With the collapse of the coup, the vision of a united conservative front capable of dragging the country out of its seemingly interminable crisis suffered a serious set-back. Most of the signatories to 'A Word To The People' who are not in prison have been ostracised and for the most part reduced to the social and political margins of the capital's life. Nevertheless, the 'Word' was not an exercise in futility. It struck a resonant chord right across the country at the time of its publication. And if its signatories were under a cloud of suspicion for a while, even now the skies are clearing. The 'national patriotic movement' promised in the 'Word' has appeared as the National Salvation Front. Its strength is undoubted and its calls for an alternative to the future being mapped out for Russia by President Yeltsin and parliament have found a ready echo amongst many people.
'A Word To The People' was written by Aleksander Prokhanov, a figure who has never been a leader of the conservative movement, but whose presence has always cast its shadow across the path and direction the movement has taken.
At one time, long before he abandoned art for politics, Prokhanov wrote sweet and melodious sketches. Later he shifted to technocratic novels about the army, for which he has already been written into the history of Soviet literature as the 'Nightingale of the General Staff'. For a while, following the coup, he was silenced. But today the 'Nightingale' is again singing patriotic songs and editing his newspaper, 'Den' (The Day).
JJ: Let's begin with 'A Word to the People'. What motivated its creation?
AP: 'A Word to the People' is a manifesto. The political and ideological programme of a movement which encompasses the whole of our patriotic and national state philosophy and politics. This movement demanded the creation of its own structures and a determinate organisational process. And it had to be directed against that process of structuring common to liberal democratic countries. When Eduard Shevardnadze and Alexander Yakovlev began their 'Democratic Reform Movement', they received a huge amount of money to this end. Both money from abroad and roubles. They published memoranda and manifestoes. For the most part they left us patriots and nationalists far behind. To recover ground, we decided to start our own movement, a powerful movement. But before we set about the formation of its structures, its 'organisational cells' in the provinces, regions and republics, and before we called a founding congress, we decided it was necessary to publish an appeal to the people to announce the formation of our movement. That was our starting point.
The appeal itself followed from a co-ordinating meeting which we held about a year before the 'Word' was published. The meeting took place here in Moscow in the House of Unions. I chaired it. All the existing patriotic organisations and representatives of every social strata were there: the intelligentsia, the church, Cossacks, the military, politicians, every type of party imaginable: from the Russian Communist Party to various Liberal Democratic Parties. In other words, it was a show of strength. The next step after this was the appeal. The initiative for writing it came from a small group of people who were all members of the movement's organisational committee. The actual text of 'A Word to the People' was written by me, yours truly.
After the 'Word' we still wanted to publish a series of similarly broad and authoritative documents in which we would have already announced the creation of organisational structures, the unfurling of our flag across the land. But the events in August cut this process short. Now, we have already recovered from the shock, the consequent moral and physical repression, the ostracism, and are getting ready to continue our work. 'A Word to the People' is as relevant now as it was then. And we shall develop its ideas.
JJ: How do you explain the fact that certain persons who signed the 'Word' - Valentin Varennikov, Alexander Tizyakov and Vasilii Starodubtsev - are now in prison following the coup?
AP: Insofar as the ideology of our movement is the ideology of a great power, the Union, an ideology of patriotism opposed to the dismemberment of the USSR and the removal of Russia from the political scene, then we are a movement of nationalists. Naturally, amongst us were found and still are to be found prominent industrialists from the state sector, people connected with the agrarian complex and eminent representatives of the army and defence ministry. And there is nothing surprising at all in the fact that people such as these put their signatures to our manifesto. Varennikov, for example, the cream, the pride of our army. It made us feel proud to see his signature beside ours on the 'Word'. And we were surprised and bitter that General Gromov who was Varennikov's comrade-in-arms in Afghanistan and who also signed our letter, in the end lost his nerve...
JJ: You mean his failure to take part in the coup?
AP: I don't know whether Gromov was connected with these events. I don't have any contact with him. But Varennikov, of course, he was in charge of the army. Let's not call what happened a 'coup', let's talk about the events of mid-August. Let the investigation, the trial reach its verdict before we call these people criminals or heroes. In any case, we won't be in a hurry to say whether they really are criminals.
JJ: Are the majority of those who signed the 'Word' your personal friends?
