At the end of June, official Andrei Loginov, who previously held the position of Deputy Minister of Justice of Russia, was appointed acting rector of the Russian State University for the Humanities. The appointment occurred against the backdrop of a public scandal surrounding the recently created “Higher Political School” at the university named after the odious philosopher Ivan Ilyin, headed by the no less odious Alexander Dugin. T-invariant carefully analyzed the biography of the new rector of the university and found that Loginov has no less reason than Ilyin and Dugin to claim the title of the main philosopher-intellectual and ideologist of the “Russian world.”
Imperial on the ruins of the empire
Andrei Loginov observed the tragedy of the collapse of the empire at close range at least twice: while working at the USSR Embassy in Kabul and while serving in the secretariat of the Supreme Council of the USSR.
Loginov began working at the Soviet embassy in the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in 1987. By this time, he graduated from the Faculty of History of Moscow State University and even managed to defend his thesis on the topic “The Formation of the Indian Population of Oklahoma in the 19th Century,” in which, naturally, he condemned American imperialism for the oppression of the Indians, who as a result turned into “disenfranchised wards of the capitalist state.” . This work could be called a classic Marxist-Leninist historical “dissertation”, if not for the list of references, two-thirds consisting of English-language sources.
Andrei Loginov met in Kabul Geneva Agreements and the almost immediate withdrawal of half of the 100,000-strong contingent of the Soviet army. Returning to the USSR, he went to work in the department for international relations of the Secretariat of the Supreme Council of the USSR. In 1991, in an interview with the newspaper “Arguments and Facts”, the heads of the secretariat said: described their ideal employee: “The main criterion is the employee’s diligence and lack of his own point of view. These are the people who receive the highest salaries and benefits.”
It was the department for international relations, in which Loginov worked under the former head of the department of interethnic relations of the CPSU Central Committee Lev Shishov, that in July 1990 became responsible for organizing the development and signing of the new Union Treaty. Secretariat officials worked, the Federation Council under the President of the USSR met regularly, even the Union Treaty was written and agreed upon – but against the backdrop of all this, the republics declared sovereignty, and their newly elected presidents delayed integration in every possible way. So, before Loginov’s eyes and with his active opposition, the Soviet Empire surrendered its internal borders.
Professional ideologist
In 1993, fate brings Loginov to Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s MENATEP bank. Here he works side by side with several people important for his future career. First of all, with Vladislav Surkov, who worked in Khodorkovsky’s structures since the late 1980s. It was Surkov, who later became an imperial intellectual in the service of the highest authorities and almost the main ideologist of the Kremlin, who in May 2012, having received an appointment to the post of chief of staff of the Russian government, would take Andrei Loginov as his deputy.
In the corridors of MENATEP, Loginov works with Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s closest associate, Leonid Nevzlin. Ironically, Nevzlin will become rector of the Russian State University for the Humanities in 10 years, and Loginov – in 30 years, having previously recognized Nevzlin as a “foreign agent” as Deputy Minister of Justice of the Russian Federation.
Finally, following Mikhail Khodorkovsky himself, Andrei Loginov ends up in the Ministry of Fuel and Energy of the Russian Federation, where he works as chief of GR and PR for almost a year. And in 1994, Loginov’s acquaintance from the apparatus of the Supreme Council of the USSR, Sergei Filatov, who by that time had become the head of the Administration of the President of Russia, took him to work in the department for interaction with deputies of the Federation Council and State Duma. Here he will work, changing positions, but without fundamentally changing his areas of responsibility, until 2000,having outlasted six heads of the AP.
In the future, not a single action or public statement by Loginov leaves any doubt that he is a completely sincere conservative statist. In 1996, he headed the working group for relations with regions in the election headquarters of Boris Yeltsin and for this he received gratitude by a separate presidential order composed of a rather narrow circle of propagandists, among whom is the president’s daughter Tatyana Dyachenko, general director of NTV Igor Malashenko, the future prominent ideologist of the “Russian world” and Loginov’s boss at Moscow State University Vyacheslav Nikonov (Loginov headed the department at the Faculty of Public Administration under Dean Nikonov), state representative in ORT Igor Shabdurasulov and, of course, head of staff Anatoly Chubais.
In the first half of the 2000s, as the plenipotentiary representative of the Russian government in the State Duma, Loginov observed the capitulation of the Duma opposition. In September 2005, he, not really hiding his satisfaction, said in one of the interview: “I think the opposition just folded their hands. Realizing that they cannot influence the voting results and attribute the adoption of the law to their faction, oppositionists often abandon real work and increasingly retreat into populism.” And he claims that he completely agrees with the government’s policy – otherwise, “as an honest man,” he would have resigned long ago.
Finally, in 2018, Konstantin Chuychenko, a native of the Soviet prosecutor’s office and Gazprom structures, became his head of the government apparatus, after whom Loginov subsequently moved to the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation. As a deputy minister, he will defend the Russian state, complain that the Internet is destroying the “national foundations of law”, speak with the idea of introducing a separate criminal offense for “Russophobia” and approve on report to the UN Human Rights that “in Russia, curbing the demonstration of non-traditional values is not a form of censure.”
Enlightened Eurasian
An amazing coincidence for an official with an academic degree: Loginov always did what he wrote about, and in what he wrote it is quite possible to find explanations for what he does. Doctor of Political Sciences and Professor at Moscow State University Loginov is not a scientist in the scientometric sense. He has only 14 publications in the RSCI, starting from the late 1980s, most of which are books and encyclopedic articles with a huge number of co-authors (182 people in total). And Loginov’s most cited publication is the encyclopedic dictionary “Russian civilization: ethnocultural and spiritual aspects” – written in collaboration with Gundyaev K., future Patriarch Kirill. In the preface to this dictionary, before moving on to specific people and phenomena, the authors explain their position in a florid and verbose manner – in fact, this is their intellectual manifesto. They say that civilization is more stable than socio-political regimes, naturally they assert the existence of a special Russian Eurasian civilization, but at the same time they still make a reservation (it’s 2001) that there is no need to “contrast Western and Russian civilization” and even “recklessly praise Russian civilization “.
But this is in collective texts. In his own works, Andrei Loginov is much more frank. Thus, in the doctoral dissertation “State-Church Relations: Political Science Analysis” he talks about the “Byzantine symphony” of church and state, about the formation of this model in the successor of Byzantium – Rus’ and no less important for Russia are “religious and ideological elements of eastern origin,” that is, the Golden Horde. It is easy to notice that then Loginov appears here as a typical Russian enlightened Eurasian, a thinker who writes and lives in a completely understandable imperial ideological framework. In his world, the Russian Orthodox people are the cementing foundation of the Russian national project, and other peoples (including Muslims) form with them“blooming complexity”. And they all live insofar as the state power gives them “civilizational foundations of regulation” (quoted by Loginov A.V. “Power and Faith”, 2005. P. 10).
By the second half of the 2000s, this concept was complemented by a contrast with the spiritless “West”, the idea of “elderhood” typical of modern mystical Russian Orthodoxy (for example, a fifth of a weighty work is devoted to the biography of 15 elders Loginova“Russian idea in national spiritual quest” 2020), and, of course, Putin’s favorite philosopher Ivan Ilyin. For example, one of the few actual scientific works of Loginov is “Ethical and legal foundations of freedom of conscience as a prerequisite for free self-identification” is entirely conceptually based on the works of Ilyin.
And here a comparison of these three names naturally arises, who, by the will of fate, “met” in 2024 at the Russian State University for the Humanities: Andrey Loginov, Ivan Ilyin and Alexander Dugin. If any of these three can lay claim to the title of philosopher-intellectual and ideologist of the “Russian world,” it is Loginov.
If only because, unlike Ilyin, you don’t expect work in the spirit of “On fascism” or phrases like “…I love in Russian, I contemplate and think, in I sing and speak Russian…” (it was quoted by Putin in September 2022 in a speech on the annexation of Ukrainian regions). And unlike Dugin, you don’t expect scientific discussions about “the great war of the continents”and long thoughts about “Fundamentals of Russian Ideology” (that’s right, every word – with a big letters). Loginov’s picture of the world is much more complete and much more intelligent than that of Ilyin and Dugin. He is not a scientist wasting his time on scientometrics, he is a thinker who clearly understands what he is fighting against and what ideal world he desires. Enlightened imperial Eurasian.
Philosopher Ivan Ilyin
Plots, dissertations, graves
Loginov has the main attributes of an official who worked for decades in government agencies of Putin’s Russia: real estate of unclear origin and a secret family business. At the end of his career in the government apparatus, based on the results of 2017, Andrei Loginov became the richest official of the apparatus, showing in his declaration an income of 115 million rubles, four plots of land and a residential building with an area of 330 square meters. After Meduza published an investigation in 2018“Coffin, cemetery, hundreds of billions of rubles”, it became approximately clear where all this prosperity came from. In particular, as Ivan Golunov found out, the son of Andrei Loginov, Denis, a former member of the far-right movementmovement “Restrukt”, owned an organization “to protect the rights of the deceased”, and his father lobbied the government for the law on burial.
Loginov is fond of sailing – and for some time he was even the first vice-president of the corresponding All-Russian federation under Alexander Kotenkov (while Loginov represented the government in the State Duma, Kotenkov was there aka presidential plenipotentiary). By the way, Kotenkov was replaced by Dmitry Zelenin, the ex-governor of the Tver region, who once posted a photograph with an earthworm at ease during a reception in the Kremlin and head of the department all in the same Russian State University for the Humanities.
It is also worth noting that Loginov defended his doctoral dissertation at the Russian State Social University (RGSU) under the scientific supervision of Academician Vasily Zhukov, the founder of RGSU. Both the university and Zhukov are well-known subjects of Dissernet investigations and have a stable reputation for producing murky dissertations.
Thermometer for the country
Russian State Humanitarian University, where Loginov will implement all his ideas, is consistently in the middle of the top hundred of any ranking of Russian universities. By which, however, like a mercury thermometer, one can measure the frosts and thaws of the Russian political regime. The liberal rector Leonid Nikiforov, appointed in the wake of the “thaw” in the late 1960s because of students protesting against the entry of troops into Czechoslovakia, was replaced by the former head of the department of Marxism-Leninism at the Moscow Energy Institute, Sergei Murashov. Murashov took the matter seriously: he hung his portraits on the walls of the institute, student activists were awarded postgraduate studies, and archivist scientists finally took up topics that were truly important for the country – for example, “Forecasting the parameters of earthmoving machines”.
During the years of perestroika, the rector of the university became a well-known democrat throughout the country, who thundered from the rostrum of the Congress of People’s Deputies of the “aggressively obedient majority”, historian Yuri Afanasyev. Allowing himself then, and even in the 2010s, to caustically criticize political power,stating that “The Yeltsin-Putin government has now ruined Russia already, in my opinion, irreversible” that Putin “destroys politics in the country”, replacing it with “phantoms and dummies,” and Minister Andrei Fursenko is a “vassal of vassals” who have usurped governance of the country.
Apparently, in an effort to get rid of budgetary dependence, Yuri Afanasyev begins at the Russian State University for the Humanities an experiment unprecedented in Russian higher education either before or since: he negotiates with Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s YUKOS on unprecedented funding: 100 million dollars over 10 years. 10 million dollars annually is one percent of the entire Russian Federation budget for higher education. Even the Higher School of Economics, favored by the authorities and business, received then only about half a million dollars in donations annually.
Yuri Afanasyev (left) and Leonid Nevzlin.Photo: Konstantin Kutsillo / PhotoXPress
In June 2003, the staff almost unanimously elected Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s business partner, one of the richest people in Russia, Leonid Nevzlin, as the rector of the Russian State University for the Humanities. According to Afanasyev – in order to “manage a single consolidated budget that would combine state and YUKOS money.”Nevzlin himself promises to make RSUH a world-class university in 5-10 years.
But the era changes, and the Russian State University for the Humanities changes with it. In July 2003, Platon Lebedev was arrested, and in October, Khodorkovsky himself. Rector of the Russian State University for the Humanities Leonid Nevzlin takes a study leave, ostensibly to write a dissertation, and hastily flies to Israel. From there in November 2003 he writes a letter of resignation of his own free will.
Higher Political School
After a series of several “acting duties”, the completely systematic and emphatically loyal Efim Pivovar becomes the rector of the Russian State University for the Humanities (he is still is president of the Russian State University for the Humanities ). In 2015, during his rectorship, the university hosted a lecture by the leader of the Anti-Maidan movement. Nikolai Starikov “Conspiracy of the West against Russia.”
Then he runs the university for less than a year Evgeniy Ivakhnenko. He is eliminating a financial hole of 300 million rubles and is even trying to fight “dissertation mills” at the university. Ivakhnenko seems to want to restore the liberal image of the Russian State University for the Humanities and considers himself a successor to Afanasyev’s work and is fighting the national-patriotic development scenario. And this is what leads to his dismissal. Head of the Department of Personality Psychology at Moscow State University Alexander Asmolov, who was closely acquainted with Ivakhnenko, then comments this is so: “The formula “we don’t need smart people, we need faithful ones” has worked.”
Ivakhnenko replaces the head of the university Alexander Bezborodov. He punishes students for participating in rallies, and in March 2022 he signs the notorious “letter from the rectors” in support of the Russian invasion of Ukraine , and in August 2023 will endorse the decision of the university’s academic council to create Higher Political School named after Ivan Ilyin under the leadership of Alexander Dugin. As they say at the presentation, first of all, for training vice-rectors of universities in educational work.
Alexander Bezborodov, ex-rector of the Russian State University for the Humanities. Photo: RGGU
The creation of a school named after Ilyin causes student protests (petition collects almost 32 thousand signatures), discussion in the State Duma and heated public discussions. There were versions that the creation of the Ilyin school cost Bezborodov his chair. However, the appointment of Andrei Loginov as rector of the Russian State University for the Humanities (simultaneously with the change in the status of the university to an autonomous institution) clearly indicates the absurdity of this version.
In 2021, speaking at the Valdai Forum, Vladimir Putin statel that Ivan Ilyin is one of his favorite philosophers: “I read Ilyin, I still read. I have a book on the shelf and from time to time I take it off and read.”
RSUH in this sense has received an ideal rector and has every chance of becoming an ideal humanitarian university in Putin’s Russia, in fact, a “think tank” where, at a high moral and ideological level, with the help of a cocktail of Orthodoxy and Eurasianism, they will justify any past, present and future aggression against any country. In this sense, Andrei Loginov must turn the Russian State University for the Humanities into one large “Higher Political School.” And, apparently, he will cope with this very well.
Text: Sergey Chernyshov
Sergey Chernyshov 9.07.2024