0300120702 (N) by Charles Clover

Author:Charles Clover
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780300120707
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

‘The Nightingale’

During his first trip to Paris, Dugin had paid a call on a man who would provide a fateful introduction that would change his career.15 Yury Mamleev, founder of the Yuzhinsky literary circle and Dugin’s literary idol, had moved to France following an unsuccessful sojourn at Cornell University in the US, where he had had no better luck finding a publisher than he had in the USSR. The French, however, with more of a taste for the intellectual and metaphysical, gave him the welcome he felt he deserved, and he stayed on in France, writing, until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In exile, Mamleev had become something of an absentee mentor for Dugin, and the two had exchanged the occasional letter during the 1980s. Dugin arranged to meet Mamleev on his first trip to Paris, and soon after that Mamleev made his first trip to Moscow in 15 years. ‘He was crossing himself at each lamp post, looked glowingly on each Russian face like it was a bright Easter egg’, joked Dugin later.

Mamleev now had a proposal for Dugin. The author had a good friend, a famed Soviet writer, whose close links to the Red Army high command were legendary. The two shared a counterculture background, coming of age in the ‘men of the sixties’ generation, though they had taken diverging paths, with Mamleev’s friend having succumbed to the temptations of the establishment to become a proselytizer and propagandizer of the Soviet military. His name was Alexander Prokhanov.

Throughout emigration, Mamleev had maintained his improbable contact with Prokhanov, whose nickname was ‘The Nightingale of the General Staff’ on account of his close friendship with top Red Army generals. Upon Mamleev’s return, the two renewed their friendship, and Prokhanov shared the details of an interesting project: he had been tasked by Vladimir Karpov, chairman of the USSR Writers’ Union, with organizing a newspaper. The Writers’ Union leadership had lost control of its in-house paper Literaturnaya Gazeta, which was seen by hardliners as being overly liberal and favouring reformist elements. Prokhanov’s newspaper would be a conservative counterweight to Literaturnaya Gazeta, and he needed talented young writers with a nationalist bent. Did Mamleev know of anyone?

Mamleev immediately thought of the young Dugin, and set about recruiting him. ‘You know, Sasha, Prokhanov is one of us’, Mamleev told the sceptical dissident. ‘How so?’ Dugin looked surprised. He believed Prokhanov to be ‘on the other side of the fence’, as he put it – a ‘cadre man’ who served the Soviet system. ‘Sasha, you are mistaken. He’s secretly with us. He is undercover, autonomous.’

Dugin became interested. He was intrigued by Prokhanov’s relationship with the army and the special services, seeing them immediately as a natural constituency for the radical ideas that he was exploring with his new contacts abroad in the European New Right. He went to see Prokhanov, who, it turned out, had the wild hair and spoke in the riffing style of a beatnik poet – not at all what Dugin had been expecting from a mythologizer of state power.

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