The emails leaked by the Anonymous International last year give us a few insights into the workings of the English language pro-Putin propaganda website Russia Insider.

Its editor Charles Bausman launched the website in September 2014, and described the rationale behind the website as follows:

It was started in September 2014 by a group of expats living in Russia who felt that coverage of Russia is biased and inaccurate.
[...]
The problem is media control by a few corporations and interest groups, and their close ties with governments and business interests.
Instead of challenging, questioning, and fostering open discussion, they tend to promote those interests.

Ironically, this is what Russia Insider itself has been doing since its launch, namely publishing and re-publishing pieces of Russia's disinformation warfare against the West and Ukraine.

Charles Bausman, editor of Russia Insider and a regular commentator for Russia Today (RT)

The leaks reveal that Bausman, rather than relying on crowdfunding for Russia Insider, asks for money from a Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeev via his associate Alexey Komov.

There were several interesting articles devoted to Malofeev in the international and Russian media. In the context of this blog, Malofeev is known for providing financial assistance to the pro-Russian extremists in Eastern Ukraine (for this very reason Malofeev was sanctioned by the EU, Norway and Switzerland), organising homophobic conferences in Russia, assisting French far right politicians in getting Russian money, and building European far right alliances.

Komov is a no less interesting figure. He is an employee of several organisations founded and funded by Malofeev, as well as a representative of the homophobic World Congress of Families in Russia. He is also an honorary president of the Lombardy-Russia Cultural Association, Russia's front organisation in Italy established by the far right Lega Nord party. Komov even gave speech at the party's congress at the end of 2013 that elected Matteo Salvini as its leader.

Alexey Komov addresses the congress of Lega Nord, December 2013, Rome

Matteo Salvini, the leader of the far right Lega Nord party, meeting Putin in October 2014

And here's a series of communications between Russia Insider's Bausman, Komov and Malofeev.


Here's the text version of the communications:

Charles Bausman to Alexey Komov (2 October 2014):
Alexey, take a look at our stats, - click the button in the footer. They are very, very strong. I still need money!!  Any chance of resuming the conversation?

Alexey Komov to Konstantin Malofeev (2 October 2014):
Charlie, however, has created a good website - http://russia-insider.com/en - a high-quality, pro-Russian and popular one. He wants to cooperate...

Charles Bausman to Alexey Komov (18 October 2014):
This has links in to my TV appearances. I've been on 4 times now. Any reaction from K?

In his last email, Bausman also sent to Komov his CV that gives us a few interesting details.
It is interesting to note that Bausman was born in West Germany (Frankfurt) in 1964, but then lived in Soviet Russia, "due to father's long-term assignment" there in 1968-1972 (one wonders what that assignment was about). According to his CV, Bausman was educated in the US, but has been living in Moscow since the late 1980s. He also states that "in virtue of of professional and family connections", he has "multiple high-ranking connections to the European and American media", as well as "investment and political spheres".

What is not clear is whether Bausman has eventually received any financial help from Malofeev (the leaked mailbox belongs to a fourth party), but his willingness to "cooperate" with a Russian oligarch who is close to the Kremlin and has been providing funding for the war in Eastern Ukraine is quite revealing.

The Neo-Eurasianist perspective on Ukraine was formed already in the 1990s, when Russian fascist Alexander Dugin argued, in his Foundations of Geopolitics, that Ukraine was “an unnatural state” consisting of four major regions with allegedly different geopolitical loyalties, and that a sovereign and united Ukraine constituted a major threat to the geopolitical security of Russia and the envisioned Eurasian Empire.

Dugin specified the means for neutralising the "Ukrainian threat to Russia" in 2009 in his book The Fourth Political Theory. In particular, he argued that “extending Russian influence on the post-Soviet space” would not necessarily imply “direct colonisation in the old tradition”: “in our world, more sophisticated and efficient network technologies are developed that allow to achieve the same results with the different means – with the use of information resources, social organisations, faith-based groups, and social movements”.  However, Russia’s direct action was also possible:

It cannot be excluded that a battle for Crimea and Eastern Ukraine awaits us.
Only a short time ago, the most hot-headed among the Russian hawks presumed only an internal conflict in Ukraine, as well as political, economic and energy pressure [on Ukraine] from the Russian side, but now a possibility of a direct military clash no longer appears unrealistic.

Alexander Dugin and his Neo-Eurasianist followers in the Russian-Georgian war, August 2008

Although Dugin conceptualised the need of dismantling Ukraine as a sovereign state through non-military measures (or a combination of non-military and military resources, which can be defined as hybrid warfare) in 2009, his Neo-Eurasianist movement became involved in the non-military measures aimed at undermining Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity already in 2005.

The timing was determined by the “Orange revolution” in Ukraine – a series of mass protests against the fraudulent “victory” of Ukraine’s corrupt, pro-Russian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych in the 2004 presidential election. The success of the “Orange revolution”, which had led to the second run-off of the presidential election in which Yanukovych’s contender, pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko, won, seemed to have scared Russia's President Vladimir Putin and the Russian ruling elites. They feared that a similar protest could take place in Russia and put an end to Putin’s regime. The significant contribution of young, active Ukrainians to the success of the “Orange revolution” prompted the Russian establishment to launch a preemptive defence force by reviving, mobilising and consolidating a pro-regime youth movement. In order to counter the largely imaginary threat of a “colour revolution” in Russia, the authorities sanctioned the creation of several “patriotic” youth movements: “Nashi” (Ours), “Rossiya molodaya” (Young Russia), “Molodaya gvardiya” (Young Guard), and some others. One of those movements was Evraziyskiy soyuz molodezhi (Eurasian Youth Union, ESM) – under the leadership of Pavel Zarifullin and Valeriy Korovin– a National Bolshevik youth wing of Dugin’s Mezhdunarodnoe evraziyskoe dvizhenie (International Eurasianist Movement, MED). It is unclear who funded the ESM from 2005, but an analysis of the Russia-based Centre of Economic and Political Reforms shows that the ESM received several presidential grants amounting to more than 18.5 million Russian rubles in 2013-2014.

The ESM was active not only in Russia, but also in other countries, including Ukraine. During 2005-2007, branches of the ESM were established in the Ukrainian cities of Kyiv, Kharkiv, Sumy, Sevastopol and some others. These branches cooperated with the Ukrainian cells of the Natsional-Bol’shevistskaya Partiya (National-Bolshevik Party), as well as with Ukrainian far right parties such as the Rus’ky blok (Russian bloc), the misleadingly named Prohresyvna sotsialistychna partiya Ukrainy (Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, PSPU) led by Natalya Vitrenko, and “Bratstvo” (Brotherhood) headed by Dmytro Korchyns’ky. Both Vitrenko and Korchyns’ky were members of the Highest Council of Dugin’s MED.

The Ukrainian branches of the ESM remained on the margins of the Ukrainian political life, while most of its activities were limited to anti-NATO protests and other similar anti-Western actions, and did not produce any significant result in terms of undermining the Ukrainian state. Moreover, some of the Ukrainian members of the ESM did not share the radical anti-Ukrainian ideas of Neo-Eurasianism. For example, after two Russian members of the movement and one Ukrainian activist of the ESM vandalised Ukrainian state symbols on the Hoverla mountain in 2007, this led to the split in the Ukrainian ESM, as many did not support this act of vandalism. This also led to the termination of any cooperation between the ESM and “Bratstvo”, and Korchyns’ky left the Highest Council of the MED. The radicals, however, welcomed the act and were outspoken in their resentment of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. One ESM activist from the Crimean town of Bakhchisaray, Kostyantyn Knyrik, made no secret of the anti-Ukrainian agenda of Neo-Eurasianism: “Our foremost priority is to focus on the creation of the empire; the first goal is to break Crimea away from Ukraine. To join it to the empire first”. Because of the anti-Ukrainian thrust of Neo-Eurasianism and the Hoverla mountain incident, the leader of the ESM, Pavel Zarifullin, and Dugin himself were banned from entering Ukraine in 2006 and 2007 correspondingly.

The Neo-Eurasianist movement largely disappeared from Ukraine by 2008, due to the 2007 split and the measures against the ESM on the part of the Sluzhba bezpeky Ukrainy (Security Service of Ukraine, SBU). Some activists left the movement for ideological reasons, some moved to Russia to continue their anti-Ukrainian work outside the country itself, some joined other pro-Russian organisations, and some abandoned political involvement whatsoever. The minority stayed in the movement, but was hardly visible until the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war in 2014.

However, Russian Neo-Eurasianists were more successful in cooperating directly with a number of pro-Russian organisations in Ukraine. One of these organisations was the above-mentioned PSPU led by Vitrenko who, at that time, could be described as “the premier representative of radical anti-Westernism in Ukraine”. Vitrenko often took part in various conferences featuring either Dugin or other members of his Neo-Eurasianist movement. Dugin called her “a charismatic politician [...] advocating Eurasianist Slavic views” and “a leader of the pan-Ukrainian resistance [to the US]”.

Vitrenko’s political narrative consisted of three main points. First, she promoted the idea of creating a political union of Ukraine, Russia and Belarus. Second, she rejected any form of Ukraine’s rapprochement with the EU and the US – the West in general. Third, she labelled all advocates of Ukraine’s independence as Ukrainian ultranationalists or even Nazis. She freely substituted “NATO” with “Nazism” (and vice versa) in her political speeches, attempting to create a strong association between Nazism and the West in general, and – appealing to the Soviet mythology of the “Great Patriotic War” – portrayed a struggle between the “fascist” West and “anti-fascist” Russia.

Yet another pro-Russian organisation that Dugin’s Neo-Eurasianists cooperated with in Ukraine was the “Donetskaya Respublika” (Donetsk Republic, DR). This organisation was created in summer 2005 by Andriy Purgin, Oleksandr Tsurkan and Oleh Frolov, as a response to the “Orange revolution” and presidency of Viktor Yushchenko who advocated pro-Western foreign policy of Ukraine. The DR was officially registered in December that year, but already in autumn leaders of the organisation took part in the protest demonstration in Kyiv together with the activists of the ESM.

For the DR, the cooperation with the ESM was apparently the most important organisational link with Russia. In August 2006, the DR’s leaders, namely Purgin and Frolov, as well as Knyrik and several other Ukrainian ESM activists, went to a summer camp in Russia organised by the ESM. Vitrenko and Oleksandr Svistunov, the leader of the Rus’ky blok, also took part in the camp where they delivered lectures to the participants. Apart from lectures, seminars and social activities, the participants of the camp were engaged in training in violent street protests. One of the trainers was Oleh Bakhtiyarov who had been Dugin’s associate since the 1990s and lived in Kyiv where he was close to the local branch of the ESM.

At the ESM camp: (Andriy Purgin, Oleh Frolov, Oleh Bakhtiyarov, Kostyantyn Knyrik), summer 2006, Russia

At the ESM camp: Oleh Frolov, Pavel Zarifullin, summer 2006, Russia

In November 2006, DR and ESM activists collected signatures to hold a referendum on the independence of the “Donetsk republic”. The referendum never took place, but the SBU and police took notice of the group, and cases were brought against the leaders of the DR under three articles of the Ukrainian Criminal Code: (1) “Actions aimed at the forcible change or overthrow of the constitutional order or the seizure of state power”, (2) “Infringement on the territorial integrity and inviolability of Ukraine”, and (3) “Violation of citizens' equality based on their race, nationality or attitude to religion”. The criminal cases hindered the process of building the DR as a functional structure; in 2007, a Ukrainian court outlawed the DR, and it went underground.

Collecting signatures to hold a referendum on the independence of the “Donetsk republic”, Donetsk, November 2006. Oleksandr Tsurkan on the left.

Collecting signatures to hold a referendum on the independence of the “Donetsk republic”, Donetsk, November 2006. Andriy Purgin in the centre

Neither the persecution nor banning of the DR, however, stymied its activities. In 2008, the DR, together with several other pro-Russian organisations, held a convention featuring Pavel Kanishchev, one of the leaders of the Moscow branch of the ESM, and Knyrik as the leader of the ESM’s Crimean cell. The convention declared the creation of the Donetsk Federal Republic. Its declaration also referred to a resolution of the “convention of popular representatives of South-Eastern Ukraine” that, in particular, renounced the existence of the Ukrainian nation, arguing that:

[The congress] considers the totally forced Ukrainisation of South-East [of Ukraine] as a form of humanitarian genocide aimed at the destruction of the indigenous Russian population (russkie), replacement of Russian concepts by the “Ukrainian” ones. Considers as a humanitarian crime against the Super-Ethnos of the Russians (Russy) the artificially created community “Ukrainian nation” that does not exist as such and divides the single people into “Ukrainians” and “Russians” (rossiyane). The primordial people of the Rus is the Russian (russkiy) people as an indivisible foundation of the Great Russian Race.

The resolution also demanded from the Ukrainian parliament to adopt a “law on the federal structure of Ukraine” through the change of the Constitution of Ukraine.

In 2009, the DR declared the “state sovereignty of the Donetsk Federal Republic” that would unite the territories of six Ukrainian south-eastern oblasts: Donets’ka, Dnipropetrovs’ka, Zaporiz’ka, Luhans’ka, Kharkivs’ka, and Khersons’ka. The same year, they organised a camp where members of the DR trained in using firearms and making Molotov cocktails.

Oleh Frolov at the DR training camp, 2009

At the DR training camp, 2009

The DR largely curtailed their activities in 2010. One possible explanation is that deaths of three activists of the DR including Tsurkan– the DR believed that the SBU poisoned them with mercury vapour – might have delivered a blow to the organisation. A more feasible explanation, however, is that the DR’s activities aimed at destabilising the Ukrainian state were no longer necessary after pro-Russian politician Viktor Yanukovych was elected President of Ukraine in February 2010, and another pro-Russian politician, Mykola Azarov, became Prime Minister. The DR, which sometimes cooperated with Yanukovych’s Partiya rehioniv (Party of Regions) – Tsurkan worked in Yanukovych’s electoral campaign office in 2004 – apparently felt that it did not need to attack Ukraine’s sovereignty as long as the country was ruled by the pro-Russian forces.

The relation between the reduced activities of the DR and the outcome of the 2010 presidential elections may also explain why the DR resumed its activities and extensive cooperation with the ESM in 2012. This was the year of parliamentary elections in Ukraine, and the pro-Russian forces struggled to retain their power in the parliament, and, thus, undermine the national-democratic pro-Western forces. At that time, Yanukovych’s allies adopted “anti-fascist” rhetoric attacking the Ukrainian far right Svoboda (Freedom) party. Since Svoboda also cooperated with the Ukrainian national-democrats, two “anti-fascist” organisations, Russia-based “World without Nazism” and the “International Antifascist Front” founded by Yanukovych’s major ally Vadym Kolesnychenko, mobilised against the entire national-democratic opposition to Yanukovych trying to discredit it as “fascist”. The DR, with its insistence on the dangers of Ukrainian pro-Western “fascism”, fit well into the campaign against the opposition to Yanukovych.

There was another important factor that contributed to the reinvigorated activities of the DR in 2012. It was also the time of heated debates on the direction of Ukraine’s foreign policy. Russia developed its Eurasian Customs Union (ECU) and wanted Ukraine to be part of it. The second option for Ukraine was the Association Agreement with the EU. Even the oligarchic community close to Yanukovych seemed to be divided on the foreign policy issue: some supported the idea of Ukraine joining the ECU; others clearly favoured the rapprochement with the EU and the West in general. It seems viable to suggest both Moscow and Ukrainian oligarchs promoting the integration into the ECU contributed to the mobilisation of the radically anti-Western DR in 2012 as leverage on Yanukovych.

Hence, the idea of the integration into the ECU dominated the contacts between the DR and ESM, as well as between other Ukrainian pro-Russian and Russian organisations, in 2012. On 18 February 2012, activists of the DR and ESM took part in a small roundtable “The Future of Donbass” in Luhansk. Around 20 Russian and pro-Russian participants adopted a resolution that, in particular, argued that “the ultimate aim of the relations between [Russia and Ukraine] had to be a transition from the regional integration to the building of a new form of the interstate integration” – the Eurasian Union as the next step in the development of the ECU.

“The Future of Donbass”, Luhansk, 18 February 2012

On 11 March 2012, representatives of various Russian and Ukrainian organisations held a roundtable “Ukraine and Donbass for the Eurasian Union” in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don to discuss the creation of the Eurasian Union. This conference featured DR’s Purgin, the leader of Moscow’s ESMAndrey Kovalenko, and Serhiy Baryshnikov, associate professor at the Donetsk National University who was known for promoting Dugin’s books and Neo-Eurasianist ideas at his lectures. Kovalenko, in particular, stated the Russian authorities were going to mobilise movements of Russian compatriots abroad, so the pressure groups of this kind could become “a basis for the broad integration movement”. The conference itself concluded with an initiative to create an international NGO “Ukraine for the Eurasian Union”, as well as establishing a special NGO for Donbass named “Donbass for the Eurasian Union” led by Baryshnikov.

