Paul Goble
Staunton,
December 10 – Since 2011, the Russian authorities have sent to prison ever more
members of extreme right, neo-Nazi groups both because of their involvement in
the 2011-2012 protests and their fighting on both sides in Ukraine. As a
result, there are now thousands of them in Russian prisons; and they are uniting
to terrorize prisoners and guards there.
Their
model, journalist Sasha Sulim says, is the Aryan Brotherhood which have been doingn
the same thing in US prisons and which in fact, he adds, “have taken many of
them under its control.” The same thing is now happening in the Russian penal
system (meduza.io/feature/2018/12/10/poshel-v-shkolu-vstupil-v-rasovuyu-voynu-sel).
Historically, Russian prisoners have
divided themselves into reds and blacks, with the former those who work with
the guards and the latter being informally in charge of everything the
authorities can’t control. These now are
seldom foud in a pure form, although the professional criminals do stand out as
in the past.
Extreme Russian nationalists and
racists are now forming their own group which one might call the whites. They protect each other, terrorize and extract
resources from other prisoners, and are increasingly articulating an ideology
based on a combination of racial superiority and hostility to the Russian
state.
According to one of their number,
Sulim continues, “’the white suit’ is not a formal organization but rather a
brotherhood, the chief goal of which is the support and cooperation of rightist
political prisoners.” He says that the word “political” is critical here: only those
jailed for political views, whatever the charges, area part of it.
They view themselves not as a criminal
subculture but as the nucleus of those who are fighting against the current
regime. They assemble on racist-related holidays and sometimes attack
non-Russian prisoners. And they stress their ideological views rather than
their criminal nature.
According to the Meduza journalist, there
were three websites on VKontakte for these groups; but two of them have now
been blocked. The “whites” view as their
particular enemies Chechnya’s Ramzan Kadyrov, Ingushetia’s Yunuss-Bek Yevkurov,
and Duma deputies Vitaly Milonov and Irina Yarovaya.
“We understand that we live in an
occupied state, that now our motherland is under the control of enemies,” one
of their number says. “The Putin regime, the chekists and the FSB have seized
power and hold it, and those who speak out against them are confined to prisons
and killed.”
In intriguing ways, they have many
views in common with other opposition groups. Aleksey Polikhovich, an anarchist
who was jailed for his role in the Bolotnoye affair, says that he and his followers
often talked with the whites because the two had so much in common. How widespread
that may be is impossible to say.
SOVA Center expert Mariya Muradova
says she has heard about the whites but “is not certain that ‘the brotherhood’
really exists.” Those who claim to be members “support traditional white racism
and national socialism” and act more politically than criminally in order to
spread their views, often helping other prisoners in the hopes of recruiting
them.
Matvey Tszen, a lawyer who has been
involved in the defense of some of the racists, says that in his opiniooin,
there are perhaps 5,000 such people in Russian prisons, less than one percent
of the 570,000 now incarcerated. But because they are active and violent, they
attract more attention and play a larger role.
Despite this, Tszen says, they aren’t
nearly as numerous or important among the new players among prisoners as “the
greens,” a term he uses to describe “the informal union of Muslim prisoners.”
No comments:
Post a Comment