I pretend to be obsessed with Russian history and social movements, but this volume has been sitting on my shelf for the past year and I still haven't gotten through all of it. When I first started reading about 90's Russia, National Bolshevism, and nationalist movements in general this was exactly the sort of book I wished existed and now it does. Some of Adam Curtis' journalism touches on some of the themes here as well, which for me boil down to: Russian politics are so much more interesting than ours. Not to live through ( though from where I live we seem to be inching our way towards a softer version of 90's Russia which might not be totally fair since I live in Buffalo) but as a political environment to study. For all of our fringe political thinkers and movements, nothing outside of the competition between the boring center right and the boring center left has any depth. We don't have intellectuals forming post-modern extremist movements based on self consciously absurd ideological constructs, just different types of Puritanism with political arms.
Fenghi traces the development of the National Bolshevik Party from its inception in the novels of Limonov and the ideas of Dugin to its breaking into two currents of thought: the pro-Putin Eurasianists and the anti-Putin Other Russia (this is a simplification but that's the quick version of his theme). This is yet another work on Russia that I read (or started to read) over the past year whose contents were given a whole different context by the SMO in Ukraine. Limonov's death also shifts my own focus to questions about what happens to a movement when a charismatic leader dies. There are other literary figures who are still part of or on the fringes of the movement, but Limonov seemed to BE the party during the ideologically empty but politically active post-Dugin years.
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