Ten years since the foundation of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR), ten years of the Donbass War. Since the DNR’s secession other breakaway entities, other little Anti-Ukraines, have risen, fallen, subsumed, recognised, unrecognised, reorganised, repopulated, depopulated… Yet through all of it the most steadfast remainder is the paradoxical Donbass aesthetic, at once concrete, distinct, and utterly indeterminant. The cut-up cosmetic of the DNR brings the entirety of Russian civilisational history into a single point; the most intense expression of Russianness located in a territory determined by ambiguity and contestation. Six years ago U/Acc blogger @cockydooody wrote a (since deleted) post titled ‘Tankie Patchwork’ comprising notes towards an investigation of the DNR and Novorossiya (the ‘official’ designation of these fractious Anti-Ukraines), suggesting that the splinter-states represented “a sort of patchwork, a harsh exit”, a Stalinist material incarnation of the NRx ideal of secessionist micropolities. Six years since: the escalation of the Donbass War into the Ukraine War, the death of Darya Dugina, the renegotiation of European supply chains, escalations in Palestine, East Asia, North Africa, South America - all cascading from the zero-point of Novorossiyan exit, of a Tankie Patchwork. I think the concept warrants further investigation and elaboration, which this short post is only a tentative step towards.
To properly address the idea of a Tankie Patchwork it’s necessary to begin with Dugin, but not the Eurasianist Orthodox-Christian Dugin of today, but the young Dugin, in his fascist-punk, Gnostic-Luciferian, avant-gardist era, working as chief theorist of 1990s renegade art-politics sect the National-Bolshevik Party. In his early text ‘The Metaphysics of National Bolshevism’ Dugin expounds the core conceit of the NazBol project as that of a “double criticism”, “Marx viewed from the Right” / “Evola viewed from the Left”. Dugin’s conception of NazBol-ism is as a “sacred alliance of the objective” locked into a cosmic war against Westoxifying subjectivisms. In Putin there came a paradoxical realisation of Dugin’s “double criticism”: it was no longer enough to blend superfascism with Marxism-Leninism, the double criticism of Left-Objectivity and Right-Objectivity, now alchemically combined, had to enter confrontation with and become its enemy. The youthful magickal-anarchist-artistic punk dynamism of the NazBol idea finds its final satisfaction in United Russia. This culmination of Dugin’s double criticism in United Russia, his rebrand as pro-establishment patriot, is also mirrored in the ascendency of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation to ‘junior partner’ status in the Russian government, a ‘loyal opposition’ functioning less to control and dampen the excesses of United Russia than to ramp them up, to accelerate the drive to confrontation with the West, to demarcate, to empower. The KPRF’s origins, as with the NazBols, lie in the early 1990s National Salvation Front (FNS), a nascent ‘sacred alliance’ of Communist conservatives, Russian monarchists, ethno-nationalists, Orthodox-Christian nationalists, ‘Third Position’ fascists, avant-garde artists, etc. The leading anti-Yeltsin force in 1993’s constitutional crisis, FNS became the premise for the majority of contemporary Russia’s radical political projects, both left and right, pro- and anti-government. ’93 as this zero-point of contemporary Russian radicalism puts the ambiguities and contradictions of Donetsk’s ‘sacred alliance’ into a continuity, as a repetition of the violence in ’93 which, in turn, saw itself as repetition of the founding violence of the October Revolution. This most recent repetition occurs on the periphery, at the threshold of Russian civilisation, in the zone of ambiguity and indeterminacy (Україна meaning ‘frontier region’, place of indeterminate demarcation).
