Soviet Dugin says Jewry, freemasonry, anti-Catholicism best of Polish history

By Fronda Quarterly No. 11-12
March 1988 Anno Domini
Translated from the Polish

Question and Answer session with Grzegorz Górny and Putin’s Prophet Aleksandr Dugin (answers in quotations):

Aleksander Dugin: I am waiting for Ivan the Terrible

– Students of the Diplomatic Academy in Moscow, whom I talked to, told me that the reading they were given during the classes, i.e. your book Fundamentals of geopolitics, was the most remembered chapter devoted to sacred geography. In Poland, I have not met anyone who would deal with this issue.Could you please tell us what place Poland occupies in sacred geography?

– I have never dealt specifically with the case of Poland, although its place is very specific. After all, this is the north of Eurasia, an important region of the pre-Christian Slavic region, the Baltic Sea basin. Regarding the archetypes of sacred geography, I would like to point out two things.

First of all, in the Orthodox reality there is a synergy between the pre-Christian and Christian world models, which overlap homologously, without conflicts. Different figures and phenomena from different orders overlap painlessly and even harmoniously. In the case of Poland, there is a much more conflicting relationship between these two models, and this is due to Catholicism, which is a tradition completely different from that of Orthodoxy. René Guenon clearly separates tradition from religion. Tradition is a broader concept than religion. Orthodoxy is a tradition, Catholicism is a religion. Tradition is able to absorb elements of other religious beliefs without conflict. Religion, on the other hand, comes into conflict with other beliefs. It is related to a different historical experience of the Eastern and Western Churches after the Great Schism. For the West was not always purely religious, Catholic, there was a period when it was more traditional, Orthodox. After the great schism, however, Catholicism departed from tradition and narrowed down to religion. This is at least our Byzantine version.

How does this relate to sacred geography? Well, in our understanding, the West, understood as a territory where Catholicism and Protestantism dominate, is in an opposite relationship to religious norms and elements. Of course, there are many elements of other religions in the West, but they conflict with the Catholic religion. Institutions that deal with sacred geography or remnants of pre-Christian traditions in the West, after the Great Schism, were relegated to autonomous spheres – to magic, esotericism, hermetic orders. In Orthodoxy, such a split did not take place.

In this context, Poland is on the border between the Catholic and Orthodox worlds. From my Eurasian point of view, the archetype of Poland’s sacred geography is deeply dualistic: on the one hand, a pre-Christian, pagan, magical, heterodox tradition whose roots remain Slavic; on the other – German-Roman Catholicism. There is a conflict between them. The situation of Poland is a borderline one. She cannot unite with the Eastern world religiously, and with the Western ethnically. In geopolitics, Poland remains part of the sanitary cordon separating the Eurasian continent into two parts, which is very convenient for the Anglo-Saxon anti-traditional forces. Poland cannot fully realize its Eurasian-Slavic essence, because it is hindered by Catholicism, nor by its Western European identity, because its own Slavic character, i.e. language, customs, archetypes, climate of places, etc. Poland is always falling victim to the Third Force, as is today’s mondialism and Atlanteanism. Due to this location on the border between Russia and Germany, the problem of the partitions of Poland between the East and the West will always occur in history. It is the result of this sacral-geographic and geopolitical duality. As Toynbee noted, the attempt to build an independent Polish-Lithuanian civilization between these two forces ended in failure. Central European civilization is too weak to withstand the tension between East and West. The countries of this region have to define themselves: either here or there. Polish-Lithuanian civilization did not want to or could not define itself, therefore it had to disappear. It is indeed a dramatic situation.

• Are there any elements in the Polish tradition that you find attractive?

I am definitely closer to the Slavic-Eurasian sources of Polishness, their ethnic and even pagan elements. I am attracted to certain eastern or oriental elements, the culture of minorities. I think the best thing in Polish history is the Jewish tradition in small towns in eastern Poland. Actually, I am interested in everything that was anti-Catholic in Poland: Polish freemasons and occultists, Jan Potocki and Hoene-Wroński, Mienżyński and Dzerzhinsky … They all chose the Eurasian path.

