The New Nobility

A penetrating investigation into how the KGB rose from the ashes of the Soviet Union and reinvented itself at the heart of the Russian state during Vladimir Putin's rule

Valerius Maximus and the Rhetoric of the New Nobility

Fearsome and provocative, the slogan "Blood and Soil" speaks to the interplay between the land and the people on it-the power of a land to shape a people and the power of a people to shape a land. Richard Walther Darré, an Obergruppenführer in the SS, was the leading "Blood and Soil" ideologist of Germany and served his people as Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture. This book, A New Nobility of Blood and Soil, was massively popular in the Third Reich and led to a strengthening of the agrarian and agriculturalist movements. Highly influential on Hitler, the principles in this book are foundational to the National Socialist worldview. This worldview held that Germany's natural elite, its nobility of blood and soil, was the nation's last hope against both the rapacious elite of capitalist wealth and the degenerate elite of ancient privilege. The hardworking and industrious peasant, who has no other country to call home, no riches with which to escape his duties, no international connections with which to deracinate himself, is the truly national man. His country is everything to him, and he is everything to his country, for it is on his back and by his sweat that his country is built. Thus, only from such a class of people can a new nobility arise that can combat the depravations of the modern world, with its polluted rivers, childless marriages, and the asphalt culture of city life. With no English language edition available, this essential text has been unknown to modern dissidents for far too long. Antelope Hill Publishing is proud to present, for the first time in English, A New Nobility of Blood and Soil. Laboriously translated by Augusto Salan and Julius Sylvester, this book is important to the preservation and contextualization of history.

In The New Nobility, two courageous Russian investigative journalists open up the closed and murky world of the Russian Federal Security Service. While Vladimir Putin has been president and prime minister of Russia, the Kremlin has deployed the security services to intimidate the political opposition, reassert the power of the state, and carry out assassinations overseas. At the same time, its agents and spies were put beyond public accountability and blessed with the prestige, benefits, and legitimacy lost since the Soviet collapse. The security services have played a central— and often mysterious—role at key turning points in Russia during these tumultuous years: from the Moscow apartment house bombings and theater siege, to the war in Chechnya and the Beslan massacre. The security services are not all-powerful; they have made clumsy and sometimes catastrophic blunders. But what is clear is that after the chaotic 1990s, when they were sidelined, they have made a remarkable return to power, abetted by their most famous alumnus, Putin.

In The New Nobility, two courageous Russian investigative journalists open up the closed and murky world of the Russian Federal Security Service. While Vladimir Putin has been president and prime minister of Russia, the Kremlin has deployed the security services to intimidate the political opposition, reassert the power of the state, and carry out assassinations overseas. At the same time, its agents and spies were put beyond public accountability and blessed with the prestige, benefits, and legitimacy lost since the Soviet collapse. The security services have played a central -- and often mysterious -- role at key turning points in Russia during these tumultuous years: from the Moscow apartment house bombings and theater siege, to the war in Chechnya and the Beslan massacre. The security services are not all-powerful; they have made clumsy and sometimes catastrophic blunders. But what is clear is that after the chaotic 1990s, when they were sidelined, they have made a remarkable return to power, abetted by their most famous alumnus, Putin.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1881.