From Solidarism to the Third Way: The French Far Right and Russian Anti-Communist Movements

Photo: Made by John Chrobak using: 
“Александр Дугин на Всемирном русском народном соборе” by Екатеринодарская Епархия licensed under CC BY 2.0; “Eduard Limonov at the Conference “Strategy-31” The Andrei Sakharov Museum and Public Center, Moscow” by Ivan Simochkin licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0; “Jean-Pierre Stirbois au Palais des Congrès de Lyon, en 1984” by M. A. CHANTELOT licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, BY-SA 2.5, BY-SA, 2.0, BY-SA 1.0; “Alexander Lvovich Kazembebek,” Unknown Author licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0; “God is with us, let Russia Rise Again,” 

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For the past ten years or so, Russia has exerted an undeniable pull on radical right-wing movements in Europe, starting with those in France. Russia has enabled some political leaders to refresh their arguments about sovereignty through extended continental cooperation, as well as about strengthening their power in the face of the so-called Anglo-Saxon world. Moscow has also impressed with its illiberal regime, which some see as a desirable model for their own societies. While this honeymoon owes much to the transformations that have taken place in Russia during Putin’s presidencies since 2000, we should remember that it was an observable constant as early as the twentieth century, although it has never been a consensus position. 

Since the interwar period, certain currents of the French radical right simultaneously committed to a struggle against communism and to connect with some groups inside the Soviet Union. Cooperation with Russian émigrés and their main anticommunist movement, the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (Narodno-Trudovoi-Soiuz, or NTS), allowed a fringe of the French extreme right not only to extend its field of action to the far reaches of Europe, but also to diversify its ideological references by borrowing the concept of “solidarism.” 

Despite the geographical and intellectual distance between French and Russian solidarism, the two share an aversion to the cleavage between “right” and “left” and were attracted by the fascist experience. Echoing the Cold War and its bipolarity, these doctrines gradually shifted and, borrowing from each other in mutual fascination, formulated the notion of the “Third Way.” While the original form of solidarism has vanished today, its ideological heritage remains tangible, especially when it comes to the links between individual members of the French extreme right and Russian supporters of osobyi put’ (“special way”), such as the National-Bolshevik Party and its Eurasianist faction in the early 1990s.

This paper proposes revisiting the bonds that united the French extreme right and Russian anti-communist movements between the 1960s and the mid-1990s around the notion of a shared “Third Way.” Through the history of these relations, we show that ideological exchanges have profoundly marked the evolution of “tercerist” thinking, with its different essences and meanings.                 

“For the Tsar and the Soviets”: The Solidarist Origins of Russian Anticommunism 

Born in the 1930s among the second generation of Russian émigrés in Europe, the NTS crafted an ideology that was nationalist, anticommunist, anti-liberal, Christian, and corporatist, advocating a third way between socialism and liberalism.^[1] Its slogan was “Neither communism nor fascism, but national labor solidarism.” Indeed, inspired by the French solidarism of the early twentieth century—that of Léon Bourgeois^[2] and Célestin Bouglé^[3]—it aimed to overthrow the Soviet regime using not only citizens’ initiative groups, but also media and culture. From its foundation in the 1930s up until the USSR’s demise, the NTS proclaimed its mission to be fighting “for the regeneration of Russia under the banner of solidarity,”^[4] as well as establishing a solidarist society, largely inspired by Italian fascism, corporatism, and nationalism. Mainly clandestine, it attempted to subvert and destabilize the Soviet regime.^[5]

The NTS banked on attracting the masses of refugees fleeing the Bolshevik revolution. The League of Nations estimated in 1926 that one million people had fled Russia since the Revolution. To this considerable number were added prisoners of war and Russian citizens of the former imperial possessions. In total, “Russia in exile” is estimated to have numbered nearly nine million people,^[6] most of whom found refuge in Europe. If these exiles all rejected the new regime, they were nevertheless divided between the smenovekhovtsy, relatively young and pragmatic partisans who wanted to return to the country and participate in building the new state to prevent Russia’s collapse, on the one hand, and the old guard of the emigration, “fathers” who were opposed to any compromise with the Bolsheviks, on the other.^[7]

As these factions confronted each other and blamed each other for the fall of the Tsarist Empire, different groups gradually emerged among the diaspora. The supporters of direct action divided into two main groups. The first was the Russian All-Military Union (ROVS), founded on September 1, 1924, under the command of Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich and General Wrangel, which numbered several tens of thousands of veterans of the Great War and the Civil War of 1917-1922.^[8] It militated for a violent terrorist struggle against the Bolsheviks. The second was the Brotherhood of Russian Truth (BRP): born in 1922 in Poland out of the newspaper Russkaia Pravda, it was a monarchist-inspired organization without a specific ideological program or doctrine. Although smaller than the ROVS, it had strong networks among peasant circles in Belarus.^[9] It was led in a collegial manner by a council of “brothers” and likewise advocated terrorist acts against the Bolsheviks.

In 1924, young Russians in exile in Bulgaria founded an association with the aim of “preserving the national heritage and undertaking, as far as the meager resources they could muster would allow, a struggle for the liberation of the fatherland.”^[10]Called the Russian National Youth Circle, this association quickly found several intermediaries abroad and established itself in France, in the towns of Rioupéroux Knutange and la Ferrière-aux-Etangs, where it recruited in industrial and mining centers. It became in 1927 the National Union of the Russian Youth; under this name, it organized a congress in Paris in 1928. New cells soon appeared in Yugoslavia, China, and Japan—while in Poland, a militant circle was formed around the newspaper Za Svobodu(For Freedom). 

However, most of these groups were unstable and fighting with each other. The NTS was competing with the Mladorossy(Russian Youth) movement led by Alexander Kazem-Bek. The Mladorossy presented itself as a political entity that drew inspiration from monarchists and revolutionaries. According to Kazem-Bek, “Communism in Russia can be modified and replaced by an exclusively national, maximalist movement capable of an effort as intense as the communist effort. We make common cause with those in Russia who, perhaps for the time being only, are doing national work under the communist flag.”^[11]The slogan of the movement was “For the Tsar and the Soviets.”

The National Union of Russian Youth advocated for the various anticommunist resistance groups to unify their means and methods of action. To this end, the Aubert Entente Internationale Communiste (Anti-Communist League) organized a conference in Saint-Julien-en-Genevois in the spring of 1930. Representatives of the latter in Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, France, Czechoslovakia, and Latvia took the opportunity to meet clandestinely in Belgrade to seal their union, which prefigured the NTS. 

