13. I will try to sort out early excesses of the Putin Kremlin

This was around 2005 – 2010, and it set a trajectory for Kremlin policy, but I do not know what policy is today, nor the limits or make-up of the Kremlin and Putin’s power. We'll try to discover.

‘Surkov created the Russian political system of the 2000s, and he almost single-handedly ran it’. The system Surkov presided over from 1999 to 2011, under three presidents, was aimed at managing dissent rather than crushing it. (I repeat this paragraph from last post #11.) This emphasized his background as a successful advertising man. The post-modernistic pseudo-democracy he created ensured that every opposition political persuasion had a voice provided by a Kremlin-backed political party or movement. Liberals, nationalists, statists, environmentalists, rightists, leftists – all were represented by a series of doppelgangers, stooges and pastiches in a Kremlin-financed simulation of politics which lasted for over a decade. ‘Political life by 2004 was packed full of simulacra, doubles and pacifiers, creating the appearance of pluralism and a wide range of choice’, said Alexandr Dugin, (ideologist), clearly referring in part to his own efforts at Rodina Party. ‘It will go into the textbooks as one of the most colossally successful social swindles of historic magnitude. It was a triumph of nonsense, bad taste and vulgarity.’ (5,800 words)

Among other tasks, Surkov coordinated the work of the Kremlin’s team of private political consultants, pollsters, provocateurs and pocket politicians. He did everything from inventing political parties and youth movements to coaxing pieces of legislation through the Duma ‘by attending to the needs of the deputies’, according to Tregubova.’

Surkovian formulations were clever puns and inherently contradictory Orwellian wordplays – such as ‘sovereign democracy’, ‘illiberal capitalism’ and ‘managed nationalism’. Surkov, says Dugin, operated a postmodern ‘ideological centrifuge’ which ‘scattered all ideological discourses to the periphery’.⁸

Putin seemed to believe that the realm of ideas, including political ideas, is minor and inconsequential, and is only concerned about one thing – that it goes smoothly. Surkov at least created the appearance that everything went smoothly … But the price for the ‘smoothness’ was the creation of a political, social and ideological system that was understandable to only one person in the country – Vladislav Surkov. Everyone else knew only parts of it. My guess is that even Putin doesn’t understand it.⁴

‘Putin rarely entrusted a key post to someone who was not a friend or a [KGB] comrade from St Petersburg’, state the authors of Operation United Russia. ‘Surkov was almost the only person in whose hands was placed the entire domestic politics of the country, and yet he was a representative of the old Yeltsin team.’⁷

At First Channel TV, Guelman coordinated the work of a 25-man expert panel, which met once a week to advise the station director, Konstantin Ernst. Guelman invited Dugin to join it. It is a sign of the times that the committee had a preponderance of conservative hardline voices. In addition to Dugin there was Sergey Kurginyan – the author of the Post-Perestroika pamphlet whom we saw back in 1991 – who was fighting his way back into the mainstream and would shortly be given star billing in political debate shows. There was also Maxim Shevchenko, a fiery critic of Western hypocrisy, who would have a brilliant career as a TV host. Kurginyan said in a 2011 interview that the swing towards conservative nationalism was a coldly calculated move: ‘They brought us in not because they love our ideas, but because they are reading the public opinion polls, the sociological research.’²

The appearance of the conservatives heralded the end of an era for Russian television, which had been dominated by liberal, questioning voices since Yeltsin’s time. Slowly, prominent anchors like Evgeny Kiselev, Leonid Parfenov and Alexey Pivovarov were driven out and replaced by pro-Kremlin voices such as Shevchenko, Kurginyan and Dugin. Arguably the first and most prominent of the First Channel patriots was Mikhail Leontyev, anchor of the TV talk show Odnako (‘On the Other Hand’). He was a hugely influential conservative and a member of Dugin’s Eurasianist Movement. Leontyev is one of the most persuasive voices in Russian state television, with powerful friends in the Kremlin. He set the ideological tone for Russian TV news broadcasts. Strident, quick and brutal in his judgements, he is one of the most powerful TV anchors. His program would appear every evening after the Vesti News broadcasts, and were almost invariably devoted to skewering Western hypocrisy or hinting darkly at foreign forces at work sabotaging the work of the Russian state.

