state ideology. High-profile politicians, including Valentina Matvienko, speaker of the Federation Council, Tatyana Moskalkova, Ombudsman of Human Rights, and others supported the proposal. This search for a state ideology, however, is not confined to political elites but encompasses a broader circle of intellectuals, too. Whilst in the Soviet Union state ideology was based on materialist science and propaganda, in Russia today an increasing number of nationalist intellectuals are proposing various doctrines based on spirituality, tradition, and emotional ideals laced with conspiratorial myths while calling for the rehabilitation of some aspects of the Soviet regime. This growing argument in favor of ideology reflects as much a popular understanding that a powerful and centralized country must have a state ideology as it is precipitated by post-Soviet resistance to the

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perceived onslaught of foreign ideology (liberalism, individualism) which is propagated to be detrimental to Russia’s communal values, spirituality, economic and military power. Conspiracy theories have been an inseparable part of modern societies, including Western countries such as the United States. Whilst in the United States such theories have tended to remain on society’s margins (with the recent exception of the Trump era when they were disseminated from the White House), in post–Soviet Russia, especially since Putin came to power, conspiracy theorists often occupy high political, academic, and moral positions, which raises the profile of their ideas.4 Conspiracy theories saturated with nationalist sentiments are thus spread throughout Russian society encompassing diverse actors from the presidential administration to civic movements to the extreme right. A group of philosophers attached to the Center for Dynamic Conservatism is one such collective of conspiracy theorists that is gaining popularity with the Kremlin’s blessing. This group first came into the spotlight with its Russian Doctrine (Russkaya doktrina)—a document purporting to unite Russia and strengthen Russian statehood—which they presented to the public in Yekaterinburg, Moscow, and St. Petersburg in 2005, receiving approval from some of the country’s highest-ranking Orthodox priests.5 But the strongest endorsement of the doctrine came in 2006 from Dmitry Kiselev, host of a television program called National Interest, broadcast on the state-controlled Rossiya channel. Analyzing Putin’s 2006 annual address to the Federal Assembly, Kiselev, who would become the Kremlin’s darling for his strong anti-Western conspiratorial views, found similarities between the Russian Doctrine and the president’s speech: Last week we witnessed the pumping of a huge volume of energy into Russian society. This was done by the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, in his unusually ideological address. Until recently, it was fashionable to avoid any [talk of] ideology. Then it became clear that if we do not have our own ideology, we would be subjected to a foreign one. We tried a foreign one—it did not suit us. We want our own ideology. Last week, Vladimir Putin proposed the essential components of a national doctrine. A group of Russian intellectuals also offer their version, which is even more encompassing and comprehensive. Their aims [that of Putin and these Russian intellectuals] coincide—which is for a powerful and prosperous Russia.

This program was followed by similar shows broadcast on television and articles published in Russia’s newspapers, which exposed the Russian Doctrine to yet wider audiences. In 2007, Vladislav Surkov approached its writers on behalf of the all-powerful Administration of Russia’s president to commission a work. Around 2005 Surkov coined the term “sovereign

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democracy” (suverennaya demokratiya), the idea being that Russia has the right to enjoy its version of “democracy” different from liberal democracy in the West. In modern Western philosophical understanding, the central premise of liberal democracy rests on the idea that any modern democratic society should be organized according to several core principles such as the divorce of church and state, the rule of law, separation of powers, and the unassailability of citizens’ rights. These rights are expressed in politics by the motto “the voter knows best,” in economics by the motto “the customer is always right,” and in jurisprudence by the motto “all are equal before the law.” Whilst the Russian constitution pays lip service to all these principles, almost none of them is practiced in reality. Church and state are intertwined in a symbiotic relationship; the legislature and the judiciary are subordinate, directly or indirectly, to the executive branch; the political, military, and ecclesiastical elites have hoarded power beyond accountability or transparency, while activists branded as “extremists” or “foreign agents” are subject to harsh punishment. Whilst this does not resemble Western democracy, proponents of “sovereign democracy” do not say that Russia is a liberal democracy but contend that Russian principles of “freedom” and “justice” and the state’s priorities should be understood in the context of Russia’s distinctive history, geography, and collectivist culture, which they see as essentially different to that of the West. As a unique form of patriotic philosophy positioning itself against the global hegemony of Western liberal values, “sovereign democracy” also presupposes that no one has the right to dictate to Russia its political order from outside. Around 2006, the ruling United Russia was revising its party program, and Surkov proposed that the concept of sovereign democracy should be incorporated as part of its official ideology. It was in this search for new ideas, both to legitimize the regime and to ideologically strengthen United Russia, that Surkov engaged with the Doctrinists. A rewritten version of the Doctrine was soon handed over to the commissioner, which included several popular policy-related suggestions to Putin, including a recommendation to increase Russia’s prestige by implementing more assertive foreign policy. Domestically, the state, according to the recommendation, must have “the guts” to suppress, if need be by force, any West-sponsored disorder, including color revolutions and attempts to overthrow the government. A watereddown version of the Doctrine, entitled “We Believe in Russia” (My verim v Rossiyu), was also presented to the general public for further discussion and popularization. Echoing Putin’s view that “the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century,” proponents of the Doctrine wish to see Russia become a regenerated superpower and blame the West and their “Russian agents” for all the misfortunes that befell their great country.

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Staunchly nationalist, pro-state, collectivist, and anti-Western, the Doctrinists not only share many views with similar groups and movements that are proliferating in Russia but are also influenced by Eurasianism and cosmism from whom they derive inspiration. According to the Doctrinists, Russia is a unique civilization imbued with ancient truth in which the spiritual and the political are organically entangled. In their view, this explains the Russian people’s mysterious cosmic mindset, strong spirituality, and propensity to perform miracles when they defend their motherland or when they are on a great historical mission. Rivalling the global liberal order, Russia has a duty to advance its geopolitical interests, reestablish its prestige, raise a generation of loyal citizens, and protect the purity of Russia’s cultural essence by returning to its “true self.” The key to achieving this complex goal is to implement so-called “dynamic conservatism” (dinamicheskiy konservatizm) which envisages reconciling tradition with creative thinking. Since Russian history is seen as an uninterrupted continuum based on “the best traditions of Ancient Russia, the Russian Empire, and the achievements of the Soviet people,” this search for “true self” does not need to go far back in time. Whilst Russia missed the opportunity to participate in the technological leap of the 1990s due to the West’s malign meddling, their country, the Doctrine argues, still has the opportunity to take revenge on the wrongdoers and become a leading power in a new epoch which will be characterized by a cognitive revolution. Russia’s greatest asset is its people, who are destined to make cognitive breakthroughs and bold innovations. All these, however, are impossible unless the state comes up with a centralizing ideology.6 Following the end of his second presidential term in 2008, Putin assumed the leadership of United Russia. At the party’s 11th Congress at St. Petersburg in 2009, Putin, now prime minister, announced that his party’s official ideology became a “Russian conservatism” (reminiscent of Russian Doctrine’s “dynamic conservatism”), based on Russia’s “own history, culture, and spirituality” which seeks to strengthen the country’s “sovereignty” (reminiscent of Surkov’s “sovereign democracy”).7 While it is all but forgotten today, conservatism and nationalism underpinned both the Soviet and early post-Soviet societies when the idea of a special kind of Russian democracy “that accords with national traditions,” as opposed to Western democracy, remained popular among citizens.8 According to a 2010 survey conducted by the Levada Center, an independent polling organization based in Moscow, whilst more than half of respondents regarded “democracy” as desirable, the number of those who supported a special kind of Russian democracy grew from 43 percent to 45 percent between 2005 and 2009.9 This trend did not change since, but was only validated and reinforced by the 2009 United Russia Congress, and—according to a March 2019 Levada Center survey—60 percent of respondents said that they wish to see Russia develop “according to its own,

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unique path” and only 15 percent wanted a “European path” of development.10 In other words, Russian citizens who wish to see their country move along its unique, i.e., non-European path are in the majority. This situation of growing nationalism and nostalgia is also entangled with emotional repercussions, and it fans the flames of reactionary ideas about national humiliation and collective victimhood inflicted by a Russophobic West on the one hand, and feeds into a feeling of spiritual superiority, uniqueness, and exceptionality on the other, which are widely shared among intellectuals as well as politicians across Russia. In fact, Putin’s enduring charisma and popularity relies on a carefully crafted image of a strong, incorruptible leader and a narrative peddled by the state-controlled mass media that, following the Yeltsin years characterized by the near-collapse of the Russian state and universal misery, it was Putin who brought back order, economic growth, and restored the country’s prestige in the world. Despite falling living conditions in recent years due partly to Western-imposed sanctions following Russia’s annexation of the Crimea in 2014, according to a March 2015 Levada Center survey, 68 percent of respondents considered Russia a great power (compared to 31 percent in a 1999 Levada survey). The idea of Russia’s simultaneous greatness and national failure also provides fertile soil for the proliferation of conspiracy theories and fantasies among all social groups about a global conspiracy against their country, which explains why things are so bad in Russia despite its greatness.11 In the Soviet Union, people imagined the West through the prism of Soviet misconceptions generated by state propaganda. Whilst many Soviet ideas were debunked in the 1990s under Yeltsin, Putin’s rise to power saw a renewed effort to construct a new cultural lens for the population to interpret the West. Influenced by the mass media, many people today have distorted views of the West as a geography permeated with world-spanning imperialist ambition, moral degradation, and double standards, meanwhile envying better Western living standards. On the national peripheries, these dichotomized beliefs and narratives tend to be amplified—as in the case of Kalmykia—because of a view that Russia’s ethnic minorities have been doubly wronged and victimized both by the West and the Russian metropolis. Hence Kalmyk ideas about exceptional Kalmyk spirituality, victimhood, unmatched bravery and masculinity, unwavering patriotism, unparalleled wit, and an exaggerated desire to prove their ethnic worth and to take on the whole world. As an imagined reality, Soviet ideology was embedded in the material world through rituals, storytelling, and consumption that formed the complex identity of Homo Sovieticus. Today, certain developments—revival of Soviet consumer brands, re-popularization of Soviet heroes and films, the rewriting of patriotic history, not to mention the return of the paternalistic state—are reminiscent of the Soviet period. In fact, in the Soviet period “unity, order,

