The RNU in Russia's Regions

Nickolai Butkevich
UCSJ Research and Advocacy Director

Russia's largest and most dangerous neo-Nazi group, Russian National Unity, led by Aleksandr Barkashov, has steadily gained power in Russia's regions. After years of being largely ignored by the Russian national and regional media, the RNU has in the time period covered in this report thrust itself into the national media spotlight. As this essay and this report will show, the RNU is a major threat to Russia's Jewish community.

Ideology

RNU ideology offers simple reasons for Russia's current economic and societal troubles— enemies of Russia, led by Jews and other religious and ethnic minorities, are destroying the country. A good example of RNU ideology can be found in text of a flyer that was distributed in Saratov and Mocow:

Russians! A small number of aliens are behaving like occupiers on conquered territory in our land, not submit ting to any laws and taking the tolerance and restraint of the Russian People to be signs of weakness. They are united in their desire to rule over "Russian slaves." Russians! If you want to be masters in your own land, join the Russian National Unity movement of A. P. Barkashov (the RNU)!

RNU ideology consists of Nazism mixed with Russian, rather than German, pseudo-history and an incoherent blend of Christianity and Russian paganism. The legacy of Russia's recent Communist past plays an indirect role in the formation of the RNU's ideology. Soviet ideology tended to see the world in terms of class struggle resolved through violence; its totalitarian suppression of free thought and its constant search for internal and external enemies provided fertile ground for the rise of fascist ideologies like that of the RNU.

RNU leaders regularly call for violence against unpopular ethnic and religious minorities (Jews, people from the Caucasus, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, etc.) and RNU members have been known to assault members of these groups. (See the Voronezh and Yaroslavl chapters.) RNU members wear modified swastika armbands and black uniforms and raise their arms in Nazi style salutes, presenting a terrifying sight both to the minorities that they target and to many ordinary Russians. Like many other neo-Nazi leaders, Aleksandr Barkashov got his start in Pamyat, Russia's oldest antisemitic nationalist organization. The RNU took part in the defense of the Russian Parliament building against government forces in 1993. Since then, it has largely followed its own path, eschewing alliances with other extremist parties.

The RNU claims to support Russian Orthodoxy and demonstrate its deference to the Church, particularly to the Old Belief.¹ However, the RNU's version of Orthodoxy is of rather a peculiar sort: Mr. Barkashov has stated that the present Church hierarchy and the Patriarch himself is "pro-Jewish." Moreover, he does not recognize Church authorities and declares that the Old Testament is not a sacred book and Jesus Christ was not a Jew.²

Media Coverage of the RNU

Before late 1998, the Russian media had given only sporadic coverage to the RNU. That all changed after the movement challenged one of Russia's most powerful politicians—Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov. The highly publicized confrontation between the RNU and Mayor Luzkhov began in earnest with his decision in December 1998 to prohibit a RNU congress in Moscow. The RNU responded in March 1999 with a march of 200 fully uniformed RNU members in Moscow. Soon thereafter, the RNU was banned in Moscow, one of only two times that a Russian official, federal or regional, has taken such a drastic step against this most prominent of Russia's fascist movements. (Primorsky Kray in October 1999 also banned the RNU).

