On Azov and Black Metal

the fascinating blurring between right wing politics and underground culture in Ukraine

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Putin announced that he had two primary goals: to demilitarize AND to “denazify Ukraine.” For many, Putin’s efforts towards highlighting a national socialist issue within Ukraine was a propaganda effort meant to distort what they perceived as the evil of his invasion. Then, old reports started resurfacing about the Azov Batallion. Until the invasion began, Western journalists had looked into the then obscure Ukrainian military unit that incorporated into the country’s National Guard in 2014, when the Russo-Ukrainian war first broke out after the Maidan Revolution (or coup, whatever you want to call it.) It was only in 2021 when Time Magazine ran a length piece on Azov’s recruiting practices, demonstrating no hesitation towards referring to Azov as a “far right” militia or discussing some of its members “neo-Nazi” politics. This kind of reporting on Azov vanished after Russia invaded, likely because the presence of Azov and other right wing militias within Ukraine’s military disrupted the popular media narrative being used to justify NATO’s involvement in support of Ukraine’s war effort. Russia was the tyrannical authoritarian regime launching an invasion of a stalwart of European democratic liberalism in Ukraine. Any information that disrupted this narrative was treated as besides the fact by some, and outright condemned as “Russian propaganda” by others.

Those of us interested in the world of extreme, hyper-ideological and rigidly right wing black metal, however, were already well-acquainted with Azov, which made the legacy media’s justification of the regiment nothing short of absurd. It wasn’t that WE necessarily condemned Ukraine for using groups like Azov in its military — on the contrary, I think we understand the necessity of a war campaign being fought by a country’s hardest, craziest motherfuckers — but it was rather that the media spent the last decade smearing everyone to the right of it as neo-Nazi and fascist. Now, in the face of an actual militant group with numerous members openly adhering to a far right and occasionally Neo-Nazi ideology, such criticisms of the group as such were “exaggerating” or “being manipulated by Russian propaganda.” For the last decade, however, bands and artists affiliated with national socialist black metal openly applauded and supported Azov for the exact same qualities that the legacy media in all other regards condemns and despises other entities for.

The first I’d really heard of the Azov Batallion came in 2017, when I was eagerly awaiting the new full-length LP by French black metal band Peste Noire. Now, it should be noted here that I was still a leftist in 2017 (aside from my vote for Trump, but at the time that was a protest vote,) but I had grown up with Jim Goad’s Answer Me! and Adam Parfrey’s Apocalypse Culture and was shaped by those Gen-X kind of sensibilities where one could be formally and conceptually interested in right wing art for its sensationalist thrills without having to adhere to the ideology. There are plenty of bands who claimed NS that I found to be interesting, but I considered Peste Nore to be a step above all in terms of the originality of its music — very rare to find an ethno-nationalist black metal band that proudly brandished influences from trap and dancehall music — and intellectual and literary rigor. Peste Noire’s founding member, de facto ideologist, and lead singer Famine was so lucid in his philosophy that he challenged my leftist assumptions about the world and got me thinking more about issues like immigration and cultural preservation that have obviously become important to my politics now (that said, I’m far too American to share his views on something like race mixing, I’m Jewish and married to an Asian woman after all.) Peste Noire posed a unique problem for intellectuals interested in black metal: they firmly reject every academic assumption about the modern world, but do so in such an eloquent manner that they force an intellectual confrontation between the listener and his self. Peste Noire’s music is, like the literature of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, such great art that even the most rigidly leftist thinkers can’t help but acknowledge the power in it.

One thing that Famine never did, however, is specifically align himself with any far right group in existence. Though he mentioned his enthusiasm for groups like the 1960s formed Groupe Union Defénse (GUD) or the Italian neo-fascist Casa Pound movement, he was slippery and evasive enough when discussing politics to signal enough ambiguity as to keep journalists guessing. French far right students’ movement When asked if Peste Noire was an NS project, he’d often protest that he was nationalist, not socialist, even though he conceded that there were hidden breadcrumbs in his project’s iconography that could lead listeners to ascribe NS views to the band. He would often correct reporters that he was a “nationalist anarchist,” and that he could never be NS because he was not a socialist.

