Alexey Dobrovolsky

Alexey Alexandrovich Dobrovolsky
Алексей Александрович Добровольский
Alexey performing a Nazi salute against the background of the military flag of Nazi Germany
Born	(1938-10-13)13 October 1938 Moscow, Soviet Union
Died	19 May 2013(2013-05-19) (aged 74) Vasenyovo, Kirov Oblast, Russia
Other names	Dobroslav (Russian: Доброслав)
Citizenship	Soviet, Russian
Occupation(s)	Soviet dissident, a founder of Russian Rodnoverie
Political party	National Alliance of Russian Solidarists, Pamyat
Movement	Slavic neopaganism, neo-Nazism, national anarchism, antisemitism

Alexey Alexandrovich Dobrovolsky (Russian: Алексей Александрович Добровольский; 13 October 1938 – 19 May 2013), also known as Dobroslav (Russian: Доброслав), was a Soviet-Russian ideologue of Slavic neopaganism, a founder of Russian Rodnoverie,^[1][2] national anarchist, and neo-Nazi.^[3]

Dobrovolsky termed his ideology "Russian National Socialism". He was the spiritual leader of the radical wing of Russian neopaganism^[3] and is characterized as an ideologue of Slavic national socialism.^[4] In the 1950s–1960s, he was a member of the dissident movement of the USSR and the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (NTS).^[1]

Dobrovolsky's father was a descendant of Zaporozhian Cossacks and studied at the Bauman Moscow State Technical University, and his mother was a native Muscovite and an engineer-economist.^[2]

Dobrovolsky grew up admiring Stalin and everything that was associated with him.^[5] From an early age, he participated in various dissident movements.^[1] After finishing secondary education, he attended the Moscow Institute of Culture but did not finish studies. He worked as a loader in the printing house of the Moskovskaya Pravda newspaper.^[1]

In 1956, Dobrovolsky left the Komsomol in protest against de-Stalinization. He says, “From the exposure of Stalin, I drew the wrong conclusions and gradually became an enemy of Soviet power."^[5] In December, influenced by the Hungarian Revolution, he formed the Russian National Socialist Party (RNSP) with young workers of Moscow's defense plants, aiming to overthrow the communists and "revive the Russian nation". The group's members were mainly engaged in distributing leaflets with anti-Soviet and anti-communist appeals.^[1]

On 23 May 1958, Dobrovolsky was arrested along with his RNSP associates and subsequently sentenced to three years in prison. In prison, he became friends with former collaborators, Nazis, associates of Pyotr Krasnov, Andrei Shkuro, and Andrey Vlasov, and members of the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (NTS). Influenced by them, he became a monarchist while in a labor camp between 1958 and 1961. While serving his sentence in the Dubravny camps (Mordovia), he met S. R. Arsenyev-Hoffman, who was a member of a secret Russian-German society before the war.^[1]

Dobrovolsky was released in 1961. That same year, he was baptized by the dissident priest Gleb Yakunin.^[1] In 1964, he joined the Union of the Working People, an organization created by Boris Yevdokimov, a member of the NTS. In March, all four members were arrested because of a provocateur.^[1] Dobrovolsky and Yevdokimov were declared mentally ill, and Dobrovolsky underwent psychiatric treatment for a year. In the special psychiatric hospital, he met dissidents Vladimir Bukovsky and General Petro Grigorenko.

On 25 August 1965, Dobrovolsky was released from the hospital, and in autumn, the NTS established contact with him, passing through him a duplicating machine to the dissident poet and NTS member Yuri Galanskov. 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 the collection Phoenix-66 were passed on to the West.

In 1967, Dobrovolsky was arrested again. At the trial, known as the Trial of the Four, he testified against himself and his comrades, thankts to which he was sentenced to only two years in prison (while Galanskov received seven years and died in prison, and Ginzburg was sentenced to five years). Anatoly Krasnov-Levitin wrote in his memoirs: “The most sensational news was Alexey Dobrovolsky's capitulation. For a long time, no one wanted to believe it. Dobrovolsky, with his mannerisms - either a white officer or a hero of the people's will - managed to inspire universal confidence in himself."^[6]

In January 1968, Pyotr Yakir, Yuliy Kim, and Ilya Gabay, calling Dobrovolsky "mean and cowardly" in their address To the workers of science, culture, art, wrote:^[7]

The life of Alexey Dobrovolsky, who played an ominous Kostomarov-like role in this trial, is also tarnished. If he has even a shred of conscience, thirty pieces of silver (a total of two years of punishment) is too little compensation for the contempt and rejection that await this slanderer. The stigma of a scoundrel who ruined his comrades, slandering them out of base interests; our punitive organs bear a large measure of responsibility for this moral deformity of Dobrovolsky.

