Translated material
Director of the SOVA Center on the history of far-right groups in Russia
On March 17, 2015, in Moscow, at the Russian Academic Youth Theater, a lecture was held by Alexander Verkhovsky, Director of the Information and Analytical Center "SOVA", about the history of far-right groups in Russia. Lenta.ru recorded the main theses of his speech and answers to questions from the audience.
Now in the mass consciousness the term "fascism" is usually identified with German Nazism. However, even in the era of classical fascism in Europe, there were other variants of it, from Italian to Portuguese. Modern European ultra-right radicals are gradually evolving further and further from the ideas of Hitler or Mussolini. Moreover, they are all very different: for example, some rely on their Orthodox roots (the Golden Dawn party in Greece), others on paganism, and still others are generally indifferent to religion. But they are united by a common racist idea of confrontation between the "white North" and the "black South". After the collapse of the USSR, such ideas began to penetrate into Russia, although by that time our country also had its own neo-Nazi tradition.
At the beginning of inglorious deeds - from the Soviet Nazis to the RNU
The first neo-Nazis appeared in the USSR in the late 1950s. One of these activists was Alexei Dobrovolsky, who, together with like-minded people, created the Russian National Socialist Party (RNSP). After several arrests and compulsory treatment in a psychiatric hospital, he became fascinated with Slavic paganism and died recently as the "sorcerer Dobroslav" known in narrow circles.
When perestroika began, far-right nationalist groups emerged from the underground, trying to carve out their own niche in the country's public life. The most prominent and recognizable of them in the late 1980s was the National Patriotic Front "Memory" led by Dmitry Vasiliev, which sought to revive the pre-revolutionary Black Hundred tradition. In the early 1990s, frankly neo-Nazi groups like the Union of Russian Youth and the National Revolutionary Action Front also appeared, trying to adapt classic Nazi Nazism to Russian realities. There were other options as well. Of particular note is the National Bolshevik Party of Eduard Limonov, which miraculously managed to combine ultra-left and ultra-right views in its ideology, which was done quite deliberately. Such an alloy of absolutely any anti-systemic ideas provides the National Bolsheviks with amazing flexibility and survival so far.
By the mid-1990s, the lush variety of such organizations was overshadowed and largely crushed by the Russian National Unity (RNU) movement. It was headed by a native of the "Memory" Alexander Barkashov, and at the peak of his popularity, the RNU consisted of up to 15 thousand people. The Barkashovites tried to evade direct actions, spending most of their time in endless formations and marches. This was explained by the fact that it was necessary to prepare for the “X hour”, when the time would come to establish the “Russian order”. As a result, such tactics severely damaged the movement and partly led to its subsequent collapse: young people quickly got tired of marching and left the organization. It is difficult to say to what extent the RNU can be considered a Nazi organization. For all their external symbolism and aesthetics, which directly referred to the Third Reich, the Barkashovites did not formulate clear ideas, relatively few texts remained of them.
The Russian National Unity was financed mainly by sympathetic middle-class businessmen, the members of the organization did not disdain racketeering and protecting small traders.
European trends
In the second half of the 1990s, a kind of revolution took place in the ultra-radical environment - the skinhead subculture began to actively penetrate from Europe to Russia. At home, in the UK, it was originally more of a musical phenomenon than a political one. But on Russian soil, the skinhead movement immediately took on an unambiguously neo-Nazi character. Nazi skinheads differed from their predecessors in age (most of them were teenagers), increased aggression and anti-intellectualism. They considered any abstract disputes of senior comrades about the options for “saving Russia” to be meaningless, and they considered direct actions, that is, street terror, to be the most effective way to fight the “racial enemies of the Russian people”.