Since 2014 the DNR and Novorossiya have acted as Russian proxy not simply in the geopolitical sense of acting in Russia’s interest, but as Russia itself, as holding the ‘essence of Russia’ - this has been the understanding of Russian nationalists for ten years, and since the Special Military Operation this line is now official Kremlin policy: Novorossiya is, in this understanding, the vanguard of Russian civilisation in its entirety, the keeper of the ‘Russian soul’, and the decider of Russia’s destiny. Viewed as repetition this makes the present conflict into the end note of Modern Russia, and the departure point toward an ‘Other Russia’, a post-Modern Russia - “tradition weighs on the minds of men like a nightmare" - Imperial Eagles clasping Hammers & Sickles; golden Kolovrats emblazoned on Soviet victory banners; Stalin standing stalwart with Tsar Alexander; Red Army uniforms adorned with crucifix medals: “We demand contradiction, so that one endpoint may touch the other unmixed.” (Ludwig Derleth). The unrelenting excessive ‘Russianness’ of Donetsk induces a feeling of hyperreality: Novorossiya is a Hyperrossiya, more Russia than Russia, more Soviet than Soviet, more Imperial than Imperial. Signifiers rendered free-floating by both Socialist revolution and Capitalist restoration, of Russia’s pasts and lost futures, are re-formatted, re-imbued with vibrancy and vitality in a struggle to the death; an interim language for the next Russia, the Russia to come, assembled by cut-up - the present Novorossiya is only a placeholder, a bookend for Russia’s modern period.
The breakdown of a central, dominant aesthetic code permits insurgent codes, nomadic aesthetics, diametrically opposed to the sedentary pastoral style of Kiev. If the Donetsk aesthetic is a rapid montage of Russian memory flashing before the eyes at the moment of death, Ukraine’s is that of forgetting, a slipping into dementia: the scrubbing of Soviet monuments and ornamentation, the remodelling of Lenin into Bandera, replacing the Soviet seal on the Motherland statue with the Ukrainian trident… The Ukrainian self-concept post-Maidan is determined by a thoroughly repressive cultural logic, fear toward the risk of life, pastoral self-containment, sedentarism, polar opposite to Donetsk’s nomadic provocation. The old NazBol slogan: “Yes, Death!”, exhilarated acceptance, because its death either way: whatever the result of the present war, modern Russia can’t make it out alive. By assuming the role of vanguard and forcing Russian military involvement Novorossiya has opened up new horizons of state-military formation, the war’s intensification drawing a possible trajectory for the dissolving of the Russian Federation and its reconfiguration into something entirely other, distributed, decentralised Empire born of loyal partisan warriors moving from the periphery into the centre (forewarned in the abortive trenchocratic coup of the Wagner Group). The cascading crises wrought by the Novorossiyan exit have the potential to redefine statehood outright, appearing in the mask of full loyalty to the Sovereign, a radical redetermination of Russian civilisation could be triggered at any moment, to act as model for the emergent counter-hegemony. The theorists of multipolarity thus far haven’t anticipated the possibility of a further, deeper polycentrism, a polycentrism that dissolves its centres; multipolarity as precondition for patchwork: “We must turn from a patchwork of states to the infectious patchwork within the state , a recursive dissolution that leaves not a network of states, but an endless flux in which the state itself disintegrates into the very war that sustains it.” (Vince Garton, Leviathan Rots)
The redetermination of Russian civilisation is to some extent already in effect, in the spectral return of the National Salvation Front via the KPRF: Putin’s semi-complimentary remarks regarding Socialism, the revival of a nostalgic Stalinism, and the rise of the Novorossiyans reveal cracks in the veneer of a supposedly postliberal Russia covertly animated by postcapitalist desire, its realisation coded in the language of a Tankie revanchism. Putin’s concessions to Novorossiya, and to the KPRF, show the slippage which war gives rise to, the coldness of the Sovereign conceding to the passions of his subjects: “Writers don't own their words. Since when do words belong to anybody? ‘Your very own words,’ indeed! And who are you?” (Brion Gysin). In the course of the conflict, a conflict which not only decides the future of counter-hegemony in form but in content as well, the Sovereign’s command of Russia’s historical-cultural memory has already been partially ceded to partisan warriors and border-guardians: it may come to pass that the ‘head’ holding the memorial index of Russia could be decapitated, replaced by insurgent claimants to Russia’s memory, an Acephalic Anti-Leviathan: Let a Thousand Russias Bloom.