In early 1969, Dobrovolsky was released. He lived in Uglich and Alexandrov. In 1972 he again received a residence permit in Moscow. At this time, he became interested in occultism and Slavic paganism.

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

In the second half of the 1980s, with the onset of Perestroika, he joined the patriotic association Pamyat. Dobrovolsky was involved in a dispute with the leader of the association, Dmitry Vasilyev. At the end of 1987, when Orthodox sentiments prevailed in the association, he moved with a group of neopagan followers to the Pamyat World Anti-Zionist and Anti-Masonic Front, which was headed by Valery Yemelyanov (Velemir).^[1]

In 1989, Dobrovolsky took part in the creation of the Moscow Slavic Pagan Community, which was headed by Alexander Belov ("Selidor"). He adopted the pagan name Dobroslav. At this time, he actively gave lectures organized by Konstantin Smirnov-Ostashvili, the leader of the Pamyat Union for National Proportional Representation. Dobroslav took an active part in national patriot rallies. In 1990, he collaborated with Viktor Korchagin's Russian Party. In the same year, Belov expelled Yemelyanov and his supporters, including Dobrovolsky, from the Moscow Slavic Pagan Community for political radicalism.^[8]

Since the early 1990s, Dobrovolsky retired to the village of Vasenyovo, Kirov Oblast, where he carried out educational work, performing naming ceremonies and organizing neopagan holidays; during the latter, there was often heavy alcohol consumption and demonstrative destruction of icons.^[9] In Vasenyovo, he founded a pagan community, consisting mainly of members of his family. 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, Dobrovolsky tried to create a political organization, titled the Russian National Liberation Movement (RNOD), an idea that his student A. M. Aratov later also unsuccessfully tried to implement. On 22 June 1997, Dobrovolsky convened the Veche Unification Congress of Pagan Communities, which proclaimed him the leader of the Russian Liberation Movement. Later, he came into conflict with the publishers of Russkaya Pravda, who had previously actively disseminated his ideas. Aratov expelled Dobroslav's son Sergei (Rodostav) from the editorial board of Russkaya Pravda for drunkenness.

In July 1999, Dobrovolsky was elected Supreme Volkhv of the Union of Slavic Native Belief Communities (headed by Vadim Kazakov from Kaluga).^[3][10]

The cultural and historical society Yarilo's Arrows, created by Dobroslav's followers, disintegrated in the early 2000s, since Dobroslav no longer wished to lead it.

In March 2001, Sergei was elected head of the Shabalinsky District Administration. In the early 2000s, Dobroslav concentrated on developing a pagan worldview. He visited Moscow several times to give lectures.

On 23 April 2001, the Shabalinsky District Court heard a case against Dobrovolsky, who was accused of inciting antisemitism and religious hatred. The local communist newspaper Kirovskaya Pravda supported him. On 1 March 2002, this case was heard in the Svechinsky District Court of Kirov, where Dobrovolsky was sentenced to two years of suspended imprisonment.

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

Dobrovolsky died on 19 May 2013. Dobroslav's body was burned on a large bonfire in imitation of the ancient Slavic funeral rite.^[11]

According to Dobrovolsky himself and people who knew him, Nazi ideas, coupled with Nazi symbolism and aesthetics, 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 themselves had allegedly built gas chambers in order to accuse the Nazis of genocide. From S. R. Arsenyev-Hoffman, Dobrovolsky first learned 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.^[12]

The historian and religious scholar Roman Shizhensky identified common, and in some places completely identical, points in the concepts of Dobrovolsky and the Nazi ideologist Hermann Wirth, the first leader of the Ahnenerbe, whose work The Oera Linda Chronicle (1933) Dobrovolsky presumably used as a source. Dobrovolsky's historical and mythological concept contains ideas about time and its attributes similar to Wirth's: in nature and the universe, examples of "revolving spheres" and "a series of ideally coordinated cycles" are abundant. He views the beauty of nature as the beauty of a mature, complete being, which is in eternal rotation. Following Wirth, Dobrovolsky considered the north to be the original habitat of the “Aryans”: “Vague ideas and archaic beliefs about the Northern Homeland have been preserved by many Indo-European peoples… All these legends are genetically linked and go back to a certain single archetype, which as a whole can be conventionally called the "Legend of the Nordic Homeland".”^[13]

Wirth and Dobrovolsky believed that Atlantis and Thule were the names of the same continent or archipelago – in Dobrovolsky’s words, the “ancestral hearth” of the “Aryan” peoples. Wirth and Dobrovolsky associated the mythical golden age with the era of matriarchy. Dobrovolsky viewed women as divinely chosen ones, keepers of ancestral memory: “The Mother was more of a Deity than a superior… all family and social life was built around her. A woman is the head of the clan, the keeper of the hearth, the guardian of clan orders and customs, and the performer of rituals and sacred rites. She is also the heir to the witchcraft knowledge and the mediator with the world of Spirits, for she, as a woman, is genetically endowed with a heightened intuitive susceptibility to occult influences...".^[13]

