Russia Profile
www.russiaprofile.org
May 7, 2007
Dwarves That Bite
How Russia’s Small Political Movements Survive in the Putin Era
By Alexander Kolesnichenko
Alexander Kolesnichenko is a political correspondent for Novye Izvestia.
At the end of March, the pro-Vladimir Putin youth movement Nashi held a rally in Moscow. Thousands of young people in red-and-white uniforms poured onto the streets, asking anyone interested in “preserving the country’s independence” to send the president a text message of support. The leaflets they handed out stated the origin of this perceived threat to Russia’s freedom: It came from punk writer Eduard Limonov, a “fascist and the Fuehrer of the National Bolshevik Party,” and former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, “who has promised the West to sell cheaper Russian oil for help in his struggle for the presidency.”
It would be difficult, however, for the political movements headed by these two individuals to cause much of a problem, however, since according to official documents, the movements simply do not ex-ist, and under new electoral laws, only officially registered parties may participate in elections.
In order to be considered a political party, an organization needs 50,000 members, including at least 500 members in each of the country’s 88 regions. There are just over a dozen parties in the country that meet these requirements. Other political organizations - of which there are hundreds in Russia - may not compete for power. Many of them are not even registered, and thus officially do not exist. Alexei Mukhin, the director of the Center for Political Information in Moscow, says that it is members of these organizations - only a few dozen people - who account for the majority of those the current authorities label as extremists.
Russia’s political life therefore happens on two levels. At one level, important delegates assemble at conferences and unanimously approve previously drafted decisions. State television then shows these congresses on the evening news as delegates drink and eat canapes at a buffet in their honor. At the other end of the spectrum, “extremists” hold banned rallies, fight with the police, and are thrown in jail. State television does not show them, and most Russians are completely unaware of their presence.
Liberal Extremists
Under the bridge over the Moscow River opposite the Kremlin, two people hang on a tow-line holding a banner that reads: “Give elections back to the people, you bastards!” Thus do Ilya Yashin, a founder of the youth movement Defense, and Maria Gaidar, daughter of Russia’s first liberal prime minister and a leader of the youth movement Democratic Alternative! (DA!), protest against amendments to electoral legislation that will allow disillusioned oppositionists to be labeled as extremists and denied the right to participate in elections. In Russia, even people who call themselves liberals risk falling into this category, usually reserved for extreme right-wing groups in the rest of the world.
Due to their role in Russia’s disastrous economic reforms of the 1990s, liberals get a bad rap in the Russian popular conscience. There are few of them, and their supporters are also few. The Center for Political Information’s Mukhin says that there are about 500 activists with liberal organizations in Moscow, and many of them are members of several different groups at once. Liberals have a reputa-tion of being extremely fractious, so an organization with 40 members may quickly transform into two with 20 each.
Former Prime Minister Kasyanov attempted to unify Russia’s liberals last summer by creating the coalition The Other Russia, yet the union failed. Russia’s best-known liberal parties, Yabloko and the Un-ion of Right Forces (SPS), refused to work with Kasyanov, seeing it as beneath their dignity to join a small group with no hope of garnering the 7 percent of votes necessary to secure a place in the Duma - although both parties hope to reach this goal on their own.
Valeria Novodvorskaya, the eccentric chairwoman of the pro-Western Democratic Union, did not want to join Kasyanov because The Other Russia had accepted National Bolshevik leader Eduard Li-monov. Limonov’s supporters were for many years known as aggressive nationalists, whose noisy pro-test actions disturbed the work of Western embassies and congresses of liberal parties, but recently, the Limonovites have started to direct their ire against “anti-populist” state organs. Many liberals have written off the antics of Limonov’s acolytes as the sins of youth, seeing them as allies in the war against Putin, but Novodvorskaya has refused to forgive and forget. When The Other Russia held its meeting in a Moscow hotel, Novodvorskaya staged a protest outside.
So far, The Other Russia has staged two large opposition rallies in Moscow and St. Petersburg called “ Dissenters’ Marches.” Four thousand people took to the streets of Moscow, and 7,000 in St. Petersburg - a large number compared to the usual liberal rallies, which generally average no more than a few hundred activists.
