The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America

CHAPTER THREE INTEGRATION OR EMPIRE (2013)

Europe, however serious its numerous shortcomings and misdemeanors, has nevertheless acquired an awesomely precious, indeed priceless, dowry of skills and know-how which it can still share with the rest of a planet that needs them now more than ever for its survival.

—ZYGMUNT BAUMAN, 2013

A state with a principle of succession exists in time. A state that arranges its foreign relations exists in space. For Europeans of the twentieth century, the central question was thus: After empire, what? When it was no longer possible for European powers to dominate large territories, how could the remnants and fragments maintain themselves as states? For a few decades, from the 1950s through the 2000s, the answer seemed self-evident: the creation, deepening, and enlargement of the European Union, a relationship among states known as integration. European empires had brought the first globalization, as well as its disastrous finales: the First World War, the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Holocaust. European integration provided a fundament for a second globalization, one that, in Europe at least, promised to be different.

European integration lasted long enough that Europeans could take it for granted, and forget the resonance and power of other political models. Yet history never ends, and alternatives always emerge. In 2013, the Russian Federation proposed an alternative to integration under the name “Eurasia”: empire for Russia, nation-states for everyone else. One problem with this proposal was that the nation-state had proven itself to be untenable in Europe. In the history of Europe’s great powers, imperialism blended into integration, with the nation-state hardly appearing. The major European powers had never been nation-states: before the Second World War they had been empires, where citizens and subjects were unequal; afterwards, as they lost their empires, they had joined a process of European integration in which sovereignty was shared. The east European nation-states that had been founded as such had collapsed in the 1930s or 1940s. In 2013, there was every reason to suspect that, absent a larger European system, European states would also dissolve. One form of disintegration, that of the European Union, would very likely lead to another, the disintegration of the states of Europe.

Russian leaders seemed to understand this. Unlike their European counterparts, they were openly discussing the 1930s. Russia’s Eurasia project had its roots in the 1930s, precisely the decade when European nation-states collapsed into war. Eurasia became plausible in Russia as its leaders made integration impossible for their people. At the same time, the Kremlin rehabilitated fascist thinkers of the era, and promoted contemporary Russian thinkers who recalled fascist ideas. The major Eurasianists of the 2010s—Alexander Dugin, Alexander Prokhanov, and Sergei Glazyev—revived or remade Nazi ideas for Russian purposes.

In his time, Ivan Ilyin was in the mainstream when he believed that the future, like the past, belonged to empires. In the 1930s, the major question seemed to be whether the new empires would be of the extreme Right or the extreme Left.

The First World War brought the collapse of the old European land empires: not only Ilyin’s Russia, but the Habsburg monarchy, the German Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. Thereafter, an experiment in the creation of nation-states was undertaken on their territories. France tried to support these new entities, but during the Great Depression ceded influence in central and eastern Europe to fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. When a Polish regional governor or a Romanian fascist pronounced that the era of liberal democracy was over, they were voicing a general European conviction, indeed one that was widely shared on the other side of the Atlantic. In the 1930s the United States was an empire, in the sense that a large number of its Native American and African American subjects were not full citizens. Whether or not it would become a democracy was an open question; many of its influential men thought not. George Kennan, an American diplomat who would become his country’s outstanding strategic thinker, proposed in 1938 that the United States should “go along the road which leads through constitutional change to the authoritarian state.” Using the slogan “America First,” the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh called for sympathy with Nazis.

The Second World War also taught Europeans that the choice was between fascism and communism, empires of the far Right or far Left. It began with an unstoppable alliance of the two extremes, a German-Soviet offensive military pact of August 1939 that quickly destroyed the European system by eliminating whole states. Germany had already demolished Austria and Czechoslovakia; the Wehrmacht and the Red Army together invaded and destroyed Poland; and then the Soviet Union occupied and annexed Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. With Soviet economic backing, Germany invaded and defeated France in 1940. The second stage of the war began in June 1941, when Hitler betrayed Stalin and Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Now the extremes were on opposite sides. Berlin’s war aim was imperial: the control of the fertile soil of Soviet Ukraine which, Hitler thought, would make of Germany a self-sufficient economy and a world power. As allies or as enemies, the far Right and the far Left seemed the only viable options. Even resistance to Nazi rule was usually led by communists.

In general, the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 discredited fascism: either because Europeans came to see fascism as a moral disaster, or because fascism claimed to be about winning and lost. After the Red Army drove the Wehrmacht from the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, Soviet power was established again in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and communist regimes took over in Romania, Poland, and Hungary—all countries where right-wing authoritarianism had seemed the work of destiny just a few years before. By 1950, communism extended across almost the entirety of the zone of nation-states that had been formed after the First World War. In the aftermath of the Second World War, as in the aftermath of the First, the European nation-state proved unsustainable.

American economic power had been decisive to the course of the war. Although the United States was late to enter the military conflict in Europe, it supplied its British and Soviet allies. In postwar Europe, the United States subsidized economic cooperation in order to support the political center and undermine the extremes and thus, in the long run, create a stable market for its exports. This recognition that markets required a social basis was of a piece with American domestic policy: in the three postwar decades, the gap between rich and poor in the United States was narrowed. In the 1960s, the vote was extended to African Americans, reducing the imperial character of American politics. Although the Soviet Union and its east European satellites refused American aid after the war, west European states undertook a renewed experiment with the rule of law and democratic elections, with American financial support. Although the policies differed considerably from state to state, in general Europe in these decades built a system of health care and social insurance that later generations would take for granted. In western and central Europe, the state would no longer be dependent upon empire, but could be rescued by integration.

European integration began in 1951. Ilyin died only three years later. Like the Russian thinkers and leaders who revived him a half century later, he never took European integration seriously. He preserved his Manichean view of politics until the end: Russian empire meant salvation, and all other regimes marked various points on the slippery slope to Satanism. When Ilyin looked at postwar Europe he saw Spain and Portugal, maritime empires governed by right-wing dictators. He believed that Francisco Franco and António de Oliveira Salazar had preserved the fascist legacy and would reconstitute the European fascist norm. In postwar Britain and France, Ilyin saw empires rather than a constitutional monarchy and a republic, and presumed that the imperial element was the durable one.

If European states were empires, wrote Ilyin, it was natural that Russia was one and should remain one. Empire was the natural state of affairs; fascist empires would be most successful; Russia would be the perfect fascist empire.

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In the half century between Ilyin’s death and his rehabilitation, a Europe of integration replaced the Europe of empire. Germany began the pattern. Defeated in war and divided thereafter, Germans accepted a proposition from neighboring France, and along with Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Italy established a European Coal and Steel Community in 1951. West Germany’s leaders, Konrad Adenauer in particular, saw that the path to national sovereignty and unification led through European integration. As other European empires also lost their colonial wars and their colonial markets, this project broadened. Even Great Britain, the imperial superpower, joined the undertaking (along with Denmark and Ireland) in 1973. Portugal and Spain set a new pattern of losing colonies, replacing authoritarianism with parliamentary democracy, and then joining the European project (both in 1986). Europe was a soft landing after empire.

By the 1980s, democracy through integration had become the norm in much of Europe. All of the members of what was then called the European Community were democracies, most of them markedly more prosperous than the communist regimes to their east. In the 1970s and 1980s, the gap in living standards between western and eastern Europe grew, as changes in communications made it harder to hide. As Mikhail Gorbachev tried to repair a Soviet state to rescue the Soviet economy, west European states were building a new political framework around economic cooperation. In 1992, a few months after the Soviet Union ceased to exist, the European Community was transformed into the European Union (EU). This EU was the practice of the coordination of law, the acceptance of a shared high court, and an area of free trade and movement. It later became, for most of its members, a zone with a common border and a common currency.

For most of the communist states of eastern Europe, the European Union also proved to be a secure destination after empire, though in a different way. In the 1930s and 1940s, the east European states established after the First World War fell prey to German empire, or to Soviet empire, or to both. After the revolutions of 1989, newly elected leaders of the east European states that emerged from Soviet domination expressed their aspiration to join the European project. This “return to Europe” was a reaction to the lesson of 1918 and 1945: that without some larger structure, the nation-state is untenable. In 1993 the EU began to sign association agreements with east European states, beginning a legal relationship. Three principles of membership were established in the 1990s: market economies able to handle competition; democracy and human rights; and the administrative capacity to implement European laws and regulations.

