About Nash Put'

Nash Put'

Nash Put' (Russian: Наш Путь, “Our Way”) was a Russian-language daily newspaper founded by Konstantin Rodzaevsky on 3 October 1933. It was issued in Harbin from 1933 to 1941 and in Shanghai from 1941 to 1943, and it ceased publication on 1 July 1943. It was the official organ of the Russian Fascist Party, known from 1937 as the Russian Fascist Union, the Russian émigré movement based in Manchukuo under Rodzaevsky's leadership. The newspaper promoted Christian Orthodoxy, Russian ultranationalism and fascism, and its estimated circulation was 4,000 copies. Because it was a closed, historical publication, its history is written here in the past tense.

The paper's publishers were recorded as V. N. Vasilenko and G. A. Khoven, and Rodzaevsky edited it throughout its life, from 1933 to 1943. It was a broadsheet daily, and around it stood a publishing house, the Izdatel'stvo gazety Nash Put' (“Publisher of the newspaper Our Way”), which issued books and pamphlets in the party's name. The principal scholarly account of the world that produced the newspaper is John J. Stephan's The Russian Fascists: Tragedy and Farce in Exile, 1925–1945, on which the modern references to the paper's dates and closure rest.

Konstantin Rodzaevsky and the party behind the paper

Konstantin Vladimirovich Rodzaevsky was born on 11 August 1907 in Blagoveshchensk, across the Amur River from China, into a Siberian middle-class family. After the defeat of the anti-communist forces in the Russian Civil War, he fled the Soviet Union for Manchuria in 1925, unexpectedly to his family. In Harbin he entered the law academy and joined the Russian Fascist Organization. On 26 May 1931 he became secretary general of the newly created Russian Fascist Party, becoming its de facto leader. When, in 1934, the party amalgamated with the All-Russian Fascist Organization of Anastasy Vonsyatsky, Rodzaevsky emerged as leader of the combined movement.

Rodzaevsky modelled himself on Benito Mussolini and used the swastika as one of the symbols of his movement. He gathered personally selected bodyguards around himself and used the symbolism of the former Russian Empire together with Russian nationalist symbols. Like the Italian Blackshirts, the Russian fascists wore black uniforms with black crossed belts, and they were armed with weapons obtained from the Imperial Japanese Army. From their headquarters in Harbin, which they styled the “Far East Moscow”, they built an international organisation of White émigrés with connections in twenty-six nations around the world, of which the most important outpost was in New York City. The party adopted the slogan “God, Nation, Labour”. It was for this movement, two years after Rodzaevsky became its secretary general, that Nash Put' was created.

Foundation in Harbin in 1933

Nash Put' was founded on 3 October 1933 in Harbin, the Manchurian city that had become the centre of the Russian emigration in the Far East and, through the party's presence, the centre of Russian fascism. The newspaper took its name, “Our Way”, from the language of the movement itself: Rodzaevsky's later programmatic book was also published under a cognate title, Russkii put' (“The Russian Way”), issued at Harbin by Nash Put' in 1939. As the party's official organ, the daily carried the party's propaganda to the émigré readership of Manchukuo, where the Russian fascists cooperated with Japan and became, by working with the Japanese authorities, the most influential émigré group in the territory.

The institutional setting mattered to the paper's position. The party set up a party school in Harbin in 1932, before the newspaper existed, and Rodzaevsky assisted the Imperial Japanese Army in forming the Asano Detachment, the all-Russian special forces unit in the Kwantung Army organised to carry out sabotage against Soviet forces in the event of a Japanese invasion of Siberia and the Russian Far East. The fascists even installed a large swastika of neon light at their branch in Manzhouli, within a few kilometres of the Soviet border. Nash Put' was the printed voice of a movement that combined newspaper propaganda with schools, uniforms, an international network and Japanese-sponsored military preparation.

What the newspaper stood for

The paper promoted Christian Orthodoxy, Russian ultranationalism and fascism. Its party called for Italian-style fascism as the means of exploiting the shaky position of the Bolshevik leadership in the face of external and internal opposition. Scholarship on Russian fascism in exile, including the study “Russian Fascism in Exile” published through ScienceDirect, has emphasised that the Harbin fascists regarded fascism as a universal idea that assumed distinct forms according to the particularities of each nation, and that from the beginning they attached great importance to elaborating their party programme, propaganda and ideology, and especially the concept of fascism itself.

Rodzaevsky was a notorious antisemite, and that prejudice ran through his journalism. During the Second World War he published numerous articles in the party newspapers Our Way and The Nation, and he was the author of the brochure “Judas' End” and of the book Contemporary Judaisation of the World or the Jewish Question in the 20th Century, published at Harbin in 1943. The newspaper is also cited in reference works as the source of an alleged quotation from Leon Trotsky which its source attributed to the memoirs of Aron Simanovitch, Rasputin's secretary; the quotation is treated in the literature as purported rather than authenticated, and its presence in the paper illustrates the kind of material the party press circulated.

The publishing house and the party's books

Besides the daily newspaper and the more intellectual journal Natsiya (“Nation”), which Rodzaevsky also published, the Russian fascists in Harbin issued numerous books, pamphlets, essays and brochures on the ideology and tactics of the All-Russian Fascist Party, for different audiences. The Nash Put' publishing house was part of that output. In 1936 it published Vladimir Kislitsin's memoirs, In the Fires of the Civil War: Memoires. Kislitsin was the White general alongside whom, and alongside Japanese forces, Rodzaevsky hoped one day to march into Russia to overthrow Soviet rule.

The best-known of the party's texts was Azbuka fashizma (“The ABC of Fascism”), compiled and edited, with additions, by Rodzaevsky and published in Harbin in the mid-1930s; bibliographies of the movement list the edition prepared by Gennadii Viktorovich Taradanov and Vladimir V. Kibardin and published by Nash Put' in 1935. Study of the Azbuka and of Rodzaevsky's other writings has shown that the fascists in remote Manchuria were familiar with the ideas of European, especially German and Italian, fascist thinkers, and that a Russian translation of Hitler's Mein Kampf circulated within the Russian emigration, with excerpts published in fascist journals and newspapers. Rodzaevsky's own works issued under the paper's imprint included Russkii put' in 1939 and his 1943 book on the “Jewish question”. In 2001 his writings were republished in Russia as Zaveshchanie russkogo fashista (“The Last Will of a Russian Fascist”).

Harbin, Manchukuo and the Japanese connection

Harbin gave the paper both its readership and its protectors. The city was the headquarters of the party, the seat of its central office and the place where its black-shirted members were photographed waiting at Harbin station for their leader in 1934. Cooperation with Japan brought the Russian Fascist Party influence inside Manchukuo, the Japanese-sponsored state in Manchuria, and it brought the party's newspaper a decade of life under Japanese protection. The relationship was nevertheless conditional. Japanese authorities limited the party's wartime activities to acts of sabotage against the Soviet Union, when Rodzaevsky wished to launch an open struggle against Bolshevism, and the protection could be withdrawn when the party became a diplomatic liability.

That dependence defined the paper's final phase. In 1941, after eight years in Harbin, publication moved to Shanghai, where Nash Put' continued from 1941 to 1943. The move transferred the party organ from the movement's Manchurian capital to the great treaty-port city further south, but it did not change the paper's editorship: Rodzaevsky remained its editor until the end, as he had been since 1933.

The final years and closure in 1943

The end came through the paper's Japanese patrons. In early 1943 the Kempeitai, the Japanese military police, began to suspect that Rodzaevsky was in fact a Soviet agent. In May 1943 he was arrested and taken in for questioning, before being released in June 1943. Then, in July 1943, following complaints from the Soviet ambassador to Japan about the anti-Soviet statements coming from the Russian émigrés in Manchukuo, the Japanese shut down Nash Put'. Stephan's history, cited for the episode, places the closure discussion at page 329 of The Russian Fascists. The newspaper's recorded cessation date is 1 July 1943, the same date on which the Russian Fascist Party itself was dissolved; scholarship on the movement likewise records that the fate of the party was finally sealed when the Japanese banned the All-Russian Fascist Party in July 1943.

The front page of the issue of 7 November 1935, reproduced in reference works, survives as the most widely seen image of the paper in its Harbin prime: a Russian broadsheet daily produced by an exile party that had built, around its newspaper, a publishing house, a journal, a school and an international organisation spanning twenty-six nations.

Aftermath: Rodzaevsky's return and execution

The newspaper outlived neither its party nor, by long, its editor. During the war Rodzaevsky had tried to open a struggle against Bolshevism and had been restricted to sabotage work. At the end of the war, perhaps in a desperate attempt to avoid execution if he were captured by the advancing Red Army, he began to argue that the Soviet regime under Joseph Stalin was evolving into a nationalist one. He gave himself up to the Soviet authorities in Harbin in 1945, with a letter showing striking similarities to the doctrines of National Bolshevism, in which he presented himself as having called for an unknown leader capable of creating a new Russia. He returned to the Soviet Union, where he had been promised freedom and a job on a Soviet newspaper, only to be arrested on arrival, together with his fellow party member Lev Okhotin.

His trial began on 26 August 1946 and was widely covered in the Soviet press. It was opened by Vasily Ulrikh, chairman of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union. Rodzaevsky and the other leaders were charged with anti-Soviet agitation, with creating the Russian Fascist Party and distributing anti-Soviet propaganda among White army exiles, and with creating similar anti-Soviet organisations in China, Europe and the United States — charges in which the propaganda work of papers such as Nash Put' stood at the centre. He was executed by shooting in the Lubyanka in Moscow on 30 August 1946, together with five other convicts. The Red Army had marched into Harbin in 1945 and arrested most of the remaining former members of the party.

Historical significance and sources

Nash Put' matters to historians because it was the daily organ of the most fully developed fascist movement produced by the Russian emigration. Scholars of transnational fascism use the Harbin example to show how fascism operated as a phenomenon, a movement and an object of study across borders: a Russian party in a Japanese-sponsored state in China, publishing a daily newspaper in Russian, drawing on Italian and German models, maintaining posts from Harbin to New York, and training a detachment for a future invasion of the Soviet Far East. Alongside the journal Natsiya and the party's books, the newspaper formed the core of a propaganda apparatus to which the movement attached importance from its very beginning.

The established facts of the paper's own record can be stated briefly. It was a Russian-language broadsheet daily, founded by Konstantin Rodzaevsky on 3 October 1933, published by V. N. Vasilenko and G. A. Khoven, edited by Rodzaevsky from 1933 to 1943, issued in Harbin until 1941 and in Shanghai thereafter, with an estimated circulation of 4,000, as the official organ of the Russian Fascist Party, and it was shut down by the Japanese in July 1943 after a decade in which it had promoted Orthodoxy, ultranationalism and fascism to the Russian diaspora of the Far East.