AP: Well, I know some of them well. Others, I would only call my comrades in the patriotic movement. Take Eduard Volodin. He is a close friend of mine. We often see each other, discuss our ideas, share a bottle of wine occasionally. There are my friends from the literary and cultural world, Yurii Bondarev and Valentin Rasputin, both writers, and the sculptor, Vyacheslav Klykov. I have a close relationship with them. Or Gennadii Zyuganov, a member of the Communist Party's Politburo, he's also close to me, not only age-wise, but in terms of our temperaments and ways of seeing things. Although he is a communist and a man of the structure, while I am absolutely not a Party person, more of a Bohemian. I'm also very fond of Varennikov. But since we are more or less different people, occupying quite different strata, then I can't really say we are friends. However, I have known him for a long time. We met each other originally in Afghanistan, during the war. He rendered me a number of services. And I helped him, both morally and I might add, politically.
As for the rest, we're no more than nodding acquaintances. But you're undoubtedly interested in those who were arrested in connection with the Emergency Committee. Alexander Tizyakov, I have only met him a few times. I can't say that we're close. But I do know that he is a prominent industrialist and nationalist. I was impressed by his conception of the role of the state sector in the reforms and the role of the military-industrial complex in integration with the West. He felt, and I would hope still feels, that the military industrial complex is the repository of our potential, of our technical ideology, of the best of everything that Soviet civilisation has produced. And of course he was devastated by the collapse and destruction of this potential.
Vasilii Starodubtsev was another I hardly knew. I only ever saw him in passing. I'm not sure what makes him tick. But I do know that he is a very experienced farmer, an experienced politician, and now, after the fact, I take my hat off to him.
JJ: As I understand it, you're also being connected with Varennikov in respect to a trip you both made to the northern nuclear testing ground at Novaya Zemlya around about the time the 'Word' was published.
AP: No, Varennikov wasn't there. I was invited to this meeting by Oleg Dmitrievich Baklanov. He is also under arrest at present. Mikhail Moiseev, chief of the General Staff, also went with us, as did Chernavin, the Commander of the Black Sea Fleet [who was removed from his post following the coup] and a number of other Generals, engineers, chemists, atomic scientists and members of the military. It was a kind of experts' working holiday on our northern nuclear testing ground, since our southern testing ground at Semipalatinsk [in Kazakhstan] had been closed. If a country has a nuclear arsenal, then you have to know its state of readiness and test the nuclear warheads. And this trip was made with the idea of enlarging and upgrading the northern testing ground. I was there as a person who is interested in problems of the military industrial complex and defence. I am writing a novel about contemporary military technology. Baklanov knew of this and invited me along. He often invited me to accompany him on his trips.
There was no rehearsal or preparation for a coup there. This is the sort of thing about which tabloid journalists speculate. But to be honest, in the last weeks before the events of August, I felt, and obviously it wasn't only me, many people sensed a sort of neuralgia, that all the political forces had reached a dead end. And convulsions had set in, convulsions resulting from paralysis. That is, everything had come to a nervous halt. But this paralysis was fettering enormous forces. And we could sense that something was happening. That is, I knew for a fact that there were two conspiracies at work. Two conspiracies of a sort. As though two underground tunnels being dug were close to running into one another head on. We sensed this as some sort of dull rumbling. And as someone who was working with people who were involved in their own secret affairs, I could not but feel that something was going on. But what exactly it was, I could not work out.
Unfortunately for me, I was not initiated into all of this. Perhaps had I been written into this process, had some of the cards with which they were playing been shown to me, I would feel myself the richer as a writer, an artist.
JJ: But why do you speak of two conspiracies?
AP: A military coup is a theme which has not been out of the papers for the last year and a half. Both the liberal papers and our own. The air was rich with it. The figure of Pinochet was the most overused stereotype in all our liberal papers. For our part, in our paper we were looking at the concept of a transitional period and kept coming back to the experience of Taiwan, South Korea, Chile too, Turkey... And I don't rule out a state of emergency being introduced even now, by Yeltsin. No one should have to live in a country where they'll murder you in your own front yard, where the last power stations are grinding to a halt, where soon there won't be any electricity and where, at the same time, the only politics is a politics of ongoing collapse. Power has to be stabilised.