In 2004 and 2007, seven post-communist states (Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia) and three former Soviet republics (Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia) joined the European Union. In 2013, Croatia also joined the EU. The kind of small political unit that had failed after 1918 and after 1945 could now endure, because there was a European order to support sovereignty. As of 2013, the EU included the metropoles of the old maritime empires that had disintegrated after the Second World War, as well as the former peripheries of the land empires that had disintegrated during or after the First.

What the EU had not done by 2013 was extend to territory that had been within the original borders of the Soviet Union as established in 1922. In 2013, twenty years after its western neighbors, Ukraine was negotiating an association agreement with the EU. At some later point, Ukrainian membership in the European Union might overcome this final barrier. Ukraine was the axis between the new Europe of integration and the old Europe of empire. Russians who wished to restore empire in the name of Eurasia would begin with Ukraine.

The politics of integration were fundamentally different from the politics of empire. The EU was like an empire in that it was a large economic space. It was unlike an empire in that its organizing principle was equality rather than inequality.

An imperial power does not recognize the political entities that it encounters in what it regards as colonial territories, and so it destroys or subverts them while claiming that they never existed. Europeans in Africa could claim that African political units did not exist, and were not therefore subject to international law. Americans expanding westward could sign treaties with native nations, and then disregard them on the logic that those nations were not sovereign. Germans invading Poland in 1939 argued that the Polish state did not exist; Soviets meeting them in the middle of the country made the exact same argument. Moscow denied the sovereign status of its neighbors when it occupied and annexed Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia in 1940, even going so far as to claim that prior service to those states was a crime. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, it denied that it was invading a state, treating the peoples of the Soviet Union as colonial subjects.

Throughout the history of European imperialism, European powers assumed that international law applied to their dealings with European peers—though not to their colonial domains where they accumulated power and wealth. In the Second World War, Europeans applied colonial principles to one another. Postwar integration was a return to the idea that law governed dealings among Europeans, as Europeans lost their colonies in Europe and then around the world. In the EU, treaties were meant to change economics, after which economics would alter politics. Recognition of sovereignty was the condition of the entire enterprise. European integration proceeded from the assumption that state borders were fixed, and that change must proceed within and between states rather than by one invading another. Each member of the EU was supposed to be a rule-of-law state, with integration among them governed by law.

The result by 2013 was a formidable if vulnerable creation. The EU’s economy was larger than that of the United States, larger than that of China, and about eight times larger than that of Russia. With its democratic procedures, welfare states, and environmental protection, the EU offered an alternative model to American, Russian, and Chinese inequality. It included most of the states regarded as the world’s least corrupt. Lacking unified armed forces and convincing institutions of foreign policy, the EU depended upon law and economics for diplomacy as well as internal functioning. Its implicit foreign policy was to persuade leaders and societies who wished for access to European markets to embrace the rule of law and democracy. Citizens of non-member states who wanted European markets or values would pressure governments to negotiate with the EU, and vote out leaders who failed to do so. This seemed to work in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.

The EU’s vulnerability was the European politics of inevitability: the fable of the wise nation. Citizens of west European member states thought that their nations had long existed and had made better choices as they learned from history, in particular learning from war in Europe that peace was a good thing. As European empires were forced to abandon colonies and joined the process of integration, this fable of the wise nation smoothed the process, allowing Europeans to look away from both defeat in colonial wars and the atrocities they committed as they lost.

In history there was no era of the nation-state: generally (with exceptions such as Finland), empire ended while integration began, with no interval in between. In the indispensible cases of Germany, France, Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal there was no moment between empire and integration when the nation was sovereign and the state flourished in isolation. It is true that citizens of these countries unreflectively believe that their country has a history as a nation-state: generally, after a moment of reflection, they realize that this is not the case. Such reflection does not usually take place, because history education throughout Europe is national. Lacking serious education in their own imperial pasts, and lacking the comparative knowledge that would allow them to see patterns, Europeans settled for a falsehood. The fable of the wise nation, learned in childhood, comforted adults by allowing them to forget the true difficulties of history. By reciting the fable of the wise nation, leaders and societies could praise themselves for choosing Europe, when in fact Europe was an existential need after empire.

By the 2010s, citizens of east European states were making the same mistake, albeit in a different way. Although most of the anticommunist dissidents had seen the need for a “return to Europe” after 1989, actual membership in the European Union after 2004 or 2007 allowed for forgetfulness. The crises after the First and Second World Wars, when the nation-state as such had proven untenable, were recast as unique moments of national victimhood. Young east Europeans were not taught to reflect on the reasons for state failure in the 1930s or 1940s. Seeing themselves exclusively as innocent victims of German and Soviet empire, they celebrated the brief interwar moment when nation-states could be found on the territory of eastern Europe. They forgot that these states were doomed not just by malice but also by structure: without a European order, they had little chance to survive.

The EU never attempted to establish a common historical education for Europeans. As a result, the fable of the wise nation made it seem possible that nation-states, having chosen to enter Europe, could also choose to leave. A loop back to an imagined past could seem possible, even desirable. And so a politics of inevitability created an opening for a politics of eternity.

In the 2010s, nationalists and fascists who opposed the EU promised Europeans a return to an imaginary national history, and their opponents rarely saw the real problem. Because everyone accepted the fable of the wise nation, the EU was defined by both its supporters and opponents as a national choice rather than as a national necessity. The United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) of Nigel Farage in Great Britain, the Front National of Marine Le Pen in France, and the Freiheitliche party of Heinz-Christian Strache in Austria, for example, all resided comfortably in the politics of eternity. The leaders of one EU member state, Hungary, built a right-wing authoritarian regime inside the EU beginning in 2010. Another EU member state, Greece, faced financial collapse after the world financial crisis in 2008. Its voters moved to the far Right or far Left. Hungarian and Greek leaders began to see Chinese and Russian investment as an alternative route to the future.

The explicit Russian rejection of a European future was something new. Russia was the first European post-imperial power not to see the EU as a safe landing for itself, as well as the first to attack integration in order to deny the possibility of sovereignty, prosperity, and democracy to others. When the Russian assault began, Europe’s vulnerabilities were exposed, its populists thrived, and its future darkened. The great question of European history was again open, because certain possibilities in Russia had been closed.

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Russia under Putin was unable to create a stable state with a succession principle and the rule of law. Because failure had to be presented as success, Russia had to present itself as a model for Europe, rather than the other way around. This required that success be defined not in terms of prosperity and freedom but in terms of sexuality and culture, and that the European Union (and the United States) be defined as threats not because of anything they did but because of the values they supposedly represented. Putin executed this maneuver with stunning rapidity as he returned to office as president in 2012.

Until 2012, Russian leaders spoke favorably of European integration. Yeltsin accepted Europe as a model, at least rhetorically. Putin described the approach of the EU to Russia’s border as an opportunity for cooperation. The eastward enlargement of NATO in 1999 was not presented by Putin as a threat. Instead, he tried to recruit the United States or NATO to cooperate with Russia to address what he saw as common security problems. After the United States was attacked by Islamist terrorists in 2001, Putin offered to cooperate with NATO in territories that bordered Russia. Putin did not present the EU enlargement of 2004 as a threat. On the contrary, he spoke favorably that year of future EU membership for Ukraine. In 2008, Putin attended the NATO summit in Bucharest. In 2009, Medvedev allowed American aircraft to fly over Russia to supply troops in Afghanistan. In 2010, Russia’s ambassador to NATO, the radical nationalist Dmitry Rogozin, expressed his concern that NATO would leave Afghanistan. Rogozin complained of NATO’s lack of fighting spirit, its “mood of capitulation.” He wanted NATO troops at Russia’s border.

The basic line of Russian foreign policy through 2011 was not that the European Union and the United States were threats. It was that they should cooperate with Russia as an equal. The decade of the 2000s was the lost opportunity for the creation of a Russian state that might have been seen as such. Russia managed no democratic changes of executive power. What had been an oligarchy of contending clans in the 1990s was transformed into a kleptocracy, in which the state itself became the single oligarchical clan. Rather than monopolizing law, the Russian state under Putin monopolized corruption. To be sure, the state provided a measure of stability to its citizens in the 2000s, thanks to exports of natural gas and oil. It did not deliver the promise of social advancement to the bulk of the Russian population. Russians who founded businesses could be arrested at any time for any imagined violation of the law, and very often they were.