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morality, and loyalty to the state,” a maxim that the state wishes to revive, were not achieved by an all-encompassing state ideology alone. Despite propaganda to the contrary, social unity and synchronicity was not provided by the theory of dialectical materialism alone but by the totality of Soviet institutions and practices that were designed to support and reinforce the otherwise wobbly theoretical basis of the regime. Likewise, in Russia today, despite the lack of such a super-theory, or an all-encompassing ideological story, social cohesion and mobilization are provided by all sorts of state and state-supported organizations and actors, including the mass media, United Russia, patriotic youth movements, and the Orthodox Church, just to name a few. Let us look briefly at the relationship between the Orthodox Church and the state. Intertwined in an intimate hug, theirs is a marriage made in heaven. This is especially the case in areas in which the interests of the political leader and Church converge, such as criticisms of liberalism, feminism, Western values, and issues related to national security. The state represses Church’s rivals by branding them as “spies” and persecutes citizens who voice anti-Christian views as “extremists.” The state also promotes patriarchal values by investing less in women’s well-being and affording them less political power, less autonomy, and less freedom of movement. In 2017 Putin, himself a wife-beater who officially divorced his wife Lyudmila in 2013,12 signed a law decriminalizing acts of domestic violence that do not result in permanent physical harm, which disproportionately exposes women to more physical and sexual abuse on the part of their elders and husbands.13 In other words, a Russian woman married to a wife-beating bully should never expect anything better, not least the state’s protection. In return for the state’s support of Orthodox values, the Patriarch of Russia, Kirill, not only declared Putin to be divine, famously describing his kleptocratic regime as a “miracle of God,” but also promotes nationalism, anti-Western sentiments, and ideas about Russia’s civilizational uniqueness and spiritual virginity. Conveniently, today all army and police units and security services have serving chaplains who preach to soldiers and officers and consecrate weapons of mass destruction, tanks, jets, and rocket launchers deployed for the protection of Mother Russia. (This reminds us of the Soviet Union where every unit in the siloviki structure had a commissar, a chaplain of sorts, who supervised the piety and devotion of military personnel to the teachings of Marxism-Leninism.) Pussy Riot’s political song-protest at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in 2012 was a godsend for the Church, which turned it into an opportunity to propagate to its flocks that opponents of Putin’s rule are a bunch of godless punks and hooligans who are puppets of the West. Several weeks after the incident, the patriarchate organized a mass prayer service at the “desecrated” Cathedral to raise awareness among the population of “growing anti-Church forces” and

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those “who promote the false values and aggressive liberalism,” as a flyer advertising the service noted. Not only was Natalya Tolokonnikova, one of the members of the band, linked to the intelligence services of a Western country on account of her Canadian residence permit, but state-aligned television channels portrayed the LGBT community as being in partnership with Pussy Riot to destroy the Cathedral and to trigger a revolution in Russia. Described as sexual perverts and militant atheists opposing Putin and Orthodox Russian society, both the band singers and the LGBT community were subjected to a homophobic campaign, culminating in the introduction of the “anti-gay law” signed by Putin on 30 June 2013. Rated one of the country’s “most influential politicians”14 and wholeheartedly supporting Putin’s military incursion into Ukraine, Patriarch Kirill contends that the Church has always been the first target of Russia’s enemies and points out that “the Church and the government are equal partners.” Given the weight of various institutions that support the state, this does not mean, however, that a state ideology proved useless in bringing the country together. On the contrary, in the Soviet experience it was the state-promoted ideological narrative that provided the regime with legitimacy and all Soviet institutions with a standardized operational script. Given its track record, it is understandable that in post–Soviet Russia there remains a widespread perception among many, especially middle-aged and older people, that only a state ideology (or “the National/Russian Idea” as some put it) can bring order and prosperity to their country, strengthen the state, and give its citizens a common purpose. This is not to say that there is no other means to provide a true purpose in life. Following the fall of communism many people happily embraced religion—Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, shamanism—that gave them new personal identities and imbued their lives with new meaning and goals. Others found inspiration and fulfillment in the pursuit of humanitarianism, helping their communities in ways they can, or in scientific endeavor to find out the truth about the world. But equally, there are many people who have been left adrift, unhappy with unfulfilled expectations, and seeing no future or grand purpose in their lives. In Russia, in the age of nationalism, what a state ideology promises is not only a national identity and attachment to the powerful state but also a sense of communal purpose and a new national worldview based on epic stories replete with struggles and failures, tribulations and triumphs, and a bright communal future stretching beyond the horizon. In short, a state ideology offers meaning in a way many were taught to recognize and appreciate. Drawing on Soviet precedents and nostalgia, this yearning for a new grand world is a powerful post-Soviet collective fantasy shared by political elites, intellectuals, and ordinary folk alike.

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In Red Square, Lenin’s marble mausoleum houses the mummy of a discredited ideology, but it also serves as a solid reminder of the glorious past which proves irresistible to resurrection. Following the collapse of the Soviet regime, the Russian government under Yeltsin tried to bury Lenin’s body twice in 1991 and 1993, but Yeltsin hesitated. This gave Kalmykia’s Ilyumzhinov the opportunity to lay claim to the “Kalmyk” Lenin and speculate about the possibility of moving the mummy to Elista. Things have changed since Putin came to power. In 2011 Putin put vast amounts into the refurbishment of the mausoleum, which has turned in recent years into an altar of resurgent Russian nationalism. It also reminds people of Russia’s long tradition of being ruled by autocratic leaders. Lenin matters now not because of his flawed and murderous regime, but because he symbolizes Russia’s stance against the West and the country’s ideological unity. Despite what people may remember (or not remember), the Leninist state embodied not only unity, control, and power but also inconsistency, subversion, and resistance. The most revered and closely guarded body in the Soviet Union, even Lenin’s mummy was subjected to attacks. The glass of the sarcophagus was broken twice by visitors in 1959 and 1969. Explosives were used by visitors with deadly effects: in 1963 a man was killed by his concealed bomb, and in 1973 another bomb killed its carrier, wounding many pilgrims around. Lenin’s body, it can be said, epitomized the state of affairs in the country. The post-mortem of Soviet-type ideologies, the main focus of this book, enables us to conduct what Gary Klein calls a “pre-mortem” of a future ideology.15 Whilst “pre-mortem” is an economic term used mainly in the context of a managerial strategy (in which business planners attempt to determine what could lead to the failure or “death” of their project or organization), a premortem analysis could also be useful in identifying weaknesses in bodies of political ideas via a hypothetical presumption of near-future failure. A PRE-MORTEM ANALYSIS My pre-mortem analysis of a future ideology is as follows. Following its near-collapse during the Yeltsin years, Putin’s emphasis on strengthening the Russian state is understandable. It is also understandable why the population should support such an initiative, given ensuing economic growth and improving living standards, not to mention the country’s enhanced prestige in the international arena secured by Putin’s aggressive policies. Putin’s staterebuilding project turned the Russian state once again into a centralized and militarized leviathan. No event exemplifies this more clearly than Victory Parades on Red Square. Aimed at celebrating the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War Two, the Victory Parade was held four times in

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the Soviet period, in 1945, 1965, 1985, and 1990, respectively. It was revived in 1995 under Yeltsin to commemorate the golden jubilee of the Soviet victory in the war. Since then, it has been held annually to bolster patriotism and to prop up Yeltsin’s faltering presidency, and from 2000 it acquired more pomp, militarism, and doctrinal significance. Victory Parades with goosestepping soldiers in which the Russian state brandishes its new weapons and displays symbols of centralized discipline and control, military superiority, and national unity are intended as much for international audiences as they are designed for domestic consumption. An idealization of the desired relationship between the state and the society it aspires to direct, the Victory Parade embodies a vision of how things should be from the Kremlin’s perspective. Broadcast on live television, the Parade has under Putin acquired a modern cast, a spectacle of power filmed like a blockbuster. Dozens of cameras soar above the pageantry, capture the marching boots from the ground-up, maneuver between the wheels of armored vehicles, and capture the cockpit of a tank only to zoom out through the gun toward the sky and enter the cockpit of a fighter jet via its screaming engine. Apart from its production values, for ordinary citizens, this visual extravaganza symbolizes their country’s immense sacrifice and victory in the Great Patriotic War, reminding them of the importance of remaining vigilant against foreign enemies, which is also a message peddled by the Kremlin.16 Russia has always been a hierarchically organized society with power emanating from the top. Tsars were referred to as gosudar’, which is etymologically related to the words gosudarstvo (“state”) and gosudarstvennost’ (“statehood”). That is, the Tsar embodied the state. In the Soviet period, absolute power was relegated to Communist Party general secretaries who ruled on behalf of the state. Post-Soviet Russia inherited this traditional pyramidal power structure. But unlike in the Soviet Union, today the Russian state resembles more a secret service hierarchy guided by its conspiratorial ethos rather than a country run by career politicians. An intuitive and creative leader, Putin projects his power by combining his traditional authority with staging personalized action-man displays involving posing bare-chested on horseback, triumphantly holding an automatic rifle, piloting an air force jet, leading a flock of endangered cranes in a glider, or saving a team crew from a Siberian tiger.17 One of the most distinctive features of Putin’s rule is the “direct line” organized almost annually with the populace through nationwide call-in television broadcasts. Reminiscent of a Tsar publically dispensing favors, solving problems of individual petitioners, and reprimanding boyars, Putin’s way of communication with the nation proved to be remarkably popular. In nationalist discourses, Putin not only serves Mother Russia but is a modern Tsar, becoming the anthropomorphized image of the country itself.

