Russia's oligarch-making system faces the usual outcome:
Vladimir Putin, the prime minister and former president, “faces one of two scenarios”, said Mr Susov. “The Polish scenario, where the regime simply gave up power [after the fall of communism], or the Romanian scenario. He could be Nicolae Ceausescu [the Romanian dictator executed by firing squad in 1989].”
The 'R' of BRIC soon will be erased.
‘Managed nationalism’ turns nasty for Putin
By Charles Clover in Moscow
Published: December 23 2010 19:38 | Last updated: December 23 2010 19:38
Moskovsky Komsomolets, a Moscow newspaper, published a statistic on its front page on Monday: sales of aluminium baseball bats had risen sharply – but sales of baseballs had not.
Four bats are bought for every ball in Moscow, a city not known for its love of the American pastime. Instead, the aluminium bat is a rapidly proliferating weapon in a new war: the armament of choice for football hooligans and skinhead gangs.
Gesture politics: far-right youths gather in Moscow
EDITOR’S CHOICE
Moscow police arrest 1,000 as racial unease builds - Dec-19Editorial: Russia’s far right - Dec-19Moscow police act to stem race riots - Dec-15Oil deal boosts Lukashenko election hopes - Dec-17Putin remarks dash hopes for Khodorkovsky - Dec-16Plea for end to Khodorkovsky ‘persecution’ - Dec-14Russia’s ultra-right has for two decades been little more than a curiosity: fodder for hand-wringing academics writing about “Weimar Russia”.
But in the wake of the biggest ethnic riots Russia has seen since the Soviet Union’s fall, this formerly marginal if violent movement has arisen as a fearsome new political power.
The riots over the past two weeks have seen Moscow’s racist gangs swiftly mobilise thousands of supporters with little warning.
On December 11, about 6,000 protesters showed they were capable of bringing their fight to the government’s doorstep – rioting on Manezh Square, underneath the Kremlin’s spires, and openly defying the Russian leadership.
“This is a massive political wave, and no one can stop it,” said Anton Susov, a member of the Movement Against Illegal Migration, one of the groups behind recent riots.
That wave, he says, reflects a wider popular anger against the government over an influx of migrants, official corruption and a stagnant economy.
Vladimir Putin, the prime minister and former president, “faces one of two scenarios”, said Mr Susov. “The Polish scenario, where the regime simply gave up power [after the fall of communism], or the Romanian scenario. He could be Nicolae Ceausescu [the Romanian dictator executed by firing squad in 1989].”
For Vladimir Makismov, a member of Slavic Force, a racist gang that took part in the recent rioting, Russia is now facing a moment in history akin to 1930s Germany. “Hitler was a good politician; a good administrator,” he said. “We need someone like him in power now.”
Whether those sorts of threats amount to anything more than empty fringe rhetoric is difficult to say. But the new boldness of Russia’s ultra-nationalist gangs is presenting the government with a serious challenge.
Law enforcement agencies have launched a crackdown, with the Russian interior ministry rounding up almost 2,000 gang members in the past week. The Kremlin’s political strategy, however, has been to appease rather than confront the ultra-nationalists.
This week, Mr Putin visited the grave of Yegor Sviridov, the football fan whose murder – allegedly by an ethnic Caucasian gang – started the trouble on December 6.
He also proposed changing rules for registering in one’s city of residence – a step seemingly aimed at limiting migration, and a key demand of nationalists.
The government is seeking to portray the violence as nothing more than a European-wide phenomenon brought on by mass migration to Moscow and other relatively affluent Russian cities from poorer southern regions such as former Soviet central Asia. As many as a million migrants have moved to Moscow in the past decade, and that has increased racial tensions.
Fifty-five per cent of Russians support the slogan “Russia for the Russians”, according to polls. When Vesti-24, a state-run radio station, broadcast a call-in show in the wake of the recent violence, virtually all the callers voiced their support of the protesters on Manezh Square.
“This is the same thing that happened in Paris [in 2005]; the same thing that has happened in Germany,” a Kremlin official said this week.
“It is connected first and foremost to immigration.”
Russian ultra-nationalism, however, is a phenomenon created not without the Kremlin’s help, and observers argue that Mr Putin’s Kremlin has used nationalism as a force for political consolidation during his decade in power.
His speeches and state news broadcasts have sewn distrust of foreigners and a belligerent form of patriotism, and he has cloaked himself in some of the symbols of imperial Russia. But Mr Putin’s 2000-08 presidency also saw the creation of pro-Kremlin youth movements such as Nashi, which have, in turn, recruited football hooligans to their ranks as part of what is known as “managed nationalism” in political circles.
Gangs of skinheads and football fans have in recent years become the nucleus for a Kremlin-backed political movement designed to control the streets and prevent a confrontation with democratic political forces in the wake of the “Rose” and “Orange” revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine – which saw democratic movements sweep entrenched regimes from power almost effortlessly.
