Other nationalists were shocked by Pamyat and were harshly critical of it. Many nationalist intellectuals thought that they were going to give the whole movement a bad name. Vadim Kozhinov wrote in 1987 in the journal Nash Sovremennik that Pamyat was ‘infantile’ and its programmes contained ‘ignorance’; but he refused to condemn it, saying that it was necessary to tolerate the extreme in order for nationalism to make the transition into a mass movement.
As much as they loathed Vasilyev, top nationalist intellectuals were starting to grasp the point that the movement, which had been born in the kitchens of dissidents and the pages of samizdat, now had to go public. For decades a small clique of intellectuals had written clever critiques and metaphors for a largely intellectual audience of sympathizers; now they had to think in terms of public slogans and personalities designed to woo the average Soviet citizen. Perhaps, one day, even voters.
Vasilyev, clearly a damaged individual, nonetheless fitted the bill. He was not afraid of the limelight, liked nothing better than public political battles, and was a tireless campaigner. Dugin says that he did not try to delve too deeply into the details of the movement – these were things that in any case were off limits, and Vasilyev discouraged members who were too curious. According to Dugin, ‘I was not interested in power. I was interested in them because I was interested in people who were in tune with my ideas.’ But he was also discovering in himself an ambition for leadership and for power.
Dugin’s term in Pamyat was brief. His and Dzhemal’s rise in the organization was seen as a threat by a group of hardline ethnic nationalists led by Alexander Barkashov, a wiry ex-welder and martial arts enthusiast, who also held a seat on Pamyat’s central committee and would eventually lead his own party – Russian National Unity – in the 1990s. Jealous of the access Dugin and Dzhemal had to Vasilyev, and seeing their ‘traditionalist’ orientation as an ideological competitor to Russian nationalism, Barkashov set a trap.
Inviting Dugin and Dzhemal into his Moscow office, he began to discuss Vasilyev’s erratic leadership, leading them to agree with him that Vasilyev was ‘unacceptable’ and that they must all move against him. Secretly, however, Barkashov was taping the conversation and later he played the recording back to Vasilyev. This led to the expulsion of Dugin and Dzhemal from the movement that same year, 1988. And soon after, the organization itself disintegrated in a flurry of departures.
Whatever Pamyat was – a party, a provocation, a success, a failure – it was also a watershed, helping a generation of Soviet intelligentsia to imagine a future in which the monolith of the Communist Party ceded space to competitors on the political playing field. The opening of the USSR was happening faster than anyone had thought possible. The process was accelerated by the glaring inefficiencies of the communist system: the potholed roads and shoddy consumer goods could no longer be papered over by promises of a brighter socialist future. Economic reforms and limited price liberalization coincided with even greater shortages and more discontent than at any time since the 1940s.
Yeltsin, meanwhile, channelled the growing anti-establishment mood into an astonishing political ascent. He was a political blank slate, with a genius for coalition-building, a talent for stealing his opponent’s best ideas and a knack of espousing blatantly contradictory positions. For a time he managed to embody the hopes of human rights campaigners and liberal dissidents, as well as of nationalists and hardliners who saw him as the antidote to the corrupt gerontocracy of the Politburo. He managed to be a reformer and a hardliner at the same time – a nationalist and a democrat, a provincial party boss who had made common cause with both the ‘lumpen youth’ of the provinces and the silver-tongued Moscow intelligentsia. He staked out a position as the effective leader of the Soviet opposition.
Amid the economic chaos, the Communist Party was dealt its worst setback in over 70 years: in March 1989 elections to the Congress of People’s Deputies, 38 province-level party secretaries were defeated. Lenin, faced with the same sort of revolt in 1917–18, had overturned the elections. Gorbachev did not, signalling to those who lost that they should step down.
The Soviet establishment by this point was virtually unanimous in agreement that the official metaphysics of the Communist Party was a dead end. Some saw a future in democratic reform and the Soviet Union’s gradual transformation into a Western-style nation state, with a market economy and democratic political system. Others saw reform as undesirable but inevitable – a process that must, as far as possible, be channelled into a predictable and stable, and ultimately authoritarian, state.
Still others believed that reform was a dangerously fissile slippery slope to a social explosion, and that the clock must be rolled back to Stalin’s time, with a new period of repressions combined with a return to an ideology of Stalin-style National Bolshevism.
But even the hardliners were in agreement that communism had zero appeal to a cynical, jaded population, and that if the regime was to survive, it needed new sources of legitimacy. This meant ideological change.
Around the same time, a joke was making the rounds of Soviet kitchens: it was simply a line from the Woody Allen film Bananas about CIA subversion of a Latin American country:
Question: ‘Is the CIA for or against the revolutionaries?’
Answer: ‘The CIA cannot take risks. Some are for, some are against.’16
The meaning was obvious: simply replace the words CIA with KGB, and the reality of the late 1980s reveals itself. The KGB and the upper echelons of the party did their best to straddle all three camps: nationalists, democratic reformers and die-hard communists.
As the vortex gained momentum there began a series of closed-door discussions high up in the Communist Party hierarchy. Just two decades before, speaking such heresies aloud would have been tantamount to a crime, leading to expulsion from the party, possible imprisonment, or worse. But starting in the late 1980s, a number of elite groups in the central committee or the KGB appear to have engaged in projects to create independent political organizations and ideological projects, which, taken at face value, were naked alternatives to communism. Some of these were probably intended as fifth columns, false flags and provocations designed to discredit reformers; others were more akin to side bets, aimed at keeping ahead of the political reform process via deniable but manageable pawns.
But other projects appeared to be sincere attempts to create alternatives to communism, which had lost once and for all its ability to legitimate the regime and mobilize the population. These were attempts to recreate communism along nationalist lines, or simply replace communism wholesale with something vaguely imperial and Russian-sounding, while never relinquishing ultimate control of the political process.
In detailed after-the-fact examination of these projects, one name keeps popping up in documents, in conversations with those involved, and in anecdotes: that of Vladimir Kryuchkov, chairman of the Soviet KGB.
According to Alexander Yakovlev, who had many dealings with Kryuchkov, he was a ‘grey mouse’ of the party apparat. As Yakovlev wrote in his 2005 memoirs:
He was polite to everyone, ingratiating, and grey, like an autumn twilight. And grey people are inclined to take themselves seriously, which is both comical and dangerous. Kryuchkov took seriously the laurels that were placed on his head, even though they were too big for his head.17