In light of this past Friday’s Russian March, noted political analyst Andrei Piontkovsky examines the growing Russian nationalist movement and its origins in the Second Chechen War and ongoing conflicts in the North Caucasus.

The Russian March to Nothingness
By Andrei Piontkovsky
November 3, 2011
Yezhednevny Zhurnal

In a country where the political regime is made up of a longtime diarchy of bandits, Putin and Kadyrov, the popular slogan “Stop Feeding the Caucasus” cannot be seen as something nationalistic or patriotic. Regardless of all its apparent radicalism, it is a deeply ingratiating, slavish, plebeian exhortation.

It means “we want to feed all of our own crooks and thieves: Putin and Abramovich, Sechin and Chemezov, Medvedev and Fridman, Deripaska and Timchenko, the Rotenburg brothers and the Kovalchuk brothers.

It means “we want to return Kadyrov’s criminal offshore accounts here to Putin’s domestic “lawful” arena, even if it requires an third, even bloodier, Chechen war.”

“We want an empire, but without black-assed people” – this is the fatal contradiction of the Russian national consciousness, decisively entangled in its own complexes.

Russians do indeed feel humiliated, offended, and robbed within their own country. As do Russian citizens of other nationalities.

Kadyrov’s palaces, motorcades and parties with Western and Russian superstar-prostitutes of both genders that cost millions in budget money are just as disgusting as the even more extravagant bells and whistles of Mr. Botox. But they have the same attitude towards the “feeding” of the overwhelming majority of North Caucasians as Abramovich’s yachts have towards ocean cruises for participants of the Russian March.

Russian laws definitely don’t operate in Chechnya. But does anybody really still believe that they operate in Russia?

The problem of the North Caucasus is much deeper and more catastrophic than the ratio of the amount of budget transfers to different regions.

What’s going on in the North Caucasus is increasingly surpassing the bounds of a serious regional conflict and is turning into a central existential problem for the Russian Federation. All of the mistakes, failures, and crimes of Russia’s post-communist government in the realms of security, economics, national policy, and federative organization have become entwined in the Caucasus.

Why did we fight two wars in Chechnya? For Russia’s territorial integrity. But territorial integrity does not imply scorched, unpopulated earth. We fought to prove to the Chechens that they are citizens of Russia. But we simultaneously destroyed their towns and villages with planes and salvo rocket systems (and the “Grad” system in open fields, with Putin and Stalingrad behind us) and kidnapped innocent people whose corpses were later found bearing signs of torture.

We have constantly proved to the Chechens the very opposite of what we proclaimed – we proved to them with all of our behavior that they are not citizens of Russia and that we have not considered them to be citizens of Russia for a long time already – but their towns and villages are Russian. And we proved this convincingly not only to the Chechens, but to everyone in the Caucasus. They were good at memorizing the visual lessons we taught them.

And this is the fundamental, tragic absurdity of the war that determined its inevitable result.

We lost the war against the Chechen separatists. One of the most brutal field commanders, Ramzan Kadyrov, won. He has such a degree of independence from the Kremlin that even the Soviet officers Dudayev and Maskhadov would never even dream of.

Having had to choose between the very bad and the monstrous as a result of his pre-election policies, Putin, I have to give him credit, chose the very bad. Admitting his defeat, he gave all the power in Chechnya to Kadyrov and his army and paid him compensation. In response, Kadyrov formally declared not so much loyalty to the Kremlin as his own personal union with Putin. The monstrous choice would have been to continue the war to the point of total destruction – in the spirit of Shamanov and Budanov.

Ms. Latynina, with her poetic nostalgia for the romantic times of the Circassian genocide, clearly sees this choice as a shameful rejection of the white man’s burden and a cowardly capitulation before the liberal-leftist dictatorship of multiculturalism. Oh, how wonderfully those shining Russian aristocrat officers butchered the natives back then, and even wrote in their journals – the Yezhednevny Zhurnals of the time – such intoxicating lines: “I f… and cry!”