Like Wirth, Dobrovolsky considered the transfer of power from women to men and the era of patriarchy to be regression. The basis of Dobrovolsky's religious doctrine is the idea of the sun — Yarilo, the most ancient, and perhaps originally the only ancient Slavic deity. In his opinion, the Slavs deified the solar disk itself. The deities who later pushed Yarilo into the background already had an unnatural anthropomorphic appearance: "these are already the gods of the Sun, and not the sun god." The basis of Dobrovolsky's doctrine is solar monotheism or henotheism. This idea of original monotheism corresponds to Wirth's idea of "polar, solar monotheism." Dobrovolsky compiled a calendar of the main holidays associated with the sun: "According to the pagan worldview, the driving force of the rotation of the wheel is Yarilo — the Sun."^[13]

Dobrovolsky represented the "national socialist" wing of Rodnoverie and enjoyed great authority among the national patriots.^[1] He was proud that he did not have a higher education because, like Adolf Hitler, he believed that "education cripples a person".^[1] In his opinion, science is currently at a dead end, and "only brings misfortunes." Dobrovolsky referred to himself and his followers as "bearers of light" and "healthy forces of the nation".^[12]

Dobrovolsky declared himself a supporter of "pagan socialism". He derived "Russian spirituality" directly from the "Slavic heredity", closely connected with the native soil. He interpreted the concept of blood and soil literally, believing that some powerful material force emanates from the graves of the ancestors and influences the fates of the living. As a supporter of national socialism ("pagan socialism"), he placed the most value not on Slavs or Russians as a nation but on the Russian community. He alleged that in the pre-Christian period, the Slavs did not have druzhinas separated from the people. Dobrovolsky traced this concept to "Russian natural peasant socialism", which allegedly included complete social equality, division of property, voluntary self-restraint, and did not recognize the right to private property.^[1]

Having borrowed the idea of vegetarianism from esoteric teachings, Dobrovolsky believed that the harmonious relationship between man and animals was first undermined by the introduction of cattle breeding. He blamed the domestication of animals on the "Semito-Hamites" who came from Atlantis and invented blood sacrifice. He considered the Jews ("Zhyds") to be a qualitatively different civilization, experiencing absolute hostility to nature, unlike all the “native peoples” of the world. In the Bible, nature is allegedly depicted not as a "nurturant mother," but as an insensitive material shell. He called the Jews parasites and fully justified Jewish pogroms as acts of "forced people's self-defense."^[1]

Dobrovolsky considered the "Judeo-Christian alienation from nature" and "the church's justification of social inequality" unacceptable. He wrote about the "unnatural mixing of races" and blamed "international Judeo-Christianity" for this crime. He viewed the Slavs as a special race suffering from racial oppression by "God's chosen people". In accordance with the principles of the German Nazis, he contrasted "two mutually exclusive worldviews: solar life-affirmation and pernicious obscurantism". He replaced "Aryans" and "Semites" with Slavs and hybrid "Judeo-Christians": for him, the former are honest and sincere, while the latter are deceitful and treacherous. At the same time, he borrowed the idea of the "Synagogue of Satan" from Christian antisemitism, associating with it the pentagram, or five-pointed star, which is supposedly a symbol of evil and Freemasonry. Allegedly, the pagan Slavs were peace-loving until Prince Vladimir introduced the custom of human sacrifice, as Christians are distinguished by their bloodthirstiness. Dobrovolsky saw the roots of this bloodthirst in “biblical punitive wars against the indigenous peoples of Palestine.” He claimed that "the misanthropic racism of the "God-chosen" Jews served as a model for Christian racism — for the extermination of entire indigenous peoples".^[1]

According to Dobrovolsky, monotheism contributed to the consolidation of princely and royal power and ultimately led to serfdom. In his opinion, the Russian Civil War, which split the people into nobility and commoners, began not in 1918 but in 988. Further, the church committed a terrible betrayal of national interests by concluding an alliance with the Tatars, which allegedly helped it to strengthen itself. He denied the patriotic activities of Sergius of Radonezh and tried to prove that the Russians defeated Mamai not with the support of the church, but in spite of it.^[1]

