In this engrossing book, Juliette Faure traces the lives and times of a handful of formerly fringe but now lamentably mainstream apologists of the Russian empire: people like the journalist Aleksandr Prokhanov and the philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, and their various acolytes, supporters, and admirers. The purpose of the book is to show how their wild ideas about Russia’s alleged civilizational mission—which, on close reading, entails “saving” Russia and (it goes without saying) the wary world through forceful imposition of reactionary bigotry—have been “co-opted” by the State, helping Vladimir Putin maintain his increasingly repressive hold on power while waging aggressive wars overseas.

Faure finds the sources of this Russian malady in the efforts of certain Soviet conservative intellectuals to “reenchant the state Marxist-Leninist ideology through its spiritualization, in order to maintain a specifically Soviet path to modernity” (29). This marriage of Sputnik and God reflected a degree of (understandable) disillusion with the hollowed-out state ideology, which these Soviet conservatives suspected of being irredeemably polluted with unspiritual Western ideas. Some of these were dissidents. Others were allegedly influential within the Soviet elites. Among the latter, Faure draws attention to one Valerii Skurl