Per 
When I was first approached to write an introduction for this section, I was of course delighted by the opportunity that I was being presented with to reflect on Anatoly's life and work. I did not know him for very long before his tragic and untimely murder, but it did not take long for me to realise that I had been blessed with the privilege of working alongside one of the most underappreciated and fascinating thinkers the Slavic reactionary movement had ever produced, and when the news of his death reached me, I was as heartbroken as the rest of us that we had lost such a vital mind. To my mind, contributing to the first published anthology of his work was one of the greatest honours I could have ever been granted.
But the delight that I felt upon being presented with this assignment quickly gave way to anxiety as I began to realise the implications of this task. The two essays collected in the following chapters represent the entirety of his posthumous notes- this is by far the shortest section of the anthology. One might at first assume that this would make my task comparatively easier than that of some of the other writers who have been involved in this project. Certainly it is true that, in a vulgar sense, I have had to do 'less' work than most of the other writers, but dealing with these short, incomplete works quickly brought be face to face with a number of unique problems.
Most of these problems are of an interpretive nature, and a significant subset of these interpretive issues can be attributed to the fact that the works in question are incomplete. However, I am of the belief that even if these essays had been completed, there would still be many questions surrounding them that might never be fully resolved, for the actual ideas and discussions present here represent some of the most cryptic and conceptually challenging material of the entire Renko corpus.
As the preceding sections of the book have made abundantly clear, Anatoly was constantly reinventing himself and reimagining his philosophy. You would be hard pressed to find another theorist whose work managed to encompass as wide a spectrum of right-wing thought as he did- every new publication seemed to represent a step forward, a shift towards a different set of interests and concerns, and sometimes even the adoption of positions that totally contradicted his preceding ones. These texts are no different- while their concern with the place of primordial religious movements within reactionaryism can be broadly identified as consistent with many of the themes of the essays that he published from 2016 until his death, the approaches and views that he appears to adopt here are radically opposed to the transcendent ethno-paganism that he had once so vehemently defended.
I say 'appears' because these essays make use of fiction in ways that virtually none of his other work does. While his speculations were often wild and strange, his discussions always drew on concrete examples. Here, however, he chooses to illustrate points with imaginary examples, and the intricacies of these falsehoods are such that it is often very difficult to tell how much of it is to be taken as 'real'. It is certainly clear that his immensely detailed accounts of religious movements such as 'Nälkä' and 'Mekhanism' are completely fabricated- no such religions exist. What is less clear, however, is the extent to which his characterisation of Rodnovery (the religion for which he had previously been an enthusiastic evangelist) as an 'infantile religion' or his call for Slavic reactionaries to ally with Mongolian Buddhist cults are to be taken seriously. It would certainly make more sense to see these views as being simple rhetorical devices whose meaning would have been clarified if he had been allowed to finish the works that they were a part of- however, it is not implausible to consider these as genuine representations of his views at the time. By this point, radical breaks with past views had become routine for him, and the break that these essays represent fits quite snugly into the pattern of ever increasing eccentricity and esotericism that can be observed throughout the evolution of his thought.
Perhaps this ambiguity was his intention. Whether it was intended or not, however, these essays are fascinating pieces of writing, on their own and within the wider context of his career. At the time that he was writing these texts, he had developed an obsession with the work of Gilles Deleuze, and while he never explicitly cites Deleuze, his influence is extremely apparent in the conceptual vocabulary he employs. His discussions of the Mongol Hordes almost directly paraphrase of many of the ideas set forth in Deleuze and Guattari's essay 'Nomadology and the War Machine', and his repeated references to 'assemblages' and 'swarms' can also be very clearly traced to Deleuze. His usage of these concepts, however, is very much his own, taking Deleuzian differential ontology and refracting it through the twin prisms of fiction and fascism, warping the ideas and putting them to uses that would no doubt have made that effete Leftist turn in his grave.
Roughly speaking, these essays both seem to broadly posit the conflict between the Enlightenment and its enemies as being a conflict between 'swarm-logic' and 'automaton-logic'. 'Nälkä, Neoanimism, and the Struggle For Life' begins by describing the characteristics of its eponymous fictional religion, a bizarre pseudo-Gnostic cult that has the power to manipulate living flesh, and contrasts this with 'Mekhanism', a religious movement that worships and manipulates machines. We can read Mekhanism as being illustrative of the Enlightenment and Nälkä as being a representative of the values of reaction- the former is driven by a desire to impose the rigid hierarchy and precision of automata on the universe, while the latter is driven by the ravenous power of the swarm.
As the essay continues, it becomes clear that for Renko, the swarm and the automaton are ontological categories- the text is a metaphysical argument for reaction, setting out the Enlightenment project as being fundamentally compromised because of its failure to grasp the relationship between swarming assemblages and automata. For him, the swarm is the most fundamental kind of relationship that allows the universe to function- the automaton is simply a subordinate assemblage that arises from the primordial swarm, and projects that attempt to assert the primacy of automata over the living swarm are not only futile, but destructive.
'The Insurgent Swarm' develops on many of these ideas, but from a noticeably different angle. The tone of the piece is distinctly polemical, and appears to be attempting to set forth a political program for the reactionary movement. However, many of the actions that he prescribes are totally fantastical, eventually concluding with a call for reactionaries to aid in efforts by Nälkic cults to revive the dormant corpses of the Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg and the Bogd Khan of Mongolia. Both, he claims, were practitioners of Nälkä, which he argues is the only religion that can truly turn the tide against the forces of Enlightenment- he also claims that both are still alive in a 'womb' beneath Ulan Bator.
'The Insurgent Swarm' is an extremely difficult essay to make sense of- while it is clear that much of the work is metaphorical, what are we to do with these calls to action? What exactly is being prescribed, and if it is not meant to be taken as a set of prescriptions, then what exactly is it meant to be taken as? A work of pure fiction? A philosophical allegory?
However we are to take it, it is certainly a thought-provoking piece, and the mixture of detail and conviction with which he writes makes it easy to forget that the subjects being dealt with are not real.