In accordance with his views, Dobrovolsky singled out particular historical figures as antiheroes of Russian history. The central place in this list was given to Prince Vladimir Svyatoslavich. Dobrovolsky developed one of the most ideologically significant Russian neopagan myths of the Judeo-Khazar origin of Prince Vladimir, blaming this for the Christianization of Kievan Rusʹ, as Christianity is a tool for the enslavement of the "Aryans" by the Jews. He borrowed this idea from the book Dezionization by Valery Yemelyanov, another one of the founders of Russian neopaganism. Dobrovolsky repeated the first part of this myth without changes: Vladimir was the son of Prince Svyatoslav from Malusha, the housekeeper of his mother, Princess Olga. Yemelyanov and Dobrovolsky stated that the name Malusha is derivative of the Jewish name Malka. They claimed that Malusha's father was a "rabbi" who bore the Hebrew name Malk, a descendant of the Khazar Jews. Dobrovolsky supplemented the second part of the myth about the deeds of Vladimir with new details. He considered Byzantium the main culprit for the introduction of Christianity in Rus'. According to him, Vladimir introduced the Inquisition and propagandized alcoholism during his reign. The result of the prince's reign was the spiritual disarmament of the Slavs, a reduction of their numbers, and their inability to resist the Mongol-Tatar hordes.^[14]

Dobrovolsky did not believe in Perun and other gods, believing that the ancestors did not believe in gods but in spirits and thus honored their lineage. According to his claims, the statues of Perun and other gods were erected in Kiev during the time of Vladimir Svyatoslavich at the instigation of the Jews in order to discredit paganism with bloody sacrifices and prepare the people for the introduction of Christianity.^[15]

Capitalism, according to Dobrovolsky, is "a monstrous offspring of Judeo-Christianity" and a "Western plutocracy, which is the result of the internal development of Judeo-Christianity": "capitalism and conscience are incompatible". For this reason, modern industrial society has brought the world to the brink of ecological catastrophe, for which nature will take cruel revenge. Like the Nazis, he believed that the townspeople had betrayed national values and became bourgeois, but contrary to the Nazis, he saw the Russian Revolution as an uprising of the village against the city and "Russian truth against Judeo-Christian falsehood". He called Bolshevism "the element of the Russian soul" and contrasted it with Marxism. Declaring the Russian Revolution "an attempt to return to our natural independent path," he revived such concepts as national bolshevism and Eurasianism, which were popular in the 1920s among some white Russian émigrés. Dobrovolsky called for an alliance of nationalists and "communist patriots" in the name of building "Russian national socialism".^[1]

Dobrovolsky saw salvation for the Slavs in "a return to the very core of the bright pagan worldview — to the highly moral attitudes of the ancients, primarily in relation to Mother Nature". He declared an uncompromising war on the "Jewish yoke" and predicted an imminent Russian rebellion against it. He wrote that the Yarilo-Sun would soon burn those most sensitive to ultraviolet radiation, a trait which he attributed primarily to the Jews. The death of the "Judeo-Christian" world, in his opinion, would mark the beginning of "our new era." Only the "new people," the sun worshipers, can survive.^[1]

Dobrovolsky is one of two probable authors of the "kolovrat" symbol; the other author could be Vadim Kazakov, with whom Dobrovolsky communicated, including on this issue; the creation of the symbol dates back to approximately 1994.^[16] In 1994, Dobrovolsky drew the symbol in his letters.^[17] In the same year, Kazakov's Imenoslov is published, where the "kolovrat" appears, gold on a red background.^[18]

Dobrovolsky introduced the eight-pointed "kolovrat" as a symbol of "resurgent paganism."^[19] According to the historian and religious scholar Roman Shizhensky, Dobrovolsky took the meaning of the swastika from the work of the Nazi ideologue Herman Wirth. The main symbol of paganism approved by Dobrovolsky - the eight-pointed gammadion (swastika) in a circle - was originally proposed and, presumably, created by Wirth, who interpreted it as the most ancient.^[13] Dobrovolsky declared the eight-pointed "kolovrat", supposedly a pagan sign of the Sun, consisting of two swastikas superimposed on each other, the symbol of an uncompromising "national liberation struggle" against the "Jewish yoke". According to him, the meaning of "kolovrat" completely coincides with the meaning of the Nazi swastika. The eight-pointed "kolovrat" accompanies many of Dobrovolsky's publications.^[1]

Dobrovolsky's ideas had a significant impact on Russian Rodnoverie. Most of his ideas became commonplace teachings among the variations of Rodnoverie. Though many of these ideas were created by earlier neopagans, Dobrovolsky popularized them for the next generation. These ideas include the understanding of the clan system as "Aryan" socialism (national socialism); the counterposing of Slavs and "Judeo-Christians"; various antisemitic ideas, including the introduction of bloody sacrifices by the Jews and the anti-natural activities and "racism" of the Old Testament and modern Jews; the treacherous activities of Prince Vladimir in introducing Christianity; the imminent onset of a new era (the Age of Aquarius), favorable for the Slavs and disastrous for their enemies.^[1]

Dobrovolsky's idea of an alliance between nationalists and "communist patriots" became the basis for the aspiration of some neopagans for an alliance with "nationally-oriented" communists.^[1]

As the ideologue of Slavic national socialism, many prominent neopagans, including extremists, came to Dobrovolsky for initiation and “blessing.”^[20]

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