It is an uneasy task to write a review on a book about Russian conspiracy theories in a time of war in Ukraine. Triggered by the conspiratorial imagination of the Russian top-power echelon, this war is the best example of the extent to which Russian society is saturated with fears of external plots today.
Thanks to previous studies of Russian conspiracy theories, we know a bit more about the cultural, social, and political background of these fears. Keith Livers takes us on a slightly different path: to explore and challenge the conspiratorial frames in the works of Russia's most significant cultural artefacts of the post-Soviet era: Viktor Pelevin's novels and Timur Bekmambetov's films Night Watch and Day Watch. Livers adds to this analysis classic examples of post-Soviet conspiratorial thinking—The Dulles Plan and Aleksandr Prokhanov's novels. This diverse set of cases is a clear illustration that conspiracy theories are not simply tools for crackpots on Russia's far right, whose views Prokhanov represents in the mainstream. One way or another they creep into the Russian cultural mainstream, conquer the imagination of the masses and facilitate the spread of a binary vision of the world between the forces of Good (always represented by Russia) and the evil forces of the outside world (usually represented by the West, or more particular by Americans). Livers's powerful and engaging analysis shows that the uneasy coping with lost greatness can be seen, for instance, in Bekmambetov's fairy tale narratives. At the same time, Pelevin's (anti)conspiratorial novels in fact reveal the most conspiratorial patterns of perceptions of reality that traumatize post-Soviet men and women.
Unfortunately, Livers's focus is not on the most recent examples of conspiratorial thinking: the book's conclusion discusses Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump—the bad bromance that seems to have taken place decades ago (or in fact just five). But clearly in the last five years the Kremlin's elite have gone miles ahead in their belief in plots from the west, and brought the Russian population with them with the help of the well-oiled propaganda machine. Yet, what adds a particular value to the book is its focus on the main actor of Russia's rise to greatness: siloviki, or men of power; former or current intelligence officers that can be found throughout Livers's book.
Looking from today's vantage point at the thirty years of Russian conspiracy culture, it becomes reasonably clear that the diminished human agency that followed the Soviet collapse was compensated by beliefs in warriors of light who will fix the Russian economy, its technology, and return a feeling of self-respect to Russian citizens. With Vladimir Putin at their top, the siloviki were seen to bring stability and order to the chaos unleashed by the collapse of a superpower. As Livers convincingly argues, their portrayal as the Order of Light, the enlightened patriots, brings geopolitics to the dimension of popular literature and thus gets into the head of ordinary Russians. First as a metaphor in the 2000s, these portrayals of power were part of post-modernist performative politics. Later, in the 2010s, performance was replaced by warmongering and weaponization of conspiracy theories as the Kremlin's tool, far from literary technique. Pelevin's irony of the chekists fighting against the mirovaya zakulisa (the global conspiracy of the powerful few against Russia) has been counterbalanced by Prokhanov's bone rattling anti-westernism that inspired nostalgia and a drift to the Ukrainian catastrophe. Russian society had the chance to overcome the trauma of the Soviet collapse, but its elite and its people preferred to believe in heavily peppered fairy tale stories of Russia's greatness and magic spells of the Russian soul. The price of this is unimaginable. And when the nightmare of the Russian invasion to Ukraine will be over, Livers's book will be among the popular studies to understand what brought Russia to the war and where to look for clues to avoid such disasters in the future.
