[3] Zhirinovsky's LDPR and Dugin's Eurasia Movement and Eurasian Youth Union and affiliated organizations remain fixtures in Russia's far-right scene and, since 1991, were joined by many other parties and networks.

[3] Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, radical right-wing ideas have shaped Russia's political system, public discourse, domestic and foreign policies, and intellectual life.

To maintain order and combat crime, the program said, the authoritarian government should rely on "people's squads" (an analog of the Black Hundreds), which were not to be subject to any law.

[11] During the Soviet era, Viktor Bezverkhy (Ostromysl), the founder of the Russian Vedism movement (a branch of Slavic neo-paganism), revered Hitler and Himmler and in the narrow circle of his students propagated racial and anti-Semitic theories, calling for ridding humanity of "defective progeny" that allegedly resulted from interracial marriages.

He called such "inferior people" "bastards", included "kikes, Indians or gypsies and mulattoes," and believed that they prevented society from achieving social justice.

Bezverhij developed a theory of "Vedism," according to which, among other things: "all peoples will be sifted through the sieve of racial definition, the Aryans will be united, the Asian, African and Indian elements will be put in their place, and the mulattoes will be eliminated as unnecessary.».

[15] With the relaxation of Communist party control over public life during Mikhail Gorbachev's rule from 1985 to 1991, extreme right-wing groups began to openly organize, hold meetings and publish newspapers and journals.

[18] The group began its political activity in 1985, holding meetings and demonstrations at state premises and propagating its main idea that the global Jewish population had conspired against Russia.

[21] In 1987, several official magazines including Nash Sovremennik and Molodaya Gvardiya started publishing The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other antisemitic literature by Russian writers the majority of whom did not belong to Pamyat but sympathized with the organization and expressed similar views.

[19] Russian authorities did not oppose the publishers and distributors of antisemitic and often purely fascist literature as the law enforcement and Communist party leadership reportedly had many sympathizers in their ranks.

[21] Representatives of the Leningrad City Communist Party Committee and police attended meetings of Pamyat from 1987 to 1988, where organizers called for a ban of marriages between Russians and non-Russians and for the deportation of all Jews.

[21] The adoption of the Soviet press law in 1990 which relaxed state censorship led to the proliferation of even more extreme publications that focused almost entirely on the Jewish question and published excerpts from works by Nazi ideologists.

Alexander Tarasov considers the breakdown of the education and upbringing system, as well as the economic recession and unemployment during the reforms of the 1990s to be the key reasons for the sharp growth of the skinhead movement in Russia.

Tarasov writes that the First Chechen War further intensified dislike for natives of the Caucasus and contributed to the growth in the number of skinheads, which was further compounded by the government's imperialist rhetoric and weak prosecution of the extremist organizations by the police.

[27] According to Victor Shnirelman, the spread of racism and "Aryan identity" among skinheads in Russia was also influenced by anti-communist propaganda and criticism of internationalism during the "wild capitalism" of the 1990s, when social Darwinism and the "pursuit of heroism" promoted the popularity of images of "superhumans" and "the superior aristocratic race».

[30][verification needed] According to estimates by Alexander Tarasov and Semyon Charny in reports by the Moscow Bureau for Human Rights, as of 2004–2005 there were about 50,000 NS-skinheads in Russia (data sources and evaluation methodology are not cited).

[36][37][verification needed] French sociologist and political scientist Marlene Laruelle reported on the participation of Russian National Unity members in the armed struggle on the side of the rebels.

[38][verification needed] Sociologist Nikolai Mitrokhin [ru] notes that one of the units called Rusich consists of neo-Nazis from St. Petersburg and fights under a banner with a swastika stylized as a "black sun.

[46] Prominent Russian liberal opposition figure Alexei Navalny said before his 2020 poisoning that the Kremlin was "far more afraid of ultra-nationalists than they were of him", noting that "[the ultranationalists] use the same imperial rhetoric as Putin does, but they can do it much better than him".

[48][49][47] In 1994, a neo-Nazi group called the Werewolf Legion operated in Moscow, whose ideology was based on the basic tenets of German Nazism, including the struggle against "subhumans".

During the trial, the jury of the St. Petersburg City Court found members of the Borovikov-Voyevodin gang ("Combat Terrorist Organization") guilty, including in the murder of Girenko.

[68] In 2011, Nikita Tikhonov, one of the organization's leaders and founders, was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murders of lawyer Stanislav Markelov and journalist Anastasia Baburova, and his roommate Yevgenia Khasis received 18 years in prison.

[69][verification needed] Judge Eduard Chuvashov [ru] of the Moscow City Court, who handed down a verdict in this case, was murdered on 12 April 2010, by members of the BORN.

[76][77] As victims, members of the group chose citizens who, in their opinion, violate generally accepted norms of behavior: persons without a fixed place of residence, begging, abusing alcohol and being intoxicated.

The group is headed by Denis Kapustin who is known as the owner of a neonazi merch store «WhiteRex», a sponsor of ultraright parties and organizer of football rioting in Europe.

In 1992–1994, he was the head of the neo-Nazi youth movement which was called the "Front of National Revolutionary Action", that organization evolved from the Union, and it declared its allegiance to Orthodox Christianity.

While he was under investigation, Lazarenko broke with the Orthodox faith and, founded the neo-Nazi Navi Society [ru] (also known as the "Holy Church of the White Race") in Moscow on Hitler's birthday in 1996.

During the trial for the skinhead organization Schultz-88 [ru] in the second half of 2005, the brochure "Paganism as the spiritual and moral basis of Russian national-socialism" by Dobrovolsky and the neo-pagan magazine The Wrath of Perun were mentioned.

The founder of the band DK Sergey Zharikov [ru] wrote about the unconditionally pagan character of rock culture, supported the national idea and messianism.

Such rock bands represent the Russian variety of[citation needed] a neo-Nazi music movement that developed in England and Germany from the early 1980s among the right-wing skinhead culture.