Zakhar Prilepin was lucky. Despite his severe wounds, he survived. Let’s recall this again - the attempt to assassinate him was carried out on May 6, 2023, near Nizhny Novgorod.

A bomb exploded in the car in which the famous Russian writer was heading to Moscow. The driver died. According to the BBC reports, Atesh – the Crimean Tatar military partisan movement fighting the Russians in the occupied territories of Ukraine - claimed responsibility for the operation. But who is really behind that incident is probably unknown.

There are people in Russian public life who can be considered emblematic figures when it comes to Russia's ostentatious hostility towards Ukraine and the Western countries that support it. Prilepin is certainly one of those people.

However, his connections with the Russian authorities are far from obvious. This nearly 48-year-old prose writer, publicist, journalist, but also a political activist, the author of such novels as “Cанкья”/" Sankya " or “Обитель”/”Abode”, was a dissident in the past. Although the repressions did not really touch him.

He began his political activity in the National Bolshevik Party, a group founded in 1994 by another Russian writer, Eduard Limonov. The National Bolsheviks, popularly known as “Nazbols”, have always been outside the mainstream of Russian politics. They had no representatives in the Russian parliament. They contested both - the line of Boris Yeltsin as well as the course of Vladimir Putin. The nostalgic feelings for the Soviet superpower they combined with postulates of left-wing social solutions. The authority in Russia - regardless of who actually exercised it - was accused of authoritarianism and being on the Western capitalists' dime, and that betrayed the interests of the Russian state.

In 2007, the National Bolshevik Party was outlawed on charges of extremism. Its members continued their political activity in new groups.

And so Prilepin took part in mass demonstrations – let’s even think about those that swept through Moscow and St. Petersburg in 2011 and 2012. It happened after the parliamentary elections in Russia. The protests participants accused the government of electoral fraud.

At that time, the writer harshly criticised Putin’s regime. But he also distanced himself from the Russian liberal bourgeoisie - a distinctive social stratum during anti-Putin speeches - with which the Nazbols did not get along.

The situation has changed in 2014 – with the landing of the Russian’s "little green men" in Crimea and Donbass. Prilepin, appreciating the aggressiveness of the Kremlin in the international arena, decided to conclude a truce with them. Thus, he became an extremist licensed by the system. And in 2021, being one of the leaders of the left-wing nationalist party "A Just Russia - For Truth" (except that nationalism, in this case, meant an option supporting a Russian multinational empire, not a Russian nation-state), he was elected as a member of the State Duma. However, eventually he gave it up. He motivated his decision by the desire to get trained in the field of state administration management.

For Prilepin, his own image is important. The writer poses as a tough guy who has gone through many combat trials in his life.

And in fact - while serving in OMON (Special Purposes Mobile Unit/a Russian secret service military unit), he fought in the first Chechen war. Its brutality was later described in the novel “The Pathologies”. In addition, since 2014, he has provided military support as a volunteer to pro-Russian separatists from the Donetsk “People’s Republic”. He was even an adviser to its leader Alexander Vladimirovich Zakharchenko. He spoke highly of him in his novel “Some will not go to hell”.

No wonder that Prilepin's involvement on the side of the pro-Russian rebellion in Donbas led to the fact that in 2017 the Security Service of Ukraine initiated criminal proceedings against him (as he was suspected of practising terrorism), and in 2022 he was subject to European Union sanctions. Thus, for political reasons, the prestige the writer gained for his literary craftsmanship has significantly decreased worldwide.

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  Even earlier, outside Russia, Prilepin had a tarnished reputation as well. In 2015, two Ukrainian prose writers – Yuriy Ihorovych Andrukhovych and Serhiy Viktorovych Zhadan - refused to participate in a discussion with him at the Berlin International Literature Festiva. In turn, in 2016 the Russian writer was supposed to be a guest of the Conrad Festival in Krakow. He was invited to participate in a debate devoted to the problem of nationalism. This met up with a group of Ukrainian writers’ disapproval, who compared him to the Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik. As a result, the invitation for the Russian guest was withdrawn.

But Zakhar Prilepin doesn't care about it. He deliberately makes outrageous statements. He wants to be perceived as a bully in the eyes of supporters of Western liberal values in Russia and abroad. The historical revisionism he preaches, serves this purpose.

Prilepin tries to whitewash and justify the Soviet era. This procedure is especially shocking in relation to Stalinism, whose crimes – at least those committed against the Russian nation – have been officially condemned in Russian historiography. For example, the writer undermines the credibility of Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn’s novel “The Gulag Archipelago” as an important historical testimony to the Soviet totalitarian structure of enslavement and violence. He mockingly compared the piece to "folk mythology about vampires".

For this reason, Zakhar Prilepin could be treated as a politically insignificant eccentric if not for the fact that national Bolshevism - next to Eurasianism (or rather neo-Eurasianism, whose leading theoretician is Aleksander Dugin, details in the text, „Cień Aleksandra Newskiego”) - is the ideological foundation of Russia's war against Ukraine. It is intriguing how the anti-Western radical ideas mentally colonised those Russian politicians who once had practised a “reset policy” with the West since they wanted to deal with it and not confront it (although, of course, over the heads of Poles and other nations of the "new" Europe).

