Key Azov political texts
Critiquing Hitler from the right. Kravchenko's 'Natiocracy 2.0' (2021) and Biletsky's 'Word of the White Fuhrer' (2008-2011). Commentary and translation.
Yesterday, Ukrainian popstar Oleh Skripka said that the country needed a military coup, so that only veterans are in power.
I suppose he’ll be content as the court jester, given his lack of frontline experience. You can listen to an example of his art below, a mainstay of any maidan fan edit.
This narrative of the need for war-steeled nationalists to take power has been highly popular among Ukraine’s liberal media the past year, in tandem with its increasingly open opposition to the Zelensky government. In countless interviews from 2025 with the leaders of the Azov movement, the liberals have found their heroes.
Not that they need Azov to dream of dictatorship. Any self-respecting Russian or Ukrainian ‘human rights dissident’ from the 80s loves to wax lyrical about the positive features of General Pinochet’s regime. ‘He dealt with the communists and privatized the economy!’, as one relative told me.
And in Ukraine, there is certainly no shortage of citizens insufficiently enthusiastic about economic liberalization and privatization. As I wrote here and here, Ukrainian (and post-soviet generally) liberals have always been very enthusiastic about removing voting rights from the ‘politically retrograde lumpenprol masses’.
The western press has also been helping out in the Azov hype campaign.
Azov is ‘Ukraine’s highest-profile combat unit’ (the Guardian), ‘Ukraine’s most prestigious military unit’ (the Economist), ‘one of the very last combat capable units in Ukraine’ (Responsible Statecraft), ‘elite fighters… that have integrated NATO’s command and staff management systems’ (Centre for European Policy Analysis), ‘the key to the country’s military success’ and ‘the forces deemed best suited to kick off the [army] reforms—and to serve as a model—because of their competent “new school” personnel and combat experience’ (Foreign Policy). You get it.
Now, the figure that Ukraine’s liberal media constantly hypes up as the only man to save the country is brigadier general Andriy Biletsky. Leader of the Azov movement, commander of the Third Army Corps. The ‘White Fuhrer’, as Azov’s publications call him.
This ‘greetings from commander of the corps, ANDRIY BILETSKY’ was posted by the Third Corps earlier this month.
After 2022, an amusing narrative emerged that ‘Azov has deradicalized’. As someone who spends far too much time reading Azovite media, I have always found such an idea too preposterous to even consider debunking. But some messages from my dear paid subscribers convinced me otherwise.
So today, we’ll be taking a look at Azov’s key theoretical works, both explaining how they see the world and what they propose to replace it with.
Keep in mind here that when I say Azov, I am referring to Biletsky’s Third Army Corps. There is a far smaller section of the pre-2022 Azov movement clustered around the 12th Azov brigade (now the 1st Corps of the National Guard). It has tried to ally somewhat with liberals against the Third Corps. I’ll direct you to my article on that split.
Today, we’re focused on Biletsky’s movement, in comparison to which the 12th is simply irrelevant in both size and ambition.
Overview
We have two authors today. First, Mykola Kravchenko’s ‘Natiocracy 2.0’, from 2021. This can be considered the movement’s most detailed political platform, written by ‘the main ideologue of Azov’.
‘Kruk’ has become one of Azov’s main martyrs since his death in 2022. ‘Deradicalization’ is not to be seen, quite the opposite.
Earlier in 2025, Azov published a book-length ‘Natiocracy 2.0’ to much fanfare, with the subtitle ‘the state structure of the future’. I haven’t been able to get a pdf of it, but it includes a range of Ukrainian nationalist texts from the 30s, including the original ‘Natiocracy’, written by the main ideologist of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), Mykola Stsiborskyi.
After Kruk, next on the menu is a number of Biletsky’s writings from 2008-11, where he expounds on the ills of globalized capitalism and the likelihood of a future race war. During this period, he was the leader of the organization ‘Patriot of Ukraine’ and the nationwide coalition of neo-nazi groups called the ‘Social National Assembly’. I wrote about this period of his political life here and here.
These articles were published in the collection ‘Word of the White Fuhrer’. The collection was re-published by Azov in 2017 with a slick preface explaining the biography of the great Leader. I translated the following articles:
Why Social Nationalism? (2008)
Global Crisis and Ethnic Chaos. (2008)
Language and Race. (2008)
The Flaws of Democracy. (2010)
By the way, some quick semantics. The word used in the title is ‘Vozhd’, the Ukrainian analogue of ‘Fuhrer’. It is an interesting choice, since ‘Vozhd’ is often associated with Stalin. Followers of Ukraine’s nationalist antagonist to Stalin, Stepan Bandera, called him ‘Providnik’. This is a Ukrainian term without a common analogue in Russian. Perhaps this points yet again to the divide between the Russian-speaking east Ukrainian Biletsky and his west-Ukrainian nationalist competitors.
‘Vozhd’ is far stronger than the neutral English word ‘leader’. You would never call, your boss at the office ‘the team vozhd’. To be a ‘vozhd’, you need fanatically devoted followers and the readiness to kill. Azov considers ‘Vozhdism’ highly important, and have published a whole book titled ‘the Vozhd Principle’, an unsubtle reference to Hitler’s ‘Führerprinzip’:
By the way, a note on sources. I managed to get ahold of today’s texts on scribd (here and here). I’ve been trying to just buy Azov literature through their publisher ‘Rainhouse’, but my bank flags any transaction with a Ukrainian as a scam. Go figure.