In matters of peace and war, Moscow also took actions that made it harder for Europeans to see Russia as an equal. In April 2007, Estonia was crippled for weeks in a major cyberattack. Although the event was confusing at the time, it was later understood to be the first salvo in a Russian cyberwar against Europe and the United States. In August 2008, Russia invaded its neighbor Georgia and occupied some of its territories. The conventional assault was accompanied by cyberwar: the president of Georgia lost control of his website, Georgian news agencies were hacked, and much of the country’s internet traffic was blocked. Russia invaded Georgia to make European integration impossible for its neighbor, but was in fact renouncing it for itself.

By the 2010s, oligarchy in the Russian Federation had made reform not just impossible but unthinkable. Writing for the German press in November 2010, Putin tried to have it both ways, arguing that the EU should integrate with Russia without expecting Russia to change in any way. Since the Russian Federation could not follow Europe’s principles, went his reasoning, Europe should forget those principles. Putin was beginning to imagine a reverse integration in which European states would become more like Russia, which would have meant the end of the EU.

A signal difference between a Europe of empire and a Europe of integration was the attitude towards law. On this issue, Putin the politician was following the course of Ilyin the philosopher: an early faith in law yielded to an endorsement of lawlessness as patriotic. Ilyin’s great concern as a young man in Russia before the revolution had been the spirit of the law. He believed that Russians needed to imbibe it, but could not see how.

A century later, the boring EU had solved this problem. Its tedious process of accession involved the export of the spirit of the law. European integration was a means of transporting the idea of the rule of law from places where it functioned better to places where it functioned worse. In the 1990s, association agreements signed between the EU and aspiring members initiated legal relationships that included the implicit promise of a deeper legal relationship, namely full membership. The prospect of future membership made clear the benefits of the rule of law, in a way that individual citizens could understand.

The mature Ilyin rejected the rule of law in favor of the arbitrariness—proizvol—of fascism. Having given up hope that Russia could be governed by law, he presented lawlessness (proizvol) as a patriotic virtue. Putin followed the same trajectory, citing Ilyin as his authority. When he first ran for president in 2000, he spoke of the need for a “dictatorship of the law.” Those two concepts contradicted each other, and one of them fell away. Running for president in 2012, Putin rejected the idea of a European Russia, which meant ignoring external incentives that favored the rule of law. Instead, proizvol would be presented as redemptive patriotism. The operative concept in the Russian language today is bespredel, boundary-less-ness, the absence of limits, the ability of a leader to do anything. The word itself arose from criminal jargon.

On this logic, Putin was not a failed statesman but a national redeemer. What the EU might describe as failures of governance were to be experienced as the flowering of Russian innocence.

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Putin chose empire over integration. If the EU did not accept Russia’s proposition to integrate with Russia, Putin explained in 2011 and 2012, Russia would help Europe to become Eurasian, more like itself. A Eurasian Customs Union with neighboring post-Soviet dictatorships Belarus and Kazakhstan was established on January 1, 2010, while Putin was prime minister. As a presidential candidate in late 2011 and early 2012, Putin proposed a more ambitious “Eurasian Union,” an alternative to the EU that would include its member states and thus assist in its demise. He described the Eurasian idea as the beginning of a new ideology and geopolitics for the world.

Writing in the newspaper Izvestiia on October 3, 2011, Putin announced the grand project of Eurasia. Russia would bring together states that had not proven to be plausible members of the European Union (and implicitly, in the future, states that exited a collapsing European Union). This meant present and future dictatorships. In Nezavisimaia Gazeta on January 23, 2012, Putin claimed, citing Ilyin, that integration was not about common achievement, as the Europeans thought, but about what Putin called “civilization.” On Putin’s logic, the rule of law ceased to be a general aspiration and became an aspect of a foreign Western civilization. Integration in Putin’s sense was not about working with others but about praising oneself; not about doing but being. There was no need to do anything to make Russia more like Europe. Europe should be more like Russia.

Of course, for the EU, coming to resemble Russia would have meant an undoing. In a third article, in Moskovskie Novosti on February 27, 2012, Putin drew that very conclusion. Russia could never become a member of the EU because of “the unique place of Russia on the world political map, its role in history and in the development of civilization.” Eurasia would therefore “integrate” its future members with Russia without any of the troubling burdens associated with the EU. No dictator would have to step down; no free elections would have to be held; no laws would have to be upheld. Eurasia was a spoiler system, designed to prevent states from joining the EU and prevent their societies from thinking that this was possible. In the long run, Putin explained, Eurasia would overwhelm the EU in a larger “Union of Europe,” a “space” between the Atlantic and the Pacific, “from Lisbon to Vladivostok.” Not to join Eurasia, Putin said, would be “to promote separatism in the broadest sense of the word.”

As a presidential candidate in 2011 and 2012, Putin promised the release of Russia from general standards and the extension of Russian particularities to others. If Russia could be portrayed as a pristine source of civilizational values that others had lost, then the question of reforming Russian kleptocracy would become irrelevant. As a beacon for others, Russia should be celebrated but not altered. Putin was matching his words with his deeds, since he had made European integration unthinkable for his people. The way that Putin assumed the office of president made his Eurasian turn irreversible. The abandonment of democratic procedures in 2011 and 2012 mocked a basic criterion of EU membership. To clear protestors from the street by violence and then portray them as agents of Europe was to define the EU as an enemy.

Russia had no plausible principle of succession, and the future of the Russian state was uncertain, but none of this could be said. Putin could control the state but not reform it. So foreign policy had to take the place of domestic policy, and diplomacy had to be about culture rather than security. In effect, this meant exporting Russian chaos while speaking of Russian order, spreading disintegration in the name of integration. Once inaugurated as president in May 2012, Putin presented Eurasia as an instrument to dissolve the EU in order to simplify the world order so that empires could compete for territory. The black hole at the center of his system could not be filled, but it could draw in neighbors. At his inauguration, Putin proposed that Russia become “a leader and a center of gravity for the whole of Eurasia.” Addressing parliament that December, he spoke of a coming catastrophe that would commence a new era of colonial resource wars. At such a moment, it would be frivolous to propose reform or to imagine progress. During this permanent emergency, Putin proclaimed, Russia would rely on its native genius within “great Russian spaces.”

The reference to “great spaces,” a concept from the Nazi legal thinker Carl Schmitt, was not even the most striking moment of the address. Using the odd word “passionarity,” Putin evoked a special Russian ability to thrive amidst global chaos. Such “passionarity” would determine, according to Putin, “who will take the lead and who will remain outsiders and inevitably lose their independence.” The strange term was the invention of one Russian thinker, Lev Gumilev. Unlike Ilyin, who had to be rediscovered, Gumilev was a Soviet citizen. His signature term “passionarity” was recognizable to Russians, even if unnoticed elsewhere. As Russians knew, Gumilev was the modern exemplar of Eurasian thought.

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Long before Putin announced his Eurasian policy, Eurasian thought had represented a specific Russian proposal to dominate and transform Europe. This important intellectual tendency had arisen in the 1920s as a response to the earlier Russian disagreement between “slavophiles” and “westernizers.” The westernizers of the nineteenth century believed that history was unitary, and that the path to progress was singular. For them, Russia’s problem was backwardness, and so reform or revolution was needed to push Russia to a modern European future. The slavophiles believed that progress was illusory and that Russia was endowed with a particular genius. Orthodox Christianity and popular mysticism, they maintained, expressed a depth of spirit unknown in the West. The slavophiles imagined that Russian history had begun with a Christian conversion in Kyiv a thousand years before. Ilyin began as a westernizer and ended as a slavophile, a trajectory that was very common.