“Ukraine and Donbass for the Eurasian Union”, Rostov-on-Don, 11 March 2012

On 24 May 2012, the ESM announced on its website that the DR opened the embassy of the Donetsk Republic in the Russian Federation: the “administration of the Embassy was temporarily housed in the headquarters of the Moscow branch of the ESM”. The announcement also argued, intrinsically rejecting the territorial integrity of Ukraine, that the opening of the embassy would “contribute to strengthening of the relations between the residents of the Donetsk Republic and the rest of Russia, and to the matter of reunification of the lands of historical Russia artificially disunited in 1991”. Furthermore, the DR was going to issue passports of the Donetsk Republic, and the residents of the above-mentioned six south-eastern oblasts of Ukraine had priority in applying for these passports.

Conferences focused on Eurasian integration of Ukraine continued. On 28 July 2012, Donetsk hosted a roundtable “Regional reintegration as a steppingstone of the Eurasian unification” that featured Russian and Ukrainian pro-Russian activists, including ESM’s Kovalenko and other members of the Neo-Eurasianist movement, DR’s Purgin, and Baryshnikov.

A similar but larger conference, titled “Donbass in the Eurasian Project”, took place on 24-25 November 2012 in Donetsk and brought together activists from 20 Russian and Ukrainian pro-Russian organisations. The conference opened with a panel chaired by Baryshnikov as the head of the “Donbass for the Eurasian Union” and featured papers of the leaders of the ESMKovalenko and Valeriy Korovin (who conveyed greetings from Dugin), as well as Purgin and two other pro-Russian activists from Donetsk. The conference adopted a resolution that, in particular, stated:

The participants of the conference declare its principal aim – the creation of the Eurasian Union [...].

Donbass can and must become a steppingstone and a support region for the launch of the genuine Eurasian project. Being a geopolitical and historical product and heritage of the Russian line of development, our land represents an optimal trans-regional model of the future integration. Our region is an organic part of the Russian world (Russkiy mir), an epicentre of Novorossiya – the last bulwark and guarantee of the unity of Ukraine and Russia. The current conditions actualise the issue of turning Donbass from the purely socio-economic reality into the political factor.

“Donbass in the Eurasian Project”, Donetsk, 24 November 2012

The DR’s activities went beyond conferences and roundtables. On 4 April 2013, the DR organised an attack on a cultural centre in Donetsk that hosted a workshop on Internet technologies. John F. Tefft, contemporary US Ambassador to Ukraine, opened the workshop, but he left before the attack. Several reports stressed the inactivity of the police during the incident; furthermore, the police later stated that there had been no violations of the public order. This reinforced suspicions that the DR had high-ranking patrons in the region who condoned their anti-Ukrainian and separatist activities during Yanukovych’s rule. The same year, activists of the DR and ESM took part in the Seliger educational forum organised by the Russian “Nashi” movement.

At the Seliger camp, Russia, summer 2013

However, the DR became less active afterwards and mobilised again only after the Ukrainian revolution, Yanukovych’s flight to Russia, and the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war that started with the Russian occupation of Crimea at the end of February 2014.

Purgin became the “first Vice Prime Minister” of the “Donetsk People's Republic” (DNR), while Oleh Frolov, became a member of the DNR’s “parliament”. Kostyantyn Knyrik, the leader of the Crimean branch of the ESM, became the head of the Information Centre “South-Eastern Front”. Sergey Baryshnikov was appointed, by the “DNR's authorities”, the rector of the Donetsk National University.

Over the years, in addition to engaging with far right activists and politicians in the capacity of commentators and opinion-makers, various Russian media have developed structural relations with the far right media projects in France, Italy and Austria. Recently, new data has emerged suggesting that structural relations seem to be developing between the Slovak magazine Zem a Vek and different Russian actors.

Zem a Vek is a typical conspiracy theory magazine with a focus, as Matúš Ritomský argues, on three particular themes: politics, a search for social alternatives, and a return to the nature. The magazine is openly anti-Western and pro-Russian, as well as being particularly obsessed with “exposing” the “power of Jews and Americans”, the LGBT “conspiracy”, and Slovak mainstream media slammed as “mouthpieces of Zionism, Americanism, globalism, defamation of national values, primacy of the minority rights over the majority rights, [and] multiculturalism”. While not being directly linked to Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico or his SMER party, he definitely benefits from the anti-Western and/or pro-Russian “alternative” new media, including Zem a Vek, that have mushroomed in the Slovak information space in the wake of the Russian-Ukrainian war, as they help him legitimise his non-reformist policies.

Selected covers of Zem & Vek: "Homosexualisation or a traditional family?", "Israel, Holocaust and anti-Semitism: On the Altar of Zionism".

In May 2014, two editors of the magazine, Tibor Eliot Rostás and Dušan Budzák, who also directs Rádio Viva, met with Russia’s contemporary Ambassador to Slovakia Pavel Kuznetsov, and published an interview with him in the June 2014 edition of the magazine. In this interview, Kuznetsov, in particular, argued that the foreign policy of the Soviet Union had been based on the promotion of communist and socialist ideas internationally, and that the Soviet Union had paid money to the communist and socialist parties in the Warsaw Pact countries, as well as to the developing countries that had attempted to carry out socialist revolutions. With the demise of the Soviet system, Kuznetsov maintained, this practice was abandoned, but the Americans started employing the same methods which the US accused the Soviet Union of employing: instigating revolutions (“colour revolutions”), financing various NGOs, and promoting its own vision of democracy internationally.

The meeting at the Russian Embassy in Slovakia: (left to right) Pavel Kuznetsov, Tibor Eliot Rostás, and Dušan Budzák, Bratislava, 26 May 2014

In June 2015, an audio file was leaked that contained an unedited version of Kuznetsov’s interview for Zem a Vek. It turned out that the magazine had not published specific parts of the conversation. Two major discussions were left out in the published version: (1) Kuznetsov’s extended discussion of the Russian foreign policy (2) the editors’ attempts to establish closer relations with Russian institutions.

First, while talking about Russia allegedly abandoning the practice of “interfering in the internal affairs of other states”, Kuznetsov expressed his regret and voiced his hope that Russia would return to this practice. When asked by the editors whether Russia would potentially support a political force yet outside the Slovak political establishment that would proclaim Russian-Slovak “Slavonic brotherhood” its official political platform, Kuznetsov said:

I am convinced that in Slovakia there is a good basis, and support among people for this kind of ideas, organisations, movements, which would contribute to the building of stronger relations between Russia and Slovakia. Naturally, we support and will support these movements [and] organisations that favour strengthening of cooperation and relationships with Russia. [...] This might have been our mistake that, in Russian foreign policy, we have abandoned what we used to call “interference” – interference in the internal affairs of other states; [we have abandoned] support – not political, but financial support – of parties in other countries. [...] But I think that, one way or another, we will eventually return to the necessity of, indeed, a more active support – not simply on the political level – of those political forces in certain countries which favour cooperation with Russia. [...] I think that, in the coming years, there will be an increasing support from the Russian side for the political forces in other countries, including Slovakia, which are loyal to Russia. And also support for the media.

The editors of Zem a Vek also mentioned that they were thinking of expanding their media business and asked Kuznetsov whether they could receive any support of their endeavours from Russia. In reply, Kuznetsov said that we would be glad “to write to Moscow”, “to people who deal with these questions”, and recommend establishing contacts between Zem a Vek and “the relevant Russian structures”.

The meeting at the Russian Embassy in Slovakia: (left to right) Pavel Kuznetsov and Tibor Eliot Rostás, Bratislava, 26 May 2014

In September 2014, Kuznetsov was replaced by Aleksey Fedotov as Russia’s Ambassador to Slovakia, and the editors of Zem a Vek established contacts with him too. There is no evidence, however, that these contacts have led to the visibility of Zem a Vek or its authors in the Russian international or domestic media. Even when Rostás announced, in the beginning of 2015, that he and his associates would start collecting signatures for a petition demanding a referendum on Slovakia’s withdrawal from NATO– an effort that the Russian authorities would naturally embrace – the Russian media hardly covered this initiative.

Nevertheless, the attempts of Zem a Vek, which changed its subtitle from “Information without censorship” to “Geopolitical and cultural monthly” in February 2015, to establish relations with the Russian structures continued. Russian Ambassador Fedotov introduced, in Bratislava, Rostás and Budzák to Armen Oganesyan, the editor of the journal Mezhdunarodnaya zhizn’ that is officially associated with Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov heads the board of the journal, and Oganesyan is an unsalaried adviser to the foreign minister. This meeting resulted in Rostás’s and Budzák’s visit to Moscow in June 2015 where, upon the initiative of the Russian Embassy in Slovakia, the editors of Zem a Vek presented their idea of creating a media holding at the round-table held at the editorial office of Mezhdunarodnaya zhizn’. Other participants included“representatives of non-governmental organisations and foundations, as well as representatives of the governmental structures”, while the round-table was held “in partnership with the Union of Oil & Gas Producers of Russia”.

(left to right) Vasiliy Likhachev, Armen Oganesyan, Tibor Eliot Rostás, and Dušan Budzák, Moscow, 4 June 2015

During his presentation at the round-table, Budzák said that they were trying to expand their media business and launch a media house that would include not only the magazine, i.e. Zem a Vek, but also TV and radio stations, a daily newspaper, and online media. This media holding, as Budzák argued, would “work against the mainstream that was largely financed by the American side and in the interests of NATO”. In response to this presentation, Vasiliy Likhachev, MP from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), in particular said:

I think your project will be carried out. I see one source that will work to the success of your project – the creation of the holding – but I will formulate it as a question: When do you think your product will gain trans-regional and Europe-wide significance? I have no doubt that – if the editorial board [of Mezhdunarodnaya zhizn’] and you are determined – Russian specialists are ready to take the most active part in processing and creating this kind of production, which [...] are much needed especially against the background of the reports that are being produced in Europe on the Brussels’ orders. One needs to compete for the public opinion and the state of minds in Europe. And here we are pragmatic allies with you. Thank you for this.

A report on the round-table published by the Russian International Affairs Council, affiliated with Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Education and Science, noted that the participants also discussed prospects of “constructing” “a Russia-friendly area in Central and Eastern Europe”.

So far, the idea of Zem a Vek to build a media holding has not been implemented (yet), but the meetings and talks that Rostás and Budzák held with Russian representatives of different levels testify to the presence of mutual interest in developing structural relations between Zem a Vek and particular Russian groups.

On 3 February 2016, the European Parliament adopted a resolution "on the human rights situation in Crimea, in particular of the Crimean Tatars". The resolution reminds that "the Russian Federation has illegally annexed Crimea and Sevastopol and therefore violated international law, including the UN Charter, the Helsinki Final Act, the 1994 Budapest Memorandum and the 1997 Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership between the Russian Federation and Ukraine".

Essentially, the European Parliament "reiterates its strong commitment to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine within its internationally recognised borders" and "calls on Russia to start negotiations with Ukraine and other parties on the de-occupation of Crimea".

584 MEPs took part in the vote; of them 472 (81%) supported the resolution, 79 (14%) voted against it, and 33 (6%) abstained.

The voting pattern is very similar to what weobservedbefore: the overwhelming majority of the votes against the resolution has come from the far right, eurosceptic and (far) left parties. Here is the full list of MEPs who gave voted against the resolution.

Country/MEP	Party	Ideological orientation
Austria
Barbara KAPPEL	FPÖ	radical right-wing populism
Georg MAYER	FPÖ	radical right-wing populism
Franz OBERMAYR	FPÖ	radical right-wing populism
Harald VILIMSKY	FPÖ	radical right-wing populism
Cyprus
Takis HADJIGEORGIOU	Progressive Party of Working People - Left - New Forces	communism
Neoklis SYLIKIOTIS	Progressive Party of Working People - Left - New Forces	communism
France
Marie-Christine ARNAUTU	Front national	radical right-wing populism
Nicolas BAY	Front national	radical right-wing populism
Dominique BILDE	Front national	radical right-wing populism
Marie-Christine BOUTONNET	Front national	radical right-wing populism
Steeve BRIOIS	Front national	radical right-wing populism
Mireille D'ORNANO	Front national	radical right-wing populism
Edouard FERRAND	Front national	radical right-wing populism
Sylvie GODDYN	Front national	radical right-wing populism
Bruno GOLLNISCH	Front national	radical right-wing populism
Jean-François JALKH	Front national	radical right-wing populism
Patrick LE HYARIC	Front de Gauche	communism
Marine LE PEN	Front national	radical right-wing populism
Dominique MARTIN	Front national	radical right-wing populism
Sophie MONTEL	Front national	radical right-wing populism
Jean-Luc MÉLENCHON	Front de Gauche	communism
Joëlle MÉLIN	Front national	radical right-wing populism
Younous OMARJEE	L'union pour les Outremer	left-wing radicalism
Florian PHILIPPOT	Front national	radical right-wing populism
Jean-Luc SCHAFFHAUSER	Rassemblement bleu Marine	radical right-wing populism
Marie-Christine VERGIAT	Front de Gauche	communism
Germany
Thomas HÄNDEL	Die Linke	socialism
Sabine LÖSING	Die Linke	socialism
Helmut SCHOLZ	Die Linke	socialism
Udo VOIGT	NPD	neo-Nazism
Gabriele ZIMMER	Die Linke	socialism
Greece
Nikolaos CHOUNTIS	Popular Unity
Georgios EPITIDEIOS	Golden Dawn	neo-Nazism
Lampros FOUNTOULIS	Golden Dawn	neo-Nazism
Stelios KOULOGLOU	Coalition of the Radical Left	left-wing radicalism
Notis MARIAS	[independent]	[independent]
Sofia SAKORAFA	[independent]	[independent]
Eleftherios SYNADINOS	Golden Dawn	Neo-Nazism
Hungary
Zoltán BALCZÓ	Jobbik	radical right-wing populism
Ireland
Luke Ming FLANAGAN	[independent]	[independent]
Italy
Isabella ADINOLFI	Movimento 5 Stelle	euroscepticism
Marco AFFRONTE	Movimento 5 Stelle	euroscepticism
Laura AGEA	Movimento 5 Stelle	euroscepticism
Daniela AIUTO	Movimento 5 Stelle	euroscepticism
Tiziana BEGHIN	Movimento 5 Stelle	euroscepticism
Mara BIZZOTTO	Lega Nord	radical right-wing populism
Mario BORGHEZIO	Lega Nord	radical right-wing populism
David BORRELLI	Movimento 5 Stelle	euroscepticism
Gianluca BUONANNO	Lega Nord	radical right-wing populism
Fabio Massimo CASTALDO	Movimento 5 Stelle	euroscepticism
Ignazio CORRAO	Movimento 5 Stelle	euroscepticism
Rosa D'AMATO	Movimento 5 Stelle	euroscepticism
Eleonora EVI	Movimento 5 Stelle	euroscepticism
Laura FERRARA	Movimento 5 Stelle	euroscepticism
Lorenzo FONTANA	Lega Nord	radical right-wing populism
Eleonora FORENZA	Lista Tsipras-L'Altra Europa	social democracy
Piernicola PEDICINI	Movimento 5 Stelle	euroscepticism
Matteo SALVINI	Lega Nord	radical right-wing populism
Barbara SPINELLI	[independent]	[independent]
Dario TAMBURRANO	Movimento 5 Stelle	euroscepticism
Marco VALLI	Movimento 5 Stelle	euroscepticism
Marco ZANNI	Movimento 5 Stelle	euroscepticism
Marco ZULLO	Movimento 5 Stelle	euroscepticism
Latvia
Andrejs MAMIKINS	"Saskaņa" sociāldemokrātiskā partija	social democracy
Tatjana ŽDANOKA	Latvijas Krievu savienība	social democracy
Netherlands
Vicky MAEIJER	Partij voor de Vrijheid	right-wing populism
Olaf STUGER	Partij voor de Vrijheid	right-wing populism
Auke ZIJLSTRA	Partij voor de Vrijheid	right-wing populism
Poland
Robert Jarosław IWASZKIEWICZ	Kongres Nowej Prawicy	euroscepticism
Janusz KORWIN-MIKKE	KORWiN	euroscepticism
Michał MARUSIK	Kongres Nowej Prawicy	euroscepticism
Stanisław ŻÓŁTEK	Kongres Nowej Prawicy	euroscepticism
Portugal
João FERREIRA	Partido Comunista Português	communism
Marisa MATIAS	Bloco de Esquerda	eurosceptic social-democracy
Miguel VIEGAS	Partido Comunista Português	communism
Spain
Marina ALBIOL GUZMÁN	Izquierda Unida	communism
Javier COUSO PERMUY	Izquierda Unida	communism
Lidia SENRA RODRÍGUEZ	Alternativa galega de esquerda en Europa	left-wing separatist

Some brief observations:

1. In comparison to the previous EP vote on Russia ("State of EU-Russia relations"), the share of the "against" votes decreased from 19% to 14%. (Abstentions decreased from 10% to 6%.) This means that fewer MEPs are now ready to remain favourable to, or uncritical of, Russia's aggressive foreign policy.

2. Already for the second time, Belgian MEP Gerolf ANNEMANS from the far right Vlaams Belangabstained, although previously he used to vote against the resolutions critical of Russia's actions.

