Financial Times - 12.30.2005

Financial Times

Russian liberals fear the rising threat of nationalism

By Arkady Ostrovsky 

Larisa Semenova, a soft spoken and neatly dressed 53-year-old retired engineer from the blue-collar part of Moscow, does not like being called a nationalist, though she admits supporting Rodina, the populist nationalistic party.

"Of course I am not a nationalist," she says. "I am a born and bred Muscovite - but you don't hear Russian language on the Moscow streets anymore. These migrants are everywhere - they have occupied the markets, they run Moscow restaurants where they play their own music, which they impose on us."

She thinks there should be restrictions on people from central Asia and the Caucuses moving to Moscow, and she is not alone. According to a recent opinion poll by Yuri Levada, an independent pollster, 60 per cent of Russians support xenophobic and anti-migrant slogans in one form or another.

Mr Levada says this is partly the result of the humiliation of the collapse of the Soviet Union - still viewed as a tragic collapse of a great empire, rather than a liberation from communism. At the same time, the economic hardship of the 1990s combined with an influx of jobless migrants from other Soviet republics is feeding the fear and hatred of migrants.

Sixty years after Russia's victory over Nazi Germany, the country's liberals are warning against the growing danger of fascism. "The situation with xenophobia is getting more acute. The activity of radical groups is growing. And the authorities are increasingly speculating on the prejudices in society," says Alexander Brod, the head of the Moscow Bureau of Human Rights.

Once confined to radical and marginalised groups, xenophobic rhetoric is fast spilling into mainstream politics - the process amply demonstrated in the recent Moscow parliamentary elections. Rodina, the fastest growing political party, launched with the Kremlin's help three years ago, based its campaign for the Moscow city elections on xenophobic slogans about clearing the city of illegal migrants.

Rodina's advert was found to be racist and the party was banned from the elections - ironically at the request of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, an ultra-nationalist whose own party campaigned under the slogan: "Russian faces to our capital."

Alexandra Radkovskaya, a psychologist from Moscow State University, says: "Xenophobia exists in many countries, but in Russia it has become a norm, a commonplace for the majority of the country. Nationalism and xenophobia are very closely related in our country."

On the same day as the Moscow elections, Vladimir Kvachkov, an anti-Semitic former military intelligence officer accused of an attempted assassination of Anatoly Chubais, an architect of market reforms, won 30 per cent of votes in a Duma by-election.

Mr Kvachkov, who called the attack on Mr Chubais the "first act of armed force in a national liberation war", belongs to a militant nationalistic movement, backed by several political parties. After the attack on Mr Chubais, members of a similar radical party were charged with an explosion on a train from Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, to Moscow.

The Moscow Bureau of Human Rights puts the total number of radical nationalists who belong to political parties at about 15,000.

Last month several nationalistic parties staged a march through the centre of Moscow. On the "day of Russia's unity" some 3,000 people marched through the city under the slogan "Russia for Russians".

"In any western city, such event would have provoked a public outrage and hundreds of thousands of people would have come out on the streets to show who is in charge," says Mr Levada.

On December 18, after much resistance from the authorities, the liberal parties staged an anti-fascist demonstration in Moscow. According to the police, it was attended by fewer than 1,500 people. Organisers say there were twice that number.

"Fascists are always better organised than the liberals - this is why they are so dangerous," says Ilya, an 18-year-old student.

Notably absent from the protest were members of the United Russia, the Kremlin's servile political party, or Nashi, its youth movement, which claims to be "anti-fascist".

Political analysts argue that having Rodina, or any other nationalist party, as its main opposition in the 2007 parliamentary election and 2008 presidential poll is convenient for the Kremlin.

Says one analyst: "It allows the Kremlin to present nationalists as a scarecrow to the west. When foreign leaders see that the choice is between Putin's candidate and some radical nationalist they will back Putin's candidate."

The Kremlin's complacency in dealing with xenophobia is dangerous, say liberals. "The feeling of impunity created by authorities' complacency . . . turns xenophobia into violence," according to Martietta Chudakova, a prominent historian and essayist.

Russia has witnessed a wave of racist attacks over recent years. In the past two years at least 54 people have been murdered, including a nine-year-old Tajik girl, and 500 wounded in racist attacks.

Most were committed by skinheads, whose numbers are estimated at 50,000 by the Moscow Bureau of Human Rights.