https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdiLQLEeLUs
An episode from Dugin's political campaign in Saint Petersburg, in which Sergey Kuryokhin and Aleksandr Dugin make fun of liberal democracy (and Yeltsin’s referendum) on Russian TV.
Post-Soviet
1995
Before dying prematurely of a rare heart disease, the multi-faceted experimental musician and performer Sergey Kuryokhin created some scandal by declaring his support for the highly controversial National Bolshevik Party and by embracing “fascism” to protest the fundamental cultural decline that, he claimed, Russia’s transition to liberal democracy had brought about. Kuryokhin was fascinated with Dugin’s dark mysticism and elaborate conspiracy theories, and, as part of his involvement with the NBP, he organized a carnivalesque campaign in support of Dugin’s 1995 candidacy for a seat in the Duma under the enigmatic slogan, Tainoe stanet iavnym (What is concealed will be revealed), which included the staging of a last “demonic” concert of his legendary music collective, Pop-mekhanika, dedicated to the British magician-occultist Aleister Crowley. In the artifact included here, Kuryokhin and Dugin appear on a political talk show as part of their campaign wearing the masks of the Egyptian gods Ibis and Anubis, parodying the empty rhetoric and surreal, ritualistic essence of Russian elections more broadly, with a possible reference to Yeltsin’s infamous 1993 referendum “Yes, yes, no, yes” (see Artifact 39). In the excerpt, they recommend to use a “system” that viewers should use to decide who to vote for: to simplify their decision and get their bearings in the plethora of candidates and parties, voters should simply make two cards with the letters p and kh—standing o stand for plokho and khorosho (bad and good)—and assign them, alternatively to the sets of categories “Capitalism/Market vs. Socialism/Plan” and “West/Cosmopolitanism” vs “Russia/State.” In doing so, Kuryokhin and Dugin were ridiculing the way in which Yeltsin and other proponents of the shock therapy—and mainstream media and the intelligentsia after them—had reduced political differences to a struggle between those who wanted to bring the country back to the darkness of its Soviet past and who would cause its descent into fascism (the proverbial “red-brown plague,” a derogatory label used to discredit Yeltsin’s opponent) and the reformers who were pursuing a capitalist/Western “normalization” of Russia. For both Kuryokhin and Dugin the campaign was part of a radical attempt at merging art and politics. Kuryokhin saw “fascism,” like mass media, as a tool to transform reality through art, and at the same time he identified it with an authentic, romantic, and absolute commitment to an artistic or political project (see Artifact 193). Dugin, a far-right thinker, advocated (in the pages of Limonka and elsewhere) for an alliance between art performance and radical politics in the spirit of French Situationism. It remains unclear whether Kuryokhin’s involvement with right-wing politics was authentic or just one of his elaborate pranks, on the model of his famous “Lenin Was a Mushroom” TV performance: most likely it was both. Dugin’s creative approach to politics, on the other hand, becomes largely indistinguishable from a new form of state propaganda with his later unconditional support of Putin’s regime and his active involvement in the Russian government’s media wars and its repressive apparatus.
Saint Petersburg and Russia
Dugin, Aleksander (Aleksandr) and Kuryokhin (Kurekhin), Sergei
Russia and former Soviet Union
“Politologi Ibis i Anubis (Dugin i Kurekhin). Vybory 1995.” YouTube.