'Shooting a Slingshot at a Battleship': Russian Fascist Parties in the Third Reich

• In Event: Slavs in the Nazi World, 1933-1945

Abstract

Of the approximately 250,000 Russians who had come to the Weimar Republic by 1923, about 50,000 opted to stay following the Nazi victory. Those who accommodated themselves to the Third Reich usually did so on account of ideological conviction, varying in particulars but almost always involving esteem for Hitler’s credentials as an enemy of Bolshevism. Within this narrower emigration, a few thousand chose to band into modest fascist organizations such as Pavel Bermondt-Avalov’s Russian National Socialist Movement (ROND/RNSD), which held out hope that Stalinism would either implode or be destroyed at Hitler’s hands. Drawing from the print literature of ROND and its rivals, the paper will document how Russian fascists nursed dreams of a final revenge against “Satan reigning in Russia”—and perhaps got more than they had bargained for.

Author

• Philip Decker, Princeton U