Yet according to the Levada Center, Russia’s leading independent pollster, Kasyanov’s presidential rating is just 6 percent, compared with 31 percent for First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, generally considered the front runner in the upcoming presidential elections. Meanwhile, state televi-sion has frequently featured reports of Kasyanov being stripped of the villa on the outskirts of Moscow that he bought from the state for a vastly reduced price while prime minister.
“Mikhail Kasyanov is known for scandals - he’s been stripped of a dacha, and the Russian people really don’t like officials who build themselves expensive dachas. Only those who really hate the au-thorities are prepared to support him,” said political scientist Dmitry Oreshkin.
Another possible candidate for president from the liberal opposition is former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, who heads the United Civil Front and makes no secret that the aim of his organiza-tion is to “bring down the Putin regime.” But like most opposition leaders, he has little access to television.
Yet even if the liberals were given unrestricted media coverage, their popularity would be unlikely to increase. Polls show that less than 15 percent of Russians want to live like their Western counterparts. “For the people, democracy has remained alien, incomprehensible and suspicious. People understand much better the statist inclinations of the current authorities. Faith in the good tsar is more robust than democratic traditions,” said Olga Kryshtanovskaya, head of the Elite Studies Center at the Sociology Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences.
Those who would see Russia develop along democratic lines keep themselves in the public eye in various ways. Activists from the Defense movement protested against privileged treatment on the roads for officials by standing along the edge of Kutuzovsky Prospekt - one of the main arteries for government officials traveling from their homes in the suburbs of Moscow to the Kremlin - and bowing down to passing official cars. The movement We is collecting signatures to call for an amendment to the constitution to allow dogs to run for president - in which case, the next president of Russia could be Vladimir Putin’s Labrador, Connie.
Back to the U.S.S.R.
In a courtroom at the Moscow City Court, the bench for defendants holds more than 30 young men and women. Another four men are being held in a defendants’ cage that has had its bars replaced by shatterproof glass. “The verdict is upheld,” the judge says. The men and women punch the air, and start to chant: “Yes, death!” These are members of Eduard Limonov’s banned National Bolshevik movement. They are being sentenced for breaking into the president’s waiting room, where people go with petitions hoping for the president’s attention, and for barricading themselves into one of the offices there. Most of the participants have already spent a year in prison, and were given conditional sentences of two to four years in jail.
The National Bolsheviks are a militant opposition group. They have no interest in elections; their aim is revolution. “History is made by those individuals who contribute to the development of the species, and not those who build apartments or dachas. People who are unafraid of death are the highest people, the heavenly ones,” teaches their leader, Limonov. The state long ago banned the National Bolsheviks for extremism and seized the Moscow basement they were using as a headquarters. Currently 27 National Bolshevik activists are in jail. Another, Olga Kudrina, is being sought and has been sentenced in her absence to three and a half years in jail. One of her “crimes” was to hang a banner reading, “Putin, quit!” on a stand at a hotel opposite the Kremlin.
The National Bolsheviks claim about 1,000 members in Moscow and a few hundred in other major cities. Most of its members are under 18. Although many soon tire of preparing for revolution, others come along to replace them; and for those who stay, the party offers rapid career growth. Alexander Averin, its press secretary, said that in two to three years, a member may go from being one of the rank and file to a Politburo member. “Places at the top soon become vacant. People get bored, people get put in jail,” said Averin. Now, places are beginning to become available even faster. Many are leaving the party in protest of Limonov’s dalliance with Kasyanov. The schismatics have created their own organization, the National Bolsheviks Without Limonov, and accuse their former leader of being bought by U.S. money to foment an Orange Revolution in Russia.
Another militant organization, the Vanguard of Red Youth, has vowed to restore the Soviet Union to its 1945 borders. The movement’s symbol is a red flag with a Kalashnikov machine gun. It says it has a hundred or so members in each region, yet only 20 or so supporters turn up at its protests. Every fall, the Vanguard of Red Youth organizes an Anti-Capitalism March in Moscow, which draws thousands of like-minded activists from across the country, including members of such Stalinist movements as the Russian Communist Workers Party/Russian Party of Communists (RCWP/RPC), headed by State Duma deputy Viktor Tyulkin; and Working Russia, headed by former journalist and Latin America expert Viktor Anpilov. Whereas the National Bolsheviks and the Vangard of Red Youth rally young people to their side, the backbone of the RCWP/RPC and Working Russia is pensioners. All are con-vinced that the Soviet Union was a wonderful thing, and that the country was then betrayed by those currently in power.