Leontyev was something strange in the corridors of Russia’s postmodern and irony-laden propaganda machine, which is staffed mainly by people like Guelman, who do not take it too seriously. Leontyev is a true believer. A former liberal, he became progressively disillusioned with his colleagues in the media over their critical coverage of the Chechen war, accusing them of ‘figuratively shooting our soldiers in the back’. Around the time of his epiphany, he met Dugin, though he is slightly vague about how this happened: ‘we met when Putin first appeared’ is all he would say. But soon after, in 2001, he had joined the board of Dugin’s Eurasia Party. ‘I don’t see any alternative to Eurasianism in the long run’, he said in 2012.

With Leontyev’s help, Dugin’s profile in the media soon rose; he was invited to write op-ed pieces in major newspapers and appear on major talk shows. He became a fixture on Ekho Moskvy, an opposition-oriented radio station, which balanced its preponderance of liberal views by inviting handpicked conservatives, such as Dugin, Prokhanov and Shevchenko on air. One other fateful contact Dugin met on First Channel was Ivan Demidov, a former liberal in the perestroika era who had evolved with the times; in 2005 he became the chief editor of Russia’s first Orthodox cable TV channel, “Salvation”, and then in February 2008 head of the directorate for ideological work on the central executive committee of Putin’s United Russia political party. ‘Doubtlessly, a crucial factor, a certain breaking point, in life, was the appearance of Alexander Dugin, in the sense that his appearance was very strange, because it made me realize that me and my circle of friends were missing an ideologue’, he said in a 2007 interview. Demidov announced that ‘it is high time to start realizing the ideas, as formulated by Alexander Dugin, of the radical center through projects’. In the interview, Demidov calls himself, with reference to Dugin, a ‘convinced Eurasianist’.³

The changing landscape of journalism was mirrored in the changing political spectrum, partly engineered by the Kremlin and partly brought about by a growing conservative mood in the country. No liberal parties made it into the Duma in the December 2003 elections, largely thanks to another exercise in political technology called the United Russia Party, formed that year as a merger of Putin’s Unity Party (largely the creation of Pavlovsky) and the opposition Fatherland Party (headed by Putin’s former opponents Yury Luzhkov and Evgeny Primakov). Oil industry magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was an important bankroller of liberal political parties, was jailed the same year, in an unmistakable warning to other businessmen to stay out of politics.

In 2003–04, the ‘Rose’ and the ‘Orange’ revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine further inflamed opinion in Russia. These revolutions swept pro-Western reformers to power, in the form of Mikheil Saakashvili and Viktor Yushchenko, respectively. The US gave verbal backing to the Ukrainian Orange revolutionaries, who also got material help from US-backed non-governmental organizations such as the National Endowment for Democracy. This is turn spread the general impression in Moscow that they had covert help from US intelligence organizations. In March 2004, meanwhile, a second post-Cold War wave of NATO expansion to Eastern Europe included the three former Soviet Baltic States. The sum total of the White House policies amounted to total contempt for Putin’s pro-US overtures, which even made US officials uneasy. According to former US ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock, this was ‘the diplomatic equivalent of swift kicks to the groin’.¹⁰

Gorbachev, Yeltsin and now Putin all began their Kremlin terms with overtures to the United States. These all elicited a pat on the head and a dismissive yawn from Washington. Now, wounded by the diplomatic slights, Putin appears to have overreacted, believing that Russia was the next target of the Orange revolution in Ukraine. Today, Pavlovsky, who at the time had been delegated the task of marshalling ‘anti-Orange’ propaganda for the Kremlin, admits that ‘we overestimated the likelihood of an Orange revolution in Russia’. Patriotism and hysteria suddenly poured out of the airwaves as the Kremlin set about stiffening the spines of the citizenry for confrontation in the streets with Western-backed Orange revolutionaries. ‘We all have to realize that the enemy is at the gates’ said Surkov, in an interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda in 2004:

“The front line passes through every city, every street, every house. We need vigilance, solidarity, mutual assistance, joint efforts of citizens and the state”. The common thread binding fake liberals and real Nazis is increasingly real. Their sponsors are of foreign origin. They share a common hatred. For Putin, and in fact, for Russia as such.¹¹

Meanwhile, the Kremlin set about organizing its own street mobs to counter potential opposition protesters in Russia. ‘There will be no uprisings here’, Surkov told the German magazine Der Spiegel at the time.

Garibaldi’s army

It was a cold 25 February 2005 when busloads of activists pulled up in the sixteenth-century Kremlin in the town of Alexandrov, 100 kilometers outside Moscow. Among them were Dugin, Korovin and Zarifullin, who had invited the assembled throng to a conference about the future of the Russian state, to be held in the historic residence of Ivan the Terrible.

The townspeople of Alexandrov, seeing the assortment of oddly dressed Moscow hipsters and bearded coffeehouse bohemians disembark, assumed they were foreigners. But they were soon assured by the new arrivals that nothing could be further from the truth. They were real Russians, some with actual Kremlin ID badges, founding a movement of simple people, like themselves – the real Russian folk, who would take back the country from the perversion of the liberal West.

But it would not be an easy task, and that was why they had chosen the home of Russia’s feared medieval tyrant – a genuine Russian patriot who had cleansed Russia of pernicious foreign influences – to launch a movement devoted to patriotism, autocracy and empire. It was the founding convention of the Eurasian Youth Union, created in the wake of the Orange revolution in Ukraine, as the prototype for a series of pro-Kremlin urban mobs. Their extremely ambitious self-declared mission would be to guard the streets of Russia’s major cities lest home-grown Orange revolutionaries tried to spread their liberal filth.

The throng clamored inside the chapel, which ‘seemed very small, not pretending to the scale of a tsar’, recalled journalist Dmitry Popov, part of the throng. First to speak at the meeting was the director of the Ivan-the-Terrible museum. She was ‘dumbfounded at the unruly crowd of people who had taken over her museum’, according to Popov. Her speech was a variation of ‘Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood, except that she replaced Stalin with Putin’. Popov added that the proceedings ‘were like a Komsomol meeting with too many speeches. Most had come just to listen to Alexander Dugin.’

Eventually, they got their wish. As Dugin, dressed in a black cassock for the occasion, got up to speak, the audience stood in rapt attention:

Because of the shocking incompetence of the regime, we are all gathered in these vaults which once echoed with the footsteps of a man who understood that a state needs guardian structures … It is necessary to create a new force, a third force. Yes, it is pro-state, aimed at the Orange revolutionaries, but with its own agenda.¹²

He was announcing the creation of a youth wing of the Eurasianist movement which was to be the first, if not the most successful, of the Kremlin-organized street movements aimed at protecting Russia from real or imagined Western-backed revolutionaries. Once Dugin had finished, the audience settled down to watch the 1944 black-and-white film Ivan the Terrible by Sergey Eisenstein, one of Stalin’s favorite movies.

The movement drew inspiration from the sixteenth-century Oprichniki, Ivan’s personal secret police, who murdered and imprisoned the regime’s enemies. A great deal more colorful and camp than its forbears, the Eurasian Youth Union was also, thankfully, far less murderous. Like the Oprichniki, they wore black clothing and some sported their long, Old-Believer beards; but unlike the real Oprichniki, their violence was mainly symbolic. With the exception of one July 2006 incident, in which a Union activist punched opposition leader Mikhail Kasyanov in the face, there is no record of it engaging in any organized violence (bar the odd bit of jostling).

