Charles Clover - Black Wind, White Snow

The Weekly Standard, November 4, 2016

Anton Vaino’s appointment in August as Vladimir Putin's new chief of staff intrigued Kremlinologists, Estonians (he is the grandson of one of Soviet Estonia's later quislings), and fans of the weird. Some years ago, Vaino (or someone acting on his behalf) penned a bizarre, densely written article in which he described a Nooscope, a device which "allows the study of humanity's collective consciousness." It is, apparently, intended to be used to help technocrats manage increasingly complex societies.

The Nooscope is nonsense—and even in Putin's Russia, commentators felt free to scoff; but it is ominous nonsense. Writing in 1936, a time of lethal nonsense in Moscow, Berlin, and elsewhere, John Maynard Keynes argued that

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. .  .  . Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.

Charles Clover, a former Moscow bureau chief for the Financial Times, cites those words in his introduction to Black Wind, White Snow. It is, indeed, an examination of "the rise of Russia's new nationalism," in the words of its subtitle; but this absorbing and often disconcerting book is also the story of the evolution of a strain of Russian political thought—barely known in the West—over the last hundred years or so that bears (if possible) even less relation to reality than the millenarian absurdities of Marxism, but in today's Russia may matter more.

Black Wind, White Snow boasts a remarkable cast—disturbed and disturbing—of dreamers, prophets, demagogues, and chancers, of those who followed them and of those who exploited them. The man who connects them is Lev Gumilev (1912-1992), the son of two poets. His father was murdered by the Bolsheviks; his mother, Anna Akhmatova, the greatest poet of the Soviet age, endured decades of persecution. Gumilev himself spent years in the Gulag and yet became an advocate of an authoritarian, distinctively Russian state characterized by passionarnost, a term he invented that conveys a sense of the irrational and the primal, a tribal equivalent (of a sort) to Nietzsche's will to power: "a type of Stockholm syndrome," writes Clover gently.

Before moving to detailed discussion of this anti-Communist Soviet patriot, Clover introduces some of Gumilev's antecedents, products of "the maximalist era of Russian philosophy" at the turn of the 20th century, an era in which a number of prominent intellectuals "were obsessed with the borderlands of reason, where it met the occult, the esoteric and the mystical." They included the geologist Vladimir Vernadsky, later a Stalin Prize winner who, according to Clover, "conceived the notion of the 'noosphere,' the unity of human reason" into which, presumably, Vaino's Nooscope is meant to peer. There are other candidates for this distinction. But this is, in many respects, a very timely book.

One of the features of this era was a growing preoccupation with Russia's supposedly Asiatic qualities, an idea of its apartness from Europe that would eventually evolve into the concept, as alluring (to some) as it was bogus, of "Eurasia." This "multi-national, multi-ethnic, multi-confessional, but distinctly Russian and distinctly non-Western geopolitical space" conveniently encompassed the peoples of both the fallen empire and its Soviet successor. It was a vision that foreshadowed Putin's rewriting of Russian history into a fantasy in which both Communists and those they overcame were given patriotic roles to play.

Eurasianism, explains Clover, "exorcizes demons, heals psychic wounds and papers over [the] ruptures" that the Soviet experience had left behind. It anticipated and must have helped inspire Putin's conceit of a "Russian world" ( Russkiy Mir), home of a civilization that—to the consternation of its neighbors—extends beyond the boundaries of today's shorn federation.

Much of modern Eurasianism is based on little more than the imagination of Lev Gumilev: "He invented people, he invented documents, or transported things magically through time so that they would fit his narrative" of a "super-ethnos," no less, formed by the fusion of cultures between Russians and a series of surprising pals—the Mongols and other unlikely folk—from the steppe. With Gumilev as its leading, somewhat unhinged, spokesman, Eurasianism spread as a nationalist alternative or (within the ranks of the regime) supplement to the exhausted Marxism-Leninism of the Brezhnev years, a period in which ideological discourse was more complicated than the usual image of a Soviet monolith would suggest.

