“We don’t have xenophobia in our country”

The murder of a Vietnamese student in St. Petersburg on October 13 and the denial of the racist motives of this crime became an occasion for discussing the problem of ethnic and religious intolerance on Radio Liberty.

Alexander Vinnikov, a member of the group on the rights of national minorities, believes that the denial of racist motives for such crimes is a Soviet tradition, the belief of officials that, if we do not talk about the fact that we have fascism in our country, then it’s like it doesn’t exist, it’s like would and would not . " Demonstrative denial of this, however, backfires. Without stopping such manifestations, the authorities only contribute to the growth of the activity of neo-Nazi groups that have been operating in St. Petersburg not even from the collapse of the USSR, but from a much earlier period.

It is also advantageous for city and federal authorities to "ignore" neo-fascists also because ethnic intolerance canalizes growing social discontent, i.e. directly removes the threat from these authorities. Yes, and politically, the presence of neo-fascists is beneficial to the authorities: * "Nazis and fascists perform here in modern Russia, and in the Soviet Union they performed the role of such a clearly negative, negative alternative. There must be. It must be fought all the time, but it cannot be destroyed They should be so that in any case, those Russian nationalists who are now in power really, I mean the Rodina party and so on, so that they can say: “We are not these. They are extremists, but we are not. We are good." This is the function they perform.

Generally speaking, even at the beginning of the 20th century and now, these extreme nationalists were considered by the authorities, the bureaucracy, I mean, as some kind of alternative to the liberals. All the time they try to oppose liberals with nationalists, push them together, say that they are both extreme, and we are good, we are in the middle.

Sources

• Extremism in St. Petersburg flourishes thanks to the connivance of the authorities // Freedom. 2004. 15 October.