#16 - JRL 2006-181 - JRL Home
Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2006
From: Andreas Umland <andreumland@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: JRL 2006, no. 180, # 2 - re: Zhafyarov on registration of foreign organizations 23:27:51,

Zhafyarov and Foreign Influences

Re: JRL 2006, no. 180, # 2 - re: "Izvestia," August 9, 2006, "NO ONE KNOWS EXACTLY HOW MANY FOREIGN ORGANIZATIONS ARE OPERATING IN RUSSIA. An interview with Federal Registration Service official Alexei Zhafyarov"

Dear David,

in your posted interview with Russian government official Alexei Zhafyarov on registration of foreign organizations, there is an irony that probably few JRL readers will notice.

Zhafyarov himself is member of the Highest Council of an organization, Aleksandr Dugin's International Eurasian Movement (http://evrazia.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1575), which is crucially inspired by non-Russian ideas, among them, not the least by.... German Nazism.

I have elaborated on this issue in "Vitrenko's Fascist Friend: The Strange Alliance between Ukrainian 'Progressive Socialism' and Russian 'Neo-Eurasianism,' " UNIAN News Agency, 17 April 2006, http://www.unian.net/eng/news/news-152563.html, and "Alexander Dugin, die Faschismusfrage und der russischen politische Diskurs," Russlandanalysen, no. 105, 2006: 2-5, http://www.russlandanalysen.de/content/media/Russlandanalysen105.pdf

There is another ironic moment in the interview when Zhafyarov talks about the government's repeated denial of a registration of the National-Bolshevik Party. As many Russia observers will know, the NBP was cofounded by the leader of Zhafyarov's own movement Aleksandr Dugin, and co-led as well as crucially inspired by Dugin in 1994-1998.

Perhaps, this is yet another illustration for the surrealistic element in the Putin administration's policies towards Russian political and civil society.

With regards,
Andreas Umland
German Academic Exchange Service Lecturer
National Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv
Ukraine