I am talking here about real conspiracies, real combinations of people, personalities and tendencies. My feeling is that there weren't even two conspiracies, but three. One was terribly gloomy. We'll call it the conspiracy of the conservatives. On a collision course with this, of course, was the conspiracy of the democrats since the democrats had a burning need to snatch away from the conservatives their main structures: the army, the KGB, industry. But it was proving impossible to do this by parliamentary methods. The best ways and means were being looked at for neutralising these structures without civil war, strife or catastrophe. Whereas the third conspiracy was the conspiracy of the advisers who knew about both the first and second conspiracies. There is a concept known as countermining. It refers to when you dig one passage under a fortress while your enemy digs a second passage from inside the fortress to meet you. When the first set of tunnellers set their charges inside the tunnel and get ready to blow up the walls of the fortress, a second mine in the second tunnel blows them to bits. The first conspiracy, that's the first tunnel. They had already set their powder, their charges, they were just about to set it all off when the second tunnel, the second group of conspirators played their trump card and with several minutes up their sleeve blew the first tunnel to bits.
But the conspiracy of the advisers knew exactly the movement and the tempo of both the first and second set of tunnellers. They synchronised these events and predetermined who would blow whom up. The victors were those who destroyed the people they wanted to. Incidentally it was a strange victory. They won without any raids and without any bombs. Everything was over in a couple of days. It wasn't tanks that won, or the special forces, or the airborne troops. It was a psychological weapon, an element of the weapon of organisation. At least that's how I see what happened. And now I have begun to write a novel about exactly these events. It's called 'The Last Soldier of the Empire'. It will have my model of the three conspiracies, the atmosphere of those days in Moscow leading up to August, the behaviour of our political leaders, the neuralgia of the city. And of course, all my real and existential experience.
JJ: I'd like to go back if you don't mind to an earlier point. You want to say that the problem of a state of emergency was in no way discussed at Novaya Zemlya?
AP: No. Though of course whenever you get politicians and the military talking about things, occasionally things like the imminent inevitability of a state of emergency will crop up. But you have to remember that our politicians at the top are very careful people. They don't trust one another at all. And you won't find them discussing this sort of thing amongst themselves, not even over a glass of vodka. And it would have been stupid for them to all go to Novaya Zemlya to discuss this sort of thing. A trip like that would hardly have been a cover. More likely it would have blown their cover. If people wanted to talk about a conspiracy then they're not likely to go to Novaya Zemlya to do it, they're more likely to go to a cinema and sit there in the back row and whisper about it amongst themselves under the noise of the film.
JJ: But before these events did you ever discuss with anyone what to do about Gorbachev?
AP: No. But I cannot stand the man. I consider Gorbachev a synonym for evil, the man who destroyed a superpower, one of our most hated figures. Now everyone hates him, both the left and the right. So much hostility to him had, of course, to accumulate somewhere. Party organisations across the country had been meeting through the summer. All of them were demanding his resignation. Everyone wanted to get rid of him as General Secretary, as a betrayer, the man who had destroyed the party. Unfortunately they never managed to get it done. And Gorbachev really did destroy this party and then he renounced his position as General Secretary. The Captain failed in his duty and deserted a ship he had driven onto the rocks.
JJ: And how did you feel when the Emergency Committee removed him from power?
AP: I wasn't in the least surprised. And even today I remain convinced that the main active figure in the coup was Gorbachev. Most likely he promised a group of conservatives his participation in the event of something happening, and in one way or another provoked them into acting. They had to have come to some kind of an agreement. Gorbachev with his liberal image in the West would not have found it all that easy to declare a state of emergency. So he entrusted this to his confederates, his closest advisers, so that when the dirty work was done, he could return to power and show the world once again how his heart had softened and how passions would not get the better of him. Once again, he would be the conciliator. They believed him and set about doing their dirty work. But then, at the last moment, he turned on them and joined forces with Yeltsin.
That's why I talk about the following model: conservatives, democrats, and, roughly speaking, Georgi Shakhnazarov [a Gorbachev confindante] and Alexander Yakovlev, through whom Gorbachev made contact with Yeltsin. Gorbachev sent his people, the coup leaders, to Moscow to lay the ground work for the state of emergency, while he himself remained in Foros. At a moment's notice he then informed Yeltsin through Shakhnazarov who was holidaying nearby. In other words he betrayed all their plans to the democrats. That explains why Yeltsin's people were prepared for the situation when it occurred. The more so in that these people are all serious politicians. They're surrounded by their spies and intelligence gathering networks. They play out all these scenarios on their computers.
I remember I wasn't in the least surprised when on the morning of either the 21st or 22nd, there was a short report on the TV about George Bush turning on his computer when he heard what had happened here, putting in one of his programmes and then modelling his reaction according to what it showed. The variant we have been discussing was undoubtedly loaded into Yeltsin's computer and they worked out their plans according to it.
