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Fashist (Fascist).
Putnam, Connecticut: Shtab 1934-37. Folio (16" x 11 "), custom bound in
contemporary cardboard covers with Quaker
Puffed Rice color placard advertisements
mounted upside down on each cover,
patterned endpapers (Our research indicates
that the placards were likely cropped from a contemporary advertisement featuring
Shirley Temple).. Six monthly issues: nos.
6, 8, 9 and 11 (1934); and nos. 32 and 33
(1937). Six scarce issues of Fashist, the official newspaper of the All Russian National Revolutionary Party (VNRP), a branch of the White Russian Fascist movement based in Putnam, Connecticut. The Party was founded in 1933-34 by Anastase Vonsiatsky, a political émigré dedicated to the overthrow of the Soviet government in Russia. He served as publisher of the newspaper until 1940 and party leader until 1942, after the U.S. entry into World War II and Vonsiatsky’s arrest for espionage by the FBI. The Polish-born Anastase Andreivich Vonsiatsky attended the Emperor Nicholas II Cavalry Academy in St. Petersburg, and served with the anti-Bolshevik forces after the October Revolution in 1917. In 1921 while exiled in Paris, he met and married Marion Ream, a wealthy American whose financial support allowed Vonsiatsky to publish the newspaper at the Party’s headquarters located on their Connecticut estate (Quinnatisset Farm), and to distribute it free among Russian exiles throughout the diaspora. Published almost exclusively in Russian, with a few short articles in English, Vonsiatsky edited the newspaper to help create the illusion that White Russian and allied fascist forces were actively working to dismantle the Soviet Union. Initially sympathetic with German National Socialism, Vonsiatsky did not share many of the core ideologies espoused by the Nazis, in particular their anti-Semitism. After the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact Vonsiatsky ceased publication of the Fashist in protest. Nevertheless, when the Germans invaded the USSR in 1941, Vonsiatsky resumed his ambitious plans of overthrowing the Soviet Union, and met with the German-American bundführer, Wilhelm Kunze. Unknown to both men, their meeting was infiltrated by an undercover FBI agent, and Vonsiatsky was sentenced to five years imprisonment under the 1917 Espionage Act. A scarce survival of six issues of this White Russian periodical in a contemporary “folk” binding made with re-purposed advertising placards. CONDITION: Covers soiled, scattered tears to the paper backstrip and edges, good overall, with a few water stains and one corner torn away from the final leaf of issue no. 9. Offered in partnership with Between the Covers Rare Books.
Item #5432
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