Novorossiya and Crimea
KONSTANTIN MALOFEYEV
The president of Katehon is Konstantin Malofeyev, a Russian businessman who who aspires to revive the Russian monarchy. In May 2013, Malofeyev attended the 7th conference [archive] of the Christian Right, anti-LGBT, anti-abortion World Congress of Families, on whose board is Aleksey Komov [archive], the head of international projects of the Saint Basil the Great Foundation [archive], the “charitable foundation” of Malofeyev [archive]. Malofeyev’s position at the World Congress of Families was to present the Christian conservatism of the West in the 1980s in favorable terms compared to the state atheism of the Soviet Union, before contrasting it to the situation in 2010, where he claimed that religious freedom was “under attack” in the West and evoked all the tropes one might hear on Fox News such as the “War on Christmas”, the “LGBT agenda” and “political correctness”. To this, he contrasted the situation in Russia, where the Church has been experiencing a revival, religion is taught in schools and homophobic laws have been on the rise, and Malofeyev promised [archive] that “Christian Russia can help liberate the West from the new liberal anti-Christian totalitarianism of political correctness, gender ideology, mass-media censorship and neo-marxist dogma”.
[Note: The members of the board of the Saint Basil the Great Foundation [archive] include Zurab Chavchavadze, and the Bishop Tikhon Shevkunov, a member of the Izborsky Club [archive] and of the Supreme Council of the Russian Orthodox Church [archive], with influential ties to the state and rumored to be the personal confessor of Vladimir Putin.]
[Note: A partner of the World Congress of Families is the Sanctity of Motherhood Program, an anti-abortion organization headed by Natalia Yakunina [archive], the wife of Vladimir Yakunin, who was the director of Russian Railways until 2015. In 2017, the World Congress of Families sponsored [archive] the Rhodes Forum 2017 [archive] of Yakunin’s foundation, the World Public Forum Dialogue of Civilizations [archive] (WPFDC). In September 2014, two of Vladimir Yakunin’s organizations which also both have Natalia Yakunina as vice president, the Center of National Glory and the Foundation of Saint Andrew the First-Called [archive], organized the “Large Family and Future of Humanity” international forum [archive] with the support of Malofeyev’s Saint Basil the Great Foundation. The conference, held at the State Kremlin Palace and animated by Yakunina, was intended to be the 8th conference of the World Congress of Families until it was forced to suspend its participation following the crisis in Ukraine [archive]. On what appears to be the conference’s Facebook page, is a now dead link [archive] (but relayed by the Christian News Wire [archive]) to a post on the website of World Congress of Families’ Russian section about a meeting by the International Planning Committee of the conference whose members included Malofeyev, Yakunin, Yakunina, and Jack Hanick, a former Fox News employee Jack Hanick, a devout Roman Catholic turned Russian Orthodox Christian [archive] who believes “God called on Russia” to fight the LGBT rights movement.]
A month later, after the adoption of the law against “gay propaganda” and “offending religious feelings” in Russia, a delegation of French anti-gay activists, joined by [archive] the National Organization for Marriage’s president Brian Brown, spoke to the State Duma [archive] on the 13th of June 2013 on the invitation of the Duma’s Committee on Family, Women and Children, whose chairperson Elena Mizulina was then a State Duma MP for the A Just Russia party. Mizulina, who had previously called abortion a “national threat”, compared surrogate parenthood to nuclear weapons, and was the author of the homophobic law, had participated [archive] in anti-LGBT roundtable talks together with French anti-LGBT activists in early June in Paris hosted by the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation, itself headed by far-right Russian politician and former State Duma MP for the fascist Rodina party, Natalia Narochnitskaya [archive]. The delegation included:
Aymeric Chauprade, then an advisor to Marine Le Pen and member of the French National Front before leaving it in 2015. Chauprade had participated in the “Large Family and Future of Humanity” conference in 2014
Fabrice Sorlin, president of Dies Irae [archive], a traditionalist Roman Catholic and far-right nationalist organization named for a hymn about the Last Judgement. Sorlin led the delegation
François Légrier, a former National Front candidate for the legislative elections and president [archive] of the Catholic Movement of Families
Odile Téqui
Hugues Revel, who leads the far-right Catholiques en Campagne [archive]
The same day, Malofeyev’s charity co-organized a roundtable discussion at the Kremlin [archive] together with the State Duma commitee on family, women and children, and on “Traditional Values: The Future of the European Peoples”, which was attended by [archive] Malofeyev, the French delegation, Sergey Gavrilov of the KPRF and Elena Mizulina.
