Introduction

In November 2019, the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) released recordings of intercepted phone calls that sharply contradicted the official Russian narrative of the war in Eastern Ukraine. According to the collected evidence, the armed groups in Donbas were not autonomous actors, but structurally and administratively backed by the Russian government, with direct communication lines running from the local leadership straight to Moscow. The greatest sensation was a tape dating back to 2014 and documenting strategic discussions between Alexander Borodai, then prime minister of the Donetsk People’s Republic administration, and Vladislav Surkov, at the time the presidential adviser overseeing Russia’s policy toward Ukraine. What was largely overlooked, however, is that earlier the same year Surkov himself – writing under the pseudonym Natan Dubovitskii – published a novel inspired by partisan warfare in the same region, in which such forms of collaboration appear as a self-evident feature of the conflict, not even open to question.

How can it be that one of the highest Russian officials, speaking through fiction, offers a version of political reality that not only sounds more “real” than the state-approved story but also seemingly subverts the ideology he himself helped to architect? To make sense of this paradox, we will need to take a fresh look at Surkov’s distinctive position within the Russian political system, as well as at the functional logic of ideology in contemporary Russia, as it becomes manifest in particular in practices of territorial power.

I approach this question through the concept of what I call political fictionality. By this, I mean a mode of authorship in which fiction and politics no longer function as separate domains, but merge into a single performative practice. Thus, reality is not merely described or justified through narrative; it is authored, revised, and tested as though it were a literary text.

In my paper, I argue that Surkov’s fiction does not aim to disseminate ideology to a mass audience. Instead, it functions as a laboratory: a space in which ideological narratives are stress-tested, contradictions are explored, and model patterns of political regulation are developed. To illustrate this, I will focus on the novel The Imitation of Homer and on how it stages territorial power, war, and authorship.

Strange Case of the Politician Surkov and the Writer Dubovitskii

So, who is Vladislav Surkov and why does he need Natan Dubovitskii? In short, Surkov can be described as a man who had for decades been widely known as “the chief Kremlin ideologist” and “the author of Putinism.” Among the strategic political projects he designed and curated are the loyalist youth movement “Walking Together” (Idushchie vmeste) and its successor “Ours” (Nashi) as well as the concepts of “Russian World” (a civilizational framework positing a transnational Russian cultural-political space) and “Russian Spring” (a narrative framing the anti-Maidan protests in Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014). His resignation from all positions in 2020 and subsequent withdrawal from politics were unexpected and remain largely unexplained – particularly in light of the “special military operation” that began two years later, for which he appears to have laid the ideological groundwork without, however, having the opportunity to fully gain political credit for this or reap the laurels.

Natan Dubovitskii is Surkov’s pen name – an open secret, though one he has never explicitly acknowledged. He made his literary debut in 2009 with the novel Around Zero, a work widely described as a postmodernist satire of contemporary Russia. As Peter Pomerantsev notes: “It’s exactly the sort of book Surkov’s youth groups burn on Red Square” (Pomerantsev 2012). Pomerantsev is referring to the “Walking Together” campaign, which claimed to act in the “protection of public morals” by staging the destruction of books accused of spreading pornography or defaming historical figures. Dubovitskii’s subsequent novel, Mashinka and Velik, or Simplification of Dublin (2012), similarly diverged from the official agenda. The writer Viktor Erofeev described the work as “suicidal” for a high-level politician, given its unadorned depiction of the everyday reality in a country Surkov was tasked with governing (Erofeev 2012). 

Was Dubovitskii, then, a sort of literary alter ego – a Mr. Hyde lurking behind Surkov and betraying the suppressed truths of the regime he represented? Dubovitskii’s most recent novel, The Imitation of Homer (2019), strongly reinforces this impression. Set against the backdrop of the Donbas conflict – clearly echoing the real-world events in Eastern Ukraine at the time – the novel exposes the absurd and grotesque nature of the war. With relentless precision, Surkov deconstructs the notion of patriotism, revealing its function as a rhetorical placeholder for the unarticulated and often even unconscious motives and emotions of ordinary soldiers and local leaders. The question “Why are we in Donbas?” permeates the entire narrative, running like a red thread through the book.

Geopolitics in an Alternative Reality

The novel opens with the death of a Russian combatant on the battlefield, rendered from a visceral first-person point of view – one that is, also physically, restricted, given that he happens to die face down. This posture symbolically underscores his inner resignation. No sublime or exalted perspective seems possible. No satisfaction provided by the sense of duty fulfilled. No metaphysical revelation. As the dying soldier himself puts it: instead of the majestic sky above Austerlitz (a reference to the famous scene in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace where the gravely wounded Prince Andrei Bolkonsky has a quasi-cathartic experience when confronted by the vastness of the universe), there is only “the dusty grass of Donetsk.” The motif of dusty ground as the ultimate reason for fighting – seemingly stripped of any ideological ornamentation – reappears later in the novel in the poetry of a decorated tanker, intended for publication in the army newspaper:

You died for this dust, for this dirt, 

you called them your native land.

You so wanted not to vanish for nothing, 

somehow to rise above yourself. (Dubovitskii 2019) 

As the sceptical commander condemns it as “obscurantist and defeatist” and asks “How can one call the homeland dirt?”, the editor tries to explain: 

“He doesn’t mean the homeland, but the land… what’s meant here is a simple guy from the provinces, a miner, or maybe a tractor driver, from a settlement where some of the streets aren’t paved, where it’s dusty, and after the rain it’s mud… and all that, but it’s still the homeland, and you can give your life for it… in principle…” (Dubovitskii 2019).

“Muddy” here are not only the streets, but seemingly also the notion of the homeland. Where does it begin, and where does it end? The blatant materiality of the home ground is contrasted with the vagueness of the borders by which it is defined. It never becomes clear – and ultimately does not matter – whether the soldier who falls at the beginning of the novel or the army poet came from the Russian Federation or spent their entire life in Donbas. The sense of homeland and, quite literally, of home soil seems to take shape through military actions that secure control over territories and actively (re)integrate them into the Russian zone of influence. This, of course, echoes the widely cited phrase uttered several years later by Vladimir Putin in the context of the most recent developments of the full-scale conflict in Ukraine: “Wherever a Russian soldier sets foot, it is ours” (Putin 2025). However, when projected onto Dubovitskii’s novel, “ours” in this logic should be understood not primarily as land claimed by the Russian government and administratively subjected to its rule, but rather as land with which the Russian people are invited to identify by proxy – through empathy with their military representatives, who are believed to have proven a special connection to it through their sacrifice.

While the narrow gaze of the ordinary soldier – who adopts a limited perspective by focusing on the soil – inevitably levels out geographical and governmental distinctions, the novel also presents another gaze, that of the local commander nicknamed Freza, which reveals a more “classical” colonial stance by perceiving the landscape in terms of its exotic and foreign features. By considering the larger picture while simultaneously attending to detail, this gaze also adopts an exploratory and strategic approach. Contemplation and quiet admiration are here coupled with planning for the future infrastructural organization of the region:

The army commander looked at the ridge of spoil heaps. Like great mountains, they had names. There was Cheerful Height, covered with sparse patches of forest; farther on, beyond the front line, Devil’s Embankment; behind it the black-and-gray Matveevsky; then the Yuzovo Peaks with their bifurcated, eternally snow-capped summit; and finally, the tallest in the Donbas, solemn and Elbrus-like – Kara-Kurgan. […]

Like many professional destroyers, Freza secretly dreamed that someday, in the place of the wretched dwellings and lives he had wiped from the face of the earth, new and beautiful cities and citizens would rise. He envisioned endless, identical straight streets intersected at right angles by other equally endless, identical straight streets – one of them, the cleanest and brightest, might, why not, be named after him (Dubovitskii 2019). 

Freza lives in the requisitioned mansion of a former local deputy who escaped to Kiev and has not changed anything inside. His “combat wife,” a local woman of unclear origins who came from the Ukrainian side of the frontline, cooks for him Ukrainian borscht, which he eats from a porcelain plate from the possession of the “rightful owner” painted in Gzhel style (famous Russian folk craft) and showing the deputy’s face on the bottom. In this way, he clearly inhabits a space of transition or rather semantic emptiness oscillating between Russian and Ukrainian cultural symbols and still only superficially described by them.

An important function of Freza is to establish and maintain a connection between this land on the margins of a (resurrecting) empire and the “center.” He does so by putting an end to the “anarchic,” “spontaneous” phase of military clashes and by mobilizing the combatants around a single cause: “He had nearly eradicated from the ranks of the militia all those liberties the fighters had grown used to during the first, most terrifying and reckless months of the war – when field commanders answered to no one and fought each other as much as they fought the enemy” (Dubovitskii 2019). 

He is equipped with a special, tap-proof phone for direct communication with his supervisors at the central command, who oversee the operation while clearly leaving him sufficient room for personal initiative and for interpreting orders from above. However, while the strategic goals of the military actions are perfectly clear – holding back Ukrainian troops and ensuring integration with Russia –, the ideological legitimation of these geopolitical efforts, as well as their deeper meaning, remains more than vague until the novel’s conclusion. It is only at that point that the true – or, more precisely, post-true – state of affairs comes to light, which explains why the novel bears the subtitle “based on a post-true story.” Indeed, subtle indicators of this “alternative reality” are woven throughout the narrative, surfacing as temporal anomalies in the seasonal rhythms and day-night cycles caused by the orbital shift.

Ultimately, the novel clarifies its timeline: the story is not set during the historical partisan war in Donbas, but in a distant future shaped by global catastrophe: following a brief “local nuclear apocalypse” that terminated a domestic conflict in the United States, an international Board took control to enforce an “eternal peace.” The most effective measure has been a program of universal vaccination; the administered drug provides immunity against aggression, effectively preventing all military conflict. However, it soon became clear that certain individuals did not respond to the vaccination as expected. For these “incurable” cases, the authorities invented controlled, simulated conflicts – athletic contests partly based on historical battles, termed “memorial wars,” with athletes labeled as “heroes.” Whether broadcast via the media or viewed as a – dangerous – live spectacle, these wars have become a highly popular and commercially profitable branch of the entertainment industry. It is precisely one of these wars that the novel pretends to reconstruct.

Shadow Ideology

The question, then, is how this bizarre dystopian fantasy can be situated within the Russian ideological narrative that Surkov represented at the time of writing. After all, as a “curator” of real combatants – positioned at the other end of the direct line connecting the front to the center – he necessarily possesses a far more encompassing view of events than any local commander. Consequently, should we not treat the science-fiction scenario of his alter ego, Dubovitskii, as a revealing metaphor for the actual situation, or at least for his understanding of it? Given his unique authorial position, the reader is left vacillating between trust in his political expertise and a general distrust of the credibility of his narrative account, given his role as a highly strategic political thinker.

Of even greater significance is that Surkov is not merely an insider, but an active participant in the very events upon which the novel delivers a commentary. This implies that Dubovitskii, as an author, possesses the power both to depict reality with varying degrees of fidelity and to shape it so that it aligns with the version articulated in his fiction. Or, at the very least, he can draw on the political authority of Surkov to establish this version as the predominant interpretation, rendering other readings of the facts irrelevant or incorrect.

This unique authorial position corresponds with Surkov’s manifest interest in the language of cybernetics. His political essays consistently frame the state as a self-regulating system concerned with stability, feedback, and the management of entropy – meaning the deliberate regulation of uncertainty, dissent, and interpretive plurality so that they do not threaten systemic stability. Thus, Surkov’s “management of entropy” can be interpreted as a form of discursive code-hacking: rather than governing through commands, it operates by accessing and modulating the internal communicative codes through which political meaning circulates.

This logic of hacking also helps to explain a strategic configuration that I refer to as shadow ideology, which can be observed clearly in Surkov’s political and literary output and remains highly influential in Russia, particularly during periods of major geopolitical shifts that pose significant challenges to the credibility of ideological narratives. In response, a set of parallel narratives is allowed to circulate which, although they do not dovetail with – and sometimes even contradict – the official narrative, nonetheless provide compelling explanations for current political measures and thereby encourage their acceptance both domestically and internationally.

The table below illustrates the coexistence of shadow and official narratives within the same political agenda by drawing an analytical distinction between different discursive logics operating simultaneously:

It may be instructive to compare the geopolitical dimension of what I call shadow ideology with the so-called “patriotism of despair,” a term used by Serguei Oushakine to describe post-Soviet forms of national belonging that emerged in the 1990s from loss, trauma, and ideological exhaustion rather than from positive political projects (Oushakine 2009). Despite certain parallels – both appear in situations where official ideological language no longer convinces – there is also a significant difference. While Oushakine examines bottom-up mechanisms through which people recover meaning after the collapse of state ideology, my concept addresses how political power regulates meaninglessness within a restored ideological framework, preventing it from destabilizing the system. In this sense, shadow ideology proves more flexible in terms of the affects it mobilizes. It can incorporate despair, but also vitality, intensity, and even the affirmative experience of permanent conflict. Its function is therefore not to mourn loss but to keep political meaning operable across shifting affective states.

Conclusion

Seen in this context, the literary works published under the name Natan Dubovitskii can be regarded as a container in which public unease and deviations from official discourse are channeled and repurposed in a controlled manner. While remaining relatively obscure to a broad readership and far from exerting any significant direct impact on Russian society, these texts nonetheless perform an important function within the ideological architecture by providing a discursive space in which tensions, contradictions, and ambiguities that cannot be articulated within official rhetoric can be explored without destabilizing the system that produces them.

Dubovitskii’s fiction therefore does not simply reveal hidden truths about the war in Donbas; rather, it stages the very instability of political meaning. By presenting multiple, partially incompatible frames of interpretation – geopolitical, existential, cynical, and dystopian – the narrative demonstrates how political realities are assembled from competing narratives rather than derived from a single authoritative account. In this sense, Surkov’s literary authorship mirrors the political practice often attributed to him: the deliberate multiplication of narratives in order to manage uncertainty and maintain strategic ambiguity. Literature here functions less as a vehicle of ideology than as a testing ground for it.

The novel’s dystopian scenario, with its simulated “memorial wars,” exposes the mechanisms through which violence, sacrifice, and territorial belonging are narratively produced and circulated. What emerges is a form of political fictionality in which the boundary between representation and governance grows increasingly porous. Rather than merely reflecting geopolitical reality, such narratives participate in shaping the interpretive frameworks through which that reality becomes intelligible in the first place.

References

Dubovitskii, Natan. 2019. “Podrazhanie Gomeru (based on a post-true story).” Russkii Pioner. https://ruspioner.ru/honest/m/single/6268 

Erofeev, Viktor. 2012. “A Suicidal Novel,” Central European Forum.“ Salon, November 27. https://salon.eu.sk/en/archiv/9151.

Oushakine, Serguei Alex. 2009. The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia. Cornell: Cornell  University Press.

Pomerantsev, Peter. 2011. “Putin’s Rasputin.” London Review of Books. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n20/peter-pomerantsev/putin-s-rasputin.

Putin, Vladimir. 2025. “Plenarnoe zasedanie Peterburgskogo mezhdunarodnogo ekonomicheskogo foruma.” June 23, 2025. http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/77222