JJ: Do you consider that the investigation into the coup being carried out now will support your version?
AP: I am utterly indifferent to this investigation. I'm convinced the investigation will be manipulated, that a huge amount of pressure will be, already is being exerted on it. The tapes of the coup leaders being interrogated that were smuggled out to 'Der Spiegel' and shown on television all over the world are all part of this. The 'Spiegel' tapes are a typical way of creating a generalised myth which will incite public opinion in a way that makes it impossible for the verdict of the court to contradict it. This is the only way a verdict can be brought in which won't arouse any opposition. The whole investigation is a filthy business.
JJ: Which suggests that the coup leaders were fools to trust Gorbachev, if he lied to them and organised the whole thing.
AP: Why fools? They weren't fools. They were proceeding out of their corporate ethic, proceeding from their interrelationship: 'Gorbachev and them'. Gorbachev was the one who brought them all in, in the first place. I know these people, Yazov, Varennikov, Baklanov, and I maintain that not one of them, either in their psychological make-up or by way of their personal ambitions, was vying for the leading role in the state. None of them would have thought of themselves without Gorbachev. For this reason, I am utterly convinced that none of them could have become a dictator in the Soviet Union. Not one! They were all on Gorbachev's side. And he sacrificed the lot of them.
Fact is, Gorbachev has sacrificed a lot of people in his time. We're talking about a particular kind of politics here. And we have written about it in our newspaper. A politician creates a situation of two polar opposites, that is, he splits the situation into two parts. For a while he balances between these poles, benefiting from the whole effect of the balancing act, but then he destroys one pole, chucks it on to the scrap heap of history and moves right over to the other pole. Later he splits that pole and goes through the whole process again, getting rid of yet another element. Then there is a determinate historical period with a new doctrine, new slogans, banners, postulates, a new psychology of power. But then he destroys this new structure too. So there is this ongoing shrugging off of stages as they ossify. To my way of thinking, this is one of the most immoral and amoral ways of conducting politics.
JJ: So when do you think Gorbachev cooked this whole thing up, August 18, or earlier?
AP: I don't know. I'm not even interested in knowing. I am an analyst. I am a peacemaker, not a spy.
JJ: How did you personally feel during those days?
AP: I spent the weekend at the dacha. Usually I return to Moscow on Sunday evening. But on the evening of the 18th unfortunately I was almost out of petrol, so I thought I would fill my car up on the morning of the 19th when there wouldn't be anybody at the petrol station. I was just about ready to head off when my neighbour from the adjoining dacha, an old soldier, came running up, flushed with excitement, saying, "Alexander Andreievich, they've removed Gorbachev, there's a military coup, hooray!" I said: "Hooray it is then. I'm off." I grabbed my wife, filled the car with petrol and dodging tanks drove into Moscow. I spent all three days with my colleagues from the editorial office, working on the newspaper. It was a real pity that the Emergency Committee did not give us permission to publish. They allowed a few papers to publish, but ours wasn't one of them. And we'd definitely have published! And what an issue it would have been.
JJ: It's fairly obvious then that you sympathised with the coup leaders.
AP: Sympathised? In general, yes. After all, as I said before, I had friends amongst them. But I was also terribly anxious.
Two years ago, in an article entitled 'The Tragedy of Centralism', I wrote about the algorithm of catastrophe, its phases. I consider that a catastrophe is unavoidable in this geophysical region. Everything that happens at the heart of this collapse once it is underway, including attempts to halt it, will be no more than phases of this catastrophe. So, the whole time I live with this terror of civil war being unleashed. I watch with horror as we creep ever closer to this war. And I know that it will happen. It's already happening! For this reason, along with a feeling of sympathy for these people, I was anxious: now it will begin. The army will split, different armed divisions will face off and start fighting one and so on...
At our paper, which unfortunately did not come out during those days, we prepared a memorandum of Russian writers appealing against a blood-letting. It was an appeal against civil war addressed to the nation. This is the basic fear I and like-minded people share. And it is our modus vivendi, our model of conduct. So stories about me being ready to rush off and join them, to be the Emergency Committee's ideological leader, are a myth. It's a nasty myth which my opponents are spreading.
JJ: But Literaturnaya Gazeta has called 'A Word to the People' the ideological foundation for the coup.
