Introduction

Russia is the largest country in the world and the most populous country in Europe, which was formed after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Therefore, many processes in Russia are explained by the peculiarities of the transition to a capitalist economy and the formation of a post-socialist society. After the period of wild capitalism of the 1990s and the rule of President Boris Yeltsin, his successor Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, and in 2001, the ruling United Russia party was formed. The party still holds a majority in parliament, providing the president with a stable vertical of power up to this day. Russia combines elements of a democratic political system with authoritarian institutions and methods of governance.

The main problems for Russians are poverty and monstrous income inequality, the powerlessness of citizens and the omnipotence of the elite, the police state and legal nihilism, the ongoing deconstruction of the social state, and the privatisation of the economy. Russia leads the world in income inequality (500 super-rich wealthier than 99.8%) and is one of the top three in the suicide rate and unhappiness level. Human rights are not respected in Russia.

More than 160 nationalities live in the Russian Federation. Over 79% of the population is made up of ethnic Russians. The most acute problem of far-right nationalism is among ethnic Russians which is directed against migration flows from post-Soviet countries and regions of Russia with non-Russian populations, for example, from the North Caucasus republics. At the same time, the nature of migration in Russia differs significantly from migration to Europe, as the post-Soviet space has a unity of language and cultural codes. 

Russia occupies most of Eurasia and shares a border with eighteen countries. Its special geopolitical position allows researchers to describe Russia as a peripheral empire. Under Putin, Russia pretends to be a leader in Eurasia, is friends with China and Central Asian countries, maintains relations with North Korea, and opposes NATO countries. Russia’s most tense situation is in relations with Ukraine.

Status of the far-right in the country

The 2000s in Russia were the heyday of the far-right, but after the events of 2014, there was a split in the movement. Part of the far-right, which can be conventionally called “imperialists”, supported the annexation of Crimea and the war against Ukraine. Radical neo-Nazis supported the national revolution in Ukraine and went there to fight against Putin’s regime. Former comrades-in-arms faced each other in the fields of Donbas on both sides of the front. The 2022 Ukraine invasion has only increased the split among Russian nationalists.

The police crackdown on the far-right finally destroyed the movement: major organisations were banned, and their leaders were arrested. Right-wing in Russia is now a pathetic remnant of their former power. Nevertheless, in the spring of 2023, anti-fascist organisations noticed a sharp increase in far-right violence. A new generation of young nationalists has emerged in the country against the backdrop of the war, attacking migrants, communists, anti-fascists, and LGBTQ+ members. They videotape their attacks and publish them in anonymous Telegram channels. Some nationalists loyal to the authorities have been incorporated into the state-controlled nationalist associations Russian Community and Northern Man. Full-fledged far-right combat units also went to war: the independent neo-Nazi group Rusich, the monarchist organisation Imperial Legion, which is in opposition to Putin, as well as two groups composed of far-right soccer hooligans: the PMC Española, which is sponsored by a man from the Rotenberg oligarchs’ entourage, and the Moscow reconnaissance unit of the 106th Airborne Division, which was assembled with money from the ultra-Orthodox oligarch Konstantin Malofeev. 

There are dwarf nationalist parties in Russia, but they are not represented in parliament in any way.

Status of antifascism in the country

The anti-fascist movement in Russia emerged in the mid-nineties as a response to far-right violence and police connivance. The first anti-fascist groups emerged in punk and skin subculture to protect musical concerts from neo-Nazi attacks. However, when the antifascists began to fight back, the neo-Nazis went from beatings to murders. By the end of the decade, terrorists from the BORN group committed a series of high-profile murders, including the murder of judge Eduard Chuvashov, leaders of anti-fascist movements Fyodor Filatov, Ilya Dzhaparidze and Ivan Khutorskoy, lawyer Stanislav Markelov, and journalist Anastasia Baburova. Journalists have noted the connection between BORN and the Kremlin. On 16 November 2009, the day after Khutorskoy’s murder, antifascists openly smashed up the reception room of Maxim Mischenko, deputy of the State Duma from “United Russia”, who had publicly cooperated with the members of BORN. 

In 2010, anti-fascists took part in the campaign to protect the Khimki Forest, after which law enforcement agencies turned to repression. Many activists have been arrested and convicted on trumped-up charges. The most characteristic of the time was the trumped-up case of “Antifa-RASH,” which was concocted by operatives of Nizhny Novgorod’s Counter-Extremism (“Center E”) department. 

After the events of 2014, the anti-fascist movement, as well as their opponents, dried up and is now practically silent. In 2020, anti-fascist Alexei “Socrates” Sutuga was killed in a fight. In 2021, only one major event involving an antifascist group was recorded: a brawl in northern Moscow after a far-right concert. 

Most Russian antifascist resources are not updated now. One of the remaining projects is the Antifa.ru channel on Telegram.

Historic developments

During the 1990s, dozens of nationalist organisations emerged in Russia as a right-wing reaction to the collapse of the USSR. The most notable phenomenon among far-right radicals in Russia was the neo-Nazi skinheads, or boneheads – an imported British youth subculture of the 1970s, which began to decline in Western countries. Also in the nineties, Russian neopaganism – Russian Vedism or Rodnoverie – became fashionable among the far-right, which further caused a division between the traditional black-hundredists Orthodox organisations and the Hitlerists, who denied Christianity as a “Jewish faith.”

According to rough estimates, the number of boneheads in Russia in the noughties was 50,000 people. Dozens of far-right groups grew into large organisations with branches all over Russia and including thousands of boneheads: National Socialist Society (NSO), Slavic Union (SS), Movement Against Illegal Immigration (DPNI), Russian All-National Union (RONS), Russian People’s Movement (ROD), Northern Brotherhood, Eurasian Youth Union (ESM) and many others. All the organisations listed here were banned to this moment except ESM. Their main goal, as described in the main bonehead book of this time, “Skins: Russia Awakens” (2003), was to create a legal party and get involved in mainstream parliamentary politics. The main public action for the far-right in Russia was the annual “Russian March,” held on National Unity Day on November 4. After 2016, the action fell into decline, and in 2021, it did not take place at all.

At the grassroots level, the neo-Nazis during the Steel noughties started street terror campaigns against migrants from the North Caucasus and Central Asia, blacks, Roma, Jews, and gays – all of whom they considered “an alien element polluting the blood of the white race”. Boneheads are organised into informal groups to commit hate crimes – murders, arson, bombings, pogroms. The most famous among them were “Mad Crowd” and “Combat Terrorist Organisation” (BTO), “Savior” (SPAS), “Schultz-88”, “Lincoln-88”, “United Brigade-88”, NS/WP, Ryno-Skachevsky gang, NSO-North, “Militant organisation of Russian nationalists” (BORN). In total, members of these groups killed more than 100 people and carried out dozens of terrorist attacks. In the public field, their mouthpiece was the leader of the Russian boneheads, Maxim “Tesak” Martsinkevich, who promoted violence through snuff videos on the “Format 18” project website. Tesak’s involvement in real murders, including the notorious “Execution of a Tajik and a Dag”, will only become known 14 years later. 

The far-right terror reached its peak by the end of the decade. Whereas in 2005, there were 152 murders committed by Nazis, in 2009, there were 548 cases, the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor’s Office calculated. On 11 December 2010, thousands of nationalists and soccer hooligans rioted on Manezhnaya Square in Moscow after the death of Spartak fan Yegor Sviridov, leaving dozens of people injured. The Manezhnaya Square events became a convenient pretext for tightening control over youth movements and defeating far-right organisations. After the 2014 events, the far-right movement was depleted. In 2020, Russian nationalist Konstantin Krylov passed away. In 2020, Maxim “Tesak” Martsinkevich committed suicide in prison, and in 2021, Yegor “Pogrom” Prosvirnin, the nationalists’ chief propagandist, jumped naked from a window in the centre of Moscow.

International relationships

The ruling party, United Russia, has established ties with far-right parties in Europe, such as the Freedom Party of Austria, the Alternative for Germany, and the French National Front of Marine Le Pen. The foreign policy of the Russian far-right takes place against this background. By the end of the decade, the contacts with far-right parties had been lost, so when the invasion of Ukraine began, the Kremlin’s former far-right friends turned their backs on it. Only the Alternative for Germany was in favour of the Kremlin.  

Russian far-right activists played an important role in forming the Azov regiment and the events in Donbas. Some of them – like Sergei “Botsman” Korotkikh – joined the National Corps party, formed based on the Azov movement. One of the most influential Russian neo-Nazis is Denis “Whiterex” Kapustin, who fled to Ukraine. He is the most critical link between the neo-Nazis of the ex-USSR and the Western countries. He promotes National Socialism under his “White Rex” MMA and clothing brand. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Kapustin assembled a neo-Nazi unit, the Russian Volunteer Corps, to liberate Russia from Bolshevism.

Another important far-right group is the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM) which has established ties with European neo-Nazis and provided military training for them. Its militant branch, the Imperial Legion, reportedly has sent fighters to Ukraine, Syria, and Libya. Two members of the Swedish neo-Nazi Nordic Resistance Movement, Viktor Melin and Anton Thulin, underwent the Partizan military training course run by a RIM before carrying out a series of bomb attacks against refugee centres in Sweden in January 2017. According to media reports, in 2020, extremists who belonged to the youth wings of two German far-right political parties—the National Democratic Party (NPD) and The Third Path—attended Partizan, where they received training in weapons, explosives, and close combat.

In June 2015, the RIM reportedly worked with the Russian political party Rodina to convene the World National-Conservative Movement (WNCM). 

Because Russia invaded Ukraine, most international contacts among the far-right have been disrupted. The most active contacts of the Russians remain in the pan-Slavic space.

Political landscape

Far-right parties are not represented in the Russian parliament, so the far-right doesn’t have its own deputies. The “United Russia” party was formed as a conservative, but its ideology has shifted over time toward centrism. “United Russia” publicly maintains the anti-Nazi rhetoric that it uses against Ukraine and Western countries.

The far-right movement achieved its greatest electoral success in the 2000s when the Rodina bloc was established in the Duma, and ROS leader Sergei Baburin entered parliament on ROS lists. However, the ideology of Rodina and ROS is often described as a “red-brown” or “red-con(servative),” with its left wing represented by economist presidential aide Sergey Glazyev. Orthodox businessman Konstantin Malofeev was supposed to create a new ultra-conservative party based on Rodina in 2019, but negotiations ended up going nowhere,

At the 2021 Duma elections, Rodina took only one seat, which belonged to its leader, Alexey Zhuravlev. One of the founders of Rodina was the leader of the Congress of Russian Communities, Dmitriy Rogozin, who now holds a high position in Russian politics and heads the State Space Corporation Roscosmos. The far-right candidates – head of “Society. Future” movement Roman Yuneman, head of the Moscow branch of the Russian All-People’s Union Mikhail Butrimov, and member of “Conservator” Valentina Bobrova – did not succeed in the 2021 elections.

Also, during the 2000s, different deputies were allegedly linked to neo-Nazis. NSO leader Dmitry Rumyantsev was an assistant to Albert Makashov, a Communist Party of Russia deputy in the Duma. Also, far-right activist Yevgeny Valyaev was an assistant to Duma LDPR deputy Nikolay Kuryanovich. Ilya Goryachev, the BORN ideologue sentenced to life imprisonment, was an assistant to Viktor Vodolatsky, a Duma deputy from the “United Russia”. As mentioned above, Maxim Mischenko, deputy of the State Duma from “United Russia”, had publicly cooperated with the members of BORN. 

An article was published in the media that BORN was connected to the Kremlin-backed movement “Locals,” which consisted of former soccer hooligans – leader of the Lyubertsy branch Leonid Simunin, one of the regional leaders Sergey Nikulkin, president of CSKA Rugby Club Alexey Mitryushin, political consultant, member of the Moscow Public Chamber Pavel Karpov and also high-profile official in charge of youth policy, former member of the Federation Council Nikita Ivanov.

Media landscape

After the police campaign, the far-right are afraid to speak openly because the articles on extremism are widely applied to them. Most far-right resources have been banned or abandoned, and Nazis have migrated en masse to Telegram as a result of de-platforming. 

The largest far-right resource in Telegram is Pozdnyakov’s “Male State“, which presumably works with Russian security forces. Also, against the backdrop of the war in Russia, dozens of anonymous Telegram channels have sprung up that specialise in publishing neo-Nazi snuff videos.

Mikhail Svetov, chairman of the “Сivil society” movement and one of the main propagators of right-wing libertarianism in Russia, leads a YouTube channel called “SVTV,” which is widely advertised in the far-right milieu. At the end of 2021, Yegor “Pogrom” Prosvirnin, the nationalists’ chief propagandist, jumped naked from a window in the centre of Moscow. His project Czar.tv status is unclear.

The official ultra-conservative media in Russia are the “Tsargrad” group and its associated online resources. “Tsargrad TV” was created according to the canons of the American conservative television channel Fox News. From the start, Tsargrad was positioned as a TV channel with “news presented from a Christian point of view”. “Tsargrad” began to spread anti-migrant hysteria and conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 pandemic. Other media accused of nationalist rhetoric is online “Readovka” and its editor-in-chief Alexei Kostylev and as well as the former liberal publication “Ridus”, whose editor-in-chief is a former member of the neo-Nazi music group Andrei “Most” Gulutin. 

Ultra-conservative media oppose the Western countries, which they see as a “den of homosexuality” and “biblical Sodom”. At the same time, the far-right repeats conservative clichés from the West, talking about the Great Replacement, the “White Race Extinction”, and the Narrative which is aggressively implemented by leftists, the dominance of feminists who want to destroy the traditional Russian family with the money of “Gayrope”. Russian ultra-conservative media also widely promote “ethical crime” topics.

Financial landscape

The far-right is a convenient tool for political manipulation. Their main asset is violence. The ultra-right was used in their interests by various groups, starting with the best-known neo-Nazi organisation Russian National Unity (RNU) in the ’90s. It was turned into a powerful organisation that acted as a scarecrow during necessary moments such as October 1993. But when its leader, Alexander Barkashov, became independent, RNU was quickly marginalised by secret services. Sympathetic middle-ranking businessmen primarily financed RNU; members of the organisation did not shy away from racketeering and protection of petty traders.

During the investigation of the NSO-North case in 2011, in which members committed 30 murders, arms trafficking, explosions, arson, and an attempted terrorist attack at a hydroelectric power plant, it was widely known that police found more than 200 million rubles in the accounts of Maxim “Adolf” Bazylev, the chief ideologist of NSO-North. Bazylev and Sergei “Botsman” Korotkikh were involved in a financial scam involving cashing out hundreds of millions of rubles. As part of this scam, the NSO received an office and a gym for free, and the society’s activists received money on secret bank cards. The media repeatedly mentioned Maxim Gritsai, a businessman with whom Malyuta and Adolf did business. Some believe Gritsai was an intermediary between the NSO and the secret services. 

It is believed that the “Russian March”, and largest nationalist Russian movement in the 2000’s DPNI, was funded by the construction business in general, particularly Mirax Group, Rogozin, and oligarch Boris Berezovsky. Konstantin Malofeev funded nationalists from the Novorossiya project who fought in Donbas as part of the deal with the state VTB bank. Malofeev was involved in a criminal case about fraud with a loan. By 2015, the debt to VTB had already reached $600 million, but the parties had signed a settlement agreement. According to Kommersant, VTB forgave 85% of this amount for helping Donbas. Malofeev was put under US sanctions for this.

After Russia invaded Ukraine, Konstantin Malofeev assembled his own “Moscow” squad of the 106th Airborne Division from far-right soccer hooligans and sponsored it. It is also known that a similar team of ultra-right-wing soccer hooligans from the PMC Espanola is sponsored by the head of the security service of Russian Railways, Viktor Shendrik, who, according to the media, acts out of the interests of the oligarch brothers Rotenberg. Who sponsors the Russian Imperial Movement and its combat wing Imperial Legion is still unknown. 

The sources of funding for the ultra-right in Russia are internal since the Russian security services closely monitor such things.