The first Eurasianists were exiled Russian scholars of the 1920s, contemporaries of Ilyin, who rejected both the slavophile and the westernizer attitudes. They agreed with the slavophiles that the West was decadent, but denied the slavophile myth of Christian continuity with ancient Kyiv. The Eurasianists saw no meaningful connection between the ancient Rus of Volodymyr/Valdemar and modern Russia. They focused instead on the Mongols, who had easily defeated the remnants of Rus in the early 1240s. In their vision, the happy conventions of Mongol rule allowed for the foundation of a new city, Moscow, in an environment safe from European corruptions such as the classical heritage of Greece and Rome, the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment. Modern Russia’s destiny was to turn Europe into Mongolia.

The Eurasianists of the 1920s soon scattered, and some of them renounced their earlier views. They had one gifted acolyte within the Soviet Union: Lev Gumilev (1912–1992). Gumilev was born to an extraordinary family, and lived one of the most tragically and garishly Soviet lives imaginable. Lev’s parents were the poets Nikolai Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova. When Lev was nine years old, his father was executed by the Cheka; his mother then wrote one of the most famous poems in modern Russia, which included the verse: “it loves, it loves droplets of blood, the Russian land.” With such parents, Lev had difficulty submerging himself into his university studies in the 1930s; he was observed closely by the secret police and denounced by his colleagues. In 1938, during the Great Terror, he was sentenced to five years in the Gulag, to a camp at Norilsk. This inspired his mother’s famous Requiem, in which Anna referred to Lev as “my son, my horror.” In 1949, Gumilev was once again sentenced to the Gulag, this time to ten years near Karaganda. After Stalin’s death in 1953 he was released, but the years in the Gulag left their mark. Gumilev saw the inspirational possibilities in repression, and believed that the basic biological truths of life were revealed in extreme settings.

Writing as an academic in the Soviet Union of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Gumilev revived the Eurasian tradition. He agreed with his teachers that Mongolia was the source of Russian character and its shelter from Western decadence. Like the émigré scholars of the 1920s, he portrayed Eurasia as a proud heartland that extended from the Pacific Ocean to a meaningless and sick European peninsula at the western extreme.

Whereas the original Eurasians had been serious scholars with disciplinary training in the universities of the Russian Empire, Gumilev was a typical Soviet autodidact, an enthusiastic amateur in several fields. To define the boundary between Eurasia and Europe, for example, he relied upon climate. He used the average January temperature to draw a line that ran through Germany. On one side was Eurasia and on the other Europe. It just so happened that, when Gumilev made this argument, East Germany was under Soviet domination and West Germany was not.

Gumilev’s contribution to Eurasianism was his theory of ethnogenesis: an explanation of how nations arise. It began from a specific understanding of astrophysics and human biology. Gumilev maintained that human sociability was generated by cosmic rays. Some human organisms were more capable than others of absorbing space energy and retransmitting it to others. These special leaders, in possession of the “passionarity” Putin mentioned in his 2012 speech, were the founders of ethnic groups. According to Gumilev, the genesis of each nation could therefore be traced to a burst of cosmic energy, which began a cycle that lasted for more than a thousand years. The cosmic rays that enlivened Western nations had been emitted in the distant past, and so the West was dead. The Russian nation arose from cosmic emissions on September 13, 1380, and was therefore young and vibrant.

Gumilev also added a specific form of antisemitism to the Eurasian tradition, one that enabled Russians to blame their own failings on the Jews and the West at the same time. The relevant concept was that of the “chimera,” or false nation. Healthy nations such as the Russian, warned Gumilev, must beware “chimerical” groups that draw life not from cosmic rays but from other groups. He meant the Jews. For Gumilev, the history of Rus did not show that Russia was ancient, but it did show that Jews were an eternal threat. Gumilev claimed that in medieval Rus it was the Jews who had traded slaves, establishing themselves as a “military-commercial octopus.” These Jews, according to Gumilev, were agents of a permanently hostile Western civilization that sought to weaken and defame Rus. He also claimed that Rus had to pay tribute to Jews in blood. Gumilev therefore advanced three basic elements of modern antisemitism: the Jew as the soulless trader, the Jew as the drinker of Christian blood, and the Jew as the agent of an alien civilization.

Despite his years in the Gulag, Gumilev came to identify himself with the Soviet Union as his Russian homeland. He made friends and taught students, and his influence even after his death in 1992 was considerable. The economist Sergei Glazyev, who advised Yeltsin and Putin, referred to Gumilev and used his concepts. Glazyev spoke of an economic union with state planning “based on the philosophy of Eurasianism.” Gumilev was friendly with the philosopher Yuri Borodai and his son Alexander. The younger Borodai dreamed of the “armed passionary,” people who would be “catalyzers of powerful movements” that would liberate “the entire territory of Eurasia.”

As president, Vladimir Putin would not only cite Gumilev on the Eurasian project, but he would appoint Sergei Glazyev his advisor on Eurasia. Not long after, Alexander Borodai would take an important part in the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

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To speak of “Eurasia” in the Russia of the 2010s was to refer to two distinct currents of thought that overlapped at two points: the corruption of the West and the evil of the Jews. The Eurasianism of the 2010s was a rough mixture of a Russian tradition developed by Gumilev with Nazi ideas mediated by the younger Russian fascist Alexander Dugin (b. 1962). Dugin was not a follower of the original Eurasianists nor a student of Gumilev. He simply used the terms “Eurasia” and “Eurasianism” to make Nazi ideas sound more Russian. Dugin, born half a century after Gumilev, was an anti-establishment kid of the Soviet 1970s and 1980s, playing his guitar and singing about killing millions of people in ovens. His life’s work was to bring fascism to Russia.

As the Soviet Union came to an end, Dugin traveled to western Europe to find intellectual allies. Even as Europe integrated, there were marginal thinkers of the far Right who preserved Nazi ideas, celebrated national purity, and decried economic, political, and legal cooperation as part of some global conspiracy. These were Dugin’s interlocutors. An early influence was Miguel Serrano, author of Hitler: The Last Avatar, who claimed that the Aryan race owed its superiority to its extraterrestrial origins. Dugin, like Gumilev, found Ilyin’s Russian redeemer by seeking beyond earth. If the leader must arrive untainted by events, he must come from somewhere beyond history. Ilyin resolved the issue by presenting a redeemer who emerged from fiction in a poof of erotic mysticism. The mature Gumilev and the young Dugin looked to the stars.

In the early 1990s, Dugin became close to the French conspiracy theorist Jean Parvulesco, who spoke to him of the ancient conflict between people of the sea (Atlanticists) and people of the earth (Eurasianists). In Parvulesco’s idea, the Americans and British yield to abstract Jewish ideas because their maritime economies separate them from the earthy truths of human experience. Alain de Benoist of the French neo-fascist movement known as the Nouvelle Droite explained to Dugin the centrality of the United States to such schemes, as the representative abstract (Jewish) culture. These were updates of Nazi ideas, as Dugin well understood. At the time, Dugin was writing under the pen name “Sievers,” a reference to Wolfram Sievers, a German Nazi executed for war crimes in 1947 who had been known for collecting the bones of murdered Jews.

Dugin’s European contacts allowed him to bring Nazi concepts home to Russia. In 1993, Dugin and Eduard Limonov, who called Dugin the “St Cyril and Methodius of fascism,” founded the National Bolshevik Party. Its members raised their fists while hailing death. In 1997, Dugin called for a “fascism, borderless and red.” Dugin exhibited standard fascist views: democracy was hollow; the middle class was evil; Russians must be ruled by a “Man of Destiny”; America was malevolent; Russia was innocent.

Dugin shared with Ilyin a debt to Carl Schmitt. It was Schmitt who had formulated a vision of world politics without laws and states, grounded instead in the subjective desires of cultural groups for ever more land. Schmitt dismissed “the empty concept of state territory” and regarded the nation as “fundamentally an organism.” In his view, the Eurasian landmass was a “great space” to be mastered by whoever could take it. Schmitt claimed that maritime powers such as Great Britain and the United States were bearers of abstract, Jewish notions of law. He formulated a concept of international law by which the world would be divided into a few “great spaces” from which “spatially alien powers” should be excluded. He meant that the United States should have no influence in Europe. Dugin preserved these ideas while simply changing the entity that was supposedly threatened by Jews, America, and law: no longer Nazi Germany but instead contemporary Russia.