In 2014, Malofeyev, as well as the leaders of the far-right party Rodina (which I talk of later), Dmitry Rogozin and Aleksandr Babakov, were in instrumental in helping Jean-Marie le Pen and the French National Front obtaining massive loans after Chauprade had introduced Le Pen to Malofeyev. That same year, Malofeyev organized an anti-LGBT conference in Vienna where the participants included:
Konstantin Malofeyev himself
Aleksandr Dugin
Ilya Glazunov, a far-right Russian nationalist painter
Marion-Marechal Le Pen from the French National Front
Aymeric Chauprade
Prince Sixtus Henry of Bourbon-Parma, the head of the Spanish Carlist monarchist movement
Serge de Pahlen, the husband of the Fiat fortune heiress Margherita Agnelli de Pahlen
Heinz-Christian Strache, the chairman of the far-right Austria Freedom Party (FPÖ), which signed a cooperation treaty with Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party in 2016
Johann Gudenus of the FPÖ
Johann Herzog of the FPÖ
Volen Siderov, the leader of far-right Bulgarian party Ataka
Croatian far-right groups
Georgian nobles
Russian nobles
a Catholic priest
Malofeyev is also the Chairman of the board of directors of the Tsargrad group of companies, which in 2015 launched Tsargrad TV (Tsargrad being the Slavic name of Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire) with the help of Jack Hanick, and which has as editor in chief Aleksandr Dugin [archive] and chairman of its supervisory board Leonid Reshetnikov [archive], who is also on the Supervisory board of Katehon, is a member of the Public Council of the Russian Ministry of Defense and of the Scientific Councils of both the Russian Security Council and Ministry of Affairs, and until January 2017 was the director of the Russian Institute of Strategic Studies [archive]. Tsargrad TV, which provides a platform to fascists such as Aleksandr Dugin and Alex Jones, is “based on Orthodox principles in the same way as Fox News” according to Malofeyev, who is a founder and shareholder of the channel and was its general producer until November 2017 [archive], having resigned from this position shortly after being made a member of the council [archive] of the Society for the Development of Russian Education: Two-Headed Eagle, a Russian monarchist organization.
[Note: Leonid Reshetnikov has blamed the Second World War on an “Anglo-Saxon elite”, which is a position similar to that of Dugin in his essay on red and borderless fascism.]
[Note: The World Congress of Families lists the Sanctity of Motherhood and the Saint Basil the Great Foundation as its partners [archive], and its Russian section lists Tsargrad TV, Katehon and the Saint Basil the Great Foundation among its partners [archive].]
THE FORMATION OF NOVOROSSIYA AND THE ANNEXATION OF CRIMEA
Malofeyev is a former employer of Aleksandr Borodai, who was once a deputy director of the FSB and had also formerly worked at Zavtra [archive] where he continues to be published as an “expert” [archive]. Malofeyev is also a former employer of Igor Girkin (more commonly known as Igor Strelkov), a former FSB member who was in charge of Malofeyev’s security when he visited Kiev and Crimea in 2014 and contributed to Zavtra between 1998 and 2000 [archive]. According to investigative newspaper Novaya Gazeta, Malofeyev drafted the plan for the creation of the so-called Novorossiya statelet which was was formed in the Donbass in eastern Ukraine. When the two “People’s Republics” making up Novorossiya were created in 2014, Girkin became the Defense Minister of the Donetsk People’s Republic while Borodai became Prime Minister. Aleksandr Proselkov, the head of the Rostov branch of Dugin’s International Eurasian Movement [archive], became Deputy Foreign Minister of the Donetsk People’s Republic [archive], and the Deputy Prime Minister was Andrey Purgin, who was himself a member of Donetskaya Respublika, a pro-Russian organization which had been created in response to the 2005 Orange Revolution, and participated in protests with and went to the summer camps of the Eurasian Youth Union (a youth wing of Aleksandr Dugin’s International Eurasianist party formed with the support of the Russian government of Vladimir Putin in reaction to the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and which received at least 18.5 million rubles in the form of presidential grants from 2013 to 2014). Donetskaya Respublika had also worked with the Russia Bloc, Bravtsovo and the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine (PSPU), which are all far-right organizations. Bravtsovo’s and the PSPU’s respective leaders, Dmytro Korchynsky and Natalya Vitrenko are members of the High Council of Dugin’s International Eurasian Movement [archive].
[Note: Natalia Vitrenko’s misleadingly-named PSPU, a far-right party, has worked with the Ukrainian Communist Party [archive] (which adheres to a Soviet nationalist red-brown politics not unlike that of the KPRF) in 2007, led a delegation to Libya in April 2011 where she awarded Muammar Gaddafi with an “anti-NATO resistance fighter” title [archive], and in July 2011 joined the All Russia’s People’s Front founded by Vladimir Putin, who became its leader in 2013. As well as being a member of Dugin’s International Eurasian Movement, Vitrenko is also a close associate of LaRouche [archive] and promotes his movement, being another close ally of both Dugin and LaRouche.]
Aleksandr Dugin and Aleksandr Prokhanov were both present at the founding congress of the Novorossiya Party [archive] in late May 2014, which was also attended by Pavel Gubarev (a former member of Barkashov’s neo-Nazi Russian National Unity as well as former member of Vitrenko’s PSPU [archive], who was governor of the Donetsk People’ Republic from March to November of that same year) and Valeriy Korovin, a member of the Izborsky Club [archive] and a leader of the Eurasian Youth Union. In early June 2014, discussions between Gubarev and Prokhanov took place [archive], during which it was decided that the Izborsky Club would develop Novorossiya economically and ideologically, and Gubarev was invited to join the Izborsky Club and create a new branch for it in the Donetsk People’s Republic. The next day, the Izborsky Club announced that it would advise the drafting of a new constitution for Novorossiya [archive]. In mid-June 2014, a Donetsk branch of the Izborsky Club was created, with Pavel Gubarev as its chairperson [archive], and the Izborsky Club itself reported that Gubarev, Girkin and Borodai had been elected as its members [archive]. After Girkin was dismissed as the Donetsk Republic’s Defense Minister in August that year, he was seen accompanying Aleksandr Dugin and Konstantin Malofeyev at the Valaam Monastery in Russian Karelia the next month, and Borodai is presently on the committee of The Two-Headed Eagle [archive] along with Malofeyev.
