Putin’s Paranoia Has Turned on Russia’s Far Right

Out of all the things Girkin could be plausibly charged for—and there are many—this is perhaps the emptiest possible. Under the Putin regime’s definition of “extremism,” anyone in modern Russia could be guilty, and quite probably it was chosen because it’s the easiest one to pin on him. Criticism of the government used to be relatively safe, as long as you did it from the right—but Wagner Group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed coup has changed the Kremlin’s attitude. It’s no longer content to just go after the so-called liberal opposition like the imprisoned Alexei Navalny and Vladimir Kara-Murza: A lot of heads are now on the chopping block. 

I have a personal enmity toward Girkin, mixed with a weird respect. Because of my work as a journalist and my podcast about the attitudes in the Baltics concerning Russian aggression, his friends have harassed me, threatened me, and even tried to fabricate a criminal case against me in Russia. Yet, at the same time, his military analysis has been eerily accurate. Girkin has called out Russia’s failure to fully mobilize or make full use of its manpower. He criticized the long siege of Mariupol, saying that it would be harmful in the long run by preventing strategic advances while Russia still had the initiative, and he opposed the “meatgrinder” tactics that threw men against hardened Ukrainian defenses. If the Kremlin was capable of listening to criticism like his, Ukraine would be in a far worse position than it is today.

Girkin’s career, and his crimes on Moscow’s behalf, makes him an unlikely figure to end up on the wrong side of the state. But his own strategic talent, and his ability to call out the military disasters of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war, got him there regardless. 

Girkin joined the Russian Armed Forces shortly after the Cold War, straight on the path of becoming an officer—because his university course had included military training in the ‘war department’, a part of almost every higher education institution in the Soviet Union and which still exist in modern Russia, he held the military rank of lieutenant right from the start. He served in the 2nd Guards Tamanskaya Motorized Rifle Division, an elite unit notable for its World War II service, helping to overthrow secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria, and taking part in the 1991 August coup against Gorbachev.

 While serving there, he developed a profound, albeit somewhat misguided, admiration for the Soviet military heritage. Yet at the same time, in the early 1990s, he also became an enthusiast of the Russian monarchy, whose last members were murdered by the Soviets. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Girkin found himself navigating a changing political landscape. He transitioned to the newly formed Russian Armed Forces and, in the subsequent years, fought in various conflicts, most notably during the Transnistrian conflict (March-July 1992), First Chechen War (1994-1996), and the Second Chechen War (1999-2000).

Girkin’s military acumen and unwavering loyalty to the Russian cause earned him recognition and promotions within the ranks. That’s particularly remarkable in context: Slacking off and nepotism were the norm at the time, and actually putting in some effort was seen as showing off and viewed with disdain. As he specialized in intelligence work and was genuinely competent, he was noticed by the FSB, which often recruits from the military. 

By the early 2000s, he had risen to the rank of colonel in the FSB, the successor to the KGB. Throughout his tenure, he was involved in covert and intelligence operations, contributing to his reputation as a formidable figure in the intelligence community inside Russia. At about the same time, he started to appear as a public figure in the Russian-speaking part of the web, criticizing what he called the liberal wing of the government, such as the head of the Russian Central Bank, Elvira Nabiullina, and various other figures that he thinks are serving Western interests, calling for a patriotic shift in the government, toward what Strelkov calls true Russian values.

A man walks by a billboard showing a portrait of Igor Girkin with other unidentified pro-Russian fighters reading “300 Strelkov’s people,” paraphrasing the 300 Spartans, in Konstantinovka, eastern Ukraine, on June 12, 2014.Evgeniy Maloletka/AP

His role mixed military action and public propaganda aimed both at Russians and the outside world. Girkin became a leading proponent of the “Russian Spring” movement, advocating for the secession of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions from Ukraine and their integration into the Russian Federation. One of his jobs was to make it appear as if the movement had sprung up naturally, when, in fact, it was a wholly Russian government-funded affair. And he did his work diligently. 

He forced the Crimean parliament, at gunpoint—literally, he was physically present in the room when this happened—to hold the independence referendum that caused Russia to annex the peninsula and served as the first minister of defense of these “people’s republics” in Donetsk that would later form into Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic, when actively leading their forces into battle against the Ukrainian military. This led to the MH17 incident, where he gave a direct order to fire upon the passenger plane that was flying over Ukrainian territory at the time, via a Russian-provided Buk surface-to-air missile system. Troops under his command followed through, the plane was shot down, and 298 people were killed. He had publicly stated that “We did warn you — do not fly in our sky,” had misidentified it as a Ukrainian transport plane, and boasted about it on his social media channels afterward—of course, those posts were soon deleted, and he’s been denying his involvement ever since, claiming innocence and that it was a Western provocation, using Ukraine as a proxy for it. 

In his personal politics, Girkin is a Russian monarchist and an irredentist. He despises the West and lives under constant delusions of grandeur. He’s stated in interviews and on his social media that the United States is “planning to destroy the entire Russian Federation,” and in many of his videos that he publishes on his Brighteon account he mentions “respectable Western partners” mockingly, making claims about how homosexuality is enforced in the West and that if Russia loses this war, then it won’t have traditional family structures anymore, only ‘parent one’ and ‘parent two’ as he claims is true in the U.S. 

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Of course, the feelings are mutual. He personally hates Ukrainians and also the Dutch. Ukrainians, he argues on both his Brighteon videos and his Telegram channel, are all actually Russians that have been “tricked by the West” to think they have their own language and culture, and the Dutch he hates because they had the audacity to rebel against their Habsburg monarch, their “rightful king,” and desired their own rights and liberties. Girkin also despises the United States and everything it stands for, believing that the U.S. is responsible for everything awful that has ever happened to Russia. Since he doesn’t speak or understand English, he gets his info by reading news articles from far-right sources in the West, created by authors that would make Alex Jones look sane, using Google translate or being told about them by his fellow angry patriots, especially by the self-proclaimed futurologist of the club, Maxim Kalashnikov, who acts as the expert on all matters relating to western politics in their club.

Girkin speaks at a news conference in Donetsk, Ukraine, on July 28, 2014.Bulent Kilic/AFP via Getty Images

This is also the focus of his political movement that was officially created earlier this year—this “Club of Angry Patriots,” which, supposedly, will unite what they refer to as the progressive and healthy forces of Russia, with their goal being the utter destruction of Ukraine, both as a nation and as an ethnic identity, “winning” over the West, and building what they consider to be the best possible Russia.

Their vision, as can be summarized together from all their various disjointed statements and beliefs, is of a police state even worse than the one run by Putin, where effectively neo-Nazis in the form of national Bolsheviks would reign freely and share absolute rule with monarchists, radical communists, and every other marginal radical extremist in Russia under a single banner. They also believe that Russian people would honestly elect such people in fair, open elections. Of course, most of them are also rampant antisemites, but that doesn’t stop them from calling themselves antifascists as well.

Girkin admits defeats and is objective about Russian prospects. He’s called out the Kremlin on the need of the Russian army to provide proper training and equipment for its conscripts, the shortage of manpower, the lack of drones and modern communications equipment, and, of course, the constant, massive corruption that plagues the Russian military.

But the problem is that, at this point, the only man Girkin hates more than Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is Putin. He’s hated him since 2014, after he was forced to retreat from eastern Ukraine and leave Donbas. Girkin felt betrayed by the Kremlin, believing that his idea of “Novorossiya” would have come true if he had had more support. Because of this, Girkin thinks that Putin is a weak leader and wholly incompetent. He’s become more and more aggressive about this lately. In the Telegram posts linked above, he mixes nationalism with misogyny. In those he says: “Miserable whining, complaints about partners, appeals ‘for all good against all bad’—that’s there as much as you want. But for a very, very long time now, the president’s rhetoric does not even remotely resemble the traditional ‘masculine standard’ and ‘In general, concluding my reflections, I have to regret that Putin is not a woman. A weak-in-character and not very smart woman could have had talented favorites. […] It also depends on luck, actually (often quite the opposite has happened), but there would have been at least a chance.” 

While he argues that Putin should not be removed from power, as that would lead to a complete collapse of Russia, he thinks that “Russia won’t take six more years of this idiot being in power.” 

A woman holds a poster with a portrait of Girkin with the slogan “Our name is Strelkov” during a rally in support of the self-proclaimed leader of the Donetsk People’s Republic in Moscow on Aug. 2, 2014. Vasily Maximov/AFP via Getty Images

But today, Girkin’s not the only figure on the Russian right to be targeted. Recently, an administrative case was started against Vladimir Kvachkov, a close (and extremely antisemitic and overall insane) associate of Girkin’s, and during the protest against Girkin’s arrest—to which a whole two dozen people arrived—the formal head of this Club of Angry Patriots, Pavel Gubarev, was also detained. Finally, the ax has fallen even on the pro-war pundits who make the mistake of criticizing the powerful. 

Part of the reason for this is Prigozhin’s revolt—after the sudden events in late June, Putin’s become much more paranoid. At this point, any criticism, no matter how genuine and constructive, is seen as a precursor to some other coup or rebellion, and any disagreement is seen as a direct threat—up to the point of firing generals who are viewed as competent by their men just because they spoke up about their difficult situation on the front. Currently, Putin values only absolute loyalty and sycophancy.

But another reason is the nature of the security state itself. Russia is out of liberal opposition. Putin jailed, killed, or forced into exile anyone and everyone who tried to oppose him. But, as in the Soviet era, the siloviki (enforcers) need to be paid for something—and if there aren’t any student protesters to be beaten up in Red Square, that means the pro-war Putin critics are in trouble. The machinery of oppression needs feeding, and a security state doing a markedly poor job against Ukrainian intelligence has to go for easy victories. 

They seem surprised that the system could turn against them. The Angry Patriots in their own statement wrote: “Igor Ivanovich openly and reasonably criticized the actions of the authorities, including the president, but the freedom of speech that the state provided testified that the country’s leadership complied with Article 29 of the Russian Constitution. Today, confidence in this has been undermined—we see that processes are taking place in our country that demonstrate the departure of the representatives of the authorities from the basic values.” 

These same groups, of course, spent years cheering on the repression of liberals. 

Members of the Club of Angry Patriots pose outside the Meshchansky District Court in Moscow on July 21, during a hearing to consider Girkin’s pretrial arrest.Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images

Unfortunately for the Club of Angry Patriots, they forgot to trademark the name in the European Union, and now I own it. I trademarked the name of Girkin’s organization in English and Russian and both of his logos so that he couldn’t open cells in the West. Using this, admittedly ridiculous, branding I’ve raised around $20,000 for the Ukrainian war efforts. (And if any of my readers want to use it, I’ll happily grant the right to anyone who supports Ukraine.)

Inside Russia, the club may be facing more serious problems than a Latvian journalist with a sense of mischief. One possibility for the near future is that Putin’s control keeps tightening and Russians’ sense of relative freedom, by autocratic standards, starts to slip away. Russia becomes the next North Korea, any freedoms whatsoever are suppressed, and they lose the war because sycophants do not make for good generals. That brings its own renewed chaos for the motherland; losing states aren’t happy places. Another is that the right fully turns on him—making his rule look weaker than ever. Internal strife seems inevitable. 

The fact that Girkin, who can’t even afford a dentist or a car, has been arrested as a threat shows that Putin is no longer clearly in control and that the old KGB officer is slowly succumbing to paranoia. After all, if such a man seems to be a serious threat to a leader, then clearly something has been broken in the structures of power. Girkin himself might not deserve to be in a Russian jail—but he does deserve to be in The Hague.