RFE/RL’s Russian Service has been reporting steadily in
recent weeks about the inroads that a certain Maksim Kalashnikov has been
making in getting his views on Russia’s future heard at the highest levels in
the Kremlin.
In October, at the personal request of President Dmitry
Medvedev, Kalashnikov laid out his ideas in a long meeting with presidential
chief of staff Sergei Sobyanin. Sobyanin later said he had forwarded
Kalashnikov’s ideas to the Russian Academy of Sciences for its recommendation.
On December 4, Kalashnikov again visited the Kremlin, this
time for a face-to-face with Sobyanin’s deputy, Vladislav Surkov, who oversees
domestic political arrangements. Asked to comment on that meeting by RFE/RL,
Kalashnikov said he wouldn’t talk to “you dogs” and referred our reporter to
his blog.
RFE/RL’s correspondent phoned the presidential press service
to ask about Surkov’s conversation with Kalashnikov and got a classic
run-around. The press service gave the correspondent a number to call and the
gruff-sounding man who answered the phone insisted that all information is
distributed only by the press service. “So they gave you my number,” he said.
“But all our contact with the mass media takes place through our respected and
entirely remarkable press service.”
“I don’t know who Maksim Kalashnikov is,” the bureaucrat
added, “because I only work with papers.” (Interestingly, although Medvedev
mentioned Kalashnikov’s meeting with Sobyanin on television and Sobyanin has
said he forwarded Kalashnikov’s projects to the Academy of Sciences and
Kalashnikov has told RFE/RL that he met with Sobyanin – despite all these things,
a spokesman in Sobyanin’s office told RFE/RL “there was no such meeting.”)
So who is Maksim Kalashnikov? A provocative blogger who has
praise for Hitler and Stalin. A futurologist whose many books envision a
restored Russian empire that seems a lot like a non-ideological Soviet Union
(his 2003 book “Forward To The USSR-2” echoes the reform plans originally
touted by Yury Andropov in the early 1980s). Former RFE/RL analyst Victor
Yasmann wrote about Kalashnikov’s works here, here and here.
Kalashnikov is a leading figure of the Moscow-based
Institute of Dynamic Conservatism (the director of the institute, Andrei
Kobyakov, is best known for his 2003 treatise, “The Sunset Of The Empire Of The
Dollar And The End Of The Pax Americana”). Under his real name, Vladimir
Kucherenko, Kalashnikov is an author of a 2008 manifesto called “The Russian
Doctrine,” a pre-publication version of which was endorsed in 2007 by
then-Metropolitan and now-Patriarch Kirill.
He has blamed the “Jewish wing of the Bolshevik party” for
detaching Ukraine from Russia and said in an interview with RFE/RL that “Josef
Vissarionovich [Stalin], thank God, suffocated that wing.”
In an essay appended to the print edition of “The Russian
Doctrine” and entitled “Russia’s Chance In The 21st century: Breaking Out Of
The Global Time Of Troubles,” Kalashnikov begins with an account of how U.S.
global hegemony in the wake of the end of the Cold War is collapsing. He
compares the situation of the United States today with that of the Soviet Union
in the late 1980s, “losing its zone of vital interests” and undergoing economic
paroxysms. “We are standing on the threshold of incredible events, a historic
collapse…. And the United States does not have the power to stop this.”
Kalashnikov then proceeds to say that this collapse affects
not only the United States, but “the entire white race.” He repeats the “sad
joke” that “in American universities, Russian professors are teaching Chinese
students at the expense of U.S. taxpayers.
But in all this turbulence, Kalashnikov sees an opportunity
for Russia – “Once again God is sending us a great opportunity.” Russia, he
writes, was the first country to enter this new “Time of Troubles,” the first
to be deprived of “a great country (the USSR) and powerful industry.” The first
to feel the effects of “the new barbarism” and to endure the “degradation of
society” and the individual. As a result, he believes Russia can be the first
to emerge from the crisis, while “Europe lies in a profound morass and the
United States simply may not be preserved as a whole country.”
In fact, Kalashnikov’s views in many particulars echo those
of former KGB analyst Igor Panarin, who has made a name for himself predicting
the collapse of the United States (Panarin has found eager audiences among some
conservatives in the United States recently, many of whom applaud his
comparisons between U.S. President Barack Obama and former Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev). In 2006, Panarin’s website published a proposal for the
unification of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan,
and Armenia by 2008. By 2010, according to the plan, the new state would
include Mongolia, Serbia, Macedonia, Greece, and Bulgaria, and by 2014, Turkey,
Syria, Lebanon, North and South Korea, and all of Eastern Europe would have
signed up to join this Eurasian Rus.
“Dynamic conservatism” indeed!
(Kalashnikov and Panarin are part of a general resurgence of
Russian "conservatism" that I wrote about, where I highlighted
the challenges this ideology poses to liberal notions such as the idea that
there are universal human rights.)
Kalashnikov wraps all the geopolitics up in paeans to the
power of advanced technologies (he uses the phrase “nanotechnology” almost as
often as Medvedev himself). Now, it appears, his views have attracted
Medvedev’s attention. It will be interesting to see what emerges when the ideas
of the author of “Forward, Russia!” merge with those of the author of “Forward
To The USSR-2.”
