The Russian Obshchina and ISIS: Two Empires, One Playbook

In an earlier column I argued that the Russian Obshchina is best understood not as a reincarnation of Ernst Röhm's Sturmabteilung, as Russian liberals like to suggest, but as the new Black Hundreds: a religious-sectarian, imperial formation, built by the secret police to save a collapsing autocracy. That comparison is accurate, but it is also parochial. It locates the Obshchina inside a strictly Russian historical lineage. There is another comparison, less flattering to Moscow and more useful for the Western reader, which places it inside a contemporary global pattern: the Islamic State.

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