War on Chechen separatism in the North Caucasus has been replaced by a different war, one generated by the first – the war on Islamic fundamentalism.

Over that time , Islamic terrorism has crept over the entire North Caucasus, where its number of followers has grown and the structures of its Jamaats have strengthened. And just like during the Chechen wars, we are increasing the number of Islamists with our policies. Take, for example, the rhetoric of our (at least for the time being) supreme commander, who is apparently experiencing a certain syndrome of a lack of brutality compared to Uncle Volodya. The entirety of his reaction to the terrorist attacks on Russian territory consists of uninterrupted calls to “utterly destroy” and punish everyone, even “those who do laundry and cook soup for the terrorists.”

Knowing the moral integrity of the counter-terrorism soldiers from Khanty-Mansiysk, sent off to the Caucasus as if on a temporary work assignment, Mr. Badminton, or at least his groomers, can’t be unaware that the only result of these calls is going to be a marked rise in the number of extrajudicial murders of people who are in no way involved with militants and reprisals against relatives of suspected terrorists. And this, in turn, increases the number suicide bombers and leads to new terrorist attacks on Russian territory.

This is the twelfth year we’ve been fighting this war without understanding the scale of ongoing tragedy – the entire country is sliding into a civil conflict between nationalities – which the government’s policies are entirely responsible for creating, having long burned this wick from both ends.

In the Caucasus, having unleashed and lost the war, the Kremlin is paying compensation in exchange for a sham submissiveness not only to Kadyrov, but to criminal elites in all other republics. This is used to purchase palaces and the golden pistols that dangle off the rumps of local leaders. But the young, unemployed residents who have lost touch with their communities take off to join in Allah’s wars or are squeezed out of the Caucasus onto the streets of Russian cities.

But that is where a generation of children whose parents have utterly and forever lost out because of the failed economic reforms of the past twenty years has already grown up.

Televised cultural rulers and other masterminds have explained to them that all of their problems have been caused by “uncles in pith helmets” and “non-indigenous criminal gangs” who want to break them apart. Gangs of teenagers from working-class backgrounds who have been deprived of their future have a hard time getting to “uncles in pith helmets” or the heavenly residents of Rublevka, and so they unleash their accumulated fury by beating to death “persons of a non-indigenous skin color.”

And today the two armies of desperados, deceived and robbed by, as it were, the exact same people, have been thrown at one another.

Mentally, there is a growing gap between Russian and Caucasian youths, who have grown up in the midst of a brutal war, first Chechen, and then Caucasian in general.

Young Muscovites march around the city with cries of “f… the Caucasus! F…!” and the young mountain youths walk around the streets of Russian cities in a demonstrably defiant and aggressive fashion. They have developed the psychology of the victors. In their minds, Moscow has lost the Caucasian war.

In mind and in spirit, the Caucasus and Russia are vastly separate entities. Although neither the Kremlin nor the North Caucasian “elites” are prepared to make a formal separation.

The Kremlin is still living with its phantom imperial illusions of wide zones of privileged interests that lie far beyond Russia’s borders, and local leaders, starting with Kadyrov, don’t want to turn down the transfers from Russia’s budget.

The Islamists don’t want to separate, either. They have dreams of a caliphate that includes quite a large part of the Russian Federation.

A situation so humiliating for Russia cannot go on forever.

But there is no easy way out. In today’s political system, with this government, there is no way out in general.

An attempt to put an end to Putin’s “Kadyrov project” by force, as is openly advocated by the professional Russian – poor Zhirinovsky – and therefore by default the majority of demagogues in the Russian March, would mean a full-scale third Chechen war that would become a military, political, and moral catastrophe for Russia. Even those who hate Kadyrov and the Chechens who suffer because of him, and moreover his personal army, would never agree to submissively return to the times of the total tyranny of the federations. To make the same mistakes three times in a row would be total lunacy. Even Putin, the most obstinate about the Chechen issue, understands that.