Dugin dismissed Ilyin as an inferior philosopher who served nothing more than a “technical function” in the Putin regime. Nevertheless, much of Dugin’s writing reads like a parody of Ilyin. “The West,” claimed Dugin in a typical expostulation, “is the place where Lucifer fell. It is the center for the global capitalist octopus.” The West, Dugin continued, “is the matrix of rotten cultural perversion and wickedness, deceit and cynicism, violence and hypocrisy.” It was so decadent that it would collapse at any moment, and yet it was a constant threat. Democracy was not its renewal, but the sign of a coming cataclysm. Dugin regarded the reelection of Barack Obama as president of the United States in 2012 in these terms: “Let him ruin this country, let justice finally prevail, so that this monstrous colossus on clay feet, this new Carthage, which spreads its abominable economic and political power across the entire world, and tries to fight with all and against all, so that it quickly disappears.” These characterizations of the West are axioms, not observations. The facts of the present are irrelevant, as are the facts of the past. For Dugin, as for Ilyin, the past only matters as a reservoir of symbols, of what Dugin called “archetypes.” The past provided Dugin with what Russians called “the spiritual resource,” a source of images to be used to alter the present.

Writing in the early twenty-first century, Dugin was confronted with the success of the European Union, a hyperlegal entity that rescued states after empire. Dugin never pronounced its name. When asked to comment upon the EU, Dugin asserted that it was doomed. Long before Putin began to speak of a Eurasia that must include Ukraine as an element of Russian civilization, Dugin defined the independent Ukrainian state as the barrier to Russia’s Eurasian destiny. In 2005, Dugin founded a state-supported youth movement whose members urged the disintegration and russification of Ukraine. In 2009, Dugin foresaw a “battle for Crimea and eastern Ukraine.” The existence of Ukraine, in Dugin’s view, constituted “an enormous danger for all of Eurasia.”

Concepts from the three interflowing currents of Russian fascism—Ilyin’s Christian totalitarianism, Gumilev’s Eurasianism, and Dugin’s “Eurasian” Nazism—appeared in Putin’s discourse as he sought an exit from the dilemma he created for his country in 2012. Fascist ideas burst into the Russian public sphere during the Obama administration’s attempt to “reset” relations with the Russian Federation. The dramatic change in Russia’s orientation bore no relation to any new unfriendly action from outside. Western enmity was not a matter of what a Western actor was doing, but what the West was portrayed as being.

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In 2012, fascist thinkers were placed in the Russian mainstream by a Russian president who seemed to think that he needed them. Ilyin had been granted as full a resuscitation as a state can give a philosopher. Gumilev was cited by Putin in his most important address. Dugin became a frequent guest on Russia’s largest television channel. The Eurasian idea was a preoccupation of a new think tank, the Izborsk Club. Its members included Dugin, Glazyev, and Tikhon Shevkunov—Putin’s favorite monk and his companion at Ilyin’s gravesite. Shevkunov was the author of the cyclical idea that Putin reincarnated Volodymyr/Valdemar of Rus—and also the author of the bestselling book in Russia of 2012.

The founder and moving spirit of the Izborsk Club was the fascist novelist Alexander Prokhanov, Putin’s companion in that radio program of December 2011 where Putin had cited Ilyin. Like Dugin, Prokhanov used the notion of Eurasia to mean the return of Soviet power in fascist form. Also like Dugin, he repeated the ideas of Carl Schmitt; if Prokhanov had a core belief, it was the endless struggle of the empty and abstract sea-people against the hearty and righteous land-people. Like Adolf Hitler, Prokhanov blamed world Jewry for inventing the ideas that enslaved his homeland. He also blamed them for the Holocaust. Like Dugin, Prokhanov openly embraced political fiction, seeking to create drastic images that would exude meaning before people had the chance to think for themselves. An example of his creative mind was his reaction to the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States. Discussing a meeting of Obama with Russians, Prokhanov moaned that it was “as if they had all been given a black teat, and they all suck at it with lust and mammalian smacking…In the end, I was humiliated by this.”

Amidst the ceaseless ink-flood of Prokhanov’s publications, the most pertinent to Eurasia was an interview he gave in Kyiv, Ukraine, on August 31, 2012, right before the opening of the Izborsk Club. That March, Ukraine and the European Union had initialed an association agreement, and the Ukrainian government had undertaken an action plan to prepare the country for the signing of the accord the following year. Baffled by Prokhanov’s attitude towards Europe, his interviewer asked him questions that revealed basic Eurasian themes: the precedence of fiction over fact; the conviction that European success was a sign of evil; the belief in a global Jewish conspiracy; and the certainty of Ukraine’s Russian fate.

When asked about the high standard of living in the EU, Prokhanov responded: “Swim across the Dnipro River and find mushrooms growing great under the sun!” A momentary vision of a primal Slavic experience was more important than a durable way of life created by decades of work for the benefit of hundreds of millions of people. Prokhanov’s next move was to claim that factuality was hypocrisy: “Europe is vermin that has learned to call heinous and disgusting things beautiful.” Whatever Europeans might seem to be doing or saying, “you don’t see their faces under the masks.” In any event, Europe was dying: “The white race is perishing: gay marriages, pederasts rule the cities, women can’t find men.” And Europe was killing Russia: “We didn’t get infected with AIDS, they deliberately infected us.”

The fundamental problem, said Prokhanov in this interview, was the Jews. “Antisemitism,” he said, “is not a result of the fact that Jews have crooked noses or cannot correctly pronounce the letter ‘r.’ It is a result of the fact that Jews took over the world, and are using their power for evil.” In a move that was typical of Russian fascists, Prokhanov deployed the symbolism of the Holocaust to describe world Jewry as a collective perpetrator and everyone else as the victims: “Jews united humanity in order to throw humanity into the furnace of the liberal order, which is now suffering a catastrophe.” The only defense against the international Jewish conspiracy was a Russian redeemer. Eurasianism was Russia’s messianic mission to redeem mankind. It “has to encompass the entire world.”

This grand redemptive project, said Prokhanov, would begin when Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus merge. “When I speak of Russia,” said Prokhanov, “I have in view people living in Ukraine and Belarus.” Ukraine had before it a “colossal messianic mission,” because the destiny of Kyiv was to bow before Moscow and thus commence the Russian conquest of the world. “If the first empire was established here,” said Prokhanov, meaning Rus a thousand years before, “the future empire has already been proclaimed by Putin. It is the Eurasian Union, and Ukraine’s contribution to this empire could be grandiose.” In the end, asked Prokhanov, “why be at the outskirts of London when you can be at the center of Eurasia?” Prokhanov was concerned that Ukraine’s president Viktor Yanukovych might not be able to fulfill this assignment. Perhaps, he mused, the government of Ukraine would have to be changed.

The Izborsk Club, the intellectual hub of the new Russian nationalism, was inaugurated a few days later, on September 8, 2012. Its manifesto began with the claim, familiar from Ilyin, that factuality was a Western weapon against Russia:

The Russian state has once again been exposed to the deadly threat posed from liberal centers: a threat from within Russian society and from beyond its borders. The lethal ideological and informational “machine” that destroyed all the bases and values of the “White” Romanov empire and then destroyed all the foundations of the “Red” Soviet empire is everywhere at work. The fall of these empires transformed the great Eurasian space into a chaos of warring peoples, faiths and cultures on fields of blood. This liberal “machine” was built with the help of anthropologists and historians, social scientists and specialists in “chaos theory,” economists and masters of information wars. It disintegrates the fundamental principles by which the unified Eurasian state is constructed. It suppresses the underlying codes of national consciousness that the nation needs to be victorious and to extend its existence in history. This battering “machine” pounds at the Orthodox Church, the spiritual basis of the nation. It prevents the construction of a national security apparatus, leaving Russia unarmed at a time of rising military conflict. It sows discord amidst the harmony of Russia’s main religious confessions. It prevents the reconciliation of Russia’s historical epochs. It prolongs the ruinous Russian Time of Troubles, demonizing the Russian leader and all institutions of authority.

