Aleksandr Prokhanov and Post-Soviet Esotericism
by Edmund Griffiths
Ibidem, £32

DON’T be put off by the title. Edmund Griffiths’s new study Aleksandr Prokhanov and Post-Soviet Esotericism sounds niche – but it is one of the most informative books you could read on modern Russian nationalism.

In Britain he’s unheard of. But Prokhanov is one of Russia’s best-selling novelists and longtime editor of the influential newspaper Zavtra (Tomorrow). He was also the reputed author of 1991’s A Word to the People – signed, among others, by the later Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov – the manifesto for that August’s failed coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, a last-ditch attempt to stop the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The “nightingale of the General Staff,” as he was known even in Soviet times for his devotion to the military, has been a formative influence on what was termed in the 1990s the “patriotic opposition” — a shifting alliance of everyone opposed to the politics of the Yeltsin years, ranging from orthodox communists to Orthodox priests.