But that wouldn’t stop the “party of blood,” which hasn’t managed to come to terms with the loss of Chechnya as a zone to feed off of and, perhaps more importantly, as a zone to exercise its drunken power over the lives and deaths of any of its inhabitants. The Kadyrov project has stripped many federal siloviki of these two basic pleasures, having made them exclusive to Kadyrov, and they are genuinely hateful because of this.

They say the price of their support is possible allies in the clannish, inter-Kremlin dismantlement – Kadyrov.

The siloviki who have an infernal desire to work again in Chechnya, of course, are mentally closer to Putin and his gang than to anyone else. But they understand perfectly well that Putin will never purge Kadyrov.

Putting an end to the Kadyrov project would be an official admission of Russia’s defeat in the second Chechen war and the proclamation of a third. This would be a return to 1999 from a much worse starting point. It would mean the total political delegitimization of Putin as “the savior of the fatherland in 1999.”

Our best political publicists have equally convincingly and passionately explained to us that our children were burned in Beslan and the hostages suffocated in Nord-Ost for the sake of the greatness of Russia and the triumph of her geopolitical interests. And where now is this greatness or this triumph?

Putin will definitely become one of the first political victims of the third Chechen war. During all twelve years of his rule I have said repeatedly that the Putin regime is not compatible with the life of the country. But God forbid we escape from Putin at such a price. Moreover that it wouldn’t let us escape from Putinism and its roots.

In 1999, the most notorious Kremlin blackguards (their names are well-known) who lead Operation “Heir” entered into an alliance with siloviki who were thirsty for revenge and, after Basayev’s campaign to Dagestan and the apartment bombings in Moscow, Volgodonsk and the failed one in Ryazan, unleashed the second Chechen war in order to bring their own, as they thought at the time, obedient marionette to power. It is they who are they real murderers of Kungayeva, Budanov and the other tens of thousands of people, Chechen and Russian, who fell during their small triumphant war.

As Slavic Power leader Dmitry Demushkin told Kommersant, this unification of nationalist organizations became possible after the Movement Against Illegal Immigration (DPNI) was banned. “After that we decided to unite all of Russia’s nationalist forces into a new movement, The Russians. At its core are the largest nationalist organizations – the DPNI and the Slavic Union,” explained Demushkin. At the very least, the new organization’s goal is to further general ethno-political Russian solidarity, and at the most – to establish a nationalist government heading a nationalist Russian state.

The DPNI was ruled extremist and subsequently banned by a Moscow court in April 2011. The Slavic Union was banned a year earlier, after which it changed its name to Slavic Power.

The structure of The Russians can be found on the DPNI’s website. In particular, it lists the names of the agencies of its administration, including: the Council of Nations (an all-Russian meeting to define strategies for the existence and activities of the organization), the High National Council (to correct strategy and ongoing activities and to confirm annual plans) and the National Observatory Council (to represent the interests of the organization and develop strategy). The first council will be chaired in turn by Aleksandr Belov, Aleksandr Turik, and Stanislav Vorobyov. The second council will be led by Demushkin, and the third by Belov.

The movement also named a number of other structures: the National Committee for Action, the National Committee for Control, and the High Court of Honor. This last one, Demushkin told Interfax, “is the movement’s highest judicial authority, led by Georgy Borovikov.”

As Demushkin explained to Kommersant, he and Belov will play a substantial role as authoritative figures for The Russians. “There’s no guarantee that the new movement won’t repeat the fate of the nationalist organizations that are already banned right now. But for this we purposely gave ourselves this awkward name. So the courts and law enforcement agencies would be banning not nationalists, but ‘Russians,'” Demushkin explained.

Human rights activist and head of the SOVA Center for Information and Analysis Aleksandr Verkhovsky told Kommersant that the emergence of a more radical sentiment among neo-Nazi organizations presents a blatant, prospectiveless dead-end for its followers. “The same thing’s going to happen as did to the DPNI,” Verkhovsky said. Svetlana Gannushkina, head of the committee Civil Assistance, sees the emergence of The Russians as a call for a change in constitutional order. “Actually, this is a disgrace for Russia,” she told Interfax.

Compiled from reports by Natalya Bashlykova and Dmitry Kozlov at Kommersant, and Interfax.

Until now, public anger against the Russian police has manifested itself largely through public protests and online videos. But on May 27, a group dubbed by the Russian media as the “Primorskie Partisans” began a series of physical attacks on police officers. The group, whose name derives from the guerilla Soviet Partisans in World War II, reportedly distributed leaflets prior to the attacks calling for corrupt officials in the Russian Internal Ministry to be removed from their posts. According to an Ekho Moskvy poll, a majority of Russians are hailing the Partisans as “Robin Hoods.”

On Thursday, the Komsomolskaya Pravda tabloid newspaper published a report, not officially verified, that police have been given an order to catch the Primorskie Partisans by June 12 – the Russia Day national holiday. On that day, says the paper, the group has supposedly promised to stage several attacks in large Russian cities. They also note that police have located several weapons caches that presumably belong to the Partisans, one of which included a sawed-off shotgun, grenades, ammunition, bulletproof armor, and a motor boat.

The group’s alleged manifesto, which seems to only have been posted online in the last few days, is signed by the group’s self-identified leader, 32-year-old Chechen War veteran Roman Muromtsev. It charges that there is a “global, behind-the-scenes” entity that is “creating terror on our land,” and say that the Primorskie Partisans are “not criminals and not murderers,” but “have taken up the battle against evil.”

It also, however, says that it has taken up the battle “against Jewish fascism, as our glorious grandfathers and fathers took it up in 1941 against the German invaders,” and reports indicate that the group has ties to nationalist and far-right organizations.

At the same time, the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General of Russia said on Thursday that Muromtsev was not a member of the Primorskie Partisans. Therefore, whether or not the manifesto actually represents the group’s views is unclear.

The AFP provides a detailed account of the story:

Russia on Thursday captured one of a gang of anti-police youths whose deadly attacks on the security forces in its Far East Region have gripped the public imagination, investigators said.

The authorities have launched a massive manhunt for the gang, accused of killing one police official and wounding three in a series of brutal attacks in the far-flung region bordering China using knives and automatic weapons.

But in a country where the police are deeply unloved, they have still been dubbed by the media as “Robin Hoods”, after the medieval outlaw of English folklore who robbed the rich and gave to the poor.

Over 71% of callers to the Echo of Moscow radio said the attackers were “Robin Hoods” compared to 29% who called them mere bandits, during a phone-in on Wednesday.

“As part of a special operation, police on June 10 detained a member of a criminal gang, suspected of attacking police,” investigators said in a statement.

The gang of at least five men is suspected of three attacks on police, apparently motivated by a grudge against the force.

More than 150 police officials have been deployed in the manhunt in the Far Eastern Primorye region, a local security services source told the RIA Novosti news agency.

Russian television showed helicopters searching the forested region, while police in flak jackets set up road blocks to check cars.

Third attack

In a first attack on May 27, a police official was stabbed to death while on night duty. The attackers then ransacked the rural police station, stealing handcuffs and uniforms.

In the latest attack on Tuesday, the gang fired at two traffic police officials, wounding them. The attackers wore camouflage and wielded automatic weapons, according to Russian media.

The gang is also linked to third attack on a police car on May 29 that left one officer with gun shot wounds to his face.

Several of the gang have military training and one served in Chechnya, sources in the security services were cited by RIA Novosti as saying.

The public support for the gang underlines what critics say is near-daily abuse of office by the police forces, whose officers are regularly accused of violent crime and bribe-taking.

