Alexey Dobrovolsky

Alexey Aleksandrovich Dobrovolsky
Алексей Александрович Добровольский
Against the background of the military flag of Nazi Germany
Born	(1938-10-13)13 October 1938 Moscow
Died	19 May 2013(2013-05-19) (aged 74) Vesenevo, Kirov Oblast, Russia
Other names	Dobroslav
Citizenship	Soviet
Occupation	Soviet dissident, one of the founders of Russian Rodnoverie, author of the concept of "Kolovrat" in relation to the swastika
Political party	National Alliance of Russian Solidarists, Pamyat
Movement	Slavic neopaganism, Nazism, social anarchism, antisemitism

Alexey Aleksandrovich Dobrovolsky (also known as Dobroslav; October 13, 1938, Moscow - May 19, 2013, Vesenevo, Kirov Oblast) was a Soviet-Russian ideologue of Slavic neopaganism (Rodnoverie) (since the 1980s), one of the founders of Russian Rodnoverie,^[1][2] national anarchist, national socialist, and volkhv of the Nature Conservation Society "Strely Yarily". Dobrovolsky was the author of the self-published article “Arrows of Yarila” for neopagans. In the 1950s-1960s, he was a member of the dissident movement of the USSR and a member of the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (NTS).

Biography[]

Dobrovolsky had secondary education and incomplete education at the Moscow Institute of Culture.^[1] He grew up in admiration for Stalin and everything that was associated with him.^[3] From an early age, he participated in various dissident movements.^[1]

After graduating from high school, he went to work as a loader in the printing house of the newspaper "Moskovskaya Pravda".

In 1956, he left the Komsomol in protest against the campaign that had begun in the country to overcome the consequences of Joseph Stalin's cult of personality. According to him, “From the exposure of Stalin, I drew the wrong conclusions and gradually became an enemy of Soviet Power."^[3]

In December 1956, under the influence of the Hungarian Revolution, he formed the Russian National Socialist Party from the young workers of the defense factories in Moscow, aiming to overthrow the communists and "revive the Russian nation".^[1] The group members were mainly involved in distributing leaflets with anti-Soviet and anti-communist slogans.

On May 23, 1958, he was arrested along with his associates from the RNSP and subsequently sentenced to three years in prison. In custody, he became friends with former collaborators, Nazis, associates of Krasnov, Shkuro, and Vlasov, and members of the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists. Under their influence in the camp in 1958–1961, he was a monarchist. While serving time in Dubravnye camps (Mordovia), Dobrovolsky met S. R. Arseniev-Hoffman, who in the pre-war years was a member of the secret Russian-German society.Shnirelman 2015

He was released in 1961. In the same year, he was baptized by the dissident priest Gleb Yakunin.^[1]

In 1964 he joined the so-called "Union of the Working People" created by Boris Evdokimov, a member of the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists. In March 1964, thanks to a provocateur,^[1] all four members were arrested. Dobrovolsky and Evdokimov were declared mentally abnormal, and Dobrovolsky underwent psychiatric treatment for a year. At the hospital, he met dissidents Vladimir Bukovsky and General Petro Grigorenko.

On August 25, 1965, he was released from a special psychiatric hospital. In the autumn, the NTS established a connection with him, which through him transferred the duplicating apparatus to the dissident poet Yuri Galanskov, a member of the NTS. In 1966, Dobrovolsky joined the NTS. Through him, Alexander Ginzburg's "White Book" (a collection of documents about the trial of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel) and a collection of "Phoenix-66" were transferred to the West.

