Knife club: antifa/fa
My nazbol and Afghan veteran friend. Stick-fighting. O9A novella. Ritual murders in Hyperborea.
Today I’ll be telling two stories involving knives. A popular pastime in the post-soviet world.
First, my escapades in an antifa knife (read: stick) fighting club, Kyiv, 2021.
Second, the decidedly darker story of Kiss of Marena, a Russian novella about a fascist knife-fighting club. This 2013 tale, translated in 2015 by the FBI-funded nazi satanist ‘Martinet Press’, is all about the mystical transcendence to be reached through serial murder. My analysis of the novel will delve into its Order of the Nine Angles (O9A) ideology and the violent misanthropy uniting post-soviet liberals and neo-nazis against the ‘bio-waste’ masses, who are to be ‘culled’. Finally, I will meditate on the role such literature plays in sparking the current wave of mass shootings and other nihilist acts of mass violence.
For those not in the loop, I’ve actually written cursorily about this novella before. As I wrote here, one of those involved in the satanist collective that originally wrote the Kiss of Marena is Kirill Kanakhin. Kanakhin is a failed Russian actor turned neo-nazi who is currently one of the leaders of the Ukrainian military unit ‘the Russian Volunteer Corps’ (RDK). And the RDK is the brainchild of the west’s favorite Ukrainian spook, head of military intelligence Kirill Budanov. I’ll soon put out a piece on Kanakhin’s own bizarre life.
But now, onto the knives.
Old friends
After 2014, the number of people openly professing anti-fascist views in Ukraine fell to the dozens. Those remaining were prone to finding a knife stuck between their ribs by ‘unknown patriots’. This had indeed happened to one acquaintance - he’d held up an offensive poster reading ‘budget funds for medicine, not the war’.
Those remaining hence thought it might not be a bad idea to ape the fascists somewhat in their obsession for knife training. Enter my friend, who I’ll call Nikita. In his 40s when I met him, he’d been a national bolshevik in his youth. A native of western Ukraine, I’ll have the reader know.
In any case, he told me that the nazbol cells in Ukraine at that time were more anarchist than anything else. Indeed, in the mid-2000s the Russian nazbols (there was one party for the whole post-soviet world, naturally) were essentially the most potent street protest party. Unlike the toothless liberals, they were filled with revolutionary youth from lower-middle class backgrounds.
Anyway, based on Nikita’s stories, being a nazbol then meant starting up a punk band and shuttling from town to town with fellow nazbols in abandoned apartments, putting on red armbands, getting in brawls at protests, and, most importantly, distributing copies of the nazbol newspaper ‘Limonka’.
The name referred to both a grenade and the surname of the founder of the nazbol party, novelist Eduard Limonov. The subtitle of each edition - ‘the newspaper of direct action’. This first issue featured an article from Alexandr Dugin, another one of the founders (though he and Limonov would soon have an epic fallout), called ‘The New Against the Old’, and an editorial piece ‘Regarding the Newborn Grenade’.
Nikita’s cell also took part in performance art-style ‘actions’. One of them involved rearranging the imitation bones at the newly opened Holodomor museum to read ‘Glory to Stalin’. The nazbols were what one might get by mixing Marina Abramovich with a 1966 troupe of Beijing Red Guards. They revolted against everything that was staid, bourgeois, and corrupt.
Dugin tried to inject his heavy Heideggerianisms into the mix, but his early departure shows how foreign his occult academicism was to the youthful movement. In the 2000s, Limonov and many nazbols would be imprisoned for years in Russia, with Limonka officially banned in 2007. Dugin, on the other hand, became a court sage.
But back to the young Nikita. He was a loyal soldier to the nazbol cause. And newspapers were among the most important weapons - each one was literally explosive.
Nikita first fell in love with the nazbol movement as a high schooler in the 90s. It was then that he first read Limonka, inspiring him to write his own revolutionary poems, songs, and polemics, which he handed out at his school.
Nikita told me proudly of how he, as the ‘commissar’ of his nazbol cell, would wait at the train station to receive the latest batch of Limonka magazines from Russia. Nationalists and anarchists were also there, possibly waiting for their own shipments. Nikita would fearlessly agitate among them, extolling the revolutionary virtues of the nazbol creed.
Those times, needless to say, were long gone. Nikita didn’t call himself a nazbol anymore. But he was, forgive me for saying this, the most punk person I’ve ever met in my life. I think about him just about every day. Obviously, this isn’t his real name.
He didn’t always think before he spoke. I met him when I tried to help out in a construction unionizing campaign, where we journeyed across the city trying to convince skeptical crane operators on the benefits of collective agreements. He ended up losing that position for arguing with the indifferent union bosses. He moved from job to job, his last position at a bottle factory.
In more than one sense, he was always true to his youthful principles. When I knew him, he was hard at work on a novel in the style of his beloved Eduard Limonov. And just like another temporary leader of the nazbol party, Egor Letov, Nikita also remained an avid musician.
If my readers haven’t, I strongly urge you to listen to all the Egor Letov there is on youtube. He is just as beloved as Viktor Tsoi in the post-soviet world, and probably inspires even more obsessed fans.
Anyway, one day Nikita told me to come to a large park in Kiev. The parks in that city are truly expansive, filled with dense forests, hills, valleys, hidden catacombs, lakes, creeks, and home-made workout equipment.
Nikita took me to a site with just such tools - wooden pullup bars, weights made out of old tires and chunks of concrete, ‘boxing bags’ that would reduce one’s bare hands to pulp.
There, we met with our instructor - Nikita’s old friend, who I’ll call Georgiy (to tell the truth, I’ve forgotten his real name as well). Georgiy taught me how to set up one’s body while delivering a punch. A strong, stout man with short, military-style hair and khaki shorts.
He was also a veteran of the Afghan war. After the Soviet Union exited the stage, he didn’t stop fighting. On the contrary, he became a private military contractor, vending his skills around the world.
