Alexey Dobrovolsky

Alexey Aleksandrovich Dobrovolsky (Алексей Александрович Добровольский; October 13, 1938 – May 19, 2013), also known as Dobroslav (Доброслав), was a Soviet-Russian ideologue of Slavic neopaganism, a founder of Russian Rodnoverie, national anarchist, neo-Nazi, and volkhv of the Nature Conservation Society "Strely Yarily" (Arrows of Yarila).

He called his ideology "Russian National Socialism".

He was the spiritual leader of the radical wing of Russian neopaganism.

Dobrovolsky was the author of the self-published article “Arrows of Yarila” for neopagans.

In the 1950s–1960s, he was a member of the dissident movement of the USSR and the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (NTS).

Dobrovolsky's father was a descendant of Zaporozhian Cossacks and studied at the Bauman Moscow State Technical University, and his mother was a native Muscovite and an engineer-economist.

Dobrovolsky grew up admiring Stalin and everything that was associated with him.

From an early age, he participated in various dissident movements.

After finishing high school, Dobrovolsky received an incomplete education at the Moscow Institute of Culture and worked as a loader in the printing house of the newspaper "Moskovskaya Pravda".

In 1956, he left the Komsomol in protest against the campaign that had begun in the country to overcome the consequences of Joseph Stalin's cult of personality.

He says, “From the exposure of Stalin, I drew the wrong conclusions and gradually became an enemy of Soviet power."

In December 1956, influenced by the Hungarian Revolution, he formed the Russian National Socialist Party from the young workers of the defense factories in Moscow, aiming to overthrow the communists and "revive the Russian nation".

The group members were mainly involved in distributing leaflets with anti-Soviet and anti-communist slogans.

On May 23, 1958, he was arrested along with his associates from the RNSP and sentenced to three years in prison.

In custody, he became friends with former collaborators, Nazis, associates of Pyotr Krasnov, Andrei Shkuro, and Andrey Vlasov, and members of the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (NTS).

Influenced by them in the camp between 1958 and 1961, he became a monarchist.

While serving time in Dubravny camps (Mordovia), Dobrovolsky met S. R. Arseniev-Hoffman, who, in the pre-war years, was a member of a secret Russian-German society.

He was released in 1961.

The same year, he was baptized by the dissident priest Gleb Yakunin.

In 1964 he joined the Union of the Working People, an organization created by Boris Evdokimov, a member of the NTS.

In March 1964, because of a provocateur, all four members of the union were arrested.

Dobrovolsky and Evdokimov were declared mentally ill, and Dobrovolsky underwent psychiatric treatment for a year.

At the hospital, he met dissidents Vladimir Bukovsky and General Petro Grigorenko.

On August 25, 1965, he was released from a special psychiatric hospital.

In the autumn, the NTS established a connection with him, which, through him, transferred the duplicating apparatus to the dissident poet Yuri Galanskov, a member of the NTS.

In 1966, Dobrovolsky joined the NTS.

Through him, Alexander Ginzburg's "White Book" (a collection of documents about the trial of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel) and the collection "Phoenix-66" were transferred to the West.

In 1967 he was arrested again.

At the Trial of the Four, he testified against himself and his comrades, being sentenced to only two years (while Galanskov received seven years and died in the camp, and Ginzburg was sentenced to five years).

Anatoly Krasnov-Levitin wrote in his memoirs: “The most sensational news was that of the surrender of Alexey Dobrovolsky.

For a long time, no one wanted to believe this.

Dobrovolsky, with his mannerisms - either a white officer or a hero of the people's will - managed to inspire universal confidence in himself."

In January 1968, Pyotr Yakir, Yuliy Kim, and Ilya Gabay, calling Dobrovolsky "mean and cowardly" in their address "To the workers of science, culture, art", wrote:

"The life of Alexey Dobrovolsky, who played an ominous Kostomarov-like role in this process, was also tarnished. If he has even a shred of conscience, thirty pieces of silver (only a two-year sentence) is too little compensation for the contempt and rejection that await this slanderer. The stigma of a scoundrel who killed his comrades, who slandered them out of base interests, for this moral deformity of Dobrovolsky, our punitive bodies are to a large extent responsible."

In early 1969, Dobrovolsky was released.

He lived in Uglich and Alexandrov.

In 1972 he again received a residence permit in Moscow.

At this time, he became interested in occultism and Slavic paganism.

In the second half of the 1980s, with the beginning of Perestroika, he joined the patriotic association Pamyat.

In 1986 he left Moscow for Pushchino, where he was engaged in folk healing.