Offended by the world: what makes Russian marginal movements related

Alina Vitukhnovskaya, writer

In the nineties, when the post-Soviet cultural and political space began to be saturated with various energies and ideas, curious (but only at first glance) characters, concepts, and movements taking shape around them appeared in the field of marginal politics. I have already briefly mentioned the history of creation and the true significance of the Limonov NBP (banned in Russia - ed.), which played a fatal role in the formation of the current pro-government quasi-ideology. But in addition to the NBP, there were many other groups that I would like to talk about in connection with what I would describe as a complete collapse of the Russian political agenda.

I would not want to fall into conspiracy theological hysteria and argue that all the politicized parties that arose at the break of the Soviet system and the new reality were inspired by the special services. Moreover, at that moment the special services themselves, together with the defeated monument to Dzerzhinsky, were in deep decline, having been reformatted into gangster structures or clubs of frustrated losers.

The meeting place of passionaries, passionate about history, politics, military paraphernalia, reconstruction, ideas of the most exotic flood, became the Mayakovsky Museum. There, like at the Ploshchad Revolyutsiya metro station, one could buy scandalous, banned, exotic books and newspapers that were not in other places. From frankly fascist to conspiratorial-schizoid content. The books “Mine Kampf” by Adolf Hitler, “The Morning of Mages” by Jacques Bergere and Louis Powel, aesthetizing and sacralizing the “secrets” of the Third Reich, the work of young Alexander Dugin “Conspirology”, the idol of all deviants, as if trying to get rid of their madness, projecting it onto others - Grigory Klimov “Prince of this world”, Newspapers “Tomorrow”, “Literature Day”, “Limonka”, “I am Russian” and many other folios. Note that the path from liberalism and democracy to a new authoritarianism, Russia has passed, publishing in industrial quantities literature on National Socialism.

Playing on anti-communist sentiments, it was not difficult to get a new homunculus man who really wanted to dress up in the SS uniform “in the name of the Russian people”. Many ideas were simply stolen from such authors, for example, as Karl Schmitt, a German theologian, lawyer, philosopher, sociologist and political theorist. The compiler and plagiarist Alexander Dugin even wrote a treatise “Karl Schmitt: 5 Lessons for Russia”, full of such taboo topics as, for example, open zoological anti-Semitism. What Karl Schmitt himself, despite the fact that he worked for the Nazis, never allowed himself. It seems that the Lubyanka curators and the gebe, in principle, were so deeply desperate that they went all the way, believing that in this way they could regain their former greatness. Fortunately, democratic changes also affected them. It was possible to publish anything. Surprisingly, a fact. It is from this deeply marginalized environment, secondary literature, and ideology that Putin’s current quasi-ideological model has been fostered.

After the beginning of the 2000s, when the state had the economic opportunity to take shape in the field of ideology due to the global oil and gas situation, it was decided to create a number of pro-Kremlin youth movements right from scratch. Such as ILA ("Association of Youth Governments"), MGER ("Young Guard of United Russia"), Youth Ecological Movement "Local", Youth Movement "OURS", Youth Association "Russia Young" and others. Loyalist patriots were represented by the ECM (Eurasian Youth Union), the AKM (Vanguard of the Red Youth) occupied the left and left-wing radical niche, the RKSM (b) (the Revolutionary Communist Youth Union (Bolsheviks), the RKSM (Russian Communist Youth Union), the LKSM RF (Leninist Communist Youth Union of the Russian Federation), FSM (Federation of Socialist Youth).

These artificially created ideologically sterile, greenhouse, albeit well-paid, projects turned out to be even more unviable than the homegrown marginal ones generated by the possessed “initiative”. The most cunning figures plundered the party cash desk and hid in an unknown direction.