So what is the national bolshevism then? The very name of this ideological trend is associated with National Socialism. And this association is strengthened when one looks at the symbolism of the Russian national Bolshevik movement. The Nazbols flag is the same as that of the Third Reich, except it displays a hammer and sickle instead of a swastika.

Strangely enough, National Bolshevism historically stood in opposition to Nazism. But in order to explain this, we need to introduce a bit closer the figure of the German politician and publicist Ernst Niekisch. He was the one who gave national Bolshevism the ideological framework.

Niekisch was politically active in the first half of the 20th century. In the interwar period, he initially belonged to the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Later, however, his political thought evolved towards Prussian nationalism.

During the Weimar Republic, Ernst Niekisch was its fierce antagonist. He was negative about the Treaty of Versailles. He was among those of his compatriots who believed that the Germans had been humiliated by the victors of the First World War, so they should get off their knees. Besides, he based his political concepts on historiosophy.

Here are its assumptions: Germany's curse is the heritage of the Rhineland Carolingian Middle Ages Empire, which constitutes its link with the West. Meanwhile, Germans should follow their own path - rely on their Prussian identity and enter into an alliance with the Soviet Union - based not only on geopolitics but also on civilisational factors. And the trump card of this new entity would be the Germanic-Slavic racial synthesis.

At the same time, this vision did not exclude the possibility of a conflict within the German-Soviet bloc. Germany and the USSR could quarrel over whose possession Poland would be.

The Soviet Union was the subject of Niekisch's fascination, not as a communist ideocracy, but as a civilisational project separate from the West, which was an alternative to the liberal, capitalist reality. Hence the interpretation of Bolshevism as a natively Russian phenomenon - different from Marxism in the Western version with its so-called proletarian internationalism. Ernst Niekisch was impressed by the development of the Soviet industry. Interestingly, after his stay in Moscow in the 1930s, the German politician harboured no illusions about the position of the working class in the Land of Soviets.

But he was convinced that for the inhabitants of the USSR, there was something more important than having to cope with harsh economic conditions - it was a mission to rule the entire world.

Niekisch opposed liberal individualism to Soviet collectivism. He pointed out that the West was shaped by two "imperial figures" of Mediterranean roots: the "eternal Roman" (embodying Christianity) and the "eternal Jew" (representing capitalism). He was convinced that Germany should reject both and choose its own identity - an "eternal barbarian" relying on the power of modern technology and turning to a third "imperial figure" - the Soviet workers’ state.

Similar threads can be found in the works of the famous German writer Ernst Jünger. Besides, he and Niekisch, despite what divided them, are included in the circles of the German Conservative Revolution.

So what is the difference between national bolshevism and Soviet no-adjective bolshevism? It is - as the name suggests - the primacy of national interests over class interests.

However - which must be firmly emphasised - Ernst Niekisch was a strong opponent of Adolf Hitler since the very beginning of the Third Reich. In 1932, he warned against him taking power in Germany. In the leader of the NSDAP he saw a politician alien to Prussia, in terms of civilisation. Hitler - as a newcomer from Austria - was in fact a foreigner. Niekisch meant that the future leader of the Third Reich - being an Austrian-Catholic hostile to communism and the USSR - actually represented the anti-Soviet West and thus posed a threat and was dangerous to Germany.

Therefore, when the Third Reich was established, hard times came for Niekisch. In 1937 he was arrested, and in 1939 he was sentenced to life imprisonment for - as ruled by a court subordinate to the Nazis - high treason and illegal political activity. Only in 1945 was he released, partially paralysed and almost blind, after the defeat of Germany in World War II. Then he settled in East Germany and became a member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. The German Democratic Republic was the Prussian state for him. Apparently, he was supposed to appeal for East Germany to be renamed as Prussia.

However, things turned around in 1953. A workers' uprising broke out in Berlin, which was suppressed by the East German authorities. It was the moment when Niekisch re-evaluated his attitude towards the East German state. He acknowledged that it had become a dictatorship country of party bureaucrats, and the revolutionary fervour had definitely evaporated from it. Hence, he began to criticise the Soviet reality from the position of a countercultural intellectual dealing with the smooth calculation of mass societies. As a result of his bitter disillusionment with real socialism, Niekisch moved to West Berlin, where he died in 1967.

Could this politician's anti-Nazism be an alibi for his national-bolshevism? Not at all. After all, the Kremlin's historical policy is built on anti-Nazism, which is one of the ideological reasons for Russia's attack on Ukraine. Let us omit other issues: treating independent Poland (representing “eternal Rome” after all) as a “bastard of the Treaty of Versailles”, or the fact that Niekisch’s thesis about the “perpetual Jew” – regardless of the intentions of its author when he formulated it – was a fuel for anti-Semites.

In modern Russia, national bolshevism is a counterculture. And the provocative behaviour of Zakhar Prilepin also proves it. Therefore, the problem is to bring National Bolshevism closer to the mainstream of Russian politics. And by the way, there is an analogy with the march of the '68 Goshist generation walking through Western institutions.

– Philip Memches

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and jornalists

– translated by Katarzyna Chocian