THE POLITICS OF APOCALYPSE: On the Russian Anti-world

This article, written by Mikhail Epstein was first published in: The Politics of Apocalypse: On the Russian Anti-world. Common Knowledge (Duke UP), 29.2, 2023, pp.41-72. The book is available in Russian in both print and as an ebook at the following sources: Mikhail Epshtein. Russkii Antimir: Politika na Grani Apokalipsisa (The Russian Anti-world: Politics on the Verge of Apocalypse). New York: FrancTireurUSA, 2023, 250 pp. ISBN 978-1-365-62846-7
Paper: http://tinyurl.com/z9nsrw9v and Ebook: http://tinyurl.com/4ph33aps

Abstract: This column examines the historical fate of Russia in its catastrophic confrontation with Ukraine and the West. The piece considers the negative self-definitions of Russia that have arisen in the aftermath of the communist utopia and its virtual transformation into an anti-world—a society whose purpose is to undermine and destroy. Emerging Russian cults of war, death, and apocalypticism are stressed, as are the paradoxes and inversions by which Russia, in attempting to become stronger, becomes weaker and indeed suicidal.

Russkii mir (“the Russian world”) is the key ideological concept of contemporary Russia, with the geopolitical expansion of that world posited as the main goal of the state. Compared to previous dominant ideas—“Orthodox tsardom,” “Third Rome,” “Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality,” or, after 1917, “communism,” “class struggle,” “proletarian internationalism,” and “world revolution”—“the Russian world” seems a meager idea, almost devoid of content. Russia is identified only with “Russianness” as such, and Russian Russia is like “oily oil.” In whose name, apart from its own, should this world expand? Vladislav Surkov, the Putin strategist who brought Russkii mir to the center of Russian politics, has not defined it as anything but the “desire to expand”: “What is the Russian world?” he asks. “I once introduced this idea into the structure of state policy. . . . The task was this: how to speak of the Empire, of our desire to expand, but at the same time not to offend the ears of the world community.”[1] With reference to the title of Surkov’s novel AroundZero (Okolonolia, 2009; published under the pseudonym Natan Dubovitsky), we can say that he defines Russkii mir as a rotating and expanding zero.[2]

Indeed, if we look at the current expansion of the Russian world, we will find in it no substantial religious, philosophical, or socioeconomic motivation. The countries at whose expense this “world” has been striving to expand—first Georgia, now (and especially) Ukraine—represent nothing fundamentally alien to Russia: the faith is Orthodox, the economic basis is capitalist. In order to determine the cause of this confrontation, one should rely, not on some positive properties of the Russian world, but on what this concept denies. The essence of “Russianness” turns out to be pure negativity. This world is defined by totally negative qualities—qualities that asserted themselves once all previous positive utopias had collapsed. The peculiarity of Russia in the twenty-first century is its stance against everything else.

Each successive phase of history gives new meaning to all preceding ones. Russia’s current war with Ukraine, with Europe and the West, reveals the negative signs of socionational identity that used to be concealed in a fog of shifting strategies and tactics. At one time, Muscovy proclaimed itself the bastion of Orthodox spirituality; later, the Russian Empire proposed to unite all Slavic peoples and lead the European world; then the Soviet Union tried to put all of humanity under the banner of the most advanced communist doctrine and sweep capitalism from the face of the earth. Now the scheme has been simplified. Russia is not against the non-Orthodox or the bourgeoisie, not against Catholicism or capitalism; it is just generally against, in the way that antimatter is, in its physical nature, against matter. Antimatter nuclei, synthesized by scientists, consist of antiprotons and antineutrons, and upon the interaction of matter and antimatter their mutual annihilation occurs. In the same way, Russia has for centuries been accumulating, within itself, historical antimatter, which now comes into collision with the surrounding world and threatens to destroy it in a chain-reaction explosion. A millennium’s worth of self-erasing utopian projects has laid the ground for a “perfect historical storm,” an empty crater the size of the largest country in the world, which seeks, like a vortex, to suck into itself everything around it and is defined not by itself but by what it opposes. It is anti-time, anti-future, anti-history, anti-society, anti-rights, anti-freedom, anti-life, anti-being.

In 2022, Russian society suddenly crystallized into an anti-society, although the process had been ongoing for a thousand years prior. This social antimatter has its physical equivalent: nuclear weapons. Usually it is said that this or that country is seeking, or has acquired, nuclear weapons of its own; but in this case it can be said that nuclear weapons have acquired their own country, which ripens to such a state of “anti” as to destroy the entire world, including itself.

Pseudomorphosis and Antimorphosis: The Global Underground

Russia’s having long since positioned itself in relation to a hostile world, surrounded by enemies—“heretics,” “non-Christians,” “Zhidomasons,” “capitalists,” “anticommunists” and “anti-Soviets,” and now “Russophobes”—is evidence of upside-downness. A world standing on its head cannot but perceive everything around it as upside down.

Russian culture has two key features that would seem to contradict one another: dependence on the West and opposition to the West. With reason did Oswald Spengler refer to Russia’s eighteenth-century transformations as a “pseudomorphosis.” One culture, not having developed from itself, takes the form of another, resenting it in the process:

All that wells up from the depths of the young soul is cast in the old molds, young feelings stiffen in senile works, and instead of rearing itself up in its own creative power, it can only hate the distant power with a hate that grows to be monstrous. . . . And thus a nationality whose destiny should have been to live without a history for some generations still was forced into a false and artificial history that the soul of Old Russia was simply incapable of understanding. Late-period arts and sciences, enlightenment, social ethics, the materialism of world-cities, were introduced, although in this pre-cultural time religion was the only language in which man understood himself and the world.[3]

But not every culture that has become “pseudo” becomes “anti” and seeks to destroy its primary matrix. For that to happen, the pseudomorphosis has to take place in a country with enough territory and population to gain the ability to confront the civilization in whose “mold” it was cast. In effect, since the time of Peter the Great, Russia has been absorbing the technology, industry, and educational system of the West in order to turn all of these against the West itself. Russia turned out to instantiate not only pseudomorphosis, but also antimorphosis—and the more it borrows, the more it makes war on the source of its borrowings. “After this everything that arose around it was felt by the true Russdom as lies and poison,” Spengler writes. “A truly apocalyptic hatred was directed on Europe, and ‘Europe’ was all that was not Russia.”[4] It is a culture of jealousy and rivalry, which finds its vocation in challenging the primacy of other cultures, displacing them on the basis of precisely those achievements that have been learned from them.

Such is the profound difference between Russia and China. China opposes the West as a distinct civilization, one that emerged before the West and developed its own ways of comprehending and transforming life, and that, even amid abundant Western borrowings, is developing on its own bases. Of course, communist Russia significantly contributed to the strengthening of anti-Western features in China, helping to set it on the path of communist revolution and Marxism-Maoism. But China’s historical fate has far more powerful and long-lasting patterns. Meanwhile, Russia itself, as a civilization, is a child of the West: it has no other pillar, no other point of aspiration, and at the same time no other point of revulsion than the West.

Russia constantly rebels against the world order, although it cannot construct order even within itself. Think of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, who is supremely, painfully conscious of his own “self” and is at the same time devoid of any great creative gift; he therefore wears himself out messing with others in ways minor and major, causing himself grief most of all. Russia is an “underground” state, and it is fitting that it was the first to create a political underground and then, in the twentieth century, to raise the revolutionary underground to the pinnacle of power. In Russia’s behavior on the world stage, one can spot the features of a quite self-assured Underground Man, whose twenty-first-century incarnation is now the head of state.

This country, which cannot desist from defying everyone, taunting and demeaning other members of the world community, is incapable of making a civilization of its own, one to which other nations might willingly reach out. The tragedy of Russia is that it is not independent and creative enough to build its own civilization to rival the great civilizations of the West and East. At the same time, it is too vast, and too proud, to become part of other civilizations, to resign itself to a subordinate role. Certainly, a country has no obligation to construct its own civilization. Neither Australia, nor Indonesia, nor Pakistan, nor Brazil has set itself such a goal. But Russia continually tries to do so, whether now as the Third Rome, the last stronghold of the true faith, Orthodoxy; now as the USSR, way-paver of the bright communist future; or now as the center of Eurasia and chief bulwark against “Atlanticism.” These attempts all fail, yet they are taken up again and again. The country torments itself and others: this is its existential stance, its way of reminding everyone, including itself, that it is alive. Without this suffering, it would long ago have become a dead wasteland; only the suffering it inflicts on others and itself animates it, just as this suffering has animated its great creative figures—from Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy to Platonov and Solzhenitsyn. The Russian mode of existence is to contradict itself and others, to come in first in the categories of (self-)negation and (self-)destruction. It is a dangerous and painful country that makes every effort to divide its population into two unequal parts: drunks, thieves, and scoundrels, on the one hand; saints and martyrs, on the other.

The Anti-Society: Synodality (Sobornost’) and Cothievery (Sovornost’)

Russia has succeeded in consolidating a society-wide “commonness in crime,” a grand mutual cover-up of lies, theft, violence, and transgression of every law. This negation is at the very foundation of society.