Key points
In what comes next, I’d like the reader to note the following. The question of biological racialism and the ‘New Right’ is particularly important for an upcoming article I’m very excited to be writing.
— Both Kravchenko’s 2021 manifesto and Biletsky’s articles from the early 2010s criticize democracy and assert the need for governance by an exclusive warrior elite. You won’t be surprised to hear that Azov is obsessed with Julius Evola, and constantly publishes translations of his work.
— Kravchenko positively references the ‘Confucianism’ of the Chinese Communist Party. Somewhat strange, given Azov’s strident anti-communism. On the one hand, this may just be an attempt to dress up their fascist ideas using an appealing example — modern China is highly respected in Ukrainian society for its rapid economic growth. However, beyond that, I will note that I’ve noticed positive references to China on other Azov resources as well. A topic for a future article.
— Biletsky’s racialist writings make reference to ‘New Right European Revolutions’ to overcome the threat of ‘Islamic invasion’. His main racial enemies in Ukraine are Vietnamese migrants in his home city of Kharkov and Tartars in Crimea. So much for joint Tartar-Ukrainian resistance to Russian imperialism. Azovites have attacked Tartars and their mosques physically as well - another future article.
— According to Biletsky, the inevitable European race war will lead to the defeat of ‘internationalism, liberalism and capitalism’, to be replaced with the ‘iron ideas of National community, hierarchy, order, and social justice’. Very accelerationist, very Turner Diaries. Dare I say it, somewhat Order of the Nine Angles? Take a look at the ‘galactic’ theme of the Natiocracy 2.0 cover…
— Biletsky prefers the terms ‘social nationalism’ to ‘national socialism’. He criticizes the natalist policies of ‘the German National Socialists’ of the 1930s because they encouraged the racially inferior to reproduce. He believes the same ‘mass-oriented’ mistake is occurring today in Ukraine, with birth benefits encouraging Roma, alcoholics, and drug addicts to multiply. Instead of nationwide socialism, Biletsky wants social benefits only for the ‘highest-quality’ representatives of the racially pure. An impressive criticism of Hitler from the right.
— Biletsky criticizes capitalism for its tendency to replace local workers with cheaper foreign migrants. His conception of ‘social nationalism’ includes economic planning and ‘fair distribution of national produce’ in order to ‘preserve and expand the national blood-based community’. This interventionist economic program is opposed to the liberalism of the west Ukrainian nationalists, who idolize the free market above all (hence the name ‘Svoboda’ - freedom).
— Biletsky is strongly opposed to race-mixing, and believes that the ‘Ukrainian racial type’ has existed ‘for at least 40,000 years’. It is race, not language, religion, or economy, which is ‘the foundation upon which the superstructure of national culture grows’. Criticizing the ‘mentally retarded liberal nationalists’ of west Ukraine obsessed with ‘linguistic nationalism’, Biletsky brings up the example of English-speaking IRA fighters. Though the article was published in Ukrainian, Biletsky and his Azov movement are known to use Russian amongst one another.
— Both Kravchenko and Biletsky are highly opposed to egalitarianism. Kravchenko proposes a complex system whereby each citizen’s voting power depends on their qualifications, professional position, real estate ownership, tax payments, military experience, political consciousness, and a great deal more. Biletsky was also already characterizing his program using the term ‘Natiocracy’ in 2010. Both authors, despite the decade separating them, are fixated on how democracy leads to ‘irresponsibility’. Biletsky is particularly concerned with the impossibility of long-term economic, military and political planning under a democratic state.
So, first of all, Mykola Kravchenko. Here’s how the official Third Corps telegram described him to their 300,000 subscribers in May 2025.
By the way, the battle on Rymarskaya street in Kharkov, March 14-15 2014, refers to the first murders of the civil war. Then, Biletsky and his fellow ‘Patriots’ killed two ‘pro-Russian separatists’. I actually mentioned this event in my article on the Azov-aligned ‘Misanthropic Division’, which triumphantly posted about its involvement at the time.
Now, onto how the ‘chief ideologist of modern Ukrainian nationalists’ explained Azov’s political platform:
NATIOCRACY 2.0:
WHAT THE POLITICAL SYSTEM
SHOULD BE LIKE IN THE 21ST CENTURY
MYKOLA KRAVCHENKOThe term “Natiocracy,” introduced by Mykola Stsiborskyi in 1935, openly frightens most modern Ukrainian citizens. Likewise, most people are frightened by responsibility.
But fear doesn’t make responsibility any lighter — it must still be taken on. Today, all citizens bear responsibility at the national level, since everyone has the ability to influence the government through their vote. And it’s not worth claiming that opportunities are unequal.
Opportunities can never be equal by nature. Some people are smarter, others are more foolish; some are more experienced, others childishly naive. This is neither good nor bad — it is an objective reality. The smarter and more experienced are always fewer in number, which means that under democratic conditions, the influence of the foolish and shortsighted is several times stronger.Universal suffrage, which grants an equal right to vote to absolutely everyone, has led to two main problems of the modern political regime:
