page_title: National Bolshevism
section_title: German National Bolshevism
hierarchical_section_title: National Bolshevism / German National Bolshevism
caption_attribution_description: English: Cover of the German National-Bolshevik magazine "Widerstand", May 1934
context_page_description: National Bolshevism, whose supporters are known as National Bolsheviks or Nazbols, is a political movement that combines elements of fascism and Bolshevism.
  Notable proponents of National Bolshevism in Germany included Ernst Niekisch, Heinrich Laufenberg, and Karl Otto Paetel. In Russia, Nikolay Ustryalov and his followers, the Smenovekhovtsy used the term.
  Notable modern advocates of the movement include Aleksandr Dugin and Eduard Limonov, who led the unregistered and banned National Bolshevik Party in the Russian Federation.
context_section_description: National Bolshevism as a term was first used to describe a current in the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and then the Communist Workers' Party of Germany (KAPD) which wanted to ally the insurgent communist movement with dissident nationalist groups in the German army who rejected the Treaty of Versailles. They were led by Heinrich Laufenberg and Fritz Wolffheim and were based in Hamburg. Their expulsion from the KAPD was one of the conditions that Karl Radek explained was necessary if the KAPD was to be welcomed to the Third Congress of the Third International. However, the demand that they withdraw from the KAPD would probably have happened anyway. Radek had dismissed the pair as National Bolsheviks, the first recorded use of the term in a German context.
  Radek subsequently courted some of the radical nationalists he had met in prison to unite with the Bolsheviks in the name of National Bolshevism. He saw in a revival of National Bolshevism a way to "remove the capitalist isolation" of the Soviet Union.
  During the 1920s, a number of German intellectuals began a dialogue which created a synthesis between radical nationalism (typically referencing Prussianism) and Bolshevism as it existed in the Soviet Union. The main figure in this was Ernst Niekisch of the Old Social Democratic Party of Germany, who edited the Widerstand journal.
  A National Bolshevik tendency also existed with the German Youth Movement, led by Karl Otto Paetel. Paetel had been a supporter of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), but became disillusioned with them as he did not feel they were truly committed to revolutionary activity or socialist economics. His 1930-formed movement, the Group of Social Revolutionary Nationalists, sought to forge a third way between the NSDAP and the KPD, emphasising both nationalism and socialist economics. He was especially active in a largely unsuccessful attempt to win over a section of the Hitler Youth to his cause.
  Although members of the NSDAP under Adolf Hitler did not take part in Niekisch's National Bolshevik project and usually presented Bolshevism in exclusively negative terms as a Jewish conspiracy, in the early 1930s there was a parallel tendency within the NSDAP which advocated similar views. This was represented by what has come to be known as Strasserism. A group led by Hermann Ehrhardt, Otto Strasser and Walther Stennes broke away in 1930 to found the Combat League of Revolutionary National Socialists, commonly known as the Black Front.
  After the Second World War, the Socialist Reich Party was established, which combined neo-Nazi ideology with a foreign policy critical of the United States and supportive of the Soviet Union, which funded the party.
caption: Ernst Niekisch's Widerstand journal featuring the original National Bolshevik eagle symbol
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