A Russian anecdote: a general’s daughter says to him: “Daddy, you are a thief.” He replies: “Daughter, I love my motherland—I’m allowed.” Patriotism is not a mask of corruption but its true face. He who does not steal is not a faithful citizen. Stealing is, in Russia, a sign of loyalty, a willingness to break any law for the sake of allegiance to comrades. In another society, it would be possible to earn an honest living and not tremble in fear of being jailed tomorrow. But to do so would mean obeying the law, whereas motherland and “getting along with others” are above the law. As Mikhail Khodorkovsky has observed: “People understand very well that if you don’t take bribes, you are potentially disloyal, and they will try to throw you out. . . . The criminal group says: if you don’t take money, you’re not with us, so either take it or get out.”[5]

The notions of “mafia” and “corruption” usually describe criminal anomalies in a normal society based on law, but in an anti-society these phenomena themselves serve as a norm, an unspoken law—the basis of “correct” social interactions.[6] This inverted morality has its own deep mystical foundations. They were developed, long before Soviet “socialism” and “collectivism,” on the basis of a special social mentality that the religious thinker and poet A. S. Khomiakov (1804–1860), one of the founders of Slavophilism, referred to as sobornost’, often translated as “synodality” or “communality.” Khomiakov faulted Catholicism for situating the idea of spiritual unity in the specific organization of the Vatican-led church and its system of dogma and canon law. At the same time, Khomiakov rejected the other major Western branch of Christianity, Protestantism, for its implication that the individual is free in direct encounters with God. Unlike Catholicism and Protestantism, Orthodox communality operates not as an obligatory law for all, nor as a personal belief in God, but as a mysterious fusion of all church members in a common spirit: “Its essence consists in the harmony and unity of the spirit and life of all its members.”[7] The mystical unity of Orthodox synodality rests on a certain experience of spiritual comembership: everyone perceived as cells of a common organism, united by a purely intuitive mutual understanding and coinvolvement.

But coinvolvement easily shades into complicity. In an anti-society, there is no difference between sobornost’—synodality or communality—and a word we could coin by the replacement of just one letter—sovornost’, or cothievery. Khomiakov’s synodality is ruled not by church institutions, nor by canon law or Holy Scripture, but by an elusive community, a mysterious union. Similarly, the anti-society is ruled by the spirit of omertà—of communion in lawlessness. Communality degenerates into complicity because there are no obstacles to it, either in the form of laws observed by society, or in the form of the individual freedom of its members. Even in the most prosperous and law-abiding periods of Russian history, the ideal of sobornost’ went hand in hand with the practice of sovornost’, forming a tacit social consensus, as the supreme rulers were aware. A few months before his death in 1855, enraged by the theft of disability funds, Czar Nicholas I commented that he knew of only one person in the entire state who did not steal, and that was himself.

An anti-society is a complex ritual system, with room not only for fear and terror but also for laughter and sarcasm. Laws are instituted so that everyone can break them little by little, can sneer at them, but also can tremble before the power that is higher than law, unaccountable and incomprehensible. Social poverty and the unequal distribution of wealth seem to account for the effectiveness of this duality in an anti-society. Official laws are made as harsh as possible, precisely so that they cannot be fully implemented—so that everyone relies only on mercy, rather than law. An anti-society is a society of co-guilty people who steal from one another and agree to keep it a secret. There is no place for self-confident or righteous citizens; everyone is tarnished; dirt could be collected on anyone. If you want to be honest and proud, to look the law straight in the eye, you will end up poor or in jail (as the story goes in Andrey Zvyagintsev’s famous crime drama Leviathan [Leviafan] of 2014). You have to teeter between destitution and prison, forsaking neither.

Now it is clear that Russian anti-society is not rooted in Marxism or communist revolution, even if the country’s downfall into the anti-world might seem to have begun with historical moments related to them. That the one-party state completely subjugates the life of society, expropriates private property, establishes a ruling ideology and censorship, and punishes the slightest deviation from it—all these are secondary signs of a deeper pattern, of a society “inside out,” a structural reversal of society, which is formed not by compliance with laws but by a concerted retreat from them. To be sure, the Bolshevik Revolution gave a new and stronger impetus to the anti-society, which in the process acquired an official ideological foundation. Lawlessness in the name of “revolutionary legality” entered the flesh and blood of this society. As Eduard Bagritskii put it, in 1929: “If [the age] says, ‘Lie,’ lie. . . . If it says: ‘Kill,’—kill.”[8] But when the Soviet system collapsed, the anti-society survived, and its structure, based on systemic lawlessness, remained the same. An anti-society can do without totalitarianism, communism, and Marxism, but it cannot exist without illegality, participation in which proves loyalty to a circle of comrades, to a revolutionary party or an organized criminal group. Therefore, however evocatively scary words like corruption and mafia may be, they are only euphemisms to cover a much deeper secret of anti-society—the secret of sobornost’–sovornost’, the communality of cothievery. Society can successfully fight the mafia, corruption, and violations of the law; but, for an anti-society, they are exactly the law itself.

Anti-space, a Territorial Curse

From time to time, students ask me: “Why is Russia so miserable? And why does it bring misery to other countries?” Students’ perceptions of a miserable country are shaped by studying the classics: Gogol, Dostoevsky, Chekhov . . . Zamyatin, Bulgakov, Platonov, Zoshchenko, Solzhenitsyn . . .

“Why . . . ?” This question has haunted me as well, my entire conscious life. I remember in the summer of 2006, during a dialectological expedition to the upper Volga, I stood on the shore of Lake Seliger. A marvelous oval of water, bordered by dark forest; clouds above, and reflected below; peace, quiet, calm. . . . You would think that, scattered all around, there would be thriving towns, cheerful boardwalks, fairytale castles, where prosperous and free people live. How could a peaceful, cheerful, productive civilization not arise amid a natural world of such serenity? But a few steps from the shore, the church stood in ruins: instead of a dome, there gaped the sky, and the floor was covered with a thick layer of cow dung. In the neighboring villages, there remained only a few old women (whose dialect we were recording) and drunken loners. The schools had long been closed, and the only sign of life in the area was a settlement of Tajik workers, who had already managed to build a mosque for themselves.

The center of the Seliger region, Ostashkov, is, by the standards of provincial Russia, a rather respectable town, but what a bland, insipid town it is, without the slightest spark of joy or inspiration, though on the shore of a storybook pearl of a lake. The train station, the main street, the pier—everything is made so clumsily that you sense what the builders felt: let’s finish and be done with this as quickly as possible. There is a striking incongruence between the sensitive, aristocratically strict, spirit-filled nature and the squalid “cultural” environment—as if nature is begging to be left in peace, not touched or marred: begging these loveless newcomers to clear out at once.

“Why?” Sometimes the harsh climate is blamed—the long winters supposedly unconducive to the development of civilization. But comparison with Finland, which is even more northern and yet prosperous, and with Scandinavia in general, refutes this explanation. Scandinavians have nothing like the central Russian plains to work with, no steppes or black earth, but they have built a wonderful civilization, peaceful, inventive, kindly, humane—and indeed, with respect to prosperity and creativity, well ahead of the rest of the climatically milder parts of Europe.

Also suggested as explanations, along with geography, are morality and religion. Russia, it is said, is a long-suffering land; such is its heavenly fate, its Christian destiny:

In servant’s guise the King of Heaven,

beneath the cross in anguish bent,

has walked the length and breadth of Russia,

blessing her people as he went,[9]

according to Fyodor Tyutchev, a Slavophile poet of the nineteenth century. But a country that has murdered tens of millions of its own and other countries’ citizens and that has built gulags over vast swathes of Europe and Asia can hardly be a model of Christian virtue. To this day, unhealed wounds inflicted by Russia are bleeding in various parts of the world: North Korea, Afghanistan, Transcaucasia—and the main victim today, of course, is Ukraine.

How to answer my students’ question, without coming off as too lyrical or even mystical?

The cause of Russia’s misfortunes, it seems to me, is the scale of its space and the corresponding sense of its own greatness. In a poem addressed “to Russia,” Khomiakov warned his beloved homeland not to fall prey to geographical hubris:

“Be proud!”—the flatterers said to you:

“A land with a crowned brow,

A land of indestructible steel,

That has taken half the world by the sword!

. . . . .. . . . .. . . . .. . . . .. . . . .. . . . .. . . . .. . . . .. . . . .. . . . . .

The steppes are beautiful in their hues,

And the mountains jut into the sky,

And your lakes are like seas . . .”

Don’t believe them, don’t listen, don’t be proud![10]

In Russia, space is so vast and yet empty that, as Osip Mandelshtam put it, “We live without feeling the country beneath us.”[11] It is difficult for those who live in Russia to feel it as their own and take responsibility for it. Russia does not adhere to the skin, as most countries do, but swells up like a huge blister. Whatever a Russian does, the country brings it to naught. If you plant a garden, strangers will rush in from somewhere and take it all away or ruin it. The country is everyone’s and no one’s; there are no partitions to allow for personal freedom and responsibility, for a cohesive community of people, of coworkers and cothinkers. It is not “my country” to anyone, not even to those who rule it. So they grab and subtract everything from the “regions,” though the regions have no desire to work for the bosses of the center, who bury their treasures far away, in foreign lands. All hangs uncertainly: unsecured rights, unfulfilled obligations, the impossibility of agreements that entail mutual responsibility.

Russia is often said to suffer from a “resource curse”—the deadening of economic vitality caused by the abundance of resources like oil and natural gas—but the territorial curse is the more terrible. The territory can neither be given away nor cultivated; those who live there can only become empty, along with it. Hence the feeling of hopelessness that deepens in every house and heart.

Solzhenitsyn stubbornly insisted that Russia needed a system of zemstvos (from zemlia, land), local self-governments, and in this conviction he was a great realist. But he also assumed that the post-Soviet federal power should absorb Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. He believed in the benefit of a common state space and called for its expansion after the collapse of the USSR: “In 1991, there was missed—if it still existed—the only healthy prospect: the real, mutually strong unification of the three Slavic republics with Kazakhstan into one federal state (a ‘confederation’ is as illusory as smoke).”[12] It is or should be obvious, however, that local self-government in the context of a vast imperial space, governed from a single state center, is a contradiction in terms. Robust zemstvos in an immense land?—that is a utopia unrealistic for Russia. The zemstvos, introduced in 1864 amid the liberal reforms of Czar Alexander II, became more and more a legal opposition to the central government and were abolished in 1918, when the Bolsheviks took power.

The vastness of space is the most empty of subjects for pride. How can one be proud of nothing, of the emptiness of a territory inversely proportional in greatness to what it contains? Russian has words—privol’e, razdol’e, razgul’e—that, almost untranslatable into other languages, convey an emptiness that seems sometimes alluring and liberating. “Something native is heard,” Pushkin writes,

In the coachman’s long songs:

Now a bold spree [razgul’e],

Now a heartfelt yearning . . .

