The Yuzhinsky brand of unofficial culture was referred to as ‘schizoid’ by both its purveyors and its detractors. The schizoids adopted the pejorative term as their own, finding madness a form of gnosis, a saner alternative to a reality that was utterly hostile to them. The creators of the underground culture ‘revelled in the unshakable sense of self-chosenness and self-apostasy’, according to Natalya Tamruchin, a historian of the movement. They despised property, money and status, and, according to Tamruchin, focused on ‘the one area which was out of reach of the eye of the state censors – the area of purely mental experience’.5
By 1980 the group had gone through many changes. The core remained, while Mamleev had departed for the United States where he taught at Cornell University, before moving to Paris, where he was finally published. (Publishers in the United States, like those in the USSR, rejected his books.) The circle no longer met in the Yuzhinsky Pereulok barracks, which had been demolished, but rather in the flats and dachas of its members. They camped out on each other’s sofas, slept on floors, performed bizarre initiation rituals, engaged in alchemy and the transmutation of metals, pored over magic texts, created secret numerological codes, wrote in streams of consciousness, drank heavily, experimented with sex, drugs and occasionally fascism.
The accent on mysticism and the occult – and alcohol – was mainly inspired by the group’s new leader, Evgeny Golovin, who had been Mamleev’s chief disciple. Nicknamed ‘Admiral’, Golovin had a reputation as a master ‘alchemist’, though it was not entirely clear what this qualification was based on or indeed how he practised alchemy. ‘He basically liked to drink a lot’, recalled Igor Dudinsky, a frequent visitor to the circle. In 2012 I visited him in his single-room Moscow flat, hung with avant-garde paintings and the paraphernalia of the Moscow beatnik underground. Golovin was defined, as far as acquaintances could tell, by two main characteristics: alcoholism and a certain Russian-style literary genius. According to Rovner’s colourful reminiscences, Golovin was ‘a natural Russian phenomenon – a classical combination of aesthetic snobbishness, esoteric misanthropy, alcoholic inspiration, plus a hot peppering of black fantasy and American horror movies’.6
Golovin was also completely obsessed with the Third Reich, seeing in it a monstrous and mystical yin to humanity’s yang. After the group of about half a dozen hardcore followers had moved into a flat on Ushakova Street, he began to refer to himself as the Führer. He named his followers ‘the Black Order of the SS’ and told them all to wear Nazi paraphernalia. He hung a picture of Hitler on the wall. ‘There was nothing anti-Semitic about it’, said Dudinsky, a bit tendentiously, as our conversation veered in this direction. ‘There were lots of Jews at these gatherings. We would all shout “Sieg Heil” and “Heil Hitler” and all we meant was “down with Soviet power!”’, said Dudinsky, a merry soul, who is still fond of flinging the odd ‘Roman salute’ just to prove a point. The police, he says, finally made them take down the Hitler poster.
In 1980, in preparation for the Olympic Games in Moscow, police cleared the riff-raff from the streets, and it was strongly suggested that the group should move out of the capital. They found new beatnik digs at a dacha in the suburb of Klyazma. It was owned by Sergey Zhigalkin, a wiry and energetic man who made a name for himself translating Heidegger and publishing Golovin’s poetry.
While writing this book, I met Zhigalkin. He offered to help recreate a typical (albeit much tamer) evening get-together of the mystical underground, taking me to the Klyazma dacha, which he still owns. We sat around a bonfire and drank cognac all night long, while he explained to me the magnetic, dark charisma of Golovin, who emerges from the tales of his followers much like the leader of a cult. ‘In Golovin’s presence, the limits of the natural world fell away, the earth became a bigger place, a limitless place. It was like being flung out of a centrifuge. We used alcohol to start the energy, but Golovin could manipulate this energy. He could destroy your perception of the world.’ The mystical underground, he said, existed in odd counterpoint to the Soviet regime: ‘The two needed each other. Without the regime, there could be no underground. But they needed us too. They needed heretics.’
One evening, a young man appeared at the Klyazma dacha, brought by an acquaintance. He looked no more than 18. His head was shaved, but he had an aristocratic bearing and a quick wit. He was immediately charismatic, and came carrying a guitar. Strumming away around a bonfire in the evening sunset, he belted out a song: ‘Fuck the Damned Sovdep’.7 Even by the extreme tastes of the mystical underground this was borderline stuff, calling for the mass murder of the Soviet leadership and conquest of the globe by Russian ‘legions’:
‘We all just fell down and worshipped him’, said Dudinsky. ‘What a great song! He was like the messiah.’ His name was Alexander Dugin, and he was the newest recruit to the Moscow mystical underground. A brilliant if unformed teenager, he soon learned to idolize his guru, Golovin.
Few people from those years have forgetten their first encounter with Dugin, who had a gift for making an entrance. Konstantin Serebrov, a follower and chronicler of the mystical underground, says Dugin ‘looked like a true representative of a higher race, with his strict and formal appearance. He belonged to the gilded youth of Moscow who had to satisfy great expectations.’ In a memoir of the times, Serebrov recalls meeting Dugin at Moscow’s Kievskaya metro station:
A look of rapture came over Alexander’s face. He pulled a bottle of port wine out of his bag and threw it on the platform. ‘Sieg Heil! I make this sacrifice to the god Dionysus.’ The bottle shattered into a million pieces, spreading a wave of port across the platform.8
The subjects of Dugin’s art and his fascination with Nazism were all part and parcel of his total devotion to Golovin, who had a penchant for ‘zombifying’ his followers and teaching them to ‘zombify’ others. Serebrov records that Dugin himself had an ‘attendant’ named Alex, whom he would order around.
Dugin is very forthright about his early Nazi antics, which he says were more about his total rebellion against a stifling Soviet upbringing than any real sympathy for Hitler. Still, virtually everyone who remembers Dugin from his early years brings it up. Serbebrov, for example, recalls Dugin reprising his famous song ‘Fuck the Damned Sovdep’: ‘20 million in the river, 20 million in the ovens, our machine guns will not misfire’, after which ‘Alexander threw his head back and closed his eyes as if he were in ecstasy.’9
In 2005, Dugin agreed to sit down with me for the first in a series of interviews about his life. Over coffee in a Mayakovsky Square café in central Moscow he unburdened himself about the (as he put it) ‘shamanistic crisis of self-actualization’ that characterised his early life. ‘I was completely normal in every sense: morally, rationally, psychologically. But the system around me was completely hostile to me.’