The referendum for the accession of the Crimean peninsula to the Russian Federation also saw fascists and neo-Stalinists close or part of the National-Bolshevik network as observers, which is unfortunately not a new phenomenon: already in the late 2000s and early 2010s, a number of elections in Europe and the former Soviet bloc had been monitored [archive] by the CIS-EMO, which was founded and headed by Aleksey Kochetkov [archive], who had been a member of Barkashov’s Russian National Unity in the 1990s, and whose experts included Thiriart’s associate Luc Michel, Mateusz Piskorski (see below) and Giulietto Chiesi [archive] (former Moscow correspondent for the Italian Communist newspaper L’Unità who has since become a red-brown militant and is on the Experts Council of the Russian Eurasianist magazine Geopolitika together with Aleksandr Dugin [archive], and became a member of the Izborsky Club in 2014 [archive] and supports Aleksandr Dugin’s ideas [archive]). The observers of the Crimean referendum had been invited by the Eurasian Observatory for Democracy and Elections, headed by Luc Michel and included:
Johannes Hubner of the FPÖ
Johann Gudenus of the FPÖ
Ewald Johann Stadler, a fromer member of the FPÖ
Frank Creyelman of Vlaams Belang
Luc Michel of the National-European Communitarian Party
Jan Penris of Vlaams Belang
Christian Vergoustraete of Vlaams Belang and the Alliance of European National Movements
Pavel Chernev of Ataka
Kiril Kolev of Ataka
Johan Backman, a neo-Stalinist who does not recognize Estonia and Latvia as states
Aymeric Chaperaude of the French National Front
Hikmat al-Sabty of German left-wing party Die Linke
Torsten Koplin of Die Linke
Piotr Luczak of Die Linke and chairperson of the European Centre for Geopolitical Analysis
Monika Merk of Die Linke and Secretary of the European Centre for Geopolitical Analysis
Manuel Ochsenreiter
Charalampos Angourakis, of the Communist Party of Greece, which is known for cooperating with the police and the state, has engaged in anti-refugee actions, and occasionally cooperates with Golden Dawn
Bela Kovacs of Jobbik and treasurer of the Alliance of European Nationalist Movements
Lev Malinsky of BenOr Consulting
Sergey Podrazhansky, the former editor of Israeli right-wing newspaper Vesti
Fabrizio Bertot, of Lega Italia
Claudio D’Amico of Lega Nord
Valerio Cignetti, of the Tricolour Flame and General Secretary of the Alliance of European National Movements
Miroslavs Mitrofanovs of the Latvian Russian Union
Tatjana Zdanoka of the Latvian Russian Union
Adam Krysztof of the Polish social-democratic party Democratic Left Alliance
Mateusz Piskorski of the Self-Defence of the Republic of Poland. Piskorski was a member of Polish fascist group Niklot, a leader of far-right Polish party Zmiana [archive], is an associate of Aleksandr Dugin, and vice-director of the German Center for Eurasian Studies [archive]
Andrzej Romanek of Solidary Poland
Milenko Baborak of the Dveri Movement
Nenad Popovic of the Democratic Party of Serbia
Zoran Radojicic
Oleg Denisenko of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF)
Pedro Mourino of the Partido Popular
Enrique Ravello, former member of CEDADE and Terre et Peuple, and present member of Plataforma per Catalunya
Srda Trifkovic, an Islamophobe and anti-Semite who has worked with the Serbian Radical Party, is a supporter of Radovan Karadzic [archive], defended Karadzic in during the latter’s trial and denies the Srebrenica genocide [archive]. Trifkovic is the Foreign Affairs Editor [archive] of the openly far-right [archive] Chronicles Magazine and a contributing editor to neo-fascist platform The Alternate Right run by Richard Spencer.
[Note: The European Centre for Geopolitical Analysis was founded by Mateusz Piskorski, himself a participant [archive] of Thierry Meyssan’s Axis for Peace conference (see below) and the vice director of the German Center for Eurasian Studies [archive], whose president is Manuel Ochsenreiter. Ochsenreiter was formerly a host on Russian state-owned channel RT, where he was presented as an “expert” on German and Middle-Eastern Affairs (he has regularly [archive] discussed [archive] Ukraine [archive], Crimea [archive] and the [archive] war in [archive] Syria [archive] on RT) before being outed as the editor of Zuerst!, a neo-Nazi German magazine which glorifies Hitler. In 2014, Yakunin’s Foundation of Saint Andrew the First-Called and Center of National Glory organized an “anti-fascist conference” in Saint Petersburg concerning the crisis in Ukraine, among whose participants was National Bolshevik Mateusz Piskorski.]