There is no fire, no black hut,

Just wilderness and snow . . .

Coming to meet me

Are only the ribboning miles.[13]

Or, as Gogol asks in Dead Souls: “Why does one hear a song of yearning echoing in one’s ears, a song borne along the whole length and breadth of you [Russia], from sea to sea? . . . What does this vast expanse prophesy?”[14] The historian Vassily Kliuchevsky (1841–1911) likewise conveys this daze of boundless space: “No habitation is visible in vast spaces, no sound is heard all around—and the observer is seized by an eerie feeling of unperturbed rest, of wakeless sleep and desolation, of loneliness, inclining one to objectless, despondent meditation, without any clear, distinct thought.”[15] The vastness of this world engenders both a nagging emptiness in the heart and a fearsome pressure to expand. When they are combined—the boldness and the yearning; the emptiness that seeks expansion and the emptiness that cannot be filled—you get those heroic deeds, exploits of a bogatyr, that only make the yearning go farther. Each step of such a bogatyr is taken down “a path in boundless yearning” (Alexander Blok).[16] Nearly every feat of this sweeping boldness is a matter of pushing the boundaries that one finds “too constricting”—not to fill them, but to expand the emptiness from which no one, least of all the bogatyr, will be able to escape.

As Hegel would say, the abstract idea of limitlessness destroys any concreteness of life. The Russian’s spirit of emptiness finds any particular living arrangement, in any particular place, unbearable. Drunkenness, theft, corruption, laziness, lying, and violence are only manifold forms of desolation and distraction from the concrete work of life; there is no solid concept of reality, of truth, of freedom, of individuality, of privacy, of civic duty, of human dignity, of personal property. All of these are blurred into the abstraction of a great space that no one can feel to be one’s own—for, like a horizon, the great space recedes from every real place, betrays it, sweeps it away into nothingness. The great and undefinable “there” (there in the capital, there in the Kremlin, there in heaven) triumphs over “here” and demands ever new sacrifices. People call this specter of great space “Motherland” and feed it sacrificially with their flesh and blood, their children, property, honor, and freedom.

So it is not surprising that, in the twenty-first century, Russia turns out to be the largest country—indeed, the only large country in the world—to lack firm, internationally recognized borders. Having annexed several regions of Ukraine (starting with Crimea in 2014), Russia has not so much grown in size as it has lost its spatial identity and the legal status of its territory. If Sebastopol and Donetsk are parts of Russia with the same constitutional rights as Moscow and Saint Petersburg, then the whole territory of Russia, including its capital, is in the same legal limbo. Russia has diffused itself, in the process almost erasing itself from the map. As a space stretches beyond certain borders, it becomes the opposite of itself, losing the country as the form of its concrete being.[17]

Anti-time: From Retro to Archaeo

The concept of retromania gained popularity after the publication, in 2011, of the British music critic Simon Reynolds’s book Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. With a mixture of irony, bitterness, and nostalgia, Reynolds argues that pop culture’s future lies in its past: reunions of bands, reissues of classic albums, remakes, mash-ups. Yet the resources of the past are not infinite—what happens when they are exhausted? Will we face a catastrophe because we have forgotten how to construct anything new?

The retromania that began to assert itself in Russia in the twenty-first century has two characteristic features. The first is its scale. Retromania in Russia is not about pop music or even pop culture in general; it affects the whole life of the country, its system of values and behavior on the world stage. It is the retro-ideology of the authorities, the retro-psychology of the masses, the desire to reverse the course of history, the predominance of a retro-Soviet and retro-imperial mentality. Second, Russian retromania harks back farther than the usual conception of retro implies. As described by Reynolds, retromania turns to the past at a depth of only a few decades, reviving (as of the time of his writing) the styles of the 1960s to the1980s. This sort of retro, to be sure, has had its place in Russia since the early 1990s, embodied in such projects as “Old Songs about the Main Things” (“Starye pesni o glavnom”), which revived late-Soviet variety shows, or in nostalgic films like Over the Dark Water (Nad temnoi vodoi; directed by Dmitry Meskhiev in 1992). Later, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the previously ridiculed Brezhnev political style of “stagnation,” with its focus on “stability,” began to catch on.

But there is, moreover, a steeper tilt to the past. The framework of retro is too narrow for the collapse into archaism that we see in Putin’s Russia. As in the twentieth century, Russia in the twenty-first leads the world in making an unrestrained leap—but this time, a leap into the feudal past, not the communist future. The Petrine “window to Europe” is rapidly closing, and the ideals of pre-Petrine Muscovy are being revived. Ivan the Terrible and the oprichnina are back in favor, a taste no longer retro but archaeo. The Soviet national anthem has returned: music by Alexander Aleksandrov to the pompous text of Sergei Mikhalkov. The victory over Nazi Germany in 1945 has become the main theme “stapling together” the whole of Russian history, the object of the newly emerging cult of the “great Victory.” The center of national self-consciousness is shifting deeper and deeper into the old times. The year 2005 saw the establishment of a festival of “national unity” in honor of the defeat of the Polish garrison in Moscow—“the day of liberation from the Polish-Lithuanian invaders”—in the year 1612. In 2008, the primary figure of Russian history was determined by way of a large-scale television competition, titled “The Name of Russia.” Coming in first place was the “saintly blessed” Prince Alexander Nevsky, who in the thirteenth century extended the Tatar-Mongols’ power to Novgorod, where he poked out the eyes of those who resisted the yoke. Apparently, over the eight centuries that followed, no great scientist, writer, composer, thinker, or military leader shone brighter in the national firmament than this prince who bowed before and served the Horde.

This slippage into the past accelerated in particular in the new century’s second decade. Even as late as 2009, the “liberal” President Dmitry Medvedev could produce a manifesto titled “Russia, Forward!” But after the return of Putin for a third term in 2012, the opposite vector of time prevailed: not “Russia, Forward!” but “Russia, Backward!” The country’s whole history underwent numerous attempts at restoration, with its different periods intermixing. Remodeled, in particular, were such historical phenomena as the kissing rituals of czar and patriarch; the tension between “Cossacks and students;” and Rosgvardiia as a new oprichnina. Russian nostalgia for the great past merges the battle of Kulikovo (1308) and the capture of Kazan (1552), the expulsion of the Polish invaders (1612), the victory over the Swedes at Poltava (1709), the defeat of Napoleon’s army (1812). . . . The 2010s and 2020s have been marked by the slogan “We can do it again!” alluding to the “Great Patriotic War” of 1945, but in essence aimed at anything and everything: Ivan the Terrible and Stalin, Alexander II and Brezhnev, both Czars Nicholas. Here we have a role-playing game on the scale of an entire country.

It is noteworthy, in this context, that Freud understood the death instinct with regression to a prior state of the living: the compulsion to repeat experiences associated with pain and displeasure expresses a desire to escape the tensions of living—to find peace in death. In this sense, repetition is the mother of repose. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, his response to “war neuroses” in 1920, Freud wrote for the first time of Thanatos as an independent drive, opposite to Eros: “The new and remarkable fact . . . that we have now to describe is that the repetition-compulsion also revives experiences of the past that contain no potentiality of pleasure, and which could at no time have been satisfactions, even of impulses since repressed.”[18] Without going into psychoanalytic detail, I would hazard that the slogan “We can repeat it,” applied to so many aspects of social life in Russia during the years 2012–22, is as vivid an expression of the death instinct and its repetition-compulsion as any in history.

Anti-life: Necrocracy

Thus came another shift, a most radical one, in political metaphysics—a move toward necrocracy: rule by the dead. It quickly laid claim to legislative status in the most phantasmagoric and grotesque way. Speaking at a Saint Petersburg conference (“Faith and Deeds: The Social Responsibility of Business”) in 2016, Alexander Ageev insisted on legal guarantees for the rights of the dead to participate in the country’s public life. He did not mean the unfeasible physical resurrection of the dead proclaimed by the nineteenth-century thinker Nikolai Fyodorov as humanity’s “common cause” but rather, so to speak, an electoral, political resurrection. Reflecting on the Second World War—referred to in the USSR as the “Great Patriotic War”—as a basis for social consolidation, Ageev proposed granting voting rights to the twenty-seven million Soviet citizens who died in the war:

The deceased would be able to influence current affairs in the country whose development and salvation they were directly involved in. For example, their families could vote for them, the scientist explained. He also said that the right to vote should probably be given to several previous generations as well, not only to those who died in the war. The reason is the same: they should be able to influence current events, insofar as these events represent a continuation of their own lives.[19]

This idea was expounded, it should be emphasized, not by a doddering veteran or a TV propagandist, but by a man whose titles and credentials included: director general of the Institute for Economic Strategies of the Russian Academy of Sciences; director of the International Research Institute for Management Problems; head of the Department of Business Project Management of the National Research Nuclear University; and professor at the Moscow State Institute for International Relations.

As eccentric as the call to enfranchise the dead may seem, it reveals the mystical basis of the Putin regime’s ambitions. Do Russian necromancers realize that, by recruiting the dead into their ranks, they themselves join the ranks of the dead? Pyotr Chaadaev, the first original Russian thinker, datelined his “Philosophical Letters” (“Filosofskie pis’ma”) of 1828–31 with the word Necropolis, casting the Moscow in which he was located as a “city of the dead.” And now Chaadaev’s sarcasm, having come full circle in Russian history, has turned into a state project: necrocracy. Likewise, in Gogol’s Dead Souls, Chichikov hopes to mortgage deceased serfs to the government, at a great profit to himself, while today Ageev would transform the dead into an instrument for the accumulation of political capital. The votes of tens of millions of the dead could help any of the authorities’ chosen candidates to be elected to the State Duma. But the question remains: for whom and for what would these legally resurrected voters vote? Those who died in the Great Patriotic War would probably vote for Stalin; in the civil war, for communism, or monarchy, or the Constituent Assembly; in the First World War, for the czar. What if a new civil war between Reds and Whites breaks out among the dead and they become repeat casualties?

