Pamiat 2.0?

In August 2014, in the middle of the war in Donbas, 76-year-old Aleksandr Prokhanov was filmed aboard a T-95 bomber bearing the emblem of the Izborskii Club. ² Russia has continued the Soviet tradition of naming airplanes after famous national figures or institutions. What is this Izborskii Club, and how did it manage to earn the honor of having one of Russia’s leading military aircraft named after it? Founded at the end of 2012, the Izborskii Club spurred lively debate, with observers, both Russian and foreign, analyzing it as a symbol of the ideological hardening taking place during Putin’s third presidential term. ³ Indeed, the Club argues that the two major catastrophes of twentieth-century Russia – the fall of Tsarism in 1917 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 – resulted from the Russian authorities refusing to recognize a state ideology and being unable to turn doctrinal fragments into a logical whole. The mission of the Club is thus to reopen the “cultural front” and to be “a laboratory where we will elaborate an ideology, an institute to engage in creating a forward-looking theory, a construction site to make an ideological weapon that we will send into combat without delay.” ⁴ For the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, a large group of self-identified nationalists or anti-liberals has united within a single structure with the express objective of influencing ideologically the authorities. The Club can therefore be compared with Pamiat, the cadres’ school of nationalism during the perestroika years – yet it probably has engineered fewer new doctrinal products than its famous predecessor. ⁵