THE ANTI-ORANGE COMMITTEE
One of Dugin’s close collaborators was Geydar Dzhemal (who died in 2016), who was a member of the Golovin Circle alongside Dugin and later of Pamyat together with Dugin before being both expelled from it together, Dzhemal later theorizing his own fascist ideas based on Islamist theory and founding his own fascist think tank called the Florian Geyer Club. The attendants of the Florian Geyer Club’s various [archive] seminars [archive] included Aleksandr Dugin, Claudio Mutti (see below), Israel Shamir (see below), Nadezhda Kevorkova (a contributor to RT since 2010 [archive]) and fascists Maksim Shevchenko and Mikhail Leontyev. Shevchenko had already cooperated with Dzhemal in 2010 when, together with Sergey Markov from Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party, they were part of a Russian delegation at a conference organized by the FPÖ concerning Color Revolutions, which was a year after he had invited Dugin to Vienna in 2009 and introduced him to the leaders of the FPÖ.
In 2012, Dugin, Leontyev, Shevchenko, Prokhanov and Nikolai Starikov joined the Anti-Orange Committee founded by Sergey Kurginyan, a former left-wing opponent of Yeltsin who has moved to the nationalist Right after the events of 1993, supports an alliance between the Left and the Right [archive], and now leads the Essence of Time movement, which describes itself as left-patriotic [archive] and aims to create a “USSR 2.0”, a movement which Anton Shekhovtsov says is National Bolshevik. The Anti-Orange Committee was founded in opposition to the anti-Putin Bolotnaya Square protests of 2011, whose speakers ironically included Yevgeny Kopyshev from the KPRF, nationalist Konstantin Krylov (see below), and representatives of the Left Front Stalinist opposition group (see below), and Dugin’s former associate Limonov had participated in demonstrations with the protesters earlier that same day in Moscow’s Revolution Square. The Committee adhered to a conspiratorial worldview where it perceived the protests against Putin to be the result of a Western conspiracy in cooperation with fascists who support WWII era war criminal and Nazi collaborationist Stepan Bandera. The name of the Committee itself as well as this conspiracy were both based on how Dugin and his acolytes, in accordance to their fascist worldview where the US is a center of liberalism which seeks to destroy Russian culture and Eurasian civilization, interpreted the 2005 US-supported Orange Revolution (and of which there are valid criticisms from the Left) in Ukraine as a Banderist plot concocted in the West against Russia, and which a large number of fascists repeat in the context of the Euromaidan and the Arab Spring.
[Note: Maksim Shevchenko was member [archive] of the Civil Chamber of the Russian Federation from 2008 to 2012 and has been a member [archive] of the Russian Federation’s Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights since 2012, and is part [archive] of its provisional body in charge of civil society and human rights in Crimea. Shevchenko is a member of the Izborsky Club [archive] together with Starikov and Leontyev. In 2017, Shevchenko joined the Left Front [archive].]
BORIS KAGARLITSKY
Among the participants of the Florian Geyer Club’s September 2011 seminar was Boris Kagarlitsky [archive], a former left-wing Soviet dissident who presents himself as a left-wing critic of Vladimir Putin but writes articles supporting Vladimir Putin and Donald [archive] Trump [archive], and associates with fascists [archive] such as Aleksey Belyaev-Gintovt (a member of Dugin’s Eurasian Youth Union [archive]), Yevgeniy Zhilin (the leader of the fascist organization Oplot), Konstantin Krylov (leader of the right-wing Russian Social Movement and one time member of the fascist party Rodina – see below), and Yegor Kholmogorov. According researcher Anton Shkehovtsov, Russian investigative journalists say Kagarlitsky has been working with the Kremlin from at least 2005 to control the section of the Russian Left independent of the KPRF and clamp down on the left-wing opposition to Vladimir Putin, and in 2005 he wrote a report which called the KPRF the most corrupt party of Russia while not investigating the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia and United Russia, due to which Kagarlitsky was successfully sued by Gennady Zyuganov and was forced to apologize. Kagarlitsky’s organization, the Institute for Global Research and Social Movements, has received state funding in the form of presidential grants.
In early June 2014, Kagarlitsky was present through Skype at the founding conference of the “Solidarity with the Antifascist Resistance in Ukraine” [archive], which was also attended by Richard Brenner from Workers’ Power (a British Trotskyist group which was dissolved and merged into the Labour Party in September 2015), Lindsey German from Counterfire, Alan Woods from Socialist Appeal and the International Marxist Tendency, and Sergey Kirchuk from Borotba (see below). In August 2014, Kagarlitsky was hosted by the UK-based Stop The War Coalition together with Tariq Ali and Lindsey German [archive].
Kagarlitsky’s position on the war in Ukraine has been to support the Novorossiyan forces and whitewash its fascist leaders [archive], and as result in June 2014 itself Denis Denisov, a Crimean left-wing activist from the Left Opposition, ended his collaboration with Kagarlitsky. Following Kagarlitsky’s reply that Denisov should reconsider his views and suggestion he should support the “self-organizing movement of solidarity with Novorossiya” instead, Volodymyr Zadyraka of the Autonomous Workers’ Union wrote a scathing criticism of Kagarlitsky’s pseudo-dissidence which in reality serves the Russian establishment and its imperialist policies, and which appeals to Western leftists whose politics are centered around geopolitics rather than concern for the lives of Syrians and Ukrainians.
