The threats follow a weekend of ethnically-targeted violence in Moscow and St. Petersburg, after a young Russian football fan was allegedly killed by men from the North Caucasus. Police had earlier released the suspected killers, leading to speculation that they had paid off the police.

Prominent Russian opposition leaders Garry Kasparov, Boris Nemtsov, and Ilya Yashin have issued this joint statement in response to the violence.

A Different Path
Statement in regards to the massive turmoil in Moscow

On December 11, 2010, several thousand young people gathered in the center of Moscow to protest the murder of Yegor Sviridov. The demonstration ended with massive clashes with the police, pogroms, and the injuries of dozens of citizens.

The turmoil began after law enforcement agencies released the persons suspected of the murder from detention.

We believe that the reasons for the release of these persons are at the bottom of the corrupt nature of law enforcement agencies.

It was precisely corruption and lawlessness that provoked the turmoil in Moscow.

The corruption of the prosecutor’s office and the incompetency of the courts and the police systematically allow murderers and bandits to escape justice. This is leading to the inevitable growth of criminality, including of an ethnic type.

Distrust of the law enforcement system by society inevitably leads to a revolt by its most radical part. The Nazis found an excuse for ethnic pogroms. We condemn nationalistic reprisals and speak out against any instances of xenophobia.

We call upon Russian society to achieve changes in our country through peaceful and nonviolent methods.

Corruption, violence, and revolt – this is a direct path to Russia’s demise.

December 12, 2010
Moscow

Garry Kasparov
Boris Nemtsov
Ilya Yashin

Translation by theotherrussia.org.

Just days after Russia was chosen to hold the 2018 World Cup, the riots were a graphic example of the blatant racism and propensity for violence that often characterizes Russian football fans and ultranationalist organizations. In a timely article published shortly before Sviridov’s death, the Financial Times provides a lengthy analysis of radical nationalism in Russia – and why the ruling regime finds it beneficial to keep that sentiment alive:

Publicly, of course, Russia’s government is aghast at the recent rise of nationalism and fascism. But it is just as clear that the Kremlin is not above using whatever works to buttress its support in a country where 55 per cent of the population agrees with the statement “Russia for the Russians”. Putin himself has picked up on the rising tide of nationalism in Russia, reflecting it in his rhetoric; playing in many public speeches on a cold-war-era distrust of foreigners.

He has referred on many occasions to “forces” that would like to see Russia remain weak. And in the capable hands of deputy chief of staff Vladislav Surkov, a master fixer and political operator who handles all domestic political affairs for Putin and now president Dmitry Medvedev, nationalism has been turned into a tool of political consolidation.

Read the full article at FT.com

Click here for photographs of the riots

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.