After ruining Russia’s defense industry and Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin should return to his roots — overseeing Russian Nazism
Dmitry Rogozin, who has ruined the military-industrial complex of Russia and, most recently, the Roscosmos space agency, should revisit the field where he began his rise to power — supervision of Nazism in Russia.
Judging by the latest achievements — or if I put it without sarcasm — “failures” of the Russian defense and space industries, both of which were pretty much led by the same person — Dmitry Rogozin — there is a feeling that he will soon have to return to his roots. Some may not be aware of this, but Rogozin began his long journey into big politics as one of the supervisors of Russia’s Nazi movement.
Given how successfully Russia has been exporting Nazism to the rest of world, especially in light of the exposure of training camps for extremists from around the globe operating in the “country that defeated fascism”, this trend may in the future become a gold mine for a vocal Nazi, Mr Rogozin. After all, this is much easier than competing with Elon Musk and even creating talking elevators instead of launching new missiles and constructing lunar bases.
At the time when Rogozin was no longer such an odious figure but rather a seasoned politician, serving as Vice PM and chairing the board of the Military Industrial Commission, his Rodina Party saw no issues in organizing in St. Petersburg forums and rallies of neo-Nazi organizations from around the world.
In 2015, one of such events, the International Russian Conservative Forum, was held in Russia’s northern capital to become became the first-ever international forum of neo-Nazi organizations from Europe and Russia. The man behind the forum was Anatoly Zhuravlev, an MP with the ruling United Russia Party, who was originally part of Rogozin’s Rodina.
Of course, many may feel a bit confused over the Nazi affiliation of someone like Rogozin — the man born into a family of security operatives, whose father, lieutenant general Oleg Rogozin, arranged his son’s marriage to Tatyana Serebryakova, daughter of a KGB officer, which opened Rogozin Jr. the door to a career in foreign intelligence.
In fact, there’s nothing surprising in such affiliation.
The thing is that the KGB and the GRU military intel have traditionally exploited various extremist and radical organizations, movements, and subcultures to serve their own goals. Entire organizations and even ideologists of anarchists and neo-Nazis were created under full control of and funded by Russian security agencies.
And therefore there is nothing surprising in the fact that some affluenza kid from a general’s family, who got so peculiarly married, grew to take the path of neo-Nazism.
However, Rogozin’s story, especially in the early stages of his career, includes a few noteworthy moments that may hint at his possible future fate in a modern-day Russia, which more and more resembles the Third Reich.
In the 1990s, Dmitry Rogozin fawned on his former chief from the SVR foreign intelligence service, Yevgeny Primakov, but on the eve of the power shift in Russia, marked with the arrival of Vladimir Putin, who was originally with the FSB security agency, he immediately flipped sides.
Having secured support at the FSB HQ on Lubyanka, in the person of Colonel-General Sergei Chemezov, a close friend of General Sergey Beseda, Mr Rogozin has reached the current heights on his career path. However, besides succeeding in crafting sophisticated schemes of grand embezzlement, Dmitry Rogozin did pretty much nothing at the helm of the defense and space industries. His positions got weaker after he got kicked out from the military-industrial complex, and now he could soon find himself out of the space as well.
In turn, the Kremlin is unlikely to get rid of such a valuable asset, so if we talk about Rogozin’s efficiency, in the wake of U.S. protests and cultivation of extremism across Europe, he could well secure a sweet spot, tasked with exporting Russian Nazism.