Black Wine, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism

Charles Clover

Yale University Press, [no price indicated]

POLITICS watchers – or, rather, listeners – become sensitised to what are called “dog-whistle” messages in major speeches. These are rarely substantive declarations of policy but occur as high-frequency overtones, subliminal messages addressed to small coteries and interest groups. So when in December 2012 Vladimir Putin dropped a solitary reference to passionarnost into his annual address to the federal assembly, there was a quiet clink of dropping pennies in all the rooms – some in Moscow, some in Washington or Langley – where the Russian president’s enigmatic motives and plans are scried.

That dark glass has cleared steadily during Putin’s second term. The war against Georgia and the naked annexation of the Crimea are the fulfilment of a strange political philosophy that has roots in Russian poetry and occult philosophy as much as in geopolitics. Putin’s selective aggression is simply a confirmation of 2012’s dog whistle, a sign that he has aligned himself, with the totalising energy that is typical of Russian culture and politics, with a faith in the mystical destiny of “Eurasia” (and if the name has an Orwellian ring, that is hardly incidental). In his St George’s Hall speech, Putin also namechecked the “historian” Lev Gumilev, the son of poet Anna Akhmatova (who once described him as her “horror”). The quotes are needed because Gumilev’s brand of history borders on Game of Thrones-style fiction, veering into science fiction when he argues that the passions that hold a nation together and allowed an unsophisticated Russian horde to overcome the ideology and technological supremacy of Nazi Germany come from cosmic radiation and “bioenergy”.

Gumilev comes along at the end of Soviet history proper, offering a mythic version of the Russian past and the Golden Horde that promised to fill the vacuum left by the retreat of communism. Gumnilev’s myth-making looked back in turn to the linguistic and philological theories around the time of the revolution by the aristocratic Nikolay Trubetskoy and his collaborator Roman Jakobson.

In a blend of universalist grammar and politics reminiscent of Chomsky’s, though with an opposite tendency, they suggest that the deepest roots of language help form a “symphonic personality” that guides a culture. These men are among the co-founders of what is recognised as structuralism and ultimately as post-modernism, which is an important clue to the true nature of contemporary Russian politics where ideas have a power in inverse ratio to their credibility. Around Putin there has gathered a strange coalition of mystics, national fascists, new-fangled historians and old-fashioned thugs, all of whom present a curious disconnect between public persona and private nature.

Among those whispering in Putin’s ear, along with his confessor Father Tikhon, is a former pop singer and anti-communist dissident called Aleksandr Dugin, who has forged an intellectual alliance with the Nouvelle Droite in France and whose political platform is the recreation of the Russian Empire. To give a sense of what kind of man Dugin is, it’s worth adding to Clover’s account that he is an enthusiastic supporter of Donald Trump for the American presidency because Trump seems the likeliest to deliver the all-out world war that will deliver the “end of times” and the rise of the new Eurasian entity. Gulp and, indeed, gulp.

Clover’s despatches will be well known to readers of the Financial Times. He is a political journalist in the Timothy Garton Ash mould: an unfoolable insider who understood how ideas and not just circumstances drive history. He misses a trick in overlooking other Russian attitudes to East/West relations, like the Stalin-era cultural commissar Lunacharsky’s insistence that the Bolshevik Revolution was an episode in the wider unfolding of the European Enlightenment and not the beginning of “rule of the East” as the Surrealists insisted. How far we’ve come! That is precisely the dark promise of the Eurasianists. You don’t have to be a reader of foreign affairs to recognise that while the present anti-jihadist struggle has been a major priority for three or four American administrations, Russia is always the primary enemy.

Clover is as clear-sighted and sceptical as his subjects are obsessively totalitarian but he shares one quality with Gumilev: an unfailing readability; however frightening the message, one wants to read on to the last whistle.