These gangs were actively recruited for Nashi, which was the brainchild of Vladislav Surkov, the deputy chief of staff for three presidents, Boris Yeltsin, Mr Putin and now Dmitry Medvedev. Nashi’s “handler” was the Kremlin official Nikita Ivanov, a former adviser to Mr Surkov, according to press reports. Mr Ivanov declined to be interviewed.
Nashi was an outgrowth of a youth group that was created in 2000, known as “Walking Together”. Its core was the “Gallant Steeds” football gang – supporters of the Moscow football club CSKA – and headed by Alexei Mitriushin, the bodyguard for Vasiliy Yakemenko, founder of both Walking Together and then Nashi.
Also at Nashi’s core were the “Gladiators” – fans of Spartak Moscow football club who sport tattoos of a gladiator with a spear. The group’s leader, Roman Verbitsky, was head of Nashi’s “volunteer youth brigade”, according to the Nashi website.
Mr Yakemenko advocated recruiting skinheads at a Nashi conference at Lake Seliger in July 2005.
“Skinheads – they are the same people as you. Why provoke enmity?” he told the audience, according to press reports at the time. “Furthermore, skinheads sincerely believe they are patriots of Russia,” he said. “They have to be offered an alternative. Why not invite 20 to 30 of them here and show that there is something to accomplish?”
Some argue that skinheads and football gangs were used as little more than muscle. “Yes, the football fan clubs belonged to these organisations, but they were simply working – doing it for the money,” said Aleksander Shprigin, president of the Russian Association of Fans, an umbrella body for football fan groups. However, football hooligans allied with Nashi have often been used as provocateurs and have attacked or harassed dissidents and liberal opposition marchers. In 2005, baseball bat-wielding “Gladiators” attacked a meeting of the opposition National Bolshevik party, wounding 10 NBP supporters.
Last July, environmentalists blocking the construction of a road through Khimki forest near Moscow were set upon by a group of baseball bat-wielding youths, some of whom sported the telltale gladiator tattoos.
Some skinhead groups appear to have closer relationships with the Kremlin than others.
Even in skinhead circles, Russian Image, a nationalist group formed in 2004, has long been suspected of serving a higher master. “It was a double organisation, created by the Kremlin,” said Dmitry Dyumushkin, head of the rival Slavic Union.
Russian Image, several of whose members were seen at Manezh Square during the December 11 riot, appears to have consistently received lenient treatment from the government and law enforcement agencies. In November 2009 it was given permission to hold a neo-Nazi “Russian March” on Bolotnaya Square, only 800 metres from the Kremlin.
“We have to hold our march way out in the middle of nowhere, and Russian Image gets prime real estate right next to the Kremlin for their march. What does that tell you?” said Mr Dyumushkin.
Publicly, the Kremlin disavows all nationalist groups. But Russian Image is open about what it sees as Kremlin backing for its activities.
“We do not have direct co-operation from the Kremlin, but I believe they give us a ‘green light’ which would allow us to take over the political field,” Evgeny Valyaev, a spokesman for the group, told the Financial Times earlier this year.
The group also has friendly links to parliament. Maksim Mishchenko, a member of parliament from Mr Putin’s United Russia party, admits that he and Ilya Goryachev, Russian Image’s head, have in the past jointly organised educational trips to Serbia and Kosovo for youth groups, including members of Russian Image, to visit Orthodox monasteries and study Serbian nationalism. He denies any organisational ties to Russian Image, however.
But whatever ties the organisation and other ultra-nationalist groups have to the powers-that-be, these may be loosening.
Even before the recent riots, a number of tragic events have shown that managed nationalism is quickly becoming unmanageable.
One of the two founding members of Russian Image, Evgeny Tikhonov, is shortly to be tried for the January 2009 murder of Stanislav Markelov, a human-rights lawyer, and Anastasia Baburova, a journalist.
One Kremlin-backed gang, Young Guard, the youth wing of the United Russia party, is one of the chief suspects in the savage beating in November of Oleg Kashin, a journalist for the daily newspaper Kommersant.
The group had published a photograph of Mr Kashin on its website, with the legend “will be punished”, apparently in retribution for his reporting, although the group denies it had anything to do with his beating.
Yulia Latynina, a commentator for Ekho Moskvy, the independent Moscow radio station, argues that the ultra-nationalists have now seized Mr Putin’s ruling narrative and taken it for themselves.
She likens what is happening in Russia today not to Weimar Germany but to what has happened in the Middle East and in Muslim states where militant Islam has grown as a force in response to the failure of moderate regimes to reform.
“Today, Russia is confronting the same problem,” she says.
“Like in Pakistan, like in Saudi Arabia. Real Nazis, real fascists come and exploit the ‘fascism-lite’ that was on the TV sets. . . They say, ‘No, it is us who are the genuine patriots.’ |
