The Manson family emerged from the heights of the Hollywood elite. It turns out that the Russo-Ukrainian film industry is quite competitive when it comes to the actor-to-nazi maniac pipeline.

There are two actors who now play prominent roles in the Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK), a military unit set up in late 2022 by Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR). Today we’ll examine just one – Kirill Kanakhin, aka Solar Cross, the grand poet of the RDK and the Ukrainian neo-nazi community as a whole. To familiarize the reader with his work, here’s one stanza from a 2014 poem of his:

The swastika – the Milky Way,

The runic futharcs of the planets,

The essence of lunar craters –

Hitler for a thousand years!

Now, visuals. Here is Kanakhin taking part in the RDK’s March 2023 raid on the southern Russian region of Bryansk:

Here is the younger Kanakhin in the Russian film Nobody Knows about Sex Part 2: No Sex (2006):

Growing up in a good Soviet family with a grandfather killed by the nazis, the pudgy young Kanakhin was into sniffing glue and opiates. Later, he became an actor in a range of cinematic masterpieces. He juggled his unsuccessful acting career with avid interest in pagan Hitlerism. His ever-growing interest in synthesizing Hinduism with nazism made him rather gaunter and more tattooed, scaring his colleagues and alienating him from broader society. After a series of eye-opening trips to gurus in India, he left to Ukraine in 2018 following arrests for participation in liberal anti-Putin protests.

In short, this story has it all. Liberal-nazi convergence in chic Moscow show business, drugs, nazi satanist blood rituals, military intelligence, serial murder…

We’ll take a look at this remarkable life journey in much more detail soon, but first, a brief overview of Kanakhin’s military unit, the RDK. This unit has become remarkably hyped-up by the media, and seems to even be involved in high-level Ukrainian politics.

The leader of the GUR and creator of the RDK, Kirillo Budanov, is today head of Ukraine’s President’s Office (OP), the most important post in the country. As you may recall, the faked assassination and ‘resurrection’ of RDK leader Denis Kapustin ‘White Rex’ in early January 2026 happened right before Budanov’s crowning as head of the OP.

Given the massive media euphoria surrounding the ‘resurrection’ and Budanov’s appearance in a video alongside White Rex announcing his resurrection, it seems to me like it was all a PR operation to prepare the public for Budanov’s latest promotion.

Budanov, by the way, is an avid reader of the fascist literature that the RDK so adores. Kanakhin himself has pointed out that Budanov’s shelf features books from the rightwing philosophers Rene Guenon and Julius Evola.

Now you might be able to understand why Budanov values cadres like Kanakhin. When a Ukrainian neo-nazi fighter dies at war, they never fail to include lines from Kanakhin in memorials. The Azovites surrounded in Mariupol back in early 2022 read Kanakhin’s poetry during the defense of the city, as well as during their time in Russian prison.

Kanakhin’s synthesis of Hinduism and pagan Hitlerism seems to have been appreciated by the GUR. According to Kanakhin, most of the fighters in the GUR’s special ops units are pagan. In August 2023, Kanakhin joyously posted a GUR recruitment poster with a broken clock, reading ‘CLOSE THE HISTORICAL CYCLE’.

Kanakhin subtitled this with the explanation that ‘The GUR will end the Kali Yuga’. According to Evola, the modern world of liberal degeneracy can be understood with the Hinduist historical concept ‘Kali Yuga’, an age that will end with the coming of great Aryan warrios.

As you can probably tell by now, the RDK is a collection of spectacularly open neo-nazis: the leader is called ‘White Rex’, another top RDK fighter Alexey Levkin has a national socialist black metal band called ‘Adolfkvlt’, and so on.

Below, you can see an early photograph of the proto-RDK from 2022. Levkin is on far right. Levkin’s friend and today’s subject, Kirill Kanakhin, is sitting with a black sun drawn on his weapon. Kanakhin and Levkin are today described by the RDK as the ‘original core’ of their organization.

