As for Dugin, who had lost the woman he loved, his son, and his life of intensive open-ended learning, he was bound to look for and find the position that was the opposite of everything. First he drifted into Pamyat (“Memory”), an organization that in the mid-1980s was emerging from the underground. It had long trafficked in antisemitic rhetoric, from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to contemporary world-Zionist-conspiracy theories. Now it allied itself with Gorbachev’s perestroika on the one hand and with an imagined Russian nationalist revival on the other.