No reference was made in the manifesto to any specific European or American policy. The problem was not what Europeans or Americans did, but that the European Union and the United States existed. As Prokhanov had made clear already, the enmity of the West was to be taken as a given, even when Western actors pursued friendly policies to Russia. The manifesto’s authors replaced history with eternity: the cyclical pattern of Western perfidy and Russian innocence. According to the manifesto, previous Eurasian empires had

flourished as no empires had before, and then crashed into a “black hole,” from which, as it seemed, there was no return. But the state was again reborn, in another form, with another historical center, and again rose and flourished before declining and disappearing. This circularity, the death of the state and its triumph over death, confer upon Russian history a resurrectionary character, in which Russian civilization inevitably rises from the dead. The first empire was that of Kyiv-Novgorod. The second was Muscovy. The third empire was that of the Romanov dynasty. The fourth empire was the Soviet Union. Today’s Russian State, despite the loss of great territories, still carries the mark of empire. The geopolitics of the Eurasian continent once again forcefully gathers spaces that had been lost. This is the legitimation of the “Eurasian project” initiated by Putin.

Rather than using Russian history to establish interests or evaluate perspectives within Russian society, Eurasia offered poetic utterances meant to create a lyrical unity from prior bloodshed. If Soviet terror murdered countless Russian Orthodox priests in the 1930s, all is well and good, because their spirits arose in the 1940s to bless the Red Army:

The unification of two historical eras, a strategic alliance of “Reds” and “Whites” in the face of the liberal peril—this is the enormous worldview mission of true statesmen. Such an alliance is possible in the light of the mystical Russian Victory of 1945, when the “Red” system had the prayerful support of all the Saints killed in the years when the church was persecuted, and the arms of the “Red Victory” became holy Russian arms. The future Russian Victory demands the union of “Reds” and “Whites.” It demands the creation of a state in which, as V. V. Putin said, “Red” commissars can live together with “White” officers.

The celebration of both the far Left and the far Right in the past elided Russia’s present problem: the absence of a center, a political fulcrum, a succession principle that would allow power to shift from left to right or right to left while preserving the state. Since all political activity was ruled out as foreign, differences of opinion or acts of opposition had to be a result of the malignant designs of Europeans and Americans who resent Russia’s immaculate innocence:

The Russian messianic consciousness, grounded in the teaching of an “earthly paradise,” in an ideal existence, in the Orthodox dream of divine justice—all of this summons the negation of Russia at the level of worldview, the attacks on her faith, culture, and historical codes. A military invasion of Russia—the consequence of that intolerance and profound hostility. And so the theme of Russian weapons is a holy theme for Russia. Russian weapons protect not only cities, territories, the boundless richness of the earth. They protect the entire religious and cultural order of Russia, all of Russia’s secular and holy shrines.

These lines were published in the midst of a new armament program, which doubled Russia’s annual weapons procurement budget between 2011 and 2013. The authors of the manifesto dreamed of a militarized totalitarian Russia that permanently mobilized the entire population and promised nothing but sacrifice:

Russia does not need hasty political reform. It needs arms factories and altars. The loss of the historical moment after the destruction of the “Red” empire, the strategic backwardness by comparison to the “liberal” West, demand from Russia a developmental leap. This leap involves a “mobilization project” which would concentrate all of the nation’s resources upon the preservation of sovereignty and the defense of the people.

After this initial salvo, further articles by members of the Izborsk Club elaborated its position. The liberal order that produced factuality, one member wrote, was the work of “the world backstage, the core of which are the Zionist leaders.” Other members of the Izborsk Club explained that Putin’s Eurasian Union was “the project of restoring Russia as a Eurasian empire.” They presented the EU as an existential threat to Russia, since it enforced law and generated prosperity. Russian foreign policy should therefore support the extreme Right within EU member states until the EU collapses, as Prokhanov ecstatically anticipated, into a “constellation of European fascist states.” Ukraine, as one Izborsk Club expert wrote, “is all ours, and eventually it will all come back to us.” According to Dugin, the annexation of Ukrainian territory by Russia was the “necessary condition” of the Eurasian imperial project.

For the Eurasianists of the Izborsk Club, facts were the enemy, Ukraine was the enemy, and facts about Ukraine were the supreme enemy. An intellectual task of the Izborsk Club was to produce the narratives that transported any such facts towards oblivion. Indeed, the mission of the Izborsk Club was to serve as a barrier to factuality. “Izborsk” was chosen as the name of the think tank because the town of Izborsk is the site of a historical Muscovite fortress that had resisted, as the club’s website recalled, “the Livonians, Poles, and Swedes.” Now the invader was the “liberal machine” of factuality.

One of Russia’s long-range bombers, a Tu-95 built to drop atomic bombs on the United States, was renamed “Izborsk” in honor of the club. In case anyone failed to notice this sign of Kremlin backing, Prokhanov was invited to fly in the cockpit of the aircraft. In the years to come, this and other Tu-95s would regularly approach the airspace of the member states of the European Union, forcing them to activate their air defense systems and to escort the approaching bomber away. The Tu-95 “Izborsk” would be used to bomb Syria in 2015, creating refugees who would flee to Europe.

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Sergei Glazyev, advisor of Putin, reader of Gumilev, follower of Schmitt, member of Izborsk, linked Eurasian theory to practice. After Glazyev was fired from the Yeltsin administration for corruption in 1993, he got a helping hand from the American conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche, who held similar views. In 1999 LaRouche published an English translation of Glazyev’s tract Genocide: Russia and the New World Order, which posited that a cabal of (Jewish) neoliberals had deliberately destroyed Russia in the 1990s. Like other Russian fascists, Glazyev used terms associated with the Holocaust (e.g., “genocide”) to suggest that Jews were the real perpetrators and Russians the real victims. He was elected to parliament as a communist in 1999, and then helped to found the radical nationalist party Rodina in 2003. This was not as much of a contradiction as it seemed. In Russia’s “managed democracy,” Rodina was meant to draw votes away from the communist party towards a group trusted by Putin. Glazyev thought that that a planned economy should serve the interests of the Russian nation, which in his view included Ukraine: “We cannot forget the historical importance of Little Russia [Ukraine] for us. We have never divided Russia and Ukraine, in our minds.”

Russian foreign policy arose, Glazyev wrote, “from the philosophy of Eurasianism.” Following Schmitt, Glazyev maintained that states were obsolete. The Eurasian project was “based on a fundamentally different spatial concept”: Schmitt’s idea of “great spaces” dominated by a great power. America must stay away, Glazyev decreed, since it was not part of the Eurasian great space. Since the EU was a bastion of state sovereignty it must fall, and the citizens of its member states must be granted the fascist totality for which they long. “Europeans,” wrote Glazyev, “have lost their sense of direction. They live in a mosaic, in a fragmented world with no shared relationships.” Happily, Russian power could return them to what Glazyev regarded as “reality.”

Glazyev did not discuss the preferences of the people who lived in the European Union. Did Europeans really need to discover firsthand the profundity of a Russian system where life expectancy in 2012 was 111th in the world, where the police could not be trusted, bribes and blackmail were the stuff of everyday life, and prison was a middle-class experience? In its distribution of wealth, Russia was the most unequal country in the world; the EU’s far greater wealth was also far more evenly shared among its citizens. Glazyev helped his master maintain Russian kleptocracy by changing the subject from prosperity to values, to what Putin called “civilization.”

Beginning in 2013, the principles of Eurasia guided the foreign policy of the Russian Federation. The official Foreign Policy Concept for that year, published on February 18 under the signature of Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov with the special endorsement of President Vladimir Putin, included, amidst the boilerplate that remained unaltered from year to year, a series of changes corresponding to the ideas of Ilyin, the Eurasianists, and their fascist traditions.

The Foreign Policy Concept repeated Putin’s characterization of the future as roiling chaos and resource grabs. As states weakened, great spaces would reemerge. In such a world there can be no “oasis” from “global turbulence,” so the EU was doomed. Law would give way to a contest of civilizations. “Global competition demands, for the first time in contemporary history, a civilizational dimension.” Russia was responsible not for the well-being of its citizens but for the safety of undefined “compatriots” beyond its borders. Eurasia was a “model of unification,” open to the former republics of the Soviet Union and also to members of the current European Union. Its basis of cooperation was “the preservation and extension of a common cultural and civilizational heritage.”

