�TIrnFeature Russia ' s rulers revert to ' Third Rome ' outlook

Over the past months the French media reported extensively about the "Nouvelle Droite" ("New Right") and "National Bolshevism" ideology becoming a major force in post -1991 Russia. Intense concern about a Russian variety of neo-fascism is also expressed elsewhere. Probably the most extensive study on that subject is Walter Laqueur's 1993 book, The Rise of Russian Fascism. Certainly Nouvelle Droite-type ideological and political trends do exist in Russia. But I would advise caution about the strength of the influence they exert. I remember well the intense media campaign in France during the late 1980s about the dangerous rise of the neo-fascist Pamyat group in Russia with their black uniforms and anti-Semitic provocations. But today Pamyat is obviously insignificant, and it never was sig­ nificant. To state this from the outset: I think that the importation of fascist and proto­ fascist ideas into Russia today is not a major factor. The ideologies of Alain de Benoist, Julius Evola, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the German "Conservative Revolution" p'roup of the 1920s, are not and will not be playing a major role in the inevitable and massive political and social dislocations that will occur in Russia in the next two to three years. Indeed, Russia does not need any such ideological imports, because the Russian reservoir of ideologies that "fit" the political require­ ments of the coming years, is already there. A few weeks ago, Lyndon LaRouche pointed to his 1983 prognosis that under certain circumstances, post-communist Russia would tend to slip back into its historically rooted "Third Rome" matrix. How can the Third Rome matrix be defined? Fyodor Dostoevsky provides a useful definition in his Diary of a Writer: "Under no circumstances can a Russian be converted into a real European if he