Fabrizio Fenghi's book provides a well-researched and evenhanded analytical survey of several figures and schools of Russian radical nationalist writing, art, and activism in the 1990s and 2000s. Fenghi closely examines writer Eduard Limonov (1943–2020) and his National Bolshevik Party, whose members were known as natsboly or limonovtsy, and philosopher Aleksandr Dugin (b. 1962), along with the Eurasian Movement he heads. Also discussed are the works of several creative personalities linked to the NBP and/or Eurasianism peripherally: most prominently, musician Sergei Kurekhin (1954–1996), and artists Timur Novikov (1958–2002) and Aleksei Beliaev–Gintovt (b. 1965). In addition to these main figures, Fenghi's study touches upon their numerous collaborators, acolytes, and followers. While the book's protagonists make for an aesthetically disparate group, they still share a number of common features, namely, their widely recognized talent and influence on their respective creative fields, personal charisma, remarkable organizing and publicity skills, and most importantly, their central or episodic role in the radically nationalist and categorically illiberal segment of Russia's political right. Branded as rabble-rousers and extremists at the dawn of their political careers, the book's subjects (that is, those who lived into the 2010s) wound up enthusiastically supporting Vladimir Putin's government in the course of its annexation of Crimea and conflict with Ukraine and the west.
Beginning his study with Limonov, Fenghi traces how this brilliant writer, international adventurer, and ideologically eclectic but uniformly radical political organizer developed elements of his scandalous literary persona into a minor political party that held considerable appeal for the disaffected youth of the economically ruinous 1990s. Limonov published dozens of books—some dazzling, some forgettable—largely “about himself,” and he also became the hero of the 2011 international bestseller, Emmanuel Carrère's “biographical novel” Limonov (2011). While much has been already said about Limonov the man and the writer, Fenghi's perspective is enriched by his sources and methodology: the scholar interviewed the National Bolsheviks who described to him their lived experience as participants in Limonov's political commune. To illuminate and interpret the Natsbols’ testimonials, Fenghi makes productive use of contemporary anthropological theories of post–Soviet nostalgia and irony.
Dugin co-founded the National Bolshevik Party with Limonov but later broke away from this direct-action group to start his own, more theoretical Eurasian Movement. Fenghi scrutinizes his ideas and demonstrates how this author of “more than fifty-four published books and a myriad of articles” (130) is, first, intellectually steeped in western postmodernist and conservative thought, and, second, has acquired a following among the western far right; Steve Bannon is a fan. Dugin's enormous output, in which he presents his illiberal political utopia, “verges on graphomania” (130), yet Fenghi concludes that “Dugin's countercultural fantasies can be surprisingly thought–provoking. If taken with a grain of salt, they can allow one to productively call into question hegemonic discourses and ideological commonplaces” (154).
In the sections devoted to Kurekhin's multimedia music performance project Pop- mekhanika and Novikov's New Academy of Fine Arts, Fenghi shows how the methods of postmodern pastiche and collage that these artists practiced and promoted creeped ideologically, aesthetically, and at times organizationally toward the nationalist far right. Kurekhin's and Novikov's projects were ended by the tragically premature deaths of both these artists.
Known for his “radical political shimmering” (191), artist Beliaev–Gintovt, Novikov's erstwhile disciple and a current member of the Eurasian Movement, continues to produce stunningly effective visual celebrations of the Soviet totalitarian past and Russian national unity, which can also be read as ironic commentaries on the prevailing institutional discourses of Putinism. Whether his projects, such as the commissioned portraits of the Kadyrov clan that rules Chechnya, should be viewed as conceptualist and ironic or servile and mercenary is a question of lively debate in Russian art circles. Having read Fenghi's study, the reader will be better equipped to fully appreciate this “shimmering.”
This being said, by putting the word “protest” in the book's title and generally stressing the underground and countercultural roots of the phenomena he examines, Fenghi tones down the transformation of many of his subjects from rightwing dissident figures into well-compensated members of the Putinist cultural establishment and purveyors of patriotic propaganda for the Russian state. The reader should be reminded that Limonov worked as a columnist for Russia Today and Izvestia, Dugin frequented state TV as a political commentator and lectured at the Academy of the General Staff, and Beliaev–Gintovt painted the Kadyrovs.
A technical flaw should also be noted: the book's analytical language occasionally turns nonspecific to the point of being imprecise; a more careful editing would have eliminated this problem. Overall, Fenghi's fascinating study will be of great value for both scholars and the general reading public—for anyone interested in post-Soviet Russian culture and politics.