The future NTS came into being on July 15, 1934. At the instigation of its president, Viktor Baidalakov, various Russian youth associations decided to unite and form the National Union of Russian Youth, later the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists. The movement included such notorious figures as Arkady Stolypin, the son of Piotr Stolypin, Tsar Nicholas II’s prime minister who was killed in 1911.^[12] During the Second Congress of December 25-28, 1931, the movement took the name National Union of the New Russian Generation (NSNP) to distinguish it from other anticommunist movements within the diaspora. In addition to setting aside the old guard of the diaspora and reaffirming the idea of overthrowing the Soviet regime, the movement—on the fourth day of its Congress—defined the modus operandi of its struggle to be clandestine action through cooperation with the ROVS or the BRP.

If the NTS beginnings were challenging, it was nevertheless able to rely on several diaspora newspapers that were infiltrated by its militants: Za Svobodu in Poland; La Russie et le monde, led by Piotr Struve; and Le Courrier de Russie in France. The NTS then became relatively dynamic, creating sections in Poland, Belgium, and even in the Far East, where it rivaled Konstantin Rodzaevski’s Russian Fascist Party. 

NTS’ primary mission was to send emissaries to operate clandestinely in the USSR itself—though all those caught were liquidated by the Soviet police. The invasion of Poland in September 1939 and the Allied response a few days later were met with mixed feelings among NTS members. Although their activities diminished by repression from the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union, whose armies occupied territories where the NTS operated, some NTS militants participated alongside the Nazis in Operation Barbarossa against the USSR in June 1941, serving as translators and bureaucrats. During the rest of the Second World War, some militants were also involved in the Committee for the Liberation of the Russian Peoples (KONR), which was part of the collaborationist Vlasov Army.^[13]

In the eyes of NTS members, the work of political subversion was to be carried out on Soviet territory despite the German occupation. As the Nazis advanced into Soviet territory, NTS activists were able to come into contact with prisoners who had been deported to Germany to contribute to the wartime economy. The many POW camps became recruitment grounds for Vlasov’s collaborationist efforts. The NTS issued propaganda to demonstrate its independence from Germany; the Gestapo would arrest over 100 NTS members, officially for contacts with British intelligence, in 1944. Those members who had chosen to join the Red Army out of patriotism were eventually arrested and liquidated by the Soviets.^[14]

Despite bouncing back after the Second World War and the world’s partition in two opposing blocs, the NTS remained a small organization in terms of personnel. After the war, it tried to send as many documents as possible to the USSR in a bid to spread its ideology through counter-propaganda. On January 12, 1949, the NTS Council agreed to resume its activities, particularly its clandestine ones, in the Soviet Union. Some Russian solidarist activists were kidnapped in Western Europe by the Soviet secret services. For example, in West Berlin in 1954 the Stasi kidnapped and tortured Alexander Trushnovich,^[15] who later died of his wounds in a diplomatic vehicle. His main activities included distributing dissident-authored leaflets, brochures, and books among the population. Many NTS German members were involved with the radio station Radio Liberty, which broadcast from the German Federal Republic to the USSR with the support of the CIA. 

Between the 1940s and the collapse of the communist bloc, NTS activists disseminated several samizdat writings and clandestine magazines, the best-known being Posev and Grani, which popularized dissident authors such as Alexander Galich; Bulat Okudjava; Georgi Vladimov, the head of the Moscow underground section of Amnesty International; and the famous Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Posev has survived to this day, both as a magazine and as a publishing house. After the USSR disintegrated, the NTS ceased to exist as a clandestine movement and its main militants left for Russia. It became instead in 1996 a nationalist and conservative movement on the margins of the political scene, before ceasing its political activities.

On the Hunt for New Battles: The French Solidarist Moment (1960-1970)

Against the backdrop of the Cold War, the NTS’ anticommunism allowed it to join up with young militants from the French extreme right. These young people, often from circles around the OAS—Organisation de l’Armée Secrète, the main pro-French Algeria movement, which opposed decolonization—were on the hunt for new battles.

From 1966 onwards, a so-called solidarist current appeared on the French extreme right. Its militants—who opposed the label “extreme right”—rejected both “Soviet totalitarianism” and the “American way of life.” More broadly, they rejected the materialism of both in favor of a Christian conception of the world.^[16] According to Francis Bergeron: 

At the end of the 60s, we were “neither right nor left, but forward,” and wanted “neither trusts nor soviets,” “neither capitalism nor Marxism,” but we also wanted to be able to define ourselves with a word that summed up the very third way we were claiming to forge. We had found this word “solidarism” among the anti-communist Russians of the NTS [Narodno-Trudovoi Soiuz]. On the other hand, the word “nationalism” referred merely to the idea of France, whereas our current was very Europeanist (in the face of the communist bloc) and favorable to the concept of Eurafrica—the idea that Europe and Africa had a common destiny.^[17]

One of the important figures of this very minor group—it never exceeded 300 militants—was Jean-Pierre Stirbois (1945-1988), who was close to the OAS’ young-activist branch, the OAS-Métro-Jeunes. The final moments of the OAS had a significant influence on the future solidarists—even though the survivors of the OAS adventure, such as Pierre Sergent,^[18] rejected them. Salazar’s policy of reaching out to right-wing extremist movements, both Christian and Westernist, also influenced the French solidarists due to the latter’s contacts with Aginter-Press, the “press agency” founded by former OAS refugees in Portugal, and with Portuguese networks.^[19]

While the number of solidarist activists was always tiny, many of the activists would go on to have long careers as extreme-right political activists. In addition to Stirbois, who ended up number 2 in the National Front, its cadres included the journalist and writer Francis Bergeron; the traditionalist and anticommunist Catholic activist Bernard Antony (alias Romain Marie); and the far right political activists Michel Collinot, Olivier Morize, and Christian Baeckeroot—not to mention François-Bernard Huyghes, a French political scientist and writer who in the 1970s became close to the New Right cradle, Groupe de Recherche et d’Études de la Civilisation Européenne (GRECE).^[20] Similarly to their NTS counterparts, the solidarists were all young adults in their twenties: “In the groups, the eldest militants of the MJR [Mouvement Jeune Révolution], GAJ [Groupe Action Jeunesse] and all that, were only 23 years old,” Bergeron indicated in a 2011 interview. “The oldest ones I met were Stirbois, who was 23-24 years old, Christian Baeckeroot, who was also 23-24 years old, and Alain Boinet.”^[21] In a highly politicized school context, solidarist propaganda aimed to attract high school students. 