This naturally led to an explosive increase in violence, the statistics of which are very difficult to even calculate. Attempts by the old leaders of the nationalist movement to draw Nazi skinheads into their ranks were almost unsuccessful, since they opposed any hierarchy, preferring to operate as part of small scattered street gangs. On the contrary, new leaders of the ultra-right came out of this environment, one of whom was the leader of the Slavic Union, Dmitry Demushkin. Its supporters did not hesitate to call themselves National Socialists, although they slightly distanced themselves from the classical Nazism of the Hitlerite persuasion.
At the beginning of the 2000s, the new right-wing radicals were more willing to use the rhetoric of modern European neo-Nazism in Russia with its ideas of “White Power” and the fight against the dominance of migrants. In part, this was also a conscious tactic aimed at bringing their views closer to the typical xenophobic prejudices of the townsfolk.
One of the most famous of these attempts was the creation of the Movement Against Illegal Immigration (DPNI), whose very name spoke of the organization's desire to achieve formal compliance with the rule of law. But even due to these tricks, they failed to significantly replenish their ranks with new supporters.
Ultra-radical nationalist groups remained marginalized. Their whole style remained alien to ordinary citizens, so they failed to create an image of a respectable ultra-right opposition with mass support and aspiring seats in parliament.
The antifa movement is very heterogeneous. Some of its activists were engaged exclusively in peaceful activities (organizing concerts, charity), but the military wing outwardly differed little from its ideological opponents and often used the same methods in street confrontation. Although, of course, the moral pathos of the two sides of this confrontation is fundamentally different. Now there are not so many “militant antifa” left in large cities, the peak of their street competition with neo-Nazis is in the past.
The anti-Caucasian theme in the rhetoric of Russian nationalists, unfortunately, will remain dominant for many years to come. The hostility of the majority of our inhabitants towards Caucasians is connected not only with cultural differences, but also with the fact that the most complex multifaceted social crisis continues and even deepens in the North Caucasus, the consequences of which are reflected throughout Russia.
Anti-Semitism continues to be an integral feature of Russian radical nationalism, but there is no particular aggression against Jews now. In recent years, there have been very few cases of not only attacks on them, but also acts of vandalism for anti-Semite motives. Anti-Semitism among domestic radical nationalists is generally limited to the awareness of the "world Jewish conspiracy" and the need to fight it.
At the beginning of the 2000s, an increase in xenophobic sentiments was recorded in Russia, and the authorities decided to use this to their advantage. Prior to the 2003 parliamentary elections, the Rodina party and bloc was hastily created, led by long-time moderate Russian nationalist Dmitry Rogozin. The bloc managed to gain 9% of the votes and get into the State Duma, after which the Rodina leadership tried to position itself as a real opposition. Therefore, in the Kremlin, the experiment was considered unsuccessful, and Rodina was quickly disbanded after some time.
Some of the radical nationalists, desperate to get into parliament and rouse the Russian people to the "white revolution", decided to recall the experience of the People's Will of the 19th century and move on to the practice of individual terror. This, in particular, was done by the “Combat Organization of Russian Nationalists” (BORN), which was part of the “Russian Image” group, which consisted mostly of matured veterans of the skinhead movement. And if the "Russian Image" was not only a legal structure, but also tried to establish contacts with the presidential administration, then BORN accounted for up to a dozen murders, including federal judge Eduard Chuvashov, lawyer Stanislav Markelov, several prominent "antifa".
Now it is difficult to reliably talk about the alleged connections of the leader of BORN, Ilya Goryachev, with employees of the presidential administration of Russia. It is clear that under Surkov, almost all political forces in the country had contacts with him or his subordinates. Here again, the analogy with the tsarist secret police and the revolutionaries is appropriate - each side tried to manipulate the other. Now, in the course of the judicial investigation, the figure of one of the leaders of the pro-Kremlin youth movement Local, Leonid Simunin, who was an intermediary between the Russian Image and the presidential administration, has surfaced. While the trial is ongoing, it is premature to assert this. But in any case, it's hard to imagine the Administration running BORN.