In November, the country’s interior minister even stressed members of the public had the right to use self-defence against abusive police officers.

The father of one of the suspects blamed “the lawlessness of the Russian police” for the attacks, saying his 18-year-old son Roman has been severely beaten by police officers before he fled home.

Suffered

“They are all boys who have suffered at the hands of the police,” Vladimir Savchenko said on Wednesday in a radio interview with the Russian News Service.

He named the police service of the Kirov district.

Media speculated over the reasons for the attacks.

Anonymous letters were sent in April to police, prosecutors, courts and some political parties in the region demanding that top police officials be fired and threatening a “partisan war,” Kommersant reported.

The gang members also appeared to have links to nationalist groups and messages of support for their attacks appeared on far-right web sites. One of the suspects Alexander Sladkikh, 20, is known to be interested in Nazi ideology, Komsomolskaya Pravda reported, citing a local police official.

Two other suspects had been detained by police for beating up foreigners, Rossiiskaya Gazeta reported.

– AFP

The surge in Russian nationalism has been endorsed in no small part by a variety of government representatives. At the same time, Russian rights activists and oppositionists have been repeatedly targeted by ultranationalist groups, and accuse the government for turning a blind eye. The editorial team at Gazeta.ru points out that with Chuvashov’s murder, they’re going to have to either start make some changes or start watching their backs.

Brown Blackmail
April 12, 2010
Gazeta.ru

Attempts by the Russian authorities to use nationalist organizations to further their own goals, in particular the battle against the democratic opposition that exists outside of the political system, are dangerous to the authorities themselves.

Investigators immediately linked the shooting of Moscow City Court Judge Eduard Chuvashov with his professional activities, naming revenge by nationalists as one possible motive.

Chuvashov presided over the scandalous cases of Artur Ryno’s and the White Wolves nationalist group’s skinhead bands, whose followers had repeatedly and publicly – on the internet – threatened him with physical violence.

One very telling commentary on the murder was given by Dmitri Demushkin, leader of the Slavic Union nationalist organization (By the way, Union members participated in the “Youth Against Terror” rally organized by the pro-Kremlin organizations Young Russia and Young Guard on Moscow’s Triumfalnaya Square on March 31). Demushkin said that “A new generation is coming to replace the large organizations of nationalists, a generation of disparate groups of autonomous youths, aimed at committing grave and very serious crimes.” Lamenting the government’s ban of the Slavic Union, he pointed out a direct threat to the government: now, “the wave of attacks from illegal nationalist groups will intensify… Many young people who don’t see any alternatives will start taking more aggressive action.”

For a long time, the Russian government has not seen nationalists as a threat to itself or to order in the country. Crimes against migrants from Asian or African countries are almost always treated by the courts as common hooliganism, not as a manifestation of interracial strife.

There are still a significant number of people in the Russian political elite and law enforcement agencies today who sympathize with Russian nationalists, and some of the slogans of the Movement Against Illegal Immigration were completely in tune with various bureaucrats’ proclamations.

Moreover, soon after the colored revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine, the authorities even allowed the nationalists to hold a “Russian March” in Moscow on November 4 – National Unity Day.

In the past few years, the government has finally begun to gradually understand the danger that nationalist organizations pose. At the very least, the Russian Marches have invariably been banned over the past few years [although not in 2009 – Ed.]; judges began more commonly punishing skinheads for crimes committed on a nationalistic basis, without hiding behind the formulation of “common hooliganism.” And the cases for Ryno and Skachevsky’s band (Judge Chuvashov announced the sentence on the second case against this group on April 8, 2010) and the White Wolves had become the biggest antinationalistic judicial cases in the country’s modern history.