Obviously inspired by its previous incarnation as the National Bolshevik Party, the Eurasian Youth Union was a movement of culture warriors. The terrain they fought for was intellectual rather than physical. They made war on the symbols of the West, arranging sit-ins at Western embassies, destroying the symbols of independence in Ukraine and Estonia and harassing the diplomats of countries accused of ‘humiliating’ Russia. These included most notably Britain’s ambassador in Moscow, Tony Brenton, whom the group trolled mercilessly, following him and disrupting his speeches after he shared a podium with Russian opposition politicians.

The group had a surfeit of creative energy and directed its aggression mainly into a series of art-house lecture projects, street theatre and ‘improv’ style public ‘happenings’. Its standard was designed by artist Alexey Belyayev-Gintovt, who would go on to win the prestigious Kandinsky Art Prize in 2009: it was a refashioned and easily recognizable Second World War-era propaganda poster entitled ‘Motherland’ – the ghostly figure of an elderly woman sweeping out of the Russian steppe, exhorting her children to fight the invaders.

The group obviously enjoyed the Kremlin’s favor, though according to Zarifullin, Kremlin patronage only started flowing in the months after its launch. ‘We created the movement as entrepreneurs’, he said impishly. Gagloev, the ever-faithful Moscow banker, paid for its headquarters in an old factory building near Avtozavodskaya metro station. Later, in 2009, Korovin told me conspiratorially: ‘No one goes to the Kremlin and gets a paper bag full of money. There are always sponsors.’¹³

‘There was a symmetrical logic to how Slava [Surkov] thought’, Guelman told me, explaining the creation of the youth brigades in 2004–05:

If there are people on the internet fighting against the regime, then there must be those who are for the regime. If there is an opposition demonstration, there must be a pro-regime demonstration. If the opposition has crazy people who do anything and break the law, then the regime has to have them too. Cold-hearted, ready to do anything, stamp on the portraits of their enemies.

Zarifullin says the movement was autonomous, fancifully called ‘Garibaldi’s Army’, a reference to the rag-tag group of idealists who became the nucleus of the movement to unite Italy in the nineteenth century. Their goal, the tag implied, would be the unification of ‘Eurasia’ in the twenty-first.

The Eurasian Youth Union was the first of a series of Kremlin-backed un-official street gangs tasked with controlling the streets of Moscow, confronting Russia’s ‘Orange revolutionaries’ and working as a conduit between the Kremlin and Russia’s youth. Others were arguably more successful.

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Three days after the Eurasian Youth Union was founded, Vasily Yakemenko, a pro-Kremlin youth leader, announced the creation of Nashi, another Kremlin-backed youth movement (not to be confused with the 1990s-era Nashi in St Petersburg). This Nashi was a combination of the Soviet Young Pioneers and a fascist skinhead gang. Nationalist ideology was fed to teenagers at its summer camps. Other groups soon sprang up – ‘Young Russia’ and ‘United Russia – Young Guard’, for example: mobs of mainly provincial youth paid to go and wave flags at official speeches, to picket foreign embassies and arrange counter-demonstrations at opposition marches. Nashi was a much larger organization, better funded, more aggressive, and given the objective of organizing counter-demonstrations wherever they might be needed. It was made up of dozens of hardcore skinheads from the ‘Gladiators’ football gang – fans of Spartak Moscow football club – who sport telltale tattoos of a gladiator with a spear. The Gladiators’ leader, Roman Verbitsky, was the leader of Nashi’s ‘volunteer youth brigade’.¹⁴ Officially these hardcore skinheads worked as guards and security, but in practice they were provocateurs and muscle. In 2005, baseball bat-wielding Gladiators attacked a meeting of Limonov’s National Bolshevik Party, severely injuring ten of its supporters. After the bloody mêlée, Verbitsky hung around to pose for photographs and answer journalists’ questions. Eventually the police showed up and rounded up the Gladiators, but then let them go almost immediately after a phone call from Nikita Ivanov, a young Kremlin apparatchik who was Nashi’s kurator and Surkov’s deputy.

Even the Eurasian Youth Union seemed to have a secret guardian angel, which became apparent during the single recorded instance that the group engaged in violence – apparently by accident. Zarifullin relates in his memoirs that in July 2006 he sent an operative named Vladimir Nikitin to disrupt an opposition speech by former prime minister (turned opposition leader) Mikhail Kasyanov. He gave Nikitin no specific instructions: ‘We just told him go and do something, we didn’t say what, or to whom.’ Zarifullin was later to regret the vagueness of the mission:

I received a telephone call later and was told that Nikitin, in full view of an audience and dozens of television cameras, had gone up to Kasyanov and given him several sharp jabs to the mouth … I phoned some lawyers, expecting he would be in police custody. Then in walks Nikitin. I asked him: ‘Why are you not in jail?’

The police, it turned out, said they could not believe he had punched Kasyanov (despite several videos of the fracas being posted online) because ‘that is simply not possible’. Nikitin was released.

It would be a mistake to believe that the Eurasian Youth Union, Nashi and other youth gangs like Young Guard and Young Russia were entirely top-down projects, centrally directed from the Kremlin offices. Instead, they represented something more complex – a milieu of deniable, autonomous groupings of money, executive power and ideology, (the Oligarchs?) the wishes of which were carried out by operatives who most often functioned without central direction and clear leadership, responding instead to ‘ideological signals’. But it must be said that these groups certainly enjoyed some degree of official protection from the Kremlin – so long as they did not overdo it or violate too many laws (as the Nikitin episode shows). The imperatives were obvious and the limits were (hopefully) understood. Funding, like Gagloev’s financing of the Eurasian Youth Union, was indirect, but everybody won: Gagloev, via Dugin’s contacts, got the ear of the Kremlin; Dugin got the movement financed; the Kremlin got a ‘patriotic’ youth project which would do its bidding and was another oar in the water of politics.

These pseudo-official organizations got scholarly treatment from Korovin in a June 2008 lecture at a forum in Foros, in the Crimea (it is interesting that Crimea was to see Russia use these same ‘network’ or ‘asymmetric’ structures on a wide scale in the 2014 takeover). Korovin identified them as ‘network structures’ in that they functioned without clear hierarchies and explicit orders but followed a generally recognized ideology – as deniable tools of domestic and foreign policy. He called them ‘the newest technology to capture terrain’, and claimed, albeit without any supporting evidence, that they had been ‘developed by the Pentagon’. Again, without much evidence, he attributed to such ‘network structures’ under US control many of the most recent popular uprisings, such as those in Yugoslavia, Georgia and Ukraine. ‘The network is not controlled from a unified center’, Korovin said in his lecture, published later as part of an anthology.¹⁵ ‘Participants in the network have to understand the meaning of events. They don’t receive direct commands such as “go there” or “do this”, because it’s not the army.’ Instructions are issued indirectly, through cues given in the media, or at forums and conferences – just like the one he was attending, and giving cues to. ‘Tasks for agents in network wars are not transmitted in code, but directly through the media. Anyone can listen to it, but isolating and decoding it from the general flow of information is not something everyone can do.’ The key is deniability: ‘If the activity is not a success, or is indeed a failure, the network center does not carry responsibility for this.’

Dugin’s and Korovin’s treatment of ‘networks’ actually prefigured a series of policy documents on ‘asymmetric warfare’ by the Russian General Staff on the eve of the culmination of the strategy in eastern Ukraine. For instance, Valery Gerasimov (chief of the Russian armed forces General Staff) notably wrote in a 2013 issue of Military Industrial Courier : ‘The role of non-military means to achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and in many cases, these means have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness.’ It would not be the first time that ideas which later received treatment in formal military strategy were first floated by Dugin and his group. According to Korovin’s 2008 lecture: ‘In the postmodern age, the most important weapon in conquering a state and establishing control over it has become its own society.’¹⁶

The ever more hysterical anti-Western tone of the state media, state-sponsored hooligan gangs, official patriotism and nationalism characterized the ‘Orange fever’ era of Russia in the mid-2000s.

