RAS 12 - JRL 6535
RUSSIAN NATIONALISM
4. NAZISM IN RUSSIA
SOURCE. Vyacheslav Likhachev, Natsizm v Rossii (Moscow: Tsentr "Panorama," 2002)
In this book one of the "Panorama" Center's leading experts on political extremism analyzes the development of fascist or neo-Nazi movements in Russia. Successive chapters are devoted to:
* Barkashov's Russian National Unity (RNU) and its successors
* Limonov's National-Bolshevik Party (in the author's opinion now the largest fascist organization following the breakup of RNU)
* the skinheads, and
* some of the most extreme neo-Nazi groups (that is, extreme even by comparison with RNU).
At the end of each chapter biographical sketches of the most important figures are appended.
There is considerable overlap between this book and corresponding sections of my own book on Russian fascism, (1) arising from the fact that I myself relied heavily on "Panorama" sources. Besides being more up to date, Likhachev analyzes some important aspects that I did not feel properly equipped to tackle.
In particular, he examines the relationship between each of the fascist organizations and the federal security service (FSB). This factor helps make sense of the different ways in which the authorities have treated the various organizations. Their leniency and complacency with regard to RNU, which has been the subject of so many complaints by antifascist journalists and activists, appear to have been connected with a deep infiltration of RNU by state security agents. The FSB was not afraid of RNU because it believed that it had the movement under control. By contrast, official policy toward other fascist organizations that were not similarly penetrated was always much stricter.
(1) Stephen D. Shenfield, Russian Fascism: Traditions, Tendencies, Movements (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2001)
[From RAS #12, JRL 6571:
FOLLOW-UP
The last issue of RAS (No. 12 item 4) contained a review of Vyacheslav Likhachev's book "Nazism in Russia" that focused especially on its treatment of the problem of the relationship between fascist movements and the state. Alexander Verkhovsky draws attention to the fact that this problem is the subject of his recent book "Gosudarstvo protiv radikal'nogo natsionalizma: Chto delat' i chego ne delat'?" [The State Against Radical Nationalism: What To Do and What Not To Do?]. The book was published by Panorama in August 2002, and the whole text is available on the Panorama website <http://www.panorama.ru/works/patr/govpol/book2/index.html>]
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