In 1966, Stirbois took part in creating the Young Revolutionary Movement (MJR), the leading French solidarist organization, which counted among its ranks “the former OAS-Metro-Jeunes members Jean Caunes and Nicolas Kayanakis, among others.”^[22]This was the beginning of French extreme right-wing solidarism. The MJR executives then met with members of the NTS and adopted Russian solidarism to distance themselves from the rest of the French extreme right. In addition, according to Nicolas Lebourg: 

In 1969, the MJR and the NTS jointly launched the Eastern European Liberation Front. With the Italian Europa Civiltà, they formed a Central Council for European Solidarism, then at the instigation of the latter participated in a congress “for a World Solidarism” (1971), and they all together published a Bulletin of European Solidarists(1972-1974).^[23]

The MJR journal, Jeune Révolution, published the first French-language article on the history of the NTS in 1968. From then on, links formed between the two organizations, with Jeune Révolution echoing the NTS’ actions and supporting the dissidents of Eastern Europe. In 1970, the NTS’ symbol, the trident, was also appropriated by the French solidarists; it later became the symbol of French tercerism.^[24]

The French solidarists defended and supported the dissidents of Eastern Europe during the Cold War.^[25] The trademark of French solidarism was performing spectacular actions designed to denounce what they interpreted as the totalitarian aspects of the Soviet regime. With this in mind, several solidarist activists went to the USSR to distribute anticommunist leaflets in solidarity with local clandestine movements (such as the NTS). They were often subject to questioning by the authorities and expelled manu militari from the country. A case in point is the arrest of Olivier Morize in Moscow in 1970 for distributing anticommunist leaflets. Another is Bergeron’s arrest on Red Square in Moscow in 1975 while he, along with Jacques Arnould, was handing out anti-communist leaflets and Russian-language copies of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago.

Stirbois subsequently moved over to the French Solidarist Movement, founded in 1971, which became the Youth Action Group (Groupe d’Action Jeunesse, or GAJ), created in 1973, then the Solidarist Action Group (Groupe d’Action Solidariste),^[26] and finally the Union Solidariste. Stirbois’s journey, with a constant taste for spectacular actions, reflects the reality of French solidarism: a succession of ephemeral groupings of a handful of very determined activists. The short history of French solidarism is indeed peppered with street brawls and political activism, for instance the demonstrations and actions against Leonid Brezhnev’s arrival in France in 1973; the distribution of anti-Soviet pamphlets in France and the USSR; the disruption of Paris-Moscow train traffic on October 3, 1975, etc. The year 1977 saw the resurgence of anti-Soviet actions in France, with demonstrations and attacks against Soviet symbols during Brezhnev’s second visit. On February 10, 1977, these actions peaked with the suicide of the militant Alain Escoffier, who set himself on fire in front of Aeroflot’s Paris offices. These actions enabled the recruitment of a new strain of militants, such as Jean-Gilles Malliarakis, who were more nationalist-revolutionary and, as we will see below, contributed to transforming solidarism into tercerism.

From the mid-1970s, however, a growing number of militants grew tired of the political struggle. Some, including Bergeron and Emmanuel Albach, took part in the Lebanese civil war, joining Christian militias. Others, such as Stirbois, joined the still young and deeply anticommunist National Front (NF).^[27] As early as 1975, solidarists such as Stirbois, Jean-Claude Nourry, and Michel Collinot, members of the Union Solidariste, moved closer to the FN. Bergeron had already joined it, while Stirbois became a member in 1977. Michel Schneider, who was openly fascist, also moved from solidarism to the NF. Nevertheless, some militants maintained the link with Russian solidarists. Bergeron is a case in point: he founded the Association for Free Russia in 1979. A journalist by profession, he even devoted an issue of the Cahiers de la Russie libre, the Association’s journal, to the NTS. At the same time, the NTS’ French representative, Michel Slavinski, was a member of the Association for Free Russia’s executive committee. Some members of the Association sought to fight communism with weapons: Alain Boiret and Laurent Marchaux, for instance, launched clandestine operations in Afghanistan and became close with Commander Massoud following the Soviet intervention of September 27, 1979.

The Eclipse of the 1980s: Solidarism’s Transformation into Revolutionary Nationalism 

With the fall of the Soviet bloc, solidarism disappeared from the political landscape of the French extreme right. However, if it disappeared as a current, its ideas—particularly its dual rejection of communism and capitalism—persisted. In its ideological evolution, solidarism carried within it the seeds of tercerism, which has long been represented in France by Jean-Gilles Malliarakis and Christian Bouchet—the latter a long-term right-hand man of the former—in a neofascist orientation under the influence of German Conservatism Revolution of the 1930s.^[28] According to its theorists, tercerism embodied a third way, an alternative to the synthesis of the despised American and Soviet materialisms. 

As early as the late 1970s, solidarist ideas encountered those of revolutionary nationalism. Revolutionary nationalism, born in the wake of Algerian independence, emerged from post-Second World War fascism. It combined anti-capitalist and anti-colonialist positions with the legacy of the German Conservative Revolution, especially Strasserism.^[29] Like the solidarists, revolutionary nationalism rejected both capitalism and the Westernization of the world, on the one hand, and the Soviet system and communist ideology, on the other hand. It referred to local examples of nationalist liberation (Ben Barka, Ho Chi Minh, Malcolm X, and so on) that allowed it to glean argumentative elements for its own discourse on national liberation, the revolutionary nationalists’ view being that the United States was occupying Europe.

Close to national-revolutionaries were the Belgian theorist of national-communism Jean-François Thiriart^[30] and the American Francis Parker Yockey.^[31] Alain de Benoist’s Nouvelle Droite took up many of their discursive elements. The narrative was also used by Yves Bataille in the 1970s with his Organisation lutte du peuple (OLP).^[32] The OLP took up the far-left codes, including Third Worldist references such as Mao Zedong and Che Guevara. Between the 1970s and the 2000s, the revolutionary nationalists supported secular Arab regimes (Syria, Iraq, and Libya). Once the Soviet system disappeared, their struggle shifted from anti-communism to the rejection of global Westernization and the unipolar world.^[33]

Not only is Christian Bouchet one of the leading figures of the Third Way, but he remains the best-known figure of the national-revolutionary current within the French extreme right. A director of several small-print newspapers, such as Alternative terceriste, and a website host, he has also run several small publishing houses (Ars Magna, Avatar, and Éditions du Chaos) that put out brochures and books devoted to the various versions of global revolutionary nationalism, Traditionalism, and esotericism. He has belonged to all the nationalist revolutionary organizations that have emerged since he became an activist in the early 1970s, becoming a leader thereof in the mid-1980s. He was a member of GRECE from 1982 to 1988 and is still considered a “fellow traveler” of the organization.

