Nationalists in the protest movement - why and how

Russian original of the article "The Nationalists and the Protest Movement" , published August 21, 2012 on the Open Democracy website. The participation of Russian nationalists, including very radical, in the protest movement that began in December last year, causes a lot of controversy and confusion. There are three main ones - how did it happen? How big is the role of the nationalists in the opposition? What can this lead to?

The answer to the first question is, in fact, very simple. AND surprising participation of nationalists in anti-Putin protests could seem only to those who did not look too closely at the nationalists in the previous couple of years. Back in the fall of 2010, the leading organizations of Russian nationalists came out with declarations that were intended to position them as part of democratic opposition. At the same time, they tried to establish contacts with activists of the liberal opposition, but made little progress in this, although among liberals already then were figures and groups that included nationalist items on your agenda; the most famous of them are Alexei Navalny and Vladimir Milov.

Networking was facilitated by the general vulnerability of law enforcement side. But the distance was still too great, and it was only strengthened by the riots on Manezhnaya Square in December 2010: even the most moderate nationalist leaders supported what they called "Spartacus uprising", while for liberals and leftists "Manezhka" unequivocally looked, if not like a pogrom, then as a harbinger of a pogrom.

By the day of elections to the State Duma, December 4, 2011, Russians nationalists approached as the most significant political force in the opposition: at the annual nationalist "Russian march" a month before the elections came out about 7 thousand people (calculations of the SOVA Center, which are always more modest than the organizers' applications) - more than the communists, let alone other leftists or liberals. "Manezhka" drew the attention of society (and authorities) to the ethnic issues and this could be a good start to expand the support base nationalists. Thus, after December 4, they could count on an important role in the protest movement.

Why weren't they pushed away? Well, first of all, this is technically was almost impossible to do at rather spontaneous rallies. And secondly, at opposition was - and still is - no "cut-off criterion": if a person stands for fair elections, for democracy (in whatever sense, no one goes into details) and against Putin, there are no grounds for him drive away, since these three points, in fact, are still exhausted opposition platform. And if the performance of Ilya Lazarenko, famous in the past neo-Nazi, now active in the tiny National Democratic Alliance, rally on December 5 could still be considered an accident, then the invitation of one of the most famous nationalist leaders Vladimir Tor to the stage purely party rally "Yabloko" on December 18 was a clear sign that the liberal the opposition is ready to oppose the regime on the widest possible front. Maximum intolerance towards nationalists, which the Organizing Committee decided on the largest opposition rally, on Sakharov Avenue on December 24, expressed in the fact that they did not let the well-known, who served time for propaganda of racist neo-Nazi violence Maxim "Tesak" Martsinkevich, limiting himself to three figures the main nationalist coalitions - the movement "Russians" and the coalition "Russian platform” (now on their basis the Nationalist Party and National Democratic Party, respectively).

The leaders of the protest all this time - and still - are not at all embarrassed by the fact that the nationalist participants in the actions behaved extremely unfriendly, up to repeated attempts to force a breakthrough onto the stage (in including at the last big rally, June 12). And the reason for this long-suffering could not be the indispensability of the nationalists to maintain mass shares. The fact is that the vast majority of nationalist activists who created the mass nature of the "Russian marches" belongs to small neo-Nazi groups and is extremely skeptical of leaders in public active nationalist organizations. No wonder, in addition to the "Russian marches", these leaders have never been able to gather even two thousand people for their shares, more often they are 300-400. Only a small part of such activists came to the general opposition rallies and marches, believing any neighborhood with liberals and leftists unacceptable and counting in the new situation rather on the prospect of destabilization and military script. The maximum participation of nationalists was reached on the procession on February 4 2012, when there were up to nine hundred people out of several tens of thousands participants, in other cases the numbers were markedly lower. Yes, and these hundreds are clearly not always obeyed famous leaders.

All this applies to Moscow; in other cities quantitative the proportions were slightly different, but otherwise everything was about the same. somewhere nationalists made a significant contribution to the protest mobilization, but about Moscow and You can't say the same about most other cities. Hence, welcoming such speakers as Alexander Belov, Konstantin Krylov and others, leaders protest movement received nothing but a vague hope of attracting side of those xenophobic citizens who, at the same time, do not sympathize neither the regime, nor the liberals, nor the left. Until now, these hopes, it must be admitted, have not justified in the slightest.