In 1967 he was arrested again. At the trial, the "Trial of the Four", he testified against himself and his comrades, thanks to which he was sentenced to only two years (while Galanskov received seven years and died in the camp, and Ginzburg was sentenced to five years). wrote in his memoirs: “The most sensational news was the news of the surrender of Alexey Dobrovolsky. For a long time, no one wanted to believe this. Dobrovolsky, with his manners - either a white officer or a hero of the People's Will - managed to inspire universal confidence in himself."^[4]

In January 1968, Pyotr Yakir, Yuliy Kim, and Ilya Gabay, calling Dobrovolsky in their address "To the workers of science, culture, art" "mean and cowardly", said:^[5]

The life of Alexey Dobrovolsky, who played an ominous role in this process, was also crippled. If he has even an ounce of conscience, thirty pieces of silver (a total of two years in prison) is too little compensation for the contempt and rejection that awaits this slanderer. The stigma of a scoundrel who killed his comrades, who slandered them out of base interests, our punitive bodies are to a large extent responsible for this moral deformity of Dobrovolsky.

In early 1969, Dobrovolsky was released. He lived in Uglich and Alexandrov.

In 1986 he left Moscow for Pushchino, where he was engaged in folk healing.^[1]

With the beginning of Perestroika, in the second half of the 1980s, he joined the patriotic association "Pamyat". Having disagreed with the leader of the association, Dmitry Vasiliev, when Orthodox sentiments prevailed in the association, at the end of 1987, he moved with a group of followers of neopaganism to the World Anti-Zionist and Anti-Masonic Front "Pamyat", which was headed by .^[1]

In 1989 he took part in the creation of the "Moscow Slavic pagan community", which was headed by Alexander Belov ("Selidor"). He took the pagan name "Dobroslav". At this time, he actively delivered lectures organized by , leader of the union for national proportional representation "Pamyat". Dobroslav took an active part in the rallies of national patriots. In 1990 he collaborated with the Russian Party of Viktor Korchagin.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, he retired to the village of Vesenevo, , Shabalinsky District, Kirov Oblast, from where he conducted "educational" work: he performed the naming ceremony, organized "pagan" holidays. During the latter, there was often an abundant use of alcohol and demonstrative destruction of icons.^[6] In Vesenevo, Dobroslav founded a pagan community mainly from his family members. One of his sons, Alexander, received the pagan name Vyatich. In 1993–1995, Dobroslav gave "educational lectures" in Kirov at the House of Political Education.

In 1994, he tried to create a political organization, the Russian National Liberation Movement (RNOD), the idea of which later his student A. M. Aratov also tried unsuccessfully to implement. On June 22, 1997, Dobroslav convened the Veche - Unification Congress of Pagan Communities, proclaiming him the leader of the Russian Liberation Movement. Later he came into conflict with the publishers of , who had previously actively disseminated his ideas. Aratov expelled Dobroslav's son Sergei from the editorial board of Russkaya Pravda "for drunkenness."

The cultural-historical society Strely Yarily, created by Dobroslav's followers, collapsed in the early 2000s since the individualist Dobroslav could no longer lead it.

In March 2001, Sergei (Rodostav) was elected head of the Shabalinsky district administration. In the early 2000s, Dobroslav concentrated on the development of a pagan worldview. He came to Moscow several times to give lectures.

On April 23, 2001, the Shabalinsky District Court considered the case of Dobroslav, accused of inciting anti-Semitism and religious hatred. The local communist newspaper Kirovskaya Pravda stood up for Dobroslav. On March 1, 2002, this case was considered in the Svechinsky District Court of the city of Kirov, where Dobroslav was sentenced to two years of suspended imprisonment.

In March, May, and July 2005, some of Dobroslav's brochures were declared extremist by various district courts of the city of Kirov. In 2007, these brochures were included in the Federal List of Extremist Literature, compiled by the Federal Registration Service (No. 6-10).^[1]

Ideas[]

According to Dobrovolsky himself and people who knew him, Nazi ideas, coupled with symbolism and "great style", made a deep impression on him in the 1960s. He began to dream of the complete extermination of the Jews. Dobrovolsky's new friends, Nazis and collaborators, convinced him that the Americans allegedly built gas chambers themselves to accuse the Nazis of genocide. From S. R. Arsenyev-Hoffman, Dobrovolsky got the first knowledge about the "faith of the ancestors" and the role of the "Nordic race". Later, in 1969, having bought a library of rare books, he became interested in paganism and the occult and became a supporter of the esoteric ideas of Helena Blavatsky.