Somewhere in the year 2008, one of the Kremlin towers was knocked on. An urgently needed national-democratic project, even a national-liberal one, with a regionalist and (oddly enough!) Separatist bias. What for? Apparently, in order to recount and classify all uncontrolled off-system nationalists. When this was done, and the idea fell on well-fertilized and fertile intellectual ground, the AP was nervous and immediately created a counterweight - that is, imperial nationalists, with anti-Ukrainian sentiments, support for the DNR-LNR and the prospect of all that dirty work that the Kremlin did not want to do do it yourself. Here, a faded, loose Black Hundred Egor Kholmogorov, and a fighting hamster, an overgrowing scout Yegor Prosvirnin and the ideological slave Konstantin Krylov who left this mortal Russian world recently came in handy. It is also worth mentioning the purely pro-government movement "NOD" Evgeny Fedorov and the sect of madmen under the direction of theatrical ex-director Sergei Kurginyan. But due to their special personal inadequacy, these projects did not become at least any noticeable political discourse, turning into the bubbling madness of the unconscious.

There are many such strange, to put it mildly, personalities in the national-patriotic environment. One of them is a person with an infantile face - Dmitry Galkovsky. The author of the book “The Endless Dead End”, widely known in narrow circles as a “philosopher” and publicist. By the way, it was he who was singled out by the Lubyanka curators and appointed as the “assemblage point” in the late 90s and early 2000s, when the whole motley environment from the Mayakovsky Museum actually lost its relevance. At about the same moment, public political life switched to online format.

A brief summary of Galkovsky. It seemed to contain all the total inadequacy of modern Russian "philosophy" and the expansive, aggressive foreign policy built on it against the backdrop of internal tyranny. And this inadequacy occurs from the projection into the external world of the nature of its author-developer.

Even if network (non-linear) constructivism is taken as the basis of the basic methodology - i.e. the most advanced reality management concept today, and in the form of “socialization through a network” like Galkovsky’s with his “digital machine”, which by the way was created not without the participation of the state, a completely wild version now appears as the goal-setting (and at the same time as the control object) completely outdated national identity, moreover, reduced to the invariability of centralized power, in fact to neo-monarchism led by the king.

Simply put, a basic identity is what they manage and what they want to get in the end, i.e. goal-setting, and ancillary identity is the main management methodology. And managing a network (non-linear) way with a centralized national identity is about how to use a microscope to hammer nails. The absurdity underlying such thinking and gives rise to all the other semantic seminal chimeras in the form of “Krymnash” and “we are Russians, what a delight (East)”, neatly fit into the concept of “The Endless Dead End” - which, apparently, suits the author himself, that's just absolutely does not work in that same network (non-linear) reality of a globalized modern world, where there are already virtually no nations, but there are political actors and (partners) of relations. Whether Galkovsky himself is able to understand his inadequacy, there is, most likely, a rhetorical question.

Dmitry Evgenievich reacted to the death of Krylov’s comrade-in-arms with a series of petty-pseudo-intellectual, descriptive-everyday notes, condescendingly called “The Man Who Decided to Become an Adult”. Most Russian nationalists are “Dostoevsky” frustrated children, therefore, speaking of Krylov, Galkovsky, of course, speaks about himself.

However, this is a property of many, many children of the Soviet Union, whose only cozy memory of life are dusty home libraries. After the death of Krylov, the entire facebook tape merged into a general pitifully infantile cry, which seemed painfully familiar to me. Somewhere I heard it all! So these are the same sislibs of the sixties, only with the opposite sign! This infantilism, veiled by childhood, is “how great it is that we all gathered here today”, this snobbish arrogance of Russian education, this eternal resentment.

It is a great illusion to believe that sislibs and natspat are different, hostile environments. This is a single environment - mentally and existentially, I am not afraid of the word - “spiritually”. And these are not opposing groups, or rather, their struggle is only an appearance. This is a self-reproducing, self-absorbing, dropped out of the world cultural and historical context one inert mass. I watched this environment from the inside, but forgot something. Looked - horrified. 15, well, 10 (okay) years ago, all sane people had to run away from there headlong. Consequently, there are no sane people there.

The authorities needed an ideology only at first, so it encouraged all sorts of NBP, PDP and others like them. It was just superfluous money, plus it was a kind of leisure for the cupped curators. Then they regretted the money for it, but they figured it out with leisure. The ideology was blinded "from what was" - and it will do! Krylov was taken to Surkov, Surkov did not like the "sweater in spools" - "Will they teach us Russian nationalism? Yes, we ourselves are Russian nationalists!”. On that it was finished.