Filed Under: "The Mysteries of the Century": Post-Truth and Mystical Nazism on Russian TV

"The Mysteries of the Century": Post-Truth and Mystical Nazism on Russian TV

Aired on two of the main state TV channels in 1992-1993, Mysteries of the Century (Tainy veka) featured one of the earliest media appearances of fringe far-right mystical philosopher Alexander Dugin (1962-). The show was also one of the earliest examples of “post-truth” in post-Soviet mainstream media, anticipating a tendency prevalent in the Putin era that followed. The show was technically in the genre of cultural/ historical investigative reporting, except that it was entirely comprised of alternative histories and conspiracy theories. Almost a parody of perestroika’s razoblachenie or unmasking of “top-secret” materials, it included fake or deceptively edited visits to the KGB archives and interviews with self-styled academic experts, former American and Russian spies, and Freemasons. There were also episodes about vampires, secret “psychotronic weapons” allegedly employed by both the KGB and the CIA, and the murder of the Romanov family.

In the main cycle of episodes, the two hosts—Dugin and the journalist Yuri Vorobyovsky—presented what they claimed to be sensational discoveries, drawn from recently unsealed KGB archives, about the mystical undercurrents of Nazism and Ahnenerbe—an SS-administered pseudoscientific institute (1935-1945) tasked with investigating the allegedly ancient origins and intrinsic superiority of the “Aryan race.” The endless chain of far-fetched connections among seemingly unrelated historical events rendered the show’s atmosphere somewhat hallucinatory, as did its audio backing of repetitive and alienating jaw harp sounds and chanted mantras.

The excerpt in this artifact, drawn from a 1992 episode titled “Mysticism of the Reich: The Enigma of the Green Dragon [Mistika Reikha: taina zelenogo drakona],” exemplifies the dark mysticism, pseudoscience, and improbable conspiracy theories that animated Dugin and Vorobyovsky’s show. In it, Vorobyovsky sits in a dark room, a green light projected onto his face and hands, placing cards with “mysterious,” esoteric symbols on a table. “Every episode of Tainy veka,” he intones, “raises new questions.” The “missing card” in his deck may belong to a secret Japanese group called “The Society of the Green Dragon,” whose members included Karl Haushofer, a theorist of German expansionism and an associate of Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess. Meanwhile, the Russian mystic Grigory Rasputin, Vorobyovsky explains, was a German spy who received messages from Stockholm signed in green ink; and, in 1930s 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 Koran,” and always kept his favorite green pen on his desk. The Tsarina Aleksandra Fedorovna, wife of Tsar Nicholas II, used to draw swastikas in her correspondence with the Tibetan healer Petr Badmaev. The mystical “crazy Baron” Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, a commander in the White Army known for his ruthlessness, used to decorate his soldiers’ epaulets with a swastika… and so on and so forth.

The episode resembles a dark version of Sergei Kuryokhin’s 1991 Lenin-Mushroom TV prank. While following the same shimmering or shifting stiob-logic, it overlays it with an additional patina of mystery and pseudo-academic solemnity. In the next sequence, Dugin, as if revealing the show’s surreal essence, 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,” since “if it exists in people’s consciousness” as “a sociological fact, as a model used to understand what is happening,” the conspiracy is “already real.”

Tainy veka exploits the thirst for truth, mystery, and transgression widespread in the late-Soviet and early post-Soviet periods. Like sex and violence, Nazism was a key discursive taboo. To violate it was to reject the hypocritical, if well-intentioned, late-Soviet calls for tolerance and equality, as well as the soon-to-be-broken neoliberal promises of prosperity and freedom that dominated early post-Soviet media. Dugin and Vorobyovsky’s show denies the very possibility of truth by mocking the perestroika-era obsession with “unmasking” truths hidden beneath layers of Soviet-sanctioned propaganda and mystification. But it also surreptitiously reclaims the dark, surreal essence of post-Soviet reality as a source of identity. In so doing, the show hints at the possibility of exploiting the radical cynicism and skepticism of the then-dominant neoliberal ethos for reactionary—or, from the point of view of its creators, revolutionary—purposes. Ultimately, Tainy veka seeks to turn “the society of the spectacle” (Guy Debord) against itself.