AP: This is a well known form of repression. Literaturnaya Gazeta is parroting the propaganda of the 1930s, when a whole group of writers and artists were branded apologists of the counter-revolution, kulaks, bourgeois ideologists. Sergei Yesenin and Nikolai Klyuev for example, were branded ideologues of the rich peasants as a class and apologists for the uprising of the kulaks. Stalin had them knocked off. A group of prominent engineers were branded ideologists of industrial sabotage. They were knocked off too. And so on. First a rash of denunciations appeared in the press, and then people began to disappear, killed.
And now we have this plethora of liberal democratic writers: Yevgenii Yevtushenko, Yurii Koryakin, Grigorii Baklanov, Yurii Nagibin - I call them our 'nasty democrats' - speaking out in public, demanding our heads, our executions, calling us the 'putschists'. It all simply repeats what our spiritual forefathers went through. Right after the events of August, a gleaming pole axe was being swung over our heads, the cutting edge of its blade coming nearer, but we stood our ground. And now we're no longer even afraid of it, we're just disgusted.
JJ: But surely these liberal writers have their reasons for speaking out like this against you?
AP: Of course, under cover of this storm they have seized the Soviet Writers' Union, its money, equipment, dachas, power, privileges, apartments. Just as when Stalin's political opponents were liquidated and they moved in and occupied their positions, their offices, their houses... It's vile! I don't even want to talk about it.
JJ: But you yourself spoke of your sympathy for the members of the Emergency Committee, several of whose signatures stand alongside yours at the bottom of the 'Word'.
AP: Pushkin was a friend of Pestel's and Trubetskii's, both Decembrists. And in effect he lent ideological support to the Decembrists' uprising [against Tsar Alexander I in 1825]. But he wasn't then connected with those that carried it out.
JJ: Are you comparing yourself with Alexander Pushkin?
AP: That would be too ambitious. But in our first issue after the coup, we published a table of Russian conspiracies beginning in the 17th Century. It lists the conspiracies of the Boyars and the Tsars, the various Bolshevik and communist conspiracies and the conspiracy of the State Emergency Committee today. Above the list is Pushkin's drawing of a scaffold with all the Decembrists hanging and a line he doodled beside the drawing from a poem that he never finished: "And I too could have been hung like a clown." Whenever I think about that line, I always think of myself. I too could have been there amongst them. After all, what did the Decembrists want to do? They wanted to halt the collapse of the empire, the collapse of the state. Which is exactly what we set out to do too. Only we are using ideology, while they used politics.
In general, if it suits you, go ahead and call our newspaper the 'paper of the putschists'. I'm prepared for it, fine, Den is the paper of the coup. But then you have to remember that up to the moment of the August events, Den had only come out sixteen times. Which means sixteen issues of the papers, about sixteen thousand papers in all, against the background of this gigantic radical press, television and radio, managed to promulgate so effective an ideology, so much Thermidorian energy that it swept away all these democratic fronts and drew columns of tanks and Special Forces out onto the streets. The Air Force took to the skies, the fleet to the seas, while submarines slipped out from their bases to patrol the coast of California and every spy satellite in the heavens turned its electronic eye on Moscow. If that's the case, fine, we're the newspaper of the coup.
I've already told you what my attitude was. The main thing was to prevent a blood-bath. I was interviewed by 'Vzglyad', if I remember correctly it was the 21st, and I said: "If everything which has happened, including the blood spilt on the Ring Road, the deaths of those three idiots, if all this means the USSR will hold together and there will be no civil war, then I am for it."
But what about our Constitution? It's been reduced to garbage, a piece of paper! Our Constitution is a folio on which the President lays his hand and lies! That's what sort of Constitution we have! I spit on this Constitution, if it's an excuse for killing my children, my native land! The constitutional will of the people was clear in the March referendum earlier this year when 70% of the people who voted were in favour of the preservation of the USSR. Gorbachev has violated this will. Which means he's the conspirator, he's the one who acted unconstitutionally. That's why I said: "If it means the State will be preserved, then I am for the coup. If the coup unleashes civil war and bloodshed, then of course I am opposed."
JJ: Tell me, do you draw a distinction between being a 'Russian Patriot' and a 'Soviet Patriot'?
AP: It's one and the same thing, because the Russian idea is in its very development the idea of a great state, a great state made up of many component parts. Today, now that the Soviet Union has fallen to pieces, the space in which the Russian idea functions has simply shrunk a bit.