• You are talking about Poland’s position between the East and the West, that is, between Russia and Germany. Meanwhile, many scholars emphasize the greater similarity of Germany, and especially Prussia, to Russia than to England or Spain. Feliks Koneczny even believed that Prussia, like Russia, belonged to the Byzantine and not Latin civilization.

Koneczny was right. Germany is internally divided. Bavaria tends to the West, Prussia to the East. Prussia is such a small Russia inside Germany.

• We have always seen this as the greatest danger for us: a friendly alliance between Germany and Russia.

That’s our job. Unite with Germany and create a powerful continental bloc.

• What about Poland then?

We, the Russians and Germans, understand in terms of expansion and we will never reason otherwise. We are not simply interested in preserving our own state or nation. We are interested in absorbing, through our pressure, the maximum number of categories that complement us. We are not interested in colonizing like the English, but in drawing our strategic geopolitical boundaries without even special Russification, although there should be some Russification. Russia, in its geopolitical and sacral-geographic development, is not interested in the existence of an independent Polish state in any form. It is also not interested in the existence of Ukraine. Not because we don’t like Poles or Ukrainians, but because these are the laws of sacred geography and geopolitics.

Poland has to choose: either Slavic or Catholic identity. I understand it’s hard to separate one from the other, but it’s inevitable. Hitler also could not fight on two fronts, he had to choose: either with England against Russia or with Russia against England, as Haushofer advised him. But Hitler did not want to choose. “I don’t want to tear myself apart, I want to remain myself,” he said, and started a war on two fronts. It plunged Germany, 20 million Russians, and a good chunk of the world. For what? That McDonalds would now open their bars in Berlin, that the Soviet Union would collapse and that NATO soldiers were stationed everywhere. The identity of Germany was so important to Hitler at the time that he did not want to make a choice. In the same way, Poland has to choose, identity is not important. If Poland insists on keeping its identity, it will turn everyone hostile towards itself and will once again become a zone of conflict.

There are nations that can expand to the size of civilization. They then lose their identity, race, and sometimes even language, but that is a risk that must be taken if you want to be an empire. This is the United States, this is Russia. Poland was unable to create its own civilization and must make a choice. I think there is still a possibility for you to make your normal choice, i.e. Byzantine. It requires a lot of courage, nonconformity, unusual forms of action, some skinheads, anarchists, mystics. Polish chaos against the Polish order.

• In a word, from your point of view, all anti-Catholic activities in Poland are beneficial?

Exactly. You have to break Catholicism from the inside, strengthen Polish Freemasonry, support decaying secular movements, promote heterodox and anti-papal Christianity. Catholicism cannot be absorbed into our tradition unless it is deeply reoriented in a nationalist and anti-papal direction. If there was a lodge in Poland like the Irish Golden Dawn, whose leaders, such as William Butler Yeats or Maud Gonne, on the one hand were Catholics, and on the other – fanatical occultists inspired by Celtic culture, then one can have some hope. Such people could decompose Catholicism from within and reorient it towards a more heterodox, even esoteric. Anyway, my friends in Poland tell me that there are groups with you, related to telemism or the achievements of Alistair Crowley.

• Frankly speaking, the opinion that is more widespread in Poland is that if there are forces decomposing Catholicism in Poland, they are closer to the West than the East.

As I said, you find yourself between two clashing blocks, two civilization concepts: Eurasianism and Atlantism, which wants to create a New World Order, i.e. a civilization devoid of tradition, sacrum, metaphysics.

• If this is how the New World Order is presented in Poland, it is almost always added that only Catholicism can be a salvation from total secularization.