Dobroslav represented the "national socialist" wing in neopaganism and enjoyed great prestige among the national patriots.^[1] He was proud that he did not have a higher education because "education cripples a person" (Hitler also believed). In his opinion, science is currently at an impasse and "only misfortunes from it." Dobroslav called himself and his followers bearers of light and "healthy forces of the nation".^[7]

Dobroslav declared himself a supporter of "pagan socialism". He deduced "Russian spirituality" directly from "Slavic heredity", closely related to his native soil. He took "blood and soil" literally. So, in his opinion, some powerful material force emanates from the graves of the ancestors, influencing the fate of the living. As a supporter of National Socialism ("pagan socialism"), he considered the highest value not to specific Slavs or Russians, but the Russian community. In the pre-Christian period, the Slavs allegedly did not have squads separated from the people. Dobroslav traced his concept to “Russian natural peasant socialism,” which reportedly included complete social equality, equalization, division of property, voluntary self-restraint, and did not recognize the right to private property.

Borrowing the idea of vegetarianism from esoteric teachings, he believed that for the first time the harmonious relationship between man and animals was undermined by the introduction of animal husbandry. In the domestication of animals, he blamed the "Semito-Hamites" who came from Atlantis and invented bloody sacrifices. He considered Jews to be a qualitatively different civilization, experiencing absolute hostility to Nature, in contrast to all "indigenous peoples" of the world. In the Bible, Nature is supposedly portrayed not as a “nursing mother” but as an insensitive material shell. He called the Jews parasites and fully justified the Jewish pogroms as "forced people's self-defense."

Dobroslav considered the "Jewish Christian alienation from Nature" and "the church's justification of social inequality" unacceptable. He wrote about the "unnatural mixing of races" and accused "international Jewish Christianity" of this crime. He viewed the Slavs as a unique race suffering from racial oppression by the "chosen people". Following the attitudes of the German Nazis, Dobroslav opposed "two mutually exclusive worldviews: solar life-affirmation and pernicious obscurantism." He replaced "Aryans" and "Semites" with Slavs and hybrid "Jewish Christians": the former are honest and sincere, the latter are cunning and insidious. At the same time, he borrowed the idea of the "Synagogue of Satan" from Christian antisemitism, associating with it a pentagram, or five-pointed star, which is supposedly a symbol of evil and Freemasonry. The pagan Slavs were peace-loving, and only Prince Vladimir allegedly introduced the custom of human sacrifice, and Christians are distinguished by their bloodthirstiness. Dobroslav saw its roots in “biblical punitive wars against the indigenous peoples of Palestine”. He argued that "the misanthropic racism of the 'chosen' Jews served as a model for Christian racism - for the extermination of entire indigenous peoples." Monotheism, according to Dobroslav, contributed to the consolidation of princely and royal power and ultimately led to serfdom. In his opinion, the civil war, which split the people into nobles and commoners, began not in 1918, but in 988. According to Dobroslav, the church committed a terrible betrayal of national interests by allying with the Tatars, which supposedly helped strengthen the church. He denied the patriotic activities of Sergius of Radonezh and tried to prove that the Russians defeated Mamai not with the church's support, but in spite of it.

Capitalism, according to Dobroslav, is "a monstrous product of Jewish Christianity", "Western plutocracy, which is the result of the internal development of Jewish Christianity": "Capitalism and conscience are incompatible." For this reason, the modern industrial society has brought the world to the brink of ecological catastrophe, and Nature will take cruel revenge for this. Like the Nazis, Dobroslav believed that the townspeople had betrayed their national values and became bourgeois. However, unlike the Nazis, he saw the 1917 revolution as a village revolt against the city and "Russian truth against Jewish-Christian falsehood". He called Bolshevism "the element of the Russian soul" and opposed to Marxism. Declaring the 1917 revolution "an attempt to return to its natural independent path," Dobroslav revived such concepts as National Bolshevism and Eurasianism, which were popular in the 1920s among some white Russian émigrés. Dobroslav called for an alliance of nationalists and "patriotic communists" in the name of building "Russian national socialism."