Since the beginning, in 2014, of the invasion of Ukraine, the so-called Russian world has been acquiring relevant rituals. Death symbolically greets the new generation at the cradle. Even infants are sometimes dressed in military uniforms to prepare them for the fate of cannon fodder, as if they were directly born into the next world. Even baby carriages are made in the form of tanks. On Victory Day, there are parades of children’s troops. Members of the Young Army “patriotic education” movement receive privileges when applying to universities. When parents dress their children in army uniforms, they essentially make a ritual sacrifice. The “Necropolis” exhibit of funeral services in Moscow (November 2022) demonstrated a truly nationwide love of death. Young men and women crowded into the exhibition, tried on shrouds, lay down in caskets or strutted around in mock-ups of them, as if making coffin-centaurs of themselves. There was a contest for the fastest cosmetic decoration of corpses, and an exciting promotion: “Bury two people, and the third is free!” As the newspaper Moskovskaya pravda proudly wrote: “The main funeral exhibition of Russia enjoys a well-deserved reputation not only in our country, but all over the world.”[20]

Is it really so surprising, though, that the dead should take a leadership role in Russia? For a whole century, the symbol of political power has been a corpse in the country’s capital—Lenin in his mausoleum. Gogol wrote about Russian thanatalization in Dead Souls, Chaadaev in his “Philosophical Letters,” Chekhov in “A Man in a Case” (“Chelovek v futliare”), Platonov in The Foundation Pit (Kotlovan) and Chevengur, Varlam Shalamov in Kolyma Tales (Kolymskie rasskazy), Yury Mamleev in The Idlers (Shatuny). What these works have in common is the idea of Russia as a realm of death, where the few survivors desperately try to save themselves and their loved ones.

Back in the early twentieth century, Dmitry Merezhkovsky spoke of three deaths that Russia had to overcome in order to survive: the power of a dead, mechanical, despotic state; the stagnancy of a deadened church hierarchy that had become part of the state, losing touch with the life of the spirit; and the power of darkness—people’s ignorance, obedience, servility, slavishness. Thus had necrocracy already ruled Russia historically, but Merezhkovsky still held out hope for a revolution of the spirit. This dream ended with the October Revolution, which ultimately culminated in an incorruptible corpse in the heart of the country, a gulag in its vast expanses, and an attempt to turn the whole world into a reputedly socialist concentration camp.

The thanatophilia of the Soviet era, with its iconic symbol, the mausoleum, has been further developed in the post-Soviet era, with the militarization of Russian society, the cult of weapons and death, and the fear of everything living and independent. Politics, economics, and even religion have become militarized. The church is mobilized to glorify the army and military valor. Pop culture promotes the imagery of battles, their heroes and casualties, and these are now incorporated into consumer products. The obsession with death permeates even erotica, and nudity proves to be more seductive when combined with signs of war. Freud counterposed the instincts of Eros and Thanatos, but in necrocracy they merge.

It is well known that the Soviet Union developed a system, called the Perimeter (or Dead Hand), for the automatic deployment of a massive nuclear strike. Even in the case of the country’s defeat, this system is capable of striking back at the enemy and guaranteeing its annihilation. Politicians and propagandists today boast about this capacity. The current regime, unlike the Soviet one, has not the slightest chance of winning a world war, should it want to unleash one. The regime cannot win, but it can destroy the world.

In Fyodor Bondarchuk’s regime-glamorizing film Stalingrad (2013), the German captain remarks: “It is impossible to fight normally with you Russians, because you are fighting not for victory, but for revenge.” The will to win can be dictated by faith, hope, and love, while revenge is dictated only by hatred. During the Great Patriotic War, it was clear what was worth dying for, although even then hatred of the enemy outweighed love for the socialist motherland. What can we say of our time? The sole aim of the current war against Ukraine is revenge on those who are freer, more enterprising, more fortunate and who have ways of breaking through to the future.

It is sometimes said that the dead can grab hold of the living—and the closer you stand to the grave, the stronger the grip. The Dead Hand is not only an automatic nuclear-strike system. It is a force that drags the living into the realm of the dead. A dying empire, on its way out, is ready to slam the lid of its coffin loudly.

Anti-morality: Bobok and Panphobia

Russian classics of the nineteenth century turned out to be prophetic about the twentieth. In Gogol’s Dead Souls, Dostoevsky’s Demons (Bésy), Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s History of a Certain Town (Istoriia odnogo goroda), and Chekhov’s “Ward No. 6” (“Palata No. 6”), we can already see the revolution, the gulag, and punitive psychiatry. The forward gaze of Russian classics extends even further—into the twenty-first century—but its doing so attests perhaps less to artistic merit than to a country unable to escape self-repetition.

In Dostoevsky’s story “Bobok” (1873), the drunken main character wanders through a cemetery and hears dead people talking. Consciousness, it turns out, leaves the dead not all at once but gradually, over the course of the few weeks or months allotted to them to reflect on their lives and repent. For them, this interstitial period is a happy moment of complete liberation from all the bonds of morality:

“Hang it all, the grave has some value after all! We’ll all tell our stories aloud, and we won’t be ashamed of anything. First of all I’ll tell you about myself. I am one of the predatory kind, you know . . . Away with cords and let us spend these two months in shameless truthfulness! Let us strip and be naked!”—“Let us be naked, let us be naked!” cried all the voices.[21]

A thick stench rises over the cemetery: not only are the bodies of the dead decaying, but also their souls. Amid this “holiday of the dead,” a strange, inarticulate word is heard, as though muttered: bobok, bobok, bobok! The exact meaning remains unclear throughout, despite the word being the story’s title. The word sounds like the bursting bubble of the last breath of a dying historical organism. Bobok is a style of the time, like the decadence of the late nineteenth century or the avant-gardism of the 1910s and 1920s. It is a clarion-word or yawp, a sign of extreme narcissistic shamelessness—of a militant anti-morality according to which anything is permitted because death will write off everything.

A treatise could be written about the phonetics and semantics of this and similar enigmatic words. Osip Mandelshtam used an indefinable but expressive verb to describe Stalin: “Some whistle, some meow, some cry, / He alone babachet and pokes” (“We live without feeling the country beneath us . . . ,” 1933). Joseph Brodsky has his enigmatic poem “The Funeral of Bobo,” with the relevant term interpreted by the author himself: “Bobo is absolute nothing.”[22] Dostoevsky was proud to have introduced into Russian the verb stushevat’sia, which means “to gradually disappear; to fade or melt into the background.” But bobok is a more important word for Russia today; it signals a disappearance that is loud and abrupt—a booming death rattle.

Bobok has many professional guises and manners. There is bobok-propaganda, bobok-education, bobok-diplomacy, bobok-metaphysics. A bobok-politician threatens to turn the United States into radioactive dust and calls for the Russian army to occupy all of Europe and establish the power of the “Russian czar” over it. A bobok-professor (Alexander Dugin) expresses himself even more bluntly with this lapidary formula: “Kill, kill, and kill” (“There should be no more talk about it. As a professor, this is what I think”).[23]

Bobok thus seems to mean a state of complete, all-devouring hatred, or panphobia, which should not be confused with misanthropy. A misanthrope avoids society, does not have a high opinion of people (including himself); the misanthrope’s is an unkind, but passively suffering, attitude toward the world, an overawareness of its vices and weaknesses. By contrast, panphobia is an emotionally aggressive attitude toward the whole world, a gloating over its troubles and misfortunes, a desire to humiliate, punish, and torture. Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, who would just as soon see the world fall into an abyss while he enjoys a cup of tea, is among the first representatives of the panphobic type.

Panphobia is expressed in the propaganda of war and violence as a means of geopolitical expansion. “This country is surrounded by the enemy on all sides,” Dmitry Medvedev declared in 2014. In the few months since the first incursion into Ukraine, the largest country in the world managed to surround itself with “the enemy” all around—such is the projection of Russia’s comprehensive hatred for the surrounding world. The charter of the Eurasian Youth Union, led by Dugin, proclaims:

We are a totalitarian party of the intellectual type, focused on an eschatological seizure of planetary power. A cunning and brutal takeover. . . . We are lords of the earth, we are the children and grandchildren of the lords of the earth. We have been worshipped by nations and countries, our hand has stretched halfway around the world, and our soles have trampled the mountains and valleys of every continent on the globe. We will take it all back.[24]

Panphobia is more dangerous than fascism or communism. Its relationship to twentieth-century forms of totalitarianism is like that of nuclear weapons to conventional ones; it expresses a total hatred, not of other classes, nations, or races, but of the world as such. It warrants the thirst for “planetary power.” Soviet communism, with its idea of class struggle and hatred of “enemies of the people,” was only a prologue to the panphobia that began to grow in the twenty-first century out of mere resentment.

In the three decades since the collapse of the USSR, the standard Russian citizen has changed from sovok (an outdated Homo Sovieticus) to bobok. The difference is immense. The sovok was a creature impudent and boorish, but also wide-eyed and floppy-eared. His ears, that is, still rang with echoes of sublime exhortations and promises of equality, brotherhood, and a grand future. Certain historical, philosophical, and moral abstractions reverberated in his subconscious, giving him a touch of good nature and restraint even in the acute struggle for his vital interests. He was not prepared to “squeeze” (otzhimat’) strangers unreservedly and “blow off” (slivat’) his best friends. He was relatively calm and balanced, and up to 2014, he believed that peace and friendship with the rest of the world could have a second beginning.