Jean-Gilles Malliarakis forged a link between the solidarism of the 1970s and the tercerism of the following decade. He became part of the GAJ and from 1977 ran the newspaper of the Jeune nation solidariste movement. In 1979, when Malliarakis became the leader and old members left the organization, he transformed what remained of the GAJ into the openly tercerist Nationalist-Revolutionary Movement (MNR) and established a new journal, Les Cahiers d’études solidaristes, that condemned both the United States and the USSR. In 1985, the MNR disappeared, giving rise to the Third Way, which existed until 1991 and published Révolution européenne and Troisième Voie. During the 1980s, Malliarakis became closer to the French New Right, notably to its two leading intellectuals, Alain de Benoist and Guillaume Faye. In 1991, the Third Way imploded and some of the militants went over to Nouvelle Résistance, a movement led by Bouchet. Malliarakis, meanwhile, became an adept of economic liberalism and left the political field to devote himself to defending merchants and artisans.

Eurasianism and National-Bolshevism: Convergences and Principles of the Russian Third Way

The collapse of the Iron Curtain in 1989, the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the cessation of the NTS’s clandestine activities^[34] might have suggested that the struggle to promote a pro-Russian “Third Way” had come to an end. However, this was not the case: both the local Russian context of shock therapy during the 1990s under Yeltsin and the international unipolar moment contributed to the revival of the notion of “Third Way”—which brought with it new alliances between French and Russian far-right actors.

The new, post-Soviet version of tercerism emerged first under the label of the National-Bolshevik ideology. Having already existed as such during the interwar period in Harbin around Nikolai Ustrialov, the movement reappeared in the Soviet Union through Anatoli Skurlatov,^[35] a notorious figure of the Komsomol Central Committee, and in the work of the historian Dimitri Likhachev from the early 1970s.^[36] As a political alternative that emerged from within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), this current played a significant role in balancing power between the different ideological wings of the state apparatus.^[37] Revived and to some degree adapted to the political and geopolitical context of the new Russia, 1990s National-Bolshevism could be more accurately described as an attempt at ideological “tinkering” than as a true heir to this historical movement.^[38]Around the two main founders of the National-Bolshevik Party (PNB), Eduard Limonov and Alexander Dugin, this new political tendency cultivated synergies with the French extreme right.

Limonov’s aesthetization of the national revolution

Eduard Limonov (1943-2020) was a disconcerting figure with respect to both his ideas and his background. A writer and poet, he is essential to understanding the resurgence of the National-Bolshevik movement in Russia in the early 1990s. Born in Dzerzhinsk to an NKVD officer father, Limonov lived a turbulent life between Bohemia and petty crime.^[39] After living in Kharkiv, Ukraine, he settled for a time in Moscow, where he established himself as a rising underground figure. Threatened by the authorities, he found refuge in New York in 1974. In this city, the showcase of a world antagonistic to his own, Limonov led a life of precarity that had a significant impact on his thinking. It was on the basis of his experience as an outcast that he wrote his very first criticisms of the West for the Russian diaspora newspaper New Russian World—writings that would become the basis of his first autobiographical novel Eto ia—Editchka (known in English as The Russian Poet Prefers Great Negroes).^[40] Far from simply attacking a model from which he expected so much, the author also lambasts the Russian émigré intelligentsia (chief among its members Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn), which he reproaches for its indulgence of the Western way of life.^[41]      

Watched by the FBI because of his links to the Socialist Workers Party, Limonov decided to move to France in 1980, where his first book met with some success among the Parisian intellectual elite. Close to the French Communist Party, which, under the presidency of George Marchais, distanced itself from the USSR, he wrote for the newspaper L’Humanité before collaborating actively from 1989 on the pamphleteering newspaper L’Idiot International. The publication had an editorial board that was heterogeneous in terms of personalities,^[42] including the writers Patrick Besson, Michel Houellebecq, and Marc-Edouard Nabe; the essayists Philippe Sollers and Philippe Muray; and the lawyer Jacques Vergès, to name but a few. Limonov became friends with the writer, journalist, polemicist, and editor Jean-Edern Hallier, who ran the newspaper and the Hallier publishing house. In 1993, Hallier helped Limonov publish his main political essay, Le Grand hospice Occidental (The Great Western Hospice),^[43]with Les Belles Lettres publishing house. Around the same time, Limonov also wrote in the extreme right-wing magazine Le choc du mois. 

In light of the ambiguous relationship between L’idiot international and Alain de Benoist (whose book Les idées à l’endroit had previously been published by Jean-Edern Hallier), and of Limonov’s multiple indictments of the fall of the USSR and the West, the newspaper was accused by several media outlets of promoting a “red-brown” axis and of theorizing a “Third Way.”^[44]Limonov did frequent the French extreme right. On behalf of Patrick Gofman and the Choc du Mois, he covered the Serbian, Moldovan, and Chechen conflicts.^[45] Having returned to Russia after the fall of the USSR, he spent a few months campaigning alongside Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party. In an effort to garner Zhirinovsky some support abroad, Limonov used his connection to Gofman to set up a meeting between the Russian nationalist leader and Jean-Marie Le Pen.^[46]

Shortly after the founding of the National-Bolshevik Party in 1993, Gofman became associated with the party newspaper, Limonka, for which he worked as a special correspondent in France from 1996. This experience led him to write several articles on French politics and to participate, with Patrick Besson, in creating the ephemeral French National-Bolshevik Party in 1998.^[47]While this somewhat atypical political adventure would suggest a certain kind of show, Gofman and Limonov’s collaboration was serious, the former acting as an admiring spokesman for the latter. 

Arrested and charged in 2002 for his involvement in an attempted coup d’état in Kazakhstan, Limonov was ardently supported by Gofman. The latter presided over an international liberation committee and multiplied his interventions in such media as Radio Courtoisie,^[48] France Soir, Le Nouvel Observateur, and Pravda. At the same time, a petition launched in 2002 collected several important signatures, including those of neo-right-wingers Alain de Benoist, François Bousquet, Philippe Conrad, and Dominique Venner.^[49] Following this widely publicized support campaign, the Russian author was released in 2003. It is therefore clear that Limonov built a significant network in France, both among the New Right/Third Way groupuscules and among a Parisian intelligentsia attracted to his non-conformist literary work and dissident dandy character.