Dobroslav saw salvation for the Slavs in "a return to the very core of a light pagan worldview - to the highly moral attitudes of the ancients, primarily in relation to Mother Nature." Dobroslav declared an uncompromising war on the "Jewish yoke" and prophesied an imminent Russian revolt against it. He wrote that the Yarilo-Sun would soon burn the most sensitive to ultraviolet radiation, a trait which he attributed primarily to the Jews. The death of the "Judeo-Christian" world, in his opinion, will mark the beginning of "our new era." Only "new people", sun worshipers, will be able to survive.

Eight-ray "Kolovrat", the name and meaning of which was introduced by Dobroslav

In the early 1990s, Dobroslav became the first to call the four-pointed swastika "Kolovrat", and later transferred this name to the eight-pointed rectangular swastika that he introduced. According to the historian and religious scholar R. V. Shizhensky, Dobroslav took the idea of the swastika from the work of the Nazi ideologist Herman Wirth, the first leader of the Ahnenerbe.^[8] The eight-ray "Kolovrat", supposedly a pagan sign of the Sun, consisting of two superimposed swastikas, Dobroslav declared the symbol of an uncompromising "national liberation struggle" against the "Jewish yoke". According to Dobroslav, the meaning of "Kolovrat" entirely coincides with the meaning of the Nazi swastika.^[1]

Influence[]

Dobroslav's ideas had a significant impact on the Russian native faith. Most of his ideas have become commonplaces for variations of this teaching. Many of these ideas, created earlier by neopagans, became known to the next generation through Dobroslav, including the understanding of the tribal system as "Aryan" socialism (National Socialism); opposition of Slavs and "Jewish Christians", antisemitic ideas, including the introduction by Jews of bloody sacrifices, anti-natural activities and "racism" of the Old Testament and modern Jews; the treacherous activity of Prince Vladimir in the introduction of Christianity; the imminent onset of a new age (the Age of Aquarius), favorable for the Slavs and destructive for their enemies.

Dobroslav introduced the term and meaning of the eight-pointed "Kolovrat", the most famous symbol of Rodnoverie. Dobroslav's idea of an alliance of nationalists and “patriotic communists” became the basis for the desire of a part of neopagans for an alliance with “nationally oriented” communists.

Dobroslav's follower, A. M. Aratov, director of the publishing house, wrote about the onset of the Era of Russia and the imminent end of Christianity and Judaism.^[1]

References[]

Literature[]

• Shnirelman, Viktor (2015). Aryan myth in the modern world. New literary review. ISBN 9785444804223.
• Kaminskaya, Dina (2009). Lawyer's Notes (PDF). M.: New publishing house. (Free man). pp. 315–412.
• Krasnov-Levitin, Anatoly (1981). Native space: Democrat. movement: Memories. Part 4. Frankfurt: Sowing. pp. 114–115.
• Gabay, Ilya; Kim, Yuliy; Yakir, Pyotr (1968). To workers of science, culture, art.
• Buldakova (2000). "Dobroslav, Svetobor, Lubomir, Tverdolik... Neopagans at the crossroads of centuries". Binoculars. Vyatka Cultural Journal (7).
• Shnirelman, Viktor (2012). Russian Rodnoverie: Neopaganism and Nationalism in Modern Russia. M.: . p. xiv + 302. ISBN 978-5-89647-291-9.

Links[]

• Shizhensky, Roman Vitalievich (2021). "Neopaganism and the middle class". Lecture hall "Krapivensky 4". 03/02/2021.
• Shizhensky, Roman Vitalievich (2012a). "The experience of a comparative analysis of the texts of A. A. Dobrovolsky and H. F. Wirth (on the issue of the source base of Russian neopagans)". Archived from the original on 2016-05-08.