These radicals do not enjoy huge popularity. Political scientist Dmitry Oreshkin said that their ideas are shared by only 3-5 percent of the population. They present no threat to the authorities, since they live in a fantasy world. For example, Oleg Shenin, a former member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and a supporter of the group of conspirators who launched a putsch against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, now heads an unregistered group that calls itself the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Since the Soviet Union was run by a party with the same name, he sees himself as the owner of the country, since “de jure the Soviet Union continues to exist, as those three people [the then presidents of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine] had no right to dissolve the Soviet Union at Belovezhskaya Pushcha.”
Socialist Dynamite
In the center of Moscow, a few dozen people stand under a black-and-red flag. The speaker, who claims to be an economics professor, explains why Russian pensioners get such small pensions. Ap-parently, it’s because all money in Russia is siphoned off to Israel, and therefore pensioners there get continual pension increases while Russian pensioners do not. Some people start arguing. The crowd shouts them down: “Quiet! Let us listen! You’re worse than Jews.”
This is a rally of the National Sovereignty Party, dissolved by the Ministry of Justice, which stands for the deportation of Jews from Russia. Two years ago, the party’s ideologist, Viktor Korchagin, was sentenced for inciting ethnic hatred, but was subsequently amnestied. Now, activists going to meetings take along portraits of Vladimir Kvachkov, a military-intelligence colonel accused of an attempt on the life of former Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Anatoly Chubais, who oversaw the pri-vatization of the early 1990s. Most Russians got nothing out of privatization, and Chubais has become a symbol of the unfair division of the national wealth.
For other nationalists, such as the Movement Against Illegal Immigration, the main enemy is not the Jews, but migrants from the Caucasus. When violence - during which two people were killed - broke out last August in the northwest Russian town of Kondopoga between local residents and migrants from Chechnya, the movement’s leader, Alexander Belov, went to the area and organized a protest that ended with an attack on stalls at the local market owned by immigrants from the Caucasus. The movement’s website includes a call to arms - in particular, to obtain licenses and buy the smooth-bore guns allowed under Russian law. Then, the warriors are encouraged to create a network of small conspiratorial groups. According to the Moscow Bureau for Human Rights, nationalist organizations have about 10,000-15,000 adult fighters at their disposal.
Also getting ready for a fight is the Russian All-Nationalist Union. At summer camps, they train in hand-to-hand combat, survival techniques for extreme conditions, God’s law and the foundations of nationalist consciousness. Unlike other nationalists, the union plans to participate in the parliamentary elections this year as part of the People’s Will Party. The party is unlikely to get into the State Duma, however: At regional elections in March, it picked up just 1.4-2.1 percent of votes, way below the 7 percent necessary to claim a Duma seat.
Standing aloof among nationalist movements is the Eurasian Union of Youth, an organization of about 1,000 people led by philosopher and former dissident Alexander Dugin. The Eurasianists call themselves oprichniki, after the feared personal guard of Ivan the Terrible. In the tradition of the tsar, they direct their anger at the “excellent rabble” - oligarchs, corrupt officials, transvestites and glamorous television show host Ksenia Sobchak. “Our warriors are prepared for street fighting against orangists of all stripes, and supporters of Americanism and the West,” says Dugin.
Of all those accused of extremism by the authorities, only the nationalists have any chance of achiev-ing some popularity. Despite Russia’s recent economic growth and rising living standards, aggressive nationalism remains a problem for the country. Boris Dubin, a sociologist from the Levada Center, said that, whereas 10 years ago 44 percent of people believed that Russia was surrounded by enemies, now that figure is 77 percent. Forty-one percent believe that Russians are worse off than people of other nationalities, while 62 percent believe that the victims of nationalist violence have only them-selves to blame for getting beaten up. Yet the authorities have the opportunity to turn this situation to their advantage. Political scientist Oreshkin maintains that the possible scenarios for the presidential elections of 2008 could include “giving society a choice between the current regime and these terrify-ing fascists.” That’s like the elections of 1996 only back then the role of scapegoat was played by the communists.