Nationalists in Russia have also previously been charged with murdering their opponents from among the “native” (in their assessment) population. In particular, Petersburg skinheads are accused of murdering the famous Petersburg ethnographer and human rights advocate Nikolai Girenko on June 19, 2004, in a trial that has already been going on for more than a year. Nationalists are charged with the 2009 murder of lawyer Stanislav Markelov. Judge Eduard Chuvashov, who was physically threatened numerous times by the White Wolves, was clearly their enemy as well. But unlike Girenko and Markelov, Chuvashov is a representative of the state.

Ultranationalists have always and everywhere been a subversive force that is prepared to commit crime – including against government representatives, even if the government has tried to play along with them.

And for sure, if radical nationalists came into power, it would lead to a great amount of blood – remembering the fascist regimes in Italy and Germany is enough.

The Russian authorities need to be aware of the fact that there are no “tame nationalists.” You can create the moderate nationalist block Rodina in the political-technical test tubes, so that you can then slam the door on the first threat of its return to real, serious political power. But you cannot, with impunity, use grassroots nationalist organizations as instruments of the state. And powerful nationalistic rhetoric from government representatives is extraordinarily dangerous as well, since it feeds the radical xenophobic mindset of some young people.

The government needs to understand that the “browns” [umbrella term for fascists/ultranationalists/neo-Nazis – Ed.] cannot just be fellow travelers in the battle against the liberal opposition; they will inevitably enter into conflict with state representatives, especially when they sense their own impunity. And that’s the main lesson that it’s time the government learned from the notorious murder cases involving representatives of nationalist organizations.

According to the November study, Russian attitudes towards immigrants became more negative on the whole. 61 percent of Russians feel that the government “should try to limit the stream of migrants,” a 9 percent increase from a year ago. Another 30 percent feel that the authorities “do not need to put administrative barriers in the way of the influx of migrants and try to use them for the good of Russia,” down from 35 percent in 2008 and 44 percent in 2002.

Attitudes towards labor immigration also followed a negative trend. Only 19 percent of Russians held a “definitely” or “probably” positive attitude towards the idea that “one meets workers from Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and other nearby foreign countries on construction sites in Russia more often.” This figure was at 30 percent in 2002. Those who held neutral attitudes towards labor immigration fell to 44 percent, down 5 percent from a year ago, and those with a negative attitude rose to 35 percent, up 4 percent from a year ago.

The percentage of Russians who felt negatively towards labor immigrants has fluctuated back and forth over the past decade. In 2000 and 2004, 38 percent of Russians held negative attitudes in this regard, but only 27 percent did so in 2002. Aleksei Grazhdankin, vice director of the Levada Center, told Gazeta.ru that the fluctuations “are connected with the economic crisis and an intensification of competition in the labor market.” Therefore, Grazhdankin continued, “attitudes towards migrants remain in a completely civilized framework, and the level of xenophobia and nationalist enmity is not increasing. People are simply striving to protect their interests in the labor market.”

Attitudes toward the idea of a Russia in which only ethnic Russians resided did not change significantly in the past year.

The number of Russians, however, who support the infamous slogan “Russia for the Russians” and feel that it “has long been time to implement” such an idea has risen to 18 percent from 15 percent a year ago.

At the same time, 36 percent believe that “it would not be bad to implement this idea, but within reasonable limits,” down from 42 percent last year. Additionally, a growing number of Russians believe that “Russia for the Russians” is “genuine fascism,” up to 32 percent from 25 percent last year.

“Such growth is very good,” said Pavel Chikov, representative of the human rights organization Agora. “In the first years of the Putin administration, there was a surge of patriotism that brought with it a growth in neo-Nazi groups.” Chikov explained the change in poll numbers as the result of more frequent public debate on immigration issues in Russia, causing more people to form opinions on the matter. “However,” he continued, “the ratio of the positions remains approximately the same for now.”

“The country is beginning to wake up and develop individual attitudes to various social phenomena, and on the whole this is, unconditionally, positive,” the human rights representative said. At the same time, he noted that the polarization of society indicates increasing degrees of opposition. “It’s good to start public debates, but I fear that it’s also starting knife fights and violence, and the government likewise answers with violence,” Chikov concluded.

