The Russian Obshchina: Neo-Black Hundreds as a Symptom of Imperial Agony

The neo-fascist "Russian Obshchina," bankrolled by the Kremlin, is one of the largest such formations, and Russian liberals love to compare it to Ernst Röhm's Sturmabteilung. The parallel is striking, but it is misleading. And it misleads for a reason.

In 1934, Hitler ran into the problem every dictator runs into the moment he reaches power: he needed to liquidate the very people who had helped him take it. Röhm's stormtroopers were the sacrifice the dictatorship had to make for the sake of its own stability. They had demanded the rewards they thought they had earned. Yes, Hitler had needed them to seize power. But after the victory they turned into a threat: too independent, too ideological, too strong. To dispose of them, he created the SS.

So here is the catch. The analogy with the SA is an optical illusion, and the people pushing it hardest are themselves imperialists wearing the costume of Russian liberals. Imperialists, because they panic at anything genuinely national, and their fear rests not on any love of civil society but on dread of the empire's collapse. They look at the camouflaged thugs and see stormtroopers, because that framing suits them. A stormtrooper, after all, is still a creature of the national state, however monstrous. But the Russian Obshchina is not about a national state. It is not about the national at all.

The Russian Obshchina is the new Black Hundreds. And it became them not against its founders' design but precisely because of its nature: religious, sectarian, imperial.

Look at who assembled it. The founders are Andrey Tkachuk, a former deputy speaker of the Omsk city council and briefly a political strategist at Konstantin Malofeev's Tsargrad; Yevgeny Chesnokov, who coordinated the anti-abortion movement "Za Zhizn"; and Andrey Afanasyev, host and war correspondent on the Spas and Tsargrad television channels. In the early stages, money came directly from Malofeev himself, the "Orthodox oligarch" who financed the Donbas separatists in 2014. According to RBC sources, the project was originally handed to Malofeev but then "for certain reasons, at some point, taken back," and under Tkachuk it began a life of its own. That did not stop Malofeev from picking up the splinter group: in 2024 several regional cells broke off and formed the "Russian Druzhina," which is now his. The market, in other words, is divided. One set of sectarians under one handler, another under the other.

Other sponsors clustered around Malofeev: the foundations of the political analyst Sergei Mikheev and of the sugar billionaire Igor Khudokormov, owner of the Prodimeks agroholding (this was documented in a BBC Eye investigation). The patron from the security bloc is Alexander Bastrykin, head of the Investigative Committee. The structure itself, according to Meduza's sources, was built under FSB curatorship: first to absorb additional budget, then to bait nationalists into crimes and arrest them with a flourish as "super-terrorists." Over time the project was reportedly handed over to the Russian Orthodox Church. Regional coordinators openly admit that they "coordinate events" with the FSB and the Investigative Committee. They do not hide it.

This is not the SA. This is the Okhrana with auxiliary druzhinniki, repainted for the 2020s. When Tsargrad's own journalists publish pieces describing the early-twentieth-century Union of the Russian People as "an example for the political life of Russia today," they are not confusing historical analogies. They are naming things accurately.

These young, fit, aggressive, ideologically inflamed boys, raised on hatred of the "enemies of the Reich," are not going to the front. Their function is internal, punitive and policing rather than military. The Kremlin is saving them for the post-war scenario or, more accurately, for the "if something goes wrong" scenario. They will lean on "the Azeris," "the chocks," extort their businesses, and to avoid attracting the attention of law enforcement, they will kill those the Kremlin finds inconvenient. They are already patrolling streets, beating and robbing migrants, staging street brawls. In April 2024, six members of the Russian Obshchina showed up at a school in the village of Koisug "looking for subhumans" and blockaded the building, all because a pupil had clashed with his Russian-language teacher. In August of the same year, masked activists wearing the organization's chevrons disrupted the annual reading of names of victims of Stalin's repressions at Sandarmokh, the burial ground of more than six thousand executed people. They doused mourners with water, drowned out the ceremony with "Katyusha," and hung up placards bearing the names of foreign fighters killed in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. In Kameshkovo, a group armed with clubs, knuckledusters, and knives attacked Ingush residents while shouting nationalist slogans. In Altai, local coordinators cheerfully report joint events with the Tsargrad cell, tournaments in the "ancient Russian game of kila," and campaigns against abortions, concerts, and migrants.