3. Peter LUNDGREN and Kristina WINBERG from the far right Sweden Democrats have made further progress: in the previous vote on the Russia-related resolution they abstained, while they earlier used to vote against similar resolutions. This time, they supported the resolution, and, therefore, rebelled against their Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy Group.

4. The overwhelming majority of the MEPs from eurosceptic UKIP supported the resolution (except for Tim AKER who abstained), although they used to vote against similar resolutions in the past.

On May 18-19, 2016, the media reported that Poland's Internal Security Agency searched the homes of the leaders of the pro-Russian party Zmiana: Tomasz Jankowski, Konrad Rękas, and Mateusz Piskorski. It was also reported in the media – and then confirmed by Zmiana – that Piskorski was detained by the Polish authorities. Few details are currently available on the case, but it may be useful to review some of Piskorski's political activities.

In the late 1990s, Mateusz Piskorski was an active member of the Niklot Association for Tradition and Culture, a neo-pagan, “metapolitical fascist” group that was influenced by the ideology of Zadruga, the Polish inter-war neo-pagan fascist movement. Apart from the indigenous Polish inter-war influences, Niklot was inspired by völkisch ideology, the writings of Italian fascist Julius Evola and French New Right thinker Alain de Benoist. The group was also characterized by its Slavic ultranationalism and opposed “the intermixture of cultures, languages, peoples and races”. Niklot published neo-Nazi zines Odala and Wadera, and actively recruited its members from skinhead and National Socialist Black Metal subcultures. The following quote from one of Odala’s articles provides a telling glimpse into the ideology of Niklot:

Considering the decay and multiraciality of the West, only a united Slavdom -- the northern empire of the rising sun -- is the hope for the White Race and anyone in the West who does not support the Slavs betrays the White Race and himself.

The neo-pagan, pro-Slavic world-view became an ideological link between Polish and Russian neo-Nazis. By invitation of Pavel Tulaev, head of the Russia-based far right Cultural Exchange Association, former co-editor of the journal Nasledie Predkov and co-editor of the neo-pagan racist journal Ateney, Piskorski and Niklot’s Marcin Martynowski, as well as members of other Polish neo-Nazi groups, paid their first visit to Russia in August 2000.

Polish neo-Nazis visiting Moscow in August 2000. Piskorski is in the center, together with his girlfriend

They held meetings with leaders of several Russian far-right organizations to discuss prospects for cooperation between the two countries. Stressing their Slavic ultranationalism, the Polish visitors expressed their concerns about the German influence in Poland. As Piskorski summed up in his article for the Russian newspaper Ya – Russkiy, “what is now going on between Poland and Germany is not a fair and open war, but a covert German economic invasion, inherently a kike method of penetration”.

In the beginning of the 2000s, Niklot was successful in infiltrating established political parties and often joined protests alongside the right-wing populist Samoobrona party led by the late Andrzej Lepper. This was a point of entry for Piskorski and some others among Niklot’s top members, including Martynowski, into the party in 2002. Piskorski rapidly progressed up the career ladder and became an important ideologue of Samoobrona and the party’s international relations officer.

Initial contacts between Piskorski and the Russian fascist Aleksandr Dugin’s International Eurasian Movement (MED) and Eurasian Youth Union (ESM) were established already in 2004, when Piskorski and the ESM's leader Pavel Zarifullin monitored the 2004 parliamentary elections in Belarus. Piskorski and Martynowski visited Moscow in 2005; in particular, they discussed the creation of a Polish branch of the MED but this project was never fully implemented.

(left to right) Marcin Martynowski, Valeriy Korovin (MED/ESM) and Mateusz Piskorski, September 2005, Moscow

A more fruitful result of Piskorski’s contacts with Russian nationalists was his visit to Transnistria as an observer of the “parliamentary elections” in December 2005. At a press conference of international observers, Piskorski declared that he would do everything to convince the Polish authorities to recognise Transnistria as an independent state. Piskorski’s trip to Transnistria and his statement provoked a scandal in Poland. Consequently, Samoobrona’s leader Andrzej Lepper, who aimed at securing the position of Deputy Prime Minister -- following the party’s success at the 2005 parliamentary elections that made it the third biggest party in the Polish parliament -- threatened Piskorski to expel him from Samoobrona for his visit to, and behavior in, Transnistria.

Over the years, Piskorski established a variety of contacts with Russian officials, and their “election observation” in favor of Kremlin’s interests became an entrance ticket to participation in other Russia-related activities.

In January 2007, Piskorski and his associates registered the European Centre of Geopolitical Analysis (ECGA) that would, in particular, provide electoral monitoring service to interested parties. The ECGA featured several Samoobrona members, including Martynowski, Konrad Rękas and Marcin Domagała, as well as Polish right-wingers such as Przemysław Sieradzan and Kornel Sawiński who would later become representatives of Dugin’s MED in Poland.

The pro-Kremlin nature of the ECGA manifested not only in their “electoral observation” activities, but also in publications indirectly linked to their monitoring. In 2009, Aleksey Kochetkov, the head of the pro-Kremlin electoral observation organization CIS-EMO, and Piskorski -- together with Aleksey Martynov, director of the International Institute of the Newly Established States -- co-authored a Russian language-book titled South Ossetia: Armed Aggression and Peace-Making War in which they attempted to condone Russia’s war against Georgia in August 2008. While grounded in the Kremlin’s official narrative of Russia’s “peace enforcement operation” in Georgia, the authors’ argument condoning Russia’s war went beyond this official line and represented a point of view of Russian imperialism:

For Russia, the participation in the events of August 8 in South Ossetia and their consequences became a certain “point of no return”. A huge country that was humiliated for 17 years has now been revived as an empire. [...] An empire has a right for intervention beyond its borders. It has a sphere of influence and a sphere of strategic interests. Before August 8m 2008, the entire world was considered a sphere of influence of the USA. After that day, it became evident that a second military and political pole exists – the Russian Federation.

Piskorski also became an important communicator of pro-Moscow narratives in Poland and the Russian state-controlled media such as RT, Sputnik, and the now defunct Voice of Russia. But his Russian media status of a “prominent Polish geopolitical analyst” was hardly commensurable to his limited political significance or the ECGA’s negligibility in his home country, Poland.

In 2014, the Russia-based Civic Control association, which aims at legitimizing controversial elections and declaring them free and fair, entrusted Piskorski ECGA and the Eurasian Observatory for Democracy and Elections (EODE) led by Belgian fascist Luc Michel with drawing up the main list of international observers for the Crimean“referendum” in March 2014. This list was then passed to the Crimean parliament that officially issued invitations to prospective election monitors. They were members of European far-right organisations such as Jobbik, Vlaams Belang, Ataka, Tricolour Flame, FPÖ, Lega Nord, and Plataforma per Catalunya among others. A number of left-wing (Die Linke and the Communist Party of Greece) and pro-Russian “trusted people” observed the “referendum” too.

Observers of the Crimean "referendum"; Piskorski is first from left at table. March 16, 2014, Crimea

Later in 2014, Piskorski took part in the Third International Parliamentary Forum organized by Sergei Naryshkin, the Chairman of the Russian State Duma [parliament]. Anti-US sentiments, as well pro-Moscow narratives on the “Ukrainian question” and the Western sanctions dominated the forum. Piskorski talked of “the most violent geopolitical struggle waged for Ukraine against Russia and Eurasian integration, against the Eurasian integration bloc as an idea that [was] being turned into reality, but also against Europe and European integration, and against the European Union”. In another speech, Piskorski discussed the “geopolitical plans” of the ominous unnamed forces that wanted to configure “social historical conscience” and create “new artificial identities”, but expressed his hope that Russia, together with the anti-American forces in Europe, would be able to ruin these plans.

(left to right) Head of State Duma Foreign Affairs Committee Aleksey Pushkov and Mateusz Piskorski at Third International Parliamentary Forum held in Moscow on June 26, 2014

In November 2014, Civic Control, Piskorski's ECGA, and Michel's EODE co-organized “electoral observation” of the fake parliamentary elections on East Ukrainian territories occupied by the Russian troops and pro-Russian separatists, and Piskorski was personally greeted by the leader of the pro-Russian separatists Aleksandr Zakharchenko.

(left to right) Aleksandr Zakharchenko, leader of pro-Russian separatist terrorists and Mateusz Piskorski, November 1, 2014, Donetsk

In early 2015, Piskorski founded a new party called Zmiana that attempted to combine Polish right-wing and left-wing extremists and position itself as openly pro-Russian. One of the leading members of Zmiana is Bartosz Bekier, the leader of the Polish fascist organisation Falanga that is on friendly terms with pro-Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine and Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria.

In January 2016, Piskorski – together with several activists pretending to be Polish journalists – visited Crimea annexed by Russia and declared that the Russian occupation forces respected the rights of all ethnic groups living in Crimea. Piskorski naturally neglected multiplehuman rights violations in Crimea, including politically motivated murders, tortures, terror campaigns and abductions.

- Dugin, Alexander. Eurasian Mission: An Introduction to Neo-Eurasianism. London: Arktos, 2014.
180 pp.
- Dugin, Alexander. The Fourth Political Theory. London: Arktos, 2014. 212 pp.






The first of the two books by Alexander Dugin reviewed here, Eurasian Mission, is what its subtitle says, “An Introduction to Neo-Eurasianism,” where “Neo-Eurasiansim,” a commonly accepted name for Dugin’s ideology, is considered a form of fascism by a number of experts of right-wing extremism. Dugin himself uses both “Eurasianism” and “Neo-Eurasianism” almost interchangeably, thus explicitly implying his ideology’s kinship to Eurasianism, the interwar Russian émigré movement that was openly anti-Western and argued that Russian culture was closer to Turanian, rather than European, cultures. However, Dugin’s Neo-Eurasianism has very limited relation to Eurasianism, having its roots largely in the Western intellectual traditions such as Integral Traditionalism, National-Bolshevism, and imperialist geopolitical theories.

Dugin’s Neo-Eurasianism portrays Russia as a central power of the Eurasian continent that is “organically” opposed to the Atlanticist world represented by the United States and its allies such as the United Kingdom. For Neo-Eurasianism, Eurasia and the Atlanticist world are not simply geography-inspired concepts. In Dugin’s view, Eurasia is associated with “a plurality of value systems,” “tradition,” “the rights of nations,” “ethnicities as the primary value and the subjects of history,” and “social fairness and human solidarity.” At the same time, Neo-Eurasianism associates the Atlanticist world with “conventional and obligatory domination of a single ideology (American liberal democracy first and foremost),” “the suppression of cultures, their dogmas, and the wisdom of traditional society,” “the ‘golden billion’ and the neo-colonial hegemony of the ‘rich North,’” “homogenization of peoples, which are to be imprisoned within artificial social constructions,” and “exploitation and the humiliation of man by man” (p. 54). Thus Neo-Eurasianism positions itself as the main opponent of American-style liberalism, globalization, and the “New World Order.” Neo-Eurasianism, as the book argues, “is a revolutionary concept on a global scale” (p. 44) aiming to act as an ideological tool for uniting various forces against the United States and liberal democracy.

The Fourth Political Theory serves two purposes. First, the book, which is an abridged and modified translation of the original Russian version published in 2009, is Dugin’s bid for originality in the overcrowded market of far-right literature. Second, it is an attempt to present Neo-Eurasianism for an international audience without the implicit reference to Russia-centered phraseology.

In this book, Dugin claims that the three ideologies (or “political theories”) that dominated twentieth-century—liberalism, communism, and fascism—have lost their relevance. Fascism was defeated first, and then communism lost the struggle against liberalism. However, “having triumphed, liberalism disappears and turns into a different entity—postliberalism” (p. 19). Since “the form which all three political theories took in the Twentieth century is no longer useful, effective, or relevant,” and “they lack the ability to explain contemporary reality or to help us understand current events,” Dugin comes up with “the fourth political theory” that he considers to be an alternative to “postliberalism” and a “crusade” against “postmodernity,” “the post-industrial society,” “liberal though realised in practice,” and “globalisation, as well as its logistical and technological bases” (p. 21).

Despite the different name, a closer analysis of the ideological tenets of Dugin’s “fourth political theory” reveals that it does not differ from Neo-Eurasianism: it is significantly influenced by imperialist geopolitics, opposes liberal democracy, detests the West and the United States, and calls for a revolution against the perceived enemies of Russia.

The two books are clearly ideological, illiberal writings, but scholars of Russian ultranationalism will find them useful only to a limited extent. In comparison to Dugin’s works written in Russian language, these two books appear “sterilized”: they are not as extremist as Dugin’s original writings in Russian, are less detailed, and suffer from vague generalizations, perhaps to appear moderate to the Anglophone audience. It is for these reasons that these books cannot be efficiently used for analyzing Dugin’s role in Russia’s sociopolitical life. However, for the same reasons, these books can be helpful for investigating the roots of Dugin’s certain impact—however limited—on European and American extreme right and extreme left circles.

This review was first published in The Russian Review, Vol. 75, No. 3 (2016), pp. 542-543.

The relations between Russia and the European far right is not a new phenomenon, but they acquired particular salience in the recent few years, especially after the Russian annexation of Crimea and the start of the Russian invasion of Eastern Ukraine.

Tactical collaboration with the European, especially German, extreme right characterised even the Cold War period of Russian history despite the horrors of the Second World War and the Soviet Union’s official condemnation of fascism. One example of Soviet collaboration with the German extreme right is the Soviet financial support for the extreme right neutralist movement in West Germany in the beginning of the 1950s. That period was marked by the beginning of the Cold War, and, in its struggle against the West, the Soviets employed a broad range of what they called “active measures” – actions comprising of establishing espionage rings in Western societies, spreading disinformation among Western publics, buying political influence, supporting socialist and communist parties, infiltrating Western peace movements, etc. The beginning of the 1950s was also a period in which West German political elites discussed a prospect of their country joining NATO. The Soviets opposed such a development and supported not only left-wing organisations in West Germany, but also extreme right neutralist movements that also opposed NATO membership.
While the Soviet collaboration with the European far right had a covert nature and was invisible for a regular observer, the cooperation between various Russian actors and European far right parties in the post-Soviet era has had a largely open character. This cooperation is best analysed through examining its three particular phases distinguished on the basis of different positions of Russian representatives involved in this cooperation.

The longest phase so far was the period between 1991 and 2004. In this period, Russian ultranationalists such as Alexander Dugin, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Sergey Glazyev and some others established contacts with far right politicians in France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Belgium, the US and other Western countries. At that time, Dugin was a fringe politician yet an influential ideologue of Neo-Eurasianism and National Bolshevism who was engaged in cultural, rather than political, struggle against liberal democracy. Zhirinovsky was the leader of the misleadingly name far right Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia – a party that emerged as the strongest political force after the 1993 parliamentary elections and as the second strongest – after the 1995 parliamentary elections. Glazyev was, for a short period of time, Minister of Russia’s External Economic Relations, then an MP and, later, head of the analytical department of the Federation Council of Russia.

Jeam-Marie Le Pen, the leader of the French National Front , and Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of the Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia. Moscow, 1995

While Dugin, Zhirinovsky and Glazyev were apparently interested in implementing some of the ideas of their Western far right associates in Russia, they seemed to understand that those ideas clashed with the regime of Russian President Boris Yeltsin, and they were too far removed from the state power to either associate themselves with the state or act on its behalf. For Dugin, Zhirinovsky and Glazyev, the immediate enemy was inside Russia, so at that time they could only use their Western far right contacts to strengthen their own positions inside the country, rather than instrumentalise their Western counterparts against the perceived external adversaries of the Russian state. The most important characteristic of this phase of the cooperation between Russian actors and the European far right was that official Moscow was not interested in any contacts with the European far right – the Kremlin actively developed relations with mainstream Western politicians and officials who, perhaps erroneously, believed that Russia would become part of the liberal-democratic West.

The second phase covers the period between 2005 and 2012. The start of this period is rooted in the Kremlin’s reaction to the series of “colour revolutions” in Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004) and Kyrgyzstan (2005). These “revolutions”, which were in fact mass street protests against fraudulent elections, were interpreted by official Moscow as attempts by the West in general and the US in particular to undermine Russian political and economic influence in the post-Soviet space. The Kremlin increasingly turned to anti-Western and anti-American narratives in its rhetoric, and launched various initiatives to thwart the largely imaginary threat of a “colour revolution” in Russia. Furthermore, given the role that the results of independent electoral observation played in mobilising protesters against stolen elections, Moscow started to look for alternative instruments of international election observation missions that would be either genuinely pro-Kremlin or controlled by the political circles close to the Kremlin. The Russian, formally independent electoral monitoring organisation CIS-EMO headed by former Russian fascist activist Aleksey Kochetkov provided such an alternative. CIS-EMO started cooperating with two EU-based organisations, the Belgian Eurasian Observatory for Democracy and Elections and the Polish European Centre for Geopolitical Analysis – both were led by far right activists, Luc Michel and Mateusz Piskorski respectively. The three organisations invited far right and far left politicians and activists for international election observation missions, and, since 2005-2006, have been engaged in legitimising practices of electoral authoritarianism in the post-Soviet space while always remaining loyal to the objectives of Russia’s foreign policy centred around maintaining Russia’s perceived sphere of influence.