In July 2014, Kagarlitsky’s Institute for Global Research and Social Movements co-organized a conference titled “The World Crisis and the Confrontation in Ukraine” in Yalta, Crimea together with Osnovaniye and the Center of Coordination and Support for Novaya Rus, both headed [archive] by Aleksey Anpilogov (a regular contributor [archive] for Zavtra). Among the attendees of the conference were:
Boris Kagarlitsky himself
Aleksey Anpilogov
Vasiliy Koltashov, who heads Kagarlitsky’s Institute for Global Research and Social Movements, wrote articles in support of Marine Le Pen for Angilopov’s now defunct Novaya Rus website, and presented a deeply homophobic report at the conference [archive]
Maksim Shevchenko
Alan Freeman, a former member of Socialist Action, a British Trotskyist group, and co-director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group
Richard Brenner of Workers’ Power
Tord Björk, an organizer for the European Social Forum and a member of the EU Committee of Friends of the Earth
Roger Annis, a left-wing blogger, editor-in-chief of The New Cold War [archive], supporter of Borotba [archive] (see below), who spoke at a conference [archive] moderated by Radhika Desai along Duginist Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, and coordinator of the Solidarity with Antifascist Resistance in Ukraine
Kai Ehlers
Hermann Dworczak, of the Austrian section of the Fourth International
Jeff Sommers, from the University of Wisconsin
Radhika Desai, a Marxist who advocates for “multipolarity” [archive] (strangely a central theme of Dugin’s ideology), and co-director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group who moderated a conference [archive] whose speakers included Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, a Duginist (see below)
Stefan Huth, an editor of Die Linke’s paper Junge Welte.
Vladimir Rogov, the leader of the Slavic Guards [archive] (which promotes a militarist form of Soviet nationalism [archive]), chairman of the Central Council of the International Saint George’s Union [archive] which is under the authority of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate), Chairman of the State Construction Committee of Novorossiya [archive], and representative of the Union Parliament of Novorossiya. In 2012, Rogov, together with Yuri Kofner’s Duginist “Young Eurasia” movement (see below) and a representative of the Young Guard of United Russia (the youth wing of United Russia), had participated in roundtable talks about Ukraine-Russia relations in Donetsk [archive]. Later that year, Rogov, RIA Novosti and Young Eurasia participated in the launching of the Eurasian Information League [archive], whose stated aim is to shape public opinion concerning the creation of an Eurasian Union.
Petr Getsko, the self-proclaimed Prime Minister of the self-declared and unrecognized “Republic of Transcarpathian Rus”, who signed an agreement [archive] with Vladimir Rogov for cooperation between the Republic of Transcarpathian Rus and Novorossiya
Anastasia Pyaterikova, a former member of the PSPU [archive] and present chairperson of the Lugansk Guards
A representative of the Mothers of Ukraine association, whose only known member is Galina Zaporozhtseva (see below)
Aleksey Albu of Borotba (see below)
The Kharkiv People’s Unity (a front for Borotba [archive])
Aleksandr Prokhanov, whose fascist newspaper Zavtra reported the conference [archive] noted that Prokhanov himself met with the attendees and that a meeting had taken place between the participants of the conference and members of the Izborsky Club, which was strangely also holding a conference in Yalta at the same time. A number of these attendees signed a manifesto [archive] adopted by the conference and drafted by Maksim Shevchenko.
In August 2014, another conference was organized, again by Angipilov’s Novaya Rus, in Yalta, called “Russia, Novorossiya, Ukraine: Global Problems and Challenges”, and which Darya Mitina (who headed the Moscow branch of the Foreign Ministry of the Donetsk People’s Republic [archive] and is a member of the Central Committee of the United Communist Party and Secretary of its Central Committee for International Relations [archive]) described as the successor to the July conference [archive]. Among [archive] the participants were:
Frank Creyelman of Vlaams Belang
Luc Michel of the National-European Communitarian Party
Pavel Chernev of Ataka
Angel Dzhambazki of the Bulgarian National Movement
Johan Backman
Márton Gyöngyösi of Jobbik
Giovanni Maria Camillacci of Forza Nuova
Roberto Fiore of Forza Nuova
Mateusz Piskorski, as representative of the Self-Defence of the Republic of Poland
Konrad Rękas, from the Self-Defence of the Republic of Poland
Bartosz Bekier of Falanga. Bekier was also named vice-president of Piskorski’s Zmiana [archive] the following year, in 2015
Nick Griffin of the British National Party
Sergey Glazyev
Maksim Shevchenko
Aleksey Anpilogov
Yegor Kholmogorov
Petr Getsko
Yegor Kvasnyuk
Andrey Kovalenko, the head of the Moscow branch of the Eurasian Youth Union [archive]
Israel Shamir
Yuri Kofner (see below)
Aleksandr Borodai
Igor Girkin
members of the Izborsk and Zinovyev clubs
[Note: Andrey Kovalenko is the founder and chairman of the National Course party [archive], the political wing of the National Liberation Movement headed by Yevgeny Fyodorov, himself a State Duma member for Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party, who strangely believes rock music is “US-instigated sabotage”, and of whom Kovalenko is the assistant [archive]. The National Liberation Movement adheres to a conspiratorial view according to which the collapse of the Soviet Union meant that Russia lost its sovereignty and was turned into a colony of the United States, and sees Vladimir Putin as the leader of a “national liberation movement” supposedly “fighting against foreign influence”. National Course works with Nikolai Starikov’s Great Fatherland party, and has expanded in Sevastopol, Crimea. Like the “Anti-Orange Committee”, it appears to have been created in reaction to the Bolotnaya Square Protests of 2011.]