Catholicism cannot be a guarantee of defense against the New World Order, because it is a transition stage to this order. I do not believe in such an evolution and such a mutation of Catholicism that it could acquire a Eurasian character. What can we hide a lot … I am not like Ziuganow, who promises every lame orphan on the road something pleasant. Poland is in a tragic geopolitical situation. Both they (ie the New World Order) and we (Eurasians) want to deprive you of your Catholicism. Our offer is better, however, because with us you will at least be able to develop and realize your Slavic identity. So the less influential the pro-Eastern forces in the anti-Catholic lobby, the more tragic your situation becomes. I do hope, however, that you will have forces leaning towards Eurasianism, maybe there will be some synthesis between the extreme right and the extreme left. It is a pity that communism in Poland has never been esoteric, as in Russia …

• Before the war, there was actually only one significant representative of mystical-Gnostic communism in the KPP, Jan Hempel, the author of the Volkist Piast Sermons.

So maybe more hopes should be attached to your extreme right. If your national current broke away from liberalism and turned towards paganism, it would naturally gravitate towards the East. There was, after all, the phenomenon of the anti-Catholic and pagan “Zadruga” before the war.

• What you say reminds me of what I read recently about Russian Christianity. Some of the historians of religion believe that Russia was never thoroughly Christianized, that Christianity was adopted very superficially, and pagan beliefs and customs were still alive among the majority of the common people.

It all depends on what we call Christianity. Orthodoxy and Christianity are two different things. When you say “Christianity”, you mean Catholicism or something analogous to Catholicism. Meanwhile, Orthodoxy is defined as non-Catholicism. So if Catholicism is Christianity, then Orthodoxy is non-Christian. Conversely, if we are Christians, you are not. I am relying not only on the claims of our fathers after the great schism, but also on the eighth and ninth-century authorities such as Photius. Orthodoxy, which is not a religion but a tradition, is much closer to what we call paganism. It embraces and includes paganism. The teaching of the Cappadocian or Palamite Fathers does not completely conflict with pagan norms, but only transforms pre-Christian archetypes in Orthodox contexts. Orthodoxy is more than a religion, both vertically, because it includes paganism, and horizontally, because it is open to metaphysics, which has completely disappeared in post-school Catholicism. Orthodoxy and Catholicism are two completely separate phenomena, tradition and religion are like a whole and a part. Therefore, it is not possible to unite Orthodoxy and Catholicism.

• Specialists in ecumenical dialogue emphasize that between Catholicism and Protestantism, cultural and civilization differences are minimal, but dogmatically there is a gap between them. The situation is different with Catholicism and Orthodoxy: dogmatic differences are small, while cultural and civilizational differences are huge.

Werner Sombarth, developing the theses of Max Weber, stated that not only Protestantism, but also Catholicism was at the source of capitalism. Catholicism with its filioque and the idea of ​​individual salvation. The idea of ​​individual salvation is not a Christian thought, but a typically Catholic one. There is no such concept in Orthodoxy. There is no concept of a unit at all. In Orthodox anthropology the word individual does not appear. As we know, anthropology is the basis for the construction of the entire social system, the entire civilization model. Sombarth believed that Catholic anthropology assumed a specific development of socio-economic relations because it attached great importance to the concept of individuality. Orthodox anthropology, in turn, always emphasized the supra-individual personality. Man then sees himself as part of a larger whole. Therefore, he does not save himself, but someone saves through him. In Catholicism, a man is an individual, and therefore an indivisible whole, in Orthodoxy, a man is a dividum, an individual, and therefore divisible. In Catholicism, man is a finite being, he is responsible for himself – to God, to people, etc. Protestantism has made this conviction even more holistic. In Orthodoxy, a person is part of the Church, a part of the community organism, just like a leg. So how can a person be responsible for himself? Can the leg be responsible for itself? This is where the idea of ​​the state, the total state, comes from. Therefore, the Russians, because they are Orthodox, can be true fascists, unlike artificial Italian fascists like Gentile or the Hegelians there. The real Hegelianism is Ivan Pereswietow – the man who invented the oprichnina for Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century. It was the real founder of Russian fascism. He formulated the thesis that the state is everything and the individual is nothing. The state is salvation, the state is the Church. It is enough to read the writings of our Orthodox saint, Józef of Wołokołamsk, to see that these two organisms are identical, identical. And now this whole organism for salvation, all strive for salvation without crumbling, like one collective soul, one collective body.