The Concept made clear that the process of supplanting the EU with Eurasia was to begin immediately, in 2013, at a time when Ukraine was in negotiations with the EU over the terms of an association agreement. According to the Concept, if Ukraine wished to negotiate with the EU, it should accept Moscow as its intermediary. In Eurasia, Russian dominance was the order of things. In the long term, Eurasia would overcome the EU, leading to “the creation of a unified humanitarian space from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.” Lavrov later repeated this aspiration, citing Ilyin as its source.

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Because the EU is a consensual organization, it was vulnerable to campaigns that raised emotions. Because it was composed of democratic states, it could be weakened by political parties that advocated leaving the EU. Because the EU had never been meaningfully opposed, it never occurred to Europeans to ask whether debates on the internet were manipulated from outside with hostile intent. The Russian policy to destroy the EU took several corresponding forms: the recruitment of European leaders and parties to represent the Russian interest in European disintegration; the digital and televisual penetration of public discourse to sow distrust of the EU; the recruitment of extreme nationalists and fascists for public promotion of Eurasia; and the endorsement of separatism of all kinds.

Putin befriended and supported European politicians who were willing to defend Russian interests. One was Gerhard Schröder, the retired German chancellor, who was in the employ of the Russian gas company Gazprom. A second was Miloš Zeman, elected president of the Czech Republic in 2013 after a campaign partly financed by the Russian oil company Lukoil, and reelected in 2018 after a campaign financed by unknown sources. A third was Silvio Berlusconi, who shared vacations with Putin before and after leaving the office of Italian prime minister in 2011. In August 2013, Berlusconi was convicted of tax fraud and banned from public office until 2019. Putin suggested that Berlusconi’s true problem was the persecution of heterosexuals: “If he were gay, no one would ever lay a finger on him.” Here Putin was enunciating a basic principle of his Eurasian civilization: when the subject is inequality, change it to sexuality. In 2018, Berlusconi began a political comeback.

In the post-communist east European member states of the European Union, such as the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Poland, Russia financed and organized internet discussion outlets to cast doubt on the value of EU membership. These sites purported to provide news on various themes but in every case suggested that the EU was decadent or unsafe. In the larger west European media markets, the international English-, Spanish-, German-, and French-language television network RT was more important. RT became the media home of European politicians who opposed the EU, such as Nigel Farage of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and Marine Le Pen of the Front National in France.

Farage and Le Pen proposed a return to a nonexistent past, when Europeans lived in nation-states without immigrants. They were eternity politicians, urging their fellow citizens to reconsider the 1930s as a golden age. Both Great Britain and France had been maritime empires that, as their colonies won independence, joined a European integration project. Never in modern history was either country a nation-state separated from the world. Thanks to the fable of the wise nation, their citizens generally did not understand their own history, and so did not appreciate the stakes of the debate about EU membership. Because Britain and France had no modern history as nation-states, an exit from the European Union would be a step into the unknown rather than the comfortable homecoming promised by nationalism. It would mean joining Russia as the remnant state of a European empire beyond the reach of European integration. Thus Farage and Le Pen were natural partners for a Russia whose approach to history was annihilation.

In 2013, a preoccupation with gay sex brought together Russian and French politicians of eternity. That May, the French parliament extended rights to same-sex couples. Marine Le Pen and her Front National then joined Russian activists to resist what they characterized as a global sodomite conspiracy. In June, Le Pen visited Russia and enthusiastically joined in Russia’s new campaign for “civilization.” She advanced the Russian argument that gay rights were the sharp end of a global neoliberal conspiracy against innocent nations. In her words, “homophilia is one of the elements of globalization,” and Russia and France must together resist “a new international empire infected by the virus of commercialization.” That particular turn of phrase was a gesture to the belief, common among Russian nationalists, that Russians were too innocent to have contracted AIDS, and that therefore its presence in Russia was a result of biological warfare. Le Pen was happy to agree that Russians were the victim of a “new cold war that the EU is carrying out against Russia.” Aymeric Chauprade, her advisor on foreign policy, promised his Russian audience that the Front National would destroy the European Union if it came to power.

At that same moment, a few reliable Americans were also invited to defend Russia’s new gender politics. RT interviewed Richard Spencer, the leading American white supremacist, on the question of American-Russian relations. As it happened, Spencer was married to Nina Kouprianova, Dugin’s translator. Since Spencer admired Putin and believed that Russia was “the sole white power in the world,” it was not surprising that he was quick to blame the Obama administration for starting a “cold war” over Russia’s anti-sodomy campaign. Three years later, Spencer would lead his followers in a modified Nazi chant: “hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory.”

As it happened, Donald Trump was the second high-profile American to support Putin that summer, during the vulnerable moment when official Russia claimed for itself the role of protector of heterosexuality. Trump was in the midst of a long campaign to delegitimize the president of his own country by claiming, falsely, that Barack Obama had not been born in the United States. RT tried to make this notion plausible. Trump was eager, however, to flatter the president of another country. On June 18, 2013, Trump wondered in a tweet whether Putin “will become my new best friend?”

Trump’s contribution to global heterosexuality was to bring a beauty pageant to the Moscow suburbs, or rather to look on as Russians did so. In principle he was the organizer; in fact he was paid twenty million dollars to oversee the work of his Russian colleagues. This was a pattern of relations between Russians and Trump that was by then long established: Trump was paid so that his name could assist Russians who knew something about money and power. Just a few weeks earlier, in April 2013, the FBI had arrested twenty-nine men suspected of running two gambling rings inside Trump Tower. According to investigators, the operation was overseen by Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, a Russian citizen who also ran a money-laundering operation from a condo directly under Trump’s own. As the FBI searched for him, Tokhtakhounov attended the Miss Universe pageant and sat a few seats away from Trump. (The United States attorney who had authorized the Trump Tower raid was Preet Bharara. Upon becoming president, Trump fired Bharara.)

The Russian property developer Aras Agalarov was Trump’s partner in bringing the beauty pageant to Russia. Agalarov, whose father-in-law had been KGB chief in Soviet Azerbaijan, was an oligarch who specialized in relations with other oligarchs. He built shopping malls, gated communities, and, later, two soccer stadiums for Putin to accommodate the 2018 World Cup. He did the work for the Miss Universe pageant: it was hosted on his property, his wife was a judge, his son sang. Trump said that during the pageant he “was with all the top people.” Be that as it may, his relationship with the Agalarov family continued. Trump sent Agalarov’s son, the pop star Emin, a video greeting on his birthday. The Agalarov family offered its help when Trump decided to run for president. Among the many instances of contact between the Trump campaign and prominent Russians was a meeting in Trump Tower in June 2016, in which a Russian lawyer, briefed by the chief prosecutor of the Russian Federation, offered the Trump campaign materials about Hillary Clinton. It was the Agalarov family that initiated the contact and brought the group together. When Donald Trump Jr. heard of the possibility of cooperating with a foreign power against the Clinton campaign, he replied, “I love it.”

The love began that summer of 2013. Agalarov was awarded the Order of Honor from Putin right before the Miss Universe pageant was held. On the day when Trump wondered if Putin would become his “new best friend,” Le Pen was touring the Russian parliament. In the years to come, Le Pen and Trump would each support the other’s aspirations to the presidency. Their 2013 visits to Moscow, superficially about homosexuality and heterosexuality, deepened political and financial debts to Russia. In late 2013 and early 2014, both Marine Le Pen and her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of her party, announced that the Front National was funded by Russia. A mediator in the financial transactions between Russia and the Front National was Aymeric Chauprade. Jean-Marie Le Pen, a beneficiary of a Russian loan, said that Chauprade was allowed to borrow 400,000 euros as a reward for his services.

Although the Front National was pleased to join the Kremlin in its anti-sodomy campaign, its major issue at home in France was immigration and Islam. Accordingly, actors in Russia tried to drive French voters towards the Front National by spreading fear of Islamist terrorism. In April 2015, Russian hackers took over the transmission of a French television station, pretended to be the Islamist terrorist group ISIS, and then broadcast a message designed to frighten French voters. That November, when 130 people were killed and 368 injured in a real terrorist attack in Paris, Prokhanov predicted that terrorism would drive Europe towards fascism and Russia.