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However, Putin’s state is not an especially effective one. This is not merely because, like all strict hierarchies, it is vulnerable from the top, but also because it is riddled with endemic corruption,18 infighting,19 electoral fraud,20 hypersensitivity to opposition,21 delusions of grandeur, not to mention an inability to generate a coherent national story or state ideology to legitimate the current regime. Failing to diversify the economy from an energy-based scenario of development, Putin keeps all his eggs in one basket, exposing Russia to volatile world petroleum prices. By extensively disseminating falsehoods in the political ecosystem and media in which truth is not seen as a paramount virtue, the Kremlin also deliberately dilutes the quality of public debate, hence that of social resilience. It should come as no surprise then that Putin, according to Gleb Pavlovsky,22 does not trust Russian media or press (which he manipulates) but gets his first-hand information from closed sources such as security services, reminding us of the Soviet Union in which the country’s leadership received news updates primarily from the KGB briefings, which was inevitably biased. The weakened social resilience of the population has been exacerbated by the 2014 law limiting freedom of assembly and open political expression, which only achieved a further polarization and radicalization of Russian society against the backdrop of the deteriorating economic situation in recent years. With the population burdened with a growing range of unresolved and unexpressed grievances, any demonstration now bears the risk of erupting into a revolutionary riot, if handled wrongly. Russian history may also offer some clues to the regime’s future. In modern times, no regime change in Russia was accomplished by political outsiders. It was always insiders close to the top who either inherited or usurped power. Putin was appointed acting president by Yeltsin, himself a Politburo member, the Communist Party’s super-elite. All preceding Soviet leaders also had the same elevated political background. Even the Bolshevik seizure of power was a coup staged not by outsiders but by those in the know. The “October Revolution” launched by the Bolsheviks in 1917 against a SocialistRevolutionary Provisional Government was a coup orchestrated by one revolutionary faction against another in the context of the struggle for state power (chapter 1). If Russia’s history is to repeat itself, one should expect change not from outside but from within the regime’s hierarchy. Merely because the Soviet Union was a global superpower with a state ideology, it does not follow that in the 21st century the Russian Federation can repeat its success by reviving old Soviet methods of governance and bringing back the demons of the Cold War. Moreover, without making fundamental changes in how its political institutions operate and without granting more political rights to its citizens, which people can use to expand their economic and entrepreneurial opportunities,23 Russia is not likely to lead the world in innovation or become an international moral beacon any time soon. Even if

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the Kremlin succeeds in resurrecting a state ideology, it may not be the same as the previous ideology in terms of overarching capacity and prestige, not least because the new ideology will not aim at uniting scientific disciplines or addressing global problems. Whilst Marxism-Leninism was future-oriented, had global appeal and mission, and offered an alternative vision to many national liberation movements across the world, this new ideology, which is likely to be past-oriented, will be limited in scope and address nationalistic, or even psychological, issues specific to post–Soviet Russia. This ideology will be neither missionary nor will it offer much to other nations. But this seems to satisfy many Russian philosophers and nationalists who see Russia, which is the largest country on the planet, as a world in its own right. Moreover, since Russia is no longer a hermetically sealed country, it is difficult to imagine that any set of ideas, however inspiring, could ever become so powerful as to transcend the ideological field and monopolize every aspect of society. Given the impossibility of today recreating a fully functional all-encompassing Soviet-type ideology—at least not by means of political instruments of mass control devised in the 20th century—the definition of gosudarstvennya ideologiya or “state ideology” will have to change accordingly and the purpose of ideology reevaluated and deconstructed. This may lead the Kremlin to announce a host of “limited” official ideologies—possibly, an economic ideology, a geopolitical ideology, an environmental ideology, or even ideologies specific to various regions—that are purpose-built to tackle various related and unrelated big and small issues pinpointed by the Kremlin. In this scenario, the Russian definition of ideologiya will be one step closer to Western definitions of this term as a system of ideas and values pertaining to various groups. RUSSIA’S METROPOLIS VERSUS REGIONS The regime’s vulnerability also has a regional and ethnic dimension. Putin’s revival of old institutions accompanied by the strict recentralization of the state around Moscow has only reinforced an imbalance in power relations between the center and the periphery, systematically reproducing conditions in which resources and manpower drain from the regions. Consequently, Moscow extracts maximum resources from the periphery with minimal investment. What is left in regions is the state’s surveillance apparatus operating against the backdrop of crumbling infrastructure, accumulating local grievances, economic stagnation, and official corruption. This leads not only to regions with strong local identities and self-interest but creates political, and even cosmological, fault lines crisscrossing the country. Such peripheries also often generate various ideas about “alternative” futures. The Republic of

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Buryatia is one such regions in Siberia. With a population of less than a million but a territory almost the size of Germany, Buryatia is an ethnic republic whose titular population are the Buryats, who are related to the Kalmyks. Despite having some of Russia’s largest deposits of key natural resources, Buryatia is a poor place with rising levels of outward migration (to Moscow, Yakutia) where local elites blame Moscow for draining resources and failing to provide adequate support to the local economy and infrastructure. Whilst a region experiencing economic crisis, stagnation, and environmental degradation, Buryatia’s capital Ulan-Ude presents itself as a location of rising spiritual values—thus Ulan-Ude’s self-promotion as a “city with an Asian soul,” “the capital of the Buryat world,” and “the Buddhist capital of Russia.”24 Similar to Kalmykia, this position offers local people the opportunity to discursively turn the disadvantage of being marginalized and underdeveloped into an advantage by juxtaposing spirituality and modernity. This spiritual position is as much influenced by Buryatia’s attempt to overcome a sense of provincialism and underdevelopment as by an ongoing Buddhist and shamanic renaissance. In 2009 the president of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, was declared by the Buryat Buddhist leader an incarnation of the Buddhist goddess White Tara. By laying claim to the Russian president’s body through Buddhification, some local leaders of the Buddhist establishment see Buryatia as a region that incorporates Russia into the larger Buddhist cosmos rather than the other way round. Owing to the Buryat identity and their historical relationship with other Buddhist countries in the region, including Mongolia, China, and India, today Buryats also view themselves as a cosmopolitan people.25 In this geo-imagination, Buryatia is a superior place imbued with cosmological vitality that is strong and independent. This recalls Ilyumzhinov’s attempt at an ideology that overwrites the Kalmyks’ otherwise peripheral location by claiming that Kalmykia incorporates Russia and the rest of the world into the Kalmyk cosmological universe. In both cases, their geo-imaginations aim at re-centering and shifting Eurasian spaces. Situated on the other side of Russia in the mountainous region of the Caucasus, Chechnya presents another case of the country’s structural weakness, albeit from a different angle. Unlike Buryatia, this Islamic republic is not only a net recipient but the biggest recipient of federal funds in Russia measured in billions of dollars annually, a price the Kremlin is willing to pay to keep this rebellious place under control. Like Kalmyks, the Chechens were deported under Stalin to Central Asia where they endured years of hunger, disease, and humiliation. But unlike Kalmyks, they resisted the authorities and were never Sovietized to the extent that the Kalmyks were.26 The demise of the Soviet Union saw Chechnya declare its independence in 1993, provoking Yeltsin to send in Russian troops to crush the rebellious republic into submission, thus initiating the First Russo-Chechen War. With tens of thousands

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of people dead, whole towns razed to the ground, and no sign of the Russian soldiers gaining the upper hand, the Kremlin announced a cease-fire in 1996, and in 1997 Yeltsin and Chechnya’s self-proclaimed leaders signed a peace treaty in Moscow. One of Putin’s first moves as Yeltsin’s heir was to declare the Chechen government illegitimate and revive the Russo-Chechen War. Despite promising to “whack the Chechen terrorists in the outhouse,” Putin also failed to suppress the Chechens and made a pact with Akhmad Kadyrov, an imam and a warlord who defected to the Russian side, by appointing him interim head of Chechnya. In 2004 Kadyrov was assassinated, prompting Putin to groom his son, Ramzan, to become Chechnya’s next leader. Following the Chechen leader’s funeral, Putin, cultivating a fatherly demeanor, posed before the cameras in the Kremlin along with the orphaned Ramzan, who was in a casual dress and crying. Styling himself a Chechen strongman, Ramzan grew into Chechnya’s version of a feudal lord, nominally subordinate only to Putin’s imperial persona, who on his part poured billions into reconstruction of the war-torn republic. Even the all-powerful FSB has no influence inside Kadyrov’s Chechen fiefdom, which is the only place in the whole of Russia to enjoy such a position. But this does not mean that Chechnya is an Islamic paradise permeated with peace and tranquility. Far from it, it is a ruthless regime policed by the kadyrovtsy, Kadyrov’s personal militia, who act with impunity and violence perhaps matched only by Taliban’s vice squad in Afghanistan. The kadyrovtsy enforce Islamic observances and public morality on the Chechen population, run a kangaroo court, and participate in Putin’s wars in Ukraine and Syria. Operating as a state within a state, Chechnya is also a modern example of how things may go wrong in a place ruled by a thug with a medieval mindset who has the monopoly of violence. Hence Chechnya periodically hits international headlines with news of human rights abuses, forced disappearances, political assassinations, and anti-gay pogroms. In 2020 the U.S. State Department placed Kadyrov on its blacklist of individuals implicated in human rights violations and abuses. In response, Kadyrov posted a picture of himself on his Telegram account wielding two machine guns with a caption addressed to the U.S. Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo: “Pompeo, we accept the fight! Things are about to get more interesting!” An underdog in the Caucasus mountains during his youth, today Kadyrov is a classic example of a banana-republic dictator, full of anxiety over his position, which makes him doubly wily, cruel, and dangerous.