In 2017, however, an interview was published on the website of the Ukrainian NS black metal label Militant Zone in anticipation of the release of Peste Noise - SPLIT -Peste Noire, a 2018 Peste Noire album split into two parts. Famine and the interviewer (more on him later) discussed Miltant Zone’s funding of a music video for a track called “La Dernier Putsch” off of the group’s 2015 La Chaise Dyable album. The video (which you can watch below) is something like a European skinhead version of a 1990s Hype Williams directed rap video. A celebration of primal masculinity and militant urban violence, it opens with Famine and an accomplice throwing a kidnapped person in the back of a car before launching into a rousing performance sequence in which Famine gives an inspired and charismatic delivery of the song’s lyrics while brandishing a knife before a crowed of masked and armed militants. While American audiences are conditioned to see similarly violent music videos by rap stars without so much as raising an eyebrow (nothing shocking about black guys in hoodies shooting each other in 2025,) seeing white Europeans portrayed like this indeed shocks and thrills in equal measure. The video was shot in Kyiv where, according to Internet legend, Famine had traveled to shortly after beating a man up at a bar so badly that he broke his jaw. Famine, according to myth, mistakenly thought the man was one of those Antifa types who make it their sole reason for existing to fuck with right wing artists. Or, maybe the guy just said something to his girlfriend. Famine was arrested for the crime when he returned to France in 2020, and received a suspended sentence of six years. Who knows? Point is, Famine ended up in Ukraine for a bit. Why?

In the aforementioned interview, Famine professed allegiance to a certain Ukrainian far right militant group. The “Le Dernier Putsch” video, he says, was dedicated to Azov, and explains the immediate conceptual and political connection he made with the group’s image and politics:

“Le dernier putsch” was initially intended as a gesture of support to AZOV, so what better place than Kiev to shoot this video? As a matter of interest, we made a t-shirt a while ago depicting a hooligan armed with a baseball bat and wearing a knight’s helmet, with the slogan: “Be mediaeval”. Back then, it was only a t-shirt design, so I was completely blown away when I first saw hooligans with bats and clubs on the Maidan, encased in medieval armour and getting ready for the real putsch!

At that time, I didn’t know what the Azov Batallion actually was and of course had no clue how big a talking point the regiment would be in the war that, while technically already happening in 2017, wouldn’t become the subject of a Western media circus for years to come. Looking more into Militant Zone, I learned that the owner of the label, the host of the interview with Famine, and the leader of black metal project M8L8TH was actually a Russian named Aleksei Levkin. This is where things get interesting.

While right wing politics always snuck their way into certain underground music and art subcultures — the neo-folk scene pioneered by Death in June has had its fair share of troubles with Antifa, power electronics had many groups with right wing aesthetics (whether they were purely aesthetic or actually ideological, who knows), leftist punk rock found its natural enemy in skinhead Oi! and rock against communism (RAC) groups, and black metal of course always leaned right and eventually had bands take on explicitly right wing ideologies — but for a major right wing militia that had a legitimate place within a European military to be recruiting soldiers from the grounds of black metal festivals and right wing MMA competitions was, to say the least, very unique. I found the whole dynamic to be fascinating. For better or worse, these artists were not posers. They were not using right wing politics as formal content to shock an audience, they were willing to put their money where their mouths were, take up arms, and fight and die for what they believed in. I found this to be admirable on the politically neutral scale where classical honor is measured.

Prior to founding Militant Zone in 2015, Levkin defected to the Ukraine from Russia in 2014 and joined Azov to fight for the pro-Ukrainian nationalists against, oddly enough, the pro-Russian nationalists who, led by the late former leader of the National Bolshevik Party Eduard Limonov, were invading their neighbor to the west.

Why was Levkin so disgusted by his own country that he would defect to its Eastern European neighbor? According to a 2019 article by Amsterdam-based, left wing investigative news source bellingcat, Levkin was the founder and a member of a far right Russian group called Woatanjugend that has been a source of major controversy in the East for a long time. On the group’s now impossible to access website, they’d go as far as to celebrate right wing terrorists like Timothy McVeigh and even the Christchurch shooter. The site at one point called Hitler a hero. More importantly, however, Woatanjujend became what its founder Levkin called a “mini university for right wing ideology” and also hosted events and underground music concerts as a means of connecting right wing ideologues from all around Europe. Levkin and his group’s beef with Putin, to the shock of many a westerner who associate the Russian president with the image of the right wing dictator, was what they perceived as his lax immigration laws. According to some sources, Russia has become more liberal in its immigration policy over the last decade in response to declining birth rates. For an ideologue like Levkin, this was a complete betrayal of the Russian right wing that supported Putin for decades.

In a 2019 interview with a magazine run by Greece’s neo-Nazi political party cum criminal organization Golden Dawn, Levkin described himself as a “political ideologist” in Azov’s National Militia, the paramilitary street wing of the Azov movement that Levkin called the “combat wing” of National Corps, Azov’s political party. Looking at the Militant Zone website, where he publishes his essays, it would seem that was the case. Levkin writes rich, provocative and defiantly right wing texts about philosophy, politics, and black metal specifically looking to understand the ways in which his preferred art form could be used as a political weapon. His writing is strong, his ideas are lucid, and there’s no doubt that he is looking to thread a needle that treats extreme black metal and underground art as a recruitment grounds for his political mission. Levkin understands that black metal’s primal violence draws in men that are willing to fight and die, and that its ideological and transgressive tendencies makes it fertile ground for developing a fierce stance against the modern world and globalism. He also, however, laments the genre’s insistence on Satanism and anti-Christianity, which he finds to be dated and distracting from what should be considered the real enemy of the European nationalist. He believes that black metal musicians opt towards Satanism solely because no artists in the West are penalized for opposing Christ, but know intuitively that there are sacred cows the offending of which would lead to life long bans from your average metal festival. In his essay “Religion in Black Metal - An Empty Threat”, he writes:

The absence of serious attacks against Islam, which is currently the only real religious power in the Western World, is absolutely striking. The reason for such obedient behaviour becomes quite clear if we consider the threat that Islamic domination represents for the labels and the artists themselves, especially in France, Germany and the Scandinavian countries where the Muslim minority does not share the passive tolerance inherent in degraded Christians (see the Charlie Hebdo shooting for reference). Therefore, the fact that the “fierce and violent” Black Metal tries to assert itself in opposition to the weakest possible opponent is nothing more than a farce.

From this, we can deduce what Levkin’s issues with Putin are — Russia has high rates of Islamic immigration from countries like Uzbekistan — and also what his ideological black metal aims to achieve: to reorient black metal away from juvenile provocation and Satanism and towards militant opposition to the liberal forces he believes are destroying Europe. Levkin believes that black metal, like the philosophy of Max Weber and the poetry of Ezra Pound, is rife with “conservative revolutionary” potential. He writes:

As the unquestionable product of Modernity, Black Metal paradoxically issues a death sentence to the Modern world. The latter is the case not only with respect to contemporary Christianity: it is the antithesis to everything that is believed to be of any value for an average representative of today’s Western society: from the conventional notions of the good and the beautiful to the metaphysical Being itself. In other words, Black Metal, at a glance, is the very embodiment of an active-nihilistic phase in a metaphysical process of transvaluation of all values heralded by Friedrich Nietzsche.

His position is not without precedent either. The aforementioned Greek far right former political party and current criminal organization The Golden Dawn, for instance, had much fluency with Greece’s own potent underground black metal sub-culture. The founding member of Greek BM band Naer Mataron, Giorgios Germenis AKA Kaiadas, who also played in the extremely hateful national socialist black metal band Der Sturmer, was elected to the Greek parliament as a member of Golden Dawn in 2012. He was later taken into custody in 2014 for leading the Golden Dawn, then described by the Greek government as a criminal organization, before being released in 2015. In 2020, however, Germenis was convicted to 10 years for his role in leading the Golden Dawn. If the leader of an American NSBM band, say one of the guys from Grand Belial’s Key, got elected to Congress, Americans would be scared fucking shitless. But this only demonstrates the peculiar political rigor of European black metal. There is no separating the art from the artists with these guys. Their politics are there content, and whether you’re terrified of them or fascinated by them, to decouple them from them is cowardly self-deception. For reference, someone like Germenis getting elected to office in Greece is like cloud rap pioneer and convicted sexual assaulter Viper the Rapper getting elected to congress.

Levkin, who has a vague history of crime in his native Russia (allegations abound related to petty but disturbing stuff, like vandalizing religious spaces) but no convictions, seems to understand the propagandistic role of art in a rather direct manner. Much like the way gang members use hip-hop to recruit members into their ranks, Levkin created the Asgardsrei Festival to bring black metal fans, sure, but specifically black metal fans with a political tendency towards the far right. The first festival staged in 2016 in Kyiv hosted Peste Noire playing for the first time in years after being effectively banned in Western Europe, M8L8TH, Ukrainian BM legends Nokturnal Mortum, and Ukrainian pagan black metal band Kroda. VICE called Asgardsrei the “social networking event of the year” for the far right in a 2020 documentary. Other titans of hateful black metal that would play the festival in later years include German NSBM outlaws Absurd, Finnish skinhead BM band Goatmoon, and influential French NSBM pioneers Seigneur Voland.

The documentary also claims that Asgardsrei and festivals like it are a major revenue source for far right groups in Europe. Despite that, the figure that they found the festivals to generate, just over $1 million, doesn’t sound at all like the kind of money that would be needed to grease an entire movement. On speculation alone, one can’t help but wonder how Militant Zone itself is able to maintain such a pristine online presence and how it’s consistently able to deliver such a valuable high quality product. Black metal labels, by and large, don’t do the kind of vast business that could support ‘90s-MTV level, well-budgeted music videos for NSBM bands. This would lead one to conclude that Levkin’s past connections to Azov earn him hefty financial support and also that Azov at one point viewrd his activities in metal and art as fruitful for the recruitment of troops and members to its ideological group. I have no idea if the United States, for instance, directly funded Levkin’s (and Famine’s) formerly Azov-affiliated unit, The Misanthropic Division, but reporting by Global Times found that the CIA had both armed and trained Azov militias since 2015. It’s not impossible that US taxpayer money went to funding the most extremist militias in Ukraine, but whether you’re more mad about that or USAID funding tranny operas in Lithuania likely depends on your own political orientation.

My colleague, the Jewish artist and writer Vladislav Davidzon who has positioned himself as a preeminent Western defender of Azov, told me that while Azov might have some neo-Nazis within its ranks, its leaders are far too politically savvy to let something as globally rank as anti-semitism disrupt their PR machine. “A lot of them are pagan Thor types,'“ he clarified to me in a DM. “Many of them are just very right or far right without being Nazis.”

The way he explained it to me is that when you’re fighting an army as powerful as Russia’s with a population fractional to that of the enemy, you aren’t going to be politically screening all the troops. All that matters is that the recruit is willing to fight and die. I’m sympathetic to this viewpoint. In an article on Azov from 2022, Davidzon makes the interesting point that while former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko was indeed concerned about the neo-Nazi elements of Azov when the government formally incorporated the militia into the country’s National Guard in 2014, he hoped that by doing so, Azov’s craziest motherfuckers would be both useful militarily and, more importantly, controlled and under the surveillance of traditional military commanders. Davidzon writes:

Poroshenko ensured that members of the security services were integrated into the battalion in order to keep an eye on the men identified as potentially independent-minded loose cannon.

Still though, one can’t deny the hilarious hypocrisy of the legacy media that for nearly a decade prior had made smearing your average gun loving Americans, Trump supporters, and all to the right of them as “LITERALLLL NAHSISSS” only for them to go into full propaganda mode to pretend that the Ukraine, a country with major military machines staffed with self-avowed neo-Nazis, had no Nazis at all, and to suggest that it did was to propagate Russian propaganda, like this New York Times piece by Charlie “Smart” that analyzes “How the Russian Media Spread False Claims About Ukrainian Nazis”.

To be clear, Putin’s “deNazification” justification for invading Ukraine WAS an example of propaganda agitprop — Russia has its own neo-Nazi militias, like the Russian Imperial Movement, which similarly recruits hard European men with far right views into its ranks but with the goal of reinstating the Russian empire as its ultimate goal — but it was not one based on a lie, just one based on an inconvenient truth. One still has to chuckle at a Western liberal propaganda machine that has written off all concerns about mass immigration to the West as retrograde and fascist then justifying something like Azov, which for years was filled with guys like Levkin, who expressly fight for a Europe that belongs to white Europeans alone.

In recent years, or at least since the war broke out, some Western journalists have stated that Azov has been de-politicized. On the level of formality, I’m sure this is true. But to assume the regiment has banished all skinheadian thinkers from its ranks is, rather obviously, a bit absurd. For what it matters, Levkin has left Azov and now fights for the Russian Volunteers Corps, which was founded by the Russian expat Dennis Nikitin in 2022. The RVC is almost exclusively comprised of the Russian nationalists who fled their home country in 2014 and oppose Putin’s imperial ambitions in favor of making Russia a purely Slavic state. Nikitin was well-known as a neo-Nazi hooligan while living in Germany prior to 2014. His activities with Levkin date back to at least the Asgardsrei Festival of 2020, when Nitikin staged a mixed martial arts competition at the festival. Azov has worked hard to relieve itself of its neo-Nazi stigma, with one of its leaders being ceremonially embraced in a trip to Israel in 2023, and has Jewish ideologists amongst its ranks. Whether you consider that sincere or merely HR is up to you. Alas, I believe I read somewhere that Levkin and Famine and others like them abandoned Azov due to its alleged “corrosive Jewish element” or something like that, but whatever I read I forgot to save and I’m merely speculating here.

This text is not a condemnation of any of the figures or groups that I’ve written about here. Instead, it’s a study of the occasionally inconvenient political alliances that are sometimes necessary in times of war and the ways in which the more establishment ends of those alliances work overtime to downplay those alliances.

Moreover, it’s about the potency of the form of black metal, one of the last art forms that doesn’t just take an oppositional and dangerous political stance, but one where its practitioners actively seek a real impact on the realpolitik. All of us artists on the right have particular attachments to the proverbial warrior poet. Ernst Junger. Wyndham Lewis. Mishima. Robert Graves. Now, I am a nationalist, but I’m certainly not a Nazi. I sympathize with Levkin’s and Famine’s contempt for mass immigration, but certainly have little overlap with their thinking elsewhere. But, I am luridly fascinated by their commitment to their causes and the ways that it manifests in their art. With all the faggots, pussies and posers in the world, how many artists with political causes are willing to take up arms and die? Very few, I’d wager.