The mid-1980s marked the beginning of the end of the USSR, but the KGB still did not know this. The relaxation of political life under Gorbachev’s glasnost policies had not happened yet. Attending a banned meeting could still land you on a list of undesirables; it could still cost you your job. No group like Pamyat – where the most heretical ideas were openly discussed in broad daylight, which organized a pseudo-political movement around racism and nationalism – could have existed without some degree of official protection for it: a krysha, or ‘roof’, as Russians put it. As for who was covering for them, Dugin says he was never sure: ‘Vasilyev said that there was a krysha in the central committee. But I don’t know whether it is true because he did not make me privy to that.’
Vasilyev, who spoke in a barely coherent stream of consciousness, was ‘an actor and a schizophrenic’, according to Dugin, and easy to dismiss as a shrill fascist. He called the Bolshevik revolution a Jewish conspiracy and designed the Pamyat banner as a Romanov double-headed eagle with jagged lightning bolts evoking the Nazi swastika. He was profoundly anti-Semitic and would frequently rail against Zionist plots, which he blamed for the death of Tsar Nicholas II and for a campaign to ‘alcoholize’ Russia. On one occasion he said that Adolf Eichmann was a ‘representative of the Jewish people’; on another he announced that if one played rock ’n’ roll records backwards one could hear oaths to Satan. He read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion14 at meetings, and campaigned to legalize the book.
But Pamyat was simultaneously more sophisticated and more establishment-oriented than many observers gave it credit for. The political programme is interesting to examine in hindsight: the leaders spoke in favour of the canonization of Nicholas II, the rebuilding of Christ the Saviour cathedral in Moscow, a ban on communist ideology, and an end to the propagation of atheism. Each of these demands would be implemented in the coming decade by the post-communist government.
Pamyat’s activities seem to have revolved around the increasingly demagogic speeches of Vasilyev. When he wasn’t giving them, his disciples distributed tapes of meetings and lectures. But Vasilyev was also paranoid: he would show up for meetings wearing a false beard, saying the disguise was necessary to evade Zionist assassins who were on his trail. He found it chronically difficult to get along with anyone else in his organization.
Dugin insists that he himself is not, and never was, an anti-Semite, and that at no time did he participate in anti-Semitic activity or violence: ‘There was no violence. There has never been one established fact of violence against Jews, of pogroms. It was all just talk. I am not defending it, but would say that it was acceptable then, though not now.’
Pamyat was the first independent political movement in the USSR (aside from the Communist Party) that was allowed to operate with any degree of freedom, and the question of why this was remains unanswered. Unlike its later liberal rival, the Democratic Union, Pamyat’s activities seemed to have some official sanction, and it was allowed to organize public demonstrations. In fact, it held the very first unsanctioned public demonstration in the history of the USSR, when 500 rallied on Manezh Square in front of the Kremlin in May 1987.
There are two schools of thought as to why Pamyat was accorded special treatment. The first is that the ‘Russian Party’ within the higher echelons of the Communist Party and the KGB were sympathetic to nationalism, and so turned a blind eye to Vasilyev, seeing in him a potential ally who was worthy of support. This version is backed up somewhat by the fact that Pamyat mercilessly criticized and harassed the hardliners’ opponents, such as Alexander Yakovlev, Gorbachev’s right-hand man and chief liberal reformer.
In a newspaper interview published in 1997, Yakovlev said he was certain that Pamyat was a KGB front organization:
In the beginning it was an organization with basically good intentions, made up of restorers and historians who concerned themselves with saving historical monuments and architecture… Then the KGB infiltrated their own guy in there, the photographer Dmitry Vasilyev, together with his cohort. The organization started to take up ‘politics’ – the fight against Zionism. The restorers left the organization, and the KGB gave Vasilyev a huge new apartment as a headquarters.15
The KGB’s goal, according to Yakovlev, was to allow the dissident movement to ‘let off steam’, but it quickly lost control of Pamyat. ‘From Pamyat there grew a new generation of more extreme Nazi movements. In this way the KGB gave birth to Russian fascism.’
A Communist Party archive opened in 1991 has shed some light on the KGB connection to Pamyat. In fact, it appears that Vasilyev himself had a KGB codename, ‘Vandal’, which indicated that his relationship with the organization was indeed more than a casual one. However, a KGB report file describes the activity of the KGB aimed at neutralizing Vasilyev as the leader of Pamyat and at splitting the movement: ‘Measures have been carried out to deepen the split within the National Patriotic Front “Pamyat” and compromise Vasilyev (Vandal)’, reads one sentence.
Pamyat may have been an impotent bunch of crazies, but it was the first manifestation of nationalism in a public movement. Until then, nationalists had stuck to their kitchens and gatherings, crossing swords with their ideological opponents only in the thick journals and newspapers. Pamyat showed how nationalism could be transformed into a mass movement.
Thanks to Pamyat, others started noticing the public appeal of nationalism, the politics of ‘us’ vs ‘them’. One of the first people inside the system to notice street nationalism and seek to harness it for political purposes – with much better results – was a silver-haired, bear-like party official from Sverdlovsk. Boris Yeltsin had been spotted by Gorbachev and brought to Moscow as first secretary of the Moscow Communist Party city committee in 1985 – to all intents and purposes, the mayor of the capital. He was burning with ambition, however, and quickly began to challenge Gorbachev’s authority and to promote himself as a successor. It was precisely while Yeltsin was head of the Moscow city party apparatus, and casting about for allies in his duel with Gorbachev, that Pamyat was able to hold its unsanctioned demonstration in Manezh Square. Yeltsin met them afterwards. He promised at the meeting to reduce the number of limitchiki (migrant workers) in Moscow, and to look into registering Pamyat as a society. And it may not be a coincidence that after Yeltsin was forced out by Gorbachev in 1987, Pamyat began to disintegrate, and Vasilyev’s deputy Kim Andreev was excluded from the Communist Party a year later.
It was dawning on Russian political forces that the end was nigh for the monopoly of the Communist Party. There was a need to find popular support, and Pamyat’s ability to generate crowds, publicity and (presumably) voters was being noticed. Yeltsin would one day prove to be the champion of Russia’s liberal dream; but back in 1987 he was in the midst of an all-out political battle with Gorbachev for position within the party, and seeking allies anywhere he could. He saw the opposition – any opposition – as a source of potential recruits to his movement (whatever that would later turn out to be). At this stage, many around him would describe him as something of an empty vessel waiting to be filled: a man of white-hot ambition who had his finger on the national pulse and was willing to follow wherever that led. Things could have turned out very differently for Russia if Yeltsin’s circle had been ultra-nationalists rather than liberal westernizers like Anatoly Chubais and Egor Gaidar, who attached themselves to his rising star a few years later.