Authors

Andrei Rogatchevski¹;  ¹ UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Norway

Discussion

Death is a cornerstone of the ethics and worldview of the radical National Bolshevik Party, established in 1993. The NBP’s attitude to death is encapsulated in the party greeting Da, smert’! (Long Live Death), which has been borrowed from the Falangists’ Viva La Muerte. Welcoming death is part of the process of overcoming the fear of death, imperative for NBP members who should be ready to sacrifice their lives as and when necessary, in order to transform Russia and the world at large. Dozens of NBP members actually died as a result of their political confrontation with different authorities across the former Soviet Union. Symbolically, the editorial board of the main party newspaper Limonka includes some of the deceased NBP members.

Principally, the NBP death ethos stems from Hagakure, a take on the Bushido code by Yamamoto Tsunetomo (1659-1719), a samurai and a Buddhist monk. In his 1993 book Ubiistvo chasovogo, the NBP leader Eduard Limonov summarises Hagakure thus: “It is impossible to commit acts of heroism in a normal state of mind. You have to become a fanatic and cultivate a maniacal attraction to death”. Using the Freudian concept of death drive (Todestrieb), as well as Pavlenko 1995 and Chantsev 2009, my paper attempts to explain the reasons behind National Bolsheviks’ self-destructive behaviour.