• Indeed, in Orthodoxy you have a certain inclination towards apocatastasis, towards the idea of universal salvation …

This is true. The most important thing is that we have no individuality. The individual dissolves into the collective. This is how the Russian works for salvation.

• Whose salvation?

The salvation of the archetype, the salvation of Adam. Through the state, the Russians are striving to save not themselves, but Adam …

• Adam Kadmon, it sounds cabbalistic.

No, this is a holistic approach. In Orthodoxy, it is about the salvation of the Old Testament Adam through the coming of the new Adam, i.e. Christ, nature, while nature is saved through people. The state, especially the holy state, is the instrument of this salvation. That is why the Russian Tsar is an active participant in the mystery of soteriology. After the fall of Byzantium, he became the last guardian of the catechon, a tradition which Charlemagne turned out to be usurper at the turn of the 8th and 9th centuries. It was the Byzantine emperor who was the true emperor of both East and West.

• I have come across the claim that the real split between East and West took place not in 1054 when the Great Schism occurred, nor in 1204 when the Crusaders ravaged Constantinople, but on Christmas 800 when Pope Leo III he put an imperial crown on the head of Charlemagne.

It was a usurpation. Therefore, the imperial function of the West, whether under the Stauffenbergs or the Habsburgs, was always questionable. Because an ecumen can only have one emperor. One of them must be false. According to all the norms of orthodoxy, such a sacred anointed figure, regardless of any negative personal character traits, was the Byzantine emperor, and after the fall of Constantinople, the Russian Tsar. It can be said that all Western philosophy and culture arose from rejecting and ignoring the Byzantine tradition. In the West, the Orthodox version of Christianity or metaphysics is not taken into account at all, it is treated as if it did not exist.

• I think that if in the last millennium there was a process of increasing separation between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, it was a bilateral process. Orthodoxy also isolated itself from Catholicism.

That’s right, but the point is, only one side can be right. If Catholicism is right, then neither Russia nor Serbia have any reason to exist, culture should be Americanized and Protestant, because this is the right direction of development. After all, Protestantism is a child of Catholicism, disgusting, I admit, and obnoxious, but legitimate. So if Orthodoxy is wrong, then one should choose the Protestant way and, as in the Church of England, vote that there is no hell. The right, however, is on the side of Orthodoxy, which remains the most perfect form of traditionalism, sacredness and conservatism. In the beginning, there was East and West. East is paradise, fullness, West is exile, nothingness. Eastern empire – legitimate, western – apostatic. These aren’t just archetypes. There is a great struggle going on between Byzantium and Rome, Russia and the West, Eurasianism and Atlanticism, socialism and capitalism, barbarism and civilization. We do not represent civilization, but culture. We all – Russians, Serbs, Tatars, etc. – represent the barbarian element. Barbarism is life, it is the sacred world of tradition. We live in shacks, beat drums, drink vodka, and we are attacked by Daniel Bell, postmodernism, post-Protestant information society, the New World Order. In this great clash of Atlantic civilization and Eurasian culture, all that lies between us – Poland, Ukraine, Central Europe, and, who knows, maybe even Germany – must disappear, be absorbed.

• Samuel Huntington in his Clash of Civilizations writes that states that are hybrids of two civilizations have no chance of surviving in the shape they are today; that Bosnia, Ukraine, Turkey and Mexico will eventually have to take sides. Huntington’s comments, however, did not apply to Poland or Germany.