The confrontation led to an explosion of articles about the RNU in the Russian national and regional press, and even to some degree in the West. Much of the Russian public was scandalized that a large neo-Nazi march was allowed to take place in the country's capital city. Regional papers from places as diverse as Bryansk and Samara began to focus on the activity of the RNU in their own backyards. While it lasted, the media frenzy generated a great deal of information about RNU activity in the regions. These stories, as well as information provided by UCSJ monitors and the Moscow Helsinki Group, are a major part of this report, which records RNU activity in 42 of the 62 regions covered. However, the conflict over Kosovo, as well as later events in Dagestan and Chechnya, have taken media attention away from the RNU story. In addition, many analysts incorrectly assumed that Mayor Luzhkov's decisive action, followed by what on the surface appeared to be a major attempt by the Russian government to crack down on the RNU, has succeeded in breaking the backbone of the movement and reducing its influence to the point where it can be safely ignored again. Among those analysts who take the threat of fascism in Russia seriously, some are so focused on the Weimar Russia scenario, whereby a humiliated and fed up Russian people bring to national power a fascist movement, that they frame the debate in ways that make it easy for skeptics to discount the RNU as a real threat.³ But just as the politics and economics of Russia cannot be understood without paying an increasing amount of attention to what is happening outside of Moscow, viewing the RNU, with its extremely low national approval rating, through the prism of national politics misses the point. There is little chance that the RNU could ever win power, either through elections or otherwise, on the national level. It is on the regional level that the RNU is strong and it is there that the RNU presents the most danger. Two hundred well trained and well armed fanatics may not be able to take over a country, but in a small provincial city they could pose an enormous threat to ethnic and religious minorities, given the right conditions.

The RNU's Strength in the Regions

The RNU rose to prominence and continues to be strong in several regions because it meets the desire of a significant segment of the public for law and order and receives both covert and overt support from some regional and municipal authorities or is viewed with indifference.

This report's regional chapters show evidence of regional and/or municipal governmental support for the RNU in 11 regions: Bryansk, Kostroma, Oryol, Tver, Yaroslavl, Voronezh, Kirov, Nizhny Novgorod, Saratov, Stavropol, and Perm. It is the support or indifference of local authorities that makes the RNU's activities possible. Those regions where the authorities either blatantly or covertly support the RNU tend to be dominated by Communists who rule in an authoritarian manner reminiscent of the Soviet period, which isn't a surprise, considering that many of these regions are still ruled by the same Soviet era officials. In some of these Communist dominated regions, RNU attacks on advocates of democratic ideas, independent journalists, and unpopular ethnic and religious minorities seem to serve the needs of the authorities, though whether or not that is the RNU's intention is hard to gauge.

The RNU also receives significant public support in some regions. The paradoxical fact that the RNU exists as a serious organization in a country that lost tens of millions of people in the struggle against Nazi Germany is a clear indication of the disorientation that many Russians feel as a result of the economic and societal breakdown which has followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Millions live in abject poverty, alcoholism, drug addiction and crime are out of control. The state has, in effect, abdicated its primary responsibility— to protect the safety and well being of its citizens. Therefore, although resentment over the country's loss of international prestige cannot be totally disregarded as a factor in the appeal of extremist movements, it is the much more parochial concern for basic law and order that leads many ordinary Russians to turn to armed groups like the RNU, Cossack bands, security firms, criminal gangs, or some combination of these groups, for protection. (See the Khabarovsk and Samara chapters.) This is especially common in regions in or near the Northern Caucasus, which are directly affected by the explosion of criminality and violence that has shaken that region in the 1990s and that are overcrowded with refugees from ethnic conflicts throughout the former Soviet Union. It is therefore no coincidence that Stavropol has the country's strongest RNU branches, or that Krasnodar and Volgograd are hotbeds of extremist movements and sometimes violent xenophobia. Of course, crime isn't only a problem in Southern Russia. RNU toughs mount joint patrols with police in the cities of Yaroslavl, Kostroma, and Voronezh, and in Oryol, the region's leading neo-Nazi, who was once a member of the RNU, appears to have close ties with the regional administration. Even in Moscow, the RNU won over some hearts and minds in the neighborhood near its headquarters in Terletsky Ponds Park after it "cleansed" the park of drug addicts and drunks. In March 1999, the newspaper Bryansky Rabochy, which is subsidized by the Bryansk regional administration, ran a positive article about the RNU, describing how the it teaches hundreds of local children combat skills

and keeps them away from lives of crime and drugs, as well as smoking and drinking. The newspaper reported that RNU members, "with pleasure give any sort of aid to all who need it" and "the most wonderful thing is that they [RNU members] have acquired a sense of self-respect and pride." In addition, the author reported that a youth brigade from the RNU conducts joint patrols with city police, concentrating on dance clubs.