In the 2017 French presidential campaign, Marine Le Pen praised her patron Putin. She finished second in the first round of elections that April, defeating every candidate from France’s traditional parties. Her opponent in the second round was Emmanuel Macron, whom Russian propaganda insinuated was the gay candidate of the “gay lobby.” In the second round, Le Pen received 34% of the ballots. Though she lost to Macron, she did better than any other far Right candidate in the history of postwar France.

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To support the Front National was to attack the European Union. France was, after Germany, the EU’s most important member, and Le Pen the EU’s most powerful critic. In 2013, Russia’s financing of the Front National seemed much more likely to alter the future of the EU than its support of Nigel Farage and “Brexit,” his project to remove Britain from the European Union. Farage, like Le Pen, Spencer, and Trump, supported Putin during his turn to Eurasia. On July 8, 2013, Farage claimed on RT that the “European project is actually beginning to die.”

The first order of business for Russian foreign policy in the United Kingdom was actually Scottish separatism. The Scottish National Party was urging Scots to vote for independence in a referendum. In the weeks before it was held on September 18, 2014, Russian media falsely suggested that Scotland would lose its health service and its football team if it remained in Great Britain. After a majority of Scottish voters elected to remain in the United Kingdom, videos appeared on the internet that seemed to cast doubt about the validity of the vote. One of them showed actual vote rigging in Russia, presented as Scotland. These videos were then promoted over Twitter by accounts based in Russia. Then a Russian official proclaimed that the result “was a total falsification.” Although no actual irregularities were reported, roughly a third of Scottish voters gained the impression that something fraudulent had taken place. It would have been a victory for Russia had Scotland left the United Kingdom; but it was also a victory for Russia if the inhabitants of the United Kingdom came to distrust their institutions. After the Conservative Party won the May 2015 general election in the United Kingdom, RT published an opinion piece on its website claiming that the British electoral system was rigged.

Although Britain’s Conservative Party could form a government by itself after those elections, it was divided on the issue of Britain’s membership in the European Union. In order to end the intra-party dispute, Prime Minister David Cameron agreed to a non-binding national referendum on the question. This was extremely good news for Moscow, although it was not entirely a surprise. Russia had been preparing for such a possibility for some time. In 2012, Russian intelligence had founded, in Britain, a front organization called the Conservative Friends of Russia. One of its founding members, the British lobbyist Matthew Elliott, served as the chief executive of Vote Leave, the official organization making the case for a British exit from the EU. Nigel Farage, leader of the political party founded on the program of leaving the EU, kept appearing on RT, and expressed his admiration for Putin. One of his senior staffers took part in a Russian smear campaign against the president of Lithuania, who had criticized Putin.

All of the major Russian television channels, including RT, supported a vote to leave the EU in the weeks before the June 23, 2016, poll. A persuasion campaign on the internet, although unnoticed at the time, was probably more important. Russian internet trolls, live people who participated in exchanges with British voters, and Russian Twitter bots, computer programs that sent out millions of targeted messages, engaged massively on behalf of the Leave campaign. Four hundred and nineteen Twitter accounts that posted on Brexit were localized to Russia’s Internet Research Agency—later, every single one of them would also post on behalf of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. About a third of the discussion of Brexit on Twitter was generated by bots—and more than 90% of the bots tweeting political material were not located in the United Kingdom. Britons who considered their choices had no idea at the time that they were reading material disseminated by bots, nor that the bots were part of a Russian foreign policy to weaken their country. The margin of the vote was 52% for leaving and 48% for staying.

This time, no Russian voice questioned the result, presumably since the voting had gone the way Moscow had wished. Brexit was a triumph for Russian foreign policy, and a sign that a cyber campaign directed from Moscow could change reality.

For some time, Russian politicians had been urging Britain to separate from the European Union. In 2015 Konstantin Kosachev, the chairman of the international affairs committee of the Duma, had instructed the British about the “myth” that the European Union was “infallible and invulnerable.” After the referendum, Vladimir Putin provided a soothing argument in favor of the disintegration of the EU: that the British had been exploited by others. In fact, many of the districts of Great Britain most heavily subsidized by the EU voted to leave it. Putin gently supported the misunderstandings and prejudices that led to things falling apart: “No one wants to feed and subsidize weaker economies, support other states, whole peoples—it is an obvious fact.” Moscow had weaponized the fable of the wise nation. In fact, Britain had never been a state that had decided to support others, but a collapsing empire whose statehood was rescued by European integration. Pervyi Kanal, the most important Russian television station, soothingly confirmed the myth that Britain could go it alone because it had always done so: “For this nation it is important that none of its alliances or commitments are binding.” Under the mistaken impression that they had a history as a nation-state, the British (the English, mainly) voted themselves into an abyss where Russia awaited.

Russia’s support of Austrian enemies of the EU was ostentatious. Like Great Britain and France, Austria was the metropole of an old European empire that had joined the integration process. Austria had been the heart of the Habsburg monarchy, and then during the 1920s and 1930s a failed nation-state, then for seven years a part of Nazi Germany. Some of the leaders of its Freiheitliche party were connected by family or ideology (or both) to the Nazi period. This was the case with Johann Gudenus, who studied in Moscow and spoke Russian.

During the 2016 Austrian presidential campaign, the Freiheitliche were negotiating a cooperation agreement with Putin’s party in Russia, apparently in the expectation that their candidate Norbert Hofer would win. He almost did. In April he won the first round of the election. He narrowly lost the second round, which was then repeated after a claim of electoral violations. In December 2016, Hofer lost the second round again. He did take 46% of the total vote, the most a Freiheitliche candidate had received in an Austrian national election.

As in France, Russia’s candidate did not win, but performed far better than would have been expected when Russia’s campaign to destroy the EU began. In December 2016, Freiheitliche leaders flew to Moscow to sign the cooperation agreement they had negotiated with Putin’s political party. In October 2017, the Freiheitliche won 26% in Austria’s parliamentary elections, and then joined a coalition government that December. A far Right party in open partnership with Moscow was helping to govern an EU member.

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Integration or empire? Would Russia’s new Eurasian imperialism destroy the EU? Or would European integration reach territory that had been part of the Soviet Union in 1922? That was the European question of 2013. As Moscow persistently sought that year to destroy the EU, Kyiv was finalizing an association agreement with it. The trade pact was popular in Ukraine: oligarchs wanted access to EU markets; owners of small businesses wanted the rule of law to compete with those oligarchs; students and younger people wanted a European future. Although President Viktor Yanukovych tried hard not to see it, he was facing a choice. If Ukraine signed an association agreement with the EU, it would not be able to join Putin’s Eurasia.

The Eurasianists themselves took a clear position. Dugin had long urged the destruction of Ukraine. Prokhanov had suggested in July 2013 that Yanukovych might have to be removed. In September 2013, Glazyev said that Russia could invade Ukrainian territory if Ukraine did not join Eurasia. In November 2013, Yanukovych failed everyone: he did not sign the completed association agreement, nor did he bring Ukraine into Eurasia. In February 2014, Russia invaded Ukraine. A Russian politics of eternity was engaging a European politics of inevitability. Europeans had little idea what to do: the EU had never been resisted, let alone combated. Few realized that an attack on integration was also an attack on their own fragile states. Moscow was continuing the campaign against the EU on what it believed would be the yielding territory of Ukraine.

Because they failed to understand the stakes of the conflict in Ukraine, Europeans proved to be more vulnerable to Russian attack than Ukrainians. Because Ukrainians were aware that their own state was fragile, many had no trouble seeing the EU as a precondition for a future with law and prosperity. They saw Russia’s intervention as cause for a patriotic revolution, since they understood EU membership as a stage in the construction of a Ukrainian state. Other Europeans had forgotten this connection, and so experienced the political problem posed by Russia’s war in Ukraine as cultural difference. Europeans proved vulnerable to soporific Russian propaganda suggesting that Ukraine’s problems showed its distance from the European mainstream.

The Russian politics of eternity easily found the blindness at the center of the European politics of inevitability. Russians had only to say, as they would in 2014 and 2015, that Ukrainians were not a wise nation, since they had not learned the lessons of the Second World War. Europeans who nodded sagely and did nothing reinforced a basic misunderstanding of their own history, and placed the sovereignty of their own states in jeopardy.

The only escape from the alternatives of inevitability and eternity was history: understanding it or making it. Ukrainians, seeing their situation for what it was, had to do something new.