The bobok is deprived of these illusions and this historical perspective. Only one right remains to him. As Petr Verkhovensky tells Stavrogin in Dostoevsky’s The Devils: “In essence, our teaching is a denial of honor. . . . The easiest way to attract a Russian to us is by openly advocating his right to dishonor.” Stavrogin replies ecstatically: “Bull’s eye! The right to dishonor—why, everyone will come running to us . . . !”[25] The bobok exercises this right to the hilt. The mass murders and rapes, tortures and looting, abuse of women and children, in Bucha, Izium, and other Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, attest horrifically to the fully utilized right to dishonor. After the most shameful defeats on battlefields, Russia deliberately attacks civilian targets and infrastructure with no military purpose and inflicts punitive missile strikes on millions of civilians, leaving them without heat, water, and electricity, while indiscriminately hitting schools, hospitals, and museums.

The sovok in his simplicity believed that the universe should nurture maternal love and care for him and admire even his boorishness as an expression of childlike spunk and spontaneity. The bobok is a disillusioned sovok, who suddenly realizes that he is an orphan. The universe will never give him the love to which he is entitled. The bobok is an aggressive and depressive sovok, who expects nothing good from the world. Hence his readiness to strike a first crushing blow and threaten a worldwide bobocalypse.

Antichrist: What Comes after Atheism?

In the Grand Inquisitor chapter of The Brothers Karamazov (Brat’ia Karamazovy), Dostoevsky gave voice to another prophecy that we only now are coming to understand—a prophecy pertaining to the relationship of church and state. According to the logic of the Grand Inquisitor, there are three stages in the history of Christianity. First, it spreads and conquers nations. Then, a great revolt begins against it—in the name of science, satiety, and power. As the Grand Inquisitor addresses the silent Christ: “‘Feed [the hungry] first, then ask virtue of them!’—that is what they will write on the banner they raise against you, and by which your temple will be destroyed. In place of your temple a new edifice will be raised, the terrible Tower of Babel will be raised again, [even if], like the former one, this one will not be completed either.”[26] We passed through this second stage in twentieth-century Russia: the destruction of the Christian church and the desire to erect in its place a new Tower of Babel, to storm heaven from the ground: the phase of communism, materialism, and atheism. Recall, for example, the grandiose project of the Palace of Soviets (in the late 1930s), almost half a kilometer high, which was to replace Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, demolished in 1931. This new Tower of Babel was never built; utopia grew decrepit even as supposedly it was being realized. The project resulted only in a flooded foundation pit, eventually converted into the Moskva Pool.

But next, Dostoevsky puts into the mouth of the Grand Inquisitor a prophecy that goes beyond the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. The same Christian church, having been persecuted and nearly destroyed, is restored and undertakes to build its own earthly kingdom: “They will seek us out again, underground, in catacombs, hiding (for again we shall be persecuted and tortured), they will find us and cry out: ‘Feed us, for those who promised us fire from heaven did not give it.’ And then we shall finish building their tower, for only he who feeds them will finish it, but only we shall feed them, in your name, for we shall lie that it is in your name.”[27] Thus, it is the church, led by the Grand Inquisitor, that will complete the Tower of Babel that the atheists and communists failed to erect. According to Dostoevsky’s projection, the overt overthrow of God is only a prologue to a far more refined feat of substitution, where the new tower will be built on the foundations of the church itself. The Cathedral of Christ the Savior was rebuilt in the 1990s on its former site—an exact replica—and it is now the main Orthodox venue of post-Soviet Russia, where the church once again enthusiastically embraces the state and seeks to serve it. Whereas Soviet atheism had been a revolt against religion, the emerging theocracy is a usurpation of religion.

In Dostoevsky’s earlier works, such as Notes from Underground (Zapiski iz podpol’ia, 1864) and Demons (1871), the “crystal palace of the future” appears as the dream of confirmed atheists and revolutionaries, such as Nikolai Chernyshevsky; but in The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Dostoevsky penetrates more deeply into the mystery of what he believes to be the coming Antichrist. This figure will emerge from the logic of the development of the Christian church and Christian state, and will shepherd the people in the name of Christ. Notably, in Dostoevsky’s prediction, this eschatological conclusion of history takes place following the collapse of the future atheistic and socialist state. Theocracy, or rather its likeness, will replace atheism. At first, the godless revolutionaries will win, but they will not be able to feed the people, at which point the reign of the Grand Inquisitor will begin. The Tower of Babel will be completed when the persecuted Christians emerge from their catacombs to be vested, by the whole populace, with authority to build the kingdom of God on earth.

And indeed, something like this prediction has taken place in the post-Soviet period. The populace, exhausted by revolutionary frenzy, has come to bow again to those—the priests and spiritual shepherds—who had been persecuted for seven decades, summoning them from the catacombs and back from distant countries of diaspora, crying: Feed us. If you give us earthly food, we will accept spiritual food from you as well. From this moment, according to Dostoevsky, when people are sated and enriched, and begin to build not only temples but mansions in the name of Christ, the real dominion of the Antichrist will commence. Atheism built a kingdom of open hatred of God, but it was not yet the final kingdom of lies and substitution. If Satan was the first rebel against God, then the Antichrist will appear as God’s false image. The new strategy of the Antichrist, set aside for the end of time, is not rebellion against, but likening himself to, God: “the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction…  he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.” (2 Thessalonians 2:3, 4, English Standard Version).Power-madness, self-interest, avarice, inquisition—all under the guise of piety: a deception for the sake of deeper deception. “This is where Satan was,” people will say when they come to their senses after the revolutionary bacchanal. “It was Satan who blasphemed against God, but we will join those who glorify God.” And all the more surely, cursing their former godlessness, they will put their trust in the one who now speaks in the name of God.

The revived nexus of church and state in Russia has facets that not even the most zealous tsarist ideologues could have projected. Particularly noteworthy is the comity found between Russia’s modern clergy and modern weaponry—weapons of mass destruction. Russia’s nuclear missiles—particularly the R-36M, designated “Satan” in NATO’s classification—have received, with the blessing of the Russian Orthodox Church, their own heavenly patron saint, the great Russian Saint Seraphim of Sarov. These most powerful of all nuclear-armed ICBMs, a Russian source menacingly promises, would “raise hell across vast swathes of the US and Western Europe.”[28] Perhaps not by chance, but “providentially,” the Russian Federal Nuclear Center that produces this “Satan” was constructed on the site of Saint Seraphim’s hermitage in Sarov (called Arzamas-16 during the Soviet period). The main cathedrals thereof were demolished in the time of state atheism, in the early 1950s; but in 2007, Saint Seraphim was declared the holy patron of nuclear weapons and forces,[29] with the nuclear center subsequently procuring a large batch of icons bearing the saint’s likeness.[30] This facility, with its staff of tens of thousands, also features Russia’s most powerful supercomputer, which serves, among other things, the “Satan” complex. Thus, with the combination of holy cloister and nuclear center, we see the deep interrelation of the theology of hell and the technology of hell.

Back in 1891, the philosopher Konstantin Leontiev predicted that, in approximately one hundred years, Russia would give birth to the Antichrist.[31] It is enough to look upon the Main Temple of the Russian Armed Forces, consecrated in 2020, to feel the alarm—is this not the abode of the one who “will take his place in the temple of God”? The structure is a fright, inside and out, its gold barely breaking through the gloomy green color of mud and/or khaki. A number of Orthodox scholars find this building to be in stark contrast to the traditions of church architecture. The temple has four aisles, each dedicated to a particular saint and a particular kind of weapon. So, Saint Barbara the Great Martyr is appointed as the patroness of the Strategic Missile Forces. Why the Great Martyr, in this case? Is it not because the nuclear weapons wielded by this branch would cause the greatest torment to their victims? Among the main relics of the museum of the Temple of the Armed Forces is a suit and cap that belonged to Hitler.[32] The memory of the führer is honored in the temple of the victory over fascism.

The “beast from the abyss,” who has invaded Ukraine and says he may attack the whole world, is stronger than Hitler was; the beast has a nuclear arsenal. At the same time, the Russian president is quite the churchgoer: he attends services on major holidays, piously crosses himself, kisses the patriarch, visits the holy places on Mount Athos and the island of Valaam, and acts as a patron of all the “holy traditions” (see, again, 2 Thessalonians 2:4.)

Anti-being: Ontocide

In one of the best-known of Russian fairy tales, a czar orders his marksman: “Go there—I know not where; bring this—I know not what.” Now the whole of Russia, like its fairytale hero, is in search of Nil. The language of modern political philosophy lacks the word ontocide (from the Greek ontos, “being” + cide, “murder”)—war on being as such—but such a thing palpably exists. Genocide, zoocide, ecocide are only partial manifestations. The enmity to being as such lies at the heart of Gnosticism, Russian Old Belief, Dugin’s Eurasianism: the world, wallowing as it is in evil, ruled by Satan—or by the West as a manifestation of him—should be destroyed. There can be no question of what the post-Stalinist USSR called peaceful coexistence.

In his Kremlin speech announcing the annexation of four Ukrainian regions, Putin accused the West of Satanism: the Western “overthrow of faith and traditional values . . . acquires the features of ‘religion in reverse’—outright Satanism.”[33] After this the Russian Security Council and the state propaganda machine proclaimed the main task of the “special operation” to be not just the denazification and demilitarization, but also the desatanization, of Ukraine.

Ontocide in practice is a scorched-earth tactic. It is sometimes carried out by a retreating army to prevent an invader from using captured resources. Even this tactic is prohibited by international norms of warfare. But in Russia’s war on Ukraine, scorched-earth tactics are being used by the attacking army, which turns whole cities into ruins. In 2022, Russia completely destroyed hundreds of towns and villages in Ukraine, including Mariupol, Volnovakha, Izyum, Rubizhne, and Severodonetsk. About 150,000 homes were destroyed or damaged. Some eight million refugees fled Ukraine and some eight million more were internally displaced. On average, civilian targets were shelled sixty times more frequently than military targets. Six million pets and at least fifty thousand dolphins in the Black Sea were killed. The largest minefield in the world, 250,000 square kilometers in size, was formed, equivalent to more than 40 percent of Ukraine’s total land area.[34] In this context, we should speak not only of genocide, zoocide, and ecocide but also about ontocide. Even Nazi Germany was careful not to destroy more infrastructure than was necessary for military victory, in order subsequently to occupy the invaded territories and benefit from their further (German) development.