(left to right) Luc Michel and Aleksey Kochetkov. Trasnistria, September 2006

The second development that characterised this second phase was the start, in 2008-2009, of the active cooperation between the Russian state-controlled media and European far right politicians. This development started after the Russian-Georgian war in August 2008. The Kremlin understood that it could win the war easily, but could not convince Western societies in the allegedly justified nature of the aggression against Georgia. As Moscow was facing criticism from the West, the Russian state-controlled changed the tactics: previously, they relied on promoting the argument that Moscow’s international and domestic activities were driven by good intentions, but since 2008-2009 the Russian media also started pushing the message that the West could not appreciate Russia’s actions because Western liberal-democratic societies were decadent, plagued by same-sex marriages, moral crisis, failing multiculturalism and disrespect for the rights of the majority. To promote this message, the Russian media have engaged with activists and politicians coming from the fringes of the sociopolitical life in the West, namely the far right, far left, conspiracy theorists and isolationists.

The third development was the mobilisation of far right organisations and parties in Italy, Austria and France that have increasingly started operating as Russia’s front organisations since 2006-2009. In Italy, the first pro-Russian efforts were launched by the Eurasia Coordination Project led by Stefano Vernole and Alberto Ascari, as well as the Institute of Advanced Studies in Geopolitics and Auxiliary Sciences headed by Tiberio Graziani and Daniele Scalea. In Austria, the initial pro-Russian activities were carried out through the company Austrian Technologies GmbH closely linked to the Freedom Party of Austria and headed by Barbara Kappel. In France, these were the France-Russia Collective led by André Chanclu and the Association France-Europe-Russia Alliance led by Fabrice Sorlin.

(left to right) Ludwig Scharinger, President of the Society of Austrian-Russian Friendship (ORFG); Sergey Nechaev (Russia’s Ambassador to Austria); Hans-Christian Strache, the head of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ); Florian Stermann (Secretary General of the ORFG); and Johann Gudenus, one of the leading members of the FPÖ. Vienna, 23 March 2015

While the Russian element of the first phase of cooperation with European far right activists and politicians was represented only by Russian ultranationalists, the second phase was marked by the increasing involvement of Russian stakeholders of a higher status. These included representatives of Russian institutions aiming to influence public opinion outside Russia and cooperating with Russian-speaking diasporas: Rossotrudnichestvo, Russian World Foundation, and the Paris-based Institute of Democracy and Cooperation. Moreover, representatives of Russian embassies and consulates in particular European countries started helping build contacts between the far right organisations and Russian officials.

The third – and current – current phase of the cooperation between Russian actors and the European far right has started in 2012-2013 and is characterised by the engagement of the top-ranking politicians and officials from the Russian side. Their engagement was a result of two major, sometimes overlapping developments. The first one was the ongoing process of the anti-Western and anti-American radicalisation of Putin’s regime that had started to develop already in 2004-2005 but was deepened by Moscow’s negative reaction to the “Arab Spring”, i.e. the wave of protests, riots and regime changes in the Arab world in 2010-2012, as well as the anti-Putin protests in 2012-2013. The second was the growing criticism of domestic and foreign policies of Putin’s Russia coming from Western mainstream politicians and state officials. This criticism related, in particular, to (1) the failure of the Russian authorities to investigate the death of imprisoned corporate lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in a Moscow prison in 2009 – the US and EU imposed sanctions related to Magnitsky in 2012; (2) the Kremlin’s crackdown on the anti-Putin protests and the polarising measures employed by the Kremlin to divide the opposition (most importantly, the Pussy Riot show trial and the “anti-LGBT propaganda law”); (3) Putin’s support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad whose suppression of the anti-government protests resulted in the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011; and (4) Russian annexation of Crimea and invasion of Eastern Ukraine in 2014.

As many mainstream politicians and officials in Western countries gradually withdrew their political support for Putin’s regime, the latter started looking for non-mainstream political allies in Europe and the West in general. In result, high-ranking members of the ruling “United Russia” party, Russian diplomats and state officials such as Chairman of the Russian Parliament Sergey Naryshkin or the head of the Russian Parliament foreign affairs committee Aleksey Pushkov, as well as President Vladimir Putin himself, increasingly developed contacts with the European far right, especially the French National Front, Italian Northern League and Bulgarian Attack party.

(left-right) Matteo Salvini, the leader of the Northern League, and Aleksey Pushkov, the head of the Russian Parliament foreign affairs committee. Moscow, October 2014

In April 2014, Putin declared that electoral victory of Viktor Orbán’s “illiberal-democratic” Fidesz and electoral successes of the far right parties such as Hungarian Jobbik and National Front pointed to the “rethinking of values in European countries” along the lines promoted by Moscow (i.e. “conservative values”), thus providing Moscow’s ideologically driven opening to the European far right. Moreover, the low-interest multi-million loan granted, in 2014, to the National Front by a Russian bank owned by Putin’s close associate implied that, at least in some cases, Moscow was ready to financially support the far right struggling to subvert the liberal-democratic in the West, undermine the EU and weaken the transatlantic cooperation thus contributing to Moscow’s geopolitical objective that consists in the conclusion of a “new Yalta agreement” that would fix a Russian sphere of influence and legitimise the indefinite rule of the authoritarian kleptocratic regime in Russia.

Originally published in German language as "Moskau und die Rechten", Die Politische Meinung, No. 539 (2016), pp. 99-103.

Early in the morning on the 7th of August, Russian border guards closed all the security checkpoints on the border between Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed in March 2014, and the rest of Ukraine. Witnesses reported the sounds of shots fired near the administrative border. The Russians re-opened the security checkpoints later but offered no official explanation as to the reasons of their closure in the first place. Some Russian media and bloggers claimed that there had been a fire-fight between Ukrainian “intruders” and Russian personnel; the alleged fire-fight had ended with one Russian killed and three wounded.

Since the closure of the border on the 7th of August, witnesses reported an increased military presence in Crimean towns and villages, while checkpoints were set up along major Crimean roads. It looked like the Russian servicemen were looking for someone.

FSB as part of Russia's occupation army in Crimea

On the 10th of August, Russia’s Federal Security Service (or FSB) issued a statement directly accusing Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) of attempting a series of terrorist attacks in Crimea. The FSB claimed that, on the night of the 6/7th of August, they had detected a subversive Ukrainian group and, while trying to detain it, the FSB lost one officer killed. On the site of the alleged fight, as the FSB stated, they found explosives and weapons used by the Ukrainian army. The Russian security services also claimed to have disclosed and “liquidated an agent network of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine’s Armed Forces”, and detained several Ukrainian and Russian citizens who had been engaged in planning terrorist attacks in Crimea. Moreover, the FSB declared that Ukrainian subversive groups had attempted to enter Crimea twice on the night of the 7/8th of August covered by fire from the Ukrainian side, and one Russian serviceman had been killed.

This grave accusation was amplified by Vladimir Putin’s statement on the 10th of August that Ukrainian authorities resorted to terrorism, that there was no sense in discussing the conflict in Eastern Ukraine in a Normandy format (Ukraine, Germany, France and Russia), and that Russia would not ignore the alleged terrorist attacks. On the 11th of August, Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) issued a statement summing up the claims made by the FSB and reiterating Putin’s arguments. Russia’s MFA also warned Ukraine and “its foreign supervisors”, i.e. Western countries, that “the damage to the Russian side” and “the deaths of Russian servicemen” would have consequences.

The Ukrainian authorities dismissed all the accusations and referred to the statements made by the FSB and Putin as provocations. The situation, however, is very serious, and many fear that the Russians may use the alleged incidents as a casus belli and start an open, non-hybrid war against Ukraine. Some experts even started to refer to the “Gleiwitz incident” that was an operation carried out in 1939 by the Nazis posing as Poles who attacked a German radio station in Gleiwitz and used this “incident” as a justification of the invasion of Poland.

"Crimea referendum"

While it would be perhaps counterproductive to try to predict the future developments, it seems important to consider the background of the “Crimea situation” and discuss its possible meaning.

The alleged incidents in Crimea took place against the background of a massive military build-up of the Russian troops along the border with Eastern Ukraine, parts of which are controlled by pro-Russian separatists and Russian forces. With the increased fighting across the line of demarcation between the Ukrainian territories controlled by the Ukrainian authorities and those uncontrolled by them, the Minsk-2 agreement that aimed to halt the war is destined to fail. As the Western sanctions against Russia are linked to the implementation of the Minsk-2 agreement, they cannot be lifted in any foreseeable future, and Moscow knows it. But the Russians also know that disagreements exist among Western leaders as to the efficiency of the sanctions, and Moscow seems to believe that the West will not impose heavier sanctions if Russia becomes even more aggressive against Ukraine.

Ukraine is not a member of NATO and, thus, is not protected by its collective defence principle. Western countries rejected all requests from the Ukrainian authorities to provide them with advanced lethal weapons to enhance defence. While the West has helped Ukraine enormously during the last two years in other areas, Ukraine – in military terms – is essentially on its own against the Russian aggression. Under these circumstances, is Ukraine interested in aggravating an already complicated situation by sending alleged terrorists to Russia-annexed Crimea? Highly unlikely.

The “Crimea situation” may indeed become a new “Gleiwitz incident”, but it may also be something else. One possible explanation is that the “Crimea situation” is a psychological operation (or psyop) devised by the Russian security services to put increased pressure on the Ukrainian government and Western countries that imposed sanctions against Russia.

The history of Soviet counterintelligence operations may provide useful insights as to what happened in Crimea, who the detained Ukrainian and Russian citizens are, and why the FSB could have carried out a psyop. In the beginning of the 1920s, the Soviet counterintelligence services conducted a so-called “operative game” called “Operation Trust” that involved running a fake anti-communist and monarchist organisation in order to lure real anti-communists and monarchists into this organisation and then arrest them. The Operation Trust that ended in the mid-1920s was very successful and helped the Soviets to undermine the anti-communist resistance network in the Soviet Union and abroad.

It may be the case that, with the “Crimea situation”, the FSB built on the success of Operation Trust and many other similar Soviet “operative games” in order to uncover a possible pro-Ukrainian resistance underground in Crimea. If the FSB indeed followed the Soviet counterintelligence playbook, they could have done the following.

The FSB sets up a fake pro-Ukrainian covert organisation in Crimea and finds real local allies for the cause. This organisation then contacts Ukrainian patriots outside Crimea telling them that the organisation is prepared to act to either return Crimea to Ukraine or subvert the Russian occupation forces in Crimea. Russian agents in Ukraine posing as representatives of the Main Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine’s MoD contact those Ukrainian patriots too and assure them that they have support from the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Then the FSB provides a fake pro-Ukrainian organisation with explosives and weapons, and invite Ukrainian patriots to go to Crimea to carry out subversive actions.

The value of such a simple “operative game” is high for the FSB. On the one hand, this operation helps uncover potential pro-Ukrainian activists prepared to take action against the Russian forces in annexed Crimea. On the other hand, the FSB detains real Ukrainian patriots who might have entered Crimea to carry out subversive actions and who thought that they were secretly supported by Ukraine’s MoD – something that they would tell during the interrogation, especially under torture. This provides the FSB and Russian officials with an opportunity to accuse Ukraine of supporting and directing would-be terrorists.

Naturally, we still do not know many details about the “Crimea situation” and can only speculate how Russia will use it. What we know for sure is that Moscow is definitely raising the stakes in its aggression against Ukraine by accusing it of attempting terrorist attacks and claiming that peaceful negotiations do not make sense.

Originally published in Norwegian as "Psykologisk krig på Krim?", VG, 16 August (2016).

Co-authored by Anton Shekhovtsov and Peter Pomerantsev

One after another the narratives that prop up belief in western liberal democracy have fallen. Ideal financial system? Not after the 2008 crisis and the euro. Military superiority? Iraq and Afghanistan have put an end to that. Effective politics? See gridlock in Washington DC and arm-twisting in Brussels.

Now the final, perhaps most fundamental, narrative risks unravelling. The supremacy of liberal democracy is rooted in the triumph of 1989: the liberation of Central Europe from the Kremlin’s authoritarianism; Václav Havel emerging from prison to become President in Prague Castle; the successful transition to democracy via European Union membership and the security blanket of NATO. The latter process was particularly important for the post-socialist states. Already in the 1990s, the prospect of the EU membership served as an impetus for reform of inefficient economies and dysfunctional political systems. At the same time, NATO provided security guarantees to the new democratising societies in Central and Eastern Europe that witnessed Russian destabilising activities in Moldova and Georgia in 1992—activities that resulted in the infringement of territorial integrity and dramatically hampered democratisation in these post-Soviet states.
For more than decade, however, Central Europe is the beacon for aspiring reformers across the world. In 2008, the World Bank published a report, “Unleashing Prosperity,” which concluded that the “Visegrád Four”—Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic—had created “stable institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for and protection of minorities,” “functioning market economies” and had “the ability to take on and implement effectively the obligations of (EU) membership.”

Yet today we are faced with a Hungary whose Prime Minister says he intends to build an “illiberal state,” a Czech President who attends anti-Muslim rallies with the far right and a Polish leadership that declares the media should do the government’s bidding. Throughout the region, the judiciary, media and civil society are under attack, while a newly belligerent Russia is looking to re-impose itself.

Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán

What has gone wrong? What does it mean for the future of the EU and the continent’s security? What can and should be done?

One sign of the extent of the reversal is that the country leading the rollback is Hungary, whose “goulash communism” was the most ideologically and economically lax in the Soviet bloc. Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister, was a high-profile, pro-western, pro-democracy dissident back in Soviet times. Some thought him another Havel, but since coming to power in 2010, Orbán has acted to ensure that he will always have it.

First, Orbán rushed through changes in the constitution enabling him to place loyalists in the Constitutional Court. Since then, 11 out of the 15 judges have been appointed by his party, Fidesz, without any consultation with the opposition, opening the way to place Fidesz members at all levels of the judiciary.

Then Orbán came for the media. Public service broadcasters were restructured under the control of a Fidesz-appointed head, who also chairs a Media Council with the power to fine television and radio stations for allegedly unbalanced coverage. In 2013, parliament adopted an amendment banning political adverts in commercial media during election campaigns. Parties are left to campaign through the public media—which, of course, is heavily influenced by Fidesz. The government stopped placing adverts in the independent media and private companies, fearing loss of government contracts, also decreased their advertising spend. Currently, 80 per cent of the population can only access Fidesz-dominated press and broadcasting.

Orbán’s policies led the NGO Freedom House to downgrade the country’s rating from “free” to “partly free” in its 2012 “Freedom of the Press” index. The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe criticised the 2014 parliamentary elections, arguing Fidesz enjoyed “an undue advantage because of biased media coverage and campaign activities that blurred the separation between political party and the State.” This “undue advantage” didn’t stop Fidesz’s vote declining. In response, Orbán added ideology to his institutional measures. Speaking at a party gathering in 2014, Orbán announced: “The new state that we are constructing in Hungary is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state. It does not reject the fundamental principles of liberalism such as freedom… but it does not make this ideology the central element of state organisation, but instead includes a different, special, national approach.” Russia and China are two of his models.

In practice, illiberal democracy has meant Orbán claiming that Hungary is threatened by enemies such as foreign NGOs and “national traitors.” In spring 2015, the government launched a national consultation on immigration, which included a questionnaire sent to eight million Hungarians. After raising concerns about terrorism, the questionnaire asked: “There are some who think that mismanagement of the immigration question by Brussels may have something to do with increased terrorism. Do you agree with this view?” Other questions canvassed support for “stricter immigration regulations,” and claimed that the number of economic immigrants had increased twentyfold. Meanwhile other policies have combined nationalist rhetoric with socialist economics: nationalising banks and raising corporate taxes.

What Orbán has achieved in half a decade, Poland’s new government is trying to pull off in months. In the October 2015 elections, the Law and Justice Party ran on a platform of economic redistribution, paranoia about non-existent immigration and Catholic conservatism. Despite presiding over the strongest economy in Europe, the incumbents were beset with problems—a scandal in which ministers were secretly recorded making damaging statements, allegations of petty corruption and internal divisions. Law and Justice managed to squeak a majority. Its campaign, however, made no mention of the undemocratic policies it has adopted since victory.

Poland’s new President Andrzej Duda refused to swear in five judges chosen by the previous parliament on to the 15-member Constitutional Tribunal. Five Law and Justice judges were sworn in instead and the government controversially reformed the court. Law and Justice also nullified civil service regulations that guaranteed competition for key posts, allowing them to appoint loyalists with no qualifications as CEOs of state companies. Media laws have been changed to put party loyalists in control of public broadcasting, prompting senior journalists to resign. The party’s leader Jarosław Kaczyński, a former Prime Minister, has no official government role but wields power behind the scenes. In Slovakia and the Czech Republic the changes are subtler. Political institutions have not been dismantled, but there has been an upswing in xenophobic rhetoric, and oligarchs are capturing politics and media.