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Since Putin had come to power the accent had been on nationalism and patriotic symbols, in an effort to consolidate support around a tough, authoritarian Kremlin. Support for nationalism was growing every year along with a deep nostalgia for the vanished greatness of the USSR. The economic dislocation of the 1990s was partly to blame, but it was also a consequence of political opportunism in the Kremlin, which saw nationalism as a ready-made program for political mobilization that simultaneously justified, in a vaguely emotional way, the strong state and authoritarian rule that Putin sought to implement.

In the right hands, nationalism could be a tool for political consolidation. But the inherent contradictions of nationalism were something that worried the Kremlin. Yeltsin, after all, had come to power as a nationalist, and his appearance on the political scene in the 1980s had coincided with (in some sense, had perhaps even precipitated) a cascade of separatist movements which led to the collapse of the USSR and caused the war in Chechnya.

Street nationalism had existed in Russia since Pamyat in the 1980s, and it retained a powerful populist hold on the Russian public. The mobilizational power of Russian nationalism was plain to see from recent history: in the right hands it could be the rocket fuel for gangs that could sweep the streets of Western-inspired opposition; in the wrong hands it could be a deadly virus – one that had already destroyed one incarnation of the state, the USSR, and could yet destroy the Russian Federation. Nationalist opposition groups were considered a mortal threat to the regime; but also, paradoxically, a new political force that could be tremendously useful if handled correctly.

In the first decade of Putin’s rule, a new generation of nationalist leaders had emerged to rule the streets, as Dugin, Barkashov and Limonov all receded into the background – and most of these nationalists were anti-Kremlin. Arguably the most important figure was Alexander Belov (whose real name, Potkin, was distinctly Jewish), leader of the Movement Against Illegal Migration, which he started in 2002. Charismatic and fond of suede loafers, Belov/Potkin had got his start in Pamyat as a teenager, had graduated to Barkashov’s blackshirts in the 1990s, and was now ready for the big time, having founded his own movement. He was an organizing genius with the air of a French intellectual; he also had an instinct for power, having worked for a number of parliamentary deputies, but he had clearly judged the opposition route to politics to be the more fruitful approach.

Another underground leader was Dmitry Demushkin, the chunky, muscular leader of the Slavic Union, which grew out of his Moscow Ultimate Fighting gym and into a national umbrella movement for skinhead groups. The third in the triad of new leaders was Dmitry Rumyantsev, hawk-faced leader of the National Socialist Organization (NSO), created in 2004. Like Belov/Potkin he had got his start in Barkashov’s blackshirted Russian National Unity, had worked for two Duma deputies and had real political ambitions.

All these nationalist political groups disavowed violence publicly, but were made up of hardcore ‘autonomous’ cells, mainly football hooligans, who were barely under the leadership’s control. There was very little in practice to distinguish between them. They were made of the same raw material; the culture was violent, fascistic, with straight-armed salutes and swastikas. They wore Thor Steinar and Lonsdale clothes, fashionable among Western European skinheads and football fans. Skinhead violence was an endemic problem in some cities, where the various gangs fought migrants or each other, in more or less equal measure. Saturday night for a skinhead gang might consist of a raid on an immigrant shelter, or the videotaped beating of Tajik guest workers coming home from work on an elektrichka commuter train.

The nationalist milieu steadily became more and more opposition-minded, as migration from Central Asia and the Caucasus increased. Tensions ran high in cities throughout Russia as pitched battles raged between ethnic Caucasian youths and ethnic Russians. The police often refused to intervene. A brawl in the northern town of Kondopoga in August 2006 became a touchstone for the nationalists. The fight, between an Azerbaijani waiter and two Russians, spiraled out of control, and two bystanders were killed. The police, having (allegedly) been paid by Chechen gangsters, did not intervene, and the incident blew up into a full-blown pogrom against ethnic Caucasians during which many were chased out of town. Moscow-based nationalists flew to Kondopoga to organize rallies.