A structure like this is easy to build. It is very difficult to stop.

The liberal public - and here I mean not the likes of Maxim Katz or Ekaterina Schulmann, but the Kremlin's domesticated liberals and those who play that role from abroad - is somehow afraid that the Russian Obshchina will inevitably become a threat to the Kremlin itself. The most striking thing is that they cite, as proof, the fact that the Kremlin understands that nationalist groups pose far greater danger to the country than the mythical "NATO soldiers" who are never going to invade Russia. This conviction, and this single-mindedness with the Kremlin, rests on the ontological hatred of "Russians" - of imperialists, really - for anything truly national. They know perfectly well that "Russian" means "imperialist," just as they know that the Russian is a surrogate of a nation, and that beyond xenophobia and imperial chauvinism there is nothing national about him. Who are they really explaining this to?

The liberals are afraid that there will be no one left to neutralize and liquidate the neo-fascists dressed up in camouflage, and they reproach the Kremlin for raising a dangerous predator by playing on the basest emotions and passions. They forget that their entire fear rests on the fear of losing the empire. For Russians, there is no more terrifying thought than the breakup of Russia - or, more precisely, its decolonization and the liberation of Moscow's colonies. Because Russia, in its essence, is Moscow and its colonies.

Allow me to reassure them. The arrival of the neo-Black Hundreds is not evidence of any rising national priority. It is evidence of Russia's agony.

There was already such a project at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Union of the Russian People was founded in 1905, in the middle of the first Russian revolution, under the direct patronage of Nicholas II. The money flowed in from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Police Department, the Okhrana, and personally from the court. By 1908 the Union and its sister organizations counted around 400,000 members. They had "fighting druzhiny," their own newspapers (Russkoye Znamya, the "Russian Banner"), their own pogroms, their own patrons in uniform and at the court. The chairman of the Main Council, Dr. Alexander Dubrovin, publicly condemned pogroms, after which his druzhiny went and carried them out. The goal was exactly today's goal: to save the autocracy, drown the revolution, beat down inorodtsy and dissenters, and brand any genuinely national movement as "the incitement of smaller peoples against Russians."

And then? The Union lasted exactly twelve years. By 1917 it had fewer than 45,000 members. Its leaders, locked into reactionary nostalgia and antisemitism, never managed to build in Russia anything resembling a national movement capable of preventing the collapse. Immediately after February 1917, the Provisional Government banned all Black Hundred organizations. The Bolsheviks, once in power, shot Dubrovin along with his ally, the priest Ioann Vostorgov, organizer of the Moscow pogroms. The men who had spent twelve years crushing revolutionaries were shot first by those very revolutionaries. Vostorgov was later canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church, though he was not around to enjoy it.

A textbook ending for a structure built by the secret police to save the monarchy.

And now, at the start of the twenty-first century, the secret police - in new uniforms and under different acronyms - are running the same play. The same druzhiny. The same rhetoric. The same curators from the security ministries. The same blessing from the Church. The same hatred of "inorodtsy" and "smaller peoples." The same "Orthodox oligarch" with his media empire, occupying the slot that industrialists and patrons of the early 1900s once held. And the same calculation: that this mob of brutes will hold together a state that is bursting at the seams for at least a little longer.

It will not hold. Russia is doomed. And the Kremlin's panicked drive to keep it within its present borders only accelerates the inevitable collapse. The neo-Black Hundreds of the Russian Obshchina, when their time comes, will share the fate of their predecessors - at the hands of their own masters and of those whom today they are teaching "how to behave on the territory of Russia."

Empire's historical memory is short. History's is not.