Robert Fico, Slovakia’s Prime Minister, leads a social democratic party, but his first term (2006-10), saw him ally with Ján Slota’s far-right Slovak National Party. Slota has called Hungarians “a cancer in the body of the Slovak nation” and “ugly, bow-legged, Mongoloid characters on disgusting horses.” Since 2012, Fico’s second term has been marked by tactical resistance to reforms, such as the persistent reluctance to reform the judiciary. Fico simply refuses to talk to independent broadcasters and only communicates via government-friendly station TA3. In 2015-16, Fico ran a xenophobic campaign stressing his refusal to accept refugees in Slovakia and, again, formed a coalition with the Slovak National Party, and two the centre right parties, after the parliamentary elections in March 2016.

Robert Fico

In the Czech Republic, Havel’s successors have not shared his dedication to liberal democracy. Václav Klaus, who replaced Havel as President in 2003, has been an outspoken, contentious figure. Just before the end of his second consecutive term in 2013, he granted amnesty to more than 6,000 prisoners, citing the slowness of the legal system. But as well as putting some petty criminals back on the streets, the amnesty stopped ongoing criminal proceedings against people associated with several notorious embezzlement cases. The Czech Senate impeached Klaus, but it was a symbolic gesture as he had already left office.

Klaus’s successor, Miloš Zeman, has turned up the nationalist rhetoric. During the 2015 refugee crisis, Zeman said: “Islamic refugees will not respect Czech laws and habits, they will apply sharia law so unfaithful women will be stoned to death and thieves will have their hands cut off.” In November 2015, President Zeman attended an anti-Muslim rally organised by the far-right “Bloc against Islam” group, standing next to its leader, Martin Konvička. Konvička faces up to three years in prison for inciting hatred against Muslims by, among other things, writing on Facebook that Muslims should be put into concentration camps.

Miloš Zeman and Vladimir Putin

Another eyebrow-raising development in Czech politics is the rise of Andrej Babiš, the second richest man in the country. He founded his own political party ANO in 2011, “to fight corruption and other ills in the country’s political system.” He is now Finance Minister in the coalition government. In 2013, Babiš’s company Agrofert bought the Mafra media group, giving him a significant percentage of Czech media—a development which led some observers to speak of the “Berlusconisation” of the Czech political space. The purchase of Mafra by Babiš prompted resignations from senior journalists. One of them, Daniel Kaiser, went to work for Echo24.cz, a new website which has been critical of Babiš. At one point, Babiš menacingly stated that he “hoped the investor of Echo24.cz had completed his tax returns.” Adam Černý, president of the Czech journalists association, fears for the media’s independence: “The legal framework has not changed, but the system has. This will have an impact on press freedom.”

All over Central Europe, as the established independent media is squeezed, there has been an explosion in far-right and far-left media. These outlets regularly promote conspiracy theories, attack western liberal democracies, spread anti-Muslim rhetoric, and deplore the alleged loss of sovereignty to the EU. What makes the region susceptible to such illiberal or undemocratic tendencies? In some ways, it is unfair to single out Central Europe. Globalisation has produced both winners and losers, and nationalist and populist appeals to voters are being successfully made by Marine Le Pen in France and Donald Trump in the United States, for example. The fact that Babiš is compared to Silvio Berlusconi shows how much the Italian leader did to normalise conflicts of interest. And, when it comes to corruption, Greece is in another league.

There are worrying trends in Germany too. Launched at the end of 2014, the social movement “Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the West” (Pegida), quickly gained momentum, especially in its birthplace of Dresden and other east German cities such as Leipzig. Pegida’s demonstrations against the perceived Islamisation of Germany (and, more recently, a call for “peace with Russia”), have attracted tens of thousands of protestors. Pegida especially benefited from the refugee crisis, but wasn’t the only far-right movement to do so: the right-wing populist “Alternative for Germany” has now become the third most popular party in the country, and will likely enter the Bundestag after the federal elections in 2017.

A few features of Central Europe, however, are unique. Slovak dissident Milan Šimečka once described life under communism as “that comfortable unfreedom where those in power know how to stop time and maintain stasis.” Illiberalism, then, is merely a reversion to the recent past for these young democracies. The past hangs over the present in other ways. That Orbán was a Soviet dissident, as was Poland’s Kaczyński, is less surprising when one considers that “freedom” and “rights” meant different things to different people: liberals like Havel were fighting for political freedom and human rights; others for national freedom and national rights. Thus Orbán can transmute “freedom” into xenophobia and authoritarianism.

Polish sociologist Sławomir Sierakowski offers another explanation. He argues that post 1989, when left-wing politics were considered discredited, “liberal” politics and the “open society” became the only viable political philosophy. When liberal parties slip up, as is inevitable, the alternative becomes “illiberal” forces who promote a “closed” society. “Instead of right and left we only have right and wrong,” quips Sierakowski.

The illiberal turn has a geopolitical angle too: Vladimir Putin has been working to influence both elites and anti-western movements in the region through money, energy and propaganda. Many of Orbán’s “illiberal” policies are echoes of “conservative” policies adopted by the Putin regime in Russia.

There are direct links between Russia and the main Hungarian opposition party, the ultra-right Jobbik. In 2008, Béla Kovács, a member of Jobbik who studied in Soviet Russia, arranged a trip for the party’s leader, Gábor Vona, to Moscow. Since then, Jobbik’s leaders have regularly attended events and conferences in Russia and promoted rapprochement between the two countries: several were observers in elections in Russian-occupied Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014. Currently, Kovács is being investigated in Hungary on charges of espionage for Russia against EU institutions.

Aleksandr Dugin and Gábor Vona

So far, Orbán’s relationship with Moscow appears to be driven by pragmatism rather than ideology. In 2014, Hungary imported 89 per cent of its oil and 57 per cent of its gas from Russia. Orbán has promised voters that he will cut gas prices, for which he needs the help of Russian companies, in particular Gazprom.

Orbán also struck a nuclear energy deal with Russia that is cloaked in secrecy. In 2015, Orbán accepted the first tranche of €10bn loan from Moscow for the expansion of the Paks nuclear power plant. Fidesz kept the exact nature of the contract secret and has classified all material related to the deal for 30 years.

When Czech President Zeman established his Party of Civil Rights in 2009 he did so with Martin Nejedlý, managing director of Lukoil Aviation Czech—a subsidiary of the giant Russian Lukoil oil company. Riikka Nisonen, a researcher at the Aleksanteri Institute at the University of Helsinki, argued that Zeman’s presidential campaign “received money from the head of Lukoil’s Czech office,” though Zeman claimed that the money was “a personal donation.”

Once in office, President Zeman adopted vigorously anti-western, anti-European, and pro-Russian language policies. In 2014, he condemned the western sanctions imposed on Russia for the annexation of Crimea and its war against Ukraine, a position echoed by former President . A series of public protests followed, but they had little impact on the president.

In 2014, the Czech-language website AE News published a series of articles alleging that anti-Zeman protests earlier that year had been sponsored by the same American “puppet masters” who orchestrated the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine. AE News portrayed an epic struggle between foreign plotters and heroic, “lion-like” President Zeman, “the only European politician who defends the national interests of his country.” These articles caused a sensation in the Czech public sphere, and the Security Information Service (BIS) publicly stated that it considered AE News“a source of dangerous Russian propaganda.” Around 80 websites in Slovakia and the Czech Republic have sprung up over the last few years, peddling conspiracy theories that repeat Russian propaganda. When journalists look into their backers, the trail leads to opaque shell companies.

What are Putin’s ultimate aims in Central Europe? It’s hard to imagine Russian tanks on the streets of Prague. But Putin can undermine EU unity on a host of issues, from sanctions against Russia for its war in Ukraine, through to the EU’s joint energy package, which promises to wean Europe off Russian energy. From this point of view, the new Polish government, which is both anti-Brussels and anti-Russian, plays into the Kremlin’s hands. It was Poland who led the EU campaign to extend the Association Agreement to Ukraine. While Poland was a model European, other EU states went along. Now it is becoming a concern there is less of an imperative to listen to its calls to be tough on Russia.

On the level of narrative, the more the idea of liberal democracy is undermined, the better it is for Putin. Domestically, Putin’s power rests on the idea that there is no alternative: he may be corrupt, but there is no viable European model for Russia. Thus the Kremlin’s domestic propaganda loves to show Central European leaders cosying up to Moscow and rejecting the west. The story of the “failure” of 1989 also adds to the argument of Putin’s regime that western-style democracy might not be compatible with political culture of non-western European societies, that the west has had its day, and that emerging countries should ally with Russia.

All this leaves the EU in a quandary.

While countries are seeking EU membership they have strong incentives to live up to its values. Once inside, it becomes harder to ensure good behaviour. The EU’s approach is to enshrine democracy in the minutiae of regulations. But countries such as Hungary have learned to game this system. “Illiberalism is like pornography,” says Jeremy Shapiro, director of research at the European Council on Foreign Relations, “you know what it is when you see it, but it’s very hard to define. Hungary’s media law was definitely pornography in this sense: but every line was taken from some media law in another EU state.” Orbán has also learned to play a cat-and-mouse game with the EU: making bold moves to undermine democratic institutions, waiting for criticism, repealing a small number of measures, then moving forward again.

To stop another Hungarian-style reversal from happening the EU adopted a new mechanism in 2014 to tackle “systemic threats to the rule of law.” If a country is found guilty, it can be stripped of its voting rights in the EU. The first phase of this mechanism, collecting information on whether there is a systemic threat, has been launched against Poland. Law and Justice responded with a rash of anti-EU statements, including comparing German calls to place Warsaw under supervision to the Nazi occupation of Poland. This rhetoric may backfire for Law and Order: Poles trust EU institutions more than their own politicians. Hundreds of thousands have come out to protest against the ruling party, and its polls have sunk.

As the EU moves forward, however, it is essential to talk above the heads of the Polish government to its population, something it has always been reluctant to do. It needs to lose its image of a bureaucratic monster, and show it can genuinely respond to the needs of citizens. In the longer term, the EU needs to find a way to support independent, fact-based broadcasting in the region. European leaders will have to show principled leadership too.

When it comes to the challenge of Russia the EU is more confounded. Lacking any common security or foreign policy on Russia it falls, for better or worse, to the US to help deal with the problem. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the US has restated its commitment to supporting NATO and defending against Russian military aggression. But that does little for the postmodern warfare Russia now prefers. To undermine the EU, to erode the fabric of Western liberalism, and to make the EU descend into a chaos of infighting, Russia doesn’t need to invade, only to abet the already existing pathological developments in the EU through disseminating illiberal propaganda, deepening social distrust towards the democratic institutions, fostering extremist movements and parties, increasing dependence on Russian energy imports, and exacerbating high-level corruption. Therefore, especially corruption in Central Europe, which is often connected to Russia, needs to be understood as a vital security issue for the entire continent, not least because allegations of corruption, whether true or false, are so often used to discredit liberal democratic political parties. International economic institutions need to come up with better means of identifying and sanctioning lawbreakers, especially those who use offshore banking systems and other techniques that are difficult for smaller governments and poor bureaucracies to investigate. Joint Western engagement in energy security is crucial too. One of Orbán’s arguments is that the US abandoned him when he tried to develop liquefied natural gas terminals that would make Hungary more energy independent, forcing him to search for an accommodation with Russia.

Action can’t come too soon. Kaczyński’s first foreign visit after Law and Justice came to power in October 2015 was to meet with Orbán, pledging mutual support against EU measures. In a nightmare scenario, illiberal states could gang together, encouraging similar trends throughout Europe. For the past 20 years the Visegrád Four have been an example for transition to democracy across the world. They could become the example for a transition away from it.

First appeared in the Prospect magazine as "The new nationalism: Eastern Europe turns right"; the current revised version was published in Swedish in Glänta as "Välkommen till den illiberala demokratin".

1977 veröffentlichte Ronald Inglehart sein weithin gefeiertes Buch „Die stille Revolution“, in dem er darlegte, dass sich im Westen eine „stille Revolution“ ereigne, die diesen von Grund auf verändere.[1] Der beispiellose Wohlstand, den die westlichen Nationen während des Kalten Kriegs und angesichts des Ausbleibens eines totalen Kriegs erfahren durften, trug laut Inglehart zu einem schrittweisen Transformationsprozess von materialistischen individuellen Werten zu postmaterialistischen bei. Sobald die Bedürfnisse des physischen Überlebens gestillt sind, beginnen Menschen ihre Bedürfnisse nach Liebe, Zugehörigkeit und Wertschätzung zu stillen. Damit rückt die Bedeutung „intellektueller und ästhetischer Zufriedenheit“ bzw. sog. postmaterialistischer Werte ins Zentrum. In der politischen Sphäre wurde die „stille Revolution“ laut Inglehart von zwei bedeutenden Trends unterstützt: 1) „Eine Verlagerung von einem überwiegenden Schwerpunkt auf Materialverbrauch und Sicherheit hin zu einer größeren Sorge um die Lebensqualität“; und 2) „eine Zunahme an politischen Fähigkeiten in den westlichen Öffentlichkeiten, die es ihnen erlaubte, eine aktivere Rolle beim Fällen wichtiger politischer Entscheidungen zu spielen.“[2] Natürlich waren die Postmaterialisten nur eine Minderheit in den westlichen Gesellschaften, aber wohl die am besten ausgebildete und aktivste in der Politik. Postmaterialisten waren auch die zentrale treibende Kraft bei der europäischen Integration und bei der Förderung einer kosmopolitischen Identität.

Aber es gab auch eine „stille Gegenrevolution“. Laut Piero Ignazi ist in den 1980er Jahren - vor dem Hintergrund „einer wachsenden Unzufriedenheit mit dem politischen System und einem korrespondierenden Vertrauensverlust in dessen Effizienz“[3] - eine neue Bewegung in Europa entstanden, die gleichzeitig Folge und Gegenreaktion der stillen Revolution der Postmaterialisten sei. Diese Bewegung war mit dem Aufstieg eines neuen Typs rechtsradikaler Parteien verbunden, die sich von den faschistischen Organisationen der Zwischenkriegszeit und den neo-faschistischen Parteien der Nachkriegszeit unterschieden. Im Gegensatz zum „postmaterialistischen Optimismus“ und Kosmopolitismus der mutmaßlich fortschrittlichen stillen Revolution forderten die stillen Gegenrevolutionäre die Durchsetzung von Recht und Gesetz sowie eine striktere Einwanderungskontrolle. Die neuen rechtsradikalen Parteien lehnten Multikulturalismus ab und insistieren auf einem aktiven Schutz dessen, was sie als traditionelle nationale oder europäische Werte ansahen. Aber trotz manchmal bedeutender Wahlerfolge in den 1990er Jahren blieb die extreme Rechte überwiegend in der Opposition. Inzwischen hat sich jedoch die Situation verändert und die Gegenrevolutionäre, die den liberalen demokratischen Konsens bekämpfen, erscheinen nicht mehr länger als still.

Gründe für den Aufstieg der Rechtsradikalen

Um diese Veränderungen zu verstehen, ist es wichtig, kurz zwei relativ junge politische Phänomene zu diskutieren, die beide die Unfähigkeit oder sogar den Unwillen moderner demokratischer Kräfte widerspiegeln, große politische Zukunftsvisionen des Westens und der Welt zu artikulieren.

Das erste Phänomen sind die Catch-all-Parteien, die in der außergewöhnlichen Friedensperiode der westlichen kapitalistischen Welt während des Kalten Kriegs verwurzelt sind. Das europäische Nachkriegsintegrationsprojekt zielte ausdrücklich auf die Verhinderung von Konflikten zwischen den europäischen Staaten, die nicht Teil des sozialistischen Blocks waren. Das Vermeiden von militärischen Konflikten gelang in der Tat, auch bedingt durch die Tatsache, dass die Mehrheit der kapitalistischen europäischen Länder Mitglieder der NATO war. Das Gefühl von Sicherheit und die Wahrnehmung von Frieden als Dauerzustand trugen zum Aufstieg der Postmaterialisten, aber auch zum Entstehen von Catch-all-Parteien bei. 1966 beschrieb Otto Kirchheimer die Catch-all-Parteien als im Wesentlichen massenbasierte, auf Wahlen ausgerichtete Organisationen, die nicht eine bestimmte gesellschaftliche Gruppe ansprechen, sondern die Gesellschaft als Ganzes.[4] Aufgrund des liberal-demokratischen Konsenses in weiten Teilen des kapitalistischen Westens unterschieden sich die Catch-all-Parteien im ideologischen Sinne geringfügig und brachten immer weniger große Ideen hervor, so dass bereits in den 1970er Jahren soziale Bewegungen „den politischen Parteien der Linken wie Rechten vorwarfen, ohne Visionen zu agieren“.[5]

Gleichzeitig ermöglichte die ausgedehnte Friedenszeit des Kalten Kriegs den Aufstieg eines weiteren Phänomens: postmoderne Politik. Diese verzichtete auf ideologische Meistererzählungen, wie z.B. Liberalismus und Marxismus, und machte geltend, dass nicht mehr die eine politische Wahrheit existiere, sondern nur individuelle Standpunkte bei der Interpretation von multiplen „Realitäten“. Große Visionen und hochfliegende Ideen waren nicht zwingend ein unverzichtbares Instrument von Catch-all-Parteien bei der Wählermobilisierung, den politischen Postmodernisten waren diese jedoch ein Gräuel.