Huntington is right: a clash of civilizations is imminent. There is no room for the countries in the middle. I have already talked about Poland. And Germany? What can Germany do? After all, this is an occupied country. The Germans missed their chance during the war. We had to fight with us against England, turn the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact to the West, and then Hitler-Stalin forever. Today, instead of English, Russian and German would be spoken everywhere. The Germans did not go for it and lost. Now there is an American occupation and such “murder” that even your mouth cannot be opened. However, I do hope that Germany will shake off this state of affairs and shed its dependency sooner or later. I am convinced that in the common Eurasian home there will be room for Germans, Poles, French and Italians. We, the Russians, will impose only a barbaric, sacred attitude to life on Eurasia, and how it will be manifested in a particular nation will depend on our own national predispositions. I see Poles, for example, as defenders of Slavic racism. The Slavic element always breaks down the frames of individualism, strives for community.

• You say so much about community, collectivity, but in fact you are an individualist.

How’s that? Why? How do you think so?

• Even here, in the premises of the National-Bolshevik Party, it is enough to look around to see that they all look the same in their black uniforms, they even have a similar facial expression, only the Lord is definitely different from them.

I am just like them. I don’t think about myself, I think about others. I don’t think for myself, I think for others. There are two concepts: personalism and individualism. Individualism is the opposite of community, because the center of the world, a constitutive element of the worldview, becomes the human individual, the individual. There is no place for community or holism here, there is only a rational, logical, relative agreement between individuals. What, in turn, do we propose? We are not against the person, but for understanding them supra-individually. This is, in a sense, the Nietzschean idea. Man is a dynamic phenomenon, constantly overcoming himself. This overcoming means human growth, growth beyond the limits of his individuality. In the vertical dimension, a person then becomes a part of a community, an organ of a certain organism. On the other hand, in the horizontal dimension … someone has to think. Together you cannot think, you can act together. If you mix them all together, then the head of this collective organism that will arise will not be the sum of the individual brains, but one brain, the most enlightened one. There must be a certain gnoseological hierarchy. This communal nature of material unity, the horizontal unity of bodies, contains within itself a hierarchy. Often times, people who fight against individualism are personalists. The spirit of unity, the spirit of community, the spirit of the nation can be manifested in them in a very condensed way. They are not individualists, but separate, discrete incarnations of the all-unity. This is their authority. This is the idea of ​​a monarch, a people’s chief, a Fuhrer. This is the phenomenon of the Russian tsars, but also of Pugachev, Lenin and Stalin. And it’s not that some individualist invents collectivism, because then he would be a fraud, a charlatan, a hypnotist. It is like chemistry: when different substances are mixed together, the lightest ones, the gases, float up the highest. Similarly in society: when different human elements are mixed together, the most subtle ones, i.e. the brains, are at the top. Therefore, for some, this idea of ​​community is concentrated in the brain, in others in the soul, and in others in the legs or hands. Nevertheless, it is the same idea for everyone. In this way, one organism is created – Behemoth (as Carl Schmitt would call him), a Eurasian Tatar-Scythian monster, which includes not only people, but also elements, elements of nature, soil, winds, rivers, mountains. The sublimation of this terrible dark cluster is the Russian monarchs, Stalin … Stalin was not a separate individual, but a collective person, an older brother, a manifestation of Eurasianism in its communist variant.

• You said that Russia’s internal imperative is expansion. But what is the purpose of this expansion, what is the idea behind the postulated ideocracy?

The goal of Russian expansion is total soteriological science. We have felt it for centuries, since the time of Metropolitan Ilarion of Kiev, but it is now more obvious than ever that we are not a nation among many, but that we have a mission to reveal a truth to the world. We want a different end to history than the one proposed by the West. We want a sacred end, not a profane end. We are convinced, and we live it, that we have a certain key to spiritual, eschatological truth. Every Russian knows it. Each.

• What is the essence of this truth?