As for the federal government, it can't even pay its nuclear scientists on time and can barely collect taxes, so taking strong action against fascist movements is low on its list of priorities. Therefore, even during the federal government's recent campaign to pressure regional governments to take real action against the RNU, which has resulted in, for the first time in many regions, RNU members being arrested and some of its regional branches' official registration being threatened, it and other extremist movements have encountered little serious resistance from regional authorities. With a few exceptions, regional authorities have limited their countermeasures against the RNU to ineffective administrative warnings and lengthy court proceedings. Many federal and regional officials justify their inaction with the hollow excuse that the country’s laws against inciting ethnic hatred are too badly designed and that until the State Duma passes a better law, little can be done against the RNU threat. It is clear, however, that waiting for the State Duma, which is dominated by Communists and extreme nationalists, to pass tough anti-extremism legislation is an exercise in futility.

In addition, the joint Moscow Helsinki Group/UCSJ report on human rights abuses in 30 Russian regions (“The Human Rights Situation in the Russian Federation: 1998”), which is summarized in a separate essay, clearly demonstrates that regional courts are largely under the control of regional authorities, who often bend the law to suit their own needs. Federal prosecutors are just as abusive of the law; the case of environmental whistleblower Alexander Nikitin, who in a clear violation of the law has been charged eight times with the same offense using secret and retroactive decrees, is a good example of rampant official lawlessness. In this context, the hypocrisy of the legal justification for inaction against extremist movements is obvious— if the authorities really cared about the activities of dangerous extremist organizations like the RNU, they would find a way to stop them.

Now that Russian government and society has become totally engrossed in the conflict in Chechnya, both the low level of repression that the government exerted against the RNU and the high level of interest with which the media covered RNU activity will no doubt fade even further. At the same time, continuing economic decline and increasing political instability, especially in Southern Russia, where the RNU is particularly strong, make it more likely than ever that the RNU will in the near future initiate mass violence against unpopular ethnic and religious groups.

The long term threat that the RNU poses is that it is especially appealing to youth. Faced with a bleak future of unemployment and despair, accentuated by the deterioration of the quality of state provided education and the massive criminalization of politics, culture and daily life, many of Russia’s young people look to movements like the RNU for discipline, fellowship, and easy answers to the complex questions about identity and the nature of the world that young people around the world tend to ask themselves.

Although different branches of the RNU are linked with criminal structures, the movement’s leaders present it as a guarantor of law and order and a “patriotic” alternative for young people to lives of crime. Drug use by RNU members is discouraged and all have to undergo a fairly rigorous training program which, in addition to strengthening their bodies, teaches them taught hand to hand combat, marksmanship and other military skills. This training usually takes place in summer camps for youth, and in Stavropol the RNU uses an abandoned military base. Former and current military instructors, some of whom are RNU members, often serve as trainers in these camps, and while some graduates go on to become full fledged RNU members, others go on to military service on a special track towards becoming intelligence or special forces soldiers. Everyone who goes through these training camps is taught the movement’s hateful ideology and blind obedience to its leaders. (See the Stavropol chapter.)

The RNU offers its members a sense of belonging that is largely missing in the wake of the collapse of Communist ideology and the failure of democracy to take root in the country. Although most Russians who are old enough to remember World War II or to have gone through the Soviet educational system, where fascism was zealously condemned, are repulsed by the RNU’s Nazi ideology and symbols, younger people tend to lack this ingrained reaction to Nazism. The attitude that many young RNU members have towards the movement is amply expressed by the following statement from a young woman detained by police in Voronezh for distributing RNU pamphlets:

Yes, we are members of the RNU, that is our ideology. We have the right to go out and distribute our literature. In the USSR there was the Komsomol, in the West there are the Scouts, and here there is the RNU.⁴

⁴ Voronezhsky Kurer, April 20, 1999.

Young RNU member in Moscow