Catch-all-Parteien wie politische Postmodernisten haben bis zu einem gewissen Grad den fruchtbaren Boden zum Aufstieg der Rechtsradikalen in den 1990er Jahren und insbesondere in den 2000er Jahren bereitet. Erstere trugen zur vermehrten Wahrnehmung der liberalen Demokratie als Projekt einiger Ausgewählter bei, die angeblich den Bezug zum gemeinen Volk verloren haben. Liberale Demokratie war für viele in Europa nicht nur einfach eine Ideologie oder eine Regierungsform, sondern sie wurde zunehmend zu einem gefühlten Symbol der Ungleichheit oder sogar zum Inbegriff von deren Ursachen.

Auf der anderen Seite trugen auch die politischen Postmodernisten durch ihre Angriffe auf die Grundlagen des liberalen Denkens zur Schwächung des liberal-demokratischen Nachkriegskonsenses bei. Politischer Postmodernismus war ein hervorstechendes Element der sog. Rückkehr der Realpolitik in den 2000er Jahren: Diese ging davon aus, dass sowohl die Beziehungen zwischen den westlichen Staaten als auch zwischen der westlichen Welt und den nicht westlichen Ländern nicht durch moralische Werte, sondern durch moralischen Relativismus, nicht durch die liberalen Prinzipien von Gerechtigkeit, Menschenrechten und Freiheit, sondern durch pragmatische Überlegungen und individuelle nationale Interessen geregelt werden können, da die liberale Demokratie nur eine unter vielen Regierungsformen sei. Mit anderen Worten: Innerhalb des Diskurses postmoderner Realpolitik sollen die internationalen Beziehungen durch augenblickliche Bewertungen der fließenden und kontextabhängigen „Realitäten“ geregelt werden. Mit Blick auf die internen Entwicklungen im Westen wirkte dieses Prinzip wie Gift, seine Umsetzung führte zur Aushöhlung der Solidarität unter den westlichen Staaten und zum Anwachsen des Isolationismus.

Neue und alte Rechte

Als das liberal fortschrittliche „Ende der Geschichte“ mit den terroristischen Attacken von Al-Qaida auf die USA im September 2001 endete, erschien der kollektive Westen trotz seiner militärischen und ökonomischen Überlegenheit schwach, was den philosophischen und ideologischen Widerstand gegen die Herausforderungen betrifft, die von den Feinden der liberalen Demokratie gestellt worden waren. Es wurde vielmehr noch schlimmer: Die globale Finanzkrise von 2008/09 und die Folgen der großen Rezession (der schlimmsten seit dem Zweiten Weltkrieg) und die Austeritätspolitik untergruben die ökonomische Überlegenheit des Westens. In jüngerer Zeit haben islamistische Terrorattacken und die Furcht vor ihnen, die Migrations- und Flüchtlingskrise, die Sparpolitik, die Krise der Eurozone und der wahrgenommene Mangel an wirksamer Führung ein Umfeld erzeugt, das isolationistisches Denken noch begünstigt. Angesicht des Rückzugs des liberalen Progressivismus und nur weniger artikulierter globaler Visionen beginnen viele Bürger westlicher Nationen Zuflucht bei lokalen, regionalen, nationalen und religiösen Identitäten zu suchen.

Die extreme Rechte hat die Gelegenheit genutzt, die sich ihr durch das Ausbreiten politischer, wirtschaftlicher, kultureller und existenzieller Ängste im Westen bietet. Im Gegensatz zu den intellektuell ausgelaugten liberalen Demokraten verfügt sie über die Fähigkeit, alternative globale Visionen für die Weltordnung anzubieten. Und im Gegensatz zu den politischen Postmodernisten lehnt sie die Idee von multiplen „Realitäten“ ab - für sie existiert nur eine einzige Wirklichkeit und sie ist bereit, Stellung zu beziehen.

Aber auch wenn die extreme Rechte im letzten Jahrzehnt offenkundig an Dynamik gewonnen hat, waren es nicht die rechtsradikalen Parteien, die zum Inbegriff der nicht mehr länger stillen Gegenrevolution wurden. Vielmehr sind dies der ungarische Ministerpräsident Viktor Orbán und sein Versprechen eines „illiberalen Staats“, die harsche Antimigranten-Rhetorik des tschechischen Präsidenten Miloš Zeman, der slowakische Ministerpräsident Robert Fico oder der Anführer der polnischen Regierungspartei „Recht und Gerechtigkeit“, Jarosław Kaczyński. Dazu kommen das Brexit-Referendum, das „Rassismus salonfähig gemacht“[6] und zu einem Anstieg von Hassverbrechen im Vereinigten Königreich geführt hat. Des Weiteren sind die Beschwichtigungspolitik von Präsident Vladimir Putins rechtsautoritärem Regime nach der russischen Invasion in der Ukraine und die Popularität des rassistischen US-Präsidentenkandidaten Donald Trump zu nennen.

Viktor Orbán and Miloš Zeman

Bei seinem Treffen mit Jarosław Kaczyński im September 2016 erklärte Viktor Orbán, dass „der Brexit eine fantastische Gelegenheit“ sei - „eine historische kulturelle Bewegung“, die „eine kulturelle Gegenrevolution“ ermögliche.[7] Kaczyński erwiderte, dass sie die Initiative ergreifen und die EU verändern müssten. Zwar könnte man Orbáns und Kaczyńskis Idee einer Gegenrevolution lediglich als Dezentralisierung der EU und Übertragen von mehr Macht an die nationalen Parlamente interpretieren, doch lässt sich nicht übersehen, dass beide die europäischen Nationen als ethnisch und religiös homogene Einheiten ansehen. Ihre Parteien nutzen geschickt ethnischen und religiösen Nationalismus zur Wählermobilisierung aus. Und nachdem Orbán und Kaczyński an die Macht gelangt sind, haben beide Schritte unternommen, um sich die volle Kontrolle über ihre jeweiligen Länder zu sichern, indem sie deren Institutionen, insbesondere die Verfassungsgerichte und die öffentlich-rechtlichen Medien, umgestaltet und herabgestuft haben.

Während die rechtsradikalen Parteien - trotz der laufenden Deradikalisierung - noch darum kämpfen, sich als legitimen und respektablen Teil des politischen Prozesses darzustellen, müssen weder Orbán noch Kaczyński oder Zeman oder Trump oder die Anführer der „Leave the EU“-Kampagne im Vereinigten Königreich die politische Eignung ihrer Ideen beweisen, obwohl sie Ultranationalismus und Populismus kombinieren - ideologische Elemente, die als wesentliche Bestandteile der rechtsradikalen Ideologie gelten.[8] Im Gegensatz zu den traditionellen Parteien der extremen Rechte, wie z.B. die FPÖ in Österreich, die ungarische Jobbik, der Front National in Frankreich oder die italienische Lega Nord, können die „Mainstream“-Gegenrevolutionäre wie Orbán oder Kaczyński zudem auf Ressourcen zurückgreifen, die den traditionellen radikalen Rechtspopulisten unzugänglich sind, und eine Politik verfolgen, die sich nicht groß von derjenigen unterscheidet, die vom Front National oder Jobbik praktiziert würde, wenn sie an die Macht kommen sollten.

In den 1980er und 1990er Jahren führten die rechtsradikalen Parteien die stille Gegenrevolution gegen die liberale Demokratie an, aber im neuen Jahrhundert nutzen größtenteils nationalkonservative Mainstream-Politiker die Gelegenheit, die sich ihnen durch den philosophisch sterilen politischen Raum bietet, der von ideologisch „ausgelaugten“ Volksparteien und zynischen politischen Postmodernisten geschaffen wurde. Diese Politiker sind nicht nur in der Lage, den westlichen liberal-demokratischen Nachkriegskonsens dramatisch zu schwächen, sondern auch die internationale Sicherheitsarchitektur zu gefährden.


Anmerkungen

1) Inglehart, Ronald: The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics. Princeton 1977.
2) Ebd., S. 363.
3) Ignazi, Piero: The Silent Counter-Revolution: Hypotheses on the Emergence of Extreme Right-wing Parties in Europe. In: European Journal of Political Research 22, 1 (1992), S. 3-34, hier S. 24.
4) Kirchheimer, Otto: The Transformation of Western European Party Systems. In: LaPalombara, Joseph; Weiner, Myron (eds.): Political Parties and Political Development. Princeton 1966, S. 177-200.
5) Aronowitz, Stanley: Postmodernism and Politics. In: Social Text 18 (1987/88), S. 99-115, hier S. 101.
6) http://www.irr.org.uk/email/brexit-and-xeno-racism-help-us-to-build-the-national-picture/.
7) http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e825f7f4-74a3-lle6-bf48-b372cdbl043a.html.
8) Mudde, Cas: Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe. Cambridge 2007, S. 22-23.

Übersetzung aus dem Englischen: Stefan Kube.
Religion& Gesellschaft in Ost und West, 9-10 (2016), S. 9-10.

On 14-16 October 2016, an Italian delegation consisting of 18 politicians and businessmen visited Crimea illegally annexed by Russian from Ukraine in March 2016. The political part of the delegation was largely represented by regional politicians from far right parties such as the Northern League (Lega Nord) and Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d’Italia), but the delegation also featured one politician from the left-wing populist party Free Alternative (Alternativa Libera). The business part was represented by the leaders of the Italian companies Albrigi, Brescia Hydropower, Cantina di Soave, Scandiuzzi Steel Constructions, and Veronesi.

This trip was, to a certain extent, a follow-up of the Second Yalta International Economic Forum that took place in Crimea in April 2016. The forum was co-hosted by the EU-sanctioned “Prime Minister of the Republic of Crimea” Sergey Aksyonov and Andrey Nazarov, co-chair of the All-Russian Civic Organisation “Business Russia” (Delovaya Rossiya) which is a union of businessmen working in non-energy sectors of Russian economy. It was the “Business Russia” organisation that officially invited and paid for the trip of the Italian delegation, and Nazarov was their main host in Crimea in October.

Italian collaborators travelling to Russia-annexed Crimea

For Russia, the conference in Yalta in April 2016 was important for two reasons. First, the sanctions introduced by the West against Russia effectively barred foreign companies from investing in businesses in Crimea to pressure Russia into returning the annexed republic to Ukraine. Second, by inviting European participants to the conference, Russia aimed to show that European businesses were interested in investing in Crimea and there were ways to pursue their interests. As could be expected, among the participants of the Second Yalta International Economic Forum one could see far right politicians coming from the Northern League, Freedom Party of Austria (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs), Bulgarian “Attack” (Ataka), Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland), Polish “Change” (Zmiana), and the Japanese Issuikai organisation. At the conference, they unanimously condemned anti-Russian sanctions and, therefore, received extensive coverage in the Russian state-controlled media.

One of the leading Italian participants of both the Yalta conference and Crimean visit in October was Stefano Valdegamberi elected to the Veneto regional council on the personal list of the Northern League’s member Luca Zaia. In May 2016, Valdegamberi initiated a resolution calling on Rome to recognise Crimea as part of Russia and to lift anti-Russian sanctions. The resolution, which was not legally binding, was adopted by the Veneto regional council in May 2016, while similar resolutions were adopted during summer 2016 by the Lombardy and Liguria regional councils. Despite the efforts of Valdegamberi and his right-wing populist colleagues from other councils, none of these resolutions had any impact on the Italian authorities.

During his October visit to Crimea, Valdegamberi talked about the sanctions again, and even declared that Ukraine had to compensate for the “economic losses” of the Veneto region allegedly inflicted by the EU’s Crimea-related sanctions. It is interesting that several politicians from the Northern League, with which Valdegamberi is associated, have served as mouthpieces of Russian propaganda since 2014: Claudio D’Amico “monitored” the illegal referendum in Crimea; Gianluca Savoini, the spokesman for the Northern League’s leader Matteo Salvini, is president of the Lombardy-Russia Cultural Association, which functions as a Russian front organisation in Italy; Salvini himself appeared in the Russian State Duma in October 2014 wearing a sweatshirt saying “No sanctions against Russia”.

Like the conference in Yalta, the visit to Crimea in October had a clear propagandistic goal aimed at legitimising the Russian annexation of Crimea and showing that Crimea was not internationally isolated. To that end, Roberto Ciambetti, the Northern League’s member and president of the Veneto regional council, signed – together with the EU-sanctioned “Chairman of State Council of the Republic of Crimea” Vladimir Konstantinov – a joint statement on the development of interregional cooperation. A member of the Brothers of Italy and a member of the council of the city of Padua Marina Buffoni signed – together with Simferopol’s “mayor” Viktor Ageyev – an agreement proclaiming Padua and Simferopol twin-cities and announcing the intention to boost economic development and bilateral business contacts. Free Alternative’s member Tancredi Turco promised to continue his work aimed at persuading the Italian authorities to lift the anti-Russian sanctions. While he was sceptical over the efficiency of his efforts, Turco expressed his hope that the political situation in Italy might change in case Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, who supports the Ukraine-related anti-Russian sanctions, lost the constitutional referendum planned for 4 December 2016.

However, the economic aspects were perhaps the more important part of the visit to Crimea. Nazarov claimed that two contracts were to be signed during this visit. One contract apparently entails the construction of a 5-star hotel in Simferopol; the second one covers the joint purchase of a Russian magazine on architecture, construction and design by the “Business Russia” organisation and Italian businessmen. While it is not yet clear whether the contracts have indeed been signed or who exactly could have signed them from the Italian side, it is known that the participant of the delegation Fulvio Scandiuzzi is CEO of Scandiuzzi Steel Constructions, which is the only Italian company that had any relation to construction among those represented during the trip to Crimea.

Marina Bufoni's Russian visa that allowed her to illegally enter Russia-annexed Crimea

Nazarov also announced the start of a joint production of a new wine brand that would be officially launched at the Third Yalta International Economic Forum planned for April 2017. He also claimed that there were offers to develop production of turkey meat. These plans clearly reflected the structure of the business part of the delegation: Cantina di Soave (represented by its president Attilio Carlesso) is a wine producing company, Albrigi (represented by its owner Stefano Albrigi) produces plants for processing and storage of liquid foods, and Veronesi (represented by its co-owner Marcello Veronesi and a senior manager Antonio Nicodemo) is engaged in farming.

The Western Crimea-related sanctions naturally remain a significant obstacle for foreign investments into the Crimean economy, and this was acknowledged by yet another participant of the delegation, director of the Chamber of Commerce of the Veneto region Gian Angelo Bellati. However, the Russians have long been discussing how Russian and non-Russian businesses could circumvent the sanctions, so it is important for relevant Western institutions to monitor closely the relations between European and Crimea-based businesses with regard to potential violation of the sanctions regime.

Members of the Italian delegation:

 1. Stefano Albrigi (owner of the company "Albrigi Srl").
2. Stefano Bargi (Lega Nord Emilia e Romagna).
3. Gian Angelo Bellati (director of the Chamber of Commerce of the Veneto region).
4. Fabio Bosio (owner of the company "Brescia Hydropower S.r.l.").
5. Marina Buffoni (Fratelli d'Italia).
6. Attilio Carlesso (president of the company "Cantina di Soave").
7. Roberto Ciambetti (Liga Veneta–Lega Nord).
8. Jari Colla (Lega Lombarda-Lega Nord).
9. Alessandro Gonzato (journalist).
10. Antonio Nicodemo (a manager of the company "Veronesi").
11. Roberto Penazzi (?).
12. Alessandro Piana (Lega Nord Liguria).
13. Luciano Sandonà (Lista Zaia/Liga Veneta–Lega Nord).
14. Fulvio Scandiuzzi (CEO of the Scandiuzzi Steel Constructions Spa).
15. Luciano Soldà (?).
16. Tancredi Turco (Alternativa Libera).
17. Stefano Valdegamberi (Lista Zaia/Liga Veneta–Lega Nord).
18. Marcello Veronesi (owner of the company "Veronesi").
19. Manuel Vescovi (Lega Nord).

The Italian delegation was accompanied by Robert Stelzl, an Austrian and an employee of Ewald Stadler, the leader of the fringe right-wing populist Reformkonservativen party.

As the news about the victory of Donald Trump in the US presidential elections have shocked many in Europe, it is high time for European leaders to learn lessons from the outcome of these elections and – to quote Winston Churchill – not let a good crisis go to waste.

The US presidential electoral campaign was characterised by the “Europeanisation” of the American politics – something that never happened before. Discarding some obvious differences between the American and European political domains, Bernie Sanders appeared a typical European social democrat, Hillary Clinton – a European pro-establishment centrist, and Donald Trump – a European anti-establishment radical right-wing populist. Trump’s rhetoric during the campaign was notorious for anti-immigrant and racist statements, so it was only natural that European right-wing politicians such as Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the former leader of Britain’s UKIP Nigel Farage or the president of Front National Marine Le Pen overwhelmingly supported Trump during his campaign.

