Meet the Student Anti-Fascist Front How a petition against a Russian university department’s name grew into a multi-campus leftist movement

In 2023, the Russian State University for the Humanities (RGGU) in Moscow appointed far-right ideologue Alexander Dugin as head of the newly founded Ivan Ilyin Higher Political School. The decision sparked student petitions, not only in response to Dugin’s extremist views but also due to the school’s namesake: Ivan Ilyin, a 20th-century philosopher who defended the actions of Hitler and Mussolini and advocated for the restoration of a tsarist autocracy in Russia.

Today, the school still bears Ilyin’s name, and Dugin remains at its helm. However, the student movement opposing both figures has grown far beyond what its initiators likely anticipated. Meduza shares the story of the Student Anti-Fascist Front (SAF), translated and abridged from reporting by the independent outlet Cherta Media.

“Comrades, you may find our program insufficiently Marxist,” announces a young man in a suit. “Well, it just so happens that I had a hand in drafting it. We deliberately aimed to make it broadly democratic.”

The “comrades” are gathered around a small table in a Moscow Rostic’s — the domestic fast food chain that has replaced KFC in Russia. He speaks into his phone, making sure to include two remote participants listening in under the nicknames “Howard Lovecraft” and “TS.” Both are newcomers and still need to be introduced to the organization’s structure and focus.

“What’s SAF’s ideology?” the suited man says, reading aloud a message from “TS.”

“Grab your dick in a fist! Stalin–Beria–Gulag!” says a sharp-bearded young man in bold glasses, quoting a song by writer and musician Mikhail Elizarov. If his face were a bit narrower, he might resemble a young Eduard Limonov, the late leader of Russia’s far-left ultra-nationalist National Bolshevik Party.

“In general, most of us lean left, but there are also liberals,” the man in the suit adds, clearly uncomfortable with his associate’s joke.

Even though we’re outlawed in Russia, we continue to deliver exclusive reporting and analysis from inside the country. 

Our journalists on the ground take risks to keep you informed about changes in Russia during its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Support Meduza’s work today.

Like the others, the suit wearer introduces himself with a pseudonym: Egor Mirovoy. He admits that he began his own political journey as a liberal. It was Alexey Navalny’s 2018 documentary “He’s Not Dimon to You,” about the corruption of former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, that sparked his political awakening, but over the years, his views evolved. Disillusioned with capitalism and liberal democracy, he eventually embraced Marxism.

Meanwhile, the young man in glasses, like the guy next to him, is a member of the “JoJack” movement — a vaguely defined group of left-wing patriotic nonconformists. They’re widely disliked in broader leftist circles, often branded as informants and “social chauvinists,” and are sometimes even accused of supporting the invasion of Ukraine. The JoJacks at the SAF meeting firmly reject this claim, introducing their movement by saying, “We hate war in all its forms.” However, they quickly add that they also despise anything “soy” and “liberal.”

None of the SAF members whom Cherta’s correspondent encounters expresses even indirect support for the war in Ukraine. At the same time, they’re also not supporters of Ukraine’s fight for sovereignty; more often than not, SAF members carefully say that they oppose “both imperialisms.”

The last participant in the meeting, a guy with a rocker’s mane, a mustache, and a goatee, introduces himself as a Maoist. Later, he clarifies that despite his views, he is not a member of the “Russian Maoist Party” — which, it turns out, actually exists.

Thus begins the meeting of the RGGU cell of the SAF. The movement was founded in the spring of 2024 by a group of students who had protested against their university’s creation of the Ivan Ilyin Higher Political School. Now, its members say their aim is to unite students nationwide and focus on combating fascism in Russian education. The movement aspires to become an independent student union that genuinely defends students’ rights, unlike the existing “yellow unions,” which they dismiss as “powerless puppets of university administrators.”

The birth of the SAF

So began the petition launched on April 12, 2024, by activists calling their movement “RGGU Against Ilyin.” Shortly after its release, online groups supporting the initiative sprang up on Telegram and VKontakte. Flyers with a quote from Ilyin — “Our ideal is a fascist monarchy” — were plastered around the university. Leftist bloggers and media picked up the story, and soon, students from other universities joined the protests.

RGGU first announced it would open the Ivan Ilyin Higher Political School (VPSH), led by Alexander Dugin, back in the summer of 2023. But activists say the real spark for the protests came from an article on the far-right Russian Orthodox news network Tsargrad, which declared a “new front in the battle” for Russian academia, claiming it was under “Western liberal ideological occupation.”

For leftist students, Dugin and Ilyin symbolize a resurgence of the ultra-right — the very force they define themselves against. Dugin was quick to blame foreign intelligence services for fueling the student protests, citing the “Ukrainian factor.” He even compared the backlash against VPSH to the 2024 Crocus City Hall terrorist attack in Moscow, claiming both were orchestrated from abroad. But neither this rhetoric nor propagandist Dmitry Kiselyov’s rebuke on state TV managed to scare the protesters off. By May, a unified inter-university organization had emerged: the Student Anti-Fascist Front (SAF).