According to Stepanov, the activists were unable to obtain sanction from city authorities to hold the rally.

Representatives of the anti-fascist youth movement were divided as to what action to take in response. Part of the group chose to place flowers in memory of Khutorskoy at the eternal flame outside of the Kremlin walls, while others chose to attempt to rally at Patriarshiye Prudy as planned.

A correspondent from Kasparov.ru reports that police temporarily detained a number of the sixty rallying activists.

Executive Director of the For Human Rights movement Lev Ponomarev was present at the rally as a human rights advocate and public observer. Ponomarev aided in negotiations between the activists and police, thanking the activists for finding a compromise with the officers to avoid creating a violent situation.

Ivan Khutorskoy was shot and killed in the entrance to his Moscow apartment building on the evening of November 16. Prior to the murder, four attempts had been made on his life. His death was the latest in the recent rise in crimes against anti-fascist activists in Russia.

Two ultra-nationalist rallies totaling nearly 3000 people were held in Moscow during the November 4 Unity Day celebrations. Many participants carried Nazi flags and placards with racist slurs, and one rally featured a concert by two openly neo-Nazi bands. Both rallies were sanctioned by city authorities.

Ivan Khutorskoy, 26, was found by neighbors in the entryway to his building on Khabarovskaya ulitsa on the evening of November 16.

Law enforcement agencies say they are investigating several possible motives for the killing, including connections to the victim’s anti-fascist activism.

According to the monitoring group Institute of Collective Action, Khutorskoy had been assaulted three times prior to his murder. In 2005 his head was slashed with a razor, he received multiple wounds around the neck from a screwdriver and was beaten with a baseball bat during a second incident, and in 2009 he was stabbed with a knife in the stomach during a street fight.

According to the website, Khutorskoy had recently been working as security for concerts put on by anti-fascist groups. Colleague Aleksei Grigoryev said in an interview on Svoboda radio that Khutorskoy had also frequently worked as security during the press conferences of the prominent human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov, who was murdered last January.

“In general, he was a visible figure for opponents; apparently this is why the fascists tried so persistently to liquidate him,” Grigoryev said.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, another colleague told Reuters that Khutorskoy’s murder was likely political. “Ivan [Khutorskoy] knew Markelov. His murder was either revenge, or a challenge to the authorities following the arrests.”

A rise in nationalist sentiments in Russia has contributed to growing clashes between anti-fascist activists, ultranationalist neo-Nazi groups, and authorities in recent years. A coalition of ultranationalist groups distributed instructions on how to acquire firearms at a large rally held during Russia’s November 4 Unity Day celebrations, while another group held a concert featuring neo-Nazi performers.

The rise in fascist and ultranationalist extremism has additionally resulted in increased violence against dark-skinned migrant workers, as well as a number of recent murders. Stanislav Markelov, a high-profile lawyer known for his defense of anti-fascists and victims of human rights abuses, was shot dead in January in central Moscow. One suspect, a member of neo-Nazi organizations, was detained in early November and has admitted to the killing. In October 2008, anti-fascist leader Fyodor Filatov was killed after a fight between anti-fascists and ultranationalists in central Moscow in which four people were injured.

In his brief to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, Bortnikov said that suspects Yevgeniya Khasis and Nikita Tikhonov were detained as a result of police infiltration of a “radical organization.” Khasis then admitted to the murder of lawyer Stanislav Markelov and journalist Anastasia Baburova.

Khasis, born 1985, is now being guarded in detention ahead of trial. She and Tikhonov, born 1980, are allegedly former members of the radical nationalist organization Russian National Unity. Police say they have confiscated a large quantity of weapons and that the suspects had planned to commit yet another “resonant” murder.

Reports began appearing in the Russian media several weeks prior to the FSB statement that murder suspects had possibly been detained. The media had named the motive for the crime as retaliation on the part of nationalists for Markelov’s involvement in the murder case of anti-fascist Aleksandr Ryukhin.

