Moscow Times
December 19, 2005
1,500 Anti-Fascists March in Moscow
By Kevin O'Flynn
Staff Writer
One month after far-right nationalists marched through Moscow's city center shouting "Sieg Heil," at least 1,500 people marched from the same square in an anti-fascist protest on Sunday afternoon.
"Let them see that we are many and that we are not afraid," said Garry Kasparov, the former chess champion, who with the liberal parties Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces, or SPS, organized the march under the title, "Moscow Without Fascists."
The march was the first organized by anti-fascists that city authorities have allowed since the Nov. 4 far-right march against illegal migration. Attempts to hold an anti-fascist rally on Nov. 27 -- first near Belorussky Station, then outside City Hall -- were foiled by police, who detained dozens of protesters.
Sunday's march began near the Chistiye Prudy metro station, a few meters away from where the far-right march, which gathered about twice as many people, began on Nov. 4, the newly created People's Unity Day.
The far-right Movement Against Illegal Immigration, or DPNI, organized that march, the biggest nationalist street protest in more than a decade. Marchers then called for an end to illegal migration and carried banners reading, "Russia for Russians."
There was probably no symbolism intended by the organizers of Sunday's march, but instead of beginning from the statue of Alexander Griboyedov, the Russian writer and diplomat who was killed in a Tehran riot in 1829, the anti-fascist march began beside the newly restored Chinese tea store on Myasnitskaya Ulitsa.
Yabloko leader Grigory Yavlinsky and SPS leader Nikita Belykh led the marchers down Myasnitskaya Ulitsa, walking alongside Yabloko deputy leader Sergei Mitrokhin and former SPS leader Yegor Gaidar.
Instead of marching to Slavyanskaya Ploshchad, where the Nov. 4 march ended, the anti-fascist march wound up opposite Federal Security Service headquarters at Lubyanskaya Ploshchad, where a rally was held in front of the Solovetsky stone, the memorial to victims of Soviet repression that was brought to Moscow from the first gulag camp on the Solovetsky Islands.
"Fascism is a disgrace, but in the country that defeated fascism it is a disgrace three times over," Yavlinsky told the rally.
The anti-fascist march, like last month's far-right march, brought together a series of disparate groups across the political spectrum -- from greens to anarchists to World War II veterans. Although there were some younger marchers on Sunday, the average age was older than in the far-right march, and the atmosphere on Sunday was decidedly more peaceful.
"There's no such thing as illegal people," read one banner, a response to the rhetoric of nationalist organizations.
At about the same time on Sunday afternoon, about 400 DPNI activists rallied near the Dynamo metro station to protest a proposed statue of the late president of Azerbaijan, Heidar Aliyev.
On Myasnitskaya Ulitsa, an anarchist protester, 23-year-old Tovarishch Krog -- real name Nikolai Makas -- pointed to the flag he was carrying and said it was the same one used by anarcho-syndicalists when they fought General Franco in the Spanish Civil War.
Tomatoes and a fake grenade were thrown at Sunday's march. Police arrested a member of a group called the Slavic Youth Union, Interfax reported.
As the march began moving down Myasnitskaya, the song "Svyashchennaya Voina," or Holy War, boomed out from loudspeakers. The song was written during World War II to inspire the Soviet Army's struggle against Nazi Germany.
"We couldn't not come," said Nora Rodionova, an elderly woman who was a small girl during the war, looking at her friend, another pensioner. "Now, there are lots of fascists, and nobody is stopping them. There are lots of them, and racially motivated attacks."
"I remember hearing this song every morning at 6 a.m.," she said, as she and her friend walked along Myasnitskaya.
Another marcher, Habty Tesfaye, said his brother Anteneh, 38, was in the hospital after being attacked Thursday near the Griboyedov statue by five skinheads, including one young woman. He said he believed the attack, the third on his brother in Moscow, to be racially motivated.
The Tesfaye brothers moved to Moscow from Ethiopia as boys with their father, a journalist.
His brother was in stable condition Sunday.
When Tesfaye went to the police precinct nearly five hours after his brother had been stabbed, he said, the police had done nothing to find the attackers. Instead, the police dismissed the attack as hooliganism and asked him why he had come to Russia.
Most of the speeches on Lubyanskaya Ploshchad were long on rhetoric and short on details about how exactly the marchers planned to fight fascism.
"A new fascism is engulfing us," Belykh said. "It is a sickness that we need to fight. Fascism will not pass. Fascism will never conquer Moscow."
Veteran human rights campaigner Svetlana Gannushkina took issue with figures on illegal migrants and crime in the city cited by the nationalist Rodina party in a leaflet for this month's Moscow City Duma elections. While the leaflet claimed that illegal migrants committed 65 percent of all crimes and that Tajiks committed 90 percent of drug-related crimes, the official statistics on the Interior Ministry's web site on Sunday were less than 4 percent and 1 percent respectively, she said.
Such inflated figures are a staple of far-right nationalist rhetoric and were much-quoted by participants in last month's march against illegal migration.
"They say that Russians are repressed, but it is Russia that is not letting Russians into the country, or allowing them to become citizens," said Gannushkina, referring to ethnic Russians in former Soviet countries who have found it difficult to gain Russian passports or move to Russia.
"Instead of me, why isn't Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev here?" she said, adding that the government's refusal to refute such inflated figures showed they were using nationalist sentiments for their own ends. These were the same scapegoat tactics as those used by Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels in Germany, she said. "They need people to have fear in their hearts," she said.