Abstract
At roughly the same time I was to land at Moscow's Domodedovo airport in early March to investigate a rise in extremist activity in Russia, a few kilometers away, a group of teenagers was beating Luis Miranda to death. Police reported that Miranda, a 71-year-old Cuban citizen and famed cigar roller at the upscale “Old Havana” restaurant, likely knew his assailants, but witnesses described the youths as skinheads.
On the march: Members of Russian nationalist groups paraded through Moscow in November 2005.
Miranda's death produced little public outrage in a country that has become inured to such violence. In the last year alone, more than 25 ethnically motivated killings have been reported in Russia. In Moscow and other large cities, beatings of Azeri traders, African students, and even children from Central Asia have become so routine as to no longer be reported or tallied.
These attacks and the increasingly frequent appearance of xenophobic and nationalist rhetoric on state television and in Moscow bookstores are the symptoms of a larger social trend that could have deep implications for a youthful and fragile Russian democracy. With the 2008 Russian presidential elections looming on the horizon, the Kremlin and Russian President Vladimir Putin appear content to exploit the country's nationalist resurgence for political gain, rather than forcefully respond to the growing threat.
Masha Lipman, a journalist and civil-society analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center, interprets the Kremlin's strategy as a way to maintain the status quo. “Let's portray nationalism as the worst evil and persuade the public and the world beyond that Putin's elite is a lesser evil,” she says.
With the Russian political landscape marked by voter apathy and the dominant United Russia party firmly supporting the president's policies, it is considerably easier in today's Russia to find a political candidate to hate rather than to love. In building the nationalist elements of society into a “sparring partner”–as one Moscow political activist put it–the Kremlin is providing the movement with a level of tacit encouragement, while simultaneously decrying it as a threat to the state.
Last year, Putin confidante Sergei Mironov gave the first indication of this developing strategy in comments to the newspaper Izvestia. In stark language, he warned of the possible rise of a “neo-fuehrer with a fascist-type, nationalist ideology.” Mironov judged the danger so grave that Putin could be “forced” to stay in power past the end of his term in 2008. (The Russian constitution limits a president from serving more than two consecutive terms, but there has been widespread speculation that Putin could amend the constitution or find some other way to stay in office.)
The Kremlin has made overtures to addressing the spreading hate, championing an “anti-fascist” pact signed by a group of lawmakers close to Putin's government several months after a coalition of nationalist groups held a march through the streets of downtown Moscow in November 2005. (Both the Putin administration and the Moscow city government had initially sanctioned the march, expecting nothing more than an unorganized gathering of a few dozen activists. What resulted, however, was a 3,000-strong crowd, carrying xenophobic signs and raising their arms in a faux-Nazi salute.) But Russia's independent political parties and human rights community resoundingly rejected the pact. “The state is less concerned with actually combating the country's very real xenophobic tendencies than using the threat of extremism to play political games,” Lipman suggests.
In attempting to manipulate the nationalist vote, Putin and his coterie of siloviki–a subtly pejorative term for those with backgrounds in the Soviet security apparatus–are building on their earlier political strategies. In 2003, the Kremlin created the openly nationalist Rodina Party in an effort to siphon votes away from the Communist Party, the second-largest political faction at the time. As Rodina emerged as an independent political force, however, it has increasingly faced the Kremlin's ire. The Kremlin knocked the party from the ballot in 2005 Moscow city elections under the pretense that it ran a blatantly racist, anti-foreigner television commercial and forced out the popular Rodina leader, Dmitry Rogozin, in late March 2006.
But Rodina's growing popularity limits the Kremilin's political options, according to Alexander Verkhovsky, the director of the SOVA Center, a nonprofit group that monitors the activities of hate groups in Russia. “The Kremlin can't take too strong of action against xenophobia for fear of going against the opinion of the majority of the Russian public,” Verkhovsky explains. Indeed, a recent nationwide poll found that 58 percent of Russians support the idea of “Russia for Russians,” while nearly a third favor an official limit of the number of nonethnic Russians living in Russian cities–both unprecedented figures.
Speaking in his cramped office, just steps from the headquarters of the FSB–the successor security agency to the KGB–Verkhovsky pointed to a recently circulating petition, the “Letter of 500,” as evidence of the consequences of the Kremlin's stance. The petition, drafted by several outspoken anti-Semitic deputies in the Russian Duma, aims to ban Jewish organizations from operating in the country and is steadily gaining support, having amassed more than 15,000 signatures as of the spring. “The current atmosphere has convinced these politicians that such an action is possible,” Verkhovsky says, shaking his head incredulously.
For their part, some of Russia's most visible nationalist groups are aware that the Kremlin is playing them. “You could say that a husband uses his wife, but also that a wife uses her husband,” says Alexander Belov, the coorganizer of the November march and leader of the Movement Against Illegal Immigration. Belov boasts of his close ties with government officials but concedes that the Kremlin is likely to continue branding him and his followers “fascists” out of political expediency.
The fascist label might well prove to be a convenient way for the Putin government to confront all opposition, not just skinheads and right-wing nationalists. Nashi, a Kremlin-affiliated youth group, has recently stepped up its “anti-fascist” rhetoric, labeling as fascist a wide range of political characters–most with little in the way of common ideology other than their outspoken opposition to the Putin administration.
But analysts and opposition figures warn that such a broad strategy might come back to haunt Putin. Unless the Kremlin changes its tack, extremists might gain further political traction as the 2008 election draws near. In attempting to present themselves as a more attractive alternative to radical, “fascist” political elements, Putin and his inner circle of political minders are tapping into emotions that, as history has proven, are easier to unleash than to control.
Supplementary Material
Russia: Country Report on Human Rights Practices