Ryukhin, who was 19 at the time of his killing, was knifed down by a group of six nationalists in 2006. Only three of the six were sentenced, and Markelov had repeatedly named Tikhonov as another possible suspect. Investigators said Tikhonov had been a member of the notorious ultranationalist organization United Brigade-88 and was a close friend to Khasis. Khasis herself had allegedly been a member of various nationalist groups since she was 16.

According to Aleksandr Belov, leader of the Movement Against Illegal Immigration, Tikhonov had worked as a speech writer for Boris Gryzlov. Gryzlov at the time had been chief of Russian police and Russia’s Interior Minister, and is currently Speaker of the State Duma and a leader of Putin’s United Russia party. Belov says that Tikhonov had “disappeared somewhere” in 2006.

Investigators had originally suspected Markelov’s murder to be motivated his involvement in the case of a girl killed by a Russian colonel in Chechnya.

An anonymous source told Kasparov.ru that Tikhonov and Khasis were likely arrested long prior to the officially cited dates of November 3 and 4, and that the media deliberately waited until after yesterday’s massive nationalist demonstrations to release the information.

Stanislav Markelov was shot in the head with a pistol in central Moscow on January 19 of this year. He died at the scene. Novaya Gazeta journalist Anastasia Baburova, who was walking with Markelov, was also shot, and died the same day in the hospital.

Novaya Gazeta Editor-in-Chief Sergei Sokolov was careful in his reaction to the FSB Director’s announcement. “I would beware of talking about a full exposure of this crime. If you bring to mind other different notorious murders – frequently after the announcement of their exposures, they don’t hold up in practice.”

In Moscow, an estimated one thousand anti-fascist activists gathered on Chistoprudny Boulevard for a rally they called “Russian Patriotism Against Fascism and Xenophobia.” According to speaker Maksim Stepanov, the goal of the demonstration was “to express protest against the neo-Nazi demonstrations” taking place elsewhere in the city that day.

“While they say they’re only fighting against illegal immigrants, there are enough fascist flags at their rallies, and they say their idol is Hitler,” he added.

Stepanov called those gathered to action. “If you see a fascist inscription – paint over it; if you see a person with Nazi insignia – tell him to his face that fascism is not acceptable!”

While the demonstration itself was without incident, Kasparov.ru reports that an eyewitness saw police and men in plain clothes detain several anti-fascist protesters near the Kitai-gorod metro station hours after the event.

In the southeastern outskirts of the city, around two thousand people attended the ultra-nationalist “Russian March.” Many participants brandished flags with swastikas and chanted anti-Semitic and other xenophobic slogans. Detailed instructions on how to acquire firearms were distributed amongst the crowd. Dmitri Demushkin, leader of the Slavic Union, said that soon in Russia “only two things will hold true value – food and ammunition.” The march, sanctioned by city authorities, was held in the Lyublino region of Moscow, where many migrant workers have recently relocated after the closing of a large market complex in June.

Across the river from the Kremlin, an additional concert was held by the ultra-nationalist organization “Russian Image.” The concert, also sanctioned by authorities and attended by approximately 700 people, featured the openly neo-Nazi groups Kolovrat and Khuk Sprava.

The city’s largest rally was held by the radical pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi, often considered Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s version of the Soviet Komsomol. More than fifteen thousand people gathered for a rally and concert. Leaders of the group preached tolerance to the crowd, chanting “Russia for All.”

The holiday, which traditionally celebrated the liberation of Moscow from foreign occupiers in 1612, was reintroduced by then-President Putin in 2005 after being abandoned in 1917. Most Russians are unaware of the holiday’s historic roots, and it has been largely latched onto by ultranationalist organizations since being reintroduced. Despite condemnation from Russian leaders, nationalistic sentiments are held by a growing percentage of the population as well as many politicians.