Alexiey Shiropayev’s Prison of the Nation:
An Ethnonationalist History of Russia, Part 4

1,919 words

Part 4 of 4

Prison of the Nation does not cover Vladimir Putin’s era, but Shiropayev has criticized it in depth in his other writings. He considers Putin’s regime “Orthodox neo-Stalinism”: a mix of the worst elements of the Byzantine and the Bolshevik phases of the Project. It is a rule of commissars blessed by Orthodox clergy who are expanding the Empire at the cost of the white population of Russia, while promoting civic patriotism, race-mixing, alcoholism, and mysticism, since God-fearing (or rather: priest-fearing) drunk patriotards will never rebel against their overlords.

And once again it is the “other races” who are the true beneficiaries of the Eurasian Project: the Russian population pays the bills for all non-European provinces, where the local despots are bribed into obedience by Moscow. It is especially Asian Muslims who have the last word in Russia. The Kremlin adapts its policies to their demands. They constitute the core of the army, where they dictate their conditions to the Russian soldiers and officers. They constitute the majority of Russia’s illegal workforce. Worst of all, the Chechen mafia runs the major cities of the Russian Federation.

Throughout Prison of the Nation, Shiropayev pays most attention to two events that he considers the turning points of Russian history. The first is the early Medieval period: Christianization and the Mongol invasion (the Tatar yoke). For him, this is the foundation of the evil Russian state, the construction of the nation’s prison on two pillars: Christian, Byzantine imperialism and non-Christian, Asiatic despotism. The other turning point is the Bolshevik revolution: the outright, explicit, full-blown genocide of the Slavic population. However, right after this disaster came one of the biggest historical opportunities for the Russian people: the German invasion of Soviet Union. Unfortunately, this opportunity for the liberation of Rus’ — and the total extermination of their persecutors — was drowned in blood by Stalin.

Shiropayev criticizes the so-called “Russian soul,” also known as the “Slavic soul.” This is the mythical inner life of a Russian, who is ideally a sentimental fatalist, who welcomes everyone with open arms but retaliates fiercely if betrayed, who wanders around the vast Russian lands searching for a lost love, and who considers human issues petty in comparison to the greatness of god. Shiropayev regards these not as natural, in-born qualities of a true Russian, but as spiritual and cultural distortions imposed from the Orient. The true Russian is a Rus’: a Nordic-Slavic Aryan, who is disciplined, freedom-loving, and a Faustian rather than fatalistic — just like the Swedes, Danes, or Germans.

The fatalist “Slavic soul” is both a reaction of the Russian people to slavery which helped them endure without risking their lives in rebellion, and an ideal cherished, encouraged, and imposed by the Mongol-Byzantine-Jewish-Communist overlords of the Eurasian Project. The “Slavic soul” is in reality a “slavish soul.” It is the daydreaming of an Aryan man forced into slavery, crippling labor, and life under humiliating conditions, whose ancestors have been exterminated by an ethnically alien elite, and who is unwilling to face reality and rebel against his masters.

Another Russian phenomenon that Shiropayev condemns is civic patriotism of the “Russian World” (“Russkiy Mir”). This patriotism means identification with the Russian state, be it tsarist, communist, or democratic — merely the successive phases of the Eurasian Project — and with the Russian language, regardless of the race or ethnicity of the person who speaks it. The role of ideology in the Project is quite tricky, as the Project chooses different ideologies depending on the needs of the moment: first it was Christianity, then Communism, now it is a blend of post-Soviet communism-friendly autocratic Orthodoxy.

This patriotism has a clear universalist aspect: if a person of any ethnicity can learn Russian, change his confession to the Orthodox or Communist faith, accept the Russian way of life, and become a citizen of Russian Federation (just as anyone can learn English, accept the American way of life, and become a citizen of the United States), then the Eurasian Project has no national or geographical boundaries — just as the American project has no such limits. If the Rus’, Ugro-Finns, Mongols, Tatars, Buryats, Chechenyans, Circassians, and Jews can become good Russians today, why can’t other nations (especially those in the “Russian sphere of influence”) follow this path? Many of these nations have already been expected to become Russians. This was the fate of Ukrainians, Belorussians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Fins, Poles, Georgians, Armenians, Tajiks, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, even some Germans, Slovaks, or Czechs. And as we can see from the current policies of Putin’s regime, peoples that bear a mark of the Russian language are considered future subjects of the Eurasian Empire. Thus, civic nationalism is a tool of universalist imperialism.

Shiropayev’s work is blasphemy against the myth of the great patriotic war which is the Soviet/Russian civil religion. His book must be viewed in this context. It is supposed to shock the Russian reader, to invert everything he has been taught in history class or Soviet war movies. Shiropayev’s aim is to brutally awaken Russians and call them to reject their false identity (the one invented and enforced by the Project) and re-discover their true identity: to go back from Russia to Rus’.

Shiropayev mocks and despises Russian hatred of the “decadent West” as well as messianic propaganda about the “Third Rome” that will “gather” all Orthodox lands under the leadership of the Moscow Patriarchy. He considers this another lie of the Project, aimed at installing false pride in its slaves and turning them against their possible liberators. He points to the facts: in matters of abortion, alcoholism, divorce, etc. the West has never been as “decadent” as the East. On the other hand, the West has always been successful in terms of civilizational development, and Russians were tricked by their masters into mocking it.

