One of the most disturbing developments in post-Eltsin Russia has been the proliferation of xenophobic violence and its mutation into revolutionary terrorism. Vladimir Putin's first two terms (2000–8) in the Kremlin witnessed a steady increase in racist attacks against migrant labourers and other non-Slavic inhabitants of Russian cities. During the Medvedev–Putin ‘tandemocracy’, some neo-Nazi fighters expanded their range of targets to include prominent public figures, state functionaries and members of the judiciary. This turn towards terror provoked intense discussion in Russian nationalist circles. One influential group of publicists took up the cause of the terrorists, whom they celebrated as precursors of a national revolution against the rule of foreign occupiers and a cosmopolitan oligarchy. Members of this group also campaigned in defence of arrested fighters, whom they portrayed as innocent victims of a Russophobic state.

This chapter examines the career of the most outspoken ideologue of this tendency, Aleksandr Sevastianov. A prolific author and a leading representative of racist ethno-nationalism, Sevastianov achieved prominence first as leader of a major nationalist party and then as a propagandist of revolutionary violence. In 2009, he triggered a major controversy by publishing an elaborate vindication of the racist killers in the ‘Russian underground’, whom he extolled as morally healthy adolescents and heirs of wartime partisans. In a series of statements, he contended that this ‘children's crusade’ threatened to become a national uprising against a regime that was facilitating the influx of racial outsiders.

Despite his prominence, Sevastianov's relationship to ultranationalist violence has attracted little academic attention. Most scholarly references to his career revolve around his contributions to anti-Semitism, white supremacist ideology and the pseudo-science of rasologiia (‘raciology’). By comparison with the extensive corpus of scholarship dedicated to the neo-Eurasianism of Aleksandr Dugin, Sevastianov is a neglected figure. There is no systematic study of his public career or his revolutionary project. This oversight has been reinforced by the fact that analyses of the rise of Russian skinheads and neo-Nazi youth have paid little attention to the influence of the public intellectuals who have incited and justified racist violence.