An episode from the TV program “Tainy veka” (The mysteries of the century), hosted by Iurii Vorobevskii and Aleksandr Dugin. One of the first examples of post-truth on Russian television.
Post-Soviet
1992-3
Broadcasted on two of the main state TV channels in 1992-1993, Tainy veka (The mysteries of the century), was one of the earliest appearances of the fringe far right mystical philosopher Aleksandr Dugin and arguably one of the earliest examples of “post-truth” in post-Soviet mainstream media, anticipating a tendency that would become predominant during the Putin era. The show belonged, formally, to the genre of cultural/historical investigative reporting, but was entirely made up of alternative histories and conspiracy theories. It was almost a parody of perestroika’s razoblachenie or unmasking of “top secret” materials, with fake or deceivingly edited visits to the KGB archives and interviews to self-styled academic experts, former American and Russian spies, and Freemasons. It included episodes about vampires, secret “psychotronic weapons” employed by both the KGB and the CIA, and the murder of the Romanov family. In the main cycle of episodes, the host, Iurii Vorobevskii, and Dugin presented what they claimed to be sensational discoveries about the mystical undercurrents of Nazism and Ahnenerbe—the pseudoscientific archeological society tasked to prove and support the ancient origins and intrinsic superiority of the Aryan race—from the recently unsealed KGB archives. The show’s atmosphere was somewhat hallucinatory—with repetitive and alienating jaw harp sounds and mantra, and an endless chain of far-fetched connections between seemingly unrelated historical events. The artifact presented here is an example of this dark mysticism, pseudoscience, and improbable conspiracy theories: an excerpt from the episode “Mistika Reikha: taina zelenogo drakona” (The mysticism of the Reich: the mystery of the green dragon). In it, Vorobevskii sits in a dark room, with a green light projected on his face and hands, placing cards with “mysterious” esoteric symbols on a table. “With each episode of Tainy veka”—he explains—“more and more questions come up.” The “missing card,” he continues, may be “The Society of the Green Dragon”: Hitler’s deputy Rudolph Hess said that the theorist of German expansionism, Karl Hausofer, was a magician, and Hausofer was a member of “The Secret Society of the Green Dragon”—a Japanese secret society; Rasputin, who was a German spy, used to receive messages from Stockholm, signed in green ink; in the 1930s in Berlin there was “a mysterious man from Tibet who used to wear green gloves”; Heinrich Himmler had a “strange liking” for “the green book of the Quran” and always kept his favorite green pen on his desk; the Tsarina Aleksandra Fedorovna, the wife of Nikolay II, used to draw a swastika in her correspondence with the Tibetan healer Petr Badmaev; the mystical “crazy Baron” Ungern-Sternberg, commander in the White Army known for his ruthlessness, used to decorate the epaulets of his soldiers with a swastika… and so on and so forth. The episode resembles a dark version of the famous Lenin-Mushroom TV prank (Artifact 205) and follows the same shimmering or shifting logic of styob while covering it with an additional patina of mystery and academic solemnity. In the next sequence, as if revealing the show’s surreal essence, Dugin explains that he is perfectly aware of the mystifying nature of all conspiracies, while at the same time arguing that “it doesn’t really matter if [a conspiracy] is real. If it exists in people’s consciousness, if it exists in the social sphere, if it exists as a conspiracy, as a sociological fact, as a model used to understand what is happening, the conspiracy is already real.” In other words, Tainy veka exploits the general thirst for truth, mystery, and transgression that was widespread in the late Soviet and early post-Soviet period. And not unlike sex and violence, Nazism constituted at the time an ultimate discursive taboo to violate as a way of rejecting the well-intended hypocrisy of both Soviet calls for tolerance and equality and the soon-to-be-broken neoliberal promises of prosperity and freedom dominating the post-Soviet media landscape. The show denies the possibility of truth by mocking the perestroika obsession with “unmasking” ultimate truths lying underneath the multiple layers of propaganda and mystification that the Soviet system had produced. But it also surreptitiously reclaims the dark surreal essence of post-Soviet reality as a source of identity and hints at the possibility of exploiting the radical cynicism and skepticism of the dominating neoliberal ethos for reactionary (or, from the point of view of its creators, revolutionary) purposes—i.e., to turn “the society of the spectacle” against itself.
Russia
Dugin, Aleksander (Aleksandr) and Vorobevsky, Yuri
Russia, Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany
“Tainy veka. Misteriia drakona.” Pervyi kanal, Chetvertyi kanal. 1992-1993 (?).