Generally, Prison of the Nation is an inspiring, informative, and nicely written book. Shiropayev’s style is very engaging, very Russian, and very witty. There is a lot of irony and dark humor, and some of his neologisms are great, such as calling the Orthodox Communist collaborators “hierochekists.” However, the book demands some critique.

First of all, Shirpoayev uses many wrong sources to draw right conclusions. He often cites conspirological or “esoteric” literature. This is very popular among Russian writers, and it is an awful tendency. However, Shiropayev draws very lucid conclusions from this rather absurd material.

Second, although race matters, race does not explain everything in history. On the other hand, there have been many economic, social, cultural, etc. analyses of Russia, so one focusing entirely on race was more than needed. However, Shiropayev sometimes goes too far. For instance, it is very probable that Rurik himself was of mixed origin, as Finns mixed rather a lot with the Vikings. Also, Shiropayev treats Ugro-Finns inhabiting Russia rather harshly while at the same time portraying Finland in a positive way. Also, I don’t believe that there were any “racial” laws among the Indo-Europeans, and it seems that they focused more on culture than blood. This was probably a mistake, as can be attested by the fate of Tocharians or Scythians who disappeared in the vast sea of other peoples.

I also believe that there is an esoteric and metaphysical aspect of history, but Shiropayev sometimes goes too far.

I was also shocked by his positive portrayal of Bronislav Kaminski, who is a dark character in Polish history. The man displayed such levels of cruelty and inhumanity during the pacification of the Warsaw Uprising that the Germans themselves shot him.

I think that Shiropayev whitewashes Hitler and his Eastern policies. I am much closer to the position of Degrelle, Manstein, J. F. C. Fuller, and many others, who believed that it was the cruel treatment of the local populations and lack of will to actually liberate the nations of the USSR that caused Barbarossa to fail.

After publishing Prison of the Nation, Shiropayev has drifted more and more towards the liberal worldview and lately has stated that he is no longer a nationalist and that it was just a phase of his personal development. He is now a “complete liberal.” In his defense, he did not apologize for his previous statements; he is not an opponent of Russian nationalism. However, he is clearly disappointed with Russian nationalists, many of whom are tsarist sentimentalists, lovers of despotism, and even admirers of Ramzan Kadyrov, who is currently the embodiment of all the worst anti-Russian tendencies of the Eurasian Project.

Nevertheless, the ideas presented in Prison of the Nation are still alive, even though Shiropayev no longer stands for them. There is a whole new generation of Russian nationalists, who reject all the faces of the Project, are free of the vices of civic nationalism, Christianity, and Asiatic despotism and slavishness. They not only believe in Shiropayev’s ideas, they actually live them. They prefer physical fitness and a straight-edge lifestyle to alcohol. They identify with the Nordic traditions of Europe, create their own communities and counter-culture, and in many cases actively fight Putin’s phase of the Project, both on the home-front, as well as on the battlefields of Eastern Ukraine.

There is an old Polish joke (a real Polish joke, not a joke at the expense of Poles) according to which the difference between communism and capitalism is that capitalism is the exploitation man by his fellow man, and communism is the exact reverse. For those who don’t get Polish humor: it is apparently the opposite but in essence the exact same thing. And it is similar in the case of the United States and Russia.

The United States is a multiracial empire, ruled by the alien and alienated, which aims at using the white population to expand its power while exploiting them and promoting non-white minorities and race mixing, aggressively exporting this system to other countries, while infiltrating, ridiculing, silencing, and jailing nationalists at home.

Russia is also a multiracial empire, ruled by the alien and alienated, which aims at using the white population to expand its power while exploiting them and promoting non-white minorities and race mixing, aggressively exporting this system to other countries, while infiltrating, ridiculing, silencing, and jailing nationalists at home. The sooner nationalists in Europe, the Americas, and Australia understand it, the better for our race.

The last crucial question is of course: what is the alternative to this prison of the nation? What do Shiropayev and other ethnonationalists in Russia propose as an alternative to the Moscow-run oligarchical “Orthodox neo-Stalinism”? The answer is simple: break up the Russian empire into independent, ethnically homogeneous states.

Bear in mind that if such a scenario happened, the European Rus’ would still be the largest European country. And Rus’ would not be the only white country created in such a scenario, as it is possible for Karelia, Kalinigrad Oblast, or mostly white Siberia to become independent states. In such a case, removal of non-white immigrants to their original homelands would be far more feasible than in a gigantic multicultural empire.

The other option is creating a real federation of autonomous republics.

And if none of these large scale scenarios are possible, the answer is simply the secession of Rus’ from the imperialist pseudo-federation, leaving the multi-ethnic Asiatic despotism to its fate.

Thus, it is quite clear that future scenarios for the Russian Empire as formulated by Russian white nationalists are similar to the scenarios for the American Empire formulated by American white nationalists. And this is a very good starting point for future collaborations.