Suspicion of being as such is a widespread Russian state of mind. Let us suppose that something arises in the world—a certain form of being, a sprout. A European sees it and wants to investigate and cultivate it. Go deeper into its causes. Grow it into something more. In Russia, this something will be viewed as a suspicious new fact of being. What the hell is it doing here? What right does it have to exist? There used to be nothing—and then, all of a sudden, hello! Who needs it? This something may become dangerous, may stir things up. We are better off without it. Insofar as there was nothing before, let there be nothing now. . . . And so it will be trampled, such that nothing of it is left. Nonbeing is more attractive and reassuring, as both our starting and arrival points.

Maxim Gorky came to the following conclusion about the native land he extensively wandered:

I think that, exclusive to the Russian people—as exclusive as the Englishman’s sense of humor—is the characteristic sense of a particular cold-blooded cruelty. . . . There is a diabolical sophistication in Russian cruelty; there is something subtle and refined in it. This quality can hardly be explained by words like psychosis or sadism. . . . If the facts of cruelty were an expression of the perverse psychology of individuals, one would not need to speak about them; in that case, they would be material for a psychiatrist, not a realist writer. But I am referring strictly to collective amusements of human torments. . . . [Among civil war atrocities committed by rank-and-file men:] A captive officer having been stripped naked, pieces of skin were torn off his shoulders, in the form of epaulets, and nails were hammered in place of the stars; the skin was torn off along the lines of belts and lapels—this operation was called “putting a uniform” on someone. It required, no doubt, a great deal of time and artistry. . . . But where, finally, is that good-natured, thoughtful Russian peasant, the tireless seeker of truth and justice, about whom Russian literature of the nineteenth century so convincingly and beautifully told the world? In my youth, I searched diligently for such a person in the villages of Russia, and I did not find him.[35]

In the same text, Gorky emphasizes that Russian cruelty is also a cognitive process, a matter of research, “as if testing the limits of a person’s tolerance for pain, as if studying the tenacity, the firmness of life.” Such cruelty is a negative kind of inquiry about being: the Russian word for “curiosity” (liubopytstvo) has the same root as “torture” (pytka). What kind of being is this?—let us test it: bend, twist, crumple, pull, and spindle it. Extreme methods of deformation are meant to make it scream, throb with pain, give itself away. On its way to death—only then is а living being truly interesting and self-revealing. Its writhing and convulsions are a sight worth watching. If it is broken, poisoned, strangled, it reveals all the depth of its troubled and departing essence. We only love being when its authenticity is fully revealed to us. Podlinnost’, “authenticity,” comes from podlinniki, which are clubs used to beat the truth from a witness in medieval court proceedings. Podnogotnaia, the “lowdown” that we seek from a tortured witness, is literally the “under-the-fingernail” truth that is thereby obtained.

As the Soviet writer Aleksey Tolstoy disclosed, his famed historical novel Peter the First (Petr Pervyi) grew out of his study of the torture records of the Moscow Department (Prikaz) of Secret Affairs: “These investigative documents were written by clerks, who did their best to record in the most concise and colorful form the story of the tortured, as accurately as possible. Albeit not pursuing any ‘literary’ tasks, the wise clerks created high verbal art. There are diamonds of literary Russian speech in their records.”[36] In Russia—where torture, pytka, has the same root as “experiment” or “experience” (opyt), “curiosity” (pytlivost’), and “attempt” (popytka)—torture is, even in fine literature, a cognitive and creative approach toward being.

Inversions

In current political events, one structure—inversion—has been repeated again and again. In the first month of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, after the attack on Bucha, it became clear that Russian forces were behaving like criminals: raping and killing civilians, pillaging and looting. A few months later, it turned out that criminals—murderers, rapists, thieves—were being recruited from prisons into Wagner, a private military company, the avant-garde of the Russian army fighting in Ukraine. These criminals have been provided with weapons and incorporated into the fighting ranks along with contract soldiers and conscripts. The transformation of soldiers into criminals, and of criminals into soldiers, are inversions whose logic is now determining Russian history.

Territory is likewise subject to inversion. On September 30, 2022, four Ukrainian regions were, by order of Putin and, then, the Constitutional Court, annexed to Russia: Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia. Supposedly, these became parts of Russia; but, as soon became clear, Russia became a part of these regions as well. When they were placed under martial law, the eight Russian regions adjacent to them were placed under semimartial law (“medium response level”); the Southern and Central Federal Districts (including Moscow) were placed on “high alert”; and the rest of the country was placed on “basic alert.” Increasingly persistent are rumors that this posture begins a transition of the whole of Russia to full martial law.

The inversion occurs not only in space but also, as we have seen, in time. Trying to overturn the world order and establish geopolitical hegemony in the future, Russia is rapidly sinking into the past, going through stages of its history in the reverse direction. Turning away from the West, slamming shut the window that Peter the Great opened into Europe, Russia is returning to an era of autarchy and isolation—to the days of Muscovy. But it can go even further back; there is still the prospect of Russia’s becoming, as when it was an ulus of the Golden Horde, an appanage of a great Eastern Empire, or even two empires: Chinese and/or Ottoman.

We can point to a number of inversions when the desire to surpass all, to be surpassing, led to the opposite result. In 2014, for example, Russia, having won the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, became a sports superpower. But as soon as the doping and exploits of the “urine-bearers” came to light, the country became a sports pariah: it not only slipped to the bottom of the standings but was essentially excluded from world sports. Another such inversion is taking place before our eyes: the country that proclaimed itself an “energy superpower” in 2005 and 2006 and turned its raw-material resources into an instrument of political pressure on other countries is rapidly losing its position on the world hydrocarbon market. Every breakthrough turns into a breakdown.

Many of Russia’s latest ideologemes are inversions. Moscow declares war on “Ukrainian Nazism” even as its own political regime is increasingly hard to distinguish from fascism. When Putin in his “Valdai Speech” (October 27, 2022) preached “a careful approach to the identity of every society and nation,” “the possibility for any nation . . . to choose its own path, its own sociopolitical system,” and accused the West of denouncing “any alternative viewpoint as subversive propaganda and a threat to democracy,”[37] he was projecting his own (repressive) policies onto the West, and the policies of the (democratic) West onto himself.

Are these inversions in any way surprising? To sharply cross one’s borders is to blur one’s specificity; an attempt to absorb another entity is the same as being absorbed by it. The line between one’s own and another’s, between law and crime, limit and limitlessness, is erased. Thus one should expect that hardened criminals, masters of chaos, will be recruited into the ostensibly most disciplined organization of society, the army; that oppressive laws imposed on occupied territories will become laws also in the occupying country; and that a leap toward world hegemony will become a fast tumble to the bottom of nations.

At the heart of all these inversions, if we accept the mythological or psychoanalytic point of view, is this equation: to love is to kill. In 2014, at the height of the “Russian Spring,” one of its main ideologues, Sergey Kurginyan, shouted, from a Moscow podium, his message to the people of Ukraine: “We love you! We love you! We love you!” The cannibal, however, loves too—loves people with a fierce, all-consuming love, to the point of crunching bone. The deepest basis of inversion, perhaps, is rooted in infant psychology: to love is to swallow. Anything infants like or are attracted to, they pull into their mouths, and the parental task is to keep them safe and instill a sense of reality, of boundaries. Alas, Russian development froze at the infantile stage: Russia seems to love Europe, especially Ukraine, and wants to swallow that continent and country for precisely that reason. Infantilism that lingers past infancy degenerates, logically, into cannibalism. In sociological surveys of Russians about Ukrainians, the former tend to say, “They are our brothers, we love them,” but they say so resentfully: “Why don’t they understand what’s good for them—why won’t they go peacefully into our stomach?” The West tried for some time to admonish Russia “parentally,” to instill in it a sense of reality, of boundaries, and has realized only recently that it is dealing no longer with an infant but with a cannibal.

As for the much-proclaimed “brotherhood of the two nations,” Cain was likewise Abel’s brother. Russia’s war against Ukraine, though, is not only fratricidal but also suicidal. Among the consequences of Russian missile attacks on Ukraine, the destruction of the department of Russian philology at Kyiv University (on October 10, 2022) is especially profound in its symbolism. Russia is striking at its own language and literature, history and culture—at its own image throughout the world. Everything good and creative in its past is now collapsing in a fit of self-destruction. Russia is attacking its own spiritual homeland, Kievan Rus, the cradle of its language and faith. To do so is not so much a mistake or a crime as it is the most grandiose suicide in the history of humankind. Whereas murderers can repent and be prayed for, the suicide is deprived of church burial and commemoration. What awaits a suicidal country is difficult even to imagine.

Russia is called a “rogue state” and placed on a par with North Korea, Iran, and Venezuela. But compared to the Russia of today, these states are choirboys. They do not demolish the cities and villages of neighboring countries. So the Russian Federation deserves a new international designation, that of “terrorist state.” Or, perhaps more appealing to its proud sense of uniqueness, Russia should be deemed an “anti-state.”

Anti-personality: The Nonlinear Logic of Military Psychosis

The growing threat of a major war became apparent on March 1, 2018, when, in an address to the Federal Assembly held at Moscow’s Manezh Hall, Putin introduced the latest types of Russian superweapons, “unparalleled in the world”: the Sarmat missile system, underwater drones, nuclear-powered cruise missiles, ad nauseam. The audience gave this necrophilic litany a standing ovation; Putin’s listeners were seized with a “resounding joy” (according to Vyacheslav Nikonov, the grandson of Stalin’s foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and also, incidentally, head of the Russian World Foundation, which since 2007 has promoted the Russian language, culture, and, at the same time, ideology abroad). Everyone present in the Manezh that day had their own reason for applauding: business and career prospects; ties of family and friendship; fear. Each was, no doubt, compos mentis. But the social action in which they took part was madness, akin to the mass psychoses of communist Russia and Nazi Germany. There, too, separate individuals were not separately crazy but were drawn into the vortex of a social psychosis that no longer depended on their personal psyches.