Other nationalists (in particular, DPNI) tried to earn political capital by spinning high-profile criminal cases in which the victims were Russians, and the attackers were migrants from Central Asia or Caucasians. An example of this was the riots in Kondopoga in September 2006 and in Moscow on Manezhnaya Square in December 2010.
But murders and pogroms not only did not contribute to the growth of the popularity of the ultra-right, but, on the contrary, forced the authorities to more effectively deal with extremists from among them. Statistics show that as soon as in Russia in the mid-2000s they began to actively imprison for crimes motivated by ethnic or racial hatred, their number began to steadily decline. But, unfortunately, our government is very inconsistent in this. In recent years, the number of sentences in such cases has begun to decrease and criminal indicators have crept up again. This shows that with all the existing costs of the domestic law enforcement and judicial system, in the presence of political will, even the banal criminal prosecution of neo-Nazis is an effective tool to combat them.
In 2013, for no apparent reason, the authorities launched a large-scale campaign against illegal immigration. This led to an explosive growth of xenophobic sentiments in society. The nationalists and other ultra-rightists decided to use this again for their own purposes. Another criminal incident on ethnic grounds with the death of a person in the Moscow district of Zapadnoye Biryulyovo became the reason for an attempt to organize a “second Manezhka” in the capital. Fortunately, the radicals did not succeed, but by the end of 2013, many experts predicted a sharp aggravation of interethnic relations in the country in the near future. No one then could have imagined that “Krymnash” would soon happen.
Ukrainian split of Russian nationalism
The Maidan victory, Russia's annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbass led to an unexpected split among radical Russian nationalists. They were divided approximately in half into those who support the "Russian Spring" and those who are against it. The latter must be specially mentioned. Basically, these are people of more radical or even neo-Nazi views. They consider the current political regime in Russia to be “anti-Russian”, which in no case and under no circumstances should be supported. Conversely, the current situation in Ukraine, where the Right Sector, recognized in our country as an extremist organization, is represented in parliament and the Azov battalion exists, is an object of envy for them. It is in Ukraine, and not in Russia, that new prospects are now opening up for these people.
Therefore, now several dozen of the most radical Russian nationalists are fighting as part of Ukrainian volunteer battalions. The most famous of them was the former associate of Maxim Martsinkevich (Tesak), the head of intelligence of the Azov battalion, Sergei Korotkikh (Malyuta), who in December 2014 received a Ukrainian passport personally from the hands of President Petro Poroshenko.
But the number of Russian nationalists fighting in the Donbass on the side of the separatists is several hundred people. Among them, for example, is the infamous St. Petersburg neo-Nazi and dog hunter Aleksey Milchakov (Fritz), who in the self-proclaimed LPR commands the Rusich detachment, infamous for his photograph with the severed head of a puppy. As a result of the split over the Ukrainian question, the Russian nationalist movement is experiencing a serious crisis.
Supporters of "Novorossiya" have become uninteresting to their potential audience, since they repeat the same thing that they say on TV every day. Opponents of Novorossiya also feel uncomfortable because they are not accustomed to speaking out against the views of the majority of the inhabitants. We are witnessing a serious decline in activity: last year's Moscow "Russian marches" in total were half as much as before. The further development of this discord on the far-right flank of Russian politics is still unclear.
The current crisis of radical Russian nationalism should not reassure anyone. Indeed, many of those who used to organize street terror in Russia left to fight in the Donbass (and this affected the statistics on racist violence). But someday the war will end there, and most of them will return home from the DPR and LPR, moreover, with weapons in their hands and with a more radical attitude. And what kind of “Russian order” they will try to establish on the streets of our cities is now hard to imagine. Undoubtedly, they will also influence the internal development of the Russian nationalist movement. How will the competition with Anti-Maidan affect him? It is not yet possible to say what will grow out of this in a year or two, but we should rather expect something worse than what we knew before the Ukrainian events.
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