If the white drawing may remind you of the 2019 Christchurch massacre, you wouldn’t be wrong – Levkin’s ‘Wotanjugend’ platform has released multiple Russian translations of his manifesto and called him a ‘vengeful Viking who has definitely earned his place in Valhalla’.

In 2021, the massive youth paramilitary Centuria, whose ideological education is managed by Mr Levkin, released photos of a young fighter of theirs holding a gun inscribed with a black sun and the date of the Christchurch massacre. Kanakhin also often visits Centuria camps. There’s no better person to educate the young generation.

Indeed, Kanakhin seems to be quite involved with training the youth. In February 2023, he wrote a text trashing Russian youth paramilitaries and praising their Ukrainian Azovite equivalents.

And shortly after, he shared a post from Yigal Levin on the Israeli approach to this matter. Levin is a former colonel in the IDF who calls himself an anarchist, though he spends most of his time glazing Azov:

In general, Kanakhin is filled with disdain for Palestine. Despite his supposed radical opposition to ‘Abrahamic religions’ and poetry that constantly glorifies Hitler, he wrote in 2023 that it would be best for Ukraine if Israel ‘totally destroys Hamas’.

One wonders whether this love for the Jewish State is not unrelated to the fact that the main patron of the RDK is the Israeli (formerly Russian) ultra-zionist oligarch Leonid Nevzlin, whose hatred of the majority of Russian citizens rivals Kanakhin’s.

So, a bit more background on today’s main character. We’ve examined Kanakhin on this substack at length, in particular his involvement in the early 2010s with the nazi satanist murder cult ‘Order of the Nine Angles’. Moving from Russia to Ukraine around 2018, he became Azov’s Yoga instructor, as well as fast friends with another future member of the RDK, Alexey Levkin.

Together, they organised such delightful musical events as the 2019 Asgardsrei national socialist black metal festival. This event featured an entire ‘Fuhrernacht’. Levkin’s ‘esoteric hitlerist’ band Adolfkvlt performed, and Kanakhin read his ‘Solar cross poetry’, described in typical Evolan fashion as ‘poetry against the modern world.

‘LIKE BLOOD FROM A WOUND FILLS THE SACRIFICIAL CUP. SO DOES THE HONEY OF POETRY FILL THE HALL TONIGHT. WHERE A RITUAL-MUSICAL ACTION WILL TAKE PLACE’

I’ve even managed to find a video of Kanakhin’s ‘mystical musical-poetic performance’ at the Fuhrernacht. Wearing his ‘Luciferian’ attire, he performs on the background of a shrine to Adolf himself.

Here you can see the altar which is visible on the top right of the above photograph:

And don’t worry, Levkin and Kanakhin don’t let their supposedly busy schedule fighting at the frontlines with the RDK limit their artistic output. In late December 2025 they held their latest ‘Yule Night’, featuring performances with such beloved groups as ‘Apartheid’, as well as Levkin’s numerous groups (Nezhegol, m8l8th/Hitler’s Hammer, Adolfkvlt)/.

And Kanakhin put out a new book of his poetry late in 2025, subtitled ‘Mantras of the Mannerbund’. The latter is a German initiation ritual into a warrior society. Despite Kanakhin’s claims to have abandoned the nazi satanist Order of the Nine Angles (O9A) for his own synthesis of esoteric Hitlerism and Hinduism, the old themes of death cults have gone nowhere.

Blood rituals

Speaking of the O9A. One reason I find Kanakhin interesting is through his role as a radicalizer of children into becoming nazi terrorists. In a world where such events never stop transpiring, Kanakhin is an important node.

As you may remember from my article on Kanakhin and the O9A, one famous poem of his from 2012 calls on children to rise up and murder all those surrounding them, ‘Krystallnacht’ style. In 2021, he wrote that this poem ‘Crusade of the Children’ was dedicated to the young men of the ‘National Socialist Organization: North’, who were serving life sentences for dozens of murders.

‘Crusade of the Children’ can be read otherwise. Consider all the young Russian school shooters obsessed with Kanakhin and Levkin’s national socialist black metal, along with their other ideological platforms like Wotanjugend. The video of Kanakhin reading this poem begins with a dedication to ‘Temple of the Black Sun’, the Russian O9A nexion that Kanakhin says he was a member of during the early 2010s.

The O9A glorifies school shooters. The most ardent O9A supporter of such actions is the American FBI agent Joshua Sutter, a man whose federally-funded ‘Martinet Press’ published a translation of a Temple of the Black Sun novel in 2015, and who came to Ukraine in 2018 to meet with Kanakhin’s good friends in Azov (I am unsure if Kanakhin himself was there).

The Temple of the Black Sun novel I am referring to is called the Kiss of Marena, originally published in 2013 with Kanakhin’s help. The novella concerns the mystical power of serial murder, and much of the book transpires in the icy wastes of Russia’s Kola Peninsula. In 2021, right after posting a photo of a ritual stone construction in the Kola peninsula that was originally published in Kiss of Marena, Kanakhin posts a poem he claims to have written there:

Solar Cross, [24/04/2021]
Disclosure

So let the Radiance pour forth,
And let the Gates dissolve!
We drank from the lake of Knowledge,
We died forever.

The Spheres blacken with the Sun,
Palm shelters palm,
In those who accepted the Light of Lucifer
And the Fire of Prometheus.

Dagger cuts will overtake
The veins of our wrists,
The acausal fluid
Will stain the Cup red.

The past was hanged!
In the eyes of Sisters and Brothers
Chaos laughs madly—
We open our arms to it.

2012

So, the poem is dedicated to blood rituals. And in a following post, Kanakhin claims to have participated in some sort of ‘rituals’ with the O9A in the 2010s, though he did not ‘undergo formal initiation’, whatever that means.

Finally, keep in mind that a number of Satanist murders were committed in the Kola Peninsula around 2016 by other O9A adepts. Whatever could Kanakhin be hinting at?

Of course, Kanakhin’s claims of a major break with his O9A past are obviously overblown. When you read Kanakhin’s ‘Hinduist’ poetry, it’s all the same story as his supposedly finished O9A career:

Solar Cross, [24/04/2021 5:29 PM]
Awaiting the Offering

I await you at night, O Dark Shakti,
At the hour when the Gods drink the Moon’s Soma.
To You, to You alone is my fervent bhakti,
By You, by You alone are my dreams enchanted.

Come to me, Devi, wanton and naked,
Appear as the embodiment of unattainable dreams.
The torments of hell and the joys of paradise—
Nothing before the chaos of your black hair.

Let me kiss your full breasts,
Since childhood I have known that taste of milk.
O bliss, O sweetness… let tomorrow not come!
Sink your two sharp fangs into my neck.

Accept the worship of the regal Yoni,
To her I offer this red flower.
Emeralds glitter in your jata crown,
The divine Cosmos hidden between your legs.

Wanton Mother-Darkness, leading toward Light,
Words could never describe you.
You are the Sky, you are the stars, you are the graha-planets,
O Shakti, I am Yours—here is my head!

2013

No matter the ideology, whether O9A or whatever Hinduist freakery he’s now thought up, Kanakhin has stayed true to his lifelong obsession with death for its own sake. Note also the fixation on a female god of death in the second poem. This is a classic O9A motif, which also appears in Kiss of Marena – Marena is supposedly the Slavic goddess of death.

Theatre-kid

So, how did such a unique individual emerge?

The wikipedia page on Kanakhin is quite amusing. It is up for deletion, for obvious reasons. To begin with, parts were clearly written by the subject himself:

During his school years, Kanakhin showed little interest in the learning process, which caused problems with his academic performance and put him on the verge of expulsion from school several times. Being an extrovert, he had many friends, both male and female, and was popular at school and in the neighborhood.

But Kanakhin, of course, wasn’t the only author. This is wikipedia after all, bastion of democracy. The main editor was a certain ‘Bonin’, who has an all-consuming fixation with the macabre.

I’ll add that ‘bon’ is a typical slang for a nazi skinhead in Russia. Here are some other pages Mr Bonin has edited, along with his hopes for the future.

Just about every single article edited by Bonin is about a serial killer. He calls Lake Leonard someone he has ‘always dreamed of writing about’ – Leonard killed between 11 and 25.

And this is Andrei Yurkin, who Bonin believes to be so lucky. At first I thought it was a sign of jealousy, but it seems to be a reference to the fact that Yurkin escaped death and returned to society after serving his sentence.

Not to get sidetracked, but Yurkin has indeed been quite lucky:

Now, back to Kanakhin, one of the many in Bonin’s pantheon of murderous heroes. Let’s track his evolution: from a youth of hard street drugs, to acting and neo-nazi militancy, to imprisonment for participation in liberal anti-Putin protests, to India, to Ukraine.

Kanakhin, born in 1982, had a typical soviet family. It’s interesting to learn from Wikipedia that Kanakhin’s grandfather died in the ‘Great Patriotic War’ against Nazi Germany. I wonder if Kanakhin tried to change that to the term ‘Second World War’. ‘Great Patriotic War’ is certainly not how Kanakhin would call it.

The most interesting section concerns his film career. I have to assume that Kanakhin wrote this, because my Russian friends in show business tell me that Kanakhin was an absolute no-name. I will reproduce the entire section in full, along with photographs of his roles I found online:

While still a student at a theater school, Kanakhin began acting in the third season of the TV series Simple Truths, playing the role of a spoiled rich kid student, Fedya Baklanov. According to Kanakhin’s recollections, he landed the role thanks to the head of the Department of Stage Speech at the Shchepkin School, who noticed him just as the show’s casting director had come to the school in search of large-built students to play Baklanov.

From 2004 to 2006, he had minor roles in the series Delusion, 9 Months, and Airport 2. In 2006, Kirill received a significant supporting role in the film Nobody Knows About Sex. The film was a success with audiences, and Kanakhin’s character, Kesha, was considered one of the most memorable, which soon led to the shooting of a sequel titled Nobody Knows About Sex 2: No Sex.

Naturally, if any of followers have seen these artworks, I would be grateful for feedback.

In the sequel, Kanakhin was given the lead role, and his co-star was Ksenia Sobchak, but the film failed to win over the wider public.

During this period, he once again played a rich kid, nicknamed “Sonny,” in the 4th season of the youth series Club. The series was one of MTV Russia’s most successful projects. Notably, this was Kanakhin’s third project with actress Anastasia Zadorozhnaya, after Simple Truths and Nobody Knows About Sex, where Kanakhin’s character was in love with hers and tried to win her affection. However, after this, Kanakhin’s career began to decline. His fellow actors noted that Kanakhin lacked exceptional talent, did not show persistence, and had issues with discipline during rehearsals.

In the following years, Kanakhin took on minor roles in series such as I Am Not Myself, Redhead, Lawyer-7, and Amanda O.

In 2010, Kirill played a bandit in five episodes of the TV series Glukhary-3. According to the plot, Kanakhin’s character took part in the kidnapping of the main character investigator Sergey Glukharyov’s sister (played by Maxim Averin) and was eventually killed by him. This was the last major project of Kanakhin’s career. Over the next two years, he appeared in minor roles in five little-known series and films, after which, in 2012, he ended his film career. His last major role was that of a police collaborator in the series Other Wings.

A parallel life

An actor has to play a part. But Kanakhin was living another, separate existence to his acting career.

This is what I’ve been able to find out from going through Kanakhin’s social media. He was already a militant nazi pagan in the early 2010s.

For instance, he met with the influential Russian pagan nazi mystic Dobroslav at that time. According to Kanakhin, Dobroslav had a poster of the nazi Hinduist spy and writer Savitri Devi. Devi would later become Kanakhin’s ideological lodestar.

And at a 2010 Moscow anti-immigrant demonstration by ‘National Democratic Alliance’, he held up a poster calling to ‘CUT OFF THE GANGRENE’, referring to the southern territories of Russia where Muslims live. This idea of balkanizing Russia has always been a crucial meeting point for neo-nazis, liberals, and NATO.