Many political commentators and analysts saw Putin’s broad gesture of intimidation as bluster. Are cartoons of superweapons so alarming? Individuals, after all, are rational and look out for their own interests. Given the “mutually assured destruction” of world war, why should they want to die? The authorities and the elite, moreover, live well in their villas and palaces, with sufficient stolen capital to have their posterity living in clover for the next century and more. They must at least have a care for their children, their grandchildren. No, they do not want to die and will not start a war; they only want to frighten the West . . .

But the explosion of military enthusiasm has a mental reality all its own. Why should the historical logic of the twenty-first century differ from that of the twentieth?—a logic far from that of enlightened optimism and rational calculation. Social psychosis has nothing to do with tallying the sum of individual wills. Did the Soviet leaders of the Stalin era—the Zinovievs, Bukharins, Tukhachevskys, Yagodas, and Yezhovs—want to die? Did they not love their children? What about the writers of that time who clamored for the destruction of “enemies of the people” and then fell into the same meat grinder themselves? Nobody wanted to die. But there is a pattern in the processes of history that we might call atmospheric, and it is far from linear. The process is expressed in a proverb: “Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.”

There are psychedelics, and then there are sociodelics—injections of propaganda that act like psychotropic drugs, stimulating illusory, altered states of consciousness. The smell of blood is the strongest narcotic, and it demands increasingly large doses. Two wars in Chechnya, then Ossetia and Abkhazia, then Crimea and Donbass, then Syria, now all of Ukraine . . . people suffer from drug withdrawal. There is a demand for fresh blood. People already want to make “our own” not just all of Ukraine but next the Baltic states, members of NATO, which would mean direct war with Europe and North America. And if rising demand is not met with a corresponding supply, people may grumble and look for more bloodthirsty leadership.

The drops of water that make up tsunamis are chemically no different from the drops in a calm, gentle sea. A tectonic shift turns them into deadly waves, capable of destroying coastal cities. Nearly all tsunamis (80 percent) are generated in the vastness of the largest ocean, the Pacific. Were it possible to divide that expanse, partition it, the shock waves might not reach such destructive levels of force. Similarly, historical tsunamis in the last century have formed on the territory of the largest country. My comments about Russia do not apply to all the people living there, among whom are many gifted, courageous, honest individuals trying to challenge the politics of their state. Breaking out of their native environment, Russian émigrés often reach heights in many fields, evincing humaneness, empathy, and diligence. The chemical analysis of particular drops is not definitive. But the laws governing physical—and social—environments are different from those governing individual particles. Only social physics can explain how lethal waves are formed from ordinary drops. One of those waves was the Russian Revolution, Bolshevism, Leninism; a second was Stalinism, which, in tandem with Hitlerism, unleashed the Second World War; and a third wave, which is now rising, is Putinism, post-Soviet militarism. Social physics was a standard term in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for what, from the mid-nineteenth on, came to be called sociology. It may be worth reviving the earlier term in relation to those models, those nonlinear processes, that are common to nature and society.

Here the reader might object: people nowadays do not have the sort of ideology or mythology that in the past inspired wars and revolutions. But it turns out that, in the twenty-first century, intricately developed ideologies, based in philosophical theories like Marxism, are no longer necessary. These former ideo-phenomena corresponded to a relatively low level of informational development in society: an idea had to be drilled in for a long time to be gradually absorbed by the masses and to become, as Marx famously put it, a material force. But now everything spreads instantly. Strange as it may seem, the more complex information systems become, the more we are reduced to bare biological instinct: us against them.

Further, war psychosis may develop into a next phase, where even this basic opposition becomes obsolete. According to opinion polls, the overwhelming majority of the Russian population supports the war against Ukraine, or at least opposes any significant concessions regarding the occupied territories. But when Ukrainian troops recaptured Kherson, forcing the Russian army to retreat, there were explosions of delight in Russia as well.[38] And then, a few days later, ordinary Russians were rejoicing once more, this time at massive rocket attacks on Ukraine. For and against is too rational a structure: no binary approach can describe the state of Russian society. The population hungers for strong feelings, suppressed by the era of capitalism and small business, and is thus ready to hail any disaster, calamity, or horror with transports of rapture. All oppositions and confrontations melt away in an ecstasy of violence for its own sake.

Hence the explosion of apocalyptic enthusiasm in the famous actor, director, and former Orthodox priest Ivan Okhlobystin as he imagines universal destruction:

Even if the impossible happens, and we lose, it means that along with us the whole world will lose. There will be nothing! There will be a great Zero. And we are all ready for that Apocalypse! The whole nation agrees. . . . In unison! Everyone I’ve talked to is in favor of victory—poets, artists. . . . We’ll kill everyone! We don’t need a world without our victory. . . . And I feel joy! It’s such a delight! . . . such an Allahu Akbar of all the people![39]

This eschatological ecstasy is the flip side of the apathy, the “learned helplessness,” that grips Russian society. Depression and mania are two sides of the same psychosis. If the Russian president were somehow lynched or electrocuted tomorrow, the population would be as ecstatic as if the American president had met the same fate. If NATO forces somehow landed in the Kremlin and shot all its occupants, there would be the same glee in Russia as if Moscow detonated a nuclear device over Washington. The Russian population is an ideologically amorphous mass, but emotionally it is highly charged. Militarism is turning into apocalypticism as weapons of mass destruction erase the difference between us and them. A nuclear disaster at the Zaporizhzhia power plant could have deadly consequences for both Ukraine and Russia, as well as for all of Europe. Accordingly, public sentiment shifts from the militaristic to the apocalyptic dimension, where horror and elation merge and, again, a kind of globalism triumphs, but in a funereal rather than beneficial sense—not a worldwide division of labor, nor a project for commerce and prosperity, but global destruction: the “end of the world.”

Anti-value: Cultural Default

Any system of signs—money, language, literature, culture as a whole—must possess something—a more widely accepted commodity or medium of exchange—to secure its value. Over the past ten years, since Russia has once again adopted an aggressive stance against the world, its culture has undergone a noticeable devaluation.[40] I do not mean to imply that Russian culture should be “canceled,” but it is clearly now subject to a certain discount. Everything produced in Russia, coming from Russia, or marked with its sign has become cheaper. And not only the products of our time but all of it, throughout its history, from ancient paganism onward, from the summoning of the Varangians, from the baptism of Russia onward.

The quality of a tree is known by the fruit that grows on it. “Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? . . . A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them” (Matthew 7:16–19). It is legitimate to ask: However great the productions of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Tchaikovsky may be, what is their value if their yield has been such bitter fruit? If the fruits are aggression, violence, and the destruction and pillaging of a “fraternal” country, then we must reconsider the quality of the tree on which they ripened. A nation’s contribution to the spiritual life of humanity changes in proportion to how descendants, developing the heritage of their ancestors, augment it or, conversely, how they squander it. And so it turns out that Russia, now populated mostly by Rashists or “Zedists” (the Roman letter Z having come to symbolize Russian fascism), does not merit much interest or respect in the eyes of the world community. Yes, great artists and creators have lived in that country, but now it becomes clear that they did not speak for the entire people, and there is no deep wisdom, experience, or historical substance to insure their value.

Take this historical anecdote as an example: the Greek political forum brought together representatives of all the city-states, large and small. The most eloquent speaker was the ambassador of one of the smallest. When he finished his inspirational speech and was surprised that his words were not treated with proper attention, it was explained to him that his speeches lacked state. Thus does everything that comes out of Russia, its literature, art, and science, now lack state, social body, historical foundation. Russia is undergoing a moral, spiritual, intellectual, and cultural default. Its “banknotes” may indicate great values—“the fate of mankind,” “brotherhood and justice,” “heavenly ideals”—but there is vanishingly little left to secure them. The gold reserve has dried up. One can imagine an even sharper break between a future Russia and its past. The Russian culture of Pushkin, Lev Tolstoy, Chekhov, Tchaikovsky, and Mendeleev may come to be perceived as a great dead culture, an Atlantis sunk at the bottom of its “golden and silver” ages.

Russian Studies as Nihilology

Thus the question arises: Who needs, now, philosophy or poetry in the language of a nation gone mad, possessed by the instinct of violence and desire for destruction? The task of all of us who think and write in Russian and about Russia has deepened greatly in the last few years. It used to be that we would turn in circles about the shaky, quicksand state of society—both in the Brezhnev era stagnation and in the early post-Soviet period. Some things were unsettling, and some things gave you hope. People were obedient and submissive but had lofty ideals. Or they were cynics, but they worked hard to develop their businesses and markets, serving progress in their own way. There were many shades of gray, some lighter, some darker, and the painter’s brush seemed to wither in the hand of anyone trying to reflect these drab tints.

But such an abyss has now opened that thought rushes headlong to the bottom of all the active, militant nothingness. All Russianists involuntarily become nihilologists, experts in (self-) destruction. We are no longer somewhere between West and East, on a dull plain slowly stretching between the values of democracy and authoritarianism. Until recently located on the periphery of the academic world, Russianists are now on the front line, since no one is better positioned than we are to say from where this threat—a threat not to Ukraine alone and to other former territories of the USSR but also to the entire world—is emerging. Who else can speak to this abyss in its own language? Given the apocalyptic signals that Russia is now sending to the world in a cultural language that we understand, the discipline of Russian studies has a new vocation—to become a practical, applied nihilology.

Image: William Blake, The House of Death 1785-1805.

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References

Abarinov, Vladimir. “Koriavyi put’ ideologa ‘Novorossii.” Info-Resist, September 28, 2014. https://inforesist.org/koryavyj-put-ideologa-novorosii/.

Bagritskii, Eduard. “TVS” [Tuberculosis]. 1928, published in 1929. https://rupoem.ru/bagrickij/pyl-po-nozdryam.aspx.