Our whole thousand-year history is an attempt to reveal this truth, to look for forms of its expression. It is the truth that the West has plunged into its depths, it is the truth about salvation, the transformation of the world, a new pleroma, a new quality of being, resurrection from the dead, the transformation of bodies, the sunlight that should come from the lips of the Great Mother. We Russians, due to our ethnic and religious predispositions, are called to do so. Our whole history, including the last battle of communism against capitalism, are only different attempts to realize the same messianic dream.

• To tell the truth, it is somehow difficult for me to imagine communism as a fight for the sacred in the world. Especially in the times of Stalin, so praised by Lord Stalin, it was a deeply anti-Orthodox movement: churches were demolished and closed, bishops were tortured and murdered, the faithful were imprisoned and sent to Siberia, forced atheization was carried out …

First of all, it was the Orthodoxy that Stalin was destroying that was very incidental – imbued with the spirit of the West, alienated from the nation. Second: the messianic dream I mentioned could live outside Orthodoxy and develop in other forms. Communism was an attempt to liberate this messianism from a purely religious understanding. Perhaps this attempt failed precisely because it was so distant from theology. So I think that in the next expansion we should use all our experiences, both purely sacred and socialist. Socialism is nothing more than a secularized version of Byzantineism, it is Red Byzantium, Orthodoxy in a sectarian, exalted form. It can be said that the people’s monarch, Stalin, with the popular faith, that is, communism, stood against the alienated, lordly, noble, occidental monarchy and the Orthodox Church. I am not such an ardent supporter of the Stalinist system, but I can clearly see the pulsation of our historical existence in communism as well. So if I say my unconditional “yes” to Bolshevism, Lenin and Stalin, it is not because it was an ideal system, but because it was the only solution for us. This time we have not succeeded yet, but the next time we will purify Orthodoxy and communism and we will discard those elements that caused these models to alienate themselves from the nation. Our next stage will be Orthodox communism – Eurasian, missionary, pan-Slavic, philotatar …

• It almost sounds like a postmodern project.

We include a lot, but also exclude a lot. We exclude individualism, the individual, the free market, worldview neutrality, tolerance, and we include barbaric, fanatic and exalted elements. This is not postmodernism, but let’s say postmodern. Postmodern is the objective state in which we live after the victory of the West over us. Moderna is over. Postmodernism is just one answer to the postmodern challenge, the liberal answer. There may also be an anti-liberal response, that is ours – postmodern anti-postmodernism. The reflection of the West breaks down everything into prime factors, while at the same time sterilizing and drying up everything like exhibits in a flowerbed. Our reflection does not deprive us of the aroma of life, even erotic delight with our ideas, it makes us drunk, we are drunk with Eurasia …

• As early as in the 18th century, Nikita Panin described the history of Russia as a polar pulsation of deadness and chaos. Similarly, two centuries later, Yuri Lotman – as jumps in entropy and organization. Today’s journalists often compare the present situation of Russia to the Weimar era in German history …

A very accurate comparison.

• The West is aware of this, therefore it does not want to humiliate Russians, to humiliate their national pride, as it did to Germany after the First World War, when it drew huge contributions from them. The West rather wants to raise Russia’s value, invites it to join the G-7 group, and pumps millions of dollars into the Russian economy. I want to avoid the Weimar scenario …

The West treats Russia very severely. I think that he did not draw conclusions from the Weimar lesson. The more he puts pressure on us, the more he will have to pay for it. It works like a spring: the harder you push, the harder it will hit back. The West is geographic Satan, geographic Antichrist. The West should pay for everything. It would be best to settle it with Chinese, Tatars, Muslims, all this Eurasian nomadism. When I was walking the streets of Paris recently, I suddenly noticed that I was missing something. And I realized it was odorless, sterile, aseptic. The only fragrance in the West is perfume. Earth, air, flowers, trees only started to smell in Poland, and when I returned to Russia, I plunged into the madness of smells. The West is dead land. It will only come back to life when it is settled by Cossacks, Tajiks, and Kazakhs. They will bring life with them, they will bring fragrances.