Down to business

Rostic’s — still called KFC by the antifascists out of habit — is packed. The only available seats are in the basement. Just six people are attending today’s SAF meeting, half the number needed for a quorum, so they decide to skip major decisions and instead focus on introducing newcomers and discussing areas of work.

They manage to outline four key priorities:

• Flooding the university administration with complaints whenever incidents occur
• Providing legal assistance to students
• Compiling a collection of critiques on Ilyin to help members write their thesis papers on him and Dugin
• Anti-corruption investigations targeting universities

It’s the last point that sparks the most interest.

“Won’t that anger the people in power?” asks “TS” through the phone.

“Of course it will. That’s the whole point!” replies Egor Mirovoy. “It’ll set a precedent, draw attention to us, and attract supporters. Besides, corruption cases still cause public outrage.”

Left-wing political in wartime Russia

‘No war but class war!’ How a group of communists in Novosibirsk has leveraged Soviet nostalgia to speak out publicly against the invasion of Ukraine

a month ago

Left-wing political in wartime Russia

‘No war but class war!’ How a group of communists in Novosibirsk has leveraged Soviet nostalgia to speak out publicly against the invasion of Ukraine

a month ago

For a while, the group discusses student issues. They proudly tell the newcomers how SAF drew attention to past problems with dorms in Yaroslavl and Kazan. Meanwhile, the JoJacks head upstairs to order food.

Once the organizational matters are settled, the meeting takes on a more informal tone. “Ektor” — the same young man who joked about “Stalin–Beria–Gulag!” — shares how his own views were shaped. It turns out he was part of a theater group in school.

“Our director raised us on the motto ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité.’ When we made lunch, for example, everyone got the same portion. Some of you might be thinking of the Khmer Rouge right now…”

“Classic barracks communism,” the Maoist interjects.

“Yeah, yeah, barracks communism! But it was really about justice — that was the main idea she instilled in us, even though her own views weren’t all that defined,” Ektor says. He launches into a story:

The meeting lasts about four hours. At some point, the conversation shifts to professors.

“Our Russian history lecturer is a grad student — he just reads off Wikipedia. Exams are coming up, and we don’t know shit! Then there are the conspiracy theory enthusiasts,” one member says.

“Mine literally admitted to having a ‘slave mentality,’” Ektor smirks. “Like, nobody will change a lightbulb in the stairwell unless Putin personally shows up to check on it. It’s the ultimate cuckoldry of the kitchen-dwelling 1960s generation.”

Anti-imperialists finding common cause

Radical crossroads Revolutionary Ireland and the fight against the Russian Empire

12 days ago

Anti-imperialists finding common cause

Radical crossroads Revolutionary Ireland and the fight against the Russian Empire

12 days ago

A big tent

Since its creation last year, SAF has championed the idea of a “broad front.” Russia’s modern political left is deeply fragmented, with groups ranging from the traditional to the bizarre. There are classical Marxists, social democrats, democratic socialists, and anarchists. Then there are the JoJacks, the Maoists, and, of course, the Trotskyists and Stalinists. But Roma, SAF’s representative from RGGU, outdoes them all: he’s a Jucheist, a supporter of North Korean-style communism.

When asked how a hereditary leadership system bordering on feudalism could be considered progressive, the 20-year-old responds calmly:

Roma describes Juche as a “humanist philosophy” aimed at achieving the common good. Apologizing in advance for “getting all romantic,” he shares his vision of technological progress — a future where humanity shifts its focus away from wars and the redistribution of wealth among the bourgeoisie toward the conquest of space.

Like Egor Mirovoy, Roma’s political awakening traces back to “He’s Not Dimon to You.” He believes, however, that the word “liberal” is meaningless, except as an insult. In the online circles where SAF antifascists gather, a liberal is, at best, a centrist. And for politically charged youth, there’s hardly a worse status to have.

‘Here they come, the Red Guards’

Nonetheless, there are some liberals in SAF, Roma admits, including in his own chapter. At RGGU, like at most Russian humanities universities, women vastly outnumber men. But in the university’s SAF chapter, the gender split is about 50/50. Among the men, every single one is a Marxist. Among the women, most are liberals.

Another SAF member shares his hopes for the movement’s future:

The Red Guards, of course, didn’t exactly have a happy ending — they unleashed terror, tormented people, killed thousands, and burned everything in their path. But despite some of the more extreme views they profess, SAF members aren’t driven by radical ideology so much as by a deep need for unity. They argue about Stalin, about the French student protests of ’68, about executions in North Korea, and about surplus value. But so far, united by the idea of anti-fascism, they seem broadly able to talk to each other without their debates turning hostile.