Dugin’s geopolitics and his links with the French New Right

The French extreme right’s honeymoon with Russia is most visible in the figure of geopolitician Alexander Dugin. Dugin, with Limonov, was at the origin of the National-Bolshevik Party in 1994 and the main figurehead of its ideology. Born in 1962 in Moscow into a modest Soviet family largely integrated into the Soviet system,^[50] Dugin subsequently distanced himself from his family, which he described as a standard Soviet one, and discovered and then frequented the Yuzhinsky Circle, which revolved around the underground dissident Yuri Mamleev.^[51] Through his contacts with some of its members, such as the occultist poet Yevgeny Golovin and the Islamist philosopher Geydar Dzhemal, Dugin was introduced to the work of traditionalist authors such as René Guénon and then Julius Evola, whose conception of “organic empire” marked him. 

If Dugin’s reading of certain works, such as those of Karl Haushofer, was primarily driven by a search for esoteric principles, the ideals of the “Third Way” elaborated by Moeller van Der Bruck or of Ernst Niekisch’s National-Bolshevism impressed themselves upon him as great intellectual references, although Dugin only made a partial reading of them.^[52] In addition to the German intellectual landscape of the 1920s and 1930s, Dugin—like other dissidents, such as Alexander Prokhanov and Sergei Kurginian, who tried to imitate him—was fascinated by the French New Right of the 1970s. All three deferentially compare Alain de Benoist’s school of thought to the proto-Völkisch movement of the pochvenniki in the nineteenth century.^[53] Keen to work with this movement, which he felt represented a great opportunity to break with the archaism of the old right in Russia and turn to a modernized imperial or Slavophile system, Dugin in 1989 made his first trip to Western Europe, during which he met several executives of the New Right, such as Alain de Benoist and Robert Steuckers. These encounters allowed him to enrich his ideological background and to extend his reputation at a time when he was beginning to turn toward Eurasian theories.

If, for the researcher Véra Nikolski, Dugin overestimated the Russophilia of the French New Right and its accomplices, successive meetings with this movement gave rise to a genuine editorial and political collaboration. Dugin became the Russian representative of the new European Liberation Front, a pan-European nationalist movement founded by European nationalist-revolutionaries, among them Jean-François Thiriart, Christian Bouchet, and the Italian Marco Battara. Bouchet and Dugin have remained close, with Bouchet regularly inviting Dugin to his tercerist activities and translating his works into French. 

The New Right shared with Dugin an imperial conception of Europe and made many references to his work. In March 1991 Dugin participated in the 24th colloquium of GRECE, “Nation and Empire;” his talk was titled “The Soviet Empire and Nationalisms at the Time of Perestroika.” Thereafter, de Benoist and other national revolutionaries visited Moscow. Dugin was introduced in Éléments, the New Right’s journal, as GRECE’s Moscow correspondent (Significantly, however, he did not appear on the list of members of the Grecist network that was published in 2000.)^[54] He also became a regular contributor to Steuckers’ revolutionary-conservative journals Vouloir and Nouvelles de Synergie Européenne^[55]—this collaboration would last until 2005. In November 2006, Dugin was invited to speak at a symposium on globalization co-organized by Synergie Européenne and the Walloon branch of the Terre et Peuple identity group. He then became close to the New Right, after which he launched the Russian version of Éléments, Elementy, published from 1992 to 1998. The choice of title was challenged by Alain de Benoist, who responded in an interview with the newspaper Europe vorn to Le Monde’s accusations about his links to anti-Yeltsin dissidents:^[56]

I told Alexander Dugin that I had misgivings about his decision to give the newspaper he created the name Elementy because I felt that this choice could only lead to confusion (as was already the case in Germany). I also asked that he remove my name from the editorial board of the newspaper, since he had included it without my permission.^[57]

For Dugin, this episode marked the end of “the establishment of Eurasianism in [Western] Europe.”^[58] In the years that followed, Alain de Benoist and Dugin began to reconnect. Thus, in issue 122 of Éléments, Alain de Benoist wrote that Dugin “[…] puts forward penetrating views on the distribution of geopolitical and spiritual forces in today’s world,” albeit immediately adding the caveat that “One is certainly not obliged to follow him in his most adventurous extrapolations….”^[59] In issue 130 of the same journal, Alain de Benoist considered Dugin to be the “principal current theorist of Eurasianism.”^[60] For his part, Dugin, in a widely publicized move, invited the French intellectual to deliver a speech at the November 2008 International Conference on the 4th Political Theory and to give lectures at the Faculty of Sociology of Lomonosov Moscow State University. Alain de Benoist returned the favor with a 60-page interview of Dugin published in Krisis in 2009.^[61] At the same time, Dugin became the Russian correspondent of Nouvelle École,^[62] Alain de Benoist’s other journal, a position he holds to this day. 

In addition to the New Right, Dugin continues to cultivate a very close relationship with the national-revolutionary right. The Avatar publishing house, which is close to Bouchet, published two books by/on Dugin in 2006: La Grande guerre des continents(The Great Continental War) and Le prophète de l’eurasisme (The Prophet of Eurasianism). The two volumes are compilations of articles and texts by Dugin, designed to familiarize the French reader with the different aspects of the author’s thought. Since then, Avatar has released several other texts or books by Dugin and edited the journal Eurasia, one issue of which was devoted to the “Russian Conservative Revolution,” with a focus on Dugin. 

Bouchet published Dugin’s work relatively early on, first a brochure titled Evola et la Russie^[63] (Evola and Russia), then articles on the French-language nationalist and revolutionary website voxnr.com (31 of his articles have been online since 2002). It is necessary to add the publication on this site of articles devoted to Dugin’s thought. Finally, since 2012, Ars Magna, founded by Bouchet, has published the translation of The Fourth Political Theory,^[64] with a foreword by Alain Soral; then, in 2013, Pour une théorie du monde multipolaire;^[65] in 2017, Vladimir Putin, le pour et le contre^[66] and Pour le front de la Tradition ;^[67] in 2018, Les Mystères de l’Eurasie ;^[68] in 2019, Les Racines de l’identité^[69] and Le Retour des grands temps (Eurasianist writings 2016-2019);^[70] and most recently, in 2020, Les Templiers du prolétariat. ^[71]

The Fate of the National-Bolshevik Movement

Dugin and Limonov met in 1992. Weary of an opposition incapable of structuring itself around a common ideology,^[72] they undertook to create an innovative movement that would be able to respond to the demands of a period of political instability that they considered revolutionary. Initially a virtual coalition called the Bolshevik National Front that was born on May 1, 1993, with the publication Order No. 1 on creating the Bolshevik National Front, the National-Bolshevik Party (PNB) was officially registered in Moscow on September 8, 1993. On November 28, 1994, the party newspaper, Limonka, was launched.              

