Authors

Discussion

War had provided a formative experience for a number of key members of the National Bolshevik Party even before it was established in 1993, or before they joined the party ranks. Thus, Eduard Limonov, an NBP leader and founder, took part in the Yugoslav Wars (1991-93), while the author Zakhar Prilepin (an NBP activist since 1997) went to both the First and the Second Chechen War as a member of the special police force (OMON). During the hybrid phase of the Donbas war, Sergei Fomchenkov (a sometime head of the NBP branch in Smolensk) made quite a career in the separatist military (and later in the regular Russian troops), becoming a battalion commander. In 2016-18, Prilepin served as Fomchenkov’s deputy. Using Prilepin’s words and deeds as a case study, the paper analyses the NBP’s war and death ethos, against the background of the Bushido code, Freudian death wish and selected writings by Aleksandr Dugin (another NBP founder).