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THE POLITICS OF ETERNITY VERSUS DEMOCRATIZATION Putin is a political animal through and through. The way Russia’s political institutions have been recentralized makes sure that whatever society throws at him Putin always seem to land on his feet, like a cat with nine lives. Today, only three years into his fourth presidential term, Putin has already set out to engineer his next move aimed at perpetuating what Timothy Snyder calls “the politics of eternity.”27 In his annual address to the Federal Assembly on 15 January 2020, Putin proposed a number of amendments to the Russian Constitution aimed at securing the long-term stability of his regime. Putin defended the need for constitutional reform by explaining that the existing 1993 Constitution “was adopted over 25 years ago amidst a severe internal political crisis and the state of affairs has completely overturned since then.” Following the address, Putin established a working group to discuss and draw up the constitutional changes. Consisting of seventy-five members, including the first Soviet female cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, the working group was co-headed by Andrey Klishas and Taliya Khabriyeva. A senator from Krasnoyarsk krai, Klishas is the author of the controversial bills that target “fake news,” “foreign agents,” and “those who insult the authorities.” A member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and head of the Institute of Legislation and Comparative Law under the Government of the Russian Federation, Khabriyeva is known for her strong views about the need for a “national ideology” in Russia. In her speech to the Russian Parliament on 10 March 2020, the cosmonaut Tereshkova proposed to include in the constitutional amendments a clause allowing Putin to remain president until 2036 (by which time he will have served longer than the longest-serving Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, who led the Soviet Union for twenty-nine years; with thrity-six years of leadership, Putin will have ruled for almost as long as Ivan the Terrible, who ruled for thirty-seven years). Tereshkova’s initiative was met with choreographed approval by Putin and his MPs. Excluding the core chapters 1, 2, and 9 of the Constitution, which can be changed only by calling together a Constitutional Assembly and developing a new Constitution, around 60 percent of articles were marked for modification, including, but not limited to, the following provisions: a ban on gay marriage; a new reference to god; the redefinition of the Russian nation as “state-forming”; the precedence of the Russian laws over international ones; and new powers vested in the president to sack federal judges. The vote for the constitutional amendments was scheduled for 22 April, Vladimir Lenin’s 150th birthday, to be followed by the 9 May Victory Parade, which was to be attended by foreign heads of state including Xi Jinping, Donald Trump, and Central Asian

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autocrats. Owing to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Russia, the referendum was postponed only to take place at the height of the pandemic on the day following a rescheduled Victory Parade on 24 June. On 24 June 1945, Stalin held his Parade of Victors in Red Square to celebrate the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany, which culminated in NKVD soldiers carrying Nazi banners and throwing them down next to Lenin’s mausoleum. The referendum took place from 25 June to 1 July in which 78 percent of voters backed the constitutional amendments.28 Aside from constitutionally bolstering the regime, the amendments gave a strong incentive to power holders to cling to power provided they please Putin and protect his rule and legacy. Hence since the referendum a torrent of new laws has been passed by the State Duma aimed at limiting human rights and curbing civil society. In November 2020 the State Duma passed a law granting ex-presidents immunity from prosecution as well as a senatorship at the Federation Council. Apart from providing life-long political power, this law also protects Putin from any criminal and corruption charges. No doubt, this law is very useful to Putin given his exclusive power to order extrajudicial killings, which he is suspected of having used against his opponents, and given that, despite his relatively modest official salary, he is believed to have amassed fabulous wealth during his tenure in power. To this should be added Putin’s long list of other corrupt and criminal activities presumed to have occurred both when he served under Anatoly Sobchak in St. Petersburg Municipality and later when he rose through the ranks in the Yeltsin administration in the Kremlin.29 Now that Putin has secured his power grab and life-long immunity, he has ample time and broad room for maneuver, which may include intensifying his ideology-building project. For this, he needs first to alter the core chapter 1 of the Constitution, which includes anti-ideology Article 13, by convening a Constitutional Assembly, which will be tantamount to adopting a new constitution. Belief in the communist myth was instrumental in cementing the Soviet social system. Contrary to the common view, Putinism has no particular doctrinal formulation, nor did Putin propose anything that comes close to the Soviet ideological myth. Reflecting Russia’s rich history of political and intellectual thought, in his political career Putin flirted with all sorts of ideas—pro-Western, anti-Western, and a mix of both—although in recent years he has shown increasing interest in anti-Western views. Putin now needs time not only to work through the details of his philosophy or a master narrative for Russia but also to coordinate a team of capable ideologists if his legacy is to survive. Putin’s two most senior spin doctors, Gleb Pavlovsky and Vladislav Surkov, who were instrumental in sustaining Putin’s regime, are known to have the view that Russia does not need Soviet-style “eternal leaders.” A former Soviet dissident, Pavlovsky worked closely with

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Putin from 1999 to 2011 when he was removed from his position by thenPrime Minister Putin for supporting President Medvedev’s plan for a second presidential term, which would have made Putin’s reclaiming his presidential seat impossible in 2012. Sharing the same view with Pavlovsky, Surkov was sidelined by Putin but was soon forgiven (presumably for confessing his political sins) and taken back into Putin’s inner circle to orchestrate Russia’s annexation of Crimea. At the beginning of 2020, Surkov suddenly resigned.30 Here I would like to draw your attention to one important point. Apart from the above-mentioned possibility of developing “limited” official ideologies, other scenarios are also possible in the future, including controlled democratization and repudiation of the Soviet concept of state ideology altogether, given that this overarching fantasy is a generational phenomenon. Younger people do not have personal memories of the Soviet Union and its ideology, nor are they burdened by the post-Soviet identity crisis (as is the older generation), and what has satisfied their parents or themselves under Putin so far may not satisfy them, especially if the situation deteriorates in the future. Tellingly, the younger a person is, the more likely they are to believe that Russia should follow a European path of development.31 Values such as “democracy,” “human rights,” and “enlightenment principles”—which have been promoted by the state, if not in practice then in theory, since the Soviet period—are still popular in Russia. But more fundamentally, Russia has a long tradition of Westernizers going back to Petr Chaadaev (1794–1856) and Peter the Great (1672–1725). More recently, Westernizers exercised considerable influence during both the Gorbachev and Yeltsin presidencies only to be marginalized under Putin. Seeing Russia as an essentially European country, Westernizers and liberal intelligentsia wish to see Russia emulate European standards and be governed by an effective rule of law and liberal political institutions. For them, Russia’s future lies not in “civilizational” self-isolation but in integration with a wider “European family of nations.”32 Many of these ideals were inscribed in the 1993 Russian Constitution, which have been either revoked or eroded by Putin’s regime. Another possible scenario is digital authoritarianism or even digital totalitarianism precipitated by rapid developments in new revolutionary digital technologies of mass communication and perception control, which will be discussed in the next chapter. NOTES 1. According to a 2019 poll by Levada Center, 70 percent of Russian respondents said that Stalin played a positive role for Russia. Stalin is getting popular not only among the general population but also among both left-wing and radical right,

