The party grew out of the followers of Konstantin Kasimovsky, a leading member of Pamyat in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. He split from the Pamyat-led National Patriotic Front in 1992 and formed his own party, the Russian National Union, the following year. This party re-emerged as the RNSP around 1999 after Kasimovsky closed down the Russian National Union and began to move away from the emphasis placed on the Russian Orthodox Church by that group. Despite this lessening of emphasis on religion the party's website lists Orthodox Christianity as one of its four main ideological principles, the others being a strong state, aggressive Russian nationalism and non-Marxist socialism. The party symbol is the Labarum of Constantine the Great and since 1999 have published a newspaper Pravoye Soprotivleniye, itself a successor to the earlier journal Shturmovik. Kasimovsky has since claimed to be the leader of a group called Russian Action although its nature, and that of its relationship to the RNSP, remains unclear.
Beheadings
On 15 August 2007 Victor Milkov, a 23-year-old student at in Adygea, was arrested for an online distribution of a video entitled Execution of a Tajik and a Dagestani, which depicts the murder of two non-ethnic Russian men by a group calling themselves "Nationalist-Socialist Party of Russia." It was later revealed that one of the victims was 24-year-old Shamil Odamanov from Russia's mainly Muslim Dagestanregion. The Tajik national was never identified. In 2008, 20-year-old Salakhetdin Azizov from Tajikistan was attacked as he walked across a stretch of wasteland in South Moscow. The 20-year-old Tajikistan market worker was stabbed and then decapitated. A group calling themselves "The Militant Organization of Russian Nationalists" claimed responsibility for the murder and demanded stricter immigration laws. A photograph of Azizov’s severed head was emailed to Sova. The two men can be heard saying "We were arrested by Russian national socialists" before Odamanov is beheaded and the other man is shot in the head by two masked men dressed in combat fatigues. Initially, Russian Minister of the Interior suggested that the video is a fake, but prosecutors eventually admitted it as authentic.
