Reading, Watching 11.05.23
This Land is Our Land
This is a regular feature for paid subscribers where I write a little about what I’ve recently been reading and/or watching. Hope you enjoy!
An interesting little coda to the series on Black October, the 1993 Russian constitutional crisis and putsch: I found an article called “A Russian version of reactionary modernism: Aleksandr Prokhanov’s ‘spiritualization of technology” by Juliette Faure in the The Journal of Political Ideologies. You might remember that in Part 1 of the series, Prokhanov was introduced as David Duke fan and editor-in-chief of Dyen, the mouthpiece the National Salvation Front, the “red-brown” alliance that took a leading role in the coup attempt. In a perfect conclusion to the coup saga, in 2019, Prokhanov, for many years a marginal figure who was part of a proscribed organization and whose newspaper was banned, presented his vision of the Russian future to the State Duma:
In July 2019, Aleksandr Prokhanov1 was invited to the Russian Parliament, the State Duma, to present his documentary film, ‘Russia – a nation of dream’,2 in front of an audience that included the Chairman of the Duma and all the leaders of the parliamentary groups. The presentation of his movie concluded a one-year tour in the Russian regions, where Prokhanov had shot a series of weekly emissions called ‘In search of the Russian dream’ and broadcasted on the state TV channel Rossiia 24.3 Prokhanov’s conception of the ‘Russian dream’ blends industrial and technological achievements with mystic Orthodox spirituality in service of an imperial authoritarian state.4
Here is the abstract of the whole article, which readers will notice intersects with some of the preoccupations of this newsletter:
In the 1970s, the Soviet journalist and writer Aleksandr Prokhanov (born 1938) sought to initiate a new literary aesthetic based on a syncretic vision of technology and spirituality. While he represented an isolated position in conservative circles during the Soviet Union, his enthusiasm for technological modernity is now commonplace among contemporary Russian conservatives. Prokhanov has managed to evolve from the position of a fringe ideologue at the margins of the public sphere in the 1990s to a public figure whose ideas are circulated on state mass media and co-opted by political authorities since the late 2000s. This article studies the formation and circulation of Prokhanov’s reactionary modernism across the transition from the Soviet Union to post-Soviet Russia. It claims that Prokhanov’s hybrid ideology stems from his dual commitment to an anticonformist intellectual background and a loyalist state patriotism. It argues that, on top of his ability to popularize extremist ideas through their literary aestheticization, Prokhanov has successfully developed the resources of an ideological entrepreneur with leadership capacity and charismatic authority among anti-liberal milieus. In the 2000s, his discourse gained legitimacy, strategic utility and public visibility when these capacities matched a shift in the cultural and political contexts brought about by Vladimir Putin’s presidency.