In November 1967, the ABN organized rallies in Ottawa outside of the Soviet embassy and in Montreal outside of the Soviet consulate to protest the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution. The main speaker at the ABN rally in Ottawa was Stetsko whose speech calling for Ukrainian Independence caused the Ukrainian-Canadian audience to erupt in rapturous joy. At another ABN rally held shortly afterward was attended by the former prime minister, John Diefenbaker, and the Conservative MP Mike Starr, the first Ukrainian-Canadian cabinet minister. In the 1968 election, a Hungarian-American ABN activist, Laszlo Pasztor who began his political career as a student activist for the Arrow Cross while attending university in his native Hungary, campaigned hard for the Republican candidate, Richard Nixon. Pasztor had been convicted of crimes against humanity in Hungary in 1946 for his role in the Holocaust in Hungary as he served as a diplomat for the short-lived Arrow Cross regime of 1944-45 in Berlin. In 1969, Nixon rewarded Pasztor by creating the Republican Heritage Groups Council of the Republican National Committee with Pasztor as its first chairman. Pasztor, in turn, recruited the leaders of ABN-affiliated groups to serve on the Republican Heritage Groups Council, shunning mainstream conservative groups in favor of the fascist groups affiliated with the ABN. For an example, the conservative Bulgarian National Committee was denied permission to affiliate with the Heritage Groups Council, but the fascist Bulgarian National Front led by Ivan Dochev was allowed to join the Heritage Groups Council. About the leaders of the Heritage Groups Council, Bellant stated: "They didn’t have a Russian affiliate because they hated all Russians of all political stripes. There were no African-Americans or Jewish affiliates either. It was just composed of these elements, and for a while, they had a German affiliate, but some exposure of the Nazi character of the German affiliate caused it to be quietly removed, but other [Nazi] elements were retained." On 21 July 1984, Nikolai Nazarenko, president of the World Federation of the Cossack National Liberation Movement of Cossackia and the Cossack American Republican National Federation, gave a speech at an ABN diner in New York. Nazarenko, who by his own admission spent much of World War Two serving as a translator and an interrogator of POWS for the Wehrmacht, praised those who fought for Nazi Germany as heroes. Turning to his main subject, Nazarenko stated: "There is a certain