• You refer to the Orthodox tradition at almost every step. But does Orthodoxy itself admit to your ideas? I talked to many representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow and none of them consider you an orthodox believer, you are considered a rather heretic.

Who said that?

• For example, deacon Andrei Kurayev.

And deacon Alexander Mumrikov said that I was fully Orthodox. And what? One deacon’s sentence against the other’s sentence. Fortunately, we do not have Catholicism, where there is the office of the Pope and everyone must obey him. I, too, can safely say that Deacon Kurayev is not fully Orthodox. At the moment, there are two Orthodoxy: the first – living, full of spirit, and the second – official, formalized, and staff. Deacon Kurajew represents the formal, pro-systemic, I would say even profane branch of Orthodoxy. He writes texts that are spiritually Catholic. For example, he believes that the merit of Christianity was an impulse to the development of exact sciences, which caused the desacralization of the cosmos. The Hesychaists would have hailed him as a heretic at once. Fortunately, Orthodoxy is wider than the Church itself and also includes a branch of the Old Believers. I belong to the Moscow Patriarchate myself, but I am in spirit with the Old Believers. Besides, they consider themselves the only true Orthodox. If there is ever a real revival of Orthodoxy, it will come not from the ossified structures of the official Church, but from the depths of the Russian national spirit, which has been fully preserved among the Old Believers.

• And which branch of the Old Believers is closer to you? Circulars or non-circulars?

This division applies to the Białokrynica hierarchy. On the other hand, I am more interested in another division: popowców and bezopowców. I am closer to the poppers who reject priests as more radical. Among them, however, the closest to me is the faction of non-believers who believe that the kingdom of Antichrist has already come, and that it is the Catholic and Protestant West.

• I see that you have a very closed thought system. But what are the chances that the ideas you are preaching will find resonance in society? Observing the Lord, you can say: some haunted idealist is sitting in the basement, something is raving under his breath, but his fantasies have absolutely no effect on people. Oh, another frustration in our century …

I will try to answer this question in three steps. First, even if I am an idealist who sits in the basement and whose ideas play no role, it does not bother me because all the great ideas started with the idealists who sat in the basement and played no role. The fate of the idea is specific. A man who deals with ideas is immersed in a theurgical atmosphere where what is invisible and inaudible appears to him as visible and audible, even in the form of a text or discourse. And even if I had remained unknown to anyone until my death and left no written word behind, what counts is the mere fact of capturing the main vectors of history, the main ideas of civilization.
Second: I am active in the National-Bolshevik Party. It is not a big party, but it has a clear focus: we especially try to influence young people, especially students, who will be the elite of the young generation in the future. We are, after all, the only party that deals with the thoughts of young people. We teach them to think and live. We are concerned with the indoctrination of the next generation. This is not done by anyone in Russia: neither liberals nor communists …

• Television does it.

That’s right, but she forms average and passive people. We, on the other hand, shape people, as Gumilev called them, passionate, above-average, those whom Pareto called counter-relatives of the future. Other nationalist parties, such as the Barkashists, do not form a counter-past, but defensive troops. Their militant organizations are not elites of any kind. We, on the other hand, focus on those who will set the tone for life in Russia in the future, we prepare them conceptually. We organize seminars for them, publish magazines and books. It can be said that our party is purely intellectual. All these pickets or demonstrations are only an addition to the basic task, which is the intellectual preparation of a generation. We already have hundreds of people formed this way across the country.
Third and finally: my ideas are not confined to the party itself. Since 1987, I have been actively involved in the ideologization of the broadly understood patriotic camp. The two largest parties in the present Duma – the communists of Zyuganov and the nationalists of Zhirinsky – took over from me, especially from my earlier texts, the main ideological and geopolitical ideas. Many politicians, whom I did not even know personally, also referred to the ideas I put forward, for example, General Liebiedź.