Alexey Navalny, a liberal member of the Yabloko Party, became what was to be one of the most recognizable of a new liberal-friendly brand of opposition nationalists. Following the events in Kondopoga he created a movement known as Narod (‘People’), and began attending nationalist rallies: ‘My liberal friends were in shock, they tore their shirts, “It’s fascism”, they said.’ But he, a solid member of the Moscow intelligentsia with impeccable liberal credentials, persisted with the experimental overtures to the lumpen street brigades: ‘It was clear to me that what is said at the Russian March, if you abstract from the people shouting “Sieg Heil!” reflects the real agenda and concerns of the majority,’ he told his biographer, Konstantin Voronkov.²²

Navalny was to be the pretty face of Russian nationalism, who made it acceptable to a liberal audience: he modelled himself as a European-style right-winger, opposed to immigration and multiculturalism, speaking in recognizable ‘dog whistles’ (like ‘ethnic crime’) but never once saying the wrong thing out loud. Nationalism, unlike appeals to liberal democracy, was capable of drawing huge crowds, but Navalny also campaigned against corruption in the regime, trying to exercise minority shareholder rights at leading state companies like Gazprom and Rosneft, and publicizing investigations into the corrupt dealings of management. It was a heady opposition cocktail, and Navalny was increasingly a force to be reckoned with.

Another face of opposition nationalism was the rump of the National Bolshevik Party, under Eduard Limonov, who had transitioned from political prankster of the 1990s to a hardened revolutionary following Dugin’s exit from the NBP. He had been jailed in 2001 for plotting terror attacks in Kazakhstan, designed to create a ‘second Russia’ among ethnic Russians in the north. On his release, the NBP was now in full, albeit not very effective, opposition to the Kremlin. For a time Limonov even became the darling of the Western media, after he joined forces with chess champion Garry Kasparov to form an opposition movement in the mid-2000s, transforming itself into a weird hybrid combining liberal hipster chic with hardcore skinhead subculture. A few years later, that strange synthesis would become the defining trait of the middle-class opposition movement that would break out onto the streets of Moscow in the winter of 2011.

On the parliamentary level, Rodina leader Dmitry Rogozin appeared to capitalize on the new mood – also increasingly in opposition to the Kremlin. Rodina ran a series of advertisements mocking immigrants’ rural customs and command of the Russian language, and promising to clean up the streets. Rogozin was soon ousted from Rodina, which was closed down; later he was sent into exile as Russia’s ambassador to NATO, returning in 2011 to the fold and the role of deputy prime minister, following large-scale protests against Putin’s rule.

Seeing the power of Russian nationalism in opposition hands, the Kremlin, under Surkov’s direction, sought to control it and co-opt it. In Putin’s Russia, Belov told me when I asked to meet him to discuss rising nationalism in 2010, there is a guiding principle for dealing with any independent political organization: ‘If they cannot destroy it, they will lead it. And they cannot destroy the nationalists.’ Thus began a broad-based effort to lead them.

It was called ‘managed nationalism’ and was a broad effort spanning around five years, from 2005 to 2010, to recruit, co-opt or otherwise seduce nationalist leaders into a pro-Kremlin orbit. It ultimately proved to be a disastrous contradiction in terms – a monument to the hubris and arrogance of the Kremlin spin doctors that led directly to precisely the thing they were trying to prevent: the emergence of a virulent nationalist opposition movement that took the mainstream hostage.

This effort to forge a pro-Kremlin force out of underground nationalist and skinhead movements featured Dugin’s Eurasian Youth Union in a key, but brief, role of political manipulation that went badly wrong.

The Kremlin may well have believed that a movement like Dugin’s – with all the accoutrements of a nationalist street gang, without the ethnic racism – could translate this highly theoretical goal into practice, rallying the skinhead gangs on the streets of Moscow and turning them into a pro-Kremlin force. In other words, Eurasianism was seen as something that promised to provide the mobilizational benefits of nationalism without provoking ethnic hostility and leading to separatism. That was the goal of the first major project carried out by the movement in 2005, known as the ‘Russian March’ – to offer Russia’s street nationalists, a growing political force, a muscular version of Eurasianism and a supra-ethnic Russian civilization alternative to ethnic racism.

