Draft:Evgeny Nechkasov

Evgeny Alekseevich Nechkasov (Евгений Алексеевич Нечкасов; born 5 October 1991) is a Russian philosopher, ideologist and writer of Pagan Traditionalism and Germanic Heathenry. He uses the pseudonym Askr Svarte which comes from the Old Norse Askr plus the adjective Svartr, meaning Black Ash-tree.

Nechkasov is a descendant of German colonists from Württemberg who settled in the lands of Bessarabia and near Odessa, in Russian Empire (today these are the lands of modern Moldova and Ukraine) in the 19th century. They were exiled to Siberia in the early years of World War II.

Ideas
Nechkasov is mostly known as the author and promoter of the idea of Pagan Traditionalism. This is a deep synthesis of the ideas of René Guénon, Julius Evola, Alain de Benoist and Alexander Dugin with the modern pagan worldview and movements.

He insists on an Advaita-monistic and ethno-religious reading of the philosophy of traditionalism, contrasting it with the Abrahamic branches of “classical” Traditionalism. He views the Abrahamic religions as inevitable milestones in the decline of Western and Eastern cultures. According to Nechkasov, the intellectual and cultural paradigm of Modernity, which Traditionalists consider their main enemy, directly follows from Abrahamic theology and ethics, with the influence of Platonic philosophy.

Regarding modern paganism, Nechkasov also takes a critical position, criticizing it for its excessive weakness and susceptibility to the influences of Postmodern culture, New Age and soft theology. Thus, his positions are close to fundamentalism.

Nechkasov's early period was also marked by an interest in mysticism and esotericism. He tried to synthesize the Indian teachings of Vamachara with German-Scandinavian mythology, creating and promoting the idea of the Left Hand Path in Odinism.

It can be argued that German philosophy had a strong influence on the development of Nechkasov’s ideas in the second half of the 2010s. Since 2017, he has moved to increasingly philosophical and cultural positions and style of philosophizing and writing.

During this period, the main themes of his texts and books were identity in the Postmodern era, existential alienation, the disenchantment of the world, criticism of progress and the problem of industrial society and the technogenic development of civilization (Gestell). In this direction, he follows and develops the ideas of Ernst Jünger, Martin Heidegger, the Finnish radical ecologist Pentti Linkola and some of the theses of the American radical thinker Theodor Kaczynski. All of them are synthesized or shown to be consistent with the main theses of Pagan Traditionalism.

According to Nechkasov, authentic and full-fledged human existence is realized in the mythological and sacred modes of being-in-the-world. Nechkasov insists on the fundamental plurality of human cultures and natures, following the school of perspectivism in anthropology. He denies the universalism of civilizational development and globalization, considering the ideal a simple life in small religious communities. He considers the only way to achieve such to be the complete dismantling of the modern global Western-centric civilization, its historical intellectual heritage and the entirety of technological infrastructure. In this case, Nechkasov’s political ideas can be described as religiously and philosophically based elitism and Neo-Luddism, which are combined with an approval of Inner emigration or Jüngers .

Since the beginning of the 2020s, Nechkasov has also begun to develop criticism and revision of the philosophical foundations of Traditionalism and current pagan theology in favor of the fundamental critique of metaphysics developed by Martin Heidegger and his teaching about Another Beginning (German: der Andere Anfang) of Western thinking and philosophy. In this direction, the greatest attention is paid to poetry, the nature of mythos, linguistics and the philosophy of language, and apophatic theology, which are contrasted with mechanical and digital thinking in the spirit of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Activism
Nechkasov is the founder of the Siberian Germanic Heathen community Svarte Aske, which existed from 2011 to 2021.

Nechkasov was briefly a member and the head of the local Novosibirsk chapter of the Eurasian Youth Union of Aleksandr Dugin from 2011 to 2013. He left the movement due to religious and philosophical disagreements.

Since 2015, Nechkasov has been the editor-in-chief of the annual Russian Traditionalist almanac Warha. To date, seven issues have been published in Russian and two in English. In 2021, the almanac changed its name to Alföðr, The Allfather, one of the names of the Scandinavian god Odin.

Nechkasov has also been featured as a guest writer in the Russian magazine Rodnovery (Russian: Родноверие), in the academic journal Colloquium Heptaplomeres established by the Russian scholar of religion Roman Shizhensky from Nizhny Novgorod State Pedagogical University, and in the Ukrainian Traditionalist almanac Tradition and Traditionalism (Ukrainian: Традиція і традиціоналізм).

In the same year Nechkasov also appeared in a documentary sponsored by the Russian Ministry of Culture, The Last Campaign of the Baron (directed by Daria Khrenova, Russian: Дарья Хренова ), about the controversial figure of Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, who was executed in Novonikolayevsk, now Novosibirsk, in 1921.

In 2017, Nechkasov began to conduct active public work as an expert and public speaker in defense of Pagan Traditionalism and the right of followers of modern paganism to freedom of conscience and the fullness of religious practice. Nechkasov repeatedly took part in debates on the Orthodox TV channel СПАС, regularly gave commentary on TV,  for the press      and religious scholars. One of his key missions in this period was to improve the public image and quality of research on modern paganism in Russia.

Starting in 2019 he was editor-in-chief of the Foundation for Traditional Religions (acronym: ФТР, FTR), a Russian think-tank organization which promotes and analyzes news and studies pertaining to different branches and kinds of modern paganism and indigenous religions with the aim of protecting and promoting them in Russia. The FTR team actively used methods of journalism, legal consulting, statistics, sociology, and philosophy in their work.

Under the auspices of the FTR, the Red Feed project was launched in 2021 as a systematic monitoring of defamation of followers of modern paganism in the media, public statements and academic research, and acts of hate speech and vandalism. Most of the recorded instances were committed by the clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church and affiliated experts and vigilantes. The project collected statistics for 2019-2021, annually registering over fifty incidents and attacks against neo-pagans in Russia and listed them on an interactive map. FTR and Red Feed were closed in March 2022 due to the inability to continue their activities.

Nechkasov is actively involved in writing and publishing activities and gives public and online lectures.

In 2022 the Russian anti-cultist activist Alexander Dvorkin listed Evgeny Nechkasov as "one of the most-known neopagan ideologists" in Russia.

Books in Russian

 * Polemos: Языческий традиционализм (2016)

Books in English

 * Svarte, Askr (2017). Gap: A Left-Hand Path Approach to Odinism (2n release). Spain: Fall of Man Press.
 * Svarte, Askr (2019). Gap: At the Left Hand of Odin (3rd release). Spain: Fall of Man Press.
 * Svarte, Askr (2019). Gap: At the Left Hand of Odin (3rd release). Spain: Fall of Man Press.