Born in 1962, Dugin and his generation were the first to grow up with the accoutrements of a normal middle-class lifestyle. But Soviet life in the 1970s was like America in the 1950s: ideologically rigid, materialistic, one-dimensional and dull. The drama of everyday life in previous decades had gradually given way to a dreary, monochrome existence, in which living standards improved just enough to promote the myth of progress – the myth that Soviet society would one day overtake the West.
The Soviet middle class had moved out of communal flats in the early 1960s and now lived in two-room Khrushchev-era apartment blocks, mainly on the outskirts of cities, with identical fake wood-panelled elevators and blue-and-white tiled kitchens. They rode the elektrichka, or commuter train, to work in offices of government ministries or state corporations. Soviet consumer one-upmanship existed in the USSR, just as it did everywhere in the world. Most people had an Oka refrigerator, but some fortunates had a Minsk; the plebeians bought Gorizont television sets, but a select few had a colour Rubin. One could tell the status of a host by which factory had manufactured their wine glasses or crystal dessert set. One of the most popular movies of the period, The Irony of Fate, satirized this blank uniformity. A man from Moscow accidentally finds himself in Leningrad after a night of drinking. Believing himself still to be in Moscow, he orders a taxi driver to take him to his home address. It turns out to be an identical apartment block, in an identical street in an identical suburb. Even his key works in the door.
For Dugin’s parents’ generation, who grew up amid the privations of the war and the Stalin years, it was prosperity. Medical care, such as it was, was free; a pension bought enough sausage for a month. Life, for those who were not very ambitious and not very curious, was carefree. The ‘bright future’ portrayed on the cheerful faces of workers in countless propaganda posters and films seemed just around the corner. But many of Dugin’s contemporaries found their tidy existences intolerable and dull, and Dugin hated this world – a boring, stultifying existence for a young intellectual. ‘We were truly petit bourgeois.’ He and his peers ridiculed his parents’ generation, their credulous acceptance of orthodoxy, their passive willingness to accept the arbitrary diktat of a malfunctioning system, in exchange for the knick-knacks of a barely comfortable life.
Dugin’s troubled teenage years and his hostility to convention are traceable to a personal hostility to authority in the form of his absentee father. Little is known about Geli Dugin, who left Alexander’s mother when his son was three. While Dugin had very little contact with the man after that, it does appear that his father loomed large in his life. Dugin has been vague in various interviews about his father’s profession. He told me and others that Geli was a general in military intelligence (the GRU). But when pressed, he admitted he didn’t actually know for a fact what he did. ‘At the end of his life he worked for the customs police, but where he worked before that – he did not tell me. That I do not really know.’ Dugin’s friends, however, are adamant that his father must have been someone of rank within the Soviet system. For starters, the family had the accoutrements of prestige – a nice dacha, relatives with nice dachas, and access to opportunities. According to Dugin’s close friend and collaborator Gaidar Dzhemal, Geli Dugin had, on more than one occasion, intervened from a high-ranking position in the Soviet state to get his son out of trouble. Dzhemal said that Geli was Dugin’s ‘get out of jail free’ card, which allowed his son to regularly violate the orthodoxies of Soviet life and get away with it. Undoubtedly this fuelled complicated feelings of both entitlement and further resentment at the unfair privilege. Dugin, however, disagrees. ‘He never supported me’, he told me flatly in a 2010 interview. ‘At least, I never felt such support.’
Dugin failed to heed his father’s request for him to enrol at the Institute for Military Translators, and instead decided on the less prestigious Civil Aviation Academy. From then on their relations were strained to breaking point by Dugin’s political antics, which had repercussions on the elder Dugin’s career. According to Alexander, Geli was transferred to the customs service after his son’s detention in 1983 by the KGB. According to Dugin’s second wife Natalya, the two men had not spoken for years when the elder Dugin died in 1998. ‘I never heard him talk about his father’, said Dudinsky, who recalled that Dugin appeared to live at a dacha belonging to his uncle in the Higher Party School dacha compound. Generational conflict in Russia has often assumed an epochal, millennial significance – ever since Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons explored the subject in 1862 – and separating the personal rebellion from the political one is impossible. In many ways, Dugin’s hostility to Soviet authority may have been inseparable from his anger at his own father: Geli was – professionally and paternally – the embodiment of Soviet authority.
Tellingly, the new generation of Moscow’s underground was overwhelmingly drawn from the children of the privileged. Dudinsky, who joined in 1961 when he was just 15, was the son of Ilya Dudinsky, the Pravda Geneva correspondent and later founder of the World Systems of Socialism Institute. Dugin, meanwhile appears to have found a fatherlike figure in the shape of Gaidar Dzhemal, 12 years his senior, a thick-set man with a goatee and a severe, heavy-lidded gaze. The two apparently met at Zhigalkin’s dacha, after which Dzhemal took the younger man as an ‘apprentice’ (in Dzhemal’s words) and instructed his charge to learn French.
Dzhemal’s father was from Azerbaijan, though his mother was Russian. Like Dugin he would be a fixture of the Moscow bohemian scene for decades. He was Dean Moriarty to Dugin’s Jack Kerouac; John the Baptist to Dugin’s Jesus. He took the unformed young man and plunged with him into Moscow’s ‘schizoid’ underground: kitchens overflowing with poetry and cognac, underground gallery shows, and dacha debauchery at the weekend.
The underground meetings, according to Dugin, involved a sort of improvisational theatre, in which all participated in vignettes invented by Golovin. ‘Golovin was always the commander’, said Dudinsky.
Maybe he was the ship’s captain and we were the cabin boys or sailors. Or we were all poets of the nineteenth century, or members of Adolf Hitler’s bunker, the knights of the Round Table, the entourage of the Emperor Barbarossa, the conquistadors in search of El Dorado.
It is difficult now to describe this game, this aesthetic, poetic play. It was not a performance. It was played without spectators and was always moving – from one apartment or dacha to another. It was a pastime, a real bohemia.
Dugin cut a striking figure in the libertine era of ‘nonconformism’. His peers remember a brilliant charismatic, who immediately drew attention to himself and who was extremely confident for his years.
Dugin’s artistic outlet was his guitar, which he carried with him everywhere. Later he began to develop his stage persona, which mixed effortlessly with the more eccentric spirit of the schizoid movement, spicing his image with a dash of fascist imagery and a repertoire of occult songs. He sported a well-trimmed goatee beard and a simple pudding-bowl haircut with a straight fringe – an affectation popular in Russian intellectual circles of the time and known as a skobka or ‘parenthesis’ haircut. It evoked the simple and austere style of the medieval peasant, much like the nineteenth-century Slavophiles gathered in their St Petersburg mansions wearing peasant murmolka caps. He had an erect bearing and a habit of trilling his ‘rs’ a little too heavily in a sign of aristocratic affectation; he sometimes accented this pose by speaking French. Most impressively, he often wore ‘galife’ trousers – the jodhpur-like breeches of a cavalry officer of a century before. He adopted the nom de plume ‘Hans Sievers’, which added a hint of Teutonic severity to an already colourful and fairly camp militaristic–folklore style. The impression he created was, as his later collaborator Eduard Limonov described it, a ‘picture of Oscar Wildean ambiguity’.