Given its originality, the National-Bolshevik Party did not seem a serious political undertaking. Wishing to play an active role within the niche of radical mobilization, in which it had found itself thanks to its youth members, the NBP capitalized first and foremost on a radical and underground aesthetic. Its symbol, a black hammer and sickle on a red background, is a direct reference to the German National Socialist Party. Designed by the graphic designer Konstantin Chuvachev,^[73] this symbol was inspired by the T-shirt worn by actor Gary Oldman while portraying the singer of the Sex Pistols, Sid Vicious, in the film Sid and Nancy.^[74]A poem by Eduard Limonov, My—natsional’nyi geroi, was the inspiration for the name of the journal, Limonka, the aesthetic of which is based on Socialist Realism and the Dutch school of the 1920s.^[75] In addition to bringing together members of the skinhead movement and Old Believers, the group also counted among its members Igor Letov, the lead singer of punk group Grazhdanskaia Oborona (Civil Defense), who brought much of the band’s fan base to the party.

Beyond this reality, which makes the PNB a circle of marginalized people more attracted to a lifestyle than to a program,^[76] the latter’s ideology has been both innovative and multidimensional. Wishing to make a clean sweep of the past in all its forms, whether nationalist or communist in the classical sense, the PNB’s ideology bases itself primarily on the principle of New Man. Developed in his 1992 work Ditsiplinarnyi sanatorii (The Great Western Hospice), and later in 2003 in Drugaia Rossiia (The Other Russia), Limonov’s tercerist positions seek to show that the old Soviet model was in no way different from the capitalist system. Inspired by George Orwell and libertarian retro-futurism,^[77] Limonov refused to join this ideological cleavage, which he considered moralistic and liberticidal: 

The national-Bolshevik is the person who will bring death to the radical right and the radical left. The national-Bolshevik is their dialectical succession and their negation […] The national-Bolshevik is a person who hates the system and its lies, alienation, conformism, and stupidity but is capable of plunging into it, assimilating it, and then destroying it from within. He is a person who loves paradox […]; discipline and freedom, spontaneity and calculation, erudition and inspiration. He is against dogma, but for authority; he is against external limitations, but he is capable of strict self-control.^[78]

While Limonov laid the initial foundations of the PNB’s aesthetic, the party’s geopolitical orientations owe far more to Dugin. In its first program of 1994, the PNB claimed that “neither blood nor belief determine the Russian character,” but its desire to “spill its own blood and that of others in the name of Russia alone.”^[79] Questioned by Nezavisimaia gazeta on May 23, 1996, Limonov indicated that he was in no way hostile to the idea of a “continental empire from Vladivostok to Gibraltar” where “the Eurasian peoples of the former USSR would gather around the Russians.”^[80] In addition to Eurasianism, Dugin integrates into Russian national-Bolshevik thought the eschatological and millenarianist dimension associated with a “Third Rome.”^[81] Thus impregnated with the writings of Karl Popper, Mikhail Argusky, Nikolai Ustrialov, and Orthodox mysticism,^[82] Dugin makes national-Bolshevism a nationalist, messianic, reactionary, organic, and popular continuum, but also a “spiritual method” and a “superideology common to all the enemies of the open society,”^[83] one that could and must save Russia in times of crisis.

At odds over the party’s direction, Dugin and Limonov eventually stopped working together in 1998. Although they both continued to claim the name “National-Bolshevik,” they no longer used it in the same way. For Limonov, this label served above all as a trademark to legitimize his role as a radical opponent of the Putin regime and to keep his movement afloat.^[84] Dugin, much more faithful to Conservative Revolution principles, continues to defend the idea of the “Third Way” through his neo-Eurasianist writings. In 2012, he published The Fourth Political Theory, which sets out to put the revolutionary left and the counterrevolutionary populist right on equal terms and promoted the principles of the Conservative Revolution. Since then, he has continued to cultivate a close relationship with the French extreme right while expanding his audience worldwide.

Conclusion

Solidarism highlights an ideological itinerary that is genuinely common to some segments of the French and Russian far right. The ephemeral French solidarist movement was only a function of circumstance, giving body and life to an ideal that went beyond the concerns of the traditional far right by opening it up to foreign policy issues. Meanwhile, although the search for a third way among NTS solidarists responded to the need to oppose the Soviet regime and elaborate a new form of ideology inspired by Italian fascism, it could not become a permanent model in contemporary Russia, where the Soviet legacy continues to influence collective memory. It was only thanks to the transformations of its values and aesthetics by Eduard Limonov and Alexander Dugin that it managed to survive as a principle of rejection of the ideologies that prevailed at the end of the twentieth century and the construction of a new imperial Russian community. 

---

^[1] Michel Slavinsky, Histoire du NTS russe, Ombres sur le Kremlin (Paris: La table ronde, 1973); Anna Pouvreau, Une Troisième voie pour la Russie(Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996).

^[2] Solidarism was initially crafted by the radical Léon Bourgeois (1851-1925). In 1896, he published a work entitled Solidarité in which he referred to Proudhon’s mutualist theories and examined the features of solidarity—that is, a quasi-contract of association agreed in fact between people who continually practice multiple and varied exchanges. He rejected all collectivist solutions, praised private ownership of the means of production, and encouraged the distribution of property to the entire population in the name of the French Republican collective. On the solidarism of Léon Bourgeois, see Serge Audier, Léon Bourgeois. Fonder la solidarité (Paris: Editions Michalon, 2007), and Serge Audier, La pensée solidariste: Aux sources du modèle social républicain (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2010).

^[3] Emmanuel Chaput, “Les formes de la démocratie dans la philosophie sociale de Célestin Bouglé,” Astérion 13 (2015), accessed February 1, 2021.

^[4] Slavinsky, Histoire du NTS russe, 1.

^[5] Ibid.

^[6] Jean-Jacques Marie, La guerre des Russes blancs, 1917-1920 (Paris: Tallandier, 2017).

^[7] Ibid.

^[8] Slavinsky, Histoire du NTS russe.

^[9] Ibid.

^[10] Ibid.

^[11] Ibid.

^[12] At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Tsar’s prime minister, Piotr Stolypin, promulgated agrarian reforms that formed the ideological basis of Russian solidarism. 

^[13] Joachim Hoffmann, L’épopée tragique du général Vlassov (Toulouse: Auda Isarn, 2014).

^[14] Ibid.