JJ: Hasn't it been for the propagation of this idea that you have been accused of chauvinism?
AP: Huh! What haven't they accused us of!? We're accused of being Russian fascists. Of being militarists. As well as putschists, homosexuals and cannibals. We also go in for ritual slayings. And here, in the editorial offices, when we get a quiet moment during lunch time, we rape women. We've been accused of everything. I'm guilty! I admit that everything they say about us is true. What does it mean to be a chauvinist? What about you, what if I say you're a lesbian, what's your reaction?
JJ: It's all the same to me.
AP: See, and it's all the same to us too.
JJ: Fine, but you do say that the Russian idea and the Soviet idea are one and the same thing. But what about the Ukrainian idea? What about the fifty million people living there and the nuclear weapons stored on Ukrainian territory?
AP: I am a chauvinist. I say that the empire has to be preserved, because the disintegration of the empire would be a catastrophe for all nations which are part of it. And for the world as a whole. This is the sense in which I am a chauvinist.
Look at what is happening. The empire is coming apart. Ukraine has claimed its nuclear weapons for itself. A war is beginning between Russia and the Ukraine over the Crimea, the fleet, the Don Basin and so on. It turns out I was right. It was a mistake to dismember the empire. Its collapse will set off dozens of Chernobyls, hundreds of nuclear warheads will unwittingly be launched on Europe, Moscow, Kiev.
JJ: But what would you do about these Ukrainians who accept neither the Soviet, nor the Russian idea?
AP: I spit on these Ukrainians! On those who don't accept these ideas. Look, in their own time, the Ukrainians, led by Bogdan Khmelnitskii, said: "We are joining Russia." Now they're saying: "We're leaving Russia." Next thing, they'll again be saying they're joining Russia. Then they'll leave again. Right now Lithuania has left. The Tatars want to leave. They'll all just keep walking back and forth.
What if Scotland leaves Great Britain, and Wales comes back, while India begs to become a dominion again?
If I am a statesman, I have to hold on to my state and defend its policies. Because in any nation, in any country, there are groups, factions, which if they gain the upper hand, will dominate every sphere of politics and will bring down any state.
JJ: Then what is this Russian idea?
AP: We would have to be drinking whisky by the bottle, then I could spend till dawn talking about what this Russian idea is. But in a couple of words, the 'Russian Idea' is, well, how can I put it, it's a complex of religious, cultural, moral, psychological, political and geo-political ideas which confer meaning to the ways of being of the Russian people, the Russian nation throughout history. Here we have to look at thousands of ethnic, fundamentalist and geographical questions, including their cosmological component. We are talking here about our attitude to the earth, to institutions of power, forms of the organisation of the economy, military doctrine and so on. It's the whole of a huge and multi-layered philosophy and practice. That's your Russian idea for you. It continues to develop, evolve. In a sense some parts of it are disappearing, while others are appearing for the first time. As for our newspaper, it is an ideological laboratory where we are striving to build a new Russian ideology and formulate the basic categories of this Russian idea in a way which is appropriate for Russian intellectuals.
JJ: And these ideas are closely bound up with the ethnicity of the Russian people?
AP: Of course. It is the ideology of the Russian people. But this people in and of itself is so ethnically diverse, so variegated and devoid of any one tendency or bearing that the Russian idea too is without any one meaning. The Russian idea is not a list of instructions you give your taxi or tank driver. Within the Russian idea there are regions which contradict one another. It contains a lot of paradoxes. There are many internal paradoxes in the Russian people. And here we are not talking about an idea of race, or an idea of ethnicity. On the one hand we are talking about a religious, cosmic idea and on the other, a geopolitical idea.
JJ: But the old Soviet empire worked hard at this idea. So why are the Georgians, the Latvians and Lithuanians running so easily and with so much hatred away from this idea?
AP: The Soviet empire was a quasi-empire which had replaced the Russian empire. In a sense, and on the surface of it, they resemble one another. Both occupied the same territory, both had a centralised form of government. But completely different things went into the one empire in contrast to the other. And it is precisely these communist components getting identified with the Russian components that provokes these anti-communist and anti-Russian sentiments in the republics. For that reason the destruction of the communist components in the empire has also led to the disintegration of the empire itself. The destruction of the Soviet Union is the price that is being paid for the extermination of the communist equation around the world.