That was also true of those in outright opposition as well. Clover takes his readers far from the familiar brave, struggling liberal intelligentsia—and, for that matter, from the less easily pigeonholed Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, too. As Clover recounts, Moscow had its own alt-right, marinated in alcohol, mysticism, and the madness that flourished in the Soviet wasteland. The occult, neo-Nazism, you name it: Strange beasts still roamed Russia's borderlands of reason.

Under Mikhail Gorbachev, some of those beasts—most notably Aleksandr Dugin, the dark star of this book, brilliant, erudite, a postmodern trickster of the far right with a hint, at various different levels, of the Rasputin about him—started to move out of the shadows. Eurasianism, as Glover notes, "a synthesis of nationalism and internationalism," began to be seen by some in the ruling hierarchy as a counterweight to the forces threatening to tear the Soviet Union apart.

In the event, Eurasianism outlived both the Soviet Union and Gumilev. It was promoted and given a far harder edge by Dugin and others with support from elements of the old power structure. Meanwhile, economic chaos at home, and humiliation abroad, was largely blamed on Russia's whirligig liberal experiment rather than on the considerably more culpable epoch of Soviet misrule that had preceded it. The stage was being set for a strong man, and Dugin and his grim pranksters did their bit to help out.

The early Putin years were not marked by any cohesive ideology: Gestures in the direction of economic liberalism and what was referred to (not altogether reassuringly) as the "dictatorship of law" were blunted by corruption, cronyism, and authoritarian diktat. But one thing was clear: The Kremlin was set on reestablishing control at home and reasserting itself abroad. The reasons for this were rooted in realpolitik, self-interest, and Putin's instinctive belief in a strong Russian state, beholden to no one and respected worldwide. Reversing, directly or indirectly, some of the territorial losses of 1991 played a significant part in that agenda, and misty fantasies of a common destiny shaped on the steppe counted for rather less.

But however skillful Putin's manipulation of public opinion (impressive, as Clover shows, both in its cynicism and sophistication), Russia's leader came to understand that his rule needed at least the facsimile of a big idea, and men like Dugin were ready to assist in defining what that could be. Eurasianism has proved to be a most useful ideology, a tool for Kremlin authoritarianism and a channel for mischief-making with the Western hard right. And its belligerent view of international politics, combining reconquest of the "near abroad" with paranoia about the eternal Atlantic adversary, makes for martial mood music, handy for drowning out domestic dissent.

As to whether Vladimir Putin, in authority but no madman, subscribes to Eurasianism himself, I'm not convinced. He may refer to passionarnost in his speeches, but it's more likely that he looks elsewhere for his inspiration—to his wallet, for example, or the spirit of Bolshevik ruthlessness, to the "third way" of the emigré rightist philosopher Ivan Ilyin, and to the shrewd authoritarianism of Piotr Stolypin, the most effective politician of the Romanov twilight and, like Ilyin, someone whom Putin has gone out of his way to praise.

That Putin's authoritarianism overlaps with increasing social conservatism is both a reflection of his own evolving preferences and a shrewd cultivation of Russia's silent majority, an effort reinforced by the Kremlin's renewed partnership with an ancient accomplice, the Russian Orthodox church. That said, Putin has adopted a foreign policy—from mounting confrontation with the West to the conflicts with Georgia and Ukraine to, well, the creation of a "Eurasian Economic Union" with several post-Soviet states—that (as Clover observes) fits neatly with a Eurasian agenda. Looked at one way, this is just a continuation of traditional Russian (great) power politics; looked at in another way, it may be a sign that an increasingly aggressive nationalism is now setting the pace for a Kremlin that, having alienated what's left of liberal Russia, feels compelled to play a very different hand.

The answer, less dramatic than Clover might concede, probably lies somewhere between the two. And then there is the question of what comes next. Clover offers little in the way of concrete prediction, choosing instead to marvel at the spectacle of the triumph of a myth created by scribblers. For my part, I can't help wondering what would happen if Putin were to be succeeded by someone who genuinely believes that the myth is the truth.