Blok, Alexander. Na pole Kulikovom. 1908. https://www.culture.ru/poems/275/na-pole-kulikovom (accessed April 4, 2023).

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.

———. Demons. Translated by Robert A. Maguire. New York: Penguin, 2008. iBooks.

———. White Nights, and Other Stories. Translated by Constance Garnett. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2008.

dpa. “Ukraine Has Largest Minefield in the World, Prime Minister Says.” Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, January 8, 2023. https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-largest-minefield-shmyhal/32214163.html.

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Edited by Ernest Jones, translated by C. J. M. Hubback. International Psycho-analytical Library 4. London: International Psycho-analytical Press, 1922. https://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/assets/pdf/freud_beyond_the_pleasure_principle.pdf.

Gogol, Nikolai Vasilyevic. Sobranie sochinenii v deviati tomakh. Vol. 5. Moscow: Russkaia mysl’, 1994. https://ilibrary.ru/text/78/p.12/index.html.

Gorky, Maxim. “O russkom kret’ianstve.” Berlin: Izdatel’stvo I. P. Ladyzhnikova, 1922. https://www.mytus.net/index.php/rekomendovana-literatura/item/87-about-the-russian-peasantry.

Khomiakov, Aleksey Stepanovich. “Rossii.” 1839. http://bytiye.ru/temy/khomyakov-o-russia.html (accessed April 4, 2023).

———. Tserkov’ odna: Opyt katekhizicheskogo izlozheniia ucheniia o Tserkvi. Moscow: Pravoslavnyi Sviato-Tikhonovskii gumanitarnyi universistet, 2018. http://www.odinblago.ru/filosofiya/homakov/tom2/2/.

Kliuchevsky, Vasily Osipovich. Kurs russkoi istorii: Sochineniia v 8 tt. 8 vols. Moscow: Politizdat, 1956.

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Mandelshtam, Osip. “My zhivem, pod soboiu ne chuia strany.” 1933. First published 1963. https://www.culture.ru/poems/41776/my-zhivem-pod-soboyu-ne-chuya-strany.

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Tokarev, Alexander. “Ikony dlia VIPov: Stalo izvestno zachem iadernomy tsentru v Sarove obraza so strazami.” Nizhnii Novgorod onlain, May 24, 2019. https://www.nn.ru/text/economics/2019/05/24/66101368/.

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Zabuzhko, Oksana. “No Guilty People in the World?: Reading Russian Literature after Bucha.” Times Literary Supplement, April 22, 2022, 7–8.

[1] See Russia Today, “Surkov rasskazal o svoem ponimanii russkogo mira.” Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own.

[2] It may also be worth recalling that the path of Putin and his friends to corporate power began with the dacha cooperative Ozero, which they founded near St. Petersburg in 1996. Ozero is the Russian word for “lake” but is also readable as “0-zero,” a double zero. In the words of the Polish aphorist Stanisław Jerzy Lec, “Zero is nothing, but two zeros already mean something.”

[3] Spengler, Perspectives of World-History, 189.

[4] Spengler, Perspectives of World-History, 193.

[5] Olevskii, “Khodorovskii o prigovore Uliukaevu.”

[6] One of the first to write about this special pattern of Russian society was the art historian and sociologist Leonid Nevler, in his article “Sotsiologiia mafioznosti”: Every worker, no matter what position he occupies, not only has the right, but is obliged to break the law, to commit forgery, to get his share of what has been stolen, because otherwise he will be recognized as an outsider in the collective. . . . Mutual connivance in breaking the law, sharing a common secret or, if you will, a common crime (since everything is organized so that, because of the discrepancy between law and practice, anyone can be prosecuted) is a much stronger basis for social consolidation than anything known to democratic structures. Nevler, “Sotsiologiia mafioznosti,” 5.

[7] Khomiakov, Tserkov’ odna.

[8] Bagritskii, “TVS.”

[9] Tyutchev, “How Bare the Countryside!”

[10] Khomiakov, “Rossii.”

[11] Mandelshtam, “My zhivem, pod soboiu ne chuia strany.”

[12] Solzhenitsyn, Rossiia v obvale, 39.

[13] Pushkin, “Zimniaia doroga.”

[14] Gogol, Sobranie sochinenii v deviati tomakh, 115.

[15] Kliuchevsky, Kurs russkoi istorii, 1:70.

[16] Blok, Na pole Kulikovom.

[17] In Russian, the words for “space” and “country” are of the same root (prostranstvo and strana); thus, erasing the boundaries of its space, the country loses itself.

[18] Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, sec. 3.

[19] On Ageev’s speech, see Direktor instituta RAN predlozhil nadelit’ pravom golosa pogibshikh vo vremia Velikoi Otechestvennoi voyny.Newsru.com. May 20, 2016. https://www.newsru.com/russia/20may2016/elections.html.

[20] Kovalev, “V Moskve otkrylas’ 30-ia mezhdunarodnaia vystavka ritual’nykh uslug ‘Nekropol’.”

[21] Dostoevsky, “Bobok,” in White Nights, 146.

[22] See Venclova, “O poslednikh trekh mesiatsakh Brodskogo v Sovetskom Soiuze,” 262.

[23] For video of this portion of the lecture by Dugin, see Alexander Lyulka. “Dugin: ubivat’, ubivat’, ubivat’!” June 18, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgHiqVy79Zs.

[24] As cited in Abarinov, “Koriavyi put’ ideologa ‘Novorossii.” September 26, 2014 http://falangeoriental.blogspot.com/2014/09/blog-post_57.html.

[25] Dostoevsky, Demons, 429.

[26] Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 253.

[27] Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 253.

[28] See Vsun’Vyn’. Raketnyi shchit Rossii (SS-18 “Satan”). Fishki.net. January 30, 2015. https://fishki.net/1408572-raketnyj-wit-rossii-ss-18-quotsatanquot.html.

[29] See V Khrame Khrista Spasitelia nachalis’ torzhestva po sluchaiu 60-letiia so dnia osnovaniia iadernogo oruzheinogo kompleksa Rossii. Patriarchia.ru, September 4, 2007. http://www.patriarchia.ru/db/text/290617.html.

[30] See Tokarev, “Ikony dlia VIPov.”

[31] “Give it a half a century, no more, and Russians will go, little by little and without even noticing it, from being a ‘God-fearing’ people to a ‘God-fighting’ people, and even more so than any other people, perhaps. For, indeed, our people is capable of going to extremes in everything. . . . And we, all of a sudden, in a hundred years or so, from the depth of our state, first classless, and then churchless or weakly churched, will give birth to that very Antichrist of whom Bishop Feofan [of Poltava] and other spiritual writers speak.” Leontiev, Vostok, Rossiia I Slavianstvo, 684; my translation.

[32] Deputy Minister of Defense Timur Ivanov proudly declared: “There are real relics there. There are unique items, up to and including a suit of Hitler’s, preserved to this day, and Hitler’s cap.” See https://www.newsru.com/russia/12jun2020/relic.html.

[33] See the transcript of Putin’s speech. Obrashcheniie Vladimira Putina po sluchaiu vkhozhdeniia v sostav RF novykh subiektov. Polnyy tekst. TASS, September 30, 2022. https://tass.ru/politika/15921545.

[34] See dpa, “Ukraine Has Largest Minefield”; Wikipedia, s.v. “2022–2023 Ukraine Refugee Crisis,” last modified March 27, 2023***, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022–2023_Ukrainian_refugee_crisis; https://radiomoldova.md/p/4441/; V rezultate rossiiskoi agressii v Ukraine pogibli 6 millionov domashnikh zhivotnykh, unichtozheny po menshei mere 50 tysiach delfinov v Chernom more. November, 15, 2022. Ukrinform. https://www.ukrinform.ru/rubric-ato/3614596-v-ukraine-pogibli-6-millionov-domasnih-zivotnyh-i-po-mensej-mere-50-tysac-delfinov-izza-agressii-rf.html.

[35] Gorky, “O russkom kret’ianstve.” Paradoxically, he suggests that “the development of inventive cruelty was influenced [in Russia] by reading the hagiographies of the great martyrs, a favorite reading of the literate inhabitants of remote villages.”

[36] For Tolstoy, see Lanab, Interesnye fakty. Bookmix. November, 20, 2010. https://bookmix.ru/groups/viewtopic.phtml?id=1242.

[37] See the transcript of this speech Polnyy tekst obrashcheniia Vladimira Putina na “Valdaye,” 27 oktiabria 2022. Komsomol’skaia pravda, October 27, 2022, https://www.kp.ru/daily/27463/4668903/.

[38] As the Russian (and now also Ukrainian) journalist Alexander Nevzorov commented in his weekly report: “How much happiness there was in Russia when Ukrainian troops entered Kherson, even among security personnel: laughter, jokes, fun.” Nevzorov, interview, V gostiakh u Dmitriia Gordona, November 16, 2022. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_r8x7hUHNY (around the eight-minute mark).

[39] Okhlobystin, as reported at Rossiiskii akter: “Esli my proigraiem, proigraiet ves mir. My vse gotovy k etomu Apokalipsisu!” TV8 channel, April 21, 2022. https://www.tv8.md/ru/2022/21/04/rossiiskii-akter-esli-mi-proigraem-proigraet-ves-mir-mi-vse-gotovi-k-etomu-apokalipsisu/198612.

[40] See, for instance, Zabuzhko, “No Guilty People in the World?,” in which it is argued that Russian literature has, for 200 years, painted a picture of the world in which the criminal is to be pitied, not condemned. We should sympathize with him, for ‘there are no guilty people in the world’ (Tolstoy again). Everyone is ready to cut his neighbour’s throat, it all depends on the price. This is ‘Russian humanism.’ And if you accept this thesis, then congratulations—you’ve welcomed the Russian army into your home. In many ways, it was Russian literature that wove the camouflage net for Russia’s tanks. (7)