• Maybe because one of Liebidzia’s advisers was Heydar Dżemal. In 1991, in your publishing house, you published the book Orientacja: Północ.

Our paths with Dżemal diverged because his traditionalism and Eurasianism is Muslim, and mine – Russian. Returning, however, to the previous thread. It does not matter if I personally know Ruckkoy or Khashbulatov who take over my ideas. I am like Ivan Pereswietov, who came up with an oprycznina for Ivan the Terrible. I’m a thought lab. I don’t think for myself, I think for the state, for the nation, for history. I’m waiting for my Ivan the Terrible. All politicians who will be looking for a real and great idea for Russia will come to me sooner or later. Not because I am a great individual and I personally came up with something myself, but because there is an objective idea of ​​Russia, and I am only its exponent. My latest book, Fundamentals of Geopolitics, is read by all opposition politicians and the more serious officials of the Yeltsin administration. The idea of ​​the Moscow-Berlin-Paris axis, which Yeltsin spoke about recently, is directly taken from my writings. If Tokyo is added to that, it is a classic element of the Eurasian geopolitical concept. In addition, many circles in other former Soviet republics are interested in our ideas of a conservative revolution. For example, in Armenia, the group of Robert Kocharian, who came to power at the moment, the so-called the party of the war are people largely shaped in our writings. So to sum up: with or without me – what I am writing about, it will happen anyway. Who will be the subject, who will put these ideas into practice – I do not know and do not undertake to answer. Perhaps it will be the current government that will change its face, it may be some opposing force, it may happen in many years, but it is an inevitable process. I may disappear, but my geopolitical ideas will not disappear.

• It is often said about your environment that you are the Russian counterpart of the Western European New Right. This orientation, assuming that the battle for the fate of mankind would take place not in the political but in the cultural field, proclaimed a kind of Kulturkamp …

Kulturkampf of the New Right is a wonderful idea, Alain de Benoist is a heroic activist and brilliant thinker, but their fight for thirty years has brought no results. They said that the battlefield would be culture, while the Americanization made its greatest triumphs in culture. Right-wing gramcsism is in a deplorable state, it has never gone beyond the margins. How to explain this? I think that the conceptual model of the New Right is very interesting, but the temperament of its European activists is insufficient to implement such ideas. They are too civilized, too conservative, too cowardly, such warm dumplings. So I don’t like comparing with them, because it’s basically comparing with losers. Over the years of the opposition in Russia, I have done such things that they never dreamed of. I was not concerned with the Kulturkampfem, but with the ideological fertilization of serious political forces. I have worked with living history, not archeology. The only man in the West whose breadth of views shocked me was Jean Thiriart, the author of the idea of ​​a Euro-Soviet empire. Before his death, he even came to Moscow; I hosted him here, I introduced him to Jegor Ligaczow, Ziuganow, Baburin …
Europe today has a choice: Eurasianism or Atlanticism. Either he goes with Russia or with America. If the European New Right chooses us, that is, it chooses the barbarian element, and therefore must adopt our methods of operation. You have to organize attacks, deal with sabotage, set fire to, and blow up bridges. True antimondialism is destruction and terror. What is the New Right doing? She turned into an intellectual sect. Overweight and gray men have been gathering at seminars for thirty years and beating foam. Of course you have to read books, but that’s not enough. You have to create a guerilla. If you are against the New World Order then take a knife, put on a mask, go out in the evening and kill at least one yankie. That is why I am so close to the New Left, the Red Brigades, and the Rote Armee Fraktion. Our task is not limited to culture, our task is to make a real revolution. For this we need ideology and intellectual preparation, but without concrete participation in the action, without frontline experience, without combat baptism – it will remain unattainable for us. I do not know if any of the New Right activists have ever been under artillery fire, but our people not only attend meetings or fight barricades, but also go to real wars, e.g. to Transnistria or Yugoslavia. The New Right is just a project, and we are designers and executors, architects and builders. Our future is.

• Thank you for the conversation.