But if you go back to 1915, 1916, the beginning of the century, at that time the whole of Kiev spoke Russian and there weren't any anti-Russian sentiments there. Or anti-imperial sentiments for that matter either. What about the Baltics? There was a lot of German influence there and enormous Russian expansion. Both the Estonians and the Finns were peaceful agrarian peoples. Even the very idea of an Estonian nationalism could not have taken root. They lived a care-free life and developed within the bosom of the Russian Empire. Now though, when the communist components have been rooted out and done away with, when the empire has fallen, all these republics have achieved their freedom under nationalist banners; the Estonian idea, the Georgian idea, the Kazakh idea. And only Russia, leaving the empire, has not come forward with a Russian banner, but has raised the flag of internationalism again: common human values, greater America. You have to understand, only one idea has remained underground, the Russian idea. In its place a sinister internationalism is being recreated. All the other republics which are emerging with a nationalist, sovereign sense of themselves in the world will flee from it.
But when the Russian idea breaks through this odious barrier, when 'A Word to the People' is written a second time, it will crush these jaded and loathsome manifestoes of Shevardnadze and Yakovlev and a nationalist government devoted to the national idea will be born in Russia. We shall establish harmony on the territory of Russia alone, which also means the Crimea, Northern Kazakhstan and the River Narva separating Russia from Estonia which was taken in Peter the Great's time. That's the first thing. The second thing is, we won't do it by the bayonet, but through oil, through traditional ties we shall return to this state everything which has been dispersed today.
JJ: Is a powerful state structure necessary for the realisation of this principle or can it be realised through the economy, for example?
AP: Through the economy? No. Because the economy is only one element of social life. In the territory which yesterday was called the Soviet Union, not only are laws of the techno-sphere or economy operating, but also highly complex geo-political motivations which have developed over millenia.
Right now, when everyone is suffering because of everyone else, these motivations are not evident. Once everything settles down a bit, these motivations will again unite us in the same numbers and across the same expanses as we Russians used to occupy before. This is what will unite us, and not the movement of the rouble or the dollar. It will not be the direction of financial currents that will direct our history, but the wind and river currents, the evolution of the mountain ranges and global tendencies. Greater Germany is again moving to the East. China and Japan, again to the sea. Sooner or later, the Kazakhs will have to choose between the expanses of China and us, since soon these billion Chinese will have so ground them down that nothing will remain of the Kazakhs, not even a rat's tail. But they will return, because it was the Russians who gave Kazakhstan its culture, its outlook on life, its economy, its technology, its books, even its writing. I am talking about geo-politics. And the economy is wedded to this.
JJ: Since the overthrow of the State Emergency Committee, we have seen the banning of the Party and the collapse of the state. What do you see in the future? How do you see the future of the country?
AP: I believe the disintegration will continue. It hasn't finished yet. The collapse will continue. Everything that we have seen to date is a phase of the collapse, a serious phase but not the final one. Ahead of us, I see enormous upheavals and destruction. Destruction that no coup or counter-coup or even prayers will halt.
JJ: What about the army?
AP: The army won't be able to stop it either. Even the American army. Our army has been routed, demobilised. It no longer has a political will. It no longer has any conception of itself. Even the Defence Ministry is finished. And it will suffer even further disintegration. Soon the great Russian army will consist of no more than a few regiments. And even they won't be much more than decoration for the parade ground.
This whole process of collapse has to follow its course, continue to its logical end. Like an avalanche which breaks away from the peaks and plunges into the valley. It cannot be halted on the slopes of the mountain. It covers everything. And when it finally comes to rest on the valley floor, pacified, out from under the snow, out from under the ruins, a new philosophy and a new real political practice will arise.
Yeltsin or no Yeltsin, this is all rubbish! We'll see our share of puppets like this on the political stage in the near future: madmen, scum, holy fools, generals. All these people who are still pirouetting on the political stage today are already yesterday's people. And this includes the democrats. They are helpless people whom history will credit in a month or two with the complete destruction of the economy and the state.
New people will appear, like phantoms. These will be the people of the avalanche. And each of them will bring their own offering to the catastrophe. But when the avalanche has settled on the valley floor, then, as I said before, real politicians will rise up out of the ruins. They are here now, amongst us. I know some of them. But the fact that they have yet to make their appearance is their salvation. Anyone who appears now in the bowels of the avalanche and tries to build something is doomed. That's my opinion of what's happening.
Incidentally, there is no point in keeping watch for a second coup. You can sleep in peace. The second coup will come out of nowhere, unannounced.