Dugin leaned over and said: ‘Eduard, your task as a warrior and kshatriya is to lead people; and I am but a priest, magician, Merlin, I have a woman’s role to explain and console.’
In fact, the party was arguably Dugin’s brainchild – the name was his idea, as was the flag: a black hammer and sickle in a white circle on a red background, evoking the Nazi swastika. It was not going to win them any elections, in a country that lost 20 million to Hitler’s fascism; but that was not the NBP’s goal. The official NBP salute was a straight arm raised with a fist, alongside a cry of ‘Da, Smert!’ (Yes! Death!). Inside the group’s headquarters, the highest-ranking party member present was always referred to as the Bunkerführer. The veneer of fascism was very much calculated – it was a bohemian ‘political art project’, in Dugin’s words. He, according to Limonov, ‘seemed to have deciphered and translated the bright shock that Soviet youth experience when they pronounce the initials “SS”’.
The NBP’s ironic stance towards fascism, though, was also a carefully calculated ploy. The salutes, the slogans (‘Stalin, Beria, Gulag!’ was one) were so odd and over the top that they verged on parody. Equating their party with fascist symbols, however, was a pose – pioneered by Dugin – that would come to define Russia’s image of authoritarian rule under Putin in the coming decade. The NBP was a ‘sight gag’ that undercut criticism by making it seem – ever so slightly – as though it was missing the point. Calling the swastika-waving, goose-stepping NBP members ‘fascists’ frankly sounded so odd that no one ever did it, for fear of looking ridiculous. Both men were instinctive haters of conventional wisdom. They loved to shock. And the movement they founded was a mélange of each man’s upbringing: Dugin a product of the overly intellectual Moscow bohemia of the 1980s; Limonov, the pre-AIDS Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1970s transplanted to central Moscow.
—Charles Clover, Black Wind, White Snow, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 225.
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