Russia is presented as a place where imported heavy music acquired political force amid the unsettled aftermath of communist rule. The book traces links between metal audiences and parts of the radical right, describes the circulation of Black Metal through underground cassette markets, and notes the appeal of Viking and Nordic imagery to some young nationalists. It also stresses the limits of what could be known: the Russian scene was developing unevenly, and its future direction remained uncertain.

Post-communist context

The account places Russia alongside Poland and other regions formerly under communist rule, where heavy music arrived with the added attraction of being perceived as anti-system. Death Metal had become prominent among Russian youth by the first half of the 1990s. The book suggests that the forbidden character of the music could matter as much as its sound, though it treats this as a broader regional context rather than evidence that Russian listeners shared a single outlook.

A report that brought the new Russian metal scene to Western readers appeared in the Wall Street Journal on February 18, 1993. It described an unusual alliance between metalheads and right-wing political groups, pairing young musicians and fans in leather and chains with nationalistic former Soviet Communists. The juxtaposition made visible a political connection that was not simply a matter of musical taste: both sides could cast themselves as opposition to the established order.

Metal and the radical right

The alliance took a concrete form in Moscow when the National Radical Party nominated Sergei Troitsky, singer of Korrozia Metalla, as a mayoral candidate. Known as Spider, Troitsky presented an image that combined black clothing and jackboots with the band’s aggressive stage identity. The book reports that the band’s most popular song targeted minorities from the south; at concerts, audience excitement extended beyond the performance, and after one show young people set fire to kiosks operated by minorities and overturned parked cars.

The political connection also worked through media. The right-wing newspaper Den paired conventional political commentary with a music feature intended to attract younger readers, promoting bands including Korrozia Metalla, Exorcist, and Death Vomit. Its deputy chief editor described the paper and the musicians as sharing an oppositional position and needing one another. Music thus served not merely as decoration for politics but as a route by which a political publication sought to reach a youth audience.

Viking imagery and underground circulation

The book describes neo-paganism and occultism as influences in some parts of the Russian far right, while emphasizing that the large majority remained attached to the Orthodox church. Right-wing publishers had begun issuing books on runes and Nordic history, and Viking imagery offered a barbaric, martial vocabulary that might appeal particularly to young people. The account connects this appropriation to the history of the name Russia, which it traces to the Rus, a predominantly Swedish Viking tribe said to have settled the region in 852. That historical reference functioned in the book’s discussion as cultural material available for modern nationalist use, not as evidence of a uniform national belief.

Black Metal circulated through cassette kiosks selling bootleg recordings and, the book says, had been available there for years. The disenchanted could find in it material around which to rally, but the account distinguishes this possibility from a settled description of the whole scene. A 1993 Russian rock critic reportedly observed an increasing atmosphere of pogroms among young people; in 1994, flyers appeared for a band calling itself SS Hitler Panzer Division, whose members adopted Nazi-themed pseudonyms. These details mark the presence of increasingly extreme imagery, without establishing how widely such groups were organized or supported.

An uncertain trajectory

The book is explicit that it was difficult to assess how the situation in Moscow and elsewhere had evolved since 1993. It characterizes ideas and cultural trends as taking longer to spread through Eastern Europe, while also describing an underground receptive to new imports. Its warning about what might follow is conditional: if Russian bands already using performance as a platform for racism and calls to arms incorporated Black Metal’s uncompromising outlook, the results could be volatile. Russia therefore enters the narrative not as a fully documented extension of the Norwegian scene, but as a developing and uneven field in which political alliances, historical symbols, bootleg distribution, and extreme music were beginning to meet.