Russian Nationalists Hate Me (And I Hate Them Back)

It’s funny to consider how many great thinkers and writers were never really appreciated by their home audience and found greater appeal abroad. Same thing goes for leaders who only succeeded in assuming power in foreign countries. Though I don’t count myself among the greatest minds and leaders of world history, there is a similar phenomenon at work with my ideas and writings albeit on a much smaller scale.

For one thing, my Russian media project got blacklisted by all the other established nationalist Telegram channels and content creators almost immediately after I started my work.

This is because I diverged from the standard right-wing talking points and dogmas that had calcified over the years - because I refused to talk about how Putin is a secret Communist agent, how we need to partition Russia to achieve a pure ethnostate and things got really bad when I refused to associate my brand and my project with Nazism, White Guardism, Naz-Bolism or Ancapism.

This was a sacrilege and me and the people that I was working with were summarily exiled from the wider right-wing coalition. That meant no reposts, no sharing of content (stealing it was fine though), and no engagement with us and our platform was allowed.

Slowly but surely though, a lot of my simple talking points and ideas finally started to permeate right-wing internet discourse. People who had attacked me viciously suddenly started giving quotes to the media about how “Russia needs to move past political ideologies” or start focusing on “the ideology of victory.”

But these are not the only Rolo-isms that have crept their way into Russian right-wing thought though.

For example, I always argued that Russians have their own political traditions and that Russian patriots need to re-learn who they are and not cargo-cult Western political thought. This may be hard to believe, but most right-wingers in Russia four years ago were pretty-much indistinguishable from libtards who whined about elections and human right’s violations and went on media outlets like (((Echo))) Moscow to vent against Putin. Thanks to great right-wing minds such as the almighty Krylov, right-wingers wanted Russia to liberalize and democratize further and worked hard to soften their positions to make them palatable to the Liberal Permanent Opposition TM so that they could enter a coalition with them against Putin. Luckily for Russia, most of the people promoting such stupidity either outright killed themselves (Egor Pogrom) or killed themselves slowly through bad lifestyle habits (Krylov) and when the dust settled, the Nat-Lib faction was decimated and leaderless.

Rest in Peace, sweet prince.

I’m not going to claim credit for foiling their plans - the credit largely goes to Putin himself, who started clamping down hard on the Liberal Opposition and made them so toxic to associate with that even the braindead nationalists wisened up and began to abandon that sinking ship.

Then, I argued that correct belief - or right-wing political orthodoxy, was inferior to correct practice - right wing political orthopraxy. That we needed to create a palatable and appealing culture - a right-wing lifestyle product - instead of constantly debating ideology, history and talking about politics all the time.

Unfortunately, this is an idea whose time has not yet come. See, it’s easy to believe the right things, but it’s harder to practice what you believe. I argued that as soon as we were able to create an appealing cultural/lifestyle product and bundle it with certain political views (think Hipsters and SJWism), that we would start winning the culture war. But, whining endlessly about what Peskov or Lavrov said on the internet seems like a more worthy use of time and energy to Russian right-wingers at the time of this writing. Hopefully that changes.

My most important, practical suggestions eventually bore fruit, although again, I was just reading political trends and wasn’t responsible for the favorable circumstances that helped my views gain traction.

I argued that street activism was stupid and would only lead to pointless arrests. Right-wing street activism was on the wane anyways, but I like to think that our vicious and unrelenting attacks on self-styled right-wing leaders who wanted to send young kids into the meat-grinder of police batons and detention centers played a role as well.

I also implored nationalists to stop attacking popular things like Putin, the Russian flag, the victory in WWII and to stop being such contrarian little homos about literally everything the Russian government did. Once again, I think progress was made in this area, and I expect to see more in the coming months and years as the state continues to become more based and thereby less criticizable from a right-wing position.

I also did my best to push back against COVIDism, but, sadly, the right in Russia embraced the hysteria and ceded the COVID opposition slot to the Communists, who, to their credit, came out as ardent anti-vaxxers and anti-lockdowners. Seeing as this was an immensely popular position to take, I was very let down to see the likes of Anatoly Karlin (part-time Russia expert extraordinaire and full-time drug-enthusiast) attacking the Russian people and calling them “sub-humans” on his Twitter for refusing to mask up and Trust the Science (tm). At the time, unfortunately, my voice was not as powerful as more established right-wingers and so I was simply branded a kook and largely ignored. Nowadays, these people pretend that we weren’t the only group on the right telling the truth about COVID and act like they knew that it was all fake from the beginning. Classy.

Moving on to cultural and social issues, I insisted that we be vehemently anti-Feminism and anti-Tolerance of any kind. Believe it or not, the “Black Hundreds” nationalist book store and the scene around them had started hiring homosexuals and pandering to the Gay Mafia in Russia. This made them enemy #1 for our little cultural guerrilla outfit and we let them have it.

Bastrakov, the organizer of the Black Hundreds book store

Luckily for us, they eventually largely gave up on pretending to be right-wing and continued their drift into trendy bookstore hipsterism and irrelevancy. They still occasionally hold lectures and promote Opposition candidates, but other than that, they’re simply no longer as relevant as they once were. So that’s good.

Finally, I spent a lot of time attacking Roman Yuneman, a rising star (at least according to the media in Russia), who presented himself as both a Liberal and a Nationalist and who made a big media splash while running for some petty bureaucrat position in the last elections.

We pressed his party managers on where their funding was coming from (Yuneman claimed that wealthy Russian businessmen had gifted him tens of millions of roubles after having coffee with him and being impressed by his ideas) and eventually got other right-wingers to distance themselves from him and his juicy slush fund.

This was part of a larger war that we waged to get the Russian right to distance itself from the Liberal Opposition and stand on its own two feet and adopt simple, un-ideologized, populist positions. I have high hopes that right-wing discourse will continue de-coupling from Liberal talking points going forward.

Russians should start looking to right-wing reactionary writers like Ivan Ilyin for guidance instead.

All in all, I think Russia is clearly moving in the direction that we want and will continue to do so simply because this is the only way for Russia to survive. Many of our “fringe” positions are now not only mainstream talking points, but actual state policy. There is much work still to be done, but I am very optimistic as things stand now.

Between you guys and me, I harbor no ambitions or hopes of becoming a political figure in Russia or anywhere else for that matter. I do fervently hope that some of the simple ideas and suggestions I’ve made and aggressively shilled for do eventually make it all the way to the top, eventually.

All I ask for is a citation occasionally.