In September that year, the Izborsky Club organized roundtable talks [archive] whose participants were:
Aleksandr Nagorny, the secretary of the Isborsky Club
Aleksey Angilopov
Vladimir Rogov
Galina Zaporozhtseva, chairperson of an organization called “Mothers of Ukraine”, and curiously also a Zavtra contributor [archive]
Pavel Gubarev
Anton Guryanov, the chairman of the Council of People’s Deputies of the Kharkiv People Republic
Darya Mitina
Yegor Kvasnyuk
Sergey Chernyakhovsky of the Izborsky Club
Ekaterina Abbasova of Lugansk
Said Gafurov, the husband of Darya Mitina
Aleksey Belozersky, the deputy chairman of Aleksay Angolopov’s Novaya Rus
ELECTION OBSERVERS FROM THE FAR-RIGHT
In November 2014, observers for elections in Novorossiya were organized by Luc Michel’s Eurasian Observatory of Democracy and Elections, Mateusz Piskorski’s European Centre for Geopolitical Analysis, and the Agency for Security and Cooperation in Europe of Austrian far-right politician Ewald Stadler, and included:
Frank Abernathy from the US-based EFS Investment Partners LLC
Fabrice Beaur from the Eurasian Observatory of Democracy and Elections and the National-European Communitarian Party
Alessandro Bertoldi from Forza Nuova
Fabrizio Bertot from Forza Nuova
Tamaz Bestayev
Anatoly Bibilov, then Speaker of the Parliament for the Republic of South Ossetia
Branislav Blažić from the misleadingly named right-wing Serbian Progressive Party
Aleksandr Brod
Mikhail Bryachak from A Just Russia
Frank Creyelman of Vlaams Belang
Stevica Deđanski of the Center for Development of International Cooperation. He is also a state secretary at the Serbian Ministry of Mining and Energy, where his profile also lists him as leader of Nikita Tolstoy (a Serbian-Russian Friendship Association) and a Serbian Italian friendship association named Gabriele D’Annunzio, after one of the precursors of Italian fascism
Felipe Delgado of the Mediasiete Corporation
Aleksey Didenko from the far-right Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia
Vladimir Djukanovic of the Serbian Progressive Party
Jaroslav Doubrava from Severočeši.cz
Márton Gyöngyösi from Jobbik
Gábor Gyóni from the Eötvös Loránd University
Sasha Klein from Israel
Nikolay Kolomeytsev from the KPRF
Vladimir Krsljanin from the far-right Movement for Serbia
Georgios Lambroulis from the Communist Party of Greece
Renato A. Landeira from the Mediesiete Corporation
Viliam Longauer from the “Union of Fighters Against Fascism”
Max Lurie from Israeli Russian language news site Cursor Info
Lucio Malan from Forza Italia
Alessandro Musolino from Forza Italia
Manuel Ochsenreiter
Oleg Pakholkov from A Just Russia
Vladimir Rodin from the KPRF
Aleksandr Ronkin from Israeli Russian language newspaper Ekho
Slobodan Samardjiza
Jean-Luc Schaffhauser from the French far-right Rassemblement Bleu Marine
Georgi Sengalevich from Ataka
Leonid Slutskiy from the Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia
Ewald Stadler from Die Reformkonservativen
Adrienn Szaniszló from Jobbik
Magdalena Tasheva from Ataka
Dragana Trifkovic from the Belgrade Center for Strategic Research, a former member of the Presidency of the right-wing Democratic Party of Serbia from which she was expelled [archive] in 2016. Trifkovic has collaborated with Manuel Ochsenreiter and written for his Zuerst! neo-Nazi magazine [archive]
Srđa Trifković
Evgeni Velkov
Galina Yartseva
Aleksandr Yushchenko from the KPRF
Sotirios Zarianopoulos from the Communist Party of Greece
Ladislav Zemánek from No to Brussels – Popular Democracy
Aleksey Zhuravlyov, the chairman of the Rodina party
Rodina
In 2003 Sergey Glazyev, Sergey Baburin (who had previously been a leader of the National Salvation Front), Dmitry Rogozin and other Russian politicians formed the Rodina bloc, a coalition which Dugin temporarily joined before disagreements over the group’s leadership, especially due to Dugin being disappointed by the party abandoning its initial National Bolshevik character in favor of what he saw as “crude nationalism” and his aversion to the monarchism of Rogozin [archive], caused him to leave. Rodina combines xenophobic, anti-LGBT, anti-abortion and ultra-conservative positions with opposition to oligarchs and the financial sector while adhering to a chauvinistic foreign policy and worshiping the Russian state in both its Tsarist and Stalinist forms, being effectively a fascist party.
