Russia and the European Right: past, present, prospects
Russia is a great European civilisation that has become estranged from us — the challenge of reintegrating it is our great historical task
Russia has fascinated right-wing Europeans for well over a century. Whether as a harbinger of Eurasian might threatening to subdue the continent or as a potential illiberal saviour of the West, its liminal position has made it an object of both study and projection. Beyond hackneyed tropes of ‘a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma’, Russia’s fractious relationship with Europe has also made it difficult to determine whether it is truly a ‘European’ country. This has been further exacerbated by the real ambiguities in its history, such as the prolonged Mongol occupation and the willingness of Russia’s own leaders to embrace civilisationally hybrid identities to this present day.
The question of whether Russia is ‘European’, and whether the European Right can present a coherent answer to this question and those attendant upon it, has assumed a far greater importance in the past decade: no longer is it merely academic. Multiculturalism and mass migration present an existential threat to all European countries. No one on the Right seriously contests that there will need to be a significant effort to remove undesirable immigrants in the near future: the debate is now over the extent and the criteria. Additionally, those who have thought about the issue seriously all recognise that this will need to happen within a multilateral and solidaristic bloc of European (and, hopefully, more broadly Western) states. A right-wing and integrated Europe will have to present a solution to the issue of where Russia lies within the framework of the Occidental world, and in turn present some kind of solution to the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
As I see it, there are three main aspects to the Russian Question.
First, while the populist revolt which has erupted throughout Europe is united in its opposition to mass migration, it has deeply ambiguous, inconsistent, and conflicting attitudes towards Russia. It must be remembered that Russia was presented from the early 2010s onwards as a new conservative pole around which sovereigntist states could align. Rapprochement with Russia was not just justified on the grounds of geopolitical realism, but also on a purported affinity between the supposedly ‘Christian’ values of the Putin regime, the Trump administration, and certain European states. This attitude extended even further in some online radical-right spheres, with hopes that a Russian revanchist offensive would somehow derail NATO and end the American ‘occupation’ of Europe, which was sometimes also implied to be the cause of social liberalism and other purported ills. This view, never very plausible, seems exceptionally difficult to sustain in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, an intractable conflict which has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Europeans, with no positive side-effects whatsoever.
Second, outside of the question of whether there could be ideological solidarity with an ‘illiberal’ Russia, the Ukraine War has forced a new geopolitical reality upon Europe, which has left it more strategically and economically dependent upon the United States than at any point since the 1950s. Since the Financial Crisis, the American economy, especially in financial services and tech, has pulled far ahead of Europe; simultaneously, European industrial strength has been badly damaged by growing Chinese competition. The loss of Russian natural gas was the coup de grâce. Some of these problems are self-inflicted; others are not. But what is certain is that this prevents the possibility of Europe acting independently on the world stage for some time, and leaves the continent highly vulnerable to the predations of America.
This is true irrespective of the ostensible political alignment of the current US administration: for instance, Vance and the Trump family have liaised with the Inuit against the Danes over the issue of Greenland. If (or indeed when) the Democrats regain control of the United States, we might anticipate a radicalised and increasingly racialised left-wing using the enormous economic leverage of the United States to attack future nationalist European governments. This will be particularly important as the Muslim diaspora in America continues to grow and gain further political influence. If blacks in America were capable of forcing an anti-apartheid foreign policy, no doubt Muslims in America could similarly seek for it to pursue an anti-nativist one in Europe.
In this context, Russia could help provide a necessary counterweight to the United States. But for this to be at all possible, there needs to be a consistent line on Russia throughout the European Right. This position should avoid the twin pitfalls of slavish Russophilia, and a Russophobia which seeks to depict a Slavic ethnic group as an Asiatic ‘other’.
Third, the Ukraine War has not just been damaging in itself: it also has the latent potential to ignite further territorial conflicts at some point in the future. While the Ukraine War now seems most likely to end in a stalemate, the very existence of such disputes will be a serious hindrance to a united and sovereign Europe. It is imperative that we find a way to manage this risk.