Data from the exit polls published by the New York Times, which gives a sociological overview of Clinton’s and Trump’s voters, further proves the affinity between the electorates of Trump and the European far right. Whites prevail (58%) over people of other ethnic origins among Trump’s voters, as do men (53%) over women and Christians (58%) – over the faithful of other religions. Moreover, whites without a college degree (67%) and residents of small cities and villages (62%) particularly stand out among Trump’s voters. For his electorate, immigration and terrorism are more important issues (64% and 57% correspondingly) than foreign policy (34%) and even economy (42%).

This picture differs little from the electorates of the majority of European far right parties, but there are interesting differences as well. Academic works on the European far right have long noted the overrepresentation of the working class among their supporters, but this seems not to be the case with Trump’s electorate, as it is almost evenly distributed over different income-based social categories. However, another important factor, again, brings Trump’s electorate close to that of the European radical right-wing populist parties: economic insecurity.

Donald Trump, US president-elect

While major scholars of the far right do not consider economic conditions as the main driver for far right support, it is important to take into account not the economic situation in a given country as such, but rather its perception by the population and their views of the future. The vast majority of Trump’s supporters (63%) believe that life will be worse for the future generation of the citizens of the country, and this particular view is prevalent among the electorates of the European far right too.

This is also where lessons for the European leaders begin. Despite the relatively stable – especially if compared to other regions of the world – economic conditions in Europe or, at the very least, the strengthening economic recovery and improvement of labour market conditions, in most European countries citizens are pessimistic about the future. Older people generally believe that their children will be worse off, younger people think the same about themselves compared to their parents. According to the 2014 Pew Research Center survey, as many as 56% of the respondents in Germany, the largest economy in Europe, said that the next generations would be worse off; the figures for the UK and France, the second and third largest European economies, were 72% and 86% correspondingly. The same survey suggests that Europe and the US are equally the most pessimistic regions in the world.

When European mainstream political leaders say that economies are recovering after the 2008-2009 financial crisis, which is true, these words are no longer sufficient for the majority of the population across Europe. The most arrogant establishment figures may even ask: “Our economy is doing great, why are you unhappy?”. They seem to fail to realise that the global financial crisis dramatically undermined economic optimism of European societies, but coupled with the declining trust towards the political elites, general European pessimism may result in a political catastrophe.

The far right are well positioned to exploit the pessimistic perceptions of economic security, and are able to appeal to publics across generations. Younger people are the least attached to the political establishment, so the anti-elite rhetoric of the far right (and, obviously, the far left) may gain further traction with them. Older people, who are more conservative, may abandon their established political affiliations and increasingly follow the far right in believing that the ills of modern Europe are underpinned by globalisation, multiculturalism, immigration, individualism and liberalism, and therefore adopting a belief that the only “way out” is a truly conservative return to the utopian old days: a homogenous nation state, isolationism, low or no immigration, law and order, patriarchal society, etc.

Trump’s victory in the US, as well as the Pyrrhic triumph of the Leave campaign at the Brexit referendum in the UK, conveys yet another message to European leaders: identity politics has become one of the most important issues for the American and European societies, and cannot be ignored by established politicians any further. According to Eurobarometer, immigration was seen in 2015 as the most important issue facing the EU; moreover, immigration and terrorism (most important problems in the eyes of Trump’s supporters) were the only significant issues the salience of which had increased for Europeans in comparison to 2014.

Ethnic and cultural identity issues, when raised by members of European majorities, were frowned upon for several decades as there was a social consensus that raising these issues amounted to xenophobia and racism. In different European societies, this consensus either no longer exists or is crumbling fast – a development that many European leaders still fail to comprehend. By shying away from discussing openly difficult questions about ethnicity, culture and religion, mainstream European politicians have surrendered a broad political field to the far right to exploit in the most efficient and, indeed, authoritarian and illiberal way.

Another problem is that when some mainstream politicians do try to talk about these issues, they adopt the language of the far right, rather than developing a new liberal-democratic language about ethnicity and culture taking into consideration that the old liberal-democratic narratives about identity politics have largely lost their moral authority among many Europeans. Liberal-democratic leaders need to re-engage with social reality, but while taking identity politics seriously, they need to thread a fine line between far right, far left and old liberal-democratic conceptions. It may be extremely difficult but anything less will eventually lead European liberal democracy to defeat. For European societies, the issues of immigration, culture and religion have deeper political significance than these phenomena as such: these are questions about what constitutes demos (people) in modern demokratia (rule of people). Without re-identifying this notion, without re-establishing clear-cut boundaries between those who are part of demos and who are not, one cannot expect revival of political trust towards the rulers.

Finally, Trump’s victory tells European leaders that political establishment can no longer take its power for granted. Anti-establishment populist rhetoric is powerful, and politicians who employ this rhetoric not only can cause headache for the ruling elites but can actually prevail over them through the normal electoral process. As the election of Trump has shown, all the psychological barriers preventing people from voting en masse for those who adopt the language of hate have been erased.

There is a huge popular demand for new political agendas in Europe. The Austrian presidential elections in 2016 provides a good example for this trend: for the first time in the Austrian post-war history, neither a representative of the social-democratic party nor that of the conservative party – these parties were the strongest in Austria for decades – made it to the second round of the presidential election. Instead, the second round saw Alexander Van der Bellen backed by the Greens and the far right politician Norbert Hofer compete for the presidential post, and Hofer has good chances to win on the 4th of December this year. However, the success of both Van der Bellen and Hofer represent a growing social demand for non-establishment new politics.

Despite Trump’s vicious anti-establishment statements during the electoral campaign, he is the establishment’s own flesh and blood, but European far right politicians are not. Their rise to power will be a disaster for Europe and will most likely dismantle the institutions that allowed European nations to co-exist peacefully for several decades and to become a shining example of the economic, political and cultural advantages of liberal-democratic order for the entire world.

But the quite feasible rise to power of the European far right can happen not because radical right-wing populists are strong, but because too many European mainstream leaders ignore the fact that socio-political environments are changing fast and, thus, fail to adapt to the new conditions by developing a new logic of communication with citizens, elaborating new powerful ideas about the future of Europe, and tackling the root causes of economic, political and cultural insecurity.

First published in Norwegian on VG: "Europeiske lærdommer etter Trump".

My public lecture on the relations between various Russian actors and the Western far right at the Institute for Human Sciences (Vienna, Austria).


The lecture discusses relations between various Russian actors (activists, politicians, organisations, media, officials, etc.) and the Western far right. It provides a historical perspective, discussing the pro-Soviet or pro-Russian views of particular Western far right activists, but its major focus is contemporary Russia. As Moscow has become more anti-Western, contacts with the Western far right have become more intense and have operated at a high level. The lecture shows that the Russian establishment was first interested in using the Western far right to legitimise Moscow’s politics and actions both domestically and internationally, but more recently Moscow has begun to support particular far right political forces to gain leverage on European politics and undermine the liberal-democratic consensus in the West.

On 20 February 2017, the de-facto authorities of the unrecognised state of Nagorno-Karabakh held a "constitutional referendum". It was observed by a number of fake electoral monitors including several European far right politicians.

Nagorno-Karabakh is the territory populated largely by ethnic Armenians and is disputed by Azerbaijan and Armenia, but is internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan. Moscow is formally not taking sides in this conflict and has not recognised the legitimacy of the "constitutional referendum". And yet the Kremlin is interested in maintaining the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh and is eagerly selling heavy weaponry to both countries. Instability and enmity between Russia's neighbours helps Moscow keep them in its sphere of influence.

Thus, it was hardly a surprise to see in Nagorno-Karabakh "electoral monitors", in particular, from the far right Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany) and Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (Freedom Party of Austria, FPÖ), which had already worked for various Russian structures promoting Moscow's foreign policy interests through biased "electoral observation". They were accompanied by Manuel Ochsenreiter, the editor of the far-right German magazine Zuerst! who had been engagedin pro-Moscow activitiesfor several years already.

(left to right) Enrico Komning (AfD), Thomas Rudy (AfD), Holger Arppe (AfD), Manuel Ochsenreiter (Zuerst!). Nagorno-Karabakh, February 2017

(left to right) Holger Arppe (AfD), Wolfgang Jung (FPÖ). Nagorno-Karabakh, February 2017

(left to right) Enrico Komning (AfD), Gerhard Dörfler (FPÖ). Nagorno-Karabakh, February 2017

Late at night on 5 March, the leader of the Italian far right Lega Nord (Northern League, LN) Matteo Salvini flew to Moscow. The next day, on 6 March, Salvini and deputy chairman of the Russian "parliament" Sergey Zheleznyak signed a coordination agreement between the LN and the ruling Yedinaya Rossiya (United Russia, ER) party.

The Lega Nord's Matteo Salvini is flying to Moscow on 5 March 2017

Matteo Salvini and Sergey Zheleznyak sign the coordination agreement between the Lega Nord and the United Russia. Moscow, 6 March 2017

The document signed by Salvini and Zheleznyak is not available publicly yet, but it seems that it differs from the one signed between the Austrian far right FPÖ and ER in December 2016. In the case of the LN, the document was first called "a protocol of intentions", but eventually the Russian state-controlled media called it "a coordination agreement" (Russian: договор о взаимодействии). In the case of the FPÖ, the document was called "a coordination and cooperation agreement" (Russian: договор о взаимодействии и сотрудничестве). This implies that the value of the agreement is higher in the case of the FPÖ compared to that of the LN. This is also corroborated by the fact that the LN's delegation consisted only of Salvini himself, while only Zheleznyak received Salvini. In contrast, the FPÖ delegation in December 2016 featured several members of the party (including its leader HC Strache), while the Russian host party featured not only Zheleznyak but also three other representatives of the Russian political establishment.

The LN under the leadership of Salvini started building contacts with the Russian actors already at the end of 2013. Aleksey Komov, an employee of Russian ultranationalist Orthodox oligarch Konstantin Malofeev and the official representative of the World Congress of Families in Russia, travelled to Turin in December 2013 and took part, together with a Russian MP from the ER Viktor Zubarev, in the LN’s congress that elected Salvini as a new leader of the party.

Since the beginning of 2014, the LN has been extremely active in carrying out pro-Kremlin efforts in Italy, in particular through the Associazione Culturale Lombardia Russia (Lombardy-Russia Cultural Association, ACLR; more on the workings of the ACLR see section "Italy"here).

Alexey Komov addresses the congress of Lega Nord. Rome, December 2013

The activities of the LN and ACLR in October 2014 were especially important for the development of their Russian connections that led to an increase of their pro-Russian efforts. That month, a delegation of the LN/ACLR visited Russia-annexed Crimea – their trip was coordinated with the Russian Embassy in Rome – and met with the EU-sanctioned “Prime Minister” of Crimea Sergey Aksyonov. After Crimea, the LN/ACLR delegation went to Moscow where they met with a number of high-ranking Russian officials and politicians such as then chairman of the State Duma Sergey Naryshkin, his deputy and the head of the “Yedinaya Rossiya” State Duma group Vladimir Vasilyev, the head of the Duma foreign affairs committee Aleksey Pushkov, and deputy Foreign Minister Aleksey Meshkov. The LN/ACLR delegation also visited a session of the State Duma, and Naryshkin personally welcomed the delegation by mentioning that the LN was "one of Italy’ political parties that [was] unalterably opposed to the anti-Russian sanctions introduced by the United States and the European Union".

Matteo Salvini and Sergey Naryshkin. Moscow, October 2014

The delegation of the Lega Nord being greeted by Sergey Naryshkin in the Russian "parliament". Moscow, October 2014

Salvini was able to meet and talk to Putin for 20 minutes during a break at the Asia-Europe summit in Milan on 17 October 2014. According to Salvini, he spoke to Putin about "the absurd sanctions against Russia introduced by the cowardly EU that defend[ed] the interests not of its own citizens, but rather those of the economic oligarchs and lobbies of the representatives of the world power".

Matteo Salvini and Vladimir Putin. Milan, 17 October 2014

The LN's trip to Moscow in October 2014 marked the beginning of a series of frequent visits of the LN leadership to Russia and their meetings with high-ranking officials and politicians from the ER. On 22 October 2014, an LN member Claudio D’Amico met with Andrey Klimov, a member of the supervisory board of Malofeev’s Katehon think-tank and a senior member of the ER who was responsible for the party’s foreign relations in 2012-2016. During this meeting, D’Amico reiterated the LN’s opposition to the sanctions against Russia, and suggested that the LN and ER signed an agreement on cross-party cooperation. Klimov and Salvini discussed this idea further during the latter’s visit to Moscow in February 2015. The two of them continued discussing tentative official cooperation between the parties on 17 December 2015 when Salvini and other LN's members arrived in Moscow for a two-day visit.

The LN delegation meets with Aleksey Pushkov (third from the left). Moscow, 17 December 2015

Thus, the LN had been discussing some version of an agreement with the ER since at least late 2014, but was able to sign the document only in March 2017. According tovarioussources, the coordination agreement between the LN and ER involves the following:

- the parties shall consult and exchange information on current affairs, international relations, exchange experiences in the sphere of youth policies and economic development;
- shall regularly exchange delegations at different levels, hold bilateral and multilateral seminars, conferences and round tables on the most topical issues of Russian-Italian reactions;
- shall contribute to the unification of all forces in the fight against Islamic terrorism, combat illegal immigration, and defend traditional values.

To reiterate, however, the agreement signed by the LN and ER is not as significant as that between the FPÖ and ER. Unlike the far right FPÖ, which is currently the most popular party in Austria, the LN is only fourth in Italy (they may obtain 10-12% of the vote in the next parliamentary election), so Moscow is not ready (yet) to provide full-fledged political support for the LN, trying to find more established and popular allies in Italy, or even in the populist Movimento 5 Stelle (Five Star Movement). At the same time, Moscow will definitely keep medium-level contacts with the LN and will turn to the Italian far right in case it fails in its search for the Putinversteher in the Italian mainstream circles.

My forthcoming book Russia and the Western Far Right: Tango Noir is now available for pre-order on several Amazon websites: France, Italy, Spain, UK, Canada, Japan, US, India.

Description:

This book is the first monograph-length inquiry into what has been a neglected but critically important trend: the growing links between Russian actors and Western far right activists, publicists, ideologues, and politicians. The author uses a range of sources including interviews, video footage, leaked communications, official statements and press coverage in order to discuss both historical and contemporary Russia in terms of its relationship with the Western far right.

Initial contacts between Russian political actors and Western far right activists were established in the early 1990s, but these contacts were low profile. As Moscow has become more anti-Western, these contacts have become more intense and have operated at a higher level. The book shows that the Russian establishment was first interested in using the Western far right to legitimise Moscow’s politics and actions both domestically and internationally, but more recently Moscow has begun to support particular far right political forces to gain leverage on European politics and undermine the liberal-democratic consensus in the West.

Contributing to ongoing scholarly debates about Russia’s role in the world, its strategies aimed at securing legitimation of Putin’s regime both internationally and domestically, modern information warfare and propaganda, far right politics and activism in the West, this book draws on theories and methods from history, political science, area studies, and media studies and will be of interest to students, scholars, activists and practitioners in these areas.

Table of contents

- Introduction
- Chapter 1. Soviet Russia in the Western Far Right Perspective: Ideology, Collaboration, Active Measures
- Chapter 2. Russia’s Opening to the Western Far Right
- Chapter 3. Putin’s Russia, an Authoritarian Kleptocracy with a Twist
- Chapter 4. Far Right Election Observers in the Service of the Kremlin’s Domestic and Foreign Policies
- Chapter 5. Undermining the West through Mass Media
- Chapter 6. Far Right Structures in Europe as Pro-Moscow Front Organisations
- Chapter 7. The Moscow-Strasbourg-Brussels Axis
- Conclusion

I will also have a website that will feature additional info (photos, texts, etc. that I could not use in the book for various reasons) and a new blog. Stay tuned.

Au début des années 1980, Jean Thiriart (1922-1992), un idéologue néofasciste belge d’après-guerre, appelait de ses vœux la création d’un empire eurosoviétique, un super-Etat fascisto-communiste qui s’étendrait de Vladivostok à Dublin. Il était convaincu que Moscou pouvait « faire l’Europe européenne» comme antithèse à ce qu’il jugeait être l’Europe américanisée, et prônait « la collaboration totale» avec l’Union soviétique.

La collaboration totale, il connaissait, puisqu’il s’était enrôlé dans la Waffen SS dans les années 1940, ce qui lui avait valu d’être condamné à la Libération. Dans les années 1980, il allait prêter allégeance à un autre régime totalitaire : « Je serai alors le premier à mettre une étoile rouge sur ma casquette. L’Europe soviétique, oui sans réticence».

Les rêves de Thiriart ne se sont jamais concrétisés, mais l’homme a des disciples prêts à collaborer avec le régime autoritaire de Vladimir Poutine qui, selon eux, veut aussi « faire l’Europe européenne». Ce sont des militants et politiciens d’extrême droite qui voient dans la Russie de Poutine « un bastion des valeurs traditionnelles» et une « lueur d’espoir» dans leur combat contre le libéralisme et l’Europe unie.