^[15] Slavinsky, Histoire du NTS russe.

^[16] Several of them were traditionalist Catholics, such as Francis Bergeron, who was for a time close to the circles of the Cité de Dieu, and Bernard Antony, an important figure of Catholic traditionalism during the 1980s and 1990s.

^[17] “Il était une fois le solidarisme. Entretien avec Francis Bergeron,” Rivarol 3021 (November 10, 2011).

^[18] On Pierre Sergent and the OAS, see Olivier Dard, Voyage au cœur de l’OAS (Paris: Tempus, 2011).

^[19] On the history of the Portuguese networks, see Olivier Dard and Ana Isabel Sardinha-Desvignes, Célébrer Salazar en France (1930-1974). Du philosalazarisme au salazarisme français (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2018).

^[20] On the history of the New Right, see Pierre-André Taguieff, Sur la Nouvelle droite. Jalons d’une analyse critique (Paris: Descartes &C^ie, 1994); Stéphane François, Les Néo-paganismes et la Nouvelle Droite (1980-2006). Pour une autre approche (Milan: Archè, 2008).

^[21] Interview with Francis Bergeron, Bagneux, July 29, 2010. Cited in Jonathan Preda, “À l’école du militantisme extrême: le cas des courants ‘solidaristes’ de 1969 à 1972,” Fragments sur les temps présents, June 5, 2011, https://tempspresents.com/2011/06/05/jonathan-preda-solidarisme/, accessed February 9, 2021.

^[22] Ibid.

^[23] Nicolas Lebourg, “Les extrêmes droites françaises dans le champ magnétique de la Russie,” Carnegie Council, 2018, https://www.carnegiecouncil.org/publications/articles_papers_reports/the-french-far-right-in-russias-orbit/_res/id=Attachments/index=0/Lebourg-FR%20revised.pdf, accessed February 9, 2021.

^[24] Christophe Boutin, “L’extrême droite française au-delà du nationalisme 1958-1996,” Revue française d’histoire des idées politiques 3 (1996): 113-159.

^[25] See Lebourg, Les extrêmes droites françaises.

^[26] The Groupe Action Jeunesse was born from a split within New Order (Ordre Nouveau) and was headed by Jean-Claude Nourry and Patrice Jumeau. The group published a magazine called Jeune Garde Solidariste.

^[27] On the journey of Jean-Pierre Stirbois, see Nicolas Lebourg and Joseph Beauregard, Dans l’ombre des Le Pen. Une histoire des numéros 2 du FN(Paris: Nouveau Monde Éditions, 2012). See also Dominique Albertini and David Doucet, Histoire du Front national (Paris: Tallandier, 2014), 71-88, as well as an issue of Cahiers d’histoire du nationalisme titled “Jean-Pierre Stirbois: de l’engagement solidariste à la percée du Front National,“Cahiers d’histoire du nationalism 15 (2018).

^[28] The German “Conservative Revolution” is a cultural current that developed in Germany after 1918 in opposition to the Weimar Republic and that was characterized by a rejection of democracy and parliamentarianism. Its ideology was based on idealism, spiritualism, and even vitalism, and aimed to reconstruct society on the basis of structured and hierarchical natural communities, led by a new aristocracy of merit and action. The authors of this current of thought meditated on the major issues of their time: technology, the state, the city, identity, war, the religious crisis, Marxism and liberalism, social justice, the national question and European edification, and ecology. They also advocated a discourse of national liberation. On this movement, see Stefan Breuer, Anatomie de la Révolution conservatrice (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1996); Olivier Dard, “Contribution à l’étude des réceptions françaises de la ‘Révolution conservatrice’ allemande: l’exemple de la Nouvelle droite,” in Médiation et conviction. Mélange offerts à Michel Grunewald, ed. Pierre Béhar, Françoise Lartillot, and Uwe Pushner (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007); Louis Dupeux, ed., La “Révolution Conservatrice” dans l’Allemagne de Weimar (Paris: Kimé, 1992); Armin Mohler, La Révolution conservatrice en Allemagne (1918-1932) (Puiseaux: Pardès, 1993).

^[29] Nicolas Lebourg, Le Monde vu de la plus extrême droite. Du fascisme au nationalisme-révolutionnaire (Perpignan: Presses Universitaires de Perpignan, 2010).

^[30] See his flagship book: Jean-François Thiriart, Un empire de 400 millions d’hommes: L’Europe (Paris: Avatar Éditions, 2007 [1964]). On Thiriart’s ideas, see Baillet, L’autre tiers-mondisme, 161-193.

^[31] Francis Parker Yockey, Imperium (Paris: Avatar Éditions, 2009 [1948]). On Yockey’s ideas, see Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1999).

^[32] On Bataille’s ideas and trajectory, see, paying attention to the use of terms, Philippe Baillet, L’autre tiers-mondisme: des origines à l’islamisme radical: fascistes, nationaux-socialistes, nationalistes-révolutionnaires entre défense de la race et solidarité anti-impérialiste (Saint-Genis-Laval: Akribeia, 2016), 178-179.

^[33] Nicolas Lebourg, “Nazi-maoïsme? Gauchisme d’extrême droite? Mythes et réalité de l’oscillation idéologique après Mai 68,” Fragment sur les temps presents, September 18, 2009, https://tempspresents.com/2009/09/18/nicolas-lebourg-nazi-maoisme-gauchistes-d%e2%80%99extreme-droite-mythe-et-realites-de-l%e2%80%99oscillation-ideologique-apres-mai-68/, accessed February 9, 2021; “Qu’est-ce que le nationalisme-révolutionnaire?” Fragments sur les temps presents, June 7, 2013, https://tempspresents.com/2013/06/07/nicolas-lebourg-definir-le-nationalisme-revolutionnaire-2/, accessed February 9, 2021.

^[34] Returning to the country after the ban on their movement was lifted, the members of the NTS pursued publishing activities, each month publishing their journals of reference: Grany and Posev. Despite its transformation into a political party (registered in 1996), the NTS failed to gain prominence on the new Russian political field. Too corporatist, and even conservative, the party also suffered from its support for general Vlasov during the Second World War. Today, the marginalized movement focuses on promoting the principle of “solidarity” in the world. 

^[35] Walter Laqueur, Histoire des droites en Russie (Paris: Michalon, 1996).

^[36] Ibid.

^[37] Vera Nikolski, National-Bolchévisme et néo-eurasisme dans la Russie contemporaine (Paris: Media Critic, 2013).

^[38] Ibid.

^[39] Eduard Limonov, Le Petit Salaud (Paris: Albin Michel, 1988); Edward Limonov, Autoportrait d’un bandit dans son adolescence (Paris: Albin Michel, 1985).

^[40] Edward Limonov, Le poète russe préfère les grands nègres [1976] (Paris: Ramsay, 1980).

^[41] Andreï Rogachevski, A Biographical and Critical Study of the Russian Writer Eduard Limonov (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2003).

^[42] Eduard Limonov, L’excité dans le monde des fous tranquilles (Chroniques 1989-1994) (Paris: Bartillat, 2012).

^[43] Eduard Limonov, Le Grand Hospice Occidental (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1993).

^[44] Olivier Biffaud and Edwyn Plenel, “La tentation nationale-communiste: En France comme en Russie des anciens staliniens et des intellectuels d’extrême droite rêvent d’une ‘troisième voie’ rouge-brune,” Le Monde, June 26, 1993.

^[45] Patrick Gofman, “Limonov et moi,” L’écho parisien. Web journal des Droites (blog), July 26, 2020, http://parolesdemilitants.blogspot.com/2020/07/limonov-et-moi-par-patrick-gofman.html, accessed February 9, 2021.

^[46] Ibid.

^[47] Patrick Gofman, Cœur de cuir (Paris: Flammarion, 1999).

^[48] Patrick Gofman, “Limonov libéré,” for “Le Libre Journal de Serge Bektech,” Radio Courtoisie, July 9, 2003.

^[49] Patrick Gofman, L’affaire Limonov (Paris: Dualpha, 2005).

^[50] In an interview given in 2005 to researcher Véra Nikolski, Alexander Dugin reports that his father was a low-level KGB agent and that his grandfather was employed in the special forces and his grandmother in the Central Committee of the CPSU. Nikolski, National-Bolchévisme et néo-eurasisme dans la Russie contemporaine.

^[51] Ibid.

^[52] Marlène Laruelle, La quête d’une identité impériale. Le néo-eurasisme dans la Russie contemporaine (Paris: Éditions Pétra, 2007).

^[53] Laqueur, Histoire des droites en Russie.

^[54] GRECE (Charles Champetier and Alain de Benoist), Manifeste pour une renaissance européenne. À la découverte du GRECE son histoire, ses idées, son organisation (Paris, 2000), 113.

^[55] The Belgian Germanist Robert Steuckers was the theoretician of the national revolutionary tendency of the New right after Guillaume Faye’s departure. He left GRECE in 1993 following virulent disagreements with Alain de Benoist, going on to create the group Synergie Européenne, as part of which he argues for an anti-capitalist, pan-European nationalism steeped in völkisch notions. 

^[56] Nikolski, National-Bolchévisme et néo-eurasisme dans la Russie contemporaine, 244.

^[57] Cited in Taguieff, Sur la Nouvelle droite, 311-312.

^[58] Nikolski, National-Bolchévisme et néo-eurasisme dans la Russie contemporaine, 244.

^[59] Alain de Benoist, “L’Eurasie annoncée par Douguine,” Éléments 122 (Fall 2006), 12.

^[60] Alain de Benoist, “Alexandre Douguine, le prophète de l’eurasisme,” Éléments 130 (Winter 2009): 17.

^[61] Alexandre Dugin, “Qu’est-ce que l’eurasisme?,” Krisis 32 (June 2009): 103-165. This interview was republished in book form as Alexandre Dugin, L’Appel de l’Eurasie. Conversation avec Alain de Benoist (Paris: Avatar Éditions, 2013).

^[62] Nouvelle École 58 (2009): 8.

^[63] Alexandre Dugin, Evola et la Russie, op. cit. (Nantes : Ars Magna, 2006).

^[64] Alexandre Dugin, La Quatrième théorie politique: La Russie et les idées politiques au XXI^e siècle (Nantes: Ars Magna Éditions, 2012).

^[65] Alexandre Dugin, Pour une théorie du monde multipolaire (Nantes: Ars Magna Éditions, 2013).

^[66] Alexandre Dugin, Vladimir Poutine, le pour et le contre (Nantes: Ars Magna, 2017).

^[67] Alexandre Dugin, Pour le front de la Tradition (Nantes: Ars Magna, 2017).

^[68] Alexandre Dugin, Les Mystères de l’Eurasie (Nantes: Ars Magna, 2018).

^[69] Alexandre Dugin, Les Racines de l’identité (Nantes: Ars Magna, 2019).

^[70] Alexandre Dugin, Le Retour des Grands Temps (écrits eurasistes 2016-2019) (Nantes: Ars Magna, 2019).

^[71] Alexandre Dugin, Les Templiers du prolétariat (Nantes: Ars Magna, 2020).

^[72] By way of example, Alexander Sterligov and Gennady Zyuganov together forged a third ideology, an alternative both to “communist internationalism” and to cosmopolitan democracy.

^[73] Fabrizio Fenghi, “Making Post-Soviet Counterpublics: The Aesthetics of Limonka and the National-Bolshevik Party,” Nationalities Papers 45, no. 2 (2017): 182-205.

^[74] A provocateur, Sid Vicious actually wore a t-shirt sporting the national-socialist swastika. To avoid censorship, the film production team replaced this symbol with a hammer and sickle.

^[75] Fenghi, “Making Post-Soviet Counterpublics.” 

^[76] Tarrassov, La gauche en Russie: des modérés aux extrémistes (Moscow: Institut de sociologie expérimentale, 1997).

^[77] Andreï Rogatchevski, “Othering Russia: Eduard Limonov’s Retrofuturistic (Anti-)Utopia,” in The Post-Soviet Politics of Utopia: Language, Fiction and Fantasy in Modern Russia, ed. Mikhail Suslov and Per-Arne Bodin (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).

^[78] Ibid.

^[79] Andrei Rogatchevski, “Eduard Limonov’s National Bolshevik Party and the Nazi Legacy: Titular Nations vs Ethnic Minorities,” in Cultural and Political Imaginaries in Putin’s Russia, ed. Niklas Benrsand and Barbara Törnquist-Plewa (Leiden: Brill, 2018).

^[80] Ibid.

^[81] Dugin, Les Templiers du prolétariat.

^[82] Ibid., 85.

^[83] Ibid., 16.

^[84] Abandoned by more and more of its faithful, the National-Bolshevik Party rejoined the liberal coalition The Other Russia in 2006. Banned in 2007, it was reformed as a party under the name of The Other Russia. Within it, Limonov campaigned for the defense of Russian minorities throughout the post-Soviet world and gave his support to various separatist movements.