At the moment, the European Right either indulges in absurd fantasies of balkanising Russia, or it puts forward the intolerable belief that everything from Tallinn to Odessa should be ceded to the Russian sphere. Neither of these positions is tenable. It is the intention of this article to attempt to lay the groundwork for properly considering the issue and then to provide a first, necessarily rough, sketch of how the European Right can approach Russia without falling into either of these traps.
A brief history of Russia and the European Right
It is beyond the scope of this article to provide a full overview of European attitudes to Russia from the early modern period, in which Muscovy began to consolidate statehood in Muslim and Mongol tutelage. Instead, we will begin with the latter decades of the eighteenth century, when something more akin to modern political life begins to emerge.
Russia, while always in some senses external to Europe, was nonetheless periodically involved in European affairs at this time: from the partitions of Poland in the late eighteenth century, to the anti-French coalitions of the Napoleonic wars, to the interventions of the Holy Alliance. It frequently acted as a force of reaction in continental politics, inhibiting the actualisation of national and democratic aspirations. Although it was an ally of the anti-revolutionary Central European monarchies, fears of Russian expansion into the Balkans and the Bosporus additionally saw the Russian Empire presented as a looming and semi-Oriental threat to Europe — even when it was arguably defending the interests of subjugated Christian peoples.
Correspondingly, European states were willing to ally with racially and religiously ‘other’ states against the Russian Empire. For much of the nineteenth century, the French and British response to the ‘Eastern Question’ was to support the Ottomans against the Russians. From the Crimean War to the reluctance of many (particularly Tory) politicians to condemn Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria in the 1880s, it could either be argued that European states lacked civilisational solidarity with a purportedly ‘alien’ Eurasian empire or, more probably, that they allowed for the triumph of raison d’état over racial and religious solidarity.
The willingness of Germany in both the First and the Second World War to mobilise Turkic and Islamic separatists to attack the peripheries of the Tsarist and Soviet empires can be understood in the same way. Yet it also reflects the sometimes odd racial anthropology of some European nationalists. Slavs, and especially Russians, have been attacked as ‘Mongoloid’ interlopers even while far-right movements have made common cause with actual Mongolic ethnic groups against them. We see echoes of this today when Ukrainian radical nationalists recruit Tartars and Chechens to their foreign legions even while their ideologues promote the narrative that Russians are genetically predisposed towards tyranny because of admixture from the Golden Horde.
Of course, this is a generalisation. There are some episodes in which civilisational solidarity was extended to Russia, most notably in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War (the first time in modern history in which a non-European power defeated a European one). But on the whole, Russia has been perceived as alien and external; more an antagonistic impetus for continental consolidation than a potential partner in such an endeavour.
The Bolshevik Revolution even further accentuated the alienation of Russia from Europe. Where once it had been governed by a Slavic-German aristocracy who, whatever else could be said of them, were integrated into the world of Occidental high politics, it was now under the tyranny of Bolsheviks who were self-consciously estranged from this civilisation. That this occurred conterminously with the emergence of a racialised far-right German nationalism which sought to implement a totalising vision of the Wilhelmine ‘Drang nach Osten’ (‘Drive to the East’) led to the emergence of the most extreme manifestation of European Russophobia. The reduction of the Russian people to a lumpen and denationalised mass instrumentalised for the purpose of international revolution would be used to justify the eliminationist policies of the Nazi occupation. It is grimly ironic that the Soviet Union which would emerge victorious would make manifest the most lurid visions of the Nazi imagination, with an industrialised Russia summoning legions of Uzbeks and Buryats to rape and loot a helpless Central Europe.
The role of Russia in the European far-right and radical-right imagination
But while Bolshevism would see Russia severed from Europe, it also generated a correspondingly internationalist outlook in its diasporic radical-right and far-right. When many interwar nationalists still pursued visions of competing territorial irredentism, Russians provided a nexus for the emergence of a ‘White Internationale’ which sought a transnational front to oppose international socialism. In some cases, this went as far as supporting Nazism: consider the role of White Russian generals like Vasily Bipuski and Pavel Bermondt-Avalov in the rise of Adolf Hitler. France, too, would host a considerable number of Russian rightists who provided support to domestic anti-Communist movements. Russia would continue to act as the primary agent of international socialism from the 1940s onwards, but its émigré population would remain active in the post-war period, supporting an eclectic variety of rightist groupings in opposition to this.
Yet from the perspective of 2025, even more interesting than the role of the White Russians in the broader European Right was the increased tendency of the European far-right (if not the radical-right) after 1945 to construe the Soviet Union as an illiberal imperium and potential ally against ‘democratic degeneracy’. Most famously, in his book Imperium (1948), Francis Parker Yockey, an American Nazi, extolled the virtues of the Soviet Union, which he claimed had preserved the perennial archetype of the hierarchic Aryan state through Stalinism. Both the perception and reality of an ‘anti-Semitic turn’ in much of the Eastern Bloc — the so-called doctors’ plot, the Prague purges of the 1950s, and the support provided to anti-Zionist movements by the Soviets — gave further impetus to those who fantasised of an alternative to Western capitalist welfarist democracy. Jean-Francois Thiriart, while obscure today, was a Belgian Nazi collaborator and acolyte of Yockey who was particularly prominent in the dissemination of ‘National Bolshevik’ principles in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s.
None of this is to say that the international far-right ever became uniformly supportive of the Warsaw Pact. It is merely to note that the later developments which we now see on both the Anglophone and Continental Right are not without precedent, and were not born purely out of political frustration. There is, in fact, quite some history of romanticising Russia by tapping into older perceptions of it as culturally alien, but subverting and inverting this by turning this alienness into a positive characteristic, claiming that it is the preserver of certain older, atavistic European traditions by virtue of unintentionally being immunised from liberal contagion due to Stalinism. This does not make such interpretations any more valid — as should be clear from this article, they are mostly (though not quite entirely) invalid — but this impulse may prove difficult to dislodge.
The twenty-first century context
The collapse of the Soviet Union saw Eastern European nationalism liberated from the permafrost of decades of communist oppression. It also begets the mutual spread of radical right-wing ideas from East to West and West to East. The Russian nationalist scene, which had started to emerge in the latter days of Perestroika, began sketching out alternatives to liberal visions of reform. This, alongside shared concerns about territorial collapse, created the more well-known syncretism of figures like Eduard Limonov, who founded the National Bolshevik Party in 1993.
But less well-known are the many, far more conventional, right-wing radicals who created organisations like Russian National Unity, a neo-Nazi group founded in 1990 and tracing its intellectual origins from Pamyat, an organisation which emerged before the fall of the Soviet Union. Another member of Pamyat would become leader of the Movement Against Illegal Migration, which was eventually banned by the Russian Supreme Court as an ‘extremist organisation’ in 2011. There have also been numerous white supremacist, neo-Nazi murders by gangs and terrorist organisations. None of this is to say that this extremism was a useful or desirable direction for the Russian Right, or to deny that Russian imperialism more generally is appealing to many Russians: it is merely to say that Russia’s ‘Oriental’ alienness, and self-perception as such, can be greatly exaggerated by other Europeans. If we are right that this is the case, it opens up many possibilities for future European engagement with the Russian people.
These more uninterrupted far-right traditions, which had been buried in Russia’s subterranean political cultures — Aryanist, often pagan, historically revisionist, and radically ethnonationalist — would dominate its nationalist scene in the 2000s. It’s worthy of note that while most Western radical-right and far-right interest in Russian politics has been spurred by an infatuation with the Oriental grandeur of Stalinism, both Eurasianist and monarchist, this has been little more than something on the peripheral fringes of the Russian scene. Celtic crosses and Doc Martens were the order of the day for the Russian right-wing youth movements of the 2000s.
It is clear, then, that Russia had a Europhilic-leaning, racialist far-right in the opening decade of the twenty-first century. No doubt Russian skinheads distrusted Western governments as much as they distrusted the government in the Kremlin, but the ludicrous auto-Orientalism of state-promoted figures like Aleksandr Dugin was virtually unheard of. Russian nationalists used to dress up as Varangians and worship Perun in their spare time. And yet, despite Russia’s demographic situation continuing to worsen, they are now confined to fire-bombing minor recruitment offices in deep rural Russia. What happened?
One of the greatest ironies of Russo-Western relations has been the misapprehension of both left-wingers and European nationalists of the political character of the Putin regime. Both have subscribed to and regurgitated narratives of Putin’s Russia as an anti-liberal, white bastion. Yet this wholly rests on an essentially amnesiac account of recent political history. United Russia is, if nothing else, a chameleonic party: remember that Putin befriended George Bush and Tony Blair and was celebrated by Peter Mandelson. He was meant to have been the original technocratic reformer.
Putin has presided over high levels of internal and external migration. He has also presided over periodic crackdowns on nativism, which formed the main opposition for much of the 2000s and early 2010s. The Red Square Riots of 2010, triggered by the murder of a Spartak Moscow ultra by Caucasian migrants, saw serious anti-government unrest in which demonstrators chanted ‘Russia for the Russians’ and attacked Central Asian and Caucasian immigrants; at least two people died. In 2011, there were again battles between police and anti-immigrant demonstrators, leading to the arrest of hundreds of Russian nationalists. Just one day later was the first of a series of large-scale and long-running protests against Putin, primarily directed against his authoritarianism and corruption but conspicuously involving anti-immigrant groups, which took place from 2011 to 2013. In 2013, there were — once again — large-scale riots in Moscow after — once again — a man was allegedly murdered by migrants, leading to hundreds more arrests. The intersection of liberal political dissidence (as alluded to from the events in 2011) and anti-immigration sentiment is all but forgotten except by ‘tankie’ critics of the late Alexei Nalvany, who, in his earlier political career, had consistently aligned himself with anti-immigrant movements.
Many Russian neo-Nazis, such as the paedophile hunter ‘Tesak’ (real name Maxim Martsinkevich), now eulogised in TikTok edits, were probably murdered. Others fled to Ukraine, utilising pre-existing links with that country’s nationalist scene. These figures, such as Denis Kaputin, who had hoped of a ‘Russian Maidan’, went on to establish neo-Vlasovite units like the Russian National Corps (now self-styled ‘democratic conservatives’, presumably in the hope of winning State Department support). Other Russian nationalists were successfully co-opted into supporting foreign adventurism, joining units like the far-right Rusich Group in the Donbas, or have been steadily marginalised domestically. Yet another totally overlooked dimension of the conflict has been the internal dissidence of Russians who oppose the war on grounds of racial fraternity with Ukrainians.
In short, the regime which now exists in Russia is a conservative Soviet one, which sees itself as the mediator of a predominantly Slavic but nonetheless foundationally multi-ethnic state which is aligned with the non-Western world. Russia’s actual ‘dissident right’ is now confined to a marginal anti-war movement.
Why does this matter?
The significance of this is that, despite all these impulses, Russia’s institutional right-wing is strongly third-worldist in orientation, pursuing economic and security ties with countries like India and China. Rhetorically, the regime blasts a supposedly ‘neocolonial’ and ‘white supremacist’ world order. Many might argue that this is a superficial ideological trapping to an essentially revanchist state that has been blocked from pursuing its legitimate interests in its near-abroad.
This view is not entirely without merit. Russia’s move towards China wasn’t inevitable — quite apart from anything else, they had deeply antagonistic relations throughout the latter part of the Cold War — and was most directly prompted by Western sanctions. Likewise, American support for the eastward expansion of NATO was a volte-face from earlier promises of the preservation of Eastern European neutrality. The State Department was indeed active in Ukraine in the run-up to the Maidan Revolution. Some European nationalists might even regard this as part of American strategy of divide-and-rule, which has forced a break between the Continent and its Russian neighbour, forcing the former into greater economic dependence while simultaneously damaging its industrial capacity.
Additionally, Russia, in spite of the memes propagated on some corners of the internet about the country’s imminent Islamisation, remains demographically healthy compared to almost all Western European countries. Russia’s ethnic minorities are geographically peripheral and autochthonous. The Russian government is undoubtedly race-conscious, even if it does not declare this openly. The court ideologue of Putinism, Vladislav Surkov, has called for Russia to be one constituent pole of a ‘Global North’ alongside Europe and the United States once the dust has settled from the Ukraine War. We can reasonably expect that this is the attitude of a significant number of European politicians who, once it is politically favourable to do so again, will support a tentative rapprochement.
But we should nonetheless be very wary of looking to accommodate Russia’s ‘legitimate interests’ in Eastern Europe. After all, what would this look like? Even totally ignoring the professed championing of the ‘Global South’ Russia has engaged in — something that, for all the above, I still don’t think is entirely for propagandistic purposes — it is also still committed to the destruction of a European state of nearly 40 million people, partly (if Putin is to be believed) on the grounds that they are ‘neo-Nazis’. It has been obvious from the failures of Trump’s peace initiatives that Russian ambitions are not limited to a south-eastern corridor to Crimea, but rather that they are committed to the bleeding of its Slavic neighbour so that a demographically anaemic rump state can be dismantled at a later stage. If we are to accept that territorial accommodation is the price of reconciliation, this will mean abandoning an entire nation and more.
While Red Dawn fantasies of Russian tanks on the Seine are ludicrous, after dismantling Ukraine, Russia would most likely seek to reassert control over other former SSRs with significant Russian minorities, such as the Baltic states and the Republic of Moldova. This would mean a Eurasian ‘Union State’ with the borders of the former Soviet Union and concurrently abandoning tens of millions more people to live in Balkanised ‘Babuksha People’s Republics’, in which ‘fascism’ and ‘racism’ — i.e., national self-determination — are criminalised. I’m personally of the view that this is a highly undesirable outcome, irrespective of the geopolitically realist arguments which can be mobilised in favour of it.
More fundamentally, the belief of many European radicals that salvation lies deep within the steppes of Russia has been consistently seen to be unfounded. Russian armoured divisions won’t crush the spirit of 1968 any more than the Cossacks crushed the spirit of 1848 or 1989. There will be no ‘Eurosiberia’. The solutions to our problems can only lie within ourselves.
At a time when nationalist movements are buoyant throughout the continent, it is time for a younger generations of right-wingers to articulate what a geopolitical solution to our problems, including Russia, will look like.
Europe: between a rock and a hard place
As many Americans like to brag online, Europe’s position is not favourable. We are poorer, short of natural resources, and facing demographic decline. Many of these problems are partly or entirely self-inflicted, but resolving them will still take time. Even a substantively united Europe — which, on fraternally nationalist grounds, is possible — will face many difficulties. America under the Trump Administration can be expected to be supportive of the efforts on immigration by European states, as well as policies aimed at achieving a permanently favourable political demography in lieu of actual mass deportations. However, we should expect aggressive interventionism against this from any future Democratic administration.
More problematic still is the possibility that any unifying efforts will be opposed by both the United States — irrespective of its ideological orientation — and the Russian Federation simultaneously. While MAGA commentators claim that they simply want Europe to defend itself and not to sponge off the United States, we all know that if a European Defence Community became a realistic possibility, their tune would quickly change.
Russia will also likely try to utilise the instability that will naturally result from European policies seriously aiming at reversing demographic change. Russia has form in this respect: it has periodically supported the Russophile far-left and has also presented itself as a champion of Islam through its interventions on Israel-Palestine. Could an ‘anti-racist’ Russia attempt to offer material support for diasporic militants?
We can’t know for certain, but we should be cautious about the future. There will be a recurrently thawing conflict on Europe’s eastern frontiers, significant demographic problems internally, as well as the increased possibility of extra-European intervention in our affairs. Europe must adopt a position of defensive neutrality in response.
What could the future of Europe look like, and how should it engage with Russia?
Many right-wing alternatives to the European Union have been proposed. Most common has been the idea of a ‘Europe of nations’ — a weakly confederalised alliance in which existing supranational bodies are atrophied to the point of non-existence.
Such a union, at least as it is envisioned by the likes of Viktor Orbán, will struggle to assert itself against major powers. It would most likely fall prey to internal divisions and external predations, and might even have trouble establishing a shared immigration program. This is not an article which is intended to be about pan-Europeanism in general, but suffice to say, instead of this kind of Europe, a new body should be established which should accelerate certain aspects of integration, especially on immigration, energy, nuclear, and defence matters. Whether this union should be genealogically descended from the current European Union is a question for another day (though I personally doubt whether it is possible to reform existing institutions in a sufficiently right-wing direction).
In terms of our immediate strategic commitments, it is right that we should fund a standing Ukrainian army, as Andre Biletsky has advocated for. But our more long-term agenda should be rather different from what has now become conventional. We must wholly reject the popular Baltic and Finnish rhetoric of the Russian ‘other’, which has been increasingly taken up by many supposedly ‘moderate’ conservatives (people who would not talk of any other ethnic group in this way) in Britain, and instead try to woo young Russians back into a love for the West. I hope I have shown above that, while this will not be easy, this is indeed possible and there are plenty of undercurrents in Russian society — both nationalist and (not much explored in this piece) liberal and the intersection between the two — that can be used to our advantage.
An affirmatively European state which crushes crime and deports hostile immigrants will gain a significant political and cultural capital advantage vis-à-vis an increasingly multicultural United States and an impoverished, Soviet-nostalgic Russia. Russia ruthlessly exploits these current weaknesses in their propaganda (most of which is in local languages, but for a general picture, see the ‘Lord Bebo’ account on X). A Europe which can respond and point to Chechen criminality as a deficiency in the Russian system, rather than instead having to spend time combating gun-toting Chechens in French cities, will be at a long-term advantage in the propaganda war over the ‘multipolar’ Putin regime.
People actually like Europe because it is Europe. Our greatest ‘soft power’ asset is our human capital, not our purported commitment to ‘human rights’ (nowadays meaning mass migration). We can aggressively extend youth visas to ethnic Russians, who have already been leaving Russia in very considerable numbers since the Ukraine War, both denuding Russia further of demographic strength and also hopefully inculcating Europhilia into the younger generations.
We won’t win these people over by calling for the Rosenberg-tier ‘nationality’ policies which envision ceding huge swathes of tundra to 50,000 or so Caucasian, Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic ethnic groups, nor by indiscriminately banning Russians from even entering the continent. It also goes without saying that we will not achieve anything by insulting them (as many seem to want to do). Russia is not just European, but a civilisation in its own right and one pole of the Boreal world that we all share as our heritage. The Russians are — rightfully — a proud people, but have been both the subject and object of much historical misfortune. If we are to achieve victory in a new Cold War, it can only be done by appealing to their sense of pride and, in fact, to the very nationalism which is such a visceral object of condemnation.
One day, we can hope for a new northern order, with Europe, Russia, and America as its respective centres. However, this can not be achieved by outsourcing fantasies of salvation to foreign liberators, whether from the steppe or from across the seas: it can only come from within ourselves and the desire to reassert our own historical agency.
This article was written by George Ruska, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.
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Useful reminders here, for those of us on the Eurocentric right, about the High Strangeness of ... the U.S.A..
I have seldom read an article in Pimlico Journal more riddled with dubious assumptions. The notion the Russkiy Mir has ever been anything but a predatory corrupting threat to the rest of Europe is laughable.