Calcul cynique

Le régime de Poutine, de son côté, se sert de ses alliés d’extrême droite pour affaiblir l’Union européenne (UE) et fragiliser la paix sociale dans les sociétés européennes. Poutine sait parfaitement que mouvements nationalistes sont un danger pour la cohésion sociale et politique des Etats – son régime réprime du reste non seulement l’opposition démocratique, mais aussi les mouvements ultranationalistes déloyaux à l’égard du pouvoir. Cela paraîtra peut-être surprenant à ses alliés européens d’extrême droite mais Poutine a conseillé aux nationalistes russes de «se souvenir que la Russie s’est formée dès le départ comme un Etat multiethnique et multiconfessionnel», et affirmé que le nationalisme détruit le « code génétique» russe.

Cela n’empêche pas Moscou d’apporter un soutien politique, médiatique et parfois même financier à des partis ultranationalistes, en faisant le calcul cynique que s’ils accédaient au pouvoir dans tel ou tel pays d’Europe, cela mettrait en péril l’unité européenne et rendrait de ce fait l’Etat plus vulnérable aux pratiques corrompues des oligarques russes, ce qui aggraverait les inégalités sociales et affaiblirait la position de l’Europe face à des grandes puissances telles que les Etats-Unis, la Chine et l’Inde.

Réaliser le rêve de l'Empire euro-soviétique de Jean Thiriart? Marine Le Pen porte une casquette militaire soviétique avec une étoile rouge lors de sa visite à Sébastopol en juin 2013. (c) archive d'Anton Shekhovtsov

Si les partis européens d’extrême droite comprenaient que l’Europe doit beaucoup de sa stature internationale à l’unité occidentale, ils éviteraient à tout le moins de se qualifier de « patriotes », car qu’y a-t-il de patriotique à tenter de se suicider en sciant la branche sur laquelle on est assis ? Et pourtant, les mouvements qui se disent « patriotes » tels que le Parti de la liberté d’Autriche (FPÖ), la Ligue du Nord en Italie, le mouvement bulgare Ataka, l’Alternative pour l’Allemagne (AfD) et le Front national en France font preuve d’une grande naïveté en s’employant tacitement à mettre à mal la sécurité de l’Europe et en montrant clairement pour le compte de qui ils le font : la kleptocratie autoritaire de Poutine.

Un prêt de plusieurs millions d’euros

En décembre 2016, le FPÖ a signé un accord de coordination et de coopération avec le parti Russie unie de Poutine. La Ligue du Nord en a fait autant en mars. Marine Le Pen s’est rendue à Moscou à plusieurs reprises depuis 2013 et son parti, le Front national, a obtenu un prêt de plusieurs millions d’euros auprès de la First Czech-Russian Bank, un établissement bancaire contrôlé par un homme d’affaires proche du Kremlin.

Marine Le Pen a beau affirmer dans son clip de campagne vouloir « que les Français puissent vivre libres dans une France indépendante», ses orientations en matière de politique étrangère indiquent qu’elle n’hésiterait pas, comme Thiriart avant elle, à rendre la France dépendante de la Russie.

Depuis 2013, il est clair que sa vision des relations internationales, notamment en ce qui concerne la Russie, s’inspire des positions du Kremlin. Par exemple, en juin 2013, lors de son déplacement dans la ville ukrainienne de Sébastopol – qui n’avait pas encore été annexée par la Russie à l’époque – Le Pen s’était prononcée en faveur de l’accord d’association Ukraine-UE.

Perroquet

Mais, après son premier voyage à Moscou le même mois, elle dénonçait le rapprochement de l’Ukraine avec l’UE et votait contre l’accord d’association au Parlement européen. Depuis que Marine Le Pen rencontre régulièrement des officiels russes, aucune de ses déclarations sur la Russie ne contredit la ligne du Kremlin, qu’il s’agisse de la répression de l’opposition démocratique russe, de l’invasion de l’Ukraine ou du soutien par Moscou apporté au régime meurtrier de Bachar Al-Assad.

Non pas qu’en se faisant le perroquet de la désinformation de Moscou, Le Pen rembourse sa dette au Kremlin ; si elle relaye le discours de Moscou, c’est qu’elle espère continuer à bénéficier d’une aide financière des Russes. Dès lors, non seulement Le Pen n’a pas de vision personnelle des relations internationales mais elle n’a pas non plus d’estime de soi. Elle avait déjà cherché à rencontrer une personnalité russe haut placée en 2011, mais personne n’avait souhaité l’inviter à Moscou, parce que le Kremlin attendait de connaître le résultat de l’élection présidentielle de 2012 en France.

Les autorités russes aspiraient à entretenir de bonnes relations avec le président élu, que ce soit François Hollande ou Nicolas Sarkozy – relations qui auraient pu être mises à mal si le Kremlin avait invité Le Pen et lui avait témoigné de son soutien avant la présidentielle. Ce n’est qu’après que le président Hollande eut reproché à Poutine, en juin 2012, de soutenir Assad que le Kremlin a décidé de durcir le ton avec la France et de nouer des relations avec le Front national dans le but de fragiliser la paix sociale dans le pays.

Une solution de repli

En 2016, Marine Le Pen est devenue une solution de repli pour le Kremlin. C’est la raison pour laquelle le Front national n’a pas réussi à obtenir un nouveau prêt d’une banque russe cette année-là (la First Czech-russe Bank a été déclarée en faillite en 2016). Cela explique aussi ses déboires avec l’Agence russe de garantie des dépôts qui est chargée de recouvrer les créances de la banque en faillite et menaçait d’entamer une procédure judiciaire contre le Front national pour obtenir le remboursement de son emprunt. L’Agence de garantie des dépôts étant une autorité administrative, on conçoit mal que sa décision n’ait pas été validée par le pouvoir.

Si le Front national est devenu une solution de repli pour le Kremlin, c’est que Moscou attendait de voir comment aller évoluer la situation politique en France. A l’issue de la primaire de la droite, il a décidé de jouer la carte François Fillon, connu pour sa position conciliante à l’égard des politiques intérieure et étrangère de la Russie, plutôt que Le Pen.

Ce n’est qu’une fois que Fillon a commencé à voir sa popularité entamée par le « Penelopegate » que le Kremlin s’est à nouveau tourné vers Le Pen et l’a même invitée à Moscou pour montrer qu’elle était le candidat préféré de Poutine pour la présidentielle.

Après l’ingérence manifeste de Moscou dans l’élection présidentielle américaine l’an dernier, les sociétés européennes sont devenues plus vigilantes face aux tentatives du Kremlin pour infléchir les processus électoraux dans les pays occidentaux. La France ne fait pas exception.

Cet article a été publié à l'origine dansLe Monde.
Traduit de l’anglais par Juliette Kopecka.
My new book, Russia and the Western Far Right: Tango Noir, will be published on 30 September 2017 and is already available for pre-order via Routledge, paperback at £17.59.

In the beginning of the 1980s, Belgian post-war neo-fascist ideologue Jean Thiriart wrote that he wanted to see the formation of a Euro-Soviet Empire, a fascist-communist super-state that would stretch from Vladivostok to Dublin. He believed that Moscow could “make Europe European” as an antithesis to what believed was an Americanised Europe, and was ready for “total collaboration” with the Soviet Union.

He was no stranger to “total collaboration”, as he served in the Waffen SS in the 1940s and was convicted for his collaborationism with the Third Reich after the war, but in the 1980s he would swear allegiance to a different totalitarian regime: “I will then be the first to put a red star on my cap. Soviet Europe, yes, without reservations”.

Thiriart’s dreams never came true, but he has followers who would collaborate with the authoritarian regime of Vladimir Putin who, they believe, would also “make Europe European”. These are extreme right activists and politicians who see in Putin’s Russia “a bastion of traditional values” and “a beacon of hope” in their fight against liberalism and united Europe.
Putin’s regime, in its turn, uses his extreme right allies to weaken the European Union and undermine social peace in European societies. Putin knows well that nationalist movements are dangerous for social and political unity of states, and his regime suppresses not only democratic opposition in Russia, but also ultranationalist movements that are disloyal to official Moscow. To Putin’s European extreme right allies this may come as a surprise, but he urged Russian nationalists to “remember that Russia was formed specifically as a multi-ethnic and multi-confessional country”, and argued that any nationalism in Russia destroy the Russian “genetic code”. And yet Moscow would cynically provide political, media and sometimes even financial support to ultranationalist parties, because were they to come to power in particular European states, they would compromise European unity and, therefore, make their respective states more vulnerable to corrupt practices of Russian oligarchs, which would contribute to social inequality, and damage Europe’s positions in the global competition among major powers such as the US, China and India.

Fulfilling Jean Thiriart's dream about the Euro-Soviet Empire? Marine Le Pen wearing a Soviet military cap with a red star during her visit to Sevastopol in June 2013. (c) Anton Shekhovtsov’s archive

If European extreme right parties understood that Europe owed much of its strong international standing to Western unity, they would at least refrain from calling themselves “patriotic” because patriotism has nothing to do with suicidal attempts to cut the ground from under their own feet. And yet self-proclaimed “patriotic” political forces such as the Freedom Party of Austria, Italy’s Northern League, Bulgaria’s Attack, Alternative for Germany and France’s Front National appear to be particularly naïve as they implicitly strive to undermine Europe’s security and explicitly demonstrate in whose favour they do it: Putin’s authoritarian kleptocracy.

In December 2016, the Austrian Freedom Party even signed a coordination and cooperation agreement with Putin’s United Russia party, while the Northern League signed a similar, yet less extensive coordination agreement with the same Russian party in March this year. Marine Le Pen has travelled to Moscow several times since 2013, and her Front National obtained a multi-million loan from the First Czech-Russian Bank controlled by one of the businessmen from Putin’s inner circle.

Marine Le Pen claims in her presidential campaign video that she wants “the French to live freely in an independent France”, but her foreign policy orientations suggest that she would be willing, like Thiriart before her, to make France dependent on Russia. Since 2013, it has been obvious that her views on international relations, especially those related to Russia, were guided by the Kremlin’s positions on those issues. For example, in June 2013, during her visit to the Ukrainian city of Sevastopol – at that time not yet annexed by Russia – Le Pen supported the Ukraine-EU Association Agreement, but, after her first ever visit to Moscow the same month, she would denounce Ukraine’s rapprochement with the EU and vote against the Association Agreement in the European Parliament. Since Le Pen started meeting Moscow’s officials on a regular basis, no Russia-related statement of hers has ever conflicted with the Kremlin’s line: neither on Putin’s repressions of domestic democratic opposition, nor on the Russian invasion of Ukraine or Moscow’s support of the murderous regime of Bashar al-Assad.

Not that by repeating Moscow’s disinformation Le Pen pays off the debt to the Kremlin; rather, she appears to echo Moscow’s narratives because she simply hopes to have continuous Russian financial support. Thus, Le Pen seems to lack not only her own views on international relations, but also self-respect. She wanted to meet someone from the Russian ruling elites already in 2011, but no Russian high-ranking official wanted to invite her to Moscow, because the Kremlin waited for the outcome of the 2012 presidential election in France. The Russian authorities aspired to have good relations with either François Hollande or Nicolas Sarkozy – relations that could have been potentially damaged, had the Kremlin invited Le Pen, and demonstrated political support for her, before the presidential election. It was only after President Hollande criticised Putin, in June 2012, for his support of Assad that the Kremlin decided to play rough on France and build relations with the Front National to destabilise social peace in the country.

But in 2016, Le Pen became a fall-back option for the Kremlin, and for this very reason the Front National not only failed to obtain another loan from a Russian bank that year (the First Czech-Russian Bank went bankrupt in 2016), but also started having problems with the Russian Deposit Insurance Agency that managed contracts of that bankrupt bank and threatened to recover the loan from the Front National through legal action. Given the fact that the Deposit Insurance Agency is a state-controlled institution, it is inconceivable that its position vis-à-vis the Front National was not coordinated with the state authorities.

The Front National became a fall-back option for the Kremlin, because Moscow adopted a wait-and-see attitude towards the political developments in France and, after the Republican primaries, decided that it would support François Fillon, who is known for his soft stance on Russian domestic and international policies, rather than Le Pen. And only after Fillon started losing popularity because of the “Penelopegate” did the Kremlin, again, decide to turn to Le Pen and even invite her to Moscow to demonstrate who Putin’s preferred candidate in the French presidential election was.

After Moscow’s apparent interference in the US presidential election last year, European societies have become more vigilant about the Kremlin’s attempts to influence political processes in the West. France is hardly an exception here.

Originally published in French inLe Monde.
My new book, Russia and the Western Far Right: Tango Noir, will be published on 30 September 2017 and is already available for pre-order via Routledge, paperback at £17.59.

Dear Friend,

As I told you before, I would love to share with you some thoughts on the cultural links between Tolkien and the European New Right (ENR). Perhaps, these thoughts are not new and eventually commonplace for you, but even if it is so, maybe you can clarify some points.

I agree with you completely that the notion of mythical time expressed in Tolkien’s works was and still is the major reason of the adoption of his ideas by the ENR. Of course, the nostalgia, as you write, for "a total world view [and] a holistic understanding of existence, warm and 'alive'" is crucial to the ENR. In Tolkien’s works one can also find references to the four Yugas, which are important to the ENR influenced by Integral Traditionalism of René Guénon and some others: "the Ainulindale", "the Years of the Lamps", "the Years of the Trees" and "the Years of the Sun". However, I believe that Tolkien’s racism is also important for the ENR.

J.R.R. Tolkien

As far as I understand, the problem of Tolkien’s racism is contentious. On the one hand, Tolkien did speak against racial prejudices. As Roger Griffin writes in his "Revolts against the Modern World", Tolkien "declared in his valedictory Address at Oxford that he had the 'hatred of apartheid in (his) bones'". Moreover, when he was asked by a German publisher (who wanted to translate The Hobbit into German) if Tolkien was Aryan in origin, the author commented:

I must say the enclosed letter from Rutten and Loening is a bit stiff. Do I suffer this impertinence because of the possession of a German name, or do their lunatic laws require a certificate of “arisch” origin from all persons of all countries? Personally I should be inclined to refuse to give any Bestatigung (although it happens that I can), and let a German translation go hang. In any case I should object strongly to any such declaration appearing in print (From a letter to Stanley Unwin, 25 July 1938).

[...] if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people (To Rutten & Loening Verlag, 25 July 1938)

On the other hand, in Tolkien’s books, there are plenty of references to the idea of racial and ethnic differentiation as such, and, besides, these racial/ethnic groups differ in their inherent abilities. There’s a good article on this issue, in which the authors – with the reference to Dr. Stephen Shapiro – write that, in Tolkien’s world, "the fellowship is portrayed as uber-Aryan, very white and there is the notion that they are a vanishing group under the advent of the other, evil ethnic groups".

All the authors who charge Tolkien with racist attitudes mention the Orcs. This race is obviously the most wicked in his world. Usually the following statement of Tolkien is quoted:

The Orcs are definitely stated to be corruptions of the "human" form seen in Elves and Men. They are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types (From a letter to Forrest J. Ackerman [Not dated; June 1958]).

There’s another interesting quote from one of his letters. When Tolkien was asked "if the notion of the Orcs, an entire race that was irredeemably wicked, was not heretical", he replied:

With regard to The Lord of the Rings, I cannot claim to be a sufficient theologian to say whether my notion of orcs is heretical or not. I don't feel under any obligation to make my story fit with formalized Christian theology, though I actually intended it to be consonant with Christian thought and belief, which is asserted somewhere, Book Five, page 190, where Frodo asserts that the orcs are not evil in origin. We believe that, I suppose, of all human kinds and sons and breeds, though some appear, both as individuals and groups to be, by us at any rate, unredeemable... (From a letter to W. H. Auden, 12 May 1965)

I think that the last sentence casts light on Tolkien’s perception of races (not only in his imaginary world, but also in the real world). It seems to me that Tolkien (1) acknowledges the existence of distinct anthropomorphous/human races, (2) considers that different races have their own innate abilities, (3) believes that no race is naturally evil in its origin, but (4) admits that it is normal for "us" (Europeans) to consider some races as wicked. If this assumption is true, then Tolkien's racism is actually a mixture of two racisms – biological and cultural.

It is also interesting that cultural racism prevails over the biological one, because Tolkien actually realizes that all the races are equal in their rights and have equal opportunities for salvation. This reminds me of the "new racism" of the ENR. Even if we ignore Tolkien's notion of the Orcs, his Middle-earth is in fact an ENR's paradise, where all the anthropomorphous races/ethic groups live in their predetermined lands and do not – as well as cannot – mix with each other. It's not the point that Men are better/worse than Hobbits, or Elves, or Dwarves. They simply cannot not mix and it seems that everyone enjoys this inability. At least, no one complains.

So, the ENR’s fascination with Tolkien is probably based on the idea of the existence of the heroic era when "people" shared the total world-view and where the races – due to their proper perception of the laws of nature – lived in a world organized according to the logic of ethnopluralism.

With best wishes,
Anton Shekhovtsov
Sevastopol, 25 May 2009