On 4 November of that year – the anniversary of the expulsion of Polish armies from Moscow in 1612 – the Eurasian Youth Union was granted permission to hold a large march just steps from the Kremlin, on Slavyansky Square. The location was pure gold, according to Zarifullin, who said the intention was to use it to cut a deal with other nationalist groups with larger memberships in order to hold a joint demonstration. They sought out Alexander Belov/Potkin, the goateed doyen of the skinhead movement, to join the march with his Movement Against Illegal Migration (DPNI). The decision to include Belov is still controversial – but the point of the march was to co-opt the skinheads. It was also a way for the Eurasian Youth Union to compete with the larger, better-funded movement using the DPNI’s numbers. ‘We could have done a real, normal march without [Belov]. But we would have had 500 and not 10,000 marchers’, said Zarifullin.

But on the day of the march, the price of cooperation with the unpredictable skinhead gangs became clear: Belov’s Hitleresque followers didn’t stick to the agreed script. Instead, they crowded around TV cameras, gleefully throwing straight-armed salutes amid shouts of ‘Sieg Heil!’ Right under the podium where Zarifullin was speaking about the pernicious influence of ethnic nationalism and the common destiny of the Eurasian peoples, a group of skinheads unfurled a banner that read ‘Russians On the Move’. Dmitry Demushkin managed to raise a flag with a Slavic swastika, known as a kolovrat, while Zarifullin was forced to give the microphone to Belov who made a five-minute speech. Despite the ostensible pro-Kremlin goal of the meeting, Belov was dressed in an orange shirt. Photographs of black-clad straight arms upraised against the blue sky, flanked by red banners with all manner of prohibited symbols, flashed around the world’s news agencies, and a few days later Zarifullin and Korovin were forced to publicly disown their participation at a joint press conference. Korovin blamed provocation by competing elements in the Kremlin who did not want their project to go ahead. Today, however, Zarifullin disagrees. Interviewed in 2013 about the episode, he said that the bungled march arose out of a conscious strategy to co-opt the nationalist street movements to Eurasianism. ‘It was pure voluntarism by Dugin’, said Zarifullin, of the effort to invite Belov’s DPNI. ‘We could have easily prevented [Belov] from attending, but that was not the point.’

Surkov had blundered badly; he had underestimated nationalism, treating it as just another papier-mâché political movement that could be cleverly spoofed with a few slogans and transformed into a Kremlin doppelganger, like all the rest. Instead, ‘managed nationalism’ was a contradiction in terms. Holding the Russian March had let a genie out of the bottle and it would not be put back. Today, opposition nationalists see the Kremlin’s move as a decisive opening for them. ‘After that, nationalism became a real phenomenon in Russian politics. It was impossible to put back in the box. Really, we opened the sluice gates for them’, admitted Zarifullin. Surkov, he said, was ‘in a trance’ after the march: ‘Surkov became disappointed in the prospects for Eurasianism because he wanted something that could control the street, and the street is nationalist.’

The split between Dugin and the radical nationalists was decisive: from then on Eurasianism was not a ‘nationalist’ project, but rather an official ideology. Its purveyors, like Dugin, Zarifullin and Korovin, could not cover themselves in the mantle of populism as they had in the past. Instead, they were accorded the careful accolades of regime henchmen. ‘Dugin was given a choice – either you are with the nationalists or you are with the regime. And nationalism was the street. So we, and the regime, were forced to give up the streets’, according to Zarifullin.

Seeing the strategy in tatters, the Kremlin began to move aggressively against the radical nationalist groups. This only pushed them harder into opposition. By 2009, a number of leading nationalists were in jail for murder, while the DPNI and Slavic Union had been banned. Surkov’s managed nationalism was in pieces. Instead of having contained or co-opted the nationalists, it had let the horse bolt, with dire consequences that are still being reckoned with.

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