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neo-pagan groups across Russia. Since the 2000s, neo-pagan movements, including the Church of Nav and the Union of the Veneds, for example, exchanged Hitler for Stalin as the cult figure of their veneration and worship. 2. Between 2000 and 2020, Putin’s lowest approval rate was 63 percent in 2013 and the highest was 85 percent in 2008 and 2015. In 2020, it was 69 percent. Statista, https://www.statista.com/statistics/896181/putin-approval-rating-russia/. 3. Throughout his first two mandates, Putin occasionally touched upon the topic of a state ideology for Russia. In 2003, for example, at a conference on the development of small cities, he called for patriotism to become a new ideology for Russia. In the same year, he reiterated this idea during a meeting with the heads of institutes of higher education. See Laruelle, In the Name of the Nation, 143–44. 4. Yablokov, Fortress Russia, 25. 5. Kobyakov and Averyanov, Russkaya Doktrina. 6. In 2012 the Center of Dynamic Conservatism, headed by the Doctrinists Andrei Kobyakov and Vitaly Averyanov,  merged with the ultranationalist Alexandr Prokhanov's network to create the Izborsky Club, a platform for Russian anti-liberal movements. The Club's members include such names as Alexandr Dugin, Father Tikhon (better known as "Putin's personal confessor"), Mikhail Delyagin (director of the Institute for the Study of Globalization), and many others. 7. In 2012 the Center of Dynamic Conservatism, headed by the Doctrinists Andrei Kobyakov and Vitaly Averyanov, merged with the ultranationalist Alexandr Prokhanov's network to create the Izborsky Club, a platform for Russian anti-liberal movements. The Club's members include such names as Alexandr Dugin, Father Tikhon (better known as "Putin's personal confessor"), Mikhail Delyagin (director of the Institute for the Study of Globalization), and many others. 8. More on conservatism and popular nationalism in post-Soviet Russia, see Laruelle, In the Name of the Nation. 9. According to the 2010 Levada survey, those who wished to see Russia adopt the same kind of democracy “as in the developed countries of Europe and America” stayed low between 24 percent and 23 percent in the same period (“Chto takoe demokratiya i nuzhna li ona Rossii?” 21 January 2010, Levada Center). These figures should be contrasted with another type of survey by the Levada Center showing that Russian citizens at large consistently “regretted” the demise of the Soviet state: between 1992 and 2008, this number grew from 55 percent to 75 percent only to drop to 60 percent in 2009 (Levada Center survey published on December 21, 2009). 10. “Po kakomu istoricheskomu puti dolzhna idti Rossiya,” March 2019, Levada Center. 11. Borenstein, Plots Against Russia; Yablokov, Fortress Russia. 12. Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy, 41. 13. Whilst perpetrators of domestic violence, who are disproportionately men, are not prosecuted, survivors who kill abusers in self-defense are imprisoned. As of 2020, as many as 80 percent of women inmates in Russia are believed to fall under this category. Freedom House, accessed September 5, 2020, https://freedomhouse.org/ country/russia/freedom-world/2020.

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14. The Patriarch of Russia Kirill was rated the sixth most influential “politician” in Russia. Nezavisimaya Gazeta, February 1, 2010, 6. 15. Klein, Streetlights and Shadows. 16. To bolster patriotism among a wider population, the Kremlin introduced in 2012 the March of the Immortal Regiment (Bessmertnyi Polk) that takes place annually during the Victory Day celebrations. Aimed at immortalizing the memory of those who fought in the Great Patriotic War, it is a massive march staged in all major cities in Russia where people carry pictures of relatives, family friends, and Soviet symbols. By incorporating a civilian element in Victory Parades, the Kremlin combined civilian patriotism and the cult of the army. The militarization of patriotism at both the official and grassroots levels occurs against the backdrop of Russia being depicted by the Kremlin-controlled media as a fortress surrounded by enemies. 17. It should come as no surprise, then, that his strong-man self-image informs Putin’s political as well as geopolitical decisions whereby he engages in sabre-rattling and “who blinks first” games, as is increasingly the case with massive military drills that Russia carries out along its border with Ukraine since the annexation of Crimea in 2014. 18. Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy. 19. Soldatov and Borogan. The New Nobility. 20. Myagkov, et al., The Forensics of Election Fraud. 21. Bennetts, I’m Going to Ruin Their Lives. 22. “Putin Files: Gleb Pavlovsky, Former Adviser to Vladimir Putin,” Frontline, interview with Gleb Pavlovsky, July 13, 2017, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/ interview/gleb-pavlovsky/. 23. Acemoglu and Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power. 24. Breslavsky, “The Suburbs of Ulan-Ude and the Ger Settlements in Ulaanbaatar.” 25. Bernstein, Religious Bodies Politic. 26. Gall and De Waal, Chechnya, 56, 70, 74. 27. Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom. 28. According to a Levada Center survey on 24–25 July 2020, less than half of respondents (48 percent) said that the vote on the amendments to the Constitution was fair. 29. Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy, 104–223. 30. Surkov makes some distinction between state ideology and what he calls "national ideology," although he does not articulate clearly what the latter is, except the fact that it has to be accepted by a majority, if not, by all citizens of Russia. Surkov is in favour of "national ideology," which according to him, has to be formulated by the presidential United Russia party. See Laruelle, In the Name of the Nation, 145, 148. 31. According to a 2020 Levada Center survey, the percentage of respondents who support a European path of development for Russia is as follows: 21 percent (age group 18–24); 15 percent (age group 25–39); 8 percent (age group 40–54); and 4 percent (age group 55 and over). Levada, accessed June 10, 2020, https://www.levada. ru/cp/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Pamyat-o-Sovetskom-Soyuze.pdf.

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32. Another movement in today's Russia that holds up the West as a model to be followed consists of so-called national democrats (Natsdem). Staunchly nationalist and xenophobic, these Natsdem groups are not only anti-Putin but many also wish to see Russia allied with "white" Europe against "people of color." The best-known national democrat is the oppositionist Alexei Navalny, more of a practitioner than a theorist, who has been sent to prison for his anti-corruption campaigns and anti-Putin activities.

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Digital Ideologies?

If men could foresee the future, they would still behave as they do now. (Russian proverb)

There is nothing new about people being manipulated by holy books, commercials, or ideological brainwashing. In fact, it can be argued that ideologies are not inherently evil in and of themselves. Just as religions, national myths, and multinational corporations are various forms of organizing communities, ideologies too serve as glue that binds communities together, ensuring effective cooperation among a large number of people. All these tools to create imagined orders, however, carry seeds of enslavement and human misery and can easily grow into totalitarian forms of control if left unchecked, as we see in the example of the Soviet Union under Stalin (chapter 2). The emergence of Soviet totalitarianism in the 1930s was made possible, first and foremost, by unprecedented technologies of communication (railways, the telegraph, the telephone, radio, later television) and mass media (including the cinema and the press) that the Communist Party harnessed for purposes of propaganda and social control. Whilst these technologies in themselves do not necessarily bring about totalitarianism, Stalinism would have been unfeasible without technologies that rendered propaganda more pervasive and perception control (i.e., controlling the way people think and act) more effective. Throughout its history, the Soviet state claimed to be in full control of its citizenry. But this claim was only partly true. Had the state had full control, the Soviet Union would not have collapsed as dramatically as it did in 1991. The final chapter discusses the implications of new technologies for ideology-building projects. Just as the unprecedented technologies of the 20th century were instrumental in bringing about authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, today new technologies are poised to reshape society in 263

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unprecedented ways once again, which may result in total control of the masses becoming an objective reality in the 21st century. Recent developments in AI (artificial intelligence), exponential growth in computer power, the emergence of online social media and portable devices, and expanding hyper-connectivity are already changing the rules of the game. Not only do new social media companies, empowered by these new technologies, possess unprecedented capacities to locate our bodies, deduce our thoughts, interests, and feelings, but they can also modify our behavior.1 Take Facebook, for example. It has 2.45 billion active users worldwide whose personal information (concerning their political beliefs, sexual orientation, personality traits, fears, and much more) is collected, analyzed, and stored by the company. In other words, by directly recording and analyzing data pertaining to the experiencing self within us (which is our moment-to-moment consciousness of which we are forgetful and unaware), this platform knows us better than we do ourselves. While primarily harnessed for commercial purposes, this data can simultaneously be used for political goals. Sitting on this colossal and valuable trove of data, Facebook already quietly influences elections, using means that its users can neither detect nor control.2 Other elephants in the room are Google, Twitter, and similar data-collecting and analyzing platforms. Such concentration of knowledge inevitably produces a historic concentration of power that can be irresistible to authoritarian states. The Communist Party of China that is rapidly turning the country toward digital authoritarianism is one example. Whilst Facebook and other Western platforms and companies are blocked in China by the GFW (Great Firewall of China), the country has a flotilla of its own home-grown equivalents comprising an ecosystem of interconnected surveillance cameras, smart ticket machines, smart scans, smartphones, wearable gadgets, smart home appliances, and personal computers. This digitized infrastructure, underpinned by increasingly integrated technology and a growing number of new-generation smart gadgets, not only controls access to goods, services, and information but also collects behavioral data. As well as permeating Chinese society, technology is relentlessly recording and analyzing people’s activities and turning them into data. Based on Big Data and extensive smart infrastructure, the Chinese government has been developing a comprehensive “social credit” system with the aim of “improving” people’s behavior. Rather than sending individuals to camps or using the threat of physical violence (which it still does), the government today gives precedence to subtler ways of modifying people’s behavior by tracking “good” and “bad” behavior across a variety of financial and social activities, automatically rating citizens and assigning punishments and rewards. Not only are “bad” people (including dissidents and activists) barred from

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buying travel tickets or luxury goods, but they are also ostracized by digital technology from their colleagues, friends, and families. “Good” and “trustworthy” citizens, by contrast, can roam freely everywhere under heaven and are offered perks, such as favorable terms on loans or renting a car without a deposit, which enhance their social prestige. Whilst this project in China is still fragmented across many pilots and regions, the current level of control that the Communist Party enjoys has been made possible by the fusion of state power with Digital Age technologies that are operational everywhere and detectable nowhere, invisibly shaping people’s behavior at the individual level. As society becomes more datafied (turned into data) and digitized, it will grow prone to more detailed analysis and real-time nuanced intervention by machines and those who control them. Moreover, with improvements in machine learning, the smart infrastructure will evolve and expand independently, upgrading itself and learning from its mistakes. In full awareness of the potential of AI, in 2018 China unveiled a program with a price tag of $150 billion to develop AI and Big Data further. Whilst Russia is in no way close to China’s level of digitally influencing its population and is lagging technologically behind China, the country is rapidly improving its digital infrastructure and surveillance capabilities. In Russia 61 percent of the population already use smartphones and of the top ten apps ranked by monthly active users, five have been developed by Russian companies. Russia has dozens if not hundreds of underground “troll factories” funded or supported by the government,3 and by manipulating the domestic internet, the Kremlin is assembling an “AI propaganda machine” which churns out bots (AI systems), trolls, and individualized advertisements onto social media, whose function is as much to create “deep noise” (making news indistinguishable from fake news) as to target with high precision all sorts of political campaigns, including elections. In 2019 the Russian Duma passed the Sovereign Internet Law aimed at developing and implementing a system which will enable the authorities to switch off certain internet activities (such as live-streaming, YouTube, etc.) in specific regions of the country. This gives the state the levers to control public protests in one region from spilling over to other parts of Russia. According to the law, all smartphones sold in Russia also have to be pre-installed with Russian-made apps, which will make surveillance more effective. The ultimate aim of this and other internet laws is to construct a bubble of Russian social media and e-mail services, which can be controlled and employed in state propaganda and projects. Of course, it is far from clear whether the Russian authorities will succeed in erecting a new Digital Curtain around the country. Given its recent technological history, we need to remember that Russia has a great potential to develop new technologies as when by the 1950s the country, despite the skepticism of Western commentators, became an industrialized colossus

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boasting the largest and best-funded scientific establishment in human history. That Russia may pull the trick again in the Digital Age should not be dismissed. Even if Russia does not lead in AI technologies, it may export or copy foreign models. Putin understands well the importance of new technologies for Russia’s future. 1 September is a day of celebration in Russia marking the first day of the new academic year. On this day, officially known as “Knowledge Day,” it is customary for educators, public figures, and leaders to give lessons, often concerning values or the future, to the younger generation. On 1 September 2017, Putin gave a speech for pupils in a secondary school in the town of Yaroslavl, which was broadcast by the main TV channels in Russia. In a bid to inspire and energize the growing generation, the president gave them the following task: Your task is not only to make something new but to take a principally new step. Look at how the world develops today. There are countries that have incommensurably larger populations than ours. There are states that have technologies and modern ways of management that far surpass those of ours. But a question arises: If we [Eurasian people] have existed for more than a thousand years and have been actively developing and strengthening ourselves, does it not mean that we have something that is conducive to this? This “something” is the “nuclear reactor” inside our people that allows us to move forward. This is passionarity that Gumilev wrote about, which pushes our people forward. And all of you, who are starting an active life, need to take this into account and achieve qualitatively better results.4

Acknowledging the decisive power of AI in the world’s geopolitical competition, Putin also added: Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia, but for all humankind. It comes with colossal opportunities, but also threats that are difficult to predict. Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.

Putin’s lesson at Yaroslavl was not empty lecturing but revealed some of his plans and projects. In its geopolitical strategy, the Kremlin has been weaponizing and digitizing the old Eurasianist idea, which enables the Russian government to wage cyberwars and to manipulate political opinion to gain geopolitical advantage. All major military operations are today accompanied by cyber-disruption, including cyber-attacks on Estonia in 2007, Georgia in 2008, as well as ongoing cyber-incursions in Ukraine. Cyber operations carried out in the depths of “Atlanticist” territory by hijacking Western social network platforms with armies of bots and trolls include the 2016 UK Brexit referendum and the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, just to mention two. As

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of 2020, the FBI’s six “most wanted” cybercriminals are all Russian nationals or groups.5 This book recounts various forms of imagined realities, that is realities or orders that are imagined but which nevertheless organize society and influence our lives in tangible ways. Many philosophical and religious traditions around the world deal with the question of two fundamental realities. More pertinent to the topic of this book, in modern European philosophy, which took root in the Age of Enlightenment, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s ideas have had a deep impact on modern epistemology and perception theory. Whilst making an analytical distinction between reality as it is (noumenon) and reality as we perceive it (phenomenon), Kant argued that the former can never be fully experienced because we can only subjectively know the world around us through our limited sense organs and mental constructs such as ideas and models. Modern biology supports his view for indeed, as the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins convincingly argues, “what we see as the real world is not the unvarnished real world but a model of the real world, regulated and adjusted by sense data” from our sense organs which are equipped to perceive only a small fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum and register only a small middle range of sizes, moving at a middle range of speeds. Hence we do not see ultraviolet light in all its richness, or molecules tussling, or elements hurtling at the speed of light. Nor do we hear what many insects hear, or notice Brownian motion that buffets the movement of bacteria. Our brain and our senses have evolved to help us navigate around the world on the scale at which our bodies operate and perceive the world in the ways which have mattered to our survival.6 Since the dawn of civilization, humans used technology—fire, agriculture, livestock breeding, religion, money, construction—to materially re-arrange the world around them into what Kant calls “reality as we perceive it” (phenomenon). Reflecting their vision of the world, human groups gradually changed the landscape by turning it into fields of crops, domesticated wildlife by selection, built artificial settlements and cities, created an economy, and sought to subjugate nature with the help of anthropomorphized gods that listen to human prayers and whims. This lasted for millennia until the emergence of steam-powered machines and electricity during the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, which changed the rules of the game. These new technologies not only ushered in a new capitalist society and fueled mechanized world wars, but also rendered the Kantian noumenal reality (what he also calls the “unknowable thing-in-itself”) knowable and measurable. Thus by the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, for the first time in history we peered into distant galaxies, measured molecules and atoms, and discovered spectrums of invisible colors and inaudible sound waves. These technologies also bridged the seemingly un-navigable gap between noumenon and

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phenomenon, releasing transformative energy and revolutionary ideas. Just as new instruments, mathematics, and electricity ushered in a new social formation of industrial capitalism, today 21st-century technologies are poised to change society once again. But most fundamentally, these new technologies have opened up a yet new reality—a hybrid consisting of the natural world overlain with simulated worlds—constituting a third kind of reality in which our experiences and perception will be increasingly enhanced by digital, neuro-, and biotechnological means such as wearables, implanted gadgets, and modified genes. This reality can be called “reality as we construct it” or structomenon.7 The rapidly improving technologies of AI, AR (augmented reality), and VR (virtual reality) have already triggered a Cambrian explosion of next-generation technologies and will soon render this third kind of reality into a hyper-reality in which the world around us will be digitally augmented at scale, and the distinction between online and offline worlds will gradually disappear. If this idea sounds far-fetched, there are already people who have microchips implanted into their bodies and brains to explore the boundaries of perception. These cyborg activists and pioneers merge their bodies with machines to sense earthquakes, to experience cosmic rays, or to see the full spectrum of color from ultraviolet to infrared. These developments are poised to create not only new abilities but also new desires, worldviews, and identities. Even at this early stage, some mainstream gadgets—such as VR headsets—are already so impressive that at the edge of a virtual cliff, individuals will display realistic emotional and hormonal responses, including accelerated heart rate. Instituting a new global economy and society and offering unprecedented possibilities for creativity, this emerging “reality as we construct it” (structomenon), underpinned by new-generation technologies of behavioral modification and perception augmentation, is bound to bring about new forms of politics and make indoctrination and mind control hyper-effective. In fact, it can bring about “digital ideologies” and along with them new human subjects. Whilst conventional 20th century ideologies targeted populations, digital ideologies will target individuals by rendering them into a collection of information and scripts, bio-technologically “wrapping” each and every person in individually constructed algorithmic bubbles, and manipulating their behavior using informational, economic, social, and even hormonallyinduced incentives or punishments. What this means is that the information and incentives/punishments that we will receive will not be the same for everyone but be individually tailored to each person’s profile. One definition of totalitarianism is the transformation of the state into a project of total possession of each individual soul by engineering inward experiences and social bonds that lead to results defined as desirable by the state. That this has never been fully achieved by any regime ever is a known fact. But this may soon

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change with the rise of structomenon, the new “reality as we construct it,” in which AI-empowered machine intelligence, guided by protocols to influence and modify human behavior and perception at scale, will effectively control what Daniel Kahneman describes as our cognitive “System 1” (the experiencing self) and “System 2” (the narrating self). Rather than years of expensive and inefficient public indoctrination in which propaganda was continuously pumped into social fields and networks in the hope that it would eventually reach as many people as possible, this new ubiquitous governance will deliver the personalized propaganda package instantaneously to each individual at a fraction of the cost. Supported by trillions of gadgets, both implanted and around us, and connected in the IoT (Internet of Things) by 5G and ensuing upper-level G networks, this ecosystem will automatically compute each and every individual’s thoughts and feelings in micro-fractions of a second 24/7, invisibly shaping our thoughts and values, giving authoritarian states the kind of power that dictators of the past could only dream of. Also, technologically reinforced by a “digital ideology” and ubiquitous surveillance, totalitarian countries will not only instill pervasive self-discipline among the target population but make it impossible for dissidents to find each other, let alone stage an uprising. Throughout history, humans have tried to devise various methods of social control, from religions to political ideologies, each of which proved to be as fallible and partially effective as those who devised them. What else can be expected of mammals closely related to chimpanzees? But the emerging autonomous techno-system is poised to change everything. Once bitten, the digital apple proved irresistible. Anticipated breakthroughs—such as quantum technologies, the IoT (Internet of Things), the mapping of the human brain, genetically based interventions and modification of the human body, which are already taking place—will not only constitute a quantum leap in how societies of the (near) future will be organized, but these technologies will also—to reiterate—give authoritarian states unprecedented power to control and manipulate their citizens. This scenario is only a possibility, not a prophecy, for the rise of new technologies does not lead to a deterministic outcome. But in order to prevent this techno-dystopian image of the future from materializing, today we need to begin to think carefully about these issues by opening this debate up to wider audiences, analyzing totalitarian ideologies, enhancing our democratic institutions, and creating legal, moral, and technological environments (for example, by developing decentralized technologies similar to the block-chain) that are structurally resistant to totalitarian impulses.

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NOTES 1. Russell, Human Compatible; Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. 2. In the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, which derived data from millions of Facebook users, reportedly gathered a database of over 220 million Americans with psychological profiles of each voter. This enabled the Trump campaign, which used Cambridge Analytica’s service, to target individual voters with catered messages on social media (Susskind, Future Politics, 220). Apart from the U.S. elections, Cambridge Analytica worked in more than 200 elections in sixty-eight countries, before being forced to close its operations in 2018. 3. Chen, “The Agency”; Galeotti, The Vory, 220, 236, 251. 4. “Teacher for a Day: Vladimir Putin Lectures Russian Schoolchildren,” DW, September 1, 2017, https://www.dw.com/en/ teacher-for-a-day-vladimir-putin-lectures-russian-schoolchildren/a-40317090. 5. “Most Wanted,” FBI website, accessed December 9, 2020, https://www.fbi.gov/ wanted/cyber. 6. Dawkins, The God Delusion, 405–19. 7. I propose the term structomenon based on the Latin root struct meaning “to build, to make up” and menon, which is the same ending as in the terms “noumenon” and “phenomenon.” The term “noumenon” derives from the Greek root noou “to know,” and the term “phenomenon” from the Greek root phen “to show, visible.”

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Index

actors, theory of, 8–14 agriculture, Soviet, 32, 39, 43, 44, 70. See also Lysenko, Trofim aliens, cosmic: in cosmism, 80, 82, 87, 90; in the Soviet Union, 93, 94, 95, 97; in post-Soviet Russia, 98, 174; in post-Soviet Kalmykia, 99, 100, 101, 102, 171, 172, 196, 220. See also UFOs Andropov, Yuri, 54–55, 58, 60. See also KGB anthropocene, 105. See also noosphere Akhmatova, Anna, 38, 41, 90, 118, 119 Arzhilovsky, Andrey, 34. See also Great Purge Astrakhan, 147, 157, 158, 215 Baba Vanga, 174, 175, 177, 180, 181, 189n5 Belarus, 65, 127, 131 Bogdanov, Alexandr, 90, 91 Bolshevik Revolution, 11–13 Bourdieu, Pierre, 7, 16, 26. See fields, theory of Brezhnev, Leonid, 44, 45–47, 49, 55, 58, 60, 176, 177 Brezhnev era, 45–54, 59, 94, 96, 175, 176, 177, 213 Buryatia, 148, 156, 164, 212, 254, 255

capitalism: as a system, 25, 45, 268; Soviet conception of, 32, 41, 42, 43, 46, 49, 61; Eurasianists’ understanding of, 120, 125 capitalism, bandit, 176–77 charisma, 184–87, 217. See also Weber, Max; prospect theory China, 45, 82, 114, 116, 121, 152, 156, 255, 264, 265 Committee for Ideology, Culture, and International Party Relations, 40, 44 Chaadaev, Petr, 55, 113, 259. See also Westernizers Chechnya, 68, 127, 221, 255, 256 Cheka (All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage), 30–31, 56, 57, 117. See also NKVD; KGB; FSB Chernenko, Konstantin, 53, 59 Chingis Khan: in Eurasianism, 112, 115, 126; as a historical figure, 152, 153, 167n7; in Ilyumzhinov’s view, 187 Chizhevsky, Alexandr, 84, 89, 96, 105, 106 Chumak, Allan, 174. Also see Kashpirovsky, Anatoly

281

282

Index

complementarity, 119, 185. See also passionarity; Gumelev, Lev; Eurasianism conspiracy theories: in Soviet society, 17, 34, 36, 39, 50, 52, 66, 74n51, 97, 117; in KGB, 57; and ideology, 47, 48, 50, 194, 224; and cosmism, 95, 108; and Eurasianism, 111, 112, 113, 123, 126, 128; and Putin, 132, 133; in post-Soviet Russia, 136, 244, 245, 248, 252; in post-Soviet Kalmykia, 182, 203, 236 Covid-19, 239, 257 cosmism, Russian: as state ideology, 70, 71, 106; history of, 79–98; in Kalmykia, 98–102; in Buddhism, 102, 103; and science, xv, 103–107. Also see UFOs Cossacks, 54, 155, 157, 158, 165, 166 Crimea, 128, 136, 138, 147, 158, 165, 248, 258. See also Ukraine Dalai Lama, 156, 168n21, 181, 184, 207, 213, 219 Dawkins, Richard, 18, 224, 225, 267 de-Stalinization of society, 40, 43, 45, 60. See also Stalinism; totalitarianism developed communism, 24 developed socialism, 45, 58 Dorzhinov, Valeriy, 99, 100, 101 Dugin, Alexandr, 123–28 Dzerzhinsky, Felix, 57, 65. See also Cheka Elista, 99, 100, 101, 141, 147, 148, 150, 156, 161, 162, 163, 165, 172, 178, 179, 181, 184, 187, 195, 201, 202, 203, 207–210, 212, 214, 215, 218, 219, 222n9, 235, 238, 239, 251 Elistaev, Batr, 212, 213, 226. See also political technology Engels, Frederick, 23, 25, 29, 42, 49 Epstein, Mikhail, xxiin1, 50

ethnogenesis, theory of, 119, 121, 122, 196. See Gumilev, Lev Eurasianism: history of, 112–17; as a “science,” xv, 11, 111–12, 114, 115, 127, 140. See also 142n4; as a geopolitical and economic project, 127, 128, 131, 134; among Russian émigré in China, 116; in Kazakhstan, 122; in Kalmykia, 138–142 Experimental Creative Center, 64, 106, 124. See Kurginian, Sergey Ezhov, Nikolay, 33, 34 Fedorov, Nikolay, 85–86, 91, 96, 104, 105, 106 Ferguson, Niall, 14, 15. See networks and hierarchies, theory of FSB (Federal Security Service), 129, 131, 208, 209, 236, 237, 256. See also Cheka; NKVD; KGB field, ideological, 16, 17, 26, 29, 31, 32, 40, 41, 46, 64, 254 fields, theory of, 16, 17, 19, 26, 32, 64, 115, 228. See Bourdieu, Pierre Gagarin, Yuri, 43, 86, 93, 94 Gellner, Ernest, 47, 48, 224, 225 genetics, 37, 38, 39, 104 Georgia, 91, 126, 128, 131, 135, 165, 266 Glushko, Valentin, 37, 86 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 58, 59–66, 98. See also perestroika Great Purge, 33, 37 gulag, 33, 34, 40, 52, 96, 119, 120, 159, 160, 175 Gumilev, Lev, 16, 111, 117–122 historiography: under Stalin, 35; Soviet, 61, 151; in Soviet Kalmykia, 161, 162; in post-Soviet Kalmykia, 152, 163, 164, 166, 167; in post-Soviet Russia, 151; and Eurasianism, 111, 115, 119, 127 Homo Sovieticus, 50, 67, 139, 248

Index

horn effect, 217, 218. See also charisma ideology: function of, xvi-xvii; definitions of, xvi, xvii, 7; Marx’s understanding of, 24, 25; and technology, 20–21, 263–269; search in post-Soviet Kalmykia, 69–72, 234–35; connection with cosmology, 194; resurgent interest in, 244–47, 253, 254; pre-mortem analysis of, 251–54 ideology, bourgeois, 25, 49 ideology, digital, 268, 269 ideology, Soviet: connection with pseudoscience, xiv, xv, 10; functions of, xvii; Bolsheviks’ understanding of, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29; textbooks and definition of, 42–43, 46; organisations that maintained, 44, 63; as experience, 47–53, 225; nostalgia for, 250. See nostalgia Ilyin, Ivan, 136–37 Ilyin, Viktor, 55 Ilyumzhinov, Kirsan: biography of, 172–75, 177; as President of Kalmykia, xiii, xviii, xix, 177–84, 209, 210; as a charismatic leader, 181–82, 185–87; as a discredited politician, 209, 210, 211, 214–20; as President of FIDE, 181, 187, 208, 220, 221, 229 intelligentsia, 36–39, 41, 62, 83, 93, 114, 122, 259 Iran, 68, 126, 133 Ivan the Terrible, 35, 154, 257 Ivanov, Vsevolod, 116 KGB (Committee for State Security), 53–56, 61, 65–67, 123, 124, 129, 131, 161, 162, 173, 177. See also Cheka; NKVD; FSB Kahneman, Daniel, 5, 21, 47, 48, 64, 99, 186, 225, 269. See prospect theory Kalmyk, etymology of, 154

283

Kalmyk State University, 101, 150, 152, 208, 218, 219 Kalmykia: general information, xvii, xviii, xix, 147–48, 207–9; population, xviii, 167n1; geographical imagination, 148–50, 165; search for identity, 138–41, 163–65; presidential elections, xviii, 178, 181, 184, 212–14, 236, 237; early history, 152–58; in Soviet times, 158–62, 169n32; post1991, 162–67; search for a state ideology, 71–74; post-Ilyumzhinov, 235–40; political opposition, 204, 214–17, 220. Kaluga, 83, 86, 89, 106, 112 Kashpirovsky, Anatoly, 174. Also see Chumak, Allan Kazakhstan, 122, 127, 131, 157, 169n32 Kerensky, Fyodor, 10, 11, 12 Khara-Davan, Erenzhen, 112, 114, 115, 116, 120, 141, 158 Khasikov, Batu, 237–39 Khrushchev, Nikita, 40–44 Kirov, Sergey, 33 Kolesnik, Vladimir, 152, 166, 167 Kornilov, Lavr, 11 Korolev, Sergey, 37, 86 Kurginian, Sergey, 124, 143. See Experimental Creative Center Kyrgyzstan, 122, 127, 131, 169n32 Lenin, Vladimir: looks, 8; genealogy of, 8, 158; biography of, 8–10, 57; as leader of the Soviet state, 30, 31–32; mausoleum, 40, 250, 251, 257; death, mummification, and cult of, 91, 184, 218, 250, 251. See also 109n16 Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR), 64, 124 Litvinenko, Alexandr, 133, 144n39 Lysenko, Trofim, 39, 43, 44, 92 Mamleev, Yuri, 124, 125. See Yuzhinsky circle

284

Index

marketplace of imagination, 17, 18, 19, 20, 48, 194, 224, 225 Marx, Carl, 23, 24, 25, 29, 42, 49 Marxism-Leninism. See ideology, Soviet Medvedev, Dmitry, 101, 134, 144n43, 220, 235, 236, 255, 258 meme, 7, 17, 18, 48, 143n39, 224, 225. See also marketplace of imagination; Dawkins, Richard Mlynar, Zdenek, 60 Mongol Horde, 115, 118, 153, 154 Mongolia, xviii, 62, 96, 109n16, 119, 126, 148, 152, 154, 179, 214, 255 Moonies (The Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity), 183 Morozov, Pavlik, 46 NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 117, 257. See also Cheka; KGB; FSB National Idea, 69, 72, 244. See ideology Neizvestny, Ernst, 41, 163 networks and hierarchies, theory of, 14–15, 66, 116, 117, 153, 252. See Ferguson, Niall Nogays, 154, 166 nomenklatura 29, 36, 38, 55, 66 noosphere: Vernadsky’s definition of, 87, 88, 105, 109n34; Soviet conception of, 88; in popular culture, 88, 89, 101, 102, 104, 193; in Kalmyk state ideology, 198, 199. See also anthropocene nostalgia, 68, 230–235, 248, 250 Nuskhaev, Alexei, 195–97, 198, 202, 210, 226, 227, 228 oprichniki, 35. See also, Ivan the Terrible Ochirov, Valeriy, xviii Orlov, Alexei, 231, 235, 236, 237 Orthodox Church, 4, 28, 42, 90, 113, 182, 249

passionarity, 118, 119, 120, 127, 141, 185, 186, 187, 193, 196, 266. Also see charisma; Gumelev, Lev; Eurasianism patriotism: in pre-revolutionary Russia, 28; among early Bolsheviks, 2; under Stalin, 19, 35, 36, 11; in Soviet society, 19, 34, 43, 48; in KGB, 56, 58; and cosmism, 81; and Eurasianism, 125, 128, 196; in postSoviet Kalmykia, 71, 164, 165, 166, 167, 213, 214, 234, 248; in postSoviet Russia, 123, 132, 135, 136, 243, 246, 249, 251 Pavlovsky, Gleb, 130, 131, 133, 135, 212, 253, 258 perestroika, 59–67, 70, 72, 97, 101, 122, 124, 148, 173, 174, 176, 182, 213, 231, 232. See also Gorbachev, Mikhail Peter the Great, 35, 83, 113, 156, 259 political technology, 130, 183, 184, 212, 213, 214. See also Pavlovsky, Gleb; Surkov, Vladislav; Elistaev, Batr Politkovskaya, Anna, 132, 133, 144n39 proletarian internationalism, 27, 28, 31 prospect theory, 5–6, 47, 48, 64, 225, 228, 230, 231, 264, 269. See Kahneman, Daniel Provisional Government, 8–12, 28 psychoanalysis, 37 Pussy Riot, rock band, 134, 165, 249, 250 Putin, Spiridon, 31 Putin, Vladimir: biography of, 128–29; interest in a state ideology, xiii, 132, 244, 245, 247, 258; interest in becoming a KGB operative, 58; as a KGB operative, 129; as (deputy) mayor of St Petersburg, 129, 176, 258; as a former KGB operative, 53, 59, 130, 131, 132, 136; 2000 elections, 59, 129, 130; 2012 elections, 134, 144n43; reaction to 9/11, 131; disillusionment

Index

with the West, 131, 133, 134; and Eurasianism, 127, 131, 134, 136, 244, 266; view of Ilyin’s ideas, 137; and Orthodox Church, 249, 250; as President of Russia, 128, 130, 131, 132, 133, 136, 209, 216, 237, 244, 249, 251, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259; as Prime Minister, 129, 130, 134, 135, 247; and FIDE elections, 221, 222n11; popularity in Russia, 243, 247, 252; image in Kalmykia, 216, 233, 238, 239 Pyurveev, Jangar, 101, 107, 138 Red Terror, 30–31, 117 Russian Doctrine, 245–47 Russo-Chechen Wars, 68, 129, 165, 255, 256 Ryzhkov, Nikolay, 58, 64 Sandzhiev, Dmitry, 101, 102 Satarov, Georgy, 67, 68, 69 Savitsky, Petr, 114, 115, 116, 117, 119, 120 science and pseudoscience, xiv, xv, xvi Scott, James, 95, 96 Secretary for Ideology: in the Soviet Union, 44, 54, 59, 61; in post-Soviet Kalmykia, 196, 197, 210, 211 sharashka, 37. See gulag Silver Age, of Russia, xv, 112, 113, 114, 118, 181, 182 Skuratov, Sergey, 129 Slavophiles, xiv, 113, 114. See also Westernizers Smirnova, Anna, 8, 158. See also Lenin, Vladimir social media, 21, 135, 239, 264, 265, 270 Socialist realism, 38, 39, 95 Solovyev, Vladimir, 96, 113, 114, 182 sovereign democracy, 245, 246, 247. See Surkov, Vladislav Soviet dissidents, 52, 53, 54, 55, 66, 123, 130, 150

285

Soviet space dogs, 94, 218 Soviet youth, 51, 52 Stalin, Joseph, 31–36, 38–39, 42, 57, 65, 91, 92, 151, 175, 243, 257 Stalinism, 31–39 Stalin Prize, 37, 88 State ideology of Kalmykia: textbook of, 197–201; how it was promulgated, 201–204; analysis of, 225, 226, 229; repudiation of, 226–30. Stierlitz, 58, 59 structomenon, 266, 267, 269n7 Surkov, Vladislav, 212, 221n1, 238, 245, 246, 258. See also political technology; sovereign democracy Suslov, Mikhail, 40, 44, 53, 54, 60 Susskind, Jamie, 21, 47 Syria, 138, 171, 220, 256 Tatarstan, 68, 122 Tereshkova, Valentina, xii, 257 Timofeev-Ressovsky, Nikolay, 120 totalitarianism, 27, 33, 34, 67, 96, 263, 268, 269. See also Stalinism; Stalin, Joseph troika tribunals, 32, 65 Trotsky, Leon, 8, 10, 11, 12, 16, 31, 32, 33 Trubetskoy, Nikolay, 112, 114, 115, 116, 117 Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin, 86–87, 89, 96, 104, 105, 106, 108 Turner, Victor, 139 UFOs, 80, 92–95, 97, 100, 102, 174. Also see aliens, cosmic Ukraine, 65, 126, 128, 131, 132, 135, 138, 165, 237, 238, 250, 256, 266. See also Crimea Vernadsky, Georgy, 112, 114, 115, 120 Vernadsky, Vladimir, 87–88, 89, 104, 105, 106, 108, 196, 198, 201 Victory Parade, 251, 252, 257

286

vory, 52–53, 56, 175, 176 Weber, Max, 184, 185, 186, 217. See charisma Westernizers, 113, 259. See also Slavophiles Yagoda, Genrikh, 33, 34 Yakovlev, Alexandr, 61, 98, 123 Yeltsin, Boris: 1991 elections, 65; 1996 elections, 68, 69, 130; as a politician, 65, 66, 67, 101, 125, 129,

Index

244, 251, 255; and Putin, 129, 253, 258; and psychics, 174; attempt at a state ideology, xi, 69, 72; era of democracy, xiii, xviii, 59, 68, 125, 131, 136, 176, 212, 230, 231, 233, 248, 250, 251, 259 Yurchak, Alexei, 49, 51 Yuzhinsky circle, 123, 124. See Mamleev, Yuri Zigel, Felix, 94, 97

About the Author

Baasanjav Terbish is an affiliated researcher at the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit of the University of Cambridge. Awarded a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge, he has studied Russia since 2009.

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