Today the racist movement’s self-styled intellectual wing is again at war with itself, after the world’s leading far-right publisher sacked its chief editor in a fierce row over his close ties to Moscow.

Recent Searchlight reports have highlighted the increasing bitterness of internal far right splits over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. These splits began well before the invasion, but they have worsened in recent months.

Support from Putin

Secret reasons for this deepening split involve a strategic decision taken by Vladimir Putin last year to increase his financial support for the international far right through a network of think tanks, conferences, web sites, social media accounts, and online streams.

A leading figure in this network is Constantin von Hoffmeister, the leading English-language promoter of Russia’s nationalist “intellectual” Aleksandr Dugin.

Hoffmeister is a German-born teacher who lived and worked for years in Russia. He first came to our notice almost twenty years ago when he spoke at a racist conference in Moscow inspired by Guillaume Faye, who was one of the leading figures in the European New Right from the late 1960s until his death in 2019.

Fellow speakers at that Moscow conference included notorious veteran extremists such as Faye’s close Pierre Krebs, militant French fascist Pierre Vial, and former Klan leader and Putin fan David Duke.

Groomed by the Russians

Finding the young Hoffmeister in this company was a clear sign that the Russians were grooming him as a future star of international fascism’s pro-Moscow wing.

In July 2012 Hoffmeister turned up as a guest speaker at Jez Bedford-Turner’s London Forum, where Searchlight’s agent inside the Forum, Duncan Robertson, reported to us about the fierce debate Hoffmeister caused by defending Israel in front of an audience of antisemites.

Bedford-Turner was embarrassed when Heritage and Destiny’s deputy editor Peter Rushton tore into Hoffmeister during questions at the end of his speech.

Rushton’s friend and fellow nazi Richard Edmonds was another speaker on the panel and was more restrained but equally clear in dissociating himself from Hoffmeister’s views.

Although his first approach to the British nazi scene misfired badly, Hoffmeister soon became influential via his work for Arktos.

Mysterious Swede

This well-financed publishing house was established in 2009, headed by a mysterious Swedish businessman, Daniel Friberg.

He remains the company’s main owner and is one of its three directors, together with an American, Jason Rogers, and a Swede based in Hungary, Tor Westman.

Arktos became the main English-language outlet for Dugin’s work, and Hoffmeister was promoted to be its Editor-in-Chief, while continuing to run his own pro-Russian website ‘Eurosiberia’.

In 2017 Searchlight reported on a major split between Arktos and their former friends at the American publishers Counter-Currents.

Part of this split involved the removal of one of Arktos’ British directors, John Morgan, who took the side of Counter-Currents and their boss Greg Johnson.

The row involved all the usual allegations of financial embezzlement and homosexuality, two themes that always crop up when nazis fall out.

But another increasingly relevant aspect is that Johnson and Counter-Currents have taken a pro-Ukrainian line, while Arktos continued promoting Dugin and (especially through Hoffmeister’s work) was seen as pro-Moscow.

British connection

An important British angle on all this is that Gregory Lauder-Frost, the ex-Tory and convicted fraudster who runs the Traditional Britain Group, had a longstanding job with Arktos until the early 2020s and is still linked with the organisation. He is another promoter of the pro-Putin line.

So why has all this changed?

One answer is that Friberg and some of his friends have grown nervous at the increasingly blatant role of Russian intelligence operatives in trying to manipulate the far right for propaganda purposes, including recruitment of mercenaries and terrorists.

Mysterious death

Friberg doubtless had one eye on the unenviable fate of Manuel Ochsenreiter, who went from editing a glossy German far-right magazine to meeting a mysterious death in Moscow in 2021.

Ochsenreiter was yet another Russian agent on the far right who in November 2012 spoke at Bedford-Turner’s London Forum, praising the Assad regime in Syria which was allied to both fugitive nazi war criminals and successive pre- and post-Soviet Russians.

Searchlight exposed some of Ochsenreiter’s connections in 2017.

Silenced

He fled to Moscow to escape criminal charges after being exposed for hiring Polish nazis to carry out a firebombing in Ukraine.

Informed observers suspect that Ochsenreiter was silenced after his Russian masters feared he would implicate other elements of their networks among European extremists.

Another factor is that Friberg feared Hoffmeister’s increasingly active promotion of Dugin would damage Arktos’ main market among European and American racists.

Abandoning Duganism

Hoffmeister has been increasingly outspoken about “multipolarity” which is derided by rival nazis such as Hoffmeister’s old enemies at Heritage and Destiny as “surrender to the Third World”.

Tensions were building for months, and today Friberg issued a statement sacking Hoffmeister, with a telling headline about “recovering our commitments”, a clear hint that Arktos intends to abandon Duginism in favour of unambiguous racism.

Friberg didn’t mince his words. Hoffmeister had, he said, “recently misused his editorial capacity at Arktos in ways which contradict the coherence, independence, and high standards that we uphold.”

Even worse, he had allegedly “engaged in associations and dealings which potentially misrepresent Arktos’s own affiliations and commitments”, including “disseminating perspectives which drift too far away from Arktos’s core values and priorities.”

Blood on the carpet

Hoffmeister replied on X that after Arktos strongly rejected his idea of forming a separate but still “Arktos-affiliated platform dedicated to Dugin”, they had completely parted company.

He has created a new “Multipolar Press”, though it’s not certain whether this will be mainly online, or whether like Arktos it will be a book publisher.

Over the next days and weeks, Searchlight expects to see divisions harden, with those who fancy themselves as the best brains of the far right taking one side or the other. It’s likely to be keyboards at dawn rather than pistols, but on past form we can’t rule out actual blood on the carpet.