Paul Goble
Staunton,
March 25 – Positive developments with regard to radical extremist Russian nationalists
during 2014 – including a falloff in the number of attacks on immigrants – were
not the result of state policy but rather the refocusing of the attention of
such people on events in Ukraine, according to SOVA’s annual report on such
groups.
The
detailed, 28,000-word report concludes that there is reason to fear that “these
changes also carry with them an extremely serious potential threat” and that
the current situation may be “a calm before the storm,” which is the title the
monitoring group gave to its report this year (polit.ru/article/2015/03/25/xeno/).
“The turn of Russian official policy
and propaganda to the side of greater traditionalis, authoritarianism, and
militarism is creating fertile soil for the assimilation of nationalist
ideology,” the report says. While the state is thus becoming “a serious
competitor” to the nationalists, the latter can exploit ideas the regime is
promoting among the broader population.
And another “major potential
problem,” SOVA says, consist of the “tens of thousands of Russian citizens, not
all of whom are nationalists who are participating in the war in Ukraine.” Once
they return home, they are unlikely to forget their military skills and may
want to use them to promote their agendas in dangerous ways.
Consequently, the SOVA report
concludes, it is not appropriate to talk about any decline in radical
nationalism but rather “about a significant activation of right radicals in
Russia in the middle term” and to recognize that this growth will present the
country with “some kind of new form of radical nationalism,” one likely to be
even more threatening than in the past.
As for Russia as a whole, so too for
the Russian radical nationalists, 2014 was a turning point. The latter focused
ever less often on immigrants and focused instead almost entirely on Ukraine,
something that split the ranks of many Russian nationalist groups with some
backing Moscow’s policies and others opposing them.
“Such a serious crisis in the movement,
the complete domination of the Ukrainian theme in the media, and possibly
official ‘anti-fascist’ rhetoric connected with Ukraine as well had an
extremely negative impact on all traditional types of the activity of the ultra-rightists,”
reducing the number of actions “’against ethnic crime’” and similar cases.
To a significant degree, “the movement
of Russian nationalists ‘lost its voice,’” SOVA says. Those who supported
Moscow’s actions in Ukraine were often absorbed into broader regime-organized
movements, and those who opposed them were in many cases marginalized even
among those who had been their supporters.
That helps to explain why “in 2014,
the criminal activity of the ultra-rightists was lower than a year before,
although the number of murders [its supporters carried out] turned out to be
higher,” SOVA says. But this “quantitative reduction in force” is almost
certainly going to prove “temporary.”
That is because it appears to be
explained by the fact that “part of the militant ultra-nationalists have for the
time being turned their attention to events in Ukraine, and some of the most aggressive of them have gone
there to take part in military operations.” It does not, SOVA stresses reflect
an improvement in government efforts, although some radical nationalists were
arrested and imprisoned over the course of the year.
“The federal list of extremist
materials” continued to grow, albeit “somewhat less intensively than earlier
but with just the same number of errors and repetitions,” the report says; and
it points as well to the use of non-judicial measures to add to the list.
For all these reasons, SOVA says,
there is no reason for optimism about the future, especially given that many of
the extreme Russian nationalists are now shifting their attention away from
Ukraine to the so-called “fifth column” at home, whose members they can attack,
possibly with government backing (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=551176573EE4E).
No comments:
Post a Comment