One cannot point a finger at who "attracted the nationalists", but you can note and consider the role of certain figures in this. Alexey Navalny, according to some testimonies, he acted here as a mediator. For moderate nationalist Navalny, I think it was important to attract nationalists less moderate, so as not to look extreme in this sense and, therefore, to strengthen own positions. Moderate leftist Ilya Ponomarev (State Duma deputy from Fair Russia") contributed to preventing the weeding out of some nationalists, made their way into the Civil Council formed in February in excess of the quotas. Other examples could be given. By itself, this Civilian advice with its ideological quotas (soon practically forgotten, however) was the fruit of the compromise of many leaders of small political and quasi-political groups, many of whom, it seems, were simply afraid to get lost otherwise against the background of an unusually massive protest movement.

But, of course, apart from this kind of "politically selfish" motivation, there was also a general fundamental idea - to create the widest possible anti-Putin front, the idea of ​​negative consolidation. She keeps acting and now: we see how the Organizing Committee of Protest Actions announced elections in early October to the Coordinating Council of the Russian opposition, and again - with the same ideological quotas - for liberals, leftists and nationalists. In fact, this idea is not new at all: even Kasparov’s movement "Other Russia" (not to be confused with the current Limonov party) assumed the unification of "everyone who is against Putin."

And this idea, in my opinion, is definitely losing. Strategy negative consolidation ("popular front") is good only in one case - when it is necessary to join forces in the short term. Already in the middle distance it never worked and greatly interfered with further mobilization supporters, since the degree of universal unity is inversely proportional the degree of intelligibility of the positive program, which (albeit not in detail) usually not mobilized yet citizens are interested. If anyone believed in December that it is possible to overthrow the existing political regime with one onslaught, then now it is clearly impossible to expect this in the near future, but many activists all levels still sincerely expect precisely the imminent "collapse of the regime" in one or in some other form, or at least expressed in this sense publicly. Maybe, this is auto-training necessary for activists (and this word suggests only little bit of irony), but a poor basis for political planning.

Not bringing, as we see, any benefit, the idea of ​​consolidating with nationalists legitimizes the activities of their political organizations, hitherto pretty marginal. This is most obvious in the example of the most numerous until now, the organization - "Russians", including not only the Movement against illegal immigration, banned for inflammatory propaganda and the involvement of a number of activists in violent hate crimes, but also openly neo-Nazi groups "Slavic Force" and National Socialist Initiative. What is particularly anecdotal here is that legally operating organizations appear as important political forces nationalists, representing only a small part of the real nationalist movement.

Part of the idea of ​​a bloc with the nationalists is based on the notion that they are "bad" and "good". "Good" here is national democrats (self-designation), not associated with ideological neo-Nazism and street racist terror, a potential analogue of legal nationalist parties Europe. With the National Democrats - why not make alliances: after all, they are in perspective are seen as an inevitable part of the political system of a democratic Russia. And there is a good deal of truth in this: yes, if the democratic order in Russia will be restored in the foreseeable future, such forces will certainly be part of parliamentary democracy, and it is worth preparing for this in advance. But there is also a considerable amount of untruth, or rather, wishful thinking.

The fact is that our current national democrats are too rooted in an aggressive racist and neo-Nazi environment (it used to be right to say - Nazi-skinhead, but the fashion for skinheadism is leaving), which is the basis of the entire nationalist movement. That's why they can't condemn racist violence, which is why, after their peaceful actions, the audience more than once switched to direct action. And the national democratic leaders themselves (according to at least many of them) have moved away too recently (if they have moved away) from much more radical views.

But this, it seems, does not bother anyone - they are happy to issue any advances in the hope, apparently, for the coming correction. A typical example is the membership of the aforementioned Ilya Lazarenko in the liberal (!) faction of the Civil advice. Maybe advances are a good strategy, but in this case they are too premature. And not only because the National Democrats do not become something really separate from the aggressive racist and neo-Nazi majority of the Russian nationalist movement, but also because they are simply very few. What has been said above about the low importance of the leaders of political nationalist organizations are triple applicable to the National Democrats: for example, the number the columns of the future National Democratic Party at the procession on June 12 did not exceed fifty people, and other national democrats look no better.

Maybe - and even likely - in the future national democratic movement will take place, but now it is more of a project than reality. The same Navalny - an almost ideal example of a national democrat - with of all his popularity is completely unpopular precisely as a nationalist, which was clearly demonstrated by his loneliness when participating in actions like “Enough feed the Caucasus!” autumn 2011. And it is completely incomprehensible why the opposition movement should perceive the phantom of national democracy as full member of the coalition.

And yet, nationalists of various shades undoubtedly will take part in the autumn actions of the opposition. And the leaders of all organizing committees will continue to give them "quotas", evading discussion on the essence of the problems that the very participation of nationalists causes. And the main one these problems - further legitimation of nationalist ideas and nationalist language in opposition and in power (these two processes interconnected) and, consequently, in society as a whole.