In January 2005 a group of State Duma members including from Rodina and the KPRF, evoking anti-Semitic conspiracy theories by claiming that the world was “under the monetary and political control of international Judaism”, signed a petition to the prosecutor-general demanding the ban of all Jewish organizations in Russia on the same day Vladimir Putin was participating in the commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz during WWII. Putin expressed shame over the petition, and while Rogozin had not signed the petition, he refused to condemn the Rodina members who had signed it. After this, frictions increased between Rogozin and Putin, and at the end of the same year Rodina came under investigation for running racist TV ads inciting racial hatred against migrants from the Caucasus and was barred from Moscow Duma elections in consequence.
Rodina has been described as a Kremlin project whose aim was to draw voters away from the National-Bolsheviks or from KPRF and liberals, eventually however becoming a force of its own, leading the Kremlin to oust its leader Dmitry Rogozin in 2006 and send him as ambassador to NATO to Brussels to rein the party in after Rogozin’s nationalist rhetoric led it to became too popular especially among opponents of Vladimir Putin, thus leading to fears it could overtake Putin’s United Russia in popularity, and Rodina itself was soon after merged into the A Just Russia opposition party in October that year. However Rodina was reinstated in 2012, with its chairman being Aleksey Zhuravlyov, a member of Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party who himself called the party “the President’s (Putin’s) black-ops force”, though control of the party would still be de facto in the hands of Rogozin, who has himself been Deputy Prime Minister and responsible of the Military-Industrial Commission for Putin’s administration since 2011.
In 2015, Rodina organized the “International Russian Conservative Forum” (IRCF), an attempt at forming a coalition of far-right parties. The conference was presided by Rodina’s chairman Zhuravlyov and was attended by [archive]:
Ataka
The Lombardy-Russia Cultural Association, itself founded by the far-right Lega Nord
Jared Taylor of the American Renaissance
The British Unity Party
The Alliance for Peace and Freedom
Igor Morozov, a member of the Federation Council of the Ryazan Oblast
Euro-Rus, a far-right group whose own page [archive] suggests both National Bolshevik and LaRouchite influences
The far-right Freedom Party of Austria and Serbian Radical Party were also scheduled to participate in the conference before dropping out of it.
The Alliance for Peace and Freedom itself includes:
Forza Nuova
The National Democratic Party of Germany
Party of the Swedes
Golden Dawn
National Democracy
Nation
The Danish Party
Later that same year, Rodina and the Russian Imperial Movement, another Russian far-right party, organized the founding conference of the World National-Conservative Movement (WNCM), which Alexander Reid Ross calls an attempt at creating a fascist internationale [archive] (Ross should know better than publishing this on the red-brown cesspool that CounterPunch is though). The chairman of the WNCM was Yuriy Lyubomirskiy, a member of Rodina. According to Anton Shekhovtsov, the WNCM was an outgrowth of the IRCF which had also been organized by Rodina that same year. An early warning sign of this attempt by Rodina to form a fascist internationale, according to Ross, was a conference organized in 2014 by the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia (which I explore below in the post), which is itself close to Rodina.
The participants of the WNCM included:
The Alliance for Peace of Freedom
The UK Life League, close to Britain First
Britain First, from the United Kingdom
The British Unity Party, from the United Kingdom
Jeune Nation, from France
Jobbik, from Hungary
The Slovak National Party, from Slovakia
The Congress of the New Right, from Poland
The Network Carpatho-Russian Movement, from Ukraine
The All-Polish Youth, from Poland
Falanga, from Poland
Blue Poland, from Poland
Serbian Action, from Serbia
Euro-Rus, from Belgium
The Polish National Convention, from Poland
The Center for Research of Orthodox Monarchism, from Serbia
The National Popular Front (ELAM), from Cyprus
Die Russlanddeutschen Konservativen, from Germany
Mișcărea Conservatoare, from Romania
Mișcarea Național, from Romania
The Nordic Resistance (which includes the Swedish Resistance and the Finnish Resistance)
Noua Dreaptă, from Romania
The Traditionalist Communion, from Spain
Action Française, from France
Renouveau Français, from France
Unité Continentale, from France, which has sent volunteers to fight alongside the Novorossiyan forces
Generace Identity, from the Czech Republic
Nordic Youth, from Sweden
Slovak Brotherhood, from Slovakia
The Finns Party, from Finland
Suomen Sisu, from Finland
Indentitarian Action, from Chine
Issuy-Kai, from Japan
Dayaar Mongol, from Mongolia
The New Political Party, from Thailand
The National Alliance for Democracy, from Thailand
The Worker’s Party of Social Justice, from the Czech Republic
Front Nasionaal, from South Africa
The National Movement, from Poland
National Democracy, from the Czech Republic
The Bulgarian National Union, from Bulgaria
The Traditionalist Youth Network (TYN), a Third Positionist neo-Nazi organization in the United States whose political wing is the Traditionalist Worker Party (TWP). The TYN/TWP is part of the American neo-fascist movement known as the “Alt-Right“, and has been actively working to network fascist groups in the United States, and in 2016 joined the fascist coalition named the Aryan Nationalist Alliance and later that year founded the Nationalist Front, a coalition of far-right groups in the United States
Millennium, also known as the Italian Communitarian Party, an Eurasianist organization who shares an ideology close to that of Aleksandr Dugin’s neo-Eurasianism and has been cooperating with Dugin for years. Millennium has sent “anti-fascist” volunteers to eastern Ukraine to support Novorossiya
The League of the South, a member of the TWP’s Nationalist Front [archive]
The American Freedom Party
The American Renaissance, part of the American neo-fascist movement known as the “Alt-Right“
The British National Party
Tomislav Sunic
David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan
Kevin McDonald
The Serbian Radical Party
Sam Dickson, a former lawyer for the Ku Klux Klan
The Russian National Cultural Center
Rodina
The Russian Imperial Movement
The Syrian Social Nationalist Party, a Syrian fascist party which I explore in the next part of this post
Which leads us to the war in Syria, where the fascist right has supported the Damascus regime, with the far-right all around the world rallying around Assad. It might be surprising at first, unless one is aware of the ties between the Ba’ath regime and the far-right going back to the days of the Cold War, when Hafez al-Assad sheltered Alois Brunner, the assistant of Adolf Eichmann. Brunner would help Assad restructure the Ba’athist state’s secret services on a model based on the Gestapo and the Waffen-SS. Another important link between the Syrian regime and fascists worldwide is the Syrian Social Nationalist Party.
The Syrian Social Nationalist Party
The Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) is a fascist organization founded in 1932 by Antun Saadeh, an admirer of Hitler who was well-acquainted in Nazism, and is described as a “Levantine clone of the Nazi party in almost every aspect”, being extremely anti-Semitic from its onset (which was about a decade before the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the creation of the colonial Israeli state), adopting a reversed swastika as party symbol and singing the party’s anthem to the tune of Deutschland über Alles, the national anthem by the Nazi regime. Saadeh would later however come to openly deny his organization was fascist after an attempt by the SSNP to obtain assistance in the form of military training from Nazi Germany was rejected by the then German consul to Syria, though his party never ceased to be a fascist organization in practice, as evidenced by a reactionary diatribe on the Facebook page of its Iraqi branch in 2017 railing against “Cultural Marxism”, political correctness and feminism [archive].
The SSNP’s ideology seeks the establishment of a “Greater Syria” [archive] which would include the modern states of Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, Cyprus and the Sinai, corresponding roughly to the borders of the ancient neo-Assyrian and neo-Babylonian Empires, and it differs from Nazi ideology in that rejects racialist conception of a Syrian nation and bases it instead on geographical and cultural terms, thus making the SSNP’s ideology closer to that of Francis Yockey and the European New Right.
In 1949, a series of three coups happened in Syria, the first overthrowing Syria’s first president and the third leading to Adib Shishakli, a military officer from the SSNP, seizing power and imposing military rule under which newspapers were banned and all political parties dissolved [archive]. Far from being an enemy of Israel, Shishakli’s regime accepted funding from the US in exchange of settling Palestinian refugees in Syria and giving them Syrian citizenship as part of the imperialist erasure of the Palestinian people while still supported by the SSNP. Shishakli would later be overthrown in a coup by the Syrian Communist Party and the Ba’ath Party in 1954 and the SSNP was banned in Syria in 1955 after a SSNP member assassinated Adnan al-Malki, an army officer from the Ba’ath Party.
Following Hafez al-Assad coming to power and the Lebanese Civil War during which the Lebanese branch of the SSNP allied with the Palestine Liberation Organization, Hezbollah and the Syrian army, the SSNP and the Syrian regime moved closer since Assad saw the SSNP as a useful proxy in Lebanon while the SSNP saw Assad as one way through which their project of a Greater Syria could be established due to Assad’s attempts to gain hegemony on Lebanon and Palestine. Thus the SSNP was slowly tolerated under Hafez’s dictatorship and under his son Bashar, the SSNP was allowed to join the Ba’ath led ruling coalition, and was legalized in 2005. When the crisis in Syria started in 2011, the SSNP threw its weight behind Bashar al-Assad, participating in pro-government demonstrations and fighting on the side of the state forces, and while the SSNP had joined the Syrian parliamentary opposition coalition in 2012, it withdrew from the coalition in 2014 because unlike its other members it supported the re-election of Bashar al-Assad.
The SSNP, Fascists and Syria
Before the outbreak of the Syrian Revolution, Issa el-Ayoubi, the Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs of the SSNP [archive] who is presently the vice-president of the Voltaire Network [archive], attended the Axis for Peace conference by conspiracist Thierry Meyssan in 2005 [archive] (see below). The SSNP and the Lebanese branch of the Baath Party appear to have contributed interviews to an edition of Eurasianist magazine Geopolitica in 2007 to which Claudio Mutti, Tiberio Graziani and Webster Tarpley also contributed to [archive]. The unsurprising result was that since the people’s uprising started in Syria, Russian, Iranian and Hezbollah media consistently ran a number of conspiracy theorists more or less close to the fascist network including William Engdahl [archive], Webster Tarpley [archive] (who was in Syria in 2011 [archive]), Chossudovsky [archive], Thierry